Jihad Joe (21 page)

The web of associations grew thicker. Another member of Awlaki's flock at Ribat—and a friend of Bayoumi's—was Mohdar Abdullah, a Yemeni college student who was, like Awlaki, fluent in both English and Arabic.
³²

Abdullah was charismatic and well liked, although the FBI considered him a slick liar. He lived in an apartment complex around the corner from Awlaki's mosque, in the same building as Bakarbashat. Abdullah's computer was stuffed with anti-American sentiments, including e-mails proposing extravagant terrorist plots and references to martyrs and grenade launchers.
³³

In the late spring or early summer of 2000, Omar Bayoumi introduced Abdullah to Hazmi and Mihdhar. Abdullah became friends with the two hijackers, acting as both a translator and a chauffeur, driving them around the area and even to Los Angeles. He helped them get driver's licenses—and fill out applications to flight schools.
³⁴

A third man, Jordanian immigrant Osama Awadallah, for a time shared an apartment with Bakarbashat at the complex around the corner from Ar-Ribat.
³⁵
Awadallah's home was filled with photographs, videotapes, and news articles featuring Osama bin Laden, as well as flyers containing bin Laden's fatwas.

Hazmi had a piece of paper with Adawallah's phone number in the car he used to drive to the Washington Dulles International Airport on September 11. Four days after the attack, Adawallah, a student, scribbled in one of his notebooks, “One of the quietest people I have met is Nawaf. Another one, his name is Khalid.”
³⁶

Awadallah and Mohdar Abdullah both worked at the same gas station as Bakarbashat. In time, so would Hazmi. The al Qaeda man told his coworkers that he would be famous some day. Shortly before the two hijackers left San Diego for good in late 2000, Hazmi brought a third hijacker, Hani Hanjour, to meet his coworkers. Before they drove off, Hazmi told his San Diego friends that they were going to take flying lessons.
³⁷

Awlaki's followers were not the only ones going out of their way to offer hospitality to the future September 11 killers. Awlaki himself knew both of the hijackers and Bayoumi. The 9/11 Commission speculated that he may have met them as soon as their first day in San Diego—nearly two months before the FBI closed its investigation of the imam.
³⁸
Four calls were made to Awlaki using Bayoumi's cell phone during February 2000, the same month the hijackers arrived in the area. One FBI agent later said he was “98 percent certain” that the calls were made by the hijackers.
³⁹

Awlaki met with Hazmi several times, often behind closed doors. Like Awadallah, Awlaki found the al Qaeda operative to be soft spoken and slow to open up. Hazmi didn't come off as particularly religious; he didn't wear a beard and didn't pray five times a day. Or at least that was what Awlaki told the FBI later.
⁴⁰

In late summer of 2000, Awlaki stepped down from his position at Ar-Ribat and embarked on travel overseas to what he would describe to reporters only as “various countries.” Awlaki told a neighbor that he was going to Yemen. Mihdhar had left San Diego for Yemen just weeks before to visit his pregnant wife. During the period that Awlaki was out of the United States, Ramzi Binalshibh, an al Qaeda facilitator supervising a different team of hijackers, also traveled to Yemen in an effort to obtain a U.S. visa.
⁴¹

By now, word was beginning to spread about Awlaki's oratorical skills. He was a much-sought-after commodity in Muslim religious circles—knowledgeable and fluent in English, with a flair for captivating young audiences. Recordings of his lectures on CD became brisk sellers, including a series on the Prophets of Islam and another on the Companions of the Prophet.

One American Muslim told me he was especially moved by Awlaki's fifteen-hour series on Abu Bakr Al Siddiq, a companion of Mohammed and the first caliph of the Muslim world. Awlaki, quoting
hadith
(traditional stories about the Prophet Muhammad's life), described Abu Bakr as the most devout and pure of the Prophet's companions.

[The Prophet Muhammad] was once sitting in the
masjid
, and he asked the Sahabah, “Who's fasting this day?” Abu Bakr Al Siddiq said, “I am.”

“Who has visited an ill person?” Abu Bakr Al Siddiq said, “I did.”

“Who has [attended a funeral]?” Abu Bakr Al Siddiq said, “I did.”

