Читать книгу The Management of Savagery - Max Blumenthal - Страница 8

On February 11, 1979, the West lost its frontline client government in the Middle East when Iranians ousted the corrupt, repressive monarchy of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. The shah was and ultimately replaced with a glowering theocrat, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. As Khomeini declared full support for the Palestinian national struggle and swore to repel the West’s imperial designs across the region, American media overflowed with Orientalist commentaries on “the Persian psyche.” “American television treated the Iran crisis either as a freak show, featuring self-flagellants and fist-wavers, or as a soap opera,” Wall Street Journal columnist Morton Kondracke observed in January 1980.

The anxiety over Iran’s revolution was also palpable in Israel, where the right-wing Likud Party had wrested power for the first time from the Zionist movement’s Labor wing. In Jerusalem, just months after Khomeini swept to power, a young Likud Party upstart named Benjamin Netanyahu organized a conference under the auspices of the Jonathan Institute, a think tank he named after his brother, who had been killed while leading the legendary 1976 Israeli raid at the Entebbe airport in Uganda.

In attendance was George H.W. Bush, neoconservative standard bearers like Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, staff from newfangled conservative think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and sympathetic policymakers and journalists from across the West. Netanyahu’s goal was to internationalize the Israeli understanding of terrorism. In short, he sought to deny rational motives to the Arabs, who had been militarily occupied for decades or had seen their nations ravaged by Western colonialism, casting their violence instead as the product of the most primitive impulses—“part of a much larger struggle, one between the forces of civilization and the forces of barbarism,” as he wrote in his 1986 tract on terrorism and “how the West can win.”

Netanyahu had cleverly reimagined right-wing scholar Richard Pipes’ vision of a global struggle between communist and “anti-communist” nations as a battle over “values” waged between the civilized “Judeo-Christian” West and the barbaric Eastern hordes. When Washington embarked on a “war on terror” two decades later, the clash of civilizations narrative Netanyahu helped construct provided the George W. Bush administration with the language it needed to market its unilateral military doctrine to a discombobulated American public. The crude mantra of the post-9/11 era in America, “They hate us because we’re free,” seemed to have flowed directly from Netanyahu’s world-view and into George W. Bush’s teleprompter. History had been erased and the West was cast as a blameless victim of stateless totalitarians driven by nothing more than a pathological urge to dismantle democracy. Anyone who attempted to place Al Qaeda in context, particularly by explaining how its early antecedents emerged thanks to semi-covert US warfare, was likely to be accused of “blaming America first.” Either you were “with us, or you’re with the terrorists,” Bush and his supporters often said, putting a distinctly Texan spin on Netanyahu’s Manichean discourse.

But only a few months after the first Jonathan Institute conference, in December 1979, Netanyahu’s understanding of “terror” had begun to resonate throughout the West. By this point, much of the American public was transfixed by the US embassy crisis in Iran that had erupted a month before, tuning in to nightly news coverage that focused in on the ayatollah as the new icon of international terror. Meanwhile, another event was unfolding largely below the radar of the Western media that would impact the future of the Middle East at least as much as Iran’s revolution. Islamist fanatics had laid siege to the Grand Mosque at Mecca, trapping some 100,000 pilgrims inside. The insurgents were guided by a millenarian preacher named Juhayman al Utaybi, who had been trained in the Saudi Arabian National Guard and inspired by the resurgent Wahhabi religious movement.

During breaks from the guard, Utaybi soaked in the jeremiads of Saudi Arabia’s Abdul Aziz bin Baz, the blind and unsightly cleric who was far and away the leading opponent of Saudi Arabia’s process of modernization. Bin Baz issued decrees against the display of wall art by the royals, urging his followers to destroy it wherever possible. He opposed the public clapping of hands and railed against the appearance of women on national news broadcasts, warning that the mere sight of them could cause ten-year-old boys to become sexually aroused. The sybaritic, American-oriented royal family was destroying Islam from within, he declared, and he fumed at its flagrant disregard for his orders. Under the influence of bin Baz, Utaybi fantasized about a popular uprising that would drive out the royals and replace them with a pious order that adhered to the true origins of Islam—at least, as he and other Wahhabi cadres saw it.

Drawn from the philosophy of eighteenth-century cleric Abd al-Wahhab and the Salaf, the original followers of the Prophet Muhammad, Wahhabism represented much more than an exceedingly fundamentalist vision of Islam; it was also a sociopolitical movement that saw non-Sunni Muslims as rejectors and encouraged conflict with non-believers. It therefore provided the basis for the toxic doctrine that labeled Muslims who opposed its sectarian designs as takfir, or self-hating apostates. This concept of belief served as the ideological justification for groups like Al Qaeda to massacre fellow Muslims, whether they were Shia or conscripted Sunni soldiers of secular governments.

Because the strictures of Islam forbade violence within the Grand Mosque, the royals were forced to turn to their sworn foe, bin Baz, for a fatwa authorizing the use of force to retake the mosque from Utaybi’s militia. In exchange for his edict, the royals entered into a Faustian bargain with the country’s rigidly conservative clerical class, agreeing to spend billions in petro-cash to project Wahhabism across the Muslim world.

The deal also expanded the clergy’s domestic influence, granting it more authority than ever to impose its hyper-conservative vision on Saudi society. Rather than repressing the extremism gestating within its borders, the House of Saud decided to co-opt it as a tool of internal political suppression and external soft power.

In the months and years after the traumatic battle to extricate Utaybi’s band of fanatics from the holy heart of Mecca, bin Baz rolled out more characteristically fanatical pronouncements. He issued a fatwa denouncing photography, condemned driving by women, forbade them from shaking hands with men (although he endorsed the use of Viagra), and urged Muslims to make exodus from non-Muslim countries, or at least, “less evil countries.” Under the watch of Crown Prince Fahd bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Saudi morality police known informally as the mutawain, or the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, were given free rein to crack down on gender mixing, seize “anti-Islamic” films and outlaw movie theaters. Even as the kingdom’s modernization process continued, Sharia law prevailed.

On December 25, just three weeks after the siege of the Grand Mosque was broken, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to prop up a loyalist communist government facing a swelling armed rebellion. A deeply conservative rural population led the insurgency, ferociously rejecting the secular modernization projects organized out of Kabul. The invasion was triggered by a scheme enacted five months prior by President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who sought to bleed the Soviet Union from its soft underbelly by funneling billions in arms and aid to the mujahedin.

A hard-line anticommunist born to Polish nobility and seared by his family’s experience in World War II, Brzezinski was the driving force behind the Carter administration’s strategy in Afghanistan. He eventually conceded that his intention had been “to induce a Soviet military intervention,” explaining to the French journal Nouvel Observateur in 1998, “That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, essentially: ‘We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.’”

To fulfill Brzezinski’s policy, Carter was forced to roll back hopes for comprehensive reforms to restore public trust in the intelligence agencies following revelations of the Phoenix assassination program that the CIA conducted during the Vietnam War. A 1977 interagency memo distributed by none other than Brzezinski concluded, “Public trust and confidence in the Intelligence Community have been seriously undermined by disclosures of activities in the past that were illegal, injudicious or otherwise improper by today’s standards.” Two years later, however, the Carter administration was setting the stage for perhaps the most consequential covert intelligence operation in US history. Worse, Carter allowed Pakistan’s Islamist-oriented military dictator Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq and his Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) to control the distribution of American military assistance to the mujahedin, giving him and his military junta a free hand, while dooming any chance to impose more transparency on the CIA.

