Jihad Joe (17 page)

One of them was Christopher Paul, an African American who converted to Islam, changing his name to “Abdul Malek Kenyatta.” Around the end of 1990, Kenyatta traveled to Pakistan seeking to sign up for jihad. He ended up in an al Qaeda guesthouse in Peshawar. He met several members of al Qaeda and eventually attended a training camp in Afghanistan, where he learned to use assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades and mastered other military techniques. A few months later, he was selected for advanced training in military tactics and the construction of improvised explosives.

As al Qaeda began the process of moving to Sudan in the early 1990s, Kenyatta bristled at the prospect that his time in combat might be coming to an end. After a brief return to the United States, where he trained aspiring Ohio jihadists in martial arts, he flew to Europe and made his way into Bosnia, where he took part in combat. After Bosnia, he continued to work for al Qaeda, training would-be terrorists in Ohio and Germany in bomb making, with the aim of killing
Americans at home and abroad. That eventually formed the basis for his prosecution in 2008, which ended with a guilty plea and a twenty-year prison sentence.
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Al Qaeda also had financial ties to the war in Bosnia, many of which ran through the United States and involved American citizens. One of the most significant charities providing support to the Bosnian mujahideen was the Benevolence International Foundation.

Spawned from a Pakistan-based organization active at the end of the Soviet jihad, a substantial part of the Benevolence operation was moved to the United States in the early 1990s by Enaam Arnaout, a Syrian who had fought alongside Osama bin Laden and later oversaw logistics for some of al Qaeda's early camps in Afghanistan. Arnaout was joined there by Loay Bayazid, the Kansas City mujahid who had been present at the founding of al Qaeda.
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Benevolence had operations in major conflict zones around the world, with a strong focus on Bosnia and Chechnya. Like many charitable organizations linked to terrorism, it really did perform charity work, but a substantial sum of money was reserved for the mujahideen. Benevolence bought uniforms and equipment for fighters in both Bosnia and Chechnya and produced propaganda videos on their behalf.

More important, the charity made travel possible for jihadists, helping at least nine people move from Afghanistan to Bosnia, including senior al Qaeda leaders. Sometimes Benevolence's leadership knew the people and their purpose in traveling, but it wasn't always formal. If someone was known to the charity or came with an introduction, this person would get help, no questions asked, usually in the form of papers stating that the traveler worked for Benevolence, which could then be used to obtain a work visa at the desired destination.
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Overseas, Benevolence served as an intelligence hub for al Qaeda, in addition to its other functions. The Benevolence office in Sarajevo archived and digitized a massive collection of al Qaeda documents, including records of the organization's founding and personnel. It also created detailed reports on the activities of the mujahideen and their relationships with one another and with suspected American intelligence agents.
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The Sarajevo office's greatest intelligence coup, however, was the cultivation of a high-level mole in the Bosnian government who funneled hundreds of pages of classified documents to al Qaeda through the Benevolence staff. It was
a devastating counterintelligence success, collecting detailed logs of phone conversations intercepted by the Bosnian government, reports on the activities of the mujahideen, and even highly classified CIA cables.

One such cable was particularly sensitive: a request from the CIA to Bosnian intelligence for the detention of Anwar Shaban, the commander of the foreign mujahideen who was a senior leader in Omar Abdel Rahman's Islamic Group and had extensive ties to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. Shortly after the request was sent, Shaban was mysteriously assassinated.
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The Benevolence network was part of the fabric of the American jihadist movement. The CARE International office in Boston used Benevolence to distribute its funds in many cases, along with another Chicago-based charity called the Global Relief Foundation. And both CARE and Benevolence were intertwined with Mohammed Zaki's American Islamic Group.
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Zaki's second-in-command was an influential jihadist propagandist named Kifah Jayyousi, a Jordanian of Palestinian descent with an unfortunate tendency to giggle at inappropriate moments. Jayyousi immigrated to the United States in 1979 and became a naturalized American citizen.
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Through Jayyousi, the American Islamic Group maintained close ties with CARE in Boston. CARE's directors sponsored speaking tours by Jayyousi to raise funds and recruit fighters for Bosnia and Chechnya. During speeches at Boston University and MIT in 1996, Jayyousi regaled audiences with tales of Russian atrocities against Muslims and showed videotaped battles of the Chechen mujahideen. Tapes of Jayyousi's lectures were also distributed by Muslim Students Association branches around the country.
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Like CARE, AIG focused on recruitment and fund-raising for mujahideen overseas. Jayyousi personally recruited fighters in addition to leveraging his speeches, taped lectures, and AIG publications in the service of jihad. The cell also moved thousands of dollars among various other charities that supported the mujahideen, including a Hamas front known as the Holy Land Foundation and mujahideen support organizations functioning in Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Azerbaijan, Libya, Egypt, and Somalia.

