The United States was at peace with the Soviet Union for the first time in fifty years, and Ronald Reagan’s vice president had been elected president. George H. W. Bush inherited a world in transition. Domestically he struggled with an economic recession, increased unemployment, and a significant budget deficit. Internationally he faced the breakup of the Soviet Union and the emergence of what he called “a new world order.” When Iraq invaded Kuwait in the summer, Bush faced a new world order crisis and called up the troops for Operation Desert Storm. Unlike many of his predecessors, Bush had both foreign policy experience and interest, having served as ambassador to China and director of the CIA. Although the Soviets were out of Afghanistan, the president continued to approve the policy to back our favored Pakistan-vetted local militias in what was now a civil war. The Soviets funded their favored militias as well. Each side hoped “his” guys would win. Meanwhile, wannabe jihadists kept coming into the area even though the infidels had left. A reporting officer in the U.S. embassy noticed. These were “well-financed Arab fanatics, extolling a virulent anti-American line, in contrast to the embassy perception of the groups that have been supported by the United States during the conflict with the Soviet Military forces.”1
In the United States, some of these recruits had come to the attention of New York City’s Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF). Made up of New York City police and members of the local FBI office, the JTTF learned that members of the al-Kifah Refugee Center and al-Farooq Mosque were negotiating for illegal arms. Someone later photographed men from al-Kifah receiving arms training at a shooting range near New York City. What were they training for? Was the Afghan war over or not? It was an open secret that the “refugee center” had links to the CIA, so the JTTF figured the CIA would know.2 What was certain, for anyone who looked closely enough, was that al-Kifah was a busy place.
One week on Atlantic Avenue, it might be a CIA-trained Afghan rebel travelling on a CIA-issued visa; the next, it might be a clean-cut Arabic-speaking Green Beret, who would lecture about the importance of being part of the mujahedin, or “warriors of God.” The more popular lectures were held upstairs in the roomier Al-Farooq Mosque; such was the case in 1990 when Sheikh Abdel-Rahman, travelling on a CIA-supported visa, came to town. The blind Egyptian cleric, with his ferocious rhetoric and impassioned preaching, filled angry, discontented Arab immigrants with a fervor for jihad—holy war. This was exactly what the CIA wanted: to stir up support for the Muslim rebels and topple the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan.3
In November 1990 the head of the Jewish Defense League, Rabbi Meir Kahane, was shot and killed after giving a speech in a New York City hotel. Police caught the gunman, an al-Kifah Center member, minutes later. In his apartment the JTTF found two associates, whom they took in for questioning, and dozens of boxes of materials: bomb-making manuals, maps of New York City landmarks, and top-secret training materials from the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg.
The police and the district attorney decided to make a “lone gunman” case.4 Police were told to release all but the gunman. An officer later noted: “The fact is that in 1990, myself and my detectives, we had in our office in handcuffs the people who blew up the World Trade Center in ’93. We were told to release them.”5 The FBI took the boxes they had found and left them in an office to collect dust for the next couple of years. The accused was tried and acquitted of all but lesser firearms offenses.
In Tucson, Arizona, another bin Laden recruit, Wadih el-Hage, also attracted attention in 1990 when he became a person of interest to law enforcement authorities. El-Hage was born a Christian in Lebanon and converted to Islam as a teen. He attended college in the United States, married an American woman, and became a citizen. El-Hage was associated with the Islamic Center of Tucson, al-Qaeda’s first recruiting center in the United States. When the imam of a rival and progressive mosque was assassinated in 1990, leads brought police to el-Hage’s door. He had hosted the primary murder suspect, who subsequently disappeared, and he also admitted he was glad the victim was killed. But there was no evidence to arrest him.6 Wadih El-Hage would play a central role in the 1998 bombings.
