American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us (13 page)

Federal records show that Khalifa was killed by a member of the Al-Fuqra organization, a black Muslim fundamentalist group that has engaged in a series of murders, robberies, and other attacks in Colorado and Canada. Members of Al-Fuqra were also indicted and convicted in the World Trade Center bombing conspiracy trials. Sources familiar with the investigation say that Al-Fuqra was as early as 1988 acquiring weapons and recruiting volunteers for the jihad in Afghanistan.

From Tucson, el-Hage moved to Arlington, Texas, sometime in 1991, where he went to work for a tire store. At the same time, according to federal prosecutors, he stayed very active with Alkhifa and on the expanding jihad battlefront. El-Hage would rise to such a senior position that he was named the successor to Alkhifa director Shalabi.

For reasons still unknown, El-Hage did not ultimately take over the Alkhifa office in Brooklyn as had been expected. According to his own statements, he showed up in New York on the day Shalabi was killed; the length of his stay is unknown. Phone records of the Alkhifa office show a series of phone calls between Alkhifa and el-Hage’s residence in Arlington, Texas on March 2, 3, 5, and 6. It appears that el-Hage was calling his home from Brooklyn. Prison records show that on March 11, 1991, el-Hage visited el-Sayeed Nosair in jail. Nosair, prosecutors later determined, had been secretly plotting to carry out additional terrorist attacks and murders while meeting with various visitors in his jail cell in 1991 and 1992.

Soon thereafter, Wadih el-Hage left the United States in order to serve as Osama bin Laden’s personal secretary. In this capacity, el-Hage worked for various bin Laden companies, which included a holding company known as “Wadi al-Aqiq,” a construction business known as “Al Hijra,” an agricultural company known as “al Themar al Mubaraka,” an investment company known as “Ladin International,” another investment company known as “Taba Investments,” and a transportation company known as “Qudarat Transport Company.” These companies earned income to support what was now al Qaeda and provided cover for the procurement of explosives, weapons, and chemicals and for the travel of al Qaeda operatives.

Sometime in 1994, el-Hage moved from Khartoum to Nairobi where he set up businesses and other organizations for al Qaeda in Kenya. There, el-Hage met repeatedly with Abu Ubaidah al Banshiri, a former al Qaeda military commander. In 1996, however, Banshiri drowned, or was drowned. El-Hage investigated the death with Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, who later became an at-large indictee for the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Eventually, el-Hage would make false statements in September and October 1997 to both the FBI and the grand jury that was investigating Osama bin Laden regarding his role in al Qaeda. At some date prior to this, el-Hage had returned to the United States. El-Hage would be questioned again by the FBI on August 20, 1998, following the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on August 7. Again he would lie to the federal agents regarding his connections with al Qaeda. He then would commit perjury before the federal grand jury in New York on September 16, 1998. Wadih el-Hage would be initially indicted for this act of perjury; later the indictment would be expanded to include charges of conspiring to kill U.S. nationals, eight counts of perjury before the federal grand jury, and three counts of making false statements to federal law-enforcement officers while being questioned pursuant to a grand jury investigation.

Testimony provided in the trial of el-Hage and others for their role in the bombing of the U.S. embassies has provided a good deal of information into Osama bin Laden’s rise. Bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia for a brief interval after the Afghanistan victory of the mujahideen. By this time, the Gulf War turned him against the Saudi regime, and his criticisms caused the regime to strip him of his Saudi passport. Set loose upon the world again, bin Laden found refuge in the country that was rapidly becoming the worldwide center of international terrorism—Sudan.

