Rashad Khalifa was a rising star in the Islamic world. An Egyptian scholar raised in the Sufi tradition, he moved to the United States in 1959 to study biochemistry. Khalifa decided to stay and raise his family in Tucson while working in his field. His son was the first American of Egyptian descent to play major league baseball.1
An obsessive student of the Koran, Khalifa used computers in his day job and was inspired to apply them to analyzing the holy book. He discovered an arcane pattern within the Koran that revolved around the number 19—as seen in the number of chapters and verses, the occurrences of references to numbers within the Koran, and other, even more complicated, derivations.
Based on his writings and translation work, Khalifa became a spiritual leader in his own right. At first, his “mathematical miracle” of the Koran was warmly received by Muslim scholars as proof of the uniqueness and the divine creation of the Koran. But Khalifa didn’t stop there.2
Over time, his studies led him to conclude that the hadith and Sunnah— Islamic traditions about the life of the Prophet Mohammed—were not reliable sources for Islamic practice. Many of the more socially restrictive practices in Islam are supported by these traditions. Eliminating the hadith and Sunnah from the mix led Khalifa into an increasingly liberal interpretation his faith. At the Masjid Tucson, where his followers gathered, Khalifa permitted men and women to pray together, and he didn’t require women to cover their heads. Word of these practices started to spread.
Worse still, the mathematical analysis of the Koran didn’t add up perfectly. According to Khalifa’s calculations, one small section of the Koran was illegitimate—written by a human hand and not the living word of Allah. This proclamation was the final straw. The suggestion that even one word of the Koran should be changed or deleted was considered heresy by many Muslims. Khalifa’s critics charged he was setting himself up as a prophet, in contradiction of Islamic teachings that state Muhammad is history’s final prophet.3
In 1985 a group of scholars led by the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, Abdullah Bin Baz, issued a fatwa declaring Khalifa an apostate, a religious crime for which he could be killed under a strict reading of Islamic law.4
One Tucson resident who looked on Khalifa with disapproval was Wadih El Hage, one of the first wave of American al Qaeda operatives (see chapter 2). El Hage agreed with the conservatives—Khalifa was not following the true teachings of Sunni Islam and “in general behaved like an infidel.”5
As word of Khalifa’s liberal views and his more esoteric heresies spread further, Islamic radicals in Brooklyn took notice. The anti-Soviet jihadists at the Al Kifah Center were now hardening into wild, undirected radicals, and their influence was growing.
In late 1989 the head of the Al Kifah Center, an al Qaeda–linked Egyptian named Mustafa Shalabi, sent an envoy from New York, an Egyptian, to investigate the Rashad Khalifa situation.
The envoy met up with El Hage, who helped him confirm the liberal cleric’s teachings. The envoy went to Masjid Tucson to witness Friday prayers but was turned away because of his long beard, which Khalifa’s followers correctly interpreted as a sign of conservatism. Peering in the windows, the envoy saw that men and women were indeed sitting together.
The man returned to New York to report his findings. The bloody response came within a couple of months. On January 31, 1990, a group of men broke into the Masjid Tucson and stabbed Khalifa repeatedly.6 His body was drenched in a flammable paint thinner. The valves had been opened in a gas stove on the premises, but the fumes had not ignited.7
When asked about the killing years later, El Hage said simply, “I think it was a good thing.” El Hage was investigated but never charged for the murder—in the end, there would be plenty of other things to charge him with. Yet because of El Hage’s involvement, the killing of Rashad Khalifa is considered the first act of al Qaeda–linked violence in the United States.8
Khalifa had already seen how he would die. In September 1989 police in Colorado Springs investigating a series of robberies raided a storage locker being used by members of a radical Islamic fraternity known as Al Fuqra. They found a cache of homemade explosives, military equipment, and training manuals. They also discovered a detailed plan for murdering Rashad Khalifa, including surveillance notes on his movements. The plan was nearly identical to Khalifa’s ultimate fate.9 Police warned the imam of the plot two weeks before he was killed.10
One of the alleged killers, a Trinidadian Muslim who went by the name of Benjamin Phillips, had gotten close to Khalifa by posing as a student. He fled the country and escaped prosecution for nearly 20 years before finally being apprehended.11 Several Al Fuqra members were also convicted of conspiracy in the killing.12
It’s hard to imagine how an Islamic sect with a history of extreme violence and dozens of armed compounds all over the United States stays out of the headlines. Yet that is the story of Al Fuqra.
