Emboldened by the success of the “Black Hawk Down” incident in Somalia, bin Laden escalated his campaign against America. In November of 1995, Al Qaeda bombed the National Guard communications center, in Riyadh, where American troops were training Saudis in surveillance methods. Five Americans were killed. Al Qaeda struck again in June of 1996, with a bombing at the Khobar Towers dormitory, in Dharan, Saudi Arabia, which killed nineteen American servicemen. (U.S. intelligence officials suspected that Iranian extremists were responsible, but they subsequently learned that Zawahiri called bin Laden immediately afterward to congratulate him on the operation.)
Bin Laden declined to take credit, but two months later, on August 23, 1996, he issued an edict entitled “Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places.” In this lengthy statement, published in the London newspaper Al-Quds al-Arabi, bin Laden boldly lays out his case against the Saudi ruling family and its American backers. “Everyone agrees that the shadow of a stick cannot be straightened as long as the stick is crooked,” he writes. “Hence, it is imperative to focus on attacking the main enemy.” He argues that the West deliberately divided the Muslim world into “states and mini-states,” which could be easily controlled. He declares, “There is no higher priority, after faith, than pushing back the American-Israeli alliance.” He calls upon all Muslims to participate in jihad in order to liberate Saudi Arabia and restore the dignity of the Islamic community. “In view of the enemy’s strength, fast and light forces must be used and must operate in absolute secrecy.”
IX—“THE WAR HAS JUST BEGUN”
In 1998, Zawahiri commissioned a study on the Jewish influence in America. As a result of the study, Islamic Jihad formally placed the United States on its list of acceptable targets. Bin Laden was sufficiently pleased to raise the organization’s annual budget from three hundred thousand dollars to five hundred thousand. “America is now controlled by the Jews, completely, as are its news, its elections, its economy, and its politics,” Zawahiri explained in the Jihad journal, Al-Mujahidoun, later that year. “It uses Israel to attack its neighbors and to slaughter those who are living peacefully there. . . . If we are a nation of martyrs—as we claim—all that we need is courage of heart and the will of killers and the belief in what we claim to be love of death for Allah’s sake. That is the key to our triumph and the beginning of their defeat. If you want to live as free people and to die in honor and be sent as martyrs, the road in front of you is clear.”
Zawahiri formally sealed his new alliance with bin Laden on February 23, 1998, when Zawahiri’s name appeared as one of the signatories on a document published in Al-Quds al-Arabi. The document announced the formation of the International Islamic Front for Jihad on the Jews and Crusaders. “In compliance with God’s order,” the text read, “we issue the following fatwa to all Muslims: the ruling to kill the Americans and their allies—civilian and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.” Included in the alliance were jihad groups in Afghanistan, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Yemen, Eritrea, Djibouti, Kenya, Pakistan, Bosnia, Croatia, Algeria, Tunisia, Lebanon, the Philippines, Tajikistan, Chechnya, Bangladesh, Kashmir, Azerbaijan, and Palestine. The document gave the West its first glimpse of the worldwide conspiracy that was beginning to form.
Many members of Islamic Jihad were wary of bin Laden’s designs on the “distant enemy.” Zawahiri called a meeting of Islamic Jihad in Afghanistan to explain the new global organization, but there was so much resistance that he threatened to resign. “The members were shocked that their leader joined without asking them,” Hany al-Sibai told me. “Only a few, who could be counted on the fingers, supported it.”
Zawahiri’s brother Mohammed, the military commander of Islamic Jihad, had long been a controversial figure in the group, and yet he remained a fixture in the hierarchy of the “company,” as the Jihad members called themselves. The two brothers had been together from their underground days. They had sometimes been at odds with each other—on one occasion, Ayman went so far as to denounce Mohammed in front of his colleagues for mismanaging the group’s meagre finances. But Mohammed was popular among many of the members, and, as deputy emir, he had run the organization whenever Ayman was travelling. According to Sibai, Mohammed refused to accept the alliance with Al Qaeda, and he left Islamic Jihad not long after the meeting in Afghanistan.