Washington was furthermore forced to look away as Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program advanced. As Jack Blum, the staff attorney with the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who led several investigations into the CIA’s illicit activities, later explained to me, “Pakistan was a wonderful staging area for war, it was so convenient. We needed it as a refuge for the mujahedin, so we completely ignored the fact that they were building a nuclear bomb. We knew about this way before this became public.”

It was also thanks to the CIA’s Afghan proxy war that President Zia was able to consolidate his regressive national vision. “Pakistan is like Israel, an ideological state,” Zia explained in 1981. “ Take out the Judaism from Israel and it will fall like a house of cards. Take Islam out of Pakistan and make it a secular state; it would collapse.”

In doling out cash and US arms, Zia’s ISI gave preference to Afghanistan’s radical Islamist factions and thereby propelled them from the fringe to the mainstream. As the Ugandan scholar of international affairs Mahmood Mamdani wrote of the elements armed by the CIA and ISI, “the right-wingers had no program outside of isolated acts of urban terror. Until the Afghan jihad, right-wing Islamists out of power had neither the aspiration of drawing strength from popular organization nor the possibility of marshaling strength from any alternative source. The Reagan administration rescued right-wing Islamism from this historical cul-de-sac.”

For Brzezinski, who worried that the Soviet Union might fill an “arc of crisis” that ran across the global South, the mujahedin and backers like Zia’s Pakistan and the Saudi royals represented a reactionary “arc of Islamism” that could be encouraged to provide a powerful counterweight to communist influence. He urged Carter to “concert with Islamic countries both a propaganda campaign and a covert action campaign to help the rebels.”

The anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan therefore offered the Saudis an opportunity to project its state religion into Central Asia, but also provided a convenient ventilation mechanism for the extremism gestating within its borders. Saudi Arabia arranged a special fund that matched every dollar the CIA gave to the cause of the mujahedin. Bolstered by the contributions of ideologically inclined princes, the Saudi backing was crucial in purchasing hundreds of Stinger antiaircraft missile systems without congressional knowledge. By backing the covert US war effort, the Saudi royal family was able to provide the most fanatical members of their society with a one-way ticket to Pakistan, where they could be shepherded over the border to vent their pent-up aggression against the atheistic Soviet invaders. At the urging of his government, bin Baz—now the Saudi Grand Mufti—issued a new fatwa compelling worldwide Muslim participation in the anti-Soviet jihad.

Thanks to Saudi support, the indigenous mujahedin in Afghanistan were supplemented by tens of thousands of foreign fighters locally referred to as the “Afghan Arabs.” Many of the foreign fighters flocking to the battlefield were drawn by the preaching of a Palestinian theologian named Abdullah Azzam. Before arriving in Pakistan, Azzam had spent several years teaching at Saudi Arabia’s King Abdulaziz University, educating students on the texts of proto-Wahhabi clerics like Ibn Taymiyyah, the medieval scholar who laid the basis for takfiri doctrine. In Jeddah, Azzam instructed a young Osama bin Laden, helping him hone the religiously zealous sensibility that set him apart from his more secular siblings.

The seventeenth son of billionaire construction baron Mohammed bin Laden, Osama had been shaken by the scenes of Saudi tanks barreling into the Grand Mosque to break the siege in December 1979. His family had been renovating the mosque at the time, and its construction blueprints were used by the military to devise the assault. Bin Laden’s revulsion at the ensuing bloodbath left him captivated by Utaybi’s vision. But his growing resentment of the royal family momentarily dissolved in the anti-Soviet jihad it was backing in Afghanistan. His family was contributing heavily to the war effort at the time, and it eventually dispatched young bin Laden to join his mentor, Azzam, in Peshawar. There, he joined several of Utaybi’s former cohorts, including Muhammad Amir Sulayman Saqr, who became one of Al Qaeda’s most skilled document forgers.

In 1984, Azzam and bin Laden founded the international Islamist organization known as Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK), or the Services Bureau. With bin Laden’s wealth and Azzam’s ardor, this network functioned like a jihadist Abraham Lincoln Brigade, providing free lodging, training and ideological indoctrination to many of the tens of thousands of Islamist fundamentalists from forty-three countries who flocked to the Afghan battlefield. The effort was bolstered by the involvement of Benevolence International, a charity funded by prominent Saudi businessman Adel Batterjee, whom Azzam had praised for being “at the forefront” of jihad.

The following year, President Ronald Reagan formalized US support for the Afghan insurgents when he issued National Security Directive 166. Among the directive’s goals was to “improve the military effectiveness of the Afghan resistance in order to keep the trends in the war unfavorable to the Soviet Union.”

From this classified authorization, the largest covert operation in CIA history was born. Known as Operation Cyclone, it committed over a billion dollars to the mujahedin, affording them state-of-the-art weapons and advanced hunter-killer training. While the American national security state cheered the gradual collapse of the Soviet military campaign, its efforts transformed Afghanistan into a petri dish for international jihadism.

Adopt a Muj

Vincent Cannistraro, a CIA counterterrorism officer who served as director of intelligence for Reagan’s National Security Council at the height of Operation Cyclone, monitored intelligence operations from Nicaragua to Afghanistan. He likened briefing Reagan to talking at a brick wall: “Reagan was a very amiable, likable person,” Cannistraro told me, “but you weren’t going to get any burst of mental energy from him on the questions of the day.”

The president’s rapidly advancing Alzheimer’s rendered him incapable of absorbing the details of foreign policy, leaving a cast of hard-liners and rogues with substantial control over covert operations. For some Cold War cowboys, the war in Afghanistan offered a chance to get revenge on the Soviets for the humiliation they experienced as enlisted soldiers in Vietnam. For others, it was an opportunity to realize the lucre and glory of war without risking American lives. For Representative Charlie Wilson, it was a bit of both.

On Capitol Hill, Wilson was known as an alcoholic vulgarian who did little for his largely African American constituency back in east Texas but provided the timber industry with a loyal servant. He had also cultivated a reputation as the most ardent supporter of the mujahedin in Congress, leveraging his position on two congressional committees to double funding for the covert war in Afghanistan. He did this with a single phone call to the staffer in charge of the House Appropriations Committee’s black operations budget. “I was expecting to have to debate it and justify it and all that,” Wilson said, “but when it was read out in the closed session of the appropriations committee, nobody said a word.”

Covert proxy wars were easy this way. The public never had to know how or where their money was being spent. And by subverting the democratic process, policymakers insulated themselves from antiwar agitation and scrutiny from the fourth estate. Opaque operations like these were also perfect vehicles for war profiteering.

Wilson made sure to insert special language into the appropriations bill requiring the Pentagon to buy $40 million in .22-millimeter cannons produced by a Swiss weapons company called Oerlikon. The guns were deemed utterly worthless against Soviet airpower and required the rebels to cart them onto the battlefield by mule and cart. But Wilson was attached to the weapon, successfully lobbying for its approval with an almost messianic zeal. According to Cannistraro, the CIA had reason to suspect a financial relationship between Wilson and Oerlikon. Wilson also owned some $250,000 worth of stocks in an oil company that became a Pakistani subsidiary right before he developed his sudden interest in Afghanistan. The mutually beneficial relationship with Pakistan paved the path for Wilson to serve as a registered lobbyist for the country upon his retirement from public life.

