The Blood of Lambs: A Former Terrorist's Memoir of Death and Redemption (32 page)

1

I spent the next ten years looking over my shoulder while hiding in plain sight. No one in my new life, as I still considered it, knew about my old one. Not even my wife.

As the computer industry took hold in the early 1990s, I made a career transition from the hospitality industry to information technology. By 2001, I had climbed the corporate ladder to become IT department manager for an international telecom, overseeing the company’s nerve center from an underground facility in the Southwest that we called the War Room. To gain access to the War Room required badging at laser-powered security boxes three times.

Beyond the final security checkpoint was a sprawling rectangular space divided into cubicles, with four enormous monitors hanging from the ceiling. Using them, we tracked the company’s worldwide network, each monitor a blinking maze of nodes, ladders, servers, and load.

I was always one of the first people in each morning, usually there by 5
A.M.
or earlier. Other diehards like my friend and coworker Christy Bonham trickled in with me to relieve the night crew. One morning in September 2001, Christy was sitting in her cubicle munching on breakfast, her tiny ten-inch television tuned into a local morning talk show.
The room was quiet; not many people in for the day shift yet, but I had let most of the overnight skeleton crew go home.

Suddenly, I heard a loud gasp. “Oh my God!”

It was Christy. She sounded so stricken, so terrified, that I jumped up and rushed to her cubicle. Was it something with her kids?

When I rounded the gray fabric partition, I saw her staring at the tiny television screen. One tower of the World Trade Center was burning. A local news anchor was saying, “Again, an American Airlines passenger jet has crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center—”

An alarm sounded in my head, oddly like the air raid sirens I had heard in Lebanon.

“Those poor people!” Christy was saying, sounding near tears. “This has got to be the worst airplane accident I’ve ever heard of!”

I could not tell her what I instinctively knew: this was no accident.

Christy reached up and changed channels. The World Trade Center was burning there, too. She flipped to another channel and another. All the broadcast stations carried the footage.

I glanced up at our telecom monitors. Server load had soared dramatically and was still climbing. My mind flashed to the calendar. September.

Jordan, 1970. Vienna, 1683. Islamic defeats. Black Septembers.

I dashed to my desk and called Victoria. She had seen the news.

“Go to the store right now,” I told her. “Buy water, groceries, flashlights, and a radio,” I told her.

“What? Why?”

“This thing is not normal. Something is happening—” I could not tell her how I knew.

“Kamal, it’s an
accident
. It’s in New York City, two thousand miles away.”

I tried to remain patient. “Baby, something is happening. The attack is on.”

“Attack? What attack?”

“Victoria, I can’t explain. It’s some crazy people—”

“I think you might be the crazy one,” she said, laughing gently.

“Victoria,” I said, pouring as much urgency into my voice as I could,
“I do not want to argue with you about this. Just gather what I said. I’m getting Tamra and coming home.”

I heard Christy behind me: “Oh my God!”

I whirled and ran back to her cubicle. A second jet had hit the south tower of the World Trade Center. This time the footage was live.

Mumbling something to Christy about Tamra, I grabbed my keys and within three minutes was in my car speeding toward my daughter’s school. I flipped on the radio and listened as harried announcers improvised, delivering fresh news as it streamed off the wire: “The Federal Aviation Administration has grounded all flights into or out of New York Air Space…the Air Force has launched F-15s…possible terrorist attack.”

As I barreled down the freeway, the blood in my veins turned to liquid fear.

The second strike! When will they launch the second strike?

When we planned attacks, we often created a diversion before the main event. Before we stole the Syrian rockets, for example, we planted bombs in Lebanon to lure Hafez al-Assad’s secret service away from home.

What will be the second strike?

It took me twenty minutes to reach Tamra’s school. I screamed into the parking lot, checked her out of class, and roared away again, her eight-year-old eyes wide at the look on my face.

Reports poured over the radio as I sped home. “Possible multiple hijackings…all U.S. airspace shut down.” Ten minutes later, as I pulled into my driveway: “…a fire at the Pentagon…unconfirmed reports that another jet may have hit the Pentagon.”

My stomach rolled in terror.
Is that it? The second strike? Is it over?