Several members of the Islamic Group tried to have Sheikh Omar named emir of the Islamic Front, but the proposal was brushed aside. Clearly, bin Laden had had enough of the fighting between the Egyptian factions. He told members of Jihad that their ineffectual operations in Egypt were too expensive, and that it was time for them to “turn their guns” on the United States and Israel. Zawahiri’s assistant Ahmed al-Najjar later told Egyptian investigators, “I myself heard bin Laden say that our main objective is now limited to one state only, the United States, and involves waging a guerrilla war against all U.S. interests, not only in the Arab region but also throughout the world.”
Since the early nineties, Egyptian authorities had felt stymied in their efforts to stamp out Islamic fundamentalists by the protection that Western governments afforded fugitives. The Egyptians complained that more than five hundred terrorists had found refuge in England, France, Germany, Austria, Denmark, Belgium, Holland, and the United States, among other countries, on the ground that they would be subject to political persecution and perhaps torture if they were sent home. Many European governments refused to return a suspect to face a trial in which he might receive the death penalty.
But the formation of the Islamic Front and its call for a fatwa against Americans and their allies prompted a new vigilance in the West. The C.I.A., which had sporadically tried to keep track of Islamic Jihad over the years, acted quickly. In July of 1998, American agents kidnapped Ahmad Salama Mabruk and another member of Jihad outside a restaurant in Baku, Azerbaijan. Mabruk’s laptop computer turned out to contain vital information about Jihad members in Europe. The same summer, the C.I.A. moved against an Islamic Jihad cell in Tirana, Albania; the cell, with sixteen members, had been created by Mohammed al-Zawahiri in the early nineties. Albanian agents, under C.I.A. supervision, kidnapped five members of the cell, blindfolded them, interrogated them for several days, and then sent the Egyptian members to Cairo. They were put on trial with more than a hundred other suspected terrorists. Their lawyer, Hafez Abu-Saada, maintains that they were tortured. The ordeal produced twenty thousand pages of confessions, and both Zawahiri brothers were given death sentences in absentia.
On August 6th, a month after the breakup of the Albanian cell, Zawahiri sent the following declaration to a London-based Arabic paper: “We are interested in briefly telling the Americans that their message has been received and that the response, which we hope they will read carefully, is being prepared, because, with God’s help, we will write it in the language that they understand.” The following day, simultaneous suicide bombings destroyed the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania; two hundred and twenty-three people died and more than five thousand were injured.
It is now clear that the bombings had been planned for some time. Zawahiri’s man, the double agent Ali Mohamed, testified in New York that bin Laden had asked him to scout American, British, French, and Israeli targets in Nairobi in late 1993. “I took pictures, drew diagrams, and wrote a report,” he said. “I later went to Khartoum, where my surveillance files were reviewed by Osama bin Laden . . . and others. Bin Laden looked at the picture of the American Embassy and pointed to where a truck could go as a suicide bomber.”
American intelligence officials were unprepared for the extent of the devastation in East Africa, and they were amazed by the skill with which the bombings were carried out. The level of planning and coördination indicated that the bombers had a new degree of sophistication, as well as a willingness to raise the stakes in terms of innocent lives. On August 20th, President Clinton ordered an attack on bin Laden’s training camps in Afghanistan, and also on a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan that was thought to be manufacturing a precursor to the lethal nerve gas VX.
American warships in the region fired seventy-nine Tomahawk cruise missiles into Afghanistan and Sudan. A subsequent investigation established that the plant in Sudan was making Ibuprofen and veterinary medicines, not poison gas; the strike killed a night watchman. In Afghanistan, the attack failed to hit its main targets—bin Laden, Zawahiri, and the other Al Qaeda leaders. (The strike also missed Mohamed Atta, the alleged leader of the September 11th attacks, who was reportedly training in one of the camps.)