In the meantime, Cannistraro joined Wilson on a fateful congressional delegation to Pakistan at the height of the anti-Soviet jihad. In Islamabad, during a dinner with President Zia, the Pakistani junta leader rose spontaneously before his guests and demanded they ship shoulder-mounted Stinger antiaircraft missiles to the mujahedin. “Everyone was taken by surprise,” Cannistraro recalled, “but then they said, okay, we agree. And that’s what broke the opposition.” The Stingers turned the tide of the battle, enabling the mujahedin to take down the Soviet Mil Mi-24 Hind combat helicopters and MiG jets that had been pulverizing the supply convoys flowing over the border from Pakistan.

The rapid improvement in weapons to the rebels complemented a CIA-built complex of tunnels and mujahedin training camps near the border city of Khost in Afghanistan’s mountainous Paktiya province. To complete the job on time, the agency tapped an experienced contractor named Osama bin Laden, who dutifully carted in his family’s earthmoving equipment. “My job was to raise the alarm and if there was an opportunity to do it and I failed to do it, it would be my failure,” Cannistraro said. “And none of us knew who bin Laden was at the time.”

Weapons were not all that flowed into Afghanistan courtesy of the US government. A $51 million grant from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to the University of Nebraska’s Center for Afghanistan Studies and a former Peace Corps volunteer who directed the center, Thomas Gouttierre, produced some 4 million third-grade textbooks that helped transform Afghan schools into jihadist indoctrination centers. Introduced in 1986, the books encouraged Afghan children to gouge the eyes and amputate the legs of Soviet soldiers.

“One group of mujahedin attacks 50 Russian soldiers. In that attack 20 Russians are killed. How many Russians fled?” read one arithmetic question in the textbook. An aid worker counted forty-three violent images in just 100 pages of one of the books. The Taliban later adopted the books as their own, blotting out the faces of soldiers to comport with religious restrictions on depicting the human form while maintaining the language that described the mujahedin as holy warriors fighting in the service of God. (In a 1989 briefing report to his funders at USAID, Gouttierre argued that educating women would anger the men whom the US depended upon as anti-Soviet proxies. “This type of reform must be left to the Afghans to be solved at their own pace,” the University of Nebraska academic wrote.)

Perhaps the greatest recipient of CIA funding through Operation Cyclone was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a ruthless Afghan warlord described in a 1985 congressional study as “a relatively young leader often compared to the Ayatollah Khomeini in his intense ideological fundamentalism.”

Hekmatyar had been a CIA asset for years before the anti-Soviet jihad, joining a secretive Islamist academic group called “the professors” in 1972. This collection of Islamist ideologues was established with the help of the Asia Foundation, a CIA front group, to counter the rise of leftist popular organizing at Kabul University. The professors there were led by Burhanuddin Rabbani, who taught Islamic law and led the campaign to drive women off campus, inciting followers like the young Hekmatyar to throw acid in the faces of female students and to murder left-wing activists. Over a decade later, Hekmatyar remained in the CIA’s favor because, as Cannistraro bluntly put it, “He was the one who was the most effective fighter.”

Cannistraro worked directly with Hekmatyar during the 1980s, escorting him to Washington to meet Reagan alongside a group of mujahedin commanders. Hekmatyar ultimately refused the face-to-face with Reagan, a flamboyant and calculated maneuver that put his contempt for the United States on international display. The warlord was furious, Cannistraro recalled, by what he considered insufficient American support for the anti-Soviet cause. That eventually changed with the infusion of some $600 million in aid and weapons directly to Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami militia, including Stinger antiaircraft missiles. (During our interview, Cannistraro referred to Hekmatyar as “Gulbud,” hinting at the guerrilla commander’s cozy relationship with Washington’s intelligence community.)

While the CIA and Pakistani ISI armed Hekmatyar to the teeth, diplomats in the region worried that his Hezb-i-Islami was playing a long game, allowing other mujahedin factions to do the bulk of the fighting against the Soviets and focusing his militia’s energy on dominating the opposition. Loathed by fellow mujahedin commanders, Hekmatyar was strongly suspected to be involved in the murder of a British cameraman and the killings of two American escorts. He rejected all negotiation, declaring his goal as “a pure Islamic state in Afghanistan.”

In 1981, before the mujahedin were junketed to Washington, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher traveled to a refugee camp on the Pakistani-Afghan border alongside President Zia. She appeared in a tent before a male-only crowd of some 1,500 mujahedin fighters. Promising an extra $4 million in aid, she encouraged them: “I want to say that the hearts of the free world are with you.” Then, moments later, Britain’s first female prime minister moved to a private tent with a few female refugees. No cameras—or men—were allowed inside. “We will never rest until Afghanistan is free again,” Thatcher declared. Shortly after that, she hustled away on a helicopter, remarking to Zia, “We had better leave while they’re friendly.”

The visit highlights a burgeoning love affair between the salt-of-the-earth mujahedin and Western elites. Hollywood paid tribute to the anticommunist guerrillas in the highly successful Rambo III, which defined Reagan-era Hollywood. The film was an unrestrained tribute to CIA field operatives and the Islamist rebels they trained, even featuring a dedication in its closing credits “to the brave mujahideen fighters of Afghanistan.” (The tribute was later edited to refer to “the gallant people of Afghanistan.”) US mainstream media sided almost reflexively with the rebels, with CBS anchor Dan Rather leading the charge. Branded “Gunga Dan” by media critic Tom Shales for the sensationalist coverage he produced for 60 Minutes while embedded with a band of mujahedin, Rather accused Soviet forces of “genocide” and of borrowing their methods from “early Hitler.”

Radek Sikorski, a young Polish exile and journalist for the UK’s Spectator, took his affection for the mujahedin a step further, donning Pashtun guerrilla garb, toting a rifle and even participating in a raid on a Soviet barracks, during which he fired three cartridge clips of ammo. According to the UK’s Telegraph, the reporter-cum-guerrilla “succeeded only in hitting the outer wall of a Soviet barracks.” After the Cold War, Sikorski went on to serve as Poland’s foreign minister and marry the vehemently anti-Russian Washington Post columnist, Anne Applebaum.

American media coverage of the Afghan conflict was substantially influenced by advocacy NGOs like the Afghanistan Relief Committee (ARC). The ARC received the bulk of its funding from the National Endowment for Democracy, a US government-backed organization that advanced American soft power by supporting political parties, media and civil society groups in countries where Washington sought regime change.

ARC’s operations were overseen by John Train, the founding manager of the Paris Review, a CIA-backed literary journal that served as a cover for agency writers. In 1982, Train volunteered his NGO as a funding vehicle for a propaganda film hyping the suffering and courage of the Afghan mujahedin. The film’s goal, according to Train, was “to impose on the Soviet Union in Afghanistan the sort of television coverage that proved fatal to the American presence in Vietnam.”