As my family passed the day glued to CNN, we learned it was not. The Twin Towers would collapse. United Flight 93 would crash into a Pennsylvania field. The death toll would be 2,999, including rescue personnel and 19 young Middle Eastern men who had infiltrated America to destroy her.

Like me.

As my entire nation plunged into a pit of mourning wider and deeper than anything in her history, I plunged into an ocean of guilt more ter
rifying than the Bay of Haifa. Suddenly, I wished I had died there. Maybe the legend of the butterfly’s wing was true: one missed beat could change history. If I had not lived to invade America, if I had not helped light the fuse, fan the flame, stir up
jihad
in the cities, perhaps Mohammed Atta and his eighteen accomplices would not have found America such fertile ground. Perhaps they would have had to build the Islamist network I built with my jihadist brothers, instead of going straight to flight school to learn how to pilot planes.

2

The whole country grieved, but my brand of grief shocked Victoria. Although no amount of mourning could seem out of proportion to such a tragedy, she still could not quite get over how much the September 11 attacks consumed my thinking in the weeks and months that followed. She chalked it up to a sensitive spirit and my ties to the Middle East. But as my spirit screamed inside me like a boiling cauldron with the lid on too tight, I could not tell her why.

I wanted to call the FBI, the CIA, even the White House, and tell them what I knew. Where to look for sleeper cells. How to spot a network. The conferences, the literature, the video boot camps. The money, the weapons, the training.

You are growing terrorists at home!
I wanted to shout.
In your universities, your ghettos, your prisons!

But I had kept quiet for so long, lulled into a false peace, like everyone else, by my comfortable American life. Now I had a wife, a child, a career. In the hot period following the September 11 attacks, I was afraid to step forward, terrified I would be stripped of my citizenship and thrown into prison. Or worse, packed onto the first plane bound for the Middle East.

I did not want to lose my family, but I also did not want to lose my country, my home. The tension between love and duty tore at me daily.
At one point, I actually filled out a civil service application, a stab at getting hired by federal law enforcement as a translator, a protocol officer, anything, so that I could share my knowledge, turn my former evil into good.

When America invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 to hunt down the Taliban, I cheered from the sidelines. While the talking news heads recalling the Soviet war of the 1980s mooed about the dangers of cave warfare and the wily
mujahadeen
, I laughed out loud. In the 1980s Afghanistan was a backward world of fragmented tribes that, when they were not killing Soviets, were robbing and killing each other. Had it not been for American assistance to Afghanistan, the Soviets would have destroyed the village-based
mujahadeen
, cut off the mountain supply routes, and left the remaining fighters to starve to death in their caves. Without the Americans, the
mujahadeen
and the Taliban were nothing.

Iraq was another matter. Still, when America invaded, I thought it was the right move. In league with other Middle Eastern leaders, Saddam had plotted for decades against America. To establish democracy there would drive a stake into the heart of a growing Islamist fanaticism that would end only one way: with more attacks on America. But as our casualties in Iraq mounted in 2004, and the media, then the public, began turning against the war, I grew frustrated.

When it comes to many things, Americans are mature in their thinking. But when it comes to war, many Americans see only the game that is being played in front of them, the battles that involve their soldiers. They don’t understand the interconnections of the jihadist threat.

In 2002 alone, there were more than fifty jihadist attacks around the world. Most of them were in Israel. One of them was in the United States, when an Egyptian gunman opened fire in the Los Angeles airport, killing two Israelis. To the American mind, the airport attack was a blip. Here and gone. Forgotten. The other forty-nine attacks had nothing to do with them at all.

Wrong. To the Islamist, Israel is the hated bastard child and America is its evil mother, offering her breast. When jihadists bomb a train in Spain, an embassy in Pakistan, or a market in Israel, they are not just earning virgins. They have an end game in mind:
Umma
, one world under Islam. The jihadists’ goal is to pull the West into a war not against a
country, but against Islam. They hope to inflame Muslim moderates around the world with the battle cry that America, the Great Satan, is bent on destroying
all
Muslims. In many quarters, they have succeeded. When Danish cartoonists lampooned Muhammad, for example, Muslims rioted all over the world.