In 1980 a Pakistani sheikh named Mubarek Ali Gilani came to the Yasin Mosque on Herkimer Street in Brooklyn.13 He was looking for men to go to Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union. Gilani was one of the first non-Afghans to join the battle, but his dream went beyond the conflict with communism.
A mystic and an Islamic faith healer of some renown, Gilani had a vision of a purified Islam, purged in fire and blood, with Muslims being segregated from the world of “kaffirs” (infidels) and living day to day, according to the precepts of their religion.14 His followers referred to themselves as Jamaat al Fuqra—the Society of the Poor. The group later changed its name to the Muslims of the Americas.15
Gilani’s message resonated with African American Muslims, and he began to attract adherents, first in Brooklyn and soon throughout the country, including significant centers of gravity in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Colorado. Some of Gilani’s new American recruits were brought to Pakistan to train in insurgent techniques with mujahideen factions fighting India in the disputed border region of Kashmir. American members of Al Fuqra would eventually take part in other jihadist conflicts, from Chechnya to Lebanon.16
Members of the group segregated themselves from Western influences, moving into rural compounds and small private villages in the United States and Canada with names like “Islamberg” and “Islamville.” The group also had outposts in Jamaica and Trinidad.17 Some of the communities aspired to be self-sufficient. Others were financed by “security” firms run by the sect, enterprises that tended to be a mix of bodyguard services and illicit arms trade.18
By the mid-1990s there were about thirty such communities in various parts of the United States, in addition to what investigators called “covert paramilitary training compounds” in several remote locations. Most of these communities still exist today.19
During the group’s thirty-year history, members of Al Fuqra filled a scorecard with crimes of shocking violence, including at least thirty-four incidents that ranged from bombings to kidnappings to murder, but the government has never moved against the group in an organized manner.20
Members of Al Fuqra were threaded through the Brooklyn Muslim community, but they stood apart from the hierarchy of scholars and fighters that was, around the same time, crystallizing at the Al Farook Mosque and the Al Kifah Center. A number of news stories during the 1990s, citing multiple anonymous sources, claimed that Abdullah Rashid, the African American mujahid who almost lost his leg in Afghanistan, was closely linked to Al Fuqra.
Michael Scheuer, a CIA analyst who tracked Rashid during the early 1990s, said that Rashid and some of his associates were “at least tangentially involved” in the group. But Tom Corrigan, a member of the New York City Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) who investigated Rashid in the United States, said he wasn’t aware of any connection and that Rashid didn’t seem to know what the group was in a conversation between the two men during the mid-1990s.21
The murder of Rashad Khalifa was eerily echoed in Brooklyn one year later, but this time the victim was one of the radicals’ own—Mustafa Shalabi, the red-headed American citizen from Egypt who headed the Al Kifah Center.22
Shalabi had worked in Brooklyn as an electrical contractor during the 1980s. Like so many other Americans, he had become entranced with the jihad against the Soviets through the writings and speeches of Abdullah Azzam. Shalabi traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan to fight and help raise funds for the mujahideen. He returned to Brooklyn as Azzam’s trusted lieutenant, in charge of the American Al Kifah operation. His deputies included the imam of Al Farook, Fawaz Damra, and another naturalized Egyptian American, Ali Shinawy, who had come to the United States during the 1970s and worked repairing trains for the New York City Transit Authority.23
In addition to providing Azzam with an operating base in the United States, the Al Kifah Center had quickly evolved into a transit station for the jihad, helping would-be jihadists find transportation and secure visas while providing support for those left behind.
Shalabi was an entrepreneur. In order to support Al Kifah’s operations, he employed a number of for-profit criminal enterprises, including gunrunning, arson for hire, and a counterfeiting ring set up in the basement of the jihad office.24
Al Kifah also provided training for jihadists in the United States, nominally as preparation for Afghanistan. The Calverton gun club visits organized by Pittsburgh transplant El Sayyid Nosair were part of this program, as were the advanced training sessions conducted by Ali Mohamed. All of this activity was undertaken in the service of Azzam. As the 1980s wound to a close, Azzam remained the shining star of the jihadi world.
