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IN COMPLETING AN APPLICATION for admission to a doctoral program at
Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, al-Bayoumi listed himself as
“assistant to the director of finance” at Dallah AVCO, an
aviation-services company based in Saudi Arabia. The FBI is investigating
possible ties between Dallah AVCO and Al Qaeda terror network. Asked about
these ties by NEWSWEEK, Dallah AVCO’s owner, Saudi billionaire Saleh
Abdullah Kamel, responded, “This is not true at all.” U.S. intelligence
suspects that wealthy Saudis are funding Islamic extremist groups. Asked
if he supported terrorist groups, Kamel replied, “I am a real Muslim.
Islam is the religion of peace.” (Arrested but released by Scotland Yard,
al-Bayoumi is now living in England, where he remains under investigation
by U.S. and British authorities.).gif)
 Newsweek On Air: Searching For
"Sleepers"
Just how rich and
deep—and diabolical—is the global terror network of Al Qaeda? Since Sept.
11, the FBI’s manhunt has rounded up more than 800 people, but only 10
have been linked in any way to the hijackings—and those 10 are not
talking. (Most of the suspects probably will turn out to be innocent.)
Federal law-enforcement officials estimate that there are perhaps a
thousand people in the United States who have ties to terrorist
organizations abroad. With cells in at least 60 countries, Al Qaeda has
thousands more awaiting orders to strike. Rooting them out is going to be
exceedingly difficult. Clues are always clearer in hindsight. One FBI
official noted, a little ruefully, that the bureau’s Phoenix, Ariz., field
office cabled headquarters last summer about an unusual number of Arabs
who seemed to be taking flight lessons. “But that was all they could tell
us—Jeez, there are a lot of Arabs taking flying lessons!” said the
official.
DEEP-COVER
AGENTS
Instant experts talk and
write ominously about “sleepers,” secret agents who have burrowed deep
into American life, invisible and possibly lethal. Actually, the Sept. 11
hijackers were not sleepers in the pure, cold-war sense: they were not
passively waiting to be “awakened” by an order from their spymasters. With
perhaps one exception (Hani Hanjour, who traveled in and out of the United
States for almost 11 years), the hijackers came to the United States with
a mission: to finish up their flying lessons and find a good target.
Federal investigators tell NEWSWEEK that Mohamed Atta, the ringleader,
visited Norfolk, Va., site of a huge U.S. Navy base, at least twice in
February and April. The Feds believe that Atta was scoping out an aircraft
carrier as a target. Most of the hijackers were slipped into the country
last summer as muscle, to slit the throats of passengers. The more
worrisome kind are like Atta: well educated, independent, patient,
fanatical. Investigators do not know how many other Attas are out there.
But they are beginning to have a better feel for the variety, cunning and
determination of the terrorists who may in fact be living next door. |
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American
warplanes have flattened a half-dozen Al Qaeda terrorist-training camps in
Afghanistan. But the camps were probably empty when the bombs fell, and
their graduates—an estimated 20,000 men—have long since moved on. Many of
them became cannon fodder for the endless Afghan civil war, but thousands
have filtered out to dozens of countries around the world. The training
camps are but one source of Al Qaeda’s manpower. Indeed, only three or
four of the 19 hijackers spent time in Al Qaeda camps. Long before Osama
bin Laden began declaring fatwas on America, a diffuse network of
Islamic terror was planting evil seeds in the United States.
Bin Laden’s brainy number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has
been selling global jihad for over a decade. Al-Zawahiri is a kind of
black prince of Islam. His paternal grandfather was the grand imam at
Al-Azhar, the Harvard of the Sunni world, in the early 1900s. His father
was a pharmacology professor at the University of Cairo. Young al-Zawahiri
grew up in an upper-class neighborhood in Cairo; it may have been telling
that as a young man at the Maadi Sporting Club, the shy, bespectacled
al-Zawahiri “liked to watch others play, rather than playing himself,”
recalled a former classmate. Al-Zawahiri was trained to be a surgeon. Yet
rather than embrace modernity, he became an Islamic extremist, earning his
stripes as a minor collaborator in the plot to assassinate Egypt’s
pro-Western President Anwar Sadat in 1981. Though sentenced to death in
absentia by Egypt, al-Zawahiri appeared to move easily around the world,
raising money in such seemingly benign settings as a mosque in Santa
Clara, Calif. |
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Newsweek
International March 3rd Issue |
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WEEKEND TERRORISM TRAINING
Al-Zawahiri’s terrorist organization, the brutal Egyptian
Islamic Jihad, began planting agents in America almost two decades ago.
