The Looming Tower (9 page)

Another key member of Zawahiri’s cell was a daring tank commander named Essam al-Qamari. Because of his valor and intelligence, Major Qamari had been promoted repeatedly over the heads of his peers. Zawahiri described him as “a noble person in the true sense of the word. Most of his sufferings and sacrifices that he endured willingly and calmly were the result of his honorable character.” Although Zawahiri was the senior member of the Maadi cell, he often deferred to Qamari, who had a natural sense of command—a quality that Zawahiri notably lacked. Indeed, Qamari observed that there was “something missing” in Zawahiri, and once cautioned him, “If you are a member of any group, you cannot be the leader.”

Qamari began smuggling weapons and ammunition from army strongholds and storing them in Zawahiri’s medical clinic in Maadi, which was in a downstairs apartment in the duplex where his parents lived. In February of
1981,
as the weapons were being transferred from the clinic to a warehouse, police officers arrested a young man carrying a bag loaded with guns, military bulletins, and maps that showed the location of all the tank emplacements in Cairo. Qamari, realizing that he would soon be implicated, dropped out of sight, but several of his officers were arrested. Zawahiri inexplicably stayed put.

Until these arrests, the Egyptian government had persuaded itself that the Islamist underground had been eliminated. That September, Sadat ordered the roundup of more than fifteen hundred people, including many prominent Egyptians—not only Islamists but also intellectuals with no religious leanings, Marxists, Coptic Christians, student leaders, journalists, writers, doctors in the Muslim Brothers syndicate—a potpourri of dissidents from various sectors. The dragnet missed Zawahiri but captured most of the other leaders of al-Jihad. However, a military cell within the scattered ranks of Jihad had already set in motion a hasty and opportunistic plan. Lieutenant Khaled Islambouli, who was twenty-three years old, proposed to kill Sadat during an appearance at a military parade the following month.

Z
AWAHIRI TESTIFIED
that he did not hear about the plan until nine o’clock on the morning of October
6, 1981,
a few hours before the assassination was scheduled to take place. One of the members of his cell, a pharmacist, brought him the news. “I was astonished and shaken,” Zawahiri told his interrogators. The pharmacist proposed that they must do something to help the hastily conceived plot succeed. “But I told him, ‘What can we do? Do they want us to shoot up the streets and let the police detain us? We are not going to do anything.’” Zawahiri went back to his patients. When he learned, a few hours later, that the military exhibition was still going on, he assumed that the operation had failed and everyone connected with it had been arrested. He then went to the home of one of his sisters, who informed him that the exhibition had been halted and the president had left unharmed. The real news was yet to be heard.

Sadat had been celebrating the eighth anniversary of the 1973 war. Surrounded by dignitaries, including several American diplomats and Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the future secretary-general of the United Nations, Sadat was saluting the passing troops when a military vehicle veered toward the reviewing stand. Lieutenant Islambouli and three other conspirators leaped out and tossed grenades into the stand. “I have killed the Pharaoh!” Islambouli cried, after emptying the cartridge of his machine gun into the president, who stood defiantly at attention until his body was riddled with bullets.

The announcement of Sadat’s death later that day met with little grief in the Arab world, which regarded him as a traitor for making peace with Israel. In Zawahiri’s opinion, the assassination had accomplished nothing in the way of achieving an Islamic state. But perhaps there was still time, in the shaky interval following the event, to put the grand plan into effect. Essam al-Qamari came out of hiding and asked Zawahiri to put him in touch with the group that had carried out the assassination. At ten that night, only eight hours after Sadat’s murder, Zawahiri and Qamari met with Aboud al-Zumar in a car outside the apartment where Qamari was hiding. Qamari had a daring proposal, this one with the chance to eliminate the entire government and many foreign leaders as well: an attack on Sadat’s funeral. Zumar agreed, and asked Qamari to supply him with ten bombs and two guns. The very next day the group met again. Qamari brought the weapons, as well as several boxes of ammunition. Meanwhile, the new government, headed by Hosni Mubarak, was rounding up thousands of prospective conspirators. Aboud al-Zumar was arrested before the plan could be put into action.