In May 2003, al-Qaeda bombers killed 26 people and injured 160 others at the American expatriate housing in Riyadh. In October 2003, a Palestinian bomber killed three Americans in a diplomatic convoy in the Gaza Strip. In August 2004, James Elshafay, a nineteen-year-old American high school dropout, planned to bomb New York’s Penn Station during the Republican National Convention. He was recruited by Shahawar Matin Siraj, a twenty-two-year-old Pakistani national, who had been in the United States illegally for six years. A radical Muslim. A person like me.

In 2004, I considered the advance of
jihad
in the world. Europe had fallen. Canada was a eunuch. Only America was keeping the light of freedom burning for the entire world.

One afternoon late that year, I called my wife into our living room and asked her to take a seat on the couch. A war raged inside me, again the clash between heart and duty. I was terrified of losing my family, my home, my freedom. Of forfeiting this new life as payment for my old one. But I knew I could remain silent no longer.

My face crumbling, I sat down on the couch near my wife, then laid my head in her lap.

“Kamal, what’s wrong?” she said.

Slowly, I turned over on my back and lay looking up at her, silent tears sliding down my cheeks. “Victoria,” I said, “I have something to tell you.”

1

People like you must be killed.

The words of the young Palestinian at the Air Force Academy conference electrified me. Suddenly I realized why he had switched the conversation to Arabic. I was not afraid, but stunned. I was used to this kind of threat, this kind of anger. Over the course of years, I had been threatened by actual assassins rather than students with reckless mouths. Still, I was surprised that this man had the brazenness to say this thing in this place.

Now he brushed past me. I turned and followed him, watching as he threaded his way through the crowd and took a seat high in the auditorium near an exit. After getting a fix on him, I found my own seat next to Keith and settled in to listen to Walid, who was speaking next. I knew this: the tactic of radical Muslims was to disrupt, to throw events into chaos. I was not going to let that happen here.

The blue amphitheater hummed with muted conversation until Walid took the podium. My friend opened brilliantly. The war on terror, Walid said, was not a battle between Islam and Christianity, but instead a clash of civilizations. “Radical Islamists have their own government, and they are ready to put that government in place in the United States,” he said.

About fifteen minutes into his talk, I leaned close to Keith. “You are not going to believe what just happened.” I told him about the confrontation.

“Are you serious?”

“Zak heard it, too. By his accent, I think he was Palestinian.”

Discreetly, Keith left his seat, and I watched him approach the major in charge.

The second Walid finished speaking, I found myself surrounded by a cluster of MPs, six or seven of them, all of them bigger than Dallas.

“Your manager told us what happened,” said a uniformed man wearing an impressive stack of stripes on his sleeve. “Is this man still sitting in here?”

I turned and peered up to the exit-row seat where I had last seen the young student. It was empty.

“No,” I said. “He left.”

I was describing him when one of the MPs spoke up. “I remember that individual. He seemed agitated. Hostile. I was watching him.”

The stripe-heavy MP said to me, “Could you identify this man if we took you around?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “I will never forget the look in his eyes.”

But it did not turn out to be so easy. By the time we began our search, the conference attendees had dispersed to breakout sessions in classrooms flung about the campus. We tramped from building to building, wing to wing, the MPs consulting a sheet to see which classrooms had been designated for the conference. At each, an MP would crack the door and I would peer in, scanning faces. Nothing.

Finally, at about the tenth room, I saw a man.
That’s him,
I thought.

I paused in the doorway, the MP peering in behind me. As one, about thirty heads turned to look. I locked eyes with the student.

“I think that’s him,” I said.

The MP closed the door. “You have to be sure.”

But I wasn’t. The student who confronted me had been wearing a jacket. This man wore only a shirt. Also, sitting down, he seemed heavier.

Now the MP in charge caught up with us and pulled his men aside. He gestured urgently. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but it appeared
to me he was upset that our search had not yielded fruit. The MPs clustered around me again and hustled me back to an area where Zak and Walid were waiting.

“I saw one man I thought might be the one, but I was not sure,” I told them.

Walid looked at the MP in charge. “Do you have a list of the guests attending the conference?”

“Yes,” the MP said.

“Show it to me and I will tell you who this person is.”

