Jihad Joe (7 page)

Not long afterward, in 1981, he moved to the United States, settled in Pittsburgh, and married an Irish American convert to Islam. Nosair lived a short walk from the University of Pittsburgh in a mildly seedy neighborhood with a handful of cockroach-infested bars and low-end strip clubs but relatively safe streets.
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His time in Pittsburgh was troubled. He was badly injured while working as an electrician, and he was eventually fired from his job after trying to convert his coworkers to Islam on company time. Allegations of sexual assault dogged him. Seeking a clean start, he packed up his wife and children and moved to Jersey City, where he found a job working at a power plant and began to attend the Masjid As-Salaam.

Around the same time he discovered the Al Kifah Center. Like so many others, he was drawn in by the powerful charisma of Abdullah Azzam. He began to spend more and more time at the center.

Family and health considerations prevented him from going to Afghanistan, but he began to organize an informal training program for those who might succeed where he could not.

It was Nosair's poster that had been spotted at As-Salaam by Khaled Ibrahim. A small group with a rotating membership of about six to twelve local Muslims began to practice shooting at a gun club in Calverton, New Jersey. Initially they were coached by an African American Muslim from Brooklyn, an ex-marine suspected of being involved in a series of bank robberies. His name is unknown because he was never charged, and the case remains open.
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The Brooklyn fighter, Abdullah Rashid, who had by now mostly recovered from nearly losing his leg in Afghanistan, joined the group. Hoping to prevent future jihadists from suffering premature injuries like his own, he had become a zealous advocate of training.
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Two other African American Muslims took part in the training, along with recent Palestinian immigrant Mohammed Salameh and Egyptian immigrant Mahmud Abouhalima, who had come to the United States a few years earlier. Both men would later be implicated in the World Trade Center bombing.

Members of the group came and went over time. Authorities suspected at one point that Wadih El Hage had trained with the men but never proved it; however, El Hage did once sell a gun to Abouhalima.
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The target-practice sessions in Calverton were frequent but irregular. The men sometimes brought their children along. Nosair's son, Zak Ebrahim, remembered one trip to the shooting range when he was only six years old:

My father seemed to be having almost as much fun as I was, if not more. Using a fully automatic weapon, he shot the legs out from under one of the larger targets. The men all shot it and had a laugh. Trying to emulate him on the next turn, I held the trigger back on a fully automatic rifle. I fired one bullet after another in quick succession. [ … ]

Besides the five or six men, there were just as many of their kids waiting to take their turn. By late morning, it began to softly drizzle and I knew our time at the range was coming to an end. On what I figured would be my last turn at shooting, I took aim at my target and let each bullet fly. The last one hit the small orange light that sat on top of the target, and to everyone's
surprise, especially mine, the entire target exploded, black smoke billowing into the sky.

My uncle turned to the rest of the men and in Arabic said
ibn abu
, which means, “Like father, like son.” They all seemed to get a very good laugh out of that comment. It wasn't until a few years later that I fully understand, understood what they thought was so funny. They thought they saw in me the same destruction my father was capable of.
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The men were wrong. Zak turned his back on his father's name and views and grew up to be an antiviolence advocate.

It was Nosair who brought Ali Mohamed into the circle, introducing him to the other trainees as “Abu Omar.” The first classes were held in Jersey City at the apartment of one of the students.

“It was about navigating in areas like if you are lost in a desert area or a jungle,” Khaled Ibrahim recalled, “or you are part of a group and you want to find your way, how to use a compass, how to find your way by looking at the stars, and survival things, and how to recognize some of the weapons if you see them, like tanks, stuff like that.”
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Yet there were other lessons, which seemed less oriented toward Afghanistan. Mohamed showed them diagrams on the construction of pipe bombs, how to make and use the most effective Molotov cocktails, how to mix chemicals and build detonators for homemade bombs, and even how to build “zip guns”—crude homemade pistols that could not be traced by law enforcement.

He also taught cell structure and operational security. To keep communications away from their home, members of the group rented mailboxes near the mosque from a check-cashing company called Sphinx Trading.
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In 2001 mailboxes at this location would be used by some of the 9/11 hijackers.

The cell attracted the attention of the Joint Terrorism Task Force, a cooperative investigation unit with members from both the NYPD and the FBI. The first investigation was spurred by a bomb threat against Atlantic City casinos, but it continued as a Neutrality Act case after it became clear that the men were at least nominally training to fight in Afghanistan. The act—rarely enforced—makes it illegal for Americans to fight in foreign wars.
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During the 1980s the FBI had little interest in pursuing cases related to Afghanistan, although bits of intelligence sometimes came up during other
investigations. People from the United States were going over there to fight, and Afghan and Arab mujahideen came to the United States to raise funds and train in relative safety outside the war zone. None of this was considered fair game for investigation.
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For instance, a large number of foreign mujahideen flew to Plainfield, Indiana, for an extended stay at a facility controlled by the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) during the late 1980s. ISNA's foreign financing was already the subject of a separate investigation, so the agent in charge sent a memo to headquarters about the mujahideen. There was no obvious case to prosecute. The president had deemed the mujahideen “freedom fighters,” and it was widely known that the United States was supporting their jihad against the Soviets.
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The case against ISNA was largely dead in the water anyway. The organization and other connected groups had sponsored hundreds of Muslim students for visas. Many of the students lacked documentation, and some brought significant amounts of money into the country. At the field-office level, a few agents investigated the origins of the money, but when someone left the jurisdiction of one field office and entered another, the case was usually lost. Washington wasn't interested in coordinating the complicated interstate investigation, especially when the Bureau could be accused of religious profiling. Field agents who lobbied for a more aggressive approach to the visa violations were ignored at best and even reprimanded when they persisted.
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Aside from the religious complications and a general lack of institutional resolve, the cases involving American mujahideen were often muddy. For instance, noncitizen immigrants were not technically in violation of the Neutrality Act, a federal law that prevents U.S. citizens from taking part in foreign wars. And the Reagan administration had made an inconvenient habit of using private citizens for covert military missions in South America. Because the United States also supported the mujahideen, it was hard to muster enthusiasm for prosecutions.
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In the case of the Calverton training, the suspected connection to a bombing plot, along with the fact that the trainees were Americans with roots in the local community, helped overcome some of these hurdles, at least for a short while. The FBI surveilled the Calverton group for a few consecutive weeks, photographing the participants and attempting to establish some basis for further action. In the end, the investigation was shelved. The photographs were filed away, only to
emerge years later—after several of the participants had been implicated in terrorist acts.
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The FBI surveillance did not capture any images of Ali Mohamed, who was expanding his reach from the Egyptian Islamic Jihad organization and moving deeper into the center of al Qaeda.