With an honorable discharge in hand, Ali Mohamed, the jihadist trainer, applied for a translator’s job in two FBI offices, and although neither hired him, the San Francisco office did take him on as an informant in a case involving local document forging. Mohamed did not include in his sales pitch the fact that he was escorting his boss, Ayman al-Zawahiri from the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ), on a fund-raising trip. Mohamed never had to take a polygraph test. “One of the most unbelievable aspects of the Ali Mohamed story,” said an agent later, “is that the Bureau could be dealing with this guy and they didn’t polygraph him. . . . The first thing you do with any kind of asset or informant is you polygraph him and if the relationship continues, you make him submit to continued polygraphs down the line.”7 FBI field offices served local priorities, not national ones, with archaic technology that made it difficult to communicate or share information.8 Ali Mohamed operated below the radar for years.
I was in Senegal, a majority Muslim country practicing a moderate brand of Islam utterly different from the one for which Ali Mohamed planned killings. Like FBI field offices, U.S. embassies do their work independent of one another. Unlike the FBI, embassies focus on national issues to implement policies established by headquarters. In our case, Washington’s policy toward sub-Saharan Africa could be summarized as “peace, prosperity, and democracy.” Our job in Senegal was to successfully manage shared interests ranging from aviation safety to international peacekeeping. My job as deputy to Ambassador George Moose and later to Katherine Shirley was to manage the State Department component of the embassy and harmonize the agendas of other government agencies represented on the country team.
Chiefs of mission are responsible for the safety and overall performance of all government employees except those under a military command. But, I quickly learned, they have no control over the budgets, agendas, rewards, promotions, or assignments of anyone outside of the State Department. You either used the leadership necessary to bring people to the same policy page, or you ceded the power of the office. The mechanism I found to help my bosses exercise leadership was the mandatory “mission program planning” process. Boring and a waste of time for some, I found it key to finding common policy ground with other agencies. Smile on my face, magic marker in hand, flip chart by my side, I led sessions to translate Washington’s myriad injunctions into tangible results through programs like economic and military assistance, through trade delegations and cultural exchanges, and through achievements in shared political objectives. I also learned how effective ambassadors influenced Washington. They exercised leadership.
In his mid-January State of the Union address, President George H. W. Bush proposed sending troops into Kuwait to force Iraqi president Saddam Hussein’s invading military to leave. He also said he would reduce spending and taxes to fix the economy. His appointees across government went about diminishing missions, resources, and morale among public servants. Secretary of State James Baker offered to open new embassies in the former Soviet republics without asking for supplemental funds, and the Congress took him up on it; resources at the department would shrink by a third. Job vacancies created by a hiring freeze became positions to eliminate, while security regulations were waived to fit the budgets. The CIA was no better off. Its focus evaporated with the fall of the Soviet Union; leadership floundered as people left. A scandal erupted over the agency’s relationship with BCCI, a bank accused of money laundering and other nefarious activities. Even defense spending plunged as the military repositioned itself for a new world. The Soviet threat was gone. No one cared about the civil war still churning in Afghanistan with the help of U.S., Saudi, Pakistani, and Russian support.
Osama bin Laden had left Afghanistan, returning to Saudi Arabia to stir up enthusiasm for a jihad in neighboring Yemen. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in the summer of 1990, he offered the Saudi royal family al-Qaeda’s military talents for protection as defense against the Iraqis. Instead, the Saudis turned to the United States, offering to host our military bases as we pushed Iraqis back into their borders. Bin Laden and others were outraged that the keeper of the two holy mosques of Islam would permit armed infidels on its soil. He left the country in a snit, and with Ali Mohamed’s help, he moved his wives, children, and operations first to Pakistan and then to Khartoum, Sudan. He was welcomed by President Omar al-Bashir, who had come to power in 1989 via military coup and who cultivated a vision of a pure Islamist society in Sudan. Under the influence of his powerful Islamist scholar-in-residence, Hassan al-Turabi, he saw his country at the center of ever-extending waves of holy war throughout the world. Together, al-Bashir and al-Turabi put up the welcome sign for jihadists of all stripes, bin Laden and al-Qaeda included.9
“Sudan in the early 1990s was an anything-goes cesspool of a place,” wrote CIA contractor Billy Waugh, “free-for-all for terrorists and rogues from throughout the Middle East. I could go on a long run from my residence in the al-Riyadh section and run past the homes or support sites of bin Laden, Abu Nidal, various members of Hezbollah, the Egyptian Gama’at al Islamiyya, the Algerian Islamic Jihad, HAMAS, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and a bunch of badass Iranians loyal to the Ayatollah Khomeini’s ‘Death to America’ craziness.”10
Waugh was asked to watch bin Laden’s activities and photograph him.