When he moved to America from Egypt in 1984, Ali Mohamed was in such a
hurry to assimilate that he married a woman he met on the plane.
Incredibly, for a time in the late 1980s, Ali Mohamed served as an
instructor to U.S. Special Forces at Fort Bragg, N.C.—while training
future Islamic terrorists in Brooklyn, N.Y., and Jersey City, N.J., on the
weekends. Mohamed later worked directly for Osama bin Laden on the 1998
bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Africa. Mohamed persuaded a friend,
Khaled Dahab, to quit medical school in Cairo and move to California.
There, Dahab drove a Volvo, joined Blockbuster, shopped at Sears—and
allegedly handled logistics for terrorists. From his home in Santa Clara,
he patched through calls for Egyptian Islamic Jihad members and
transferred money around the globe. Al-Zawahiri called Dahab from time to
time, once to price telephone-surveillance equipment. (Mohamed is now in a
U.S. prison; Dahab, who claims he is innocent, is in jail in Egypt.) |
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Virtually all the men detained for
questioning by the FBI are from Middle Eastern ethnic groups. But anxious
citizens who quietly countenance racial profiling to slow down Islamic
terrorists may be in for a surprise. Al Qaeda is a rainbow coalition.
Along with almost every other nationality, Al Qaeda training camps have
attracted blond, blue-eyed Swedes and Germans. Lost youth of any race or
nationality can be drawn to Islam’s certainties. Once in the mosque, they
can become bait for traveling imams preaching jihad. With its cultlike
qualities, Al Qaeda has become a catchall for the disaffected.
Consider the odyssey of David and Jerome Courtailler,
born of solid French stock, sons of a butcher in the quiet town of
Bonneville, nestled in the Alps near the Swiss border. The Courtailler
boys were raised as Roman Catholics and avidly played soccer. But they
started using drugs and felt trapped in a dead-end existence. “I couldn’t
see a way out,” David told Le Nouvel Observateur. Drifting to England
looking for a job, David “visited a mosque for the first time. It was
impressive, all these people in the process of finding themselves. There
was a serenity that showed on their faces.” Both boys were recruited to go
to Afghanistan. “Going there was going to be great,” said David. “I had
never traveled ... I was taken care of totally.” They found out they were
headed for terrorist-training camps only when they got there, David
claims. “I considered the training to be sort of military service,” said
David, though it grew “tiresome,” and David returned home to Bonneville.
His brother Jerome took a different path: he is now in prison in the
Netherlands as a prime suspect in an Al Qaeda plot to blow up the American
Embassy in Paris last summer. |
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‘PATIENCE, PRUDENCE, PRECISION’
Relative innocents can be swept up in the jihad. Dennis
Justen is a 19-year-old blond, unemployed high-school grad from suburban
Frankfurt. As a young teen, he surprised his parents by fasting for
Ramadan, wearing a caftan, cutting off his girlfriend and hogging the
family bathroom for hours-long “ritual cleansing.” The Justens were told
by counselors that their son was “just going through a phase.” But on
Sept. 22, Justen was caught trying to cross the border illegally from
Afghanistan to Pakistan. Before flying home to Germany, he was
interrogated by the FBI. Some Europeans join the jihad for more than
spiritual relief and a chance to see the world. Some very violent types
have signed on, like Lionel Dumont, 29, described by the French press as
“the invisible Public Enemy No. 1.” Growing up in a grimy industrial town
in the north of France, he began attending a local mosque before doing his
time in the French Army in Somalia, where he saw vast suffering by
Muslims. He drifted to the Bosnian civil war, where he joined an extremist
faction, called Takfir wal Hijra (Expiation and Exile), which is now seen
as a core sect in the bin Laden network. Dumont and some buddies returned
to France and went on a rampage, attacking police with assault rifles and
grenade launchers. When they placed a car loaded with explosives and
bottled-gas canisters in front of police headquarters in Lille on the eve
of a G7 ministers’ meeting in 1996, a violent shoot-out ensued. Dumont
escaped, presumably back to Bosnia. Among his effects found by police was
an explosives manual that he had inscribed with the words “Patience,
Prudence, Precision.” |
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“We will have victory like
there was in Afghanistan and we will have total Islamic law. Not only in
Chechnya, but reaching as far as Moscow, New York and Washington, D.C.”