The United States had played host to a significant number of jihadists, many of whom were now contemplating life after the Soviet Union. In order to accomplish bin Laden's goal of taking the jihad global, al Qaeda would have to establish a formal presence on American soil. Before that could happen, blood would flow.

Rashad Khalifa was a rising star in the Islamic world. An Egyptian scholar raised in the Sufi tradition, he moved to the United States in 1959 to study biochemistry. Khalifa decided to stay and raise his family in Tucson while working in his field. His son was the first American of Egyptian descent to play major league baseball.
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An obsessive student of the Koran, Khalifa used computers in his day job and was inspired to apply them to analyzing the holy book. He discovered an arcane pattern within the Koran that revolved around the number 19—as seen in the number of chapters and verses, the occurrences of references to numbers within the Koran, and other, even more complicated, derivations.

Based on his writings and translation work, Khalifa became a spiritual leader in his own right. At first, his “mathematical miracle” of the Koran was warmly received by Muslim scholars as proof of the uniqueness and the divine creation of the Koran. But Khalifa didn't stop there.
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Over time, his studies led him to conclude that the
hadith
and Sunnah— Islamic traditions about the life of the Prophet Mohammed—were not reliable sources for Islamic practice. Many of the more socially restrictive practices in Islam are supported by these traditions. Eliminating the
hadith
and Sunnah from the mix led Khalifa into an increasingly liberal interpretation his faith. At the Masjid Tucson, where his followers gathered, Khalifa permitted men and women to pray together, and he didn't require women to cover their heads. Word of these practices started to spread.

Worse still, the mathematical analysis of the Koran didn't add up perfectly. According to Khalifa's calculations, one small section of the Koran was illegitimate—written by a human hand and not the living word of Allah. This proclamation was the final straw. The suggestion that even one word of the Koran should be changed or deleted was considered heresy by many Muslims. Khalifa's critics charged he was setting himself up as a prophet, in contradiction of Islamic teachings that state Muhammad is history's final prophet.
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In 1985 a group of scholars led by the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, Abdullah Bin Baz, issued a fatwa declaring Khalifa an apostate, a religious crime for which he could be killed under a strict reading of Islamic law.
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One Tucson resident who looked on Khalifa with disapproval was Wadih El Hage, one of the first wave of American al Qaeda operatives (see
chapter 2
). El Hage agreed with the conservatives—Khalifa was not following the true teachings of Sunni Islam and “in general behaved like an infidel.”
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As word of Khalifa's liberal views and his more esoteric heresies spread further, Islamic radicals in Brooklyn took notice. The anti-Soviet jihadists at the Al Kifah Center were now hardening into wild, undirected radicals, and their influence was growing.

In late 1989 the head of the Al Kifah Center, an al Qaeda–linked Egyptian named Mustafa Shalabi, sent an envoy from New York, an Egyptian, to investigate the Rashad Khalifa situation.

The envoy met up with El Hage, who helped him confirm the liberal cleric's teachings. The envoy went to Masjid Tucson to witness Friday prayers but was turned away because of his long beard, which Khalifa's followers correctly interpreted as a sign of conservatism. Peering in the windows, the envoy saw that men and women were indeed sitting together.

The man returned to New York to report his findings. The bloody response came within a couple of months. On January 31, 1990, a group of men broke into the Masjid Tucson and stabbed Khalifa repeatedly.
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His body was drenched in a flammable paint thinner. The valves had been opened in a gas stove on the premises, but the fumes had not ignited.
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When asked about the killing years later, El Hage said simply, “I think it was a good thing.” El Hage was investigated but never charged for the murder—in the end, there would be plenty of other things to charge him with. Yet because of El
Hage's involvement, the killing of Rashad Khalifa is considered the first act of al Qaeda–linked violence in the United States.
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Khalifa had already seen how he would die. In September 1989 police in Colorado Springs investigating a series of robberies raided a storage locker being used by members of a radical Islamic fraternity known as Al Fuqra. They found a cache of homemade explosives, military equipment, and training manuals. They also discovered a detailed plan for murdering Rashad Khalifa, including surveillance notes on his movements. The plan was nearly identical to Khalifa's ultimate fate.
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Police warned the imam of the plot two weeks before he was killed.
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One of the alleged killers, a Trinidadian Muslim who went by the name of Benjamin Phillips, had gotten close to Khalifa by posing as a student. He fled the country and escaped prosecution for nearly 20 years before finally being apprehended.
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Several Al Fuqra members were also convicted of conspiracy in the killing.
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It's hard to imagine how an Islamic sect with a history of extreme violence and dozens of armed compounds all over the United States stays out of the headlines. Yet that is the story of Al Fuqra.