Brilliant,
I thought, and mentally slapped myself for not thinking of it. As in many eastern countries, a person’s name reveals his origin. A note of irony sounded in my brain. It had been the Palestinians who taught me to differentiate between names: in Sabra, we learned how to use last names to identify Jews, in case we had a crowd of hostages and needed to know which ones to kill first.

An MP returned with a sheet of paper and handed it to Walid, who ran his finger down a neatly typed column of names. Midway down, his finger stopped.

“This man here,” he said.

He was an exchange student. Based on his name, Walid knew instantly the man was Palestinian.

“How sure are you?” the MP asked.

“Ninety-five percent.” Walid’s finger brushed down the rest of the list until it found a second name. “Here’s another possibility, but I would say it is only a 5 percent chance that this is the man.”

Again, a knot of MPs rushed me across the campus. An MP went into the classroom and returned with the student, who glanced briefly my way. They stood a distance from me, and I could overhear snatches of the conversation.

“Did you speak to Mr. Saleem after lunch?” an MP asked the student.

“Yes.”

“Did you say to him that he had insulted Islam?”

“Yes. I do not agree with his views. This is America. I have freedom of speech.”

“Yes, you’re right. This is America,” the MP said. “But you’re at the
Air Force Academy, not on the streets. Did you tell Mr. Saleem that people like him must be killed?”

“No.”

2

An investigation revealed that the student was in America on an educational visa. But he had not threatened my life
directly,
I was told. He had not said
he
was going to kill me. The student completely denied my account, was not charged with any wrongdoing, and was free to go.

Do you think he is rare? If so, do not forget the taxi driver, the pizza boy, the roofer who planned to attack Fort Dix. Do not forget Syed Ahmed and Ehsanul Sadequee, the Georgia Tech students who collaborated with terrorists. Do not forget Hamid Hayat and his plan to “wage violent
jihad
.”

In March 2008, my nephew called me at home from Lebanon. I was just finishing lunch, a turkey sandwich.

“You have a new religion now,” he said from miles away. It was more of an observation than an accusation.

“I am a Christian.”

“There will be a war in the family. They will never talk to you again if they find out you are a Christian.” I already knew that. For more than twenty years, I had hidden my faith from them—all except for my sisters, who loved me unconditionally.

You see, a Muslim who converts to Christianity is worse than an infidel, who, the theology goes, never experienced the glory and truth of Islam. An infidel is worthy of death—but it’s not his fault. He is therefore given a chance: before they chop off his head, he is allowed an opportunity to convert.

But even if he converts, he will still have to pay the
jezyah,
the tax levied for having been an infidel. If he cannot pay it, he must, by law, teach ten Muslim men about the horrors of his old religion and why it is false.

In centuries past, when Muslims conquered a country, instead of taxing or killing, the conquerors lopped off infidels’ right hands and left feet so that everyone would know they were vanquished infidels.

This is from Sura 5:33–34, the “Table Spread”:

Merciful, indeed.

Those in America who defend Islam as if it were all of one cloth like to ignore these facts. Or pretend that
sura
like these are relics of an ancient era, like the New Testament admonition that women should not cut their hair. But only a couple of months before my nephew called, Islamists in Gaza murdered Rami Ayyad, the manager of the area’s only Christian bookstore. Operated by the Palestinian Bible Society, the shop was located in a central part of Gaza City. Ayyad had received many death threats. Then one Saturday afternoon in October 2007, as he closed the Teacher’s Bookshop, gunmen snatched him off the street. Two days later, Ayyad’s captors dumped his body, bloody with knife and gunshot wounds, near the store. Ayyad was only twenty-six. He left behind two young children and a pregnant wife, Pauline.

His crime: he helped lead Gaza Baptist Church’s AWANA group, a kids’ Scripture memory club, and he directed the church’s summer children’s camp.

Sadly, Rami Ayyad is just one of hundreds martyred every year by Islamists whose white-hot hatred fires their killing. In July 2008 near Mogadishu, Somalia, two Muslim men approached Sayid Ali Sheikh Luqman Hussein, a twenty-eight-year-old convert to Christianity.

“Do you face Mecca when you pray?” the men asked Hussein.

“I am a Christian,” Hussein said. “I do not have to face a specific direction to pray because God is everywhere.”