In the postmortems, there was speculation that the Pakistani intelligence agency had given bin Laden advance warning. However, Samuel Berger, Clinton’s national-security adviser, told me that neither the Pakistani Prime Minister nor the head of Pakistan’s Army was informed of the strikes until the missiles were in the air. Only half an hour earlier, Zawahiri had been talking on bin Laden’s satellite phone to a reporter in Pakistan. Tracking the phone was the best way U.S. intelligence agents had of determining bin Laden’s and Zawahiri’s whereabouts, and if only surveillance aircraft had been positioned in the region Zawahiri’s call would have given the agents their exact location. Zawahiri later told a newspaper in Karachi, Pakistan, that he and bin Laden were safe “somewhere in Afghanistan.”
The strikes, which, in the big-chested parlance of military planners, were dubbed Operation Infinite Reach, cost American taxpayers seventy-nine million dollars, but they merely exposed the inadequacy of American intelligence. President Clinton later explained that one of the strikes had been aimed at a “gathering of key terrorist leaders,” but the meeting in question had occurred a month earlier. According to Russian intelligence sources cited in Al-Majallah, an Arabic magazine in London, bin Laden sold the Tomahawk missiles that failed to explode to China for more than ten million dollars, which he then used to finance operations in Chechnya.
The failure of Operation Infinite Reach established bin Laden as a legendary figure not just in the Muslim world but wherever America, with the clamor of its narcissistic culture and the presence of its military forces, had made itself unwelcome. When bin Laden’s voice came crackling across a radio transmission—“By the grace of God, I am alive!”—the forces of anti-Americanism had found their champion. Those who had objected to the slaughter of innocents in the embassies in East Africa, many of whom were Muslims, were cowed by the popular response to this man whose defiance of America now seemed blessed by divine favor.
The day after the strikes, Zawahiri called a reporter in Karachi, with a message: “Tell the Americans that we aren’t afraid of bombardment, threats, and acts of aggression. We suffered and survived the Soviet bombings for ten years in Afghanistan and we are ready for more sacrifices. The war has only just begun; the Americans should now await the answer.”
After years of fending off criticism of his leadership, Zawahiri resigned as the emir of Islamic Jihad in the summer of 1999. He was angry at the Jihad members who found fault with him from comfortable perches in Europe. He disdainfully called them “the hot-blooded revolutionary strugglers who have now become as cold as ice after they experienced the life of civilization and luxury, the guarantees of the new world order, the gallant ethics of civilized Europe, and the impartiality and materialism of Western civilization.” Many of his former allies, exhausted and demoralized by years of setbacks, had become advocates of an initiative by Islamist leaders imprisoned in Egypt, who had declared a unilateral ceasefire. Those who remained loyal to the movement no longer wanted to endure the primitive living conditions in Afghanistan. Yet, even as the organization was disintegrating, Zawahiri rejected any thought of negotiation with the Egyptian regime or with the West. But without his leadership Islamic Jihad was adrift, and several months after he resigned his successor relinquished the post. Zawahiri was back in charge. According to testimony given at the trial of the Albanian cell members, however, the membership of Islamic Jihad outside Egypt had diminished to forty.
Zawahiri’s continual efforts to maintain a semblance of autonomy ended in June, 2001, when Islamic Jihad and Al Qaeda merged into a single entity, Qaeda al-Jihad. The name reflected the fact that the Egyptians were still in control; indeed, the nine-member leadership council includes only three non-Egyptians—most prominently, bin Laden. Within the organization, the dominance of the Egyptians has been a subject of contention, especially among the Saudis. According to an American investigator, bin Laden has tried to mollify the malcontents by explaining that he can always count on the Egyptians, since they are unable to go home without being arrested; like him, they are men without a country.