Zawahiri must have known that his name would surface, but still he lingered. On October
23,
he had finally packed his belongings for another trip to Pakistan. He went to say good-bye to some relatives. His brother Hussein was driving him to the airport when the police stopped them on the Nile Corniche. “They took Ayman to the Maadi police station, and he was surrounded by guards,” his cousin Omar Azzam recalled. “The chief of police slapped him on the face—and Ayman slapped him back!” The family regards this incident with amazement, not only because of the recklessness of Zawahiri’s response but also because until that moment he had never, in their memory, resorted to violence. Zawahiri immediately became known among the other prisoners as the man who struck back.

S
ECURITY FORCES GREETED
the incoming prisoners by stripping them naked, blindfolding and handcuffing them, then beating them with sticks. Humiliated, frightened, and disoriented, they were thrown into narrow stone cells, the only light coming from a tiny square window in the iron door. The dungeon had been built in the twelfth century by the great Kurdish conqueror Saladin, using the labor of captured Crusaders. It was part of the Citadel, a massive fortress on a hill overlooking Cairo, that had served as the seat of government for seven hundred years.

The screams of fellow prisoners who were being interrogated kept many men in a state of near madness, even when they weren’t tortured themselves. Because of his status, Zawahiri was subjected to frequent beatings and other ingenious and sadistic forms of punishment created by Intelligence Unit
75,
which oversaw Egypt’s inquisition.

One line of thinking proposes that America’s tragedy on September 11 was born in the prisons of Egypt. Human-rights advocates in Cairo argue that torture created an appetite for revenge, first in Sayyid Qutb and later in his acolytes, including Ayman al-Zawahiri. The main target of the prisoners’ wrath was the secular Egyptian government, but a powerful current of anger was also directed toward the West, which they saw as an enabling force behind the repressive regime. They held the West responsible for corrupting and humiliating Islamic society. Indeed, the theme of humiliation, which is the essence of torture, is important to understanding the radical Islamists’ rage. Egypt’s prisons became a factory for producing militants whose need for retribution—they called it justice—was all-consuming.

Montassir al-Zayyat, an Islamist attorney who was imprisoned with Zawahiri and later became his lawyer and biographer,
^*
maintains that the traumatic experiences suffered by Zawahiri in prison transformed him from being a relatively moderate force in al-Jihad into a violent and implacable extremist. Zayyat and other witnesses point to what happened to his relationship with Essam al-Qamari, who had been his close friend and a man he keenly admired. Immediately after Zawahiri’s arrest, officers in the Interior Ministry began grilling him about Major Qamari, who continued to slip their nets. He was now the most wanted man in Egypt. He had already survived a firefight with grenades and automatic weapons in which many policemen were killed or wounded. In their relentless search for Qamari, the security officers booted the distinguished Zawahiri family out of their house and tore up the floors and pulled down all the wallpaper looking for evidence. They also waited by the phone, betting that eventually the desperado would call. Two weeks later, the call finally came. The caller identified himself as “Dr. Essam” and asked to meet Zawahiri. Qamari was unaware that Zawahiri was in custody when he phoned, since it had been kept secret. A police officer, pretending to be a family member, told “Dr. Essam” that Zawahiri was not there. The caller suggested, “Let him pray the
maghreb
”—the sunset prayer—“with me,” at a mosque they both knew.