The war against the Soviets was finally coming to an end, largely due to the efforts of the native Afghan mujahideen. Yet in the wider Muslim world, a healthy dose of spin transformed the victory of the Afghan resistance into a victory for pan-Islamic jihad, the confluence of foreign money and imported Muslim fighters, with Azzam at the center, managing, inspiring, and holding the whole effort together.
The end of the war posed a powerful question, however. Azzam was heir apparent to a substantial fund-raising operation and an army of irregulars who hung on his every word. Where would this army go? The battle over direction raged on two fronts: in Pakistan, where Azzam tussled with his fellow war veterans, and in the United States, where it took a different form.
Although Azzam was the most influential figure in the jihad machine, he was not the only one. Another prominent scholar with a significant following in the United States was an Egyptian named Omar Abdel Rahman. Blind since childhood, Rahman had managed to memorize the entire Koran, an impressive act of scholarship even for the sighted.
He earned a degree from Cairo’s Al Azhar, the most prestigious Sunni Islamic university in the world, and lectured there on the fundamentals of Islam. He also became embroiled in the seething cauldron of the Islamic movement in Egypt and eventually emerged as a spiritual guide to the Islamic Group and the EIJ organization led by Ayman Al Zawahiri.25
The relationship between Rahman and Zawahiri was close and operational but riddled with rivalry and animosity. At one point, Zawahiri sided with a faction that sought to remove Rahman from his position on the grounds that blindness made him an unfit leader for the jihad. Nevertheless, they were both potent figures who commanded substantial resources, and ultimately an uneasy accommodation was reached. Rahman continued to lead the Islamic Group, while Zawahiri established a branch of EIJ in exile. Each man exerted significant influence within the other’s circles, despite the tensions.26
Rahman was arrested after the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat by EIJ in 1981 and accused of having foreknowledge of the attack and having provided a fatwa to justify the killing on religious grounds. He was acquitted, but Egypt became unfriendly ground for him. Despite his blindness, he made his way to Afghanistan to “see” the war for himself and soon became one of the most vocal supporters of the mujahideen.27
Some people in the United States looked on Rahman favorably because of his support for the CIA-backed jihad in Afghanistan. He made several trips to the United States to raise funds for the mujahideen and call American Muslims to join the fighting, attracting a large number of followers. Although Afghanistan was a strong focus for his speeches, Rahman roused a different sort of inspiration than Azzam and attracted more of a hardcore radical audience.
Azzam, in his rhetoric, had a tendency to lead with the glories of jihad, leveraging the spectacle to introduce ideological aspirations more subtly. His writings and speeches still contained plenty of blood and fire, and his goals were unabashedly those of Islamic supremacism. The Azzam style, however, was to first entice new recruits to Afghanistan to see the miracles and later inculcate them with ideology—that approach had drawn in Loay Bayazid, the mostly secularized Muslim from Kansas City, among others.
If Azzam used jihad as the carrot, for Rahman it was unquestionably the stick. The blind sheikh was more vocally—or at least more visibly—critical of Western and American morals than many of his contemporaries. Yet much of his venom was reserved for Muslim leaders. As the incendiary nature of his rhetoric became clear, Rahman was added to a State Department watch list that barred him from entering the United States.
Soon afterward, he wrote a scathing commentary questioning whether the leaders of Arab countries could be considered Muslims. His arguments were consistent with the radical Islamic movement known as takfir—Arabic for “excommunication”—claiming that only leaders who conformed to the strictest interpretation of Islam should be considered Muslims. Leaders who adopted secular legal systems, instead of shariah law such as the government of Egypt, could legitimately be killed in the name of jihad and “must not remain unopposed even for a moment.”
