By the late 1980s, New York City was beginning to feel the early stirrings of a clandestine movement born out of a war half a world away. An estimated fourteen thousand jihadis had dispersed after the Russians abandoned Afghanistan in 1989,1 and untold numbers began to settle in New York and New Jersey. Ali Mohammed, the secretive ex-Egyptian army officer who conducted the Calverton paramilitary training, later told federal investigators that al Qaeda sleeper agents called “submarines” were burrowing deep into U.S. cities.2
When the Afghan war ended, “we got the hell out of there,” said Milt Bearden, the former CIA station chief in Islamabad. “Afghanistan was off the front burner.” But America’s sudden abandonment of the region, a theater of ops it had invested in so heavily, was a strategic mistake of historic proportions. A few months after the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, Jack Blum, the former special counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, drew a direct link between the devastation below the Trade Towers and U.S. support for the “Afghan Arabs” in the war against the Soviets.
“Large chunks of our Government don’t want to look at the disposal problem at the end of our war,” said Blum. “Nobody wants to acknowledge this is our glorious victory in Afghanistan coming home to bite us.”3
At that moment, the man with the sharpest set of teeth was preaching from a mosque located on the third floor above a toy store in Jersey City.
Born in 1938 in the village of Al Gamalia near the Nile Delta, Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman lost his sight as an infant. By the age of eleven, driven by a relative who forced him to get up at 4:00 A.M. and study Islamic scripture in Braille, the young Omar had memorized the entire Koran.4 He went on to distinguish himself at Cairo’s Al Azhar, the oldest university in the Islamic world, where he earned a degree in Koranic studies in 1972.5
The young Sheikh was hardened by the philosophy of the fourteenth-century Muslim thinker Ibn Taymiyah, who believed that Islam had replaced Judaism and Christianity.6 He was later radicalized by the teachings of Sayyid Qutb, a modern Egyptian scholar who spent three years in the United States and returned with the belief that Western civilization had led humanity “to corruption and irreligion from which only Islam can save it.”7 In moderate Islamic circles, the word jihad means “task” or “calling.” To scholars like Qutb it meant “holy war.” In 1966 he was executed by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, whom the blind Sheikh called “the wicked pharaoh.” Abdel Rahman preached that Muslims had a duty to kill political leaders who didn’t adhere strictly to the Sharia, the holy law of Islam. He was later jailed for nine months in the notorious Qala prison, and reportedly subjected to brutal torture, which only steeled his resolve.
By the early 1980s, Sheikh Rahman, paroled and on his way to becoming a mythic figure among young Islamic radicals, had become spiritual adviser to a number of members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ). In 1981, when EIJ radicals from an errant Egyptian army squad8 murdered President Anwar Sadat during a military parade, the Sheikh was imprisoned and tried as a coconspirator. He had blessed the idea of Sadat’s assassination, but when no proof was presented at trial that the Sheikh had any direct involvement, he was acquitted.
In 1988, having been jailed, tried, and acquitted once again for his alleged role in a wave of terror against Egyptian Coptic Christians, the Sheikh made his way to Peshawar, Pakistan, near the Afghan border.
It was the height of the anti-Soviet war, and Peshawar, a kind of Wild West town near the Afghan frontier, was the staging area for the U.S. supply operation. Here the blind Sheikh soon became allied with the head of the largest Afghan mujahadeen rebel faction backed by the CIA.9 As billions of dollars poured in from the United States and the Saudis matched the U.S. contribution, the Sheikh reconnected with another former Al Azhar instructor, Sheikh Abdullah Azzam. A Palestinian Ph.D., Azzam was one of the founding fathers of the modern radical Islamic jihad.10 His slogan was “Jihad and the rifle alone: no negotiations, no conferences, no dialogues.”11 Terrorism analyst Steven Emerson has said that Azzam “is more responsible than any Arab figure in modern history for galvanizing the Muslim masses to wage an international holy war against all infidels and non-believers.”12
Exhorting Muslims to “unsheathe [their] sword[s]” against the perceived enemies of Islam, Azzam crossed the world from 1985 to 1989. He visited dozens of U.S. cities and began setting up a network of offices designed as recruiting posts and fund-raising centers for the mujahadeen in their battle with the Soviets. Informally they were known as NGOs—nongovernmental organizations—entities that purportedly raised money for charitable purposes.