Pretty much any front was all right, one member of the organization commented during a meeting with Zaki and Jayyousi. “As long as there is slaughtering, we're with them. If there's no slaughtering, [ … ] that's it, buzz off.”
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This bloodthirstiness was typical of AIG, especially after Zaki's death. Unlike CARE, which was more narrowly focused on the guerrilla combat of military jihad, AIG was at times unabashedly supportive of terrorism. Jayyousi published a newsletter known as the
Islam Report
, which was initially filled with details of the terrorism trial of Omar Abdel Rahman. Jayyousi also helped Rahman—now in prison—stay in contact with members of his Egyptian jihadist network overseas. One issue of
Islam Report
described convicted World Trade Center bomber Mahmud Abouhalima as “A Good Citizen and a Muslim Hero.”
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At one point, Jayyousi reached out to CARE officer Samir Al Monla to ask for financial help to move Abouhalima's family out of the United States. Al Monla, suspicious that his calls were under surveillance, asked Jayyousi to use a false name when referring to Abouhalima, which prompted one of Jayyousi's trademark nervous giggles. Al Monla finally agreed to provide $1,000 toward airfare for Abouhalima's wife and four children and to try to raise funds for the remainder. However, he added, they should tell people that the money was “for helping the poor, or the needy or an orphan [ … ] without mentioning any names at all.”
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One of Jayyousi's top deputies was an outspoken Palestinian activist named Adham Hassoun. A computer programmer who had moved to the United States in 1989 and illegally overstayed a student visa, Hassoun headed up an early office of the Benevolence Foundation. Soon after, he began to work closely with both CARE in Boston and AIG in San Diego from his home base in the South Florida town of Sunrise.
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Hassoun was a prolific jihadist recruiter, constantly working the phones and roaming the community in search of bodies and dollars to support the cause. Like Jayyousi, his definition of jihad was widely inclusive of terrorism and the killing of civilians. When talking to Jayyousi and other members of his jihadist network, Hassoun used simple codes to communicate, assuming (correctly, as it turned out) that the FBI might be listening in. “Terrorism” became “tourism,” and military jihad became “football” or “soccer.”
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Hassoun and Jayyousi helped move thousands of dollars and perhaps dozens of men to jihad fronts in Bosnia and Chechnya. They also worked to establish and financially support an active cell of jihadists in Somalia and neighboring Ethiopia.
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Some of their recruits ended up in al Qaeda, which was gearing up to begin its assault against the United States in earnest. The terror network was actively
seeking U.S. citizens who were willing to go beyond the concept of defensive jihad and embrace an all-out war against a much broader array of enemies.