He imagined his film being aired on public television, shown on college campuses and broadcast on right-wing televangelist Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network. And he proposed Hekmatyar, the CIA-backed Islamist warlord, as the local fixer. In a memo to Freedom House, the US government-supported NGO, Train spelled out the kind of footage he was hoping to capture: “Russians: Coverage live of air assault and destruction of a rural village and mosque. Reprisal killings, use of CBW [chemical or biological weapons].”

In Train’s spy-ops fantasy, ordinary Afghans were little more than imperial stage props. As journalist Joel Whitney wrote in his investigative book Finks, which exposed the CIA’s role in Cold War cultural propaganda, “This seemed to take propaganda to a whole new level that completely dehumanized the victims of the violence in the service of some apocalyptic bet between angels and demons.”

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In 1985, as US support for the mujahedin reached its height, journalist Helena Cobban discovered how deeply the fetishization of the Afghan rebels had penetrated American culture. Cobban had been invited to an event advertised as an academic conference at a resort hotel in Tucscon, Arizona. When she entered the hotel, Cobban found herself inside a Cold War political rally. “I remember mingling with all of these wealthy Republican women and being asked, ‘Have you adopted a muj?” Cobban recalled to me. “Each one had pledged money to sponsor a member of the Afghan mujahedin in the name of beating the communists. Some were even seated at the event next to their personal ‘muj.’”

The keynote speaker of the evening, according to Cobban, was a hard-charging freshman member of Congress named John McCain. During the Vietnam War, the North Vietnamese Army had captured McCain after he was shot down by a Soviet officer on his way to bomb a civilian light bulb factory. He spent two years in captivity at the so-called Hanoi Hilton, during which he provided the Vietnamese with valuable intelligence on US war planning. McCain returned from the war with a deep, abiding loathing of his former captors, remarking in 2000, “I hate the gooks. I will hate them as long as I live.” His visceral anticommunist resentment informed his vocal support for the mujahedin as well as the right-wing Contra death squads in Central America.

So committed was McCain to the anticommunist cause that he momentarily served on the advisory board of the United States Council for World Freedom, the American affiliate of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL). Geoffrey Stewart-Smith, a former leader of WACL’s British chapter, described the organization as “a collection of Nazis, Fascists, anti-Semites, sellers of forgeries, vicious racialists, and corrupt self-seekers. It has evolved into an anti-Semitic international.”

Joining McCain in the organization were notables such as Yaroslav Stetsko, the Ukrainian Nazi collaborator who helped oversee the massacre of thousands of Jews during the 1941 Lviv pogrom; the brutal Argentinian former dictator Jorge Rafael Videla; and Guatemalan death squad leader Mario Sandoval Alarcón. Ignoring the rogue’s gallery that comprised WACL’s leadership, Reagan honored the group for playing “a leadership role in drawing attention to the gallant struggle now being waged by the true freedom fighters of our day.”

Before journalists Scott and Jon Lee Anderson published their damning investigative book on the WACL, Inside the League, in 1986, the unsavory connections fostered by the Reagan White House and its Republican congressional allies received little attention from the mainstream press. The same was generally true for Washington’s anticommunist proxies, from Central America to Afghanistan.

When mujahedin rebels committed atrocities, like the massacre by bin Laden’s fighters of seventy Afghan government officers who had surrendered at Torkham in 1988, newspaper editors generally turned their attention elsewhere. The rebels’ rampage on Kunduz in 1988, which saw rape and pillaging on a mass scale, also drew little attention. And when Hekmatyar’s forces butchered thirty fellow rebels—all top CIA trainees—State Department spokesman Richard Boucher casually dismissed a lone reporter’s critical questions: “I think what you’re doing is taking one incident and blowing it out of proportion,” Boucher protested.

A year later, with encouragement from the CIA to “put pressure” on Kabul, Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami opened up a campaign of terrorist bombings around the city. When Ed McWilliams, a foreign service officer at the US embassy in Kabul, attempted to report back to Washington about a car bombing by one of Hekmatyar’s men that had torn through a neighborhood of minority Hazaras and left a pile of dead civilians, he was rebuked. McWilliams explained to journalist Andrew Cockburn that the CIA had demanded that he “report a little less specifically about the humanitarian consequences of those vehicle bombs.”

The American covert war in Afghanistan helped inflame the worst refugee crisis in history, turning Afghans into the largest refugee group in the world at the time and what Rüdiger Schöch, a researcher for the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR), described as “victims of political instrumentalization” by the powers driving the conflict. According to Schöch, the Afghans were not received in Pakistan as refugees fleeing persecution in their own country, but rather as “partisan holy warriors in a struggle against atheist tyranny” who were “accepted practically under the condition of their outspoken opposition against the regime in Kabul.”

His report concluded that “even though UNHCR confines its humanitarian programme to persons of its concern, there is ample evidence that the [Pakistani] government as the operational partner is permitting, by acts of commission or omission, humanitarian assistance to flow into the hands of freedom fighters participating in the ‘Holy Jehad.’”

As the refugees from Afghanistan and other destabilized nations began to reach Europe during the 1980s, right-wing forces that had lain dormant since the end of World War II began to mobilize for a new Kulturkampf. In 1985, Norway saw its first right-wing terror attack with the firebombing of the Nor Mosque in Oslo, a congregation of the demonstratively “moderate” Ahmadiyya sect. The attack was preceded by public remonstrations by the right-wing National Popular Party against liberal politicians for allowing the entry of “thousands of Muslims who now demand the right to practice their religion.”

As the number of refugees rose in the late 1980s, far-right elements that had organized around their loathing of European Jews now transferred their resentment onto Muslims, declaring followers of Islam the main threat to the survival of Western civilization. As Norwegian social anthropologist Sindre Bangstad noted, the far-right Popular Movement Against Immigration drew its activist core from former volunteers for the Waffen SS Nordic division. Among them was Arne Myrdal, who publicly heralded the birth of a “resistance movement” that was “fighting against the Muslim invasion of our country and against the national traitors who assist them.”

Back in Washington, where the Reagan administration made the call to arm the most ferocious Islamist commanders of the Afghan mujahedin, the administration was becoming suspicious of America’s well-educated, rapidly assimilating Arab population. In 1987, Reagan’s Immigration and Naturalization Service drew up a formal blueprint to hold Arab Americans at a concentration camp in Oakdale, Louisiana, in the event of a future war with Middle Eastern countries. Slowly but surely, the government was establishing the groundwork for holding American Arabs and Muslims collectively responsible for the actions of the band of fanatics the government had secretly armed and trained.

Ali the American

In the United States, an archipelago of front organizations shepherded men and money to the Afghan battlefield right under the nose of the FBI. The top recruitment center in the United States was an inauspicious storefront on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn called the Al-Kifah Afghan Refugee Center. Acting as staffers of a relief organization, the center’s leadership dispatched impressionable young Muslim men to Afghanistan while raising money from private sources across the country. Al-Kifah was, in fact, the American branch of the Peshawar-based Services Bureau funded by bin Laden and overseen by his mentor, Azzam. Historian Alfred McCoy later described Al-Kifah as “a place of pivotal importance to [the CIA’s] Operation Cyclone, the clandestine American training effort to support the mujahadeen.”

