The Blood of Lambs: A Former Terrorist's Memoir of Death and Redemption

You once said to me,
“God has something special planned for your future.”
That something special was you, my dear wife.

When I was thirsty, you gave me drink.
When I was hungry, you fed me—
not lies
not hate
not cruelty
just love.

Your love has brought healing to that young boy who cried out
on the rooftop, in his secret place, and on the sea cliffs.
The boy who learned to love hate and dream murder is no longer.

Victoria, you are my new dreaming window.
And the boy in the man still looks out and dreams,
but now only of loving you.

Nothing can separate us.

M
ap of the Middle East

C
hino, California 2007

B
eirut, Lebanon 1963

A
spen, Colorado 2007

B
eirut, Lebanon 1964

B
eirut, Lebanon 1965

A
nn Arbor, Michigan 2007

B
eirut, Lebanon 1965

H
ouston, Texas 2007

B
eirut, Lebanon 1965

A
tlanta, Georgia 2007

B
eirut, Lebanon 1965

S
outhwestern United States 2007

B
eirut, Lebanon 1966–1971

B
eirut, Lebanon, and the Libyan Desert 1972–1974

S
outhwestern United States 2007

B
eirut, Lebanon 1975–1976

S
outhwestern United States 2007

S
audi Arabia 1977–1978

C
hino, California, January 2008

A
fghanistan 1978–1979

S
outhwestern United States 2005

A
merica 1981–1985

C
olorado Springs 2008

A
merica 1985

C
olorado Springs 2008

A
merica 1985–1991

L
ebanon 1991

S
outhwestern United States 1991–2004

C
olorado Springs 2008

A
ppendixes

People

Places

Groups

Events

Foreign Words and Weapons

N
otes

A
cknowledgments

I came to have this new power, the “power of two”—the Koran in one hand and the gun in the other. One equipped me spiritually and one physically. One spoke into my life, and one spoke into the lives of others.

Kamal Saleem

1

Leaving the auditorium, we rolled through Southern California sunshine in a pair of black Yukons. Zakariah in the rear vehicle, me in the lead, and six 9 mm handguns between the two. People born in this country might not think weapons are necessary when returning from a speaking engagement. I know differently. When I was with the PLO, our special unit assassinated a grand imam on his way home from leading evening prayer.

Five minutes to the hotel. The security men riding with us were off-duty law enforcement and antiterrorist agents—six locals, each with a Sig Sauer or Glock concealed beneath his plain shirt or jacket. Back at the venue, Jack, our host, had introduced these men only by first name.

“Kamal, this is John,” Jack said to me as we stood in a huge empty auditorium built on an oasis campus of palm and trickling fountains that reminded me of a safe house villa where I had once hidden in Spain. “He’ll be heading up security for you this afternoon.”

About three dozen men in plainclothes gathered loosely around me, Zakariah, and our friend Walid, waiting to be assigned their posts. Four plainclothes policemen stood in the background. An unusual amount of armed security for three civilians, but certain jihadists were growing tired of our little road show. Already Walid had been threatened dozens
of times. Zak had been severely beaten twice and once almost beheaded. He had moved six times in six years—once out of the country—to protect his family from those who wished to silence him.

Blond and blue-eyed, John shook my hand with a firm grip and looked me in the eye. “While you’re speaking, I’ll be standing right beside you,” he said, his muscled frame squaring the shoulders of his sport jacket. I guessed him to be off-duty SWAT. “If anything happens, run straight toward me. I’ll get you out.”

I believed him.

Now, three minutes from the hotel, John sat beside me in the Yukon’s leather backseat, talking quietly over the headrest with a dark-haired agent whose large head nearly scraped the roof over the passenger seat. Outside the window to my right, I saw planned communities and business districts skating by. I wondered how Zak liked the scenery in California and whether Walid had made his plane on time. When the driver stopped at a traffic light, John’s low murmuring also stopped as each agent scanned the area. But the only movement was to our left, in a small, pine-shaded park with kids on swings. Two women watched them from a park bench, laughing.

Sleeping
, I thought.
Sleeping through an invasion that is already underway
.

Zak, Walid, and I had delivered our message to an audience of three thousand. People filled the overflow rooms and even sat outside on the stamped-concrete terraces, listening on loudspeakers. Zak, a Koran scholar who had once assassinated a man by flinging him from a Lebanese rooftop, explained the theology of
jihad.
Walid, a Bethlehem-born, former terrorist who was now a U.S. citizen, discussed Islamic-Jewish hatred. I told the audience how I had been recruited into the Muslim Brotherhood at age seven and how at age twenty-three I had crossed the Atlantic, on a mission to destroy America from the inside out.