Zawahiri’s name had been in American intelligence files at least since the Soviet-Afghan war. The F.B.I. became interested in him after the Islamic Jihad bombing of the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad, but at that point he was still seen as an Egyptian problem. When Zawahiri signed the alliance with bin Laden, in February, 1998, the Bureau opened a file on him. Then came the suicide bombings of the American embassies in East Africa, which were planned and executed, in large part, by Egyptian members of Al Qaeda. American intelligence agencies now realized that there was not just one leader of the organization. They began regarding Zawahiri as an equal partner with bin Laden in the planning and carrying out of the terrorist agenda. On October 12, 2000, Al Qaeda bombed the U.S.S. Cole, one of the Navy’s most advanced destroyers, in Aden, Yemen. By now, American intelligence knew enough about Zawahiri to realize that he was in charge of the Yemen cell. He was also closely affiliated with the Saudi terrorist Tawifiq bin Atash, who is now thought to have been the planner of that operation. Moreover, the C.I.A. believes that Atash was one of the chief organizers of the September 11th attacks.
As these pieces came together, American intelligence worked more closely with its Egyptian counterparts, and the C.I.A., in conjunction with Egyptian authorities, began to target not just Zawahiri but his brothers. In November, 1999, Mohammed’s wife, Aliya, with their five children, surrendered to Egyptian authorities in Yemen, saying that her husband had abandoned them. A few months later, according to Islamist sources, Egyptian intelligence kidnapped Mohammed from the United Arab Emirates and took him back to Cairo, where he “disappeared.” Aliya allegedly told Egyptian authorities where the youngest Zawahiri brother, Hussein, could be found. Hussein had been arrested several times on suspicion of having ties to Islamic Jihad, but nothing was ever proved against him. In the late nineties, he was employed as an engineer for a Malaysian company called Multidiscovery, which was building electrical plants. According to a senior intelligence officer in the Clinton White House, American agents ordered the kidnapping of Hussein in Malaysia and flew him to Cairo, where he, too, “disappeared.” Six months later, he reemerged, in the middle of the night, wearing the same clothes in which he had been abducted.
X—WHERE IS ZAWAHIRI?
As a man of science, Zawahiri was interested in the use of biological and chemical warfare. In a memo from April of 1999, he observed that “the destructive power of these weapons is no less than that of nuclear weapons,” and proposed that Islamic Jihad conduct research into biological and chemical agents. “Despite their extreme danger, we only became aware of them when the enemy drew our attention to them by repeatedly expressing concern that they can be produced simply,” he noted. He pored over medical journals to research the subject, and he met with an Egyptian scientist in Afghanistan, Medhat Mursi al-Sayed, whose Jihad name was Abu Khabab. C.I.A. officials believe that Khabab prepared the explosives for the bomb that hit the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad. Khabab supervised elementary tests of nerve gas; satellite photos purportedly show corpses of dogs scattered about one of the camps near Tora Bora, and Al Qaeda training videos recently acquired by CNN show that poison gas had been tested on dogs. “We knew from hundreds of different sources that Al Qaeda was interested in biological and chemical weapons,” says Richard A. Clarke, who was the Clinton Administration’s national coördinator for counterterrorism in the National Security Council and is now in charge of cybersecurity for the N.S.C. Clarke told me that in one of the camps human volunteers, wearing protective clothing, were exposed to chemicals in tests similar to ones that the U.S. Army has conducted. During the invasion of Afghanistan, American forces discovered a factory under construction, near Kandahar, that intelligence officials say was to be used for the production of anthrax. A sample of anthrax powder was reportedly found in Zawahiri’s house in Afghanistan. According to reports from Israel and Russia, bin Laden paid Chechen mobsters millions of dollars in cash and heroin to obtain radiological “suitcase” bombs left over from the Soviets. He declared in November, 2001, “We have chemical and nuclear weapons,” and vowed to use them “if America used them against us.”