An Egyptian immigrant, Mustafa Shalabi, directed the Al-Kifah operation and answered directly to Azzam. Throughout the 1980s, Azzam barnstormed America, rustling up money and manpower for the anti-Soviet jihad. Barnett Rubin, a scholarly expert on Afghanistan and Pakistan, told journalist Robert Friedman that Azzam “was ‘enlisted’ by the CIA to unite fractious rebel groups operating in Peshawar.” His anticommunist agenda dovetailed neatly with the CIA’s; indeed, few figures played as pivotal a role as Azzam did in exporting Islamism into secular Arab societies and undercutting socialist movements in the Middle East. Azzam coordinated his efforts abroad with Omar Abdel-Rahman, the so-called “Blind Sheikh” who was adored in jihadist circles for his masterfully accessible application of tracts by Ibn Taymiyyah and other proto-Wahhabist scholars to the contemporary crises facing the Islamic world. Credited with the fatwa that provided justification for the 1981 assassination of Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat, Abdel-Rahman wound up being expelled from Egypt instead of jailed. Like Azzam, the CIA paid Abdel-Rahman’s way to Peshawar, where he joined Hekmatyar, the CIA’s favorite warlord, and functioned as his charismatic sidekick.

Ayman al-Zawahiri, a wealthy surgeon who led Al-Jihad, rounded out the Services Bureau leadership by bringing Egypt’s most potent jihadist organization to the table. Unlike Abdel-Rahman, Zawahiri had done hard jail time for the Sadat assassination plot and suffered grisly abuses in the dungeons of Egyptian state security. After his release, Zawahiri testified to being whipped with electric cables and attacked by wild dogs that, according to journalist Lawrence Wright, had been trained to rape prisoners. Over time, Zawahiri became obsessed with revenge. “In striking the enemy, he would create a new reality,” Wright wrote. “His strategy was to force the Egyptian regime to become even more repressive, to make the people hate it.”

One of Zawahiri’s most potent weapons came in the form of an Egyptian special-forces soldier drummed out of the army for his untethered extremism. Muscular and six foot two, a martial arts expert who boasted a degree in psychology and proficiency in four languages, the army veteran had somehow managed to find work as a security advisor for Egypt Air, the national airline. Sensing an enticing opportunity, Zawahiri assigned the recruit with his first mission: scout out Cairo’s airport and prepare a detailed plan for an aerial hijacking. Thus began the saga of Ali Abdel Saoud Mohamed, a brazen and brilliant covert operator known in Al Qaeda’s inner circle as “Ali the American.”

With startling ease, Mohamed infiltrated the CIA, FBI and US Army, tapping his high-level government connections to evade investigation while he provided invaluable intelligence to the Al Qaeda handlers to whom he owed his loyalty. Though Mohamed’s case might seem extraordinary, it fit within the CIA’s Cold War–era modus operandi, which flagrantly disregarded national security imperatives to achieve imperial goals—in this case, anticommunism—that seemed much more urgent at the time.

Again and again, Mohamed furnished his superior officers with specific information about Al Qaeda’s existence and its determination to strike American assets. His intelligence was even used to warn President George W. Bush about the 9/11 plot. But each time, the red flags were ignored, allowing the plots to move ahead while international jihadism metastasized. And as journalist Peter Lance argued in his book Triple Cross, the CIA was so determined to protect its relationship with the Blind Sheikh, it “may have run interference for Ali [Mohamed] as he sought entry to the United States and a position of influence at Fort Bragg, the heart of the US military’s black operations.”

Mohamed’s career as a US intelligence agent began in 1985 when he showed up uninvited at the US embassy in Cairo to offer his services. Despite warnings from Egyptian intelligence, the CIA assigned him to Hamburg, Germany, where he was to spy on a mosque supposedly tied to Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shia-based political movement that preoccupied the agency while Sunni jihadism flourished under its watch. Mohamed immediately blew his cover, informing senior figures at the mosque that he was a CIA operative.

Having betrayed the agency, the State Department put him on a terrorist watch list. This should have been the end of his career in intelligence, but somehow Mohamed was still able to enter the United States on a State Department visa. On the flight over, he successfully courted a young American woman and married her weeks later at a drive-through wedding chapel in Reno, Nevada. At her home in California’s Silicon Valley, he proceeded to set up a jihadist sleeper cell while apparently maintaining his relationship with the CIA. “Everyone in the community knew he was working as a liaison between the CIA and the Afghan cause,” Ali Zaki, a local obstetrician, told journalist Peter Lance.

In 1986, Mohamed enlisted in the US Army at Fort Bragg’s John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School. His commanding officer, Lt. Col. Robert Anderson, was convinced that the invisible hand of the intelligence community engineered Mohammed’s assignment to a special-forces unit. “If you proposed this to any army non-commissioned officer [or] commissioned officer, they’[d] tell you, it didn’t happen without support form an outside agency,” Anderson said. “Now, what outside agency? I would say that it would have to have been the CIA getting him into the United States. And then once in the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

With his physical prowess and battlefield experience, Mohamed quickly rose to the rank of supply sergeant, gaining access to special-forces equipment and training manuals. During a joint exercise between American and Egyptian forces, however, Mohamed was sent home after Egyptian intelligence informed his army superiors that he was a potentially dangerous radical with ties to Al-Jihad. The army responded by simply reassigning him to another unit at Fort Bragg, where he served under the command of Colonel Norville “Tex” De Atkine.

As the director of the JFK School’s Middle East studies department, De Atkine fancied himself an expert on the history and culture of Arab societies. Among his most notable contributions was the foreword to The Arab Mind. Written by Raphael Patai, an Israeli American cultural anthropologist, the book presented a collection of lurid colonial stereotypes about Arabs. Patai devoted a full twenty-five pages to the supposed sexual dysfunctions of contemporary Arabs, musing about “the Arab view that masturbation is far more shameful than visiting prostitutes.” Thanks to De Atkine, the Orientalist tract became required reading for officers serving in the Middle East.

“It is essential reading,” De Atkine wrote in the book’s foreword. “At the institution where I teach military officers, The Arab Mind forms the basis of my cultural instruction.”

The colonel arranged for Mohamed to lead a series of cultural training seminars for officers on their way to the Middle East. He presented the religiously devout Egyptian as the embodiment of the Arab mind. In one such forum, Mohamed offered a vision of Islam so extreme that it could have been lifted from the pages of Patai’s book. “We have to establish an Islamic state because Islam without political domination cannot survive,” Mohamed declared before an array of stone-faced army officers. “Actually,” he continued, “if you look at the religion, we do not have moderates. You have one line. You accept the one line or not.”

De Atkine later defended his relationship with Mohamed, stating, “I don’t think he was anti-American. He was what I would call a Muslim fundamentalist, which isn’t a bomb thrower.”

At the time, Mohamed was situated in one of the most important hubs of the Afghan proxy war. Indeed, Fort Bragg was known to CIA operatives as “the Farm.” When investigative journalist John Cooley visited the onsite JFK Special Warfare Center, he found that “Green Beret officers, many of them seasoned veterans of Vietnam, took draconian secrecy oaths and then began the secret training assignments for the Afghanistan war.” From this “farm” and others across the American south, including a CIA black site in rural Virginia, according to Cooley, special-forces soldiers trained Pakistani officers and visiting Afghan mujahedin in use and detection of explosives; surveillance and counter-surveillance; how to write reports according to CIA “Company” standards; how to shoot various weapons, and the running of counter-terrorism, counter-narcotics and paramilitary operations.