A few days later, the men returned with an AK–47 and a handgun and shot Hussein to death. When his pregnant wife heard of her husband’s murder, the shock triggered premature labor, and she delivered the new child dead.

When I have pointed out incidents like these, groups like CAIR have accused me of promoting “fear.”

Am I afraid of Islam? No: I killed for it. Am I afraid of what radical Islamists will do if they continue their successful advance in America? Yes. And those who believe that America is so powerful that she is immune to such killing within her own borders are fools. It is already happening to Muslim women. And since 9/11, American authorities have exposed and halted no fewer than fourteen domestic attacks.

My nephew is among the blind. “Those things you are saying about what the Muslims do, their terrorism, is not real,” he told me on the phone. “Those who do that are muttarafeen; they are not even Muslim.”

I knew what he was saying: that moderate Muslims view groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda the way Christians view the Ku Klux Klan—as a radical splinter group that has laid claim to the teachings of a faith, but perverted them. Whether jihadists are a perverted splinter group or part of the true Muslim faith is a debatable idea. Their violence and its consequences are real.

Some moderate Muslims disagree with the jihadist and only wish to be left to live out their faith in Allah peacefully, treating the Koranic call to jihad as a throwback to a more barbaric time. In many cases, the moderates know the ruthlessness of the jihadists and are afraid to speak out against them. It is one thing to know that radicals consider you a neutered Muslim, an impotent pretender; it is another thing entirely to speak out against them and thereby mark yourself for death.

But there is still another group of moderate Muslims and many in this group have infiltrated the United States. These moderates have lives and jobs and families, but they secretly cheer on the jihadists as they do the dirty work. For example, the Holy Land Foundation was the largest charity delivering material aid to Islamic countries from America. In November 2008, five of its leaders were convicted of 108 charges of illegally funding the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.
¹⁷

In the days following September 11, 2001, the streets of countries where Muslims live should have been filled with “moderates” crying out against the atrocities done in their name, protesting, “What you have done is not godly!” Instead, all over the world—including New York, Chicago, Houston, and Michigan—so-called moderate Muslims celebrated what happened to America. They reacted with joy to the news that the sword of Islam had cut down the Great Satan.

Moderate or muttarafeen, they celebrated the same, with dancing in the streets. People have forgotten that. Americans have forgotten.

Some Americans also believe that our jihadist enemy consists mainly of unsophisticated Third World savages who could never truly threaten such a technologically advanced nation as the United States. That is not true. In November 2008, six months after my nephew called, Pakistani terrorists invaded Mumbai, India, targeting tourists carrying Western passports and ultimately killing 179 people including six Americans. Before they landed in Mumbai, authorities learned, the terrorists studied satellite images of the city, carried handheld global-positioning sets, and kept in touch with their handlers via Internet, cell-, and satellite-phones. Meanwhile, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a fiery Shia radical, is leading his country toward becoming the first nuclear jihadist state. Ahmadinejad believes he has been chosen by Allah to usher in worldwide Islamic rule. But in a 2005 speech in Tehran to leaders of the terror groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the Iranian president did not ask his audience to imagine a Muslim-ruled America, but a world without America.

As I wrote this book, there were days when I wished I had never gone down this road. Often, I would open up Google News or some other Internet feed and find that I had once again been branded a fraud or a mercenary.

“Terrorism pays,” one writer quipped, accusing me of being in this for the money. I wish I could have shown her my bank account.

People who had never met me, never bothered to hear my story from my own lips, were ready to say that not only had I never been a terrorist, but that I had never even been a Muslim. And that was when I was only doing a few speaking engagements.

What will happen when the book comes out? I asked myself.

The answer: Professors, theologians, and historians will come out in force to try and discredit me.

For example, my real name is not Kamal Saleem. When I began speaking out against radical Islam, a number of professors and journalists began speculating on my real name, thoughtless of the fact they were endangering my family in Lebanon. Apparently, when you make your living destroying reputations with unresearched words, it is not of concern whether your words will endanger real people living in places where murder in the name of religion is tolerated.

This is another reason I did not speak out the instant the World Trade Center towers crumbled: because I feared for my family, still living in Lebanon. I am not just an infidel, but an ultimate infidel. Not just a former Muslim, but a former terrorist, too. I must be killed. And whoever kills me gets a prize.