“Who on this day has given [something extra to charity]?” Abu Bakr Al Siddiq said, “I did.”

And everybody else in the
masjid
was looking around, and the only hand that is going up is the hand of Abu Bakr. [ … ] He would always come out the first.

And the amazing thing is that it didn't seem as if Abu Bakr Al Siddiq [ … ] wasn't doing it to compete with anyone. It came natural. See, what the others, they were trying to compete with him. Abu Bakr [ … ] was trying to compete with Abu Bakr.
⁴²

Awlaki was hired at Dar Al Hijrah in Falls Church, Virginia, one of the nation's most prominent mosques. Dar Al Hijrah had been founded in the 1980s and grew to a respectable size during the early 1990s, when it became associated with members of the American Muslim Brotherhood. Members of Hamas were also known to attend the mosque.
⁴³

Johari Abdul-Malik, the mosque's current imam, explained to the press how Awlaki came to be hired:

Our community needed an imam who could speak English, not like many
masjid
, who have an imam who is from the old guard, he—he speaks broken
English, if he speaks English at all, but someone who could convey that message with the full force of faith. He was that person. And he delivered that message dutifully.
⁴⁴

As he had in San Diego, Awlaki began to attract devotees at Dar Al Hijrah. His talks during this period were positioned as moderate, but flashes of darkness surfaced from time to time. During a 2001 lecture on tolerance, he explained that Muslims were the most tolerant people in history, then qualified that statement to exclude a call for tolerance in modern times.

Now, is there [ … ] a problem among the Muslim community of intolerance towards other faiths? Well, to some extent there is. To some extent there is.

However, when one is dealing with the issue of tolerance, usually the party that is asked to be tolerant is the party that is in power, the party that is in control. However, when a people are suffering, and oppressed, it is not easy, or it's not, doesn't even make a lot of sense to bring up the issue of tolerance.
⁴⁵

Awlaki was highly critical of U.S. foreign policy, and his attraction to the phenomenon of jihad continued, though often carefully framed. One undated lecture was an eight-hour dissertation on a classic book about jihad, which Awlaki attempted to disarm with a prefatory disclaimer:

Now I want to state in the beginning and make it
very clear
that our study of this book is not an exhortation or invitation to violence or promotion of violence against an individual or a society or a state. This is purely an academic study. We are studying a book that is 600 years old.
⁴⁶

One of the regulars who attended his sermons was an army psychiatrist named Nidal Hasan. Hasan, whose father had died two years earlier, had coped with his grief by turning more fervently to religion. Hasan's eyes would light up when he talked about Awlaki's teachings.
⁴⁷

There were also familiar faces. The FBI and the 9/11 Commission determined that at least two and as many as four of the September 11 hijackers attended
the imam's services at Dar Al Hijrah, including Hani Hanjour and Awlaki's San Diego disciple Nawaf Al Hazmi.
⁴⁸

As in San Diego, a handful of people from Awlaki's flock stepped forward to help the hijackers accomplish small tasks on the road to September 11. Jordanian Eyad al Rababah offered to help Hazmi and Hanjour find an apartment and ended up helping them get driver's licenses (illegally) before escorting them around the East Coast on a trip he described as “sightseeing.” The apartment he eventually found for them was in New Jersey. As in San Diego, FBI agents suspected, Awlaki had tasked Rababah to assist the hijackers. In early 2001 Rababah had asked Awlaki for help finding a job; he started to assist the hijackers immediately thereafter.
⁴⁹

The relationships among Awlaki, Omar Bayoumi, and the hijackers and the helpers remain ambiguous to this day, even among those who were in a position to know. FBI agents working the case wanted badly to arrest Awlaki but couldn't come up with the hard evidence.