A desert nation directly south of Egypt, Sudan was governed by the National Islamic Front party under Dr. Hassan al-Turabi, who seized power through a military coup in 1989. Al-Turabi did two things: he imposed a fundamentalist regime almost identical to the Ayatollah Khomeini’s rule in Iran except based on Sunni principles, and he opened up Sudan to worldwide terrorists. Al-Turabi’s comrade-in-arms in the coup that established the Islamic state in Sudan, Sudanese president Omar Bashir, personally welcomed al Qaeda to the country. He gave the terror organization special permission to avoid taxes and import duties and even exempted it from local law enforcement. (Sudan was not alone in sponsoring al Qaeda. Hizzbollah was happy to contribute. Hizzbollah officials arranged special advanced weapons and explosives training for mujahideen in Lebanon. Among the items on the curriculum were instructions on how to blow up large buildings.)

Soon Sudan was hosting an entire spectrum of radical Islamic groups that would plague both the Middle East and the West and foster political unrest around the world. As low-cost, low-tech weapons became more accessible, Sudan-based terrorists found it easier to export death and destruction worldwide, including to the most technically advanced nations.

To pick a random list, Sudan-based terrorists instigated:

Although Iran sponsored more terrorism than Sudan during this period, Dr. al-Turabi’s regime was more focused than any other on supporting the global Muslim Brotherhood. His Popular Arab Islamic Conferences—three in all—were unprecedented gatherings that featured a global panorama of the Islamic movement, including delegations from the Middle East, Spain, France, Italy, Argentina, Mexico, Canada, Kenya, and the United States.

There were plenty of critics of Sudan in the international community. In response, apologists for Dr. al-Turabi liked to claim that Sudan was singled out only because of its Islamic identity. In August 1994, for example,
The Atlantic Monthly
published “Turabi’s Law,” an article by William Langewiesche that exposed in chilling detail the totalitarian religious code that was being imposed by the Sudanese government. In a letter to the editor two months later, Ibrahim Hooper, director of communications of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), attacked the article for making “many negative assertions about Islam, Shariah, Sudan and Hassan al-Turabi.” Hooper denied the existence of Sudanese secret police and criticized the article for “merely rehashed Western clichés about ‘fundamentalism’ and Islamic radicalism [while] ignor[ing] non-Islamic causes of Sudan’s turmoil.”
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There were non-Muslim apologists as well. In 1993, when Sudan was placed on the State Department’s list of countries supporting terrorism, Jimmy Carter expressed his disdain for the decision. “They declared that Sudan was a terrorist training center, I think without proof,” said the former president. “In fact, when I later asked an assistant secretary of state he said they did not have proof, but there were strong allegations…. I think there is too much of an inclination in this country to look at Muslims as inherently terrorist or inherently against the West…. I don’t see that when I meet with these people.”
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The urbane, British-and-French-educated Hassan al-Turabi, with a doctorate from the Sorbonne, obviously made a strong impression on the former president. Yet if it is wrong to consider all Muslims terrorists, so is it wrong to assume that all Muslim militants carry automatic weapons, wear scruffy beards, and shout “Death to America.” Many are highly sophisticated Westernized intellectuals. Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum, has argued that it is precisely the Westernized intellectuals in Muslim countries who are most susceptible to anti-Americanism and Islamic militancy. The posture seems to represent, in part, a recoil from the stresses of trying to assimilate to another culture.

As a semi-Westernized intellectual, Dr. al-Turabi is skillful in telling other Westerners what they want to hear. Speaking in the London-based
Al-Quds al-Arabi,
Dr. al-Turabi defended Islam by arguing, “We have a heritage and a wealth of culture but their [the West’s] life has been culturally empty. Even their music is now more like loud noise than serious music. They no longer know or read books. They are content with just watching television and switching from one channel to another.”
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Many Westerners would obviously agree—although they wouldn’t necessarily resort to terrorism as a consequence. At other times, Dr. al-Turabi has been more blunt: “The enemy is America,” he told
The London Daily Telegraph
on August 15, 1995. “If we are challenged economically we will develop our own country, we are very rich; if we are challenged culturally we will develop our own culture; if we are challenged militarily, we will have to fight back.”