The first center, established in the early 1980s in Peshawar, was called Alkifah. Over the next decade, Azzam set up branches at mosques in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Norway, and throughout the Mideast.13 The network was formally known as the Services Office for the Mujahadeen, or Makhtab al-Khidimat (MAK). The flagship Alkifah center in the United States was established on the ground floor of the Al Farooq Mosque in Brooklyn. A counterpart was created at the Islamic Center in Tucson. Soon Azzam opened similar offices in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and thirty other U.S. cities.14 During the late 1980s the network raised millions each year for the Afghan struggle.
At its height, the Services Office published a magazine called Al-Jihad with a circulation of fifty thousand. It was distributed by the centers in Brooklyn and Tucson, Arizona, which became the east-west anchors in Azzam’s U.S. network. All this would come to have deadly importance in 1989, when the Services Office was taken over by Osama bin Laden and morphed into his terror network called al Qaeda.15
It was Azzam who introduced the blind Sheikh to the young Saudi billionaire. At the age of twenty-two, bin Laden had arrived in Peshawar in the mid-1980s with a military transport plane full of bulldozers and equipment from his family construction conglomerate, the Bin Laden Group. Dubbed “the Contractor,” bin Laden quickly used the equipment to build roads, storage depots, and tunnels for the mujahadeen then battling the Soviets.16 Before long, Azzam convinced bin Laden to help fund his worldwide Services Office network of NGOs.
During the late 1980s, as the Afghan war waged on and the cash poured in, bin Laden became devoted to Azzam. But soon after the Soviets were defeated, a conflict developed between Azzam and bin Laden over the best use of the fortune in aid that still flowed through the centers of the MAK. Azzam wanted the money to help install a pure Islamic government in Afghanistan, in a revolution akin to the one that had swept Iran in 1979.
But bin Laden’s plan was much more ambitious. He wanted the Services Office money directed toward a “global jihad” that would carry the war to secular Islamic nations and the West. Like the blind Sheikh, bin Laden was a puritanical disciple of Taymiyah and Qutb, who saw America in particular as a “satanic state.”
Azzam argued openly and bitterly with the blind Sheikh,17 who backed bin Laden along with two other Egyptians: Dr. Ayman Al Zawahiri, head of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ), and Mohammed Atef, a former Cairo police official who became bin Laden’s right-hand man. Atef was so close to the Saudi billionaire that his son married bin Laden’s daughter.
The power struggle for control of the Services Office rivaled the internecine warfare of two Mafia families. Finally, after a violent triple homicide, the Egyptian-backed bin Laden bloc prevailed. On November 24, 1989, Azzam and his two sons were killed by a car bomb in Peshawar as they drove to juma (Friday prayers). The murders remain unsolved, and although he expressed public grief at their deaths, some U.S. intelligence officials believe that Osama bin Laden himself gave the order for the hit.
At that moment, one of Azzam’s most productive U.S.-based Services Office outposts was the Alkifah Center in Brooklyn. This was the very NGO the FBI had under surveillance during the Calverton shooting sessions in 1989. It was run by Azzam’s handpicked representative, an electrical engineer named Mustafa Shalabi. Under Shalabi, the center became a propaganda front and meeting place for aspiring young jihadis in the New York area. It also turned into a cash machine, raising millions of dollars each year. The Egyptian was so successful that Osama bin Laden himself asked for Shalabi’s help when he moved from Afghanistan to Sudan.18
Now, with the Afghan war over, bin Laden needed financing for his worldwide holy war. While Israel had been radical Islam’s primary enemy for decades, bin Laden’s new rhetoric encompassed a twin-headed hydra: the “Zionist-Crusader.” This new second enemy was a reminder of the Christian hordes who had descended from Europe to crush Islam in the eleventh century.
