In an American Embassy somewhere overseas, the young Sudanese man waited patiently in the visa line that summer day in 1996. When his turn came, he told the clerk, “I don’t want visa, but I have some information for your government . . . about people, they want to do something against your government.”
Twenty minutes later, he began telling embassy officials a chilling story, unexpectedly compelling in its plot and its characters. That story, currently unfolding in a heavily secured Manhattan federal courtroom, provides an unprecedented firsthand account of the inner workings and outward reach of Osama bin Laden’s campaign of global terrorism, a network U.S. authorities have charged with the deadly 1998 bombings of two U.S. Embassies in Africa.
Jamal Ahmed Al-Fadl, whom courtroom artists are forbidden to sketch, is the government’s star witness in the trial of four of bin Laden’s associates charged with the embassy bombings. Al-Fadl says he knew and worked for the Saudi extremist multimillionaire for nine years.
Claiming to be among the first to swear a loyalty oath to bin Laden’s terrorist organization, al Qaeda, “the Base” in Arabic, Al-Fadl paints a portrait of a large, far-flung group, tightly organized at the core. This shadowy network runs businesses from construction companies to tanneries, has bank accounts from Khartoum to Hong Kong, forges ad hoc alliances with extremist groups in dozens of Muslim countries and is driven by bin Laden’s hatred of the West.
Despite Al-Fadl’s detailed information, his testimony underscores just how much U.S. officials don’t know about this terrorist organization that has declared a jihad, or holy war, on America.
In its crusade, the group has bombed American property and has stated its intention to take American lives anywhere in the world they can be found, including on U.S.soil.
At the same time, Al-Fadl’s testimony raises the question of whether the fugitive bin Laden, indicted in this case but believed to be living in Afghanistan, actually is “the most immediate and serious threat” to Americans, as CIA Director George Tenet told Congress last week, or whether he simply is the threat U.S. officials think they know best.
With his testimony, Al-Fadl is providing the most detailed public look into the operations of bin Laden, from insights into his motivations and overviews of his financial ventures to the most intimate aspects of daily life at his former headquarters in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, between 1990 and 1996.
In 1996, bin Laden caught Al-Fadl stealing $110,000 from the group’s businesses, expelled him from al Qaeda and told him the price of forgiveness was payback in full, Al-Fadl told the court. Unable to repay the money, Al-Fadl fled Sudan, where he was born in 1963. On the lam and in fear of his life, he eventually approached U.S. authorities at an unspecified embassy, seeking protection for himself and his family in exchange for betraying his former boss and mentor.
Although he has pleaded guilty to charges including transporting weapons and conspiracy to harm the U.S. and U.S. troops, he said he hopes his cooperation will buy him a lighter sentence than the 15 years in prison he currently faces.
Al-Fadl and his family are in the federal witness protection program, which lent him $20,000 “to start your life,” he told the court. Somewhat ruefully, he said he was denied the $5 million reward offered by the State Department for information leading to the conviction of bin Laden because he participated in bin Laden’s crimes.
Closed court scene
Appearing on the witness stand last week as the government’s first witness, the black-bearded Al-Fadl wore the same white knit skullcap, blue and white striped shirt and faded jeans both days of his testimony.
To his left in the wood-paneled courtroom was the jury of six men and six women, as well as 12 alternates, a racially and ethnically diverse group. To his right sat Judge Leonard Sand.
In front of the witness sat the battalion of lawyers representing four of the 22 men accused of simultaneously bombing the U.S. Embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on Aug. 7, 1998. The explosions killed 224 people, including 12 Americans, and injured more than 4,000 others.
All four of the defendants are his former comrades in arms. Wadih El-Hage and Mohamed Odeh face possible life in prison without parole if convicted of conspiracy in the bombings. Mohamed Al-`Owhali and Khalfan Khamis Mohamed face a possible death penalty. They all listened to their former colleague, showing no emotion.
Over the last five years, Al-Fadl has been interrogated relentlessly by an array of American law-enforcement officials, and he has been well-prepared to testify against the four former comrades. At times his English is so heavily accented as to be incomprehensible.
He is to be cross-examined starting Tuesday.
Like thousands of young Muslims throughout the world during the mid- to late 1980s, Al-Fadl was recruited to fight with the mujahedin against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Contact was made through a mosque in Brooklyn, where he lived on a student visa in 1986.
When the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan, many of the men who fought them found a new place to continue their jihad to establish Muslim governments; it was with bin Ladin’s nascent terrorist organization. Al-Fadl was one of them and helped to set up al Qaeda’s new home in Sudan, where the government welcomed bin Laden.
Al Qaeda grew globally as bin Ladin tirelessly reached out to other extremist groups like a venture capitalist, seeding their projects with cash, training and arms, Al-Fadl said. At the top of the organization was bin Laden, a sort of chairman/CEO dubbed “The Director.” Under him, was the emir, a kind of president/COO.