The 9/11 Commission left its section on Awlaki open-ended but clearly opinionated; the final report found Awlaki's role suspicious enough to explicitly mention but said the commission was “unable to learn enough about Awlaki's relationship with Hazmi and Mihdhar to reach a conclusion.”
⁵⁰

On the topic of Omar Bayoumi, the commission was similarly conflicted. The final report of the commission described him as “devout,” “obliging,” and “gregarious,” and investigators “find him to be an unlikely candidate for clandestine involvement with Islamist extremists.” On the other hand, the commission conceded that it could not be sure whether Bayoumi's initial “chance meeting” with the hijackers “occurred by chance or design.”
⁵¹

The nature of Bayoumi's job is extremely unclear. He was known in the local community as someone who actively sought out new Muslims in town and helped them get settled. Many people assumed he performed this role on behalf of the Saudi government, which tends to be very activist about taking care of its citizens abroad. Although his interactions with the hijackers may simply have fallen within that mandate, questions linger.
⁵²

The placement of the hijackers within Awlaki's social circle raises significant questions. Bayoumi first met the hijackers in L.A., where he had connections with both the Saudi embassy and the Saudi-financed King Fahd Mosque. In San Diego
he held a position of some importance at a Kurdish mosque not far from Alwaki's Ar-Ribat mosque, where he could easily have arranged assistance with housing, transportation, and English lessons. Perhaps he felt the Saudis would be more comfortable at Ribat, which had a strong Saudi-Salafist orientation.
⁵³

Or perhaps there is another explanation. In the immediate wake of September 11, many journalists probed into Bayoumi's role with the hijackers without success. Questions were raised but never answered about the possibility that Bayoumi might have been a “handler” for the hijackers, working on behalf of someone in Saudi Arabia. A congressional probe into 9/11 found that Bayoumi had “tasked” San Diego Muslims to assist the hijackers.
⁵⁴

Yet after Bayoumi's initial contact with Hazmi and Mihdhar, most of the people who provided assistance to the hijackers were as close to Awlaki as they were to Bayoumi, if not closer. An FBI agent, whose name was redacted from released records, told the 9/11 Commission that “if anyone had knowledge of the plot, it was Awlaki.”
⁵⁵

For most of the helpers, Awlaki was not only a friend or an acquaintance but an authority figure who inspired fervent devotion. Yet perhaps the most damning indicator of Awlaki's involvement with the hijackers came several months after San Diego—when Awlaki's followers performed the same helper function on the opposite coast, a social transaction with no apparent link to Bayoumi.

Finally, there is Awlaki's connection to Ramzi Binalshibh, the al Qaeda facilitator who provided logistical assistance to several of the September 11 hijackers— but not Hazmi and Mihdhar, who were being helped by Awlaki's followers on both coasts. Binalshibh was in Yemen during the summer of 2000, around the same time Awlaki said he would be there. More significantly, when investigators searched Binalshibh's apartment after September 11, they found the phone number of Awlaki's mosque in Virginia, Dar Al Hijrah.
⁵⁶

If Awlaki was helping the hijackers, the final question then becomes this: what did he know?

Did he know they were extremists? Terrorists? Al Qaeda? Did he know they were planning to kill on U.S. soil? Did he know exactly what they were going to do? Awlaki has notably declined to address these questions. Even after he fully committed to terrorism (see
chapter 9
), he never raised the issue of September 11.

Unless Awlaki is arrested and charged in a U.S. courtroom, these questions may never be answered. But Awlaki's neighbor in San Diego, Lincoln Higgie, remembered an ominous pronouncement the imam made when he left San Diego for Virginia:

He said, “I'm going back to Virginia, and shortly after that, I'll be going to Yemen.” And I said, “Well, I do hope you'll be coming back to San Diego soon.” And he says, “No, I won't be coming back. And in a little while, you'll understand why.”
⁵⁷

Whatever Awlaki knew or didn't know before September 11, his meetings with the hijackers were not destined to be his last contact with al Qaeda.

It defies preconceptions, but on a per capita basis, Arizona may have hosted more al Qaeda members than any other state in America.

Tucson residents included some of Osama bin Laden's closest associates, such as early al Qaeda financier Wael Julaidan, the American citizen jihadist Wadih El Hage, and the American citizen Loay Bayazid, who was present at the founding of al Qaeda (see
chapter 2
).
¹
An Islamic newspaper based in Tucson issued an ID card to World Trade Center bombing mastermind Ramzi Yousef in 1992.
²

A branch of the Al Kifah Center was located in the city during the 1980s, recruiting Americans to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.
³
There was so much jihadist activity, over so many years, that U.S. intelligence officially labeled Arizona a “long term nexus for Islamic extremists.”
⁴