Eager to take his fight to America, the young Saudi billionaire needed a beachhead. So he turned his attention to the Alkifah center that Azzam had sent Mustafa Shalabi to run. Bin Laden was plotting a coup at the Brooklyn center, and the man he dispatched to stage it was none other than the blind Sheikh.
On his return to Egypt in 1990, Sheikh Rahman was placed under house arrest, but he escaped when his followers used a double to pose for him.19 By that summer, Rahman had made his way to Sudan. There, even though he’d been on a U.S. terrorism Watch List for three years, the Sheikh was granted a visa to enter America. This was another blunder on the part of U.S. intelligence that became a significant dot on the chart.* Later, the CIA would try to blame his admission on a corrupt case officer who helped Abdel Rahman’s lawyer obtain illegal U.S. visas for his clients.20 But the State Department later determined that, although he was on the list of “undesirables,” the Sheikh obtained three sanctioned visas from CIA agents posing as State Department officials at the U.S. embassy in Khartoum.21 Many intelligence analysts believe that Abdel Rahman’s entry was payback by the Agency for his help in the CIA’s support of the Afghan “freedom fighters.”
Begun under President Jimmy Carter, the mujahadeen covert aid campaign was considered one of the CIA’s greatest achievements during the Reagan years, and the Peshawar-based covert supply operation enjoyed broad bipartisan support. By the late 1980s, when the CIA’s secret funding of the Contras in Nicaragua had become a foreign policy disaster for the Reagan White House, many Democrats saw Afghanistan as “the good war.”22 At the time, no one in U.S. intelligence circles seemed to notice that the chief Afghan warlord, backed by the CIA, was denouncing the United States with the same level of hatred he’d shown toward the USSR.23
The night he flew into JFK in July of 1990, Omar Abdel Rahman was picked up by Mahmud Abouhalima, the redheaded Egyptian who had fired AK-47s at Calverton. This was the same man who would drive the aborted getaway cab on the night of Kahane’s murder four months later. Also in the welcoming party was Mustafa Shalabi, Abdullah Azzam’s representative, who had sponsored the Sheikh’s entry.24 Seemingly unaware that a conspiracy to displace him was afoot, Shalabi installed the Sheikh at a Bay Ridge apartment, and Abouhalima began to serve as his driver. Soon the charismatic Sheikh was preaching at the Al Farooq Mosque in Brooklyn.
An Egyptian in the FDNY
Among the Sheikh’s devoted followers at the mosque was a quiet, unassuming accountant named Ahmed Amin Refai. Born in Alexandria, Egypt, Refai had emigrated to the United States in 1970. For the past sixteen years he had worked in the Capital Budget Unit of the New York City Fire Department—or hardly worked, according to Kay Woods, an assistant FDNY commissioner who was Refai’s boss at the time.
“Ahmed really had the time of his life,” said Woods. “He would come in late. He would call in sick. He would take long lunches. He would make phone calls to Egypt. He literally fell asleep at his desk sometimes.”25
After Sheikh Rahman arrived, Refai would spend hours at the Al Farooq and Abu Bakr mosques, not far from FDNY headquarters on Livingston Street in Brooklyn.
“Every day there was something,” said Woods. “Arrive a little bit late. Leave early. Take a long lunch. Wouldn’t come in.”
But for the most part, Refai kept his head down and acted like a nondescript city bureaucrat. His tenure remained uneventful until one day in the early 1990s when Woods decided to empty out a series of filing cabinets left over from an FDNY unit that had once used the office.
“There were these old beat-up green cabinets,” said Woods, “full of files that a former FDNY fire captain had reviewed.” The file cabinets were loaded with architectural drawings and the plans of various city buildings. To accommodate the discarded files, Woods brought in two Dumpsters. She was just coming back from lunch one day when she found Ahmed Refai rifling through them. Along with the blueprints, there were pen-and-ink drawings and some architectural renderings. Woods asked what Refai was doing. He smiled and turned to face her.