After that came the Shura Council, a sort of executive committee composed of those experienced in waging holy war and expert in the Koran, the holy book of Islam.
Four committees reported to the Shura: Military, in charge of training and weapons; Money and Business, in charge of salaries, travel, health care and commercial business ventures; Fatwa and Islamic Study, in charge of making sure that bin Laden’s fatwas, or religious declarations, were in line with the Koran; and Media, which produced a weekly in-house newspaper, “The Newscast,” run by a man with the nom de guerre Abu Musad Reuter, a nod to the international news service.
Staffed with a combination of sworn al Qaeda members and civilians, the group’s headquarters, first in downtown Khartoum and later in a sprawling, three-story guesthouse compound near the Blue Nile River in the Riyadh section of town, buzzed with activity, Al-Fadl said.
Under its umbrella corporation, Wadi al Aqiq, al Qaeda ran a host of businesses, including companies dealing with import-export, foreign exchange, fruit and vegetables, trucking, construction, and leather tanning.
The group also maintained farms for military training as well as agriculture, said Al-Fadl, who worked for some the companies and for a while handled payroll.
Favors from Sudan
Conducting business in Sudan was easy, he said, because Sudanese President Omar al Bashir had sent the umbrella corporation a letter waiving all customs duties, tariffs and other fees for the al Qaeda companies.
Moreover, Al-Fadl said, Sudanese intelligence worked with al Qaeda to screen new immigrants for possible informants for foreign governments and, at times, even helped al Qaeda to transport weapons bound for comrades in other lands.
In the evenings, after the sunset prayer, al Qaeda members often would attend bin Laden at the guesthouse, taking dinner with him or sitting in the yard sipping tea and chatting about jihad and the Koran, Al-Fadl said. Every Thursday night, however, attendance was mandatory at a farm near Khartoum, where they were lectured by bin Laden and other senior members “about jihad and our agenda,” Al-Fadl said.
By the mid-1990s, al Qaeda’s “agenda” had crystallized around attacking the West and, in particular, decapitating the “snake,” as bin Laden described America. Angered by the U.S. presence in the Persian Gulf and by the arrival of U.S. peacekeepers in Somalia, bin Laden issued a series of fatwas against America, Al-Fadl said.
In 1998, bin Laden publicly issued his most sweeping fatwa, calling for the killing of Americans, military or civilian, anywhere in the world they could be found.
Indeed, the first thing Al-Fadl said he told officials at the embassy where he sought asylum was that groups of people were training hard “to make war against your country.”
When asked what kind of war, he said: “I don’t know. Maybe they try to do something inside the United States and they try to fight the United States Army outside, and also they try make bomb against some embassy outside.” Two years later, the two embassies in Africa were hit.
Not everything was smooth in the al Qaeda organization, Al-Fadl said. People, including him, increasingly became upset over the disparities in salaries. Al-Fadl, who monthly was paid $200 from his work at the foreign exchange firm and another $300 from al Qaeda, said others, particularly the Egyptians, not only made much more but had far more power than some in the group.
In response to his complaint, bin Laden told him he had placed the best people in the right jobs and the Egyptians got more because they had to commute home to see their families. Many, particularly those who had fought with bin Laden in Afghanistan, were miffed, Al-Fadl said.
Arms from the U.S.
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s assistance to Afghan mujahedin in their war against the Soviet Union throughout the 1980s remains controversial. The $2 billion to $4 billion spent on arms and training undoubtedly played a significant role in ousting the Soviets from Afghanistan.
The war in Afghanistan and the CIA’s covert campaign there had unintended consequences: They prepared the ground for the repressive Taliban regime currently in control and left unchecked a growing Islamic fundamentalist movement tucked safely in the rugged Afghan mountains.
Critics have charged that the CIA’s aid and steady supply of shoulder-held Stinger missiles and other weaponry during the Afghan war only worked to equip bin Ladin’s new brand of terrorists.
Al-Fadl testified that when bin Laden moved his headquarters to Sudan in 1991, among the first acts was to ship weapons from Afghanistan to Sudan. Al-Fadl said that he was told that the group had a cache of what he described as Stinger missiles and other rockets that they planned to ferry back to Sudan on a cargo plane sent there to deliver food to the Afghans.
Those involved in the U.S. effort angrily deny that the CIA helped arm bin Laden and his followers.
“No Arab was ever trained by the CIA to go into that war,” said Milt Bearden, who from 1986-89 managed the CIA’s covert role in Afghanistan. Arabs in Afghanistan “were by and large a disrupting factor in that jihad,” he said.
Bearden said bin Laden worked during the Afghan-Soviet war to raise money but only rarely was near the front lines. The role of money man wasn’t unimportant; Bearden said bin Laden and other influential Arabs in Pakistan were raising $320 million a year by the war’s end.