How could a Muslim be so bold, after all we have seen, as to replace even one part of the Shariah? How could a ruler claim to follow Islam, and still do such a thing? Wouldn’t he be aware that by giving preference to his own legislation over that of Allah he would inevitably have excluded himself from the Islamic Community? [ … ] The common people and their rulers, the educated and the ignorant, the cultured and the illiterate, all agree that these things are fundamental to Islam. Someone who denies any part of this has left Islam, and must perish in the mire of apostasy.28
In April 1989 Rahman was arrested by Egyptian authorities on charges of provoking an antigovernment riot. A few days later, the Islamic Group began to make tentative overtures to the U.S. government, a delicate proposition given American support for Sadat’s successor, Hosni Mubarak, an ironclad dictator.
One of Rahman’s disciples secretly came to the U.S. embassy in Cairo and met with State Department diplomats to spin the Islamic Group as a legitimate political organization, rather than a terrorist gang. Rahman, he explained, was innocent of the instigation charge that had been leveled against him, and the group was inclined to work with the government to make Egypt more Islamic and less secular. During the long conversation, the IG operative also assured the diplomats that the blind sheik’s organization had not attacked U.S. citizens, and he dangled the prospect of cooperation with the Americans where mutual interests could be found.29
The embassy officers were intrigued but cautious. The approach seemed like a “desperate outreach effort,” one of them wrote in a cable back to Washington. The Islamic Group operative “has revealed much more than we would have considered prudent. [ … ] We deduced that [name redacted]’s willingness to meet with embassy officers, most recently at the embassy itself, is motivated [by] a desperate hope of securing U.S. ‘support.’”
The meetings apparently took place without the knowledge of U.S. ambassador to Cairo Frank Wisner, who was aware of the Islamic Group as an Egyptian opposition movement involved with the assassination of Sadat. Wisner said he was unaware of the contacts that were being cultivated within the embassy. Any formal asylum request would have had to go to Wisner for his signature, and he said that no such request was ever filed. An embassy official directly involved in the meetings refused to be interviewed for this book.30
A little more than a year after this meeting, in July 1990, Omar Abdel Rahman moved to the United States via a circuitous route from Egypt to Pakistan to Sudan. Despite the presence of his name on a watch list, Rahman’s visa to enter the United States was signed by a CIA officer assigned to the embassy in Khartoum who was pulling duty as a consular officer. The government characterized the decision to allow the visa as a simple oversight. The CIA’s involvement, investigators said, was merely coincidental.31
Even as Rahman’s visa was working its way through the system, the blind sheikh was openly telegraphing his hostile intent toward the United States. In early 1990, Rahman gave a speech in Denmark:
If Muslim battalions were to do five or six operations to the Americans in surprise attacks like the [1983 terrorist bombings] in Lebanon, the Americans would have exited [the Persian Gulf] and gathered their armies and gone back [ … ] to their country.32
As Rahman was preparing to leave Egypt, a dramatic development in Pakistan changed the course of the jihad movement with a literal explosion. In the wake of the August 1988 creation of al Qaeda, the unified jihad front created by Azzam started to crumble.
Osama bin Laden wanted to expand the movement into a wide-ranging global jihad with aspirations to reclaim Muslim lands in the Middle East from “corrupt” Muslim rulers, with Egypt near the top of the target list. Included in this global jihad would be Egypt’s most important patron, the United States.
Azzam, by most accounts, had little interest in fighting fellow Muslims, which he saw as counterproductive. His strategic vision for the long term was attuned more toward lands that had historically been Muslim, such as Spain, the Balkans, and especially Palestine, where Muslims faced a clear external enemy in Israel. His short-term strategy was to consolidate his power base in Afghanistan and help stabilize the political situation there in the wake of the Soviets’ departure. To accomplish this, he appealed to the elders of the community.33
The passion of youths might be enough to win a war, but to create an Islamic revolution in Afghanistan required serious thinkers, and Muslims fully committed to the propagation of Islam. Azzam was interested in nation building. In December 1988 Azzam wrote:
It is possible for Muslims to obtain many benefits from the school of the Afghan Jihad. It is also possible for more distinguished models, people with mature abilities and wiser, more mindful propagators to come to the land of jihad. Thousands of such people could bring about a tremendous revolution in the reality of Afghanistan, and in the inhabited regions thereafter. Those thousands may change history.