“Qamari had given him an appointment on the road to Maadi, but he noticed the security people, and he escaped again,” said Fouad Allam, who was the head of the Interior Ministry’s anti-terrorism unit at the time. He is an avuncular figure with a basso profundo voice, who has interrogated almost every major Islamic radical since
1965,
when he questioned Sayyid Qutb. “I called Ayman al-Zawahiri to my office in order to propose a plan.” Allam found Zawahiri “shy and distant. He doesn’t look at you when he talks, which is a sign of politeness in the Arab world.” According to Zawahiri’s uncle Mahfouz, Zawahiri had already been brutally tortured, and he actually came to Allam’s office wearing only one shoe, because of an injury inflicted to his foot. Allam arranged to have Zawahiri’s telephone line transferred into his office, and he held Zawahiri there until Qamari finally called again. This time Zawahiri answered and made a date to meet at the Zawya Mosque in Embaba. As planned, Zawahiri went to the mosque and fingered his friend.

Zawahiri himself doesn’t admit to this in his memoir, except obliquely, where he writes about the “humiliation” of imprisonment. “The toughest thing about captivity is forcing the
mujahid,
under the force of torture, to confess about his colleagues, to destroy his movement with his own hands, and offer his and his colleagues’ secrets to the enemy.”

Perversely, the authorities placed Qamari in the same cell with Zawahiri after Zawahiri testified against him and thirteen others. Qamari received a ten-year sentence. “As usual, he received the news with his unique calmness and self-composure,” Zawahiri recorded. “He even tried to comfort me, and said, ‘I pity you for the burdens you will carry.’” In 1988 Qamari was shot to death by police after escaping from prison.

Z
AWAHIRI WAS DEFENDANT
number 113 of 302 who were accused of aiding or planning the assassination, as well as various other crimes (in Zawahiri’s case, dealing in arms). Lieutenant Islambouli and twenty-three others charged with the actual assassination were tried separately. Islambouli and four conspirators were hanged. Nearly every notable Islamist in Egypt was implicated in the plot.
^*
The other defendants, some of whom were adolescents, were crowded into a zoo-like cage that ran across one side of a vast improvised courtroom in the Exhibition Grounds in Cairo where fairs and conventions are often held. They came from various organizations—al-Jihad, the Islamic Group, the Muslim Brotherhood—that formed the fractious core of the Islamist movement. International news organizations covered the trial, and Zawahiri, who had the best command of English among the defendants, was their designated spokesman.

Video footage of the opening day of the trial, December
4, 1982,
shows the three hundred defendants, illuminated by the lights of the TV cameras, chanting, praying, and calling out desperately to family members. Finally, the camera settles on Zawahiri, who stands apart from the chaos with a look of solemn, focused intensity. Thirty-one years old, he is wearing a white robe and has a gray scarf thrown over his shoulder.

At a signal, the other prisoners fall silent, and Zawahiri cries out, “Now we want to speak to the whole world! Who are we? Why do they bring us here, and what we want to say? About the first question, we are Muslims! We are Muslims who believe in their religion! We are Muslims who believe in their religion, both in ideology and practice, and hence we tried our best to establish an Islamic state and an Islamic society!”

The other defendants chant, in Arabic, “There is no God but God!”

Zawahiri continues, in a fiercely repetitive cadence, “We are not sorry, we are not sorry for what we have done for our religion, and we have sacrificed, and we stand ready to make more sacrifices!”

The others shout, “There is no God but God!”

Zawahiri then says, “We are here—the real Islamic front and the real Islamic opposition against Zionism, Communism, and imperialism!” He pauses, then: “And now, as an answer to the second question, why did they bring us here? They bring us here for two reasons! First, they are trying to abolish the outstanding Islamic movement…and, secondly, to complete the conspiracy of evacuating the area in preparation for the Zionist infiltration.”

The others cry out, “We will not sacrifice the blood of Muslims for the Americans and the Jews!”

The prisoners pull off their shoes and raise their robes to expose marks of torture. Zawahiri talks about the abuse that took place in the “dirty Egyptian jails…where we suffered the severest inhuman treatment. There they kicked us, they beat us, they whipped us with electric cables, they shocked us with electricity! They shocked us with electricity! And they used the wild dogs! And they used the wild dogs! And they hung us over the edges of the doors”—here he bends forward to demonstrate—“with our hands tied at the back! They arrested the wives, the mothers, the fathers, the sisters, and the sons!”