For the most part, though, the visiting “Afghan Arabs,” as they came to be called, left the fighting to the real Afghan rebels, who had earned a reputation as fierce soldiers.
“It wasn’t the Arabs, but the Afghan people, who were resisting the invasion of their country,” Bearden said. “That’s a big difference. This has been worked into the mythological presumption that bin Laden was trained by the CIA, that he was the great fighter against the Soviets. I would challenge that.”
Arabs scarce on front
So would Charlie Wilson, a Washington lobbyist who while a Texas congressman in the 1980s favored sending Stinger anti-aircraft missiles to the Afghan rebels. Wilson, who traveled frequently to Afghanistan, said bin Laden in particular and the Afghan Arabs in general were scarce along the front lines.
“I never saw any Arabs,” Wilson said. “The Saudis were way, way back from where the fighting was going on. They were writing checks and giving advice. They weren’t up there where the shooting was.
“Whenever I see that picture of bin Laden with an AK-47, I think that he probably doesn’t even know how to chamber a round.”
Few dispute that the Afghan war’s atmosphere and its abundance of arms and men played a part in fortifying what would become bin Laden’s terrorist organization. As the war wound down, guns, money and men were plentiful, and Afghanistan lacked order, which suited some just fine.
Barnett Rubin, author of the “The Fragmentation of Afghanistan,” noted that the CIA worked in concert with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to promote the Afghan war against the Soviet Union. The U.S. provided $3.2 billion in aid, which was matched by the Saudis, he said. The U.S. also trained the Pakistanis and Saudis, who in turn trained the Afghan forces and Arabs who had come to fight.
“We very unwisely thought that the only thing that mattered was killing Soviet soldiers,” Rubin said. “We didn’t think about the political future of Afghanistan.”
And when the Soviets left, he said, the U.S. kept pouring money and arms into the region to fight a pro-communist Afghan faction vying for power. It was the Arabs, he said, who were then willing to continue the fight, and who in turn continued to receive the training that may have bolstered bin Laden’s ambitions.
U.S. `partly responsible’
“In that sense we are partly responsible,” Rubin said. “We are not the only ones who are responsible. We didn’t train Osama bin Laden.”
Al-Fadl said his role in the Afghan jihad was one of a background holy warrior, who arrived in the country as the war was ending.
Terrorism experts say bin Laden’s international profile increased only when he quit Afghanistan for Sudan, where a radical Islamic government had taken over.
“There was a lot of talk of training camps, a flow of some light arms,” said Patrick Clawson, director of research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. The Sudanese leaders “were very interested in being the center of Islamic resistance, and things were going along swimmingly.”
Al-Fadl testified that he watched as bin Laden’s and al Qaeda’s contracts with Iranians and other Muslim nationals became more frequent. He also said that he was told that al Qaeda members received training in Lebanon from Iranian-backed Hezbollah forces.
Eventually, bin Laden’s presence in Sudan became disconcerting even for the radical Sudanese leadership.
After an attempt on the life of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in 1995 attributed to Egyptian fundamentalists, Egypt and the U.S. both began to pressure Sudan to oust terrorists, including bin Laden.
Clawson said that for the West, groups like bin Laden’s being in Sudan had become unacceptable.
“Sudan is a much more dangerous place than Afghanistan,” he said, “because it’s not only in the heart of the Arab world, but it’s also much more integrated with the Arab world. There’s an incredible flow of people back and forth.”
Benign view of Sudan
Clawson said that today Sudan would be likely to cooperate with the United States in proving or disproving Al-Fadl’s testimony and other elements of its case against bin Laden and his alleged accomplices. The U.S. still lists Sudan as one of those countries that supports terrorism.
“The Sudanese government has worked particularly hard to show that it’s not supporting terrorists,” Clawson said. “They want to get the hell off that terrorism list.”
Back in Afghanistan, where the extremist ruling Taliban protects him in exchange for his financial and other support in its quest to take over the country, bin Laden is a real threat to the U.S., but perhaps not quite in the way Americans think, according to Brian Jenkins, a specialist in terrorism and international crime.
While the U.S. portrays bin Laden as the head of Terrorism Inc., Jenkins said, his operation may look like IBM “but probably is closer to Kentucky Fried Chicken–franchises.”
Bin Laden is essentially connected to an empire of terrorist organizations, but in control of none but his own, Jenkins said.
The West’s need to put a face on the often faceless phenomenon of terrorism has given bin Laden undeserved stature, Jenkins said.
“There is that tendency to address these difficult phenomenon . . . in terms of drug lords, godfathers and terrorist masterminds. It’s the Dr. No syndrome,” Jenkins said.
“There was terrorism before Osama bin Laden, and there will be terrorism after him.”