Mature propagators are still the talk of the hour in the Islamic jihad of Afghanistan, and the subject of pressing necessity and glaring need. There are still many solutions which lie in the hands of those who are not playing the roles they should.34
In the months after al Qaeda was established, Azzam used his considerable influence in an effort to seize control of the copious amounts of Saudi money flowing into Peshawar under the pretext of humanitarian relief. He strong-armed former friends, spread nasty rumors about those who didn’t play ball, and even called in favors with bank officials to have strategic accounts frozen. When persuasion and politics failed, he turned to force, sending loyalists to beat his opponents and seize their assets. Yet the al Qaeda faction committed to bin Laden was growing in influence. The Saudi had friends in high places, in Afghanistan and back in Saudi Arabia, where donors were becoming concerned about the infighting and the lack of direction. Azzam was forced to create a committee to explore the possibility of exporting jihad to other fronts around the world.35
In late 1988 Azzam was dragged into arbitration over one of these disputes, involving a project account worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. The deck was stacked against him. The chief arbitrator was Sayyid Imam Al Sharif, a legendary jihadist ideologue known best by his pen name, Dr. Fadl. Sharif was an Egyptian, a longtime friend of Zawahiri, and a member of the Islamic Jihad. One of Azzam’s trusted lieutenants, a financier with close ties to bin Laden, testified that Azzam had falsified evidence in the case. In the end, Azzam suffered a humiliating loss; he was ordered to relinquish the funds and return the materials he had seized during the dispute.36
The situation continued to deteriorate. Sometime in 1989 his enemies planted dynamite under the pulpit in a Peshawar mosque where Azzam preached every Friday. That improvised bomb failed to detonate, but the next one succeeded. On November 24, 1989—just days after a contentious meeting about money with bin Laden’s supporters—Azzam’s car was bombed.37
The founding father of the Afghan Jihad had been assassinated, quite possibly by one of his former friends. Exactly who did it remains unknown to this day. There were a multitude of suspects, including the CIA and the Mossad, but Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al Zawahiri certainly had means, motive, and opportunity.38
Whoever was responsible, bin Laden took advantage of the situation and began to consolidate his control of the Afghan fund-raising apparatus. In subsequent issues of Al Jihad magazine, which Azzam had founded, the father of the Afghan jihad’s history was rewritten to tell the tale of his support for the global jihad. His death was portrayed as having united the fractious mujahideen factions in Afghanistan—their continued internecine bloodshed notwithstanding.39
Back in Brooklyn, Mustafa Shalabi was caught in the middle of this breaking storm. Although he had long-standing ties to Zawahiri and kept an open channel with bin Laden, he wanted Al Kifah to continue in the direction Azzam had started, specifically by cultivating the Afghan refugees and working to consolidate Afghanistan as a base for future operations.40
Things got worse when Omar Abdel Rahman arrived in New York. Shalabi and El Sayyid Nosair picked up Rahman at the airport when he arrived in 1990. Nosair smelled trouble immediately.
“Each one of them has a different view for the Islamic war,” Nosair told a friend. “They are going to have a clash someday.” Nosair wanted to stay out of it.41
Although Azzam’s rhetoric was sometimes harsh and always focused on jihad, he was also inspiring and gregarious, offering his vision with a wide smile and a sense of humor. Rahman was an entirely different sort of figure, perpetually angry, delivering fiery speeches that skewed heavily toward the negative. His ambitions went well beyond reclaiming historically Muslim lands. He was intensely focused on expanding the reach of Islam, and anyone who was not with him was against Islam.
The obligation of Allah is upon us to wage jihad for the sake of Allah. It is one of the obligations that we must undoubtedly fulfill. And we conquer the lands of the infidels and we spread Islam by calling the infidels to Allah. And if they stand in our way, then we wage jihad for the sake of Allah.42
The dark tenor of Rahman’s rhetoric began to inspire dark thoughts in his followers. Nosair was especially captivated by Rahman’s increasingly violent message. His son, Zak Ebrahim, described one Friday service during a speech against violence delivered in 2010:
[Rahman] began his khutba, or oration, and I sat there trying my best to mimic my father as he listened intently to his words. That day, the sheikh argued that Western culture was corrupting Muslims all over the world, that the consequences of American democracy were materialism, sexual perversion and idolatry, meant to distract believers from the true word of God, laying blame for the Muslim world’s ills on many of the same groups that Jerry Falwell blamed for 9/11: pagans, feminists and gays. But the sheikh saved his most venomous words for those of the Jewish faith.