My first task was to find an observation post close enough to his residence to keep an eye on his movements. The CIA didn’t know much about him, but it wanted me to be in a position to know more. They knew about the personal bank account, but they wanted to know more of his associations, his habits, and whether he was training some of these al-Qaeda folks to do harm to our interests. The chief of station gave me the authorization to spend whatever money necessary to establish an observation post that would enable me to watch and photograph UBL. It was clear this tall, languid man with the curious background was working his way onto our radar range.11
Bin Laden bought a house and a guesthouse; he farmed, bred thoroughbred horses, and started developing the country’s crumbling infrastructure with his construction company. He also set up guerilla training camps, organized jihadist networks around the world, and ran an international finance system to help support them. He had gung-ho lieutenants like Ali Mohamed, and he was about to transfer Wadih el-Hage and his family from Arizona to Khartoum to serve as his personal secretary.
El-Hage was once again in hot water in the United States, this time in connection with the murder of the heretofore head of the al-Kifah Refugee Center in Brooklyn. The incumbent had argued over money with the Blind Sheikh and ended up shot, stabbed, and bludgeoned in his own home. It so happened that el-Hage knew the victim and arrived in New York on the day he was murdered. The FBI found out about el-Hage’s connection to the murder of a liberal imam in Arizona and discovered that he had visited Rabbi Kahane’s assailant in prison. Bad company, but insufficient evidence to charge el-Hage. He was free to leave the country, and he did.12
Ali Mohamed was racking up his own frequent flyer miles as he helped move bin Laden and his entourage of two thousand from Afghanistan to Sudan. Mohamed also set up three new al-Qaeda training camps so he could teach recruits to create cells, make bombs, wage urban warfare, and kidnap people.13
In Dakar, Senegal, we went on terrorism alert, along with every other embassy in the world, when U.S. troops hit the ground in Kuwait. A contingent of Senegalese troops joined the U.S.-led coalition that chased Saddam Hussein’s troops out of Kuwait in three short months. The French-language equivalent of “chemical warhead,” “rules of engagement,” and sundry military armaments grew my vocabulary. Conversations with the government were broadening from agricultural reforms and economic structural adjustment to continuing ethnic tensions in Mauritania to the north, conflicts in Mali to the east, and increasing chaos from clashes in Liberia to the south. As we pressed the Senegalese to use their effective military for peacekeeping in Liberia, I grew more conversant in issues of refugees and conflict. I was gaining expertise in new world order.
Presidents George Bush and Boris Yeltsin formally declared an end to the Cold War. A vicious conflict began in the Balkans as former parts of Yugoslavia declared independence and turned on one another. In the newly independent, multiethnic republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbian citizens marshaled forces against their Bosnian Muslim and Catholic Croat compatriots. The new world order was not pretty.
In Sudan Osama bin Laden formally declared war against the United States through a religious ruling, fatwa, condemning us for choosing to keep our base in Saudi Arabia even after Iraqi troops no longer threatened Kuwait.14 Ali Mohamed continued to serve as his go-to guy for various sorts of training, from countersurveillance to assassination. On one trip from Afghanistan, Italian airport authorities asked him about the false compartments in his luggage, but he convinced them he was fighting terrorists, and they let him go.15 Many of Ali Mohamed’s trainees were headed for Bosnia to fight alongside Muslim citizens battling Serbs. A post-Afghanistan generation of mujahedin had a new jihad, fully funded by Saudi Arabia and once again assisted by the United States.16
President Bush could not keep his promise of no new taxes, and the American people voted him out of office in favor of a Washington outsider, Bill Clinton. In his last months in office, Bush committed U.S. troops to Somalia as a humanitarian gesture to help the United Nations peacekeepers distribute food amid a vicious inter-clan war. We had, after all, won a desert war in the Middle East and a cold war with the former Soviet Union. In neighboring Kenya, the U.S. ambassador did his job by warning Washington that “Somalis, as the Italians and the British learned to their discomfiture, are natural-born guerrillas. They will mine the roads. They will lay ambushes. They will launch hit-and-run attacks.”17 Washington did not listen.