“Oh, I was just going to keep those. Do you mind if I keep some?”
“No,” she told the immigrant Egyptian. “They’re going out in the garbage. Keep whatever you want. Why? What are you gonna do with them?”
Refai just smiled and gathered up the files that he wanted. Among them were detailed drawings and blueprints of the bridges and tunnels around Manhattan, and the eight-square-block Port Authority complex between West and Liberty Streets: the World Trade Center.
“I had no idea at the time,” Woods said in an interview for this book.
In the years to come, however, the events that unfolded around the blind Sheikh’s circle would send a chill through her.26
As the summer of 1991 approached, the connections between the players became clearer. Sheikh Omar’s circle operated out of three mosques: the dingy al-Salaam in Jersey City, and the two mosques in Brooklyn. The Al Farooq was the location of Mustafa Shalabi’s Alkifah Center on Atlantic Avenue. The Sheikh also preached at the Abu Bakr on Forrest Avenue. The second-floor imam’s residence there had been renovated by Ibrahim El-Gabrowny, a forty-two-year-old Egyptian immigrant who worked as a contractor.
El-Gabrowny was the cousin of El Sayyid Nosair, the Calverton shooting trainee who was about to stand trial for the murder of Rabbi Kahane. In the months before the trial in 1991, Mustafa Shalabi, emir of the Alkifah, dedicated himself to raising money for Nosair’s defense. A reported $163,000 was collected from Arab restaurants and mosques all over Brooklyn. El-Gabrowny even made a trip to Saudi Arabia, where he met with Osama bin Laden himself and solicited twenty thousand dollars for Nosair’s legal bills. Years later, after the 9/11 attacks, an FBI agent told a congressional committee that it was in the context of this legal fee contribution that the Bureau heard bin Laden’s name for the first time.27 But in 1991 nobody in the New York Joint Terrorist Task Force thought to put the bin Laden dot on the chart.*
Meanwhile, violence seemed to follow the Sheikh wherever he went. He’d only been in town four months before his follower Nosair gunned down the rabbi. Though the Sheikh’s own driver, Abouhalima, had been Nosair’s intended wheelman on the night of the hit, the FBI seemed powerless to connect the cleric to Kahane’s murder. But that wasn’t his last association with a violent homicide. A few months later, a rift began to develop between Mustafa Shalabi and Sheikh Rahman. It would result in a second act of violence that might have led the FBI to another important bin Laden link.
Early in 1991, in a conflict that mirrored bin Laden’s earlier dispute with the murdered Azzam, the Sheikh began openly arguing with Shalabi over the best use for the fortune that continued to pour into the Alkifah Center. One account estimated it at over two million dollars a year.28 Shalabi, like Azzam, wanted the money to go to the Afghanis struggling to build a post-Soviet government in Kabul. But the Sheikh demanded that half the funds be earmarked for his own cause: the removal of Hosni Mubarak as president in Egypt.29
The split drove the Sheikh to rage, and he denounced Shalabi—his original sponsor—in a pamphlet circulated to area mosques. “He is no longer a Muslim,” the pamphlet read. “We should no longer…be manipulated by his deviousness.”
The president of the Abu Bakr Mosque’s board of directors made a personal appeal to the Sheikh on Shalabi’s behalf. “You have been invited into your neighbor’s home, and now you are trying to take over that home. How can you say that is just?”
“Shalabi is wrong,” the Sheikh snapped back defiantly.30
Just after 7:00 p.m. on the night of February 26, 1991, Shalabi was packing at his apartment in the Seagate neighborhood of Brooklyn for a trip to Egypt the following day. He was planning to join his wife and child there, and he was worried. He’d told friends that because of the struggle with the volatile Sheikh, his life might be in jeopardy.31
He never made it to Cairo.
The next day, when Shalabi’s relatives in Egypt began calling his Brooklyn home, the phone went unanswered. Soon, they contacted the police. But on that particular day, February 27, 1991, the attention of most Americans was focused on events halfway around the world: the U.S. forces of Operation Desert Storm were about to close in on Baghdad.