In 1988, Mohamed informed his army superiors that he would take his leave in Afghanistan, where he planned to kill as many Russians as he could. Despite the diplomatic peril of allowing an active-duty US soldier to participate directly in a war that was supposed to be covert, he was given a green light. Before long, he was on his way to the Services Bureau in Peshawar, and then across the Afghan border to rendezvous with his handler, Zawahiri. On the Afghan frontier, Mohamed presided over the training of newly arrived jihadists, including a gloomy Egyptian American named El-Sayyid Nosair.

Mohamed returned to his unit at Fort Bragg proudly bearing the belt of a Russian soldier and maps of the training camps he toured. De Atkine rewarded him by assigning him to lead an officer-level seminar on the tactics of the Soviet Spetnaz. Other officers, meanwhile, were stunned that Mohamed was not harshly punished for his freelance participation in a foreign war. “I believe that there was an [FBI] agent that controlled Ali and knew Ali Mohamed’s actions,” Anderson remarked to Lance.

According to Mohamed’s army evaluation report, his duties included “translat[ing] military briefings from English to Arabic.” This gave him access to training manuals demonstrating how to load and fire shoulder-mounted M72A2 antitank rockets and M16 rifles, as well as dispatches from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to US embassies in cities across the Middle East marked “top secret for training.” Mohamed highlighted the embassies in Kenya, Tanzania and Yemen, translated the documents into Arabic and smuggled them to jihadist cadres of the Services Bureau.

The Disposal Problem

In Kabul, as the tide of battle turned against the Soviets, women who had been empowered by the communist government fretted about a future under mujahedin control. “Without the revolution, what would I be?” a college-educated Afghan Red Crescent worker named Mina Fahim declared in 1988. “I would be staying at home, and maybe only going out with the veil—like my mother did. And for marriage, I could be bought like so much property. This is why so many Afghan women are with this revolution, and why we will fight so hard to defend it.”

A reporter from the Knight Ridder news service noted at the time:

The differences in how the two sides view women are enormous. When asked why they had left Afghanistan for the refugee camps, many Afghans in Pakistan don’t talk about the bombing or land reform, or even the suppression of Islam. What they did not like, those Afghans said recently, was that the Communists in Kabul wanted to send their daughters to school.

The anti-Soviet jihad had altered Afghanistan for good. The cultural tensions that flared throughout 1970s Kabul, with Islamists battling student leftists in the streets, had been settled through conventional warfare, with the former camp winning out. The modernizing reforms of the communists, advanced against the will of the rural clan-based population, were about to be washed away in a green tide that not only restored traditional patriarchal values, but introduced new strains of Islamism cultivated in the ideological hothouses of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. The United States was hardly an innocent bystander to this development; if anything, its role was decisive.

On February 15, 1989, the last of the Red Army’s beleaguered forces retreated from Afghanistan. On the eve of Soviet withdrawal, that country’s premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, proposed to President Bush a ceasefire, with an end to weapons shipments and the establishment of a coalition government that welcomed the mujahedin into power. So determined was Gorbachev to prevent the Afghan state from collapsing, he proposed free elections supervised by the UN. “If we score any points, we can do it only together. If we try to score points alone, nothing good will happen,” the Soviet premier had told Bush and then-president Reagan weeks earlier at the UN, beseeching them for American cooperation. His entreaties were ultimately met with a cold shoulder from Washington, which had adopted the mujahedin position as its own: full regime change or perpetual insurgency. With the Soviet-backed government of Mohammad Najibullah still in power, the arms continued to flow to the rebels.

The Afghan trap laid more than a decade before by Brzezinski had successfully ensnared the Soviet Union. The Reagan doctrine seemed to have been ratified and America’s nemesis was teetering on the brink of collapse. The war had worked out nicely for the arms industry as well, enabling the battlefield testing of new weapons systems and record sales to oil-rich allies. Reagan’s secretary of defense, Caspar Weinberger, was a former president of Bechtel, and the construction and pipeline company did billions of dollars in business in Saudi Arabia. As a reward for the kingdom’s support for the anti-Soviet jihad, Weinberger helped arrange a whopping $8.5 billion arms deal that granted the Saudis advanced AWACS surveillance aircraft. It was the beginning of a very special relationship.

Peter Tomsen, an Afghanistan specialist working in the State Department under the first Bush administration, was a voice in the wilderness when he warned of the consequences of Najibullah’s government falling. “An extremist seizure of Kabul would plunge Afghanistan into a fresh round of warfare, which could affect areas adjoining Afghanistan,” Tomsen wrote in a secret 1991 cable to Washington. He added that if Hekmatyar reached the city, “extremists in the Arab world would support them in stoking Islamic radicalism in the region, including the Soviet Central Asian republics, but also in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Arab world.”

Tomsen called for a political settlement, but few in Washington were listening. In the final years before the CIA and Soviet Union agreed to cut off arms to Afghanistan, the CIA pumped unprecedented amounts of cash and weapons to Hekmatyar. Tomsen, for his part, saw to it that an almost equal amount went to Ahmad Shah Massoud, his guerrilla rival, who was seen as more moderate and was favored by the State Department. As soon as Kabul fell, a collection of warlords took control, each with an array of foreign backers, often in competition with one another, and none with any interest in maintaining a semblance of functional government. The country remained a magnet for foreign jihadists while droves of women empowered by communist rule were forced to flee for their lives, their worst fears realized thanks in no small part to the freedom-loving United States.

With one superpower vanquished, an emboldened cadre of zealots introduced to the Afghan battlefield through the Services Bureau set out to wage jihad across the world. The tactics the CIA brought to Afghanistan were on display virtually anywhere jihadist militancy took root. “Time and again,” Cooley noted, “these same techniques reappear among the Islamist insurgents in Upper Egypt and Algeria, since the ‘Afghani’ [sic] Arab veterans began returning there in the late 1980s and early 1990s.”

Abdurajik Abubakar Janjalani, a Filipino jihadist who’d fought alongside bin Laden in Afghanistan, returned home to wage an insurgency for an independent Islamic State under the banner of the Abu Sayyaf terrorist group. According to Cooley, Abu Sayyaf was “the most violent and radical Islamist group in the Far East, using its CIA and ISI training to harass, attack, and murder Christian priests, wealthy non-Muslim plantation owners, and merchants and local government in the southern Philippine island of Mindanao.” Filipino senator Aquilino Pimentel was gripped with outrage after reading Cooley’s reporting. Pimentel branded Abu Sayyaf a “CIA monster,” demanding a government inquiry into the agency’s role in establishing the jihadist organization.

In Bosnia, where some 3,000 foreign Islamic fundamentalists flocked to fight the Russian-aligned Serbs, Senator Jesse Helms, far-right former WACL member and powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee member, said it was time to “begin treating the Bosnians as we did the Contras and mujahedin—as freedom fighters engaged in a war of liberation.”