On a dark December night, in the blaze of the media’s bright lights, American military units splashed onto a beach outside of Mogadishu, the Somali capital. Days later, two hotels in Yemen that had served as barracks blew up. The soldiers had already left, but two tourists were killed. Osama bin Laden had just launched his first direct attack on the United States. What Americans considered humanitarian assistance, bin Laden and al-Qaeda saw as yet another power move and acted immediately. When the U.S. military relocated its barracks, bin Laden preened. As Michael Scheuer reported, “The United States wanted to set up a military base for U.S. soldiers in Yemen, so that it could send fresh troops to Somalia. The Arab mujahedin related to the Afghan jihad carried out two bomb explosions in Yemen to warn the United States, causing damage to some Americans staying in those hotels. The United States received our warning and gave up the idea of setting up its military bases in Yemen. This was the first al-Qaeda victory scored against the Crusaders.”18 Bin Laden was keeping score of victories in a war which the U.S. national security community was unaware existed.
In Senegal, Richard and I entered what would amount to our fifth year in Dakar. I was familiar and comfortable despite the difference of my skin color, religion, language, culture, and in many cases gender. Interactions with Senegalese were easy, especially with courtesies observed. Few talked about the fact that 750,000 people from the Senegambia area were kidnapped and shipped to the Americas for more than three centuries.19 We laughed at the same kinds of jokes, and we found ourselves on the same side of the policy agendas. When our public diplomacy colleagues introduced the queen of Zydeco from Cajun country to a Senegalese public, we witnessed a love fest.
Senegal was the third majority-Muslim country I had lived in and by far the most open. Their interpretation prescribed no veils, no religious police, and no intolerance. Dakar moved to the rhythm of the Muslim lunar calendar with western and African style and sophistication. Beautiful men and women in French-cut suits and long, gorgeously embroidered boubous integrated us into conversations and celebrations of faith I had not encountered in Pakistan or Iran.
I was comfortable enough to ask questions about what it was like to live in a polygamous family. As a teen I was curious, and as a feminist I was repelled, but what did I actually know? African cultures, I learned, had practiced polygamy long before Islam. Subsistence agriculture needed many hands, and the vast, semi-arid landscape needed more people to cultivate it. Islam actually limited the number of wives to four, all to be treated equally. In contemporary, expensive Dakar, one or two wives were the norm. Senegal’s secular laws entitled a woman to know her spouse’s intentions before she legally married him. Senegalese professional women in our conversations generally opposed polygamy, but if pressured into a plural marriage, they advocated the status of second wife. First wives have to struggle as their husbands start careers, finish graduate school, find jobs, and build reputations, only to face the humiliation of learning in middle age that he has taken a second, usually younger wife. At that point in the conversation, we American women would be nodding in understanding. Yup, it happened in the United States, too, only serially. Far easier, our Senegalese female friends would continue, was to come second, seizing the advantage of a husband’s absence for business trips or simply enjoy a few days of a life of one’s own.
From the men I got different perspectives. Rural men lounging under neem trees said polygamy was the natural order of things, and the women liked it because they had someone to share the work. Said wives were usually toiling in the fields, baby strapped on back, while these conversations took place. Urban men gave more nuanced commentaries and less enthusiasm for the practice. Many talked about the pressure when they were children to successfully compete with multiple stepbrothers for their father’s approval. Their mother’s status often depended on their performance in school and in the paternal eye. While the extended family created an effective safety net for those who needed it, it was also a burden for employed family members who provided it. As to supporting more than one wife and family, that was both costly and stressful. Our conversations about religious differences came naturally and without tension. Cherishing the tenets of the holy Koran did not translate into intolerance. I was a smarter person by the time Richard and I left Senegal.