— PHYS-ED TRAINER IN MANCHESTER, ENGLAND
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The various civil wars pitting Muslims against infidels around the world
offer a perfect proving ground for jihad. A videotape obtained by the
Russian intelligence service, the FSB, shows a muscular black man,
speaking in perfect English, discussing how he left his work as a phys-ed
trainer in Manchester, England, to join the mujahedin fighting the
Russians in Chechnya. “We will have victory like there was in
Afghanistan,” he says, “and we will have total Islamic law. Not only in
Chechnya, but reaching as far as Moscow, New York and Washington, D.C.”
Another video shows some rebels discussing the attack on the World Trade
Center. Says one: “It seems that America, between two oceans, cannot
defend itself. With a few small knives you can take hundreds of thousands
of lives. The Americans are hiding the real number of casualties so we
won’t celebrate.”
ANCIENT HATREDS IN THE INTERNET
AGE
In the loosely linked
underworld of Al Qaeda, ancient ethnic struggles can turn into modern
recruiting posters via the Internet. In the Moluccas, the former Spice
Islands in Indonesia, Muslims and Christians are slaughtering each other,
as they have from time to time over the centuries. But the Laskar Jihad
fighters are using not only medieval-looking scimitars but a Web site. It
attracts up to 2,500 hits a day from like-minded Netizens who view gory
photos of anti-Muslim atrocities (“His body was cut, his penis was put in
his mouth”). “We are especially popular in California,” says Laskar
communications head Hardi Ibnu Harun.
Bin
Laden’s training camps help sort the tourists from the true terrorists. In
France, police are concerned about a half-dozen cases of “missing sons”
who told their families they were going to fight “in Bosnia in the Muslim
struggle” and have not been heard from since. Officials now think that
some of them may have found their way to Afghanistan and, once there, were
essentially taken prisoner or brainwashed by cultists. “The leaders in
these camps separate out the strong from the weak,” says one French
authority. “Those who are strong go on to fight and perhaps become leaders
themselves. The weak may be simply eliminated.”
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Terrorist handbooks aren't
limited to Arabic editions -- this one, written in Russian, was discovered
in Chechnya
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Some Al Qaeda operatives take their learning with them
in a handy manual. A mixture of Quran quotes and practical tips for
killing, the handbook has lessons on kidnapping and assassination using
rifles and pistols (chapter 14), assassination using explosives (chapter
15) and assassination using poisons and cold steel (chapter 16). There is
training in code (for example, how to encipher the instruction “kill this
devil”) and training in the proper posture for shooting someone (“the body
should be normal, not tense, and the joints relaxed, not too tight, not
too loose”).
The manual instructs Al Qaeda
fighters to lie low, not to visit mosques or publicly praise Allah, and it
teaches them how to obtain false documents and aliases. As a practical
matter, moving in and out of Western countries, with their porous borders
and civil-rights sensitivities, has been a breeze. In 1997, New York
police, tipped off by a neighbor, were able to foil a plot by Ghazi
Ibrahum Aby Mezer to bomb the New York subway. It turned out Mezer had
already been apprehended three times by the U.S. Immigration and
Naturalization Service in the past 13 months for illegally entering the
United States from Canada. The INS had begun a formal deportation
proceeding, but he was free on bail and had filed a request for political
asylum. The ground: he was afraid the Israeli government would arrest him
for his membership in the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. |
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To a greater
degree than they will ever want to admit, the intelligence and
law-enforcement authorities of several Western countries have tolerated
terrorists in their midst. The rationalization has always been that it’s
better to keep an eye on terror cells than drive them underground. Radical
imams sometimes act as informants for law enforcement. In the murky world
of terror cells, however, it is sometimes hard to tell who is an
informant—and who is a double (or triple) agent. When Al Qaeda networks
moved into the Bosnian civil war, the CIA argued against expelling the
extremists, insisting that it was more important to watch them and monitor
their communications.
The British have not
been above tolerating some terrorists of their own. For years British
authorities have permitted a rabid imam named Abu Qatada to preach at a
social club in London. But when 18 videos of Abu Qatada’s rants turned up
in the Hamburg apartment of a fugitive member of Mohamed Atta’s terrorist
cell, the fiery imam became an instant candidate for new British laws
designed to detain potential terrorists without trial. All over the world,
America and its allies are trying to strangle the sleeper cells from
within. But in the difficult war on terror, squeezing one end of the
network may only push the poison in another direction. The war on the
Taliban has created a flood of refugees. Some of them are holy warriors,
who pay $20,000 to $30,000 to “travel agents,” professional smuggling
syndicates that set them up with new identities and passports. Newly
minted, the jihadists can go back into the world and start spreading
terror all over again.
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© 2003 Newsweek, Inc.
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The Iran
Connection