On the drive home that afternoon, I wondered to myself, “What made the sheikh and his followers so intensely devout?” I asked my father, “When did you become such a ‘good’ Muslim?” and he replied, “When I came to this country and I saw everything that was wrong with it.” And in that instant, I recognized the same look on his face that I had seen on the sheikh.43
Nosair wasn’t content with ideology. On November 5, 1990, he shot and killed Meir Kahane, a radical Jewish leader, during a conference for a Zionist group at the New York Marriott East Side. The controversial founder of the Jewish Defense League, a terrorist organization based in New York, Kahane had an FBI file more than a foot thick. A rabid, over-the-top Zionist and a member of the Israeli parliament, he was considered a racist and an extremist by most Israelis, let alone by anyone else.44
After Kahane’s speech, Nosair, wearing a skullcap to appear Jewish, approached Kahane and extended his hand. When Kahane reached to return the handshake, Nosair shot him in the neck with a .357 magnum handgun. Kahane died at the hospital a short while later.
“The son of a bitch killed the Rabbi,” someone yelled. “See if you can catch him!” “Stop, murderer!” shouted another. Nosair shot one bystander fleeing the room, then shot an off-duty postal inspector while trying to escape. Unfortunately for the assassin, the inspector was wearing a bulletproof vest and returned fire, taking Nosair down.45
Nosair lay on the ground with his arms outstretched and a smile on his face. If he was dreaming that he had achieved martyrdom, he was destined to be disappointed. The killer was taken to the hospital and soon recovered.46
Investigators hauled boxes of documents out of Nosair’s apartment. Most were in Arabic, but the stash included military training manuals and documents given to Nosair by Sergeant Ali Mohamed, the jihadist mole at Fort Bragg. The material went into storage without close examination. The NYPD’s chief of detectives decreed that Nosair had acted alone.47
Kahane was widely loathed by Muslims and non-Muslims alike. In a room full of people, no one had gotten a good-enough look to clearly identify Nosair as the man who fired the killing shot. Between those who didn’t think he was guilty and those who didn’t mind if he was, Nosair became a local hero, especially among the more radical segment of the Muslim community.
Supporters showed up at his hearings and trial proceedings in large and often loud numbers. The hat was passed, and money was raised. One large contribution to Nosair’s defense fund came from abroad—Osama bin Laden sent $20,000 for the cause.48
Because of the lack of eyewitnesses, Nosair was acquitted of murder and escaped life in prison, but he went to jail on a handgun charge. Crowds cheered outside the courtroom when the verdict was announced. Later, Nosair would receive a stream of visitors in prison, including many of his friends in the blind sheikh’s circles.
In this air of increasing violence, Mustafa Shalabi tried to make things work with the blind sheikh. He helped Rahman get an apartment in the Bay Ridge neighborhood of Brooklyn. He hosted gatherings at his home, where he introduced Rahman to his circle of followers. Some of them swore bayat—an oath of allegiance—to the sheikh. An Egyptian named Abdo Haggag entered the inner circle, serving as Rahman’s speechwriter. Unlike his peers, Haggag found Rahman to be a hypocrite and eventually turned against him, spying on Rahman for the Egyptian government and (much later) becoming a cooperating witness for the United States.49
The conflict that had played out in Afghanistan between bin Laden and Azzam was repeating itself in Brooklyn through their respective proxies. Rahman was involved with bin Laden. It’s not entirely clear how solid that relationship was, but it was strong enough that bin Laden sent several $5,000 payments to help cover Rahman’s living expenses in the United States.50
Shalabi was sitting on a significant amount of money, at least tens of thousands of dollars, and some reports put the total as high as $2 million. Rahman wanted the money for the global jihad, including Egypt specifically, but with an eye toward a widening conflict that would soon encompass the United States. Shalabi remained focused on Azzam’s vision—Afghanistan first and the rest of the world later.51
Shalabi had also taken money out of the center and opened a shop, with the apparent intention of rolling the profits back into the jihad. Yet questions about Shalabi’s honesty had persisted for years, and some called this theft. In a 1989 memo sent to Al Kifah officers in the United States and abroad, Fawaz Damra, one of the founders of the Brooklyn office, accused Shalabi of embezzling $1 million from the center.52
Damra was forced out of his post as imam of the Al Farook Mosque and sent into exile in Ohio. Omar Abdel Rahman replaced him, but he, too, began to bitterly criticize Shalabi, first for his handling of Al Kifah’s funds and then for his religious inadequacy. The two issues were inextricably linked, as far as the sheikh was concerned, and both were matters of life and death.