According to a source in the C.I.A., American agents came close to apprehending Zawahiri a month before September 11th, when he travelled to Yemen for medical treatments. “The Egyptian intelligence service briefed us that he was in a hospital in Sanaa,” the person told me. “We sent a few people over there, and they made a colossal screwup. While our guys were conducting a surveillance of the hospital, the guards caught them with their videocameras.” The plan was compromised, and Zawahiri returned to Afghanistan.
On September 11th, Zawahiri, bin Laden, and their followers evacuated their quarters in Kandahar and fled into the mountains, where they listened to an Arabic radio station’s news flashes about the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. According to a C.I.A. report about the events of that morning, at 9:53 A.M., between the crash of American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon and the downing of United Airlines Flight 93 in Pennsylvania, a member of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan was overheard saying that the attackers were following through on “the doctor’s program.”
On December 3rd, American bombers struck a heavily fortified complex of caves near Jalalabad. When the ground troops arrived, they discovered more than a hundred bodies, and they were able to identify eighteen of them as top Al Qaeda lieutenants. Zawahiri’s wife, Azza, and their children were also said to have been killed, but, according to the F.B.I., there is no confirming evidence of this.
“I’ll never forget the first time I saw Azza after a long absence when I went to visit her in Pakistan,” Nabila Galal recalled when she heard the reports of her daughter’s death. “She was waiting for me at the airport with her three little daughters wearing hijabs. They smiled at me, and I will never forget those little children’s smiles. Could it be true they all died in the same instant? By the grace of God, we will be hastened.”
I asked Azza’s older brother, Essam, whether his mother has kept any letters from her daughter in Afghanistan. “Yes,” he said, “but she is very ill and very upset and I don’t want to cause her any more grief by bringing up this subject. She gets asthma attacks every time she thinks about what happened. I tell her that everything’s going to be fine and that, inshallah, nothing happened to my sister.”
A Northern Alliance commander announced that Zawahiri, too, had been killed in the American bombing, but there was no reliable evidence of his death, either. On December 16th, Zawahiri was quoted by a Cairo-based reporter for Al-Majallah. “We are not hiding in caves or avoiding confrontation,” he said. “Suicide is a goal that we seek.” Because Zawahiri’s remarks were dictated to the reporter by an Al Qaeda middleman, it is not possible to know if they are genuine.
There is a videotape of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri which shows them sitting on a blanket beside a mountain stream—or, in the view of some intelligence analysts, an artificial backdrop—talking about the jihad operations of September 11th. (Their comments are interspersed with scenes from a martyrdom tape of a young man named Ahmed al-Haznawy, one of the hijackers, but the footage with bin Laden and Zawahiri is thought to have been shot sometime in December.) On the tape, a pallid bin Laden says little. Zawahiri is wearing a white galabeya, a black turban, and a vest. Although the black turban may be a sign that he is in mourning for the death of his family, he appears healthy and content. “This great victory was possible only by the grace of God,” he says with quiet pride. “This was not just a human achievement—it was a holy act. These nineteen brave men who gave their lives for the cause of God will be well taken care of. God granted them the strength to do what they did. There’s no comparison between the power of these nineteen men and the power of America, and there’s no comparison between the destruction these nineteen men caused and the destruction America caused.”
This may have been Zawahiri’s last public statement. Some American intelligence officials believe that he was killed by Pakistani mercenaries as he was riding in an ambulance after being wounded by an American bomb. The killers allegedly buried him, along with other Al Qaeda fighters, in a snowbank, where he lay until spring, when Canadian troops dug up some of the remains. The skull of a corpse believed to be Zawahiri’s was sent to a laboratory at F.B.I. headquarters, in Washington. Forensic technicians compared the DNA of the skull with that of Mohammed al-Zawahiri, which is contained in a vial that the Bureau obtained from Egyptian authorities. Tests showed that the skull was not Zawahiri’s.♦
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