At that point, the Bosnian forces had purchased as much as $200 million in illegal weapons through a shadowy group called Third World Relief Agency, with funding provided by countries like Saudi Arabia and, according to the Washington Post, “the wealthy Saudi Arabian emigre [sic] Osama Binladen.” (The 1995 report represents one of the first mentions of bin Laden in the American media.) A Western diplomat complained at the time, “We were told [by Washington] to watch [the Third World Relief Agency] but not interfere. Bosnia was trying to get weapons from anybody, and we weren’t helping much. The least we could do is back off. So we backed off.”

Another charity that was instrumental in shepherding jihadist fighters from Afghanistan to new flashpoints like Bosnia was Benevolence International. Overseen by Saudi businessman Adel Batterjee, Benevolence International had established a camp to train fighters in Afghanistan in 1991, then followed bin Laden into Sudan, where he set up training grounds the following year. The charity also established an office that year in suburban Chicago, Illinois. Though a 1996 CIA report found that Benevolence International was among a chain of charities that “employ members or otherwise facilitate the activities of terrorist groups operating in Bosnia,” the FBI took no action against it.

As the Chicago Tribune later explained, “the United States did not push the matter because of a long political understanding: America would defend the kingdom [of Saudi Arabia] militarily and not meddle in its internal affairs if the Saudis remained a loyal oil supplier and Middle East ally.” Another undeniable reason for Washington’s passive attitude was that the Islamist guerrillas in Bosnia were becoming valuable proxies in the NATO-orchestrated destruction of Yugoslavia.

Thus Central Europe became the next petri dish for international jihadism, as thousands of foreign fighters flocked there to battle the Serbs, or jaunted over to Chechnya to confront Russia once again.

Former Senate Foreign Relations Committee investigative counsel Jack Blum was among a tiny handful in Washington who raised the alarm about the anti-Soviet jihad’s unintended consequences. When Blum testified before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in October 1996 about allegations of the CIA trafficking drugs to fund the Nicaraguan Contras during the 1980s, he warned that the agency was facing a new and especially troublesome “disposal problem.”

The problem first arose, according to Blum, when Cuban mercenaries trained by the CIA returned to Miami after the botched amphibious Bay of Pigs landing. “And when you teach people how to change their identity, how to hide from the law, how to build bombs, how to assassinate people,” Blum testified, “they don’t forget how to do it, and you wind up, after the covert action is over, with a disposal problem. We’ve never been very good at handling disposal.”

After 1961, CIA-trained Cuban exiles had wreaked havoc around the world, from the assassination of Chilean socialist diplomat Orlando Letelier to the downing of Cubana Flight 455 by right-wing Cuban CIA asset Orlando Bosch. But the danger presented by the veterans of the anti-Soviet jihad was exponentially greater, Blum warned: “We have all kinds of people who have been trained in bomb-making, and by God, they’ve been with us everywhere from the World Trade Center to Paris and all over the world, wherever there’s somebody who doesn’t suit their ideological tenor.”

Two decades after his testimony, Blum’s frustration has only grown. “By creating a motley assortment of volunteers and bringing them to Afghanistan,” he remarked to me, “we created the monster of all monsters. And nobody seemed to care. It was not only a disposal problem, they were totally abandoned. It went well beyond disposal. They all went home and went to work doing what we trained them to do. And nobody, I mean nobody, has been held accountable for this.”

The Ghosts of Operation Cyclone

Upon his triumphant return home from the Afghan battlefield, Osama bin Laden held court with one of his most generous wartime patrons. Prince Bandar bin Sultan, former Saudi ambassador to the United States, had once helped the CIA manage mass transfers of arms to Afghan rebels and Nicaraguan Contras. He had even coordinated with the CIA to arrange the assassination of Iranian assets. Seated before the well-connected prince, bin Laden gushed about the American aid he received. “Thank you!” he exclaimed to Bandar. “Thank you for bringing the Americans to help us get rid of the secularist, atheist Soviets.”

Bin Laden’s friendly attitude to Washington was fleeting, however. Almost as soon as the last Soviet tanks left Afghanistan, he was mapping out plans for an organization that could expand the battlefield across the globe, and ultimately to American shores. Alongside Zawahiri, the founder of Al-Jihad, bin Laden named the new network Al Qaeda—“the base”—after their old military camp in Afghanistan. Zawahiri maintained control over his old organization, which aimed to topple Egypt’s government and implement Islamist rule, while serving as one of Al Qaeda’s top tacticians. However, Zawahiri faced a powerful internal rival in Azzam, founder of the CIA- and ISI-backed Services Bureau.

A Palestinian refugee who had endured the bitterness of forced displacement, Azzam was determined to return to his homeland as a leader of a newfangled Islamist resistance against the Israeli occupiers. During 1970’s Black September, when the Jordanian monarchy brutally ejected Palestinian forces from its realm, Azzam refused to retaliate. His neutrality stemmed not only from his belief that the secular, left-oriented Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was a rival to his Islamist camp, he warned that in battling fellow Muslims, “forbidden blood would be spilled.” Twenty years later, Azzam insisted again that killing Muslims was not only counterproductive, but sinful; he demanded that Israel, not a “near enemy” like Egypt, be the next target. He thus placed himself in direct conflict with Zawahiri over Al Qaeda’s fundamental strategy.

On November 24, 1989, a massive bomb planted on a Peshawar roadside tore Azzam to pieces. Lawrence Wright, who chronicled the rise of Al Qaeda in his book The Looming Tower, speculated that Zawahiri might have been behind the assassination, noting that he had been overheard spreading rumors that Azzam was an American agent that same day. But the killers could have come from any number of outfits—from the Israeli Mossad, which sought to liquidate another implacable foe, or from the CIA, which might have decided that Azzam had outlived his usefulness. At the time, Peshawar was a haven for operatives from virtually every intelligence agency meddling in Afghanistan. Whoever the culprits were, Azzam’s killing left Zawahiri in the driver’s seat, with bin Laden by his side.

Months after Azzam’s killing, Abdel-Rahman (the Blind Sheikh) entered the United States on a visa he had obtained at the US consulate in Sudan, despite having been on a US terrorist watch list for three years. The CIA had reviewed seven applications made by Abdel-Rahman between 1986 and 1990, during the height of the anti-Soviet jihad, when he had been a key recruiter for Azzam’s Services Bureau. CIA officers turned him down only once due to his links to international terrorism. At the same time, the FBI had been closely monitoring Azzam’s recruitment of young Muslims in the United States to fight in Afghanistan. Its investigators ultimately found a curious rationalization for closing its inquiry into the matter: “This will not be considered as mercenary recruiting, since they did not sign any documents nor did it appear that they were recruited to Afghanistan to fight.”

Five years later, a 1995 report in the Boston Globe featured a rare public acknowledgement of Abdel-Rahman’s relationship with the CIA. The article essentially revealed that the Blind Sheikh had entered the United States on the clandestine CIA Department of Operations visa waiver program, which provided privileged access to valuable assets. “In May 1993, the Egyptian government newspaper Al Gomhuria quoted Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak as saying that Rahman had worked with the CIA,” the report noted. It also quoted Mubarak complaining that the United States could have prevented the first World Trade Center bombing if it had heeded his warnings about Abdel-Rahman. Under pressure from the US State Department, the newspaper’s editor retracted the story a few days later. But in July 1993, US press reports asserted that CIA officers working under consular cover in Egypt and Sudan had reviewed seven US visa applications made by Rahman between 1986 and 1990. The CIA officers approved six of the requests.”