Rahman did not enjoy unequivocal support from the community. Al Farook members suspected that he himself was funneling Al Kifah funds for his own purposes, such as supporting his family back in Egypt. Shalabi again won the power struggle, and Rahman was dismissed from his duties at Al Farook. Unlike Damra, however, he would not go quietly.53
Rahman’s loyalists began a whisper campaign against Shalabi that soon grew to a roar. They passed pamphlets around the community warning local Muslims not to trust their money to the Al Kifah Center.
At the beginning of 1991, the tide began to turn against Shalabi. Fearing for his life, he called Ali Mohamed, the jihadist Special Forces sergeant who worked for Ayman Al Zawahiri, and asked him to take Shalabi’s wife and son to the airport, where they flew back to Egypt. Shalabi intended to leave the country himself within a few days, but his time had run out.54
Enter Wadih El Hage, the al Qaeda member from Tucson who had been mysteriously linked to the brutal killing of liberal imam Rashad Khalifa little more than a year earlier.
According to El Hage, Shalabi called the Arizona Muslim and invited him to New York to look after the Al Kifah office while Shalabi flew to Pakistan, possibly to make his case with what remained of Abdullah Azzam’s organization back in Peshawar.55
On March 1 neighbors found Shalabi dead in his South Brooklyn apartment, a stain of dried blood beneath him. His death had been extraordinarily violent—he had been shot in the face but somehow survived and tried to fight back against his killers, who then stabbed him to death.56
The investigation into Shalabi’s assassination was hampered by the standards of the day. At the time, both the NYPD and the FBI were prohibited from conducting investigations predicated on religion. Although Shalabi’s killing had clear connections to his religious community, investigators weren’t even allowed to use the word “Muslim” in their reports.57
Within the local Muslim community, rumors flew hard and fast. Some said the CIA had killed Shalabi; others suggested a Jewish conspiracy. In 2005 New York City detectives extracted a confession that confirmed what had long been suspected: the killing was carried out by the increasingly fanatical followers of Omar Abdel Rahman. According to the confession, three men, all American citizens, took part in the murder—Bilal Alkaisi, Mohammed Salameh, and Nidal Ayyad. None were ever prosecuted for the crime.58
As in the Khalifa case, El Hage told investigators he knew nothing about the murder. He claimed that Shalabi had failed to pick him up at the airport as they had arranged, and he had hitched a ride with another Al Kifah official, only to hear about the murder days later.59
With Shalabi out of the way, there were few personalities who could draw focus away from the blind sheikh, and the local jihadists either lined up in his camp or dropped out altogether. Rahman had a galvanizing effect on the Brooklyn jihadists who, under Shalabi, had mostly confined themselves to training on weekends.
“He was like a major league ballplayer that wound up playing in a minor-league stadium. He made everybody else around him better,” said Tom Corrigan, an NYPD detective who worked with FBI agents on New York’s Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), which had taken an interested in Rahman’s circle after the Kahane killing.60
The energy generated by Rahman was building to a peak. Shalabi’s killers were not sated; they desired more violence and were now plotting as a terrorist cell.