Born Roman Catholic, Jose Padilla grew up on tough streets in Chicago. As a young teenager of Puerto Rican descent, he became involved with a gang known as the Latin Disciples and soon wound up in prison after the kids he was running with pulled off a brutal murder. Worried about his downward trajectory, Padilla's family moved to the Fort Lauderdale area to get away from the gangs, but Padilla's temperament continued to sour, culminating in a 1991 incident in which he pulled a gun on a cop during a routine traffic stop.
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That got him ten months in a Florida prison, where he was impressed with Muslim prisoners who were serving time at the same facility. One prisoner in particular, a member of the Nation of Islam, debated with Padilla about Islam. Padilla later described this as the “turning point” of his life. After being put in solitary confinement for fighting, Padilla said he had a vision of himself floating in the air, wearing a black hood and a blue robe. The vision inspired him to learn more about Islam.
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After his release, he voraciously pursued information about Islam while working at a Taco Bell in Davie, Florida, near Fort Lauderdale. His inquiries led him to Adham Hassoun.

Padilla soon converted and eventually changed his name to Abdullah Al Muhajir. Although by no means a bright student, he applied himself industriously to studying Islam and learning Arabic. He married a Jamaican immigrant, who also converted, and it seemed—all too briefly—that he had turned his life around. But Padilla embraced his new religion with a passion that frightened those closest to him. His mother told a neighbor that she feared he had joined a cult.
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Padilla began to adopt Arab garb and a conservative posture, which stood out as unusual even at the Koran studies classes he took in 1995 and 1996. Going deeper still into his religion, he decided that he wanted to become an imam and arranged to travel to Egypt for further study. The trip was encouraged and financially sponsored by Adham Hassoun, who also helped “psychologically prepare” Padilla for the journey he was about to undertake. Not the journey into Egypt— but the journey to al Qaeda.
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Padilla spent a couple of years in Egypt, supposedly honing his language skills but finding time to run errands as a cash courier for Hassoun. While there, he married a second wife, after abandoning his first but before divorcing her.

He soon left his now-pregnant second wife as well. In 2000 he made the hajj pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia, where he met a Yemeni al Qaeda recruiter and was invited to take the history-laden path first to Pakistan, from there into Afghanistan, and finally into the heart of darkness. On July 24, 2000, he filled out an application form to join al Qaeda's Al Farooq training camp in Afghanistan, where he studied religion, surveillance, improvised explosives, and communications.
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Padilla and others were assigned to come up with a terrorist attack on U.S. soil by al Qaeda's military commander Mohammed Atef. Padilla approached the job with zeal, discussing various improvised explosive schemes and pie-in-the-sky ideas like spraying cyanide on people at nightclubs.
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His enthusiasm often outstripped his ability. At one point, Padilla approached Mohammed with instructions on how to build a nuclear bomb, which he had found on the Internet. The webside was a parody, but Padilla had taken it seriously. Undeterred, he returned to his computer and soon came back with an idea for building a dirty bomb: a conventional bomb combined with radioactive material designed to contaminate the target area.
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Finally, in June 2001 Atef decided on a mission. Padilla and his team would rent apartments in high-rises that used natural gas for heat. They would breach the building's gas lines and ignite the fumes to bring the buildings down. Padilla's partner in this assignment was another American al Qaeda member—someone Padilla already knew.
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Adnan Shukrijumah was born in Saudi Arabia in 1975 and moved to the United States with his family during the 1990s. The clan landed in Brooklyn. His father, Gulshair Shukrijumah, was a Saudi-sponsored imam who spent time at the Al Fa-rook Mosque on Atlantic Avenue, which had been attached to the Al Kifah Center.
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The elder Shukrijumah served as a translator for the blind sheikh, Omar Abdel Rahman, and was friends with Abdullah Rashid, the African American mujahid who had lost his leg in Afghanistan. Shukrijumah testified on Rashid's behalf as a character witness.
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Padilla had blundered through his American life, cutting a broad swathe for journalists and investigators to navigate. Adnan Shukrijumah was more circumspect, leaving few clues in his wake. The family moved from New York to the suburbs of Fort Lauderdale in 1995.

Working as a used car salesman, Shukrijumah paid his way through Broward Community College, majoring in computer science and chemistry. Although he left little trace of his views, Shukrijumah's mother said he became disgusted by American society, including the use of drugs and alcohol and what he saw as sexual promiscuity, all the while growing angry over U.S. foreign policy in the Muslim world.
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