For all his supposed erudition, Abdel-Rahman displayed almost baffling naivete when he arrived in the United States. In his mind, he was the Salafi version of Iran’s Shi’ite theocrat Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Modeling his move to the New York area after Khomeini’s exile in Paris, Abdel-Rahman fantasized about returning to Egypt as the spiritual guide of a new, Islamist government after the old, corruption-addled dictatorship fell, just as Khomeini had done in Iran. The United States had supported Abdel-Rahman’s cause abroad for years, so why would it have a problem with him preaching jihad within its borders? He arrived to US shores with supreme confidence, but he was walking into a trap.

Abdel-Rahman’s first order of business was to take control of Brooklyn’s Al-Kifah center. The center represented a remnant of Azzam’s old CIA and Saudi-backed Services Bureau, which had directed foreign fighters into Afghanistan to bleed the Soviets. According to Osama el-Baz, former security advisor to Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, the CIA and Saudi Arabia had kept the Services Bureau afloat for future operations against Iran, relying on Al-Kifah to launder funding. “It’s all the fault of those stupid bastards at the CIA,” el-Baz complained to journalist Andrew Cockburn. “They trained these people, kept them in after the Russians left, and now we get this.”

At Al-Kifah, millions of dollars were left over from fundraising campaigns during the height of the anti-Soviet jihad, and $100,000 was still pouring in each month. Abdel-Rahman insisted that half of the donations be committed to toppling Mubarak’s government—the ultimate goal of Zawahiri’s Al-Jihad. But Shalabi wanted to spend the funds backing the establishment of an Islamist government in Kabul.

On March 1, 1991, following a sustained campaign of incitement by the Blind Sheikh, Shalabi was found soaked in his own blood on the floor of his Brooklyn apartment, bludgeoned with a baseball bat and hacked with knife wounds. As in any gangland style murder, the killer’s methods were designed to make an example of the victim.

Despite ample evidence pointing to Abdel-Rahman’s network, and the disappearance of $100,000 in Al-Kifah donations from the apartment, the murder investigation was hastily closed with no arrests. Ali Mohamed, who had been a confidant of Shalabi and his family, was not even questioned. This allowed the Blind Sheikh to complete his takeover of Al-Kifah, which meant that bin Laden had taken over the Services Bureau network once and for all—providing his Al Qaeda network with easy access to the United States.

The ghosts of Operation Cyclone hovered over early-1990s New York City. One of them, Nosair, had been an understudy of Abdel-Rahman and trained on the Afghan battlefield by Ali Mohamed. A highly educated immigrant to the United States, Nosair had turned to fundamentalist Islam in reaction to the repression of Egypt’s dictatorship. Once he arrived in the United States, he grew depressed, popping Prozac and reeling in disgust at the socially permissive, hyper-consumerist atmosphere in which he was suddenly immersed. Trained as an engineer back in Egypt, he toiled as an air conditioner repairman, developing an inferiority complex and suffering a painful industrial accident that left him with lingering injuries. He became a constant presence at Al-Kifah, joining fellow veterans of the Afghan War for excursions to a shooting range in Long Island, where Mohamed schooled them in the use of high-powered assault rifles. Undercover FBI agents tailed them to one session and photographed them wearing Services Bureau T-shirts emblazoned with a map of Afghanistan. No action was taken, however.

Before long, though, Nosair applied his firearms and infiltration skills to target the Jewish fanatical rabbi, Meir Kahane. Kahane had made his name clamoring for the overthrow of Israel’s civil law-based government and replacing it with a fascist theocracy cleansed of all Palestinians—the State of Judea. He was the Jewish analog to Zawahiri, who aimed to do the same thing in Egypt by toppling a putatively secular government and installing a fundamentalist Islamic State that purged religious minorities.

And like Zawahiri, Kahane was a hard-line anticommunist who had been used by the US government to advance an ulterior political agenda that did lasting damage to America’s social fabric. Indeed, Kahane had enjoyed a long relationship with the FBI, dating back to his infiltration of the right-wing John Birch Society in the 1950s. During the early 1970s, Kahane and his Jewish Defense League served as tools in the FBI’s campaign of subterfuge against the Black Panthers. Agents agitated Kahane with fabricated anti-Semitic messages authored in the name of black radicals, inflaming long-standing racial tensions, sparking street fights and advancing the FBI’s plan to shatter efforts at leftist black-Jewish political coalition building. The FBI-fomented paranoia ultimately enabled the militant rabbi to paint himself as the only thing standing between Jews and a second Holocaust at hands of blacks, Arabs and their liberal Jewish donors.

On November 5, 1990, Kahane appeared at the Marriott East Side hotel in Manhattan for the founding conference of a group he called ZEERO, or the Zionist Emergency Evacuation Rescue Organization. In characteristic fashion, the rabbi conjured up a scenario of imminent doom for the Jews, urging his hundred or so supporters to abandon life in America before the flames of anti-Semitism consumed them. Their only sanctuary, he declared, was within the militarized frontiers of the self-proclaimed Jewish state.

Suddenly, a man dressed as an ultra-Orthodox Jew approached Kahane. With a crazed look in his eyes, he unloaded a .357 Magnum revolver into the rabbi’s torso. It was Nosair, demonstrating the tactics he had learned from years of training in Afghanistan and under the watch of Ali Mohamed. The fascist rabbi died that night. His funeral, held days later in Jerusalem, where he had served as a lawmaker in Israel’s Knesset, was the largest to date in that country’s history and was even addressed by Israel’s chief rabbi.

Martyred by a fellow religious fanatic, Kahane’s views moved steadily into the Israeli mainstream in the years after his death, particularly his proposals for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian citizens from Israel. The fallout from his killing demonstrated the success of the logic both Al Qaeda and his own followers embraced: terror begets extremism and collapses the fragile space where multi-confessional societies survive.

In Nosair’s home, FBI and NYPD investigators found the trove of documents stolen by Ali Mohamed from Fort Bragg, including classified dispatches from the Joint Chiefs to US embassies across the Middle East and Green Beret training manuals that Mohamed had translated into Arabic. They found Nosair’s notebooks containing detailed plans, in his words, for an attack “to be done by means of destroying—exploding—the structures of [America’s] civilized pillars such as the tourist infrastructure which they are proud of and their high world buildings which they are proud of and their statues which they endear and the buildings in which gather their leaders.” The investigators also discovered maps of the World Trade Center and audiotapes of the Blind Sheikh calling for holy war.

Besides training him in firearms, Mohamed had instructed Nosair in the use of dead mail drops, prompting him to register a post office box at a check-cashing store in Jersey City called Sphinx Trading. It was the same mailbox center that the 9/11 ringleaders relied on to exchange messages as the plot developed. Despite uncovering a massive cache of evidence that connected Nosair to an international terror network and suggested active plots underway in New York City, Nosair was tried as a lone gunman. His lawyer, the leftist firebrand William Kunstler, easily outmaneuvered a clumsy government prosecution team. In the end, Nosair got off with an illegal gun rap—a stinging defeat for the government.

The FBI had failed to stop Al Qaeda before it could metastasize into a major global force. Meanwhile, bin Laden was turning against his former patrons and preparing ambitious plans to wage war on a global scale.