Goaded by Nosair, whom they had visited in prison, Salameh and Ayyad settled on the strategy of bombing Jewish targets in New York City. Alkaisi, a Palestinian American who had trained in explosives in Afghanistan, broke with the group after an argument over money. The remaining plotters now lacked expertise.61
The cell sought help from overseas, and in September 1992 Ramzi Yousef and Ahmad Ajaj flew into New York City from Peshawar, Pakistan.62
Yousef, a Pakistani, was an explosives genius who had refined his craft at Khaldan, an al Qaeda training camp in the vicinity of Khost, Afghanistan, and at the University of Dawa and Jihad in Pakistan. He spent several months shuttling between Khost and Peshawar, extending his own knowledge to others. Ajaj was one of his students.
At the camps, Yousef, Ajaj, and unknown accomplices had been discussing a plot to bomb the World Trade Center in New York. When Salameh’s cell called for help, it was the perfect opportunity to make his scheme a reality.63
Investigators do not know exactly how the New York conspirators managed to secure Yousef’s participation in the plot, but several of the New York plotters— including Salameh, Ayyad, and Egyptian immigrant Mahmud Abouhalima—had been trained by Ali Mohamed, al Qaeda’s mole at Fort Bragg.64
Mohamed was in Afghanistan when the connection was made, training al Qaeda commanders in military tactics while working on his Encyclopedia of Jihad. For the flight to America, Ajaj had packed a collection of terrorist and military manuals in Arabic and English. The books were virtually identical to those Mohamed had given Nosair in New Jersey a few years earlier.65
Was Mohamed the link between the New York cell and Ramzi Yousef? The evidence is lacking, but the circumstantial case is intriguing.
“That would make more sense than anything I’ve heard before,” said Corrigan, the JTTF investigator, when asked whether Mohamed could have arranged for Yousef to join the cell. On the other hand, Andrew McCarthy, a federal prosecutor who investigated Ali Mohamed and convicted Omar Abdel Rahman, argues there is “not a shred of evidence” that Mohamed had any prior knowledge of the World Trade Center bombing. Without new evidence, the issue must remain in the realm of speculation.66
Yousef took command of Salameh’s cell. The conspirators included Abouhalima, Ayyad, and Abdul Rahman Yasin, an American citizen of Iraqi descent born in Bloomington, Indiana, and raised in Iraq. He returned to the United States in 1992 to join family members living in New Jersey. Yasin had been living on welfare when he encountered Yousef, who was renting an apartment downstairs from him. Eyad Ismoil, a Jordanian in the United States on a visa, joined the plot late, as a driver.67
With Yousef’s arrival, the plans rapidly moved into high gear. Under Yousef’s expert supervision, the crew built a devastating and sophisticated truck bomb. Salameh rented the truck, and Ismoil drove it into position—a parking garage under the World Trade Center. Shortly after noon on February 26, 1993, Yousef used a cigarette lighter to ignite a simple fuse. It took twelve minutes to burn down.
The explosion left a crater one hundred feet wide, gouging a hole in the building several stories deep and several more high. The epicenter was the parking garage beneath the World Trade Center. Flames and fumes shot up through the building. People who weren’t trapped soon poured out of the building, panicstricken and covered in soot. More than a thousand people were injured, some seriously, with crushed limbs, fractured skulls, burns, and bleeding wounds. Six died almost instantly.
It was a stunning act of terrorism and mass murder but less than Yousef had desired. His plan was that the explosion would topple one of the towers onto the other, killing thousands.68
Ajaj, who had traveled to the United States with Yousef, was already in prison on immigration charges. Salameh was arrested when he tried to recover the deposit on the rental truck used in the attack. Ayyad was next. Yousef, Yasin, and Abouhalima fled the country. Abouhalima was soon captured in Egypt and returned to the United States for trial. Yousef would remain free for two years before being captured in Pakistan. Yasin was detained in Iraq for years. His current whereabouts are unknown. Except for Yasin, everyone in the cell was eventually convicted for the bombing, and all are in prison today.69
Investigators knew that Salameh and Ayyad were followers of Omar Abdel Rahman, and they began to increase their scrutiny of the blind sheikh’s other followers. What they found was a second wave in the making, an even more ambitious plan to wreak havoc on New York, camouflaged by the jihadists’ new cause: the genocidal war raging in Bosnia.