All three of us had abandoned
jihad,
each for a different reason and by a different road. When we finished telling our stories, the audience rose and showered us with waterfalls of applause. For a moment, my heart was glad. But I also knew most would drive off and discuss the “3 Ex-Terrorists” over lunch or Starbucks. Then they would rejoin the national slumber, the comfortable sleep of prosperity.

They would not remember what I had told them about
Al-Anfâl
—Koran, Sura 8, “The Spoils of War”—in which Allah counsels his warriors to be patient. Or that I had told them the invaders had already breached America’s borders and were spreading. Silently. Lethally. Like a cancer.

In the Yukon, we rolled again. After several blocks, the driver turned in at a hotel where Zak and I had checked in the day before. As the driver glided past the glassed lobby, I froze.

Two men standing on the sidewalk locked eyes with me. One was Middle Eastern. The other looked Pakistani. Both carried canvas tote bags—not luggage. Both men bolted through the sliding glass doors into the lobby. Inside, a half-dozen more men rose from their seats.

Instantly, my muscles tensed for battle, heart thumping, hands tingling.

The men with tote bags nodded in our direction.

John spotted them. “Code Red,” he said. “That’s a Code Red!”

The driver braked to a halt. On a handheld radio, John relayed the alert to the rear Yukon. I saw the two men striding rapidly out of the lobby and toward the hotel interior. Toward my room.

It had been more than twenty years since my last armed mission, but my right hand now screamed for the familiar, comforting weight of a gun.

John turned sharply to me: “Stay here. Do not leave this vehicle.” Then, to the agent up front: “Let’s move.”

Weapons already drawn, each man chambered a 9 mm round, kicked open his door, and jumped to the pavement. Glancing behind me, I saw two more agents spill from Zak’s vehicle. John and a man from the rear vehicle jogged into the lobby, holding their weapons beside their legs.

Hotel guests backed away with wide, frightened eyes. John and the other agent scanned the room and in four long strides reached the lobby desk. I could see a young woman behind it talking with him and pointing.

The other agents fanned out in the parking lot, feeling the hoods of cars, checking for recent arrivals. I watched as they read license plate numbers into their radios.

I did not like my exposed position. Looking up, I could see row after
row of hotel windows with direct lines of sight to the Yukon roofs. The men had dispersed
into
, not out of, the hotel. I flashed back to Lebanon. How many times had I fired an RPG from elevation and watched a vehicle below erupt into shrapnel and flame?

This could be it.

When somebody runs from you in a war, it does not mean they are afraid of you. What preparations are they running
toward
? What button are they running to push? Who is lying in wait? In urban warfare, if you cannot take cover, sometimes the smartest move is aggression. I itched to burst out of the Yukon and join the hunt.

Head swiveling, I scanned the windows, the parking lot, the lobby. My mind whirled and I tensed, half expecting the searing whine of an incoming RPG, something that had not been seen in the streets of America. Yet.

But then, until 2001, America—my adopted country—had not seen jets used as missiles. Until 2001, she had never seen skyscrapers dissolve into avalanches. She had never seen thousands of innocent civilians murdered at once. Yet even with the horrific impact of 9/11, America did not understand what I
knew
: that the invasion was on. The enemy already lurked inside her walls, the cancer of
jihad
seething through her inner cities, her prisons, her small, sleepy towns. And while the cancer ate and ate, metastasizing in the intellectual centers, the elite stood on the ramparts screaming, “Peace! Peace!” They closed their eyes, willfully blind, accomplices in the rape of their own nation.

I knew because I had helped to cause it. I had
planned
it. I came here, funded by Islamists in the Arab countries, willing to die for this glorious invasion. To someday see blood running in American streets.

2

Twenty minutes passed before John and his agents returned to the Yukon outside the Holiday Inn. John opened the rear door, and I saw he had holstered his weapon.

“We checked the hotel, the public areas, the parking lots. No sign of them,” he said. “No Middle Eastern names on the hotel register. They probably checked in under western names. We notified Chino PD, SWAT, and the FBI SAIC of suspicious activity.”

SAIC. Special Agent in Charge. I knew the term well from staying off the FBI’s radar in my former life.

“I called Jack,” John said. “He thinks we should move you and Zak to another hotel.”

I was tired from traveling, but unwilling to take chances. “Good idea.”

