American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us by Steven Emerson Page B

Qaeda, around 1989.
    According to records of the World Trade Center bombing trials, Ali Mohammed began giving training sessions in New Jersey in guerrilla warfare in 1989 to Islamic militants that included, among others, El-Sayeed Nosair, Mahmud Abouhalima, and Khalid Ibrahim. Other training sessions took place in Connecticut, where Islamic militants trained on weekends. An FBI report, based on Connecticut State Police intelligence, summarized the activities of these training sessions, where semi-automatic weapons were used.
    According to military records, Ali Mohammed left the military in November 1989 and moved to Santa Clara, California. Law enforcement officials say he traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan, where he befriended Osama bin Laden and other top militants in the Islamic fundamentalist movements who had sought sanctuary in Peshawar. From his base in Santa Clara, Mohammed soon emerged as a top aide to Osama bin Laden. Federal officials say that Mohammed traveled regularly to and from Pakistan and Afghanistan, having helped oversee bin Laden’s terrorist bases in Khost and other terrorist camps in Afghanistan. In 1991, Mohammed was the person in charge of bin Laden’s move from Afghanistan to Sudan. The move was considered perilous since bin Laden had made so many enemies. Mohammed helped bin Laden set up his new home and terrorist base in Khartoum, Sudan, where 2,000 “Arab Afghans”—the name given to the Arab veterans of the Afghanistan jihad—were headquartered in bin Laden terrorist camps. After 1991 Ali Mohammed continued to travel between the terrorist camps in Afghanistan, bin Laden’s base in Sudan, and the United States, and continued to train new Islamic recruits in the expanded holy war.
    Law enforcement records show that Ali Mohammed’s extended stays outside the United States would range from weeks to half a year. But he would always return to the United States, which provided him a safe base from which to travel around the world on behalf of bin Laden. In California, Mohammed became involved in smuggling illegal aliens into the United States, including suspected terrorists. Law enforcement sources say that a favorite route for Mohammed was to smuggle illegal aliens through Vancouver, Canada.
    In a seemingly bizarre twist, while in California, Mohammed volunteered to provide information to the FBI on smuggling operations involving other aliens not connected to terrorist groups. Officials say the relationship allowed Mohammed to divert the FBI’s attention away from looking at his real role in terrorism into examining the information he gave them about other smuggling. This gave Mohammed a de facto shield, effectively insulating himself from FBI scrutiny for his ties to bin Laden. His relationship with the FBI also helped protect Mohammed from being scrutinized by other federal agencies. Mohammed had also tried to cultivate a relationship with the CIA, which did not succeed, although he had far better success in playing off the FBI against the CIA in his dealings with both agencies. Like a character from a John Le Carré thriller, Mohammed played the role of a triple agent and nearly got away with it.
    In late 1994 Ali Mohammed was called by the FBI, who wanted to speak with him about the trial in the World Trade Center conspiracy case. As Mohammed would later state to authorities, “I flew back to the United States, spoke to the FBI, but didn’t disclose everything I knew.” In other words, Mohammed was continuing to manipulate the American authorities even when he was called to testify regarding the acts of terrorists about whom he possessed information.
    Mohammed was named on the long list of potential unindicted coconspirators in the World Trade Center bombing conspiracy released by federal prosecutors. In turn, when Mohammed obtained a copy of this list, he sent it to Wadih el-Hage, bin Laden’s personal assistant, in Kenya “expecting that it would be forwarded to bin Laden in