03.09.07
Crazy But True: Al Qaida Penetrated CIA, FBI, & Special Forces Ahead of 9/11
Little noticed at the time, less than two months after the 9/11 attack, was a positively jaw-dropping story in the San Francisco Chronicle which revealed:
A former U.S. Army sergeant who trained Osama bin Laden’s bodyguards and helped plan the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kenya was a U.S. government informant during much of his terrorist career, according to [US government] sources familiar with his case.
…[Ali] Mohamed, 49 [in 2001], is a former Egyptian Army major, fluent in Arabic and English, who after his arrest became known as bin Laden’s “California connection.” Last year [in 2000], when he pleaded guilty in the embassy bombing case, he told a federal judge that he first was drawn to terrorism in 1981, when he joined Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a fundamentalist group implicated in that year’s assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.
For almost as long as he was a terrorist, Mohamed also was in contact with U.S. intelligence, according to court records and sources.
In 1984, he quit the Egyptian Army to work as a counterterrorism security expert for EgyptAir. After that, he offered to become a CIA informant, said the U.S. government official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
“The agency tried him out, but because he told other possible terrorists or people possibly associated with terrorist groups that he was working for the CIA, clearly he was not suitable,” the official said.
The CIA cut off contact with Mohamed and put his name on a “watch list” aimed at blocking his entrance to the United States, according to the official.
Nevertheless, Mohamed got a visa one year later. He ultimately became a U.S. citizen after marrying a Santa Clara woman. In 1986, he joined the U.S. Army as an enlisted man. He was posted to Fort Bragg, N.C., home of the elite Special Forces.
There he worked as a supply sergeant for a Green Beret unit, then as an instructor on Middle Eastern affairs in the John F. Kennedy special warfare school.
…In 1989, Mohamed left the Army and returned to Santa Clara, where he worked as a security guard and at a home computer business.
Between then and his 1998 arrest, he said in court last year, Mohamed was deeply involved in bin Laden’s al Qaeda. He spent months abroad, training bin Laden’s fighters in camps in Afghanistan and Sudan. While in Africa, he scouted the U.S. Embassy in Kenya, target of the 1998 bombing. In this country, he helped al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s top aide, enter the country with a fake passport and tour U.S. mosques, raising money later funneled to al Qaeda.
According to Steven Emerson, a terrorism expert and author who has written about the case, Mohamed by the early 1990s had also established himself as an FBI informant.
“He agreed to serve (the FBI) and provide information, but in fact he was working for the bad guys and insulating himself from scrutiny from other law enforcement agencies,” Emerson said in an interview.
One particularly troubling aspect of the case, Emerson says, was that Mohamed’s role as an FBI informant gave bin Laden important insights into U.S. efforts to penetrate al Qaeda.
…In 1993, [a 1998 FBI] affidavit says, Mohamed was questioned by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police after a bin Laden aide was caught trying to enter the United States with Mohamed’s driver’s license and a false passport.
Mohamed acknowledged traveling to Vancouver to help the terrorist sneak into the United States and admitted working closely with bin Laden’s group. Yet he was so unconcerned about being arrested that he told the Mounties he hoped the interview wouldn’t hurt his chances of getting a job as an FBI interpreter.
(According to the affidavit, he had indeed applied for the FBI position but never got it.)
Later that year, Mohamed — again seemingly without concern for consequences — told the FBI that he had trained bin Laden followers in intelligence and anti-hijacking techniques in Afghanistan, the affidavit says.
In January 1995, Mohamed applied for a U.S. security clearance, in hopes of becoming a security guard with a Santa Clara defense contractor. His application failed to mention ever traveling to Pakistan or Afghanistan, trips he had told the FBI about earlier. In three interviews with Defense Department officials, who conducted a background check on him, he claimed he had never been a terrorist.
“I have never belonged to a terrorist organization, but I have been approached by organizations that could be called terrorist,” he told the interviewers.
According to the affidavit, he told FBI agents in 1997 that he had trained bin Laden’s bodyguards, saying he loved bin Laden and believed in him. Mohamed also said it was “obvious” that the United States was the enemy of Muslim people.
…“I think you or I would have a better chance of winning Powerball (a lottery), than an Egyptian major in the unit that assassinated Sadat would have getting a [US] visa, getting to California…getting into the Army and getting assigned to a Special Forces unit,” [Lt. Col. Robert Anderson, Mohamed’s former commanding officer at Ft. Bragg] said. “That just doesn’t happen. “
Well…except it did. And more than five years later, most folks have no idea about it.
Ali Mohamed and his role as an Al Qaida mole within the US intelligence infrastructure is the subject of Triple Cross, a mammoth new book by Emmy Award-winning investigative journalist Peter Lance. I’ve not read the book (I’m waiting for the paperback edition, which I suspect will be revised and updated to whatever extent), so I can’t offer an opinion about it. But I’ve read portions of his two previous books related to 9/11 — 1,000 Years for Revenge and Cover Up: What the Government is Still Hiding About the War on Terror — and I would say that while he sometimes evinces a slight lean to the sensational and not-so-well-written (which I take to be a shadow of his broadcast journalism background), he’s not the conspiracy nut one might initially take him for. He digs up very interesting information and raises very pointed — and eminently relevant — questions.
Meanwhile, I recommend checking out this recent Metafilter post about Mohamed, which include numerous worthwhile relevant links. Also, this November 2006 Democracy Now! interview with Lance is worth absorbing.
Last summer, the National Geographic Channel aired a documentary based on Triple Cross. I have not seen it, but apparently Mr. Lance was pretty ticked off about the final product, saying it omitted the most important part of the story — how exactly Mohammed was allowed to operate with such impunity, and who exactly was apparently involved.
It’s probably obligatory to mention this (unquestionably biased) blog post by Larry C. Johnson, which seeks to discredit Lance and Triple Cross, in part by quoting from (and posting PDFs of) interrogation reports related to one Hakim Murad — whose relevance to the core tale is not made evident and, like I say, since I ain’t read the book I couldn’t tell ya. In this context, it’s worth noting that — in addition to getting very personal and nasty in his follow-up comments — Mr. Johnson beats his breast about a quote by Johnson that Lance apparently falsely cites as appearing in a NY Times op-ed piece on some date or other. In fact, the quote in question definitely does not appear in said cited op-ed piece, and Mr. Johnson thus calls Mr. Lance “a liar” and more than implying that he never uttered such words ever, amen. However, it turns out that Mr. Johnson did in fact utter the quote, which was indeed published in a NY Times article but on a different date and not in an op-ed piece. So while Mr. Lance is rightly chastised for poor citation work, Mr. Johnson’s own demonstrably selective assertions in the matter definitely make one wonder about his own agenda (especially since Mr. Johnson served as a counter-terrorism expert for the current Bush administration).
Piffle and whatever. Ali Mohamed — and just what the US government had to do with him and why — is obviously worth learning much more about.