John shut the Yukon door and walked back to the lobby to wait while the agent driving the Yukon pulled under the portico. Walking in the center of a knot of six agents, I passed through the lobby and down the first-floor corridor that ran off to the left. Now three agents moved ahead of me and three fell back.

We passed the open door of a travelers’ business center on the left. Empty.

Then past a sitting room and a small gym with a glass door on the right. No one.

My room was next, on the left.

“It’s open,” one of the agents said, a tense whisper. “The door is open!”

Adrenaline surged through me. Sounds of cycling steel as all six agents drew their weapons and one man pushed me against the far wall. Two agents flattened themselves against the wall on each side of the door. John knelt before the door, gun raised. I felt naked and wished again for a weapon.

Hand and eye signals passed between the men. On a silent count, John rose up and kicked the door wide open.

Two agents knelt in the door frame, sweeping their weapons in a room-clearing arc. Two agents stood above.

Empty.

John crossed the carpet and checked the bathroom. He turned to us and shook his head. Nothing.

I was not so sure. My mind whirred, flipping back through what I would have done in the same situation. Rig the lamp switch with explosives? Lace the toothbrush with poison? Put a tank mine under a couch cushion?

“Touch nothing,” I said.

3

John and his men listened as I quietly explained that in Fatah and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, when we missed our mark, we did not give up. Instead, we resorted to booby traps. As the security team looked on, I threw away all my toiletries, checked under my luggage for wires, stuffed in my robe and slippers, latched it, and walked out of the room.

An hour later, Zak and I were traveling across the city. The agents deposited us in a nameless hotel on the other side of Chino. Satisfied that we had not been followed, the security team swept the room and left. Now, sitting in an overstuffed chair facing the bolted door, I had time to think. I wondered if there was a Kamal, another me, among those Middle Easterners at the Holiday Inn. A man with a heart like I used to have, who would stop at nothing to fulfill his mission for Allah. A zealot whose very heart was a wick on which the flame of
jihad
burned.

If so, would I still be alive in the morning?

I stared at the back of the hotel-room door. How many had I seen since I came out from the shadows, since I revealed to my American wife my secret past, since I started speaking out against radical Islam?

Nearly thirty years before, empowered by the Muslim Brotherhood
and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), I had come to America. From the Koranic teaching of my youth, I knew that by infiltrating the American education system, overrunning its universities and jails, and swarming its poor neighborhoods, my jihadist brothers and I could usher in
Umma
—one world under Islam. It would be, as Americans like to say, “a piece of cake.”

I had worked odd jobs as cover only, since I was being well paid by Middle Eastern sheikhs. While on the jihadist side, I came to realize that the strength of the American people and infrastructure is also its weakness. An open society with constitutionally protected freedom of speech and religion, which prides itself on its embrace of foreign cultures, was the perfect place to teach a message of hatred in broad daylight. I was a master at reaching the poor and those who perceived themselves oppressed. I taught them that Allah cared for them. I found them jobs, mentored them, and invited them to fellowship with my jihadist brothers, who all the while never mentioned
jihad.
Once the converts were hooked, we turned them over to the imams at small “apartment mosques” to be radicalized.

Now, sitting in the hotel room, I knew I had introduced a deadly disease into an unsuspecting host. The human body does not know when a cancer is growing within. It hums happily along, seeming to function normally. Even when the immune system performs its routine protective scans, it does not recognize the cancer cell as a threat because the cell itself takes on the aspect of its neighbors, fooling the body for months and sometimes years. But over time, the cancer spreads and then becomes dominant, until finally it brings the host to the point of death.

So is radical Islam to America. Now I was speaking out against it. And apparently had become a target. Some might call it poetic: the cancer had circled back to one of its makers.

My mission could have ended today
, I thought.

I thought about my wife, my children. What if they had been with me? What if there had been an attack? Should I stop? Should I stop telling America to wake up? To rise up and fight?

When I met my American wife, I was unprocessed, like the minerals in a rock. She saw something in me I did not know was there. Was it
goodness? I did not think that was quite the right word. But she knew if she could chisel it out, if she could polish it, it might shine. I could not risk losing her. And yet she was the one who kept me going forward with my message.

“It’s the right thing to do, Kamal,” Victoria often said.

If she was not afraid, how could I be afraid? Yet I knew how deadly these people were. Their blood was darkness and they had no tears. They were not only willing to die, but
hoping
to die, to be ushered into the presence of Allah and the glorious rewards of
al-shaheed
, the martyrs.

On the clock beside the bed, red numbers flickered past. Throughout the long watch of the night, I stared at the door, certain that any moment the knob would silently turn.