It was not long before Sudan was doing just that. Evidence produced at the trial of the Day of Terror bombings, plus information obtained by federal law-enforcement agents, shows that top officials of the Sudanese regime not only knew in advance of the foiled “Day of Terror” but actively facilitated the plot. Taped conversations linked the defendants with members of the Sudanese government. In those tapes, Siddiq Ali, a translator for the blind sheikh and the Sudanese ringleader of the Day of Terror, openly proclaimed that “our relation is very, very, very, very strong with the Sudanese government, and with the Islamic leaderships of Sudan, thanks to God that I have a direct contact with the Islamic leaders themselves.”
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In the same conversation, Ali stated that his ties were so close to Sudanese officials in the United States that he could walk right into the office of the Sudanese ambassador to the United Nations, the Sudanese consul, and the vice consul.

“When we hit the United Nations, it will teach the world, the world, not only America a lesson,” Siddiq Ali declared in discussing the plan to blow up U.N. headquarters. Ali told fellow conspirators he could obtain critical help from Sudanese U.N. diplomats in securing credentials, license plates, and ID cards. This would enable them to drive an explosives-laden Lincoln Town Car right into the parking garage adjacent to U.N. headquarters. Sudanese officials were aware of the plan, Ali stated.

When Siddiq Ali began to conspire to assassinate Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, who was scheduled to visit New York City that spring, the Sudanese mission in New York provided him with acutely sensitive information about how to pierce President Mubarak’s security detail as it drove him from Kennedy Airport to his suite at the Waldorf Astoria. In a chilling conversation taped by Emad Salem, Ali told his coconspirators the exact route of Mubarak’s U.S. Secret Service detail, even specifying the precise car in the police motorcade in which the president would be riding. Asked by Emad Salem where he got this information, Ali responded, “I get it from the highest level…from people inside the [Sudanese] Embassy…. My contact is the ambassador, brother.”

Siddiq Ali was not the only Sudanese connection to the terrorist plot. Another defendant was Mohammed Saleh, a Yonkers gasoline-station operator who was to provide the fuel for the explosive device. According to information obtained by federal investigators, Saleh was a Hamas operative in charge of training terrorist recruits in Sudan. He had also bought terrorist tools, including guns and night-vision goggles, which were ultimately smuggled to Hamas squads in the West Bank. Mr. Saleh’s home in the Bronx was a safe house for terrorists visiting the United States, including Jordanian militant and recruiter of Hamas terrorists, Ahmed Noufal.

Eventually, relations between the United States and Sudan chilled. Two Sudanese diplomats in New York were expelled in 1986; nevertheless, in early 1997, a Sudanese intelligence officer who once worked in Washington, D.C., sought entry to the United States under false documentation. His mission was to expand the Sudanese terrorist network on behalf of the National Islamic Front. Working secretly at night out of the Washington offices of the America Muslim Council for almost a year, this operative was able to establish close ties between Islamic groups in the United States and members of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Middle East. This information was revealed to me by a former AMC official, who was genuinely repelled by the fact that an American Muslim group would work hand-in-hand with such a brutal regime.

By far the most damaging result of Sudan’s sponsorship of terrorism was the rise of Osama bin Laden, who came into his own during the years he spent there. Bin Laden sponsored the arrival of nearly 2,000 mujahideen from Afghanistan, who lived under his care. Bin Laden also became extremely active in terrorist activities around the world. In the late 1990s trial of the African embassy bombings, former bin Laden lieutenant Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl, a Sudanese who absconded with some of bin Laden’s money in 1994, said that he personally smuggled four crates of explosives from bin Laden’s farm at Soba to rebels in Yemen. Al-Fadl also claimed to have led a camel caravan loaded with Kalashnikovs to Egypt. Utilizing both his money and his construction expertise, bin Laden helped Sudan’s ruling NIF build what was at that point the world’s largest complex of terrorist training camps. Among the sites were: