-Caveat Lector-
Bin Laden's man in Silicon Valley
"Mohamed the American' orchestrated terrorist acts while living a quiet
suburban life in Santa Clara
By Lance Williams, Erin McCormick
San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writers
Friday, September 21, 2001
He was the California connection to Osama bin Laden's fearsome terrorist
organization -- an architect of horrific acts of violence against his
adopted country, even as he lived a quiet suburban lifestyle in Silicon
Valley.
For much of a decade he commuted from the West Coast to the terrorist
camps of Afghanistan and Sudan, where he trained bin Laden's men in
guerrilla military tactics, surveillance and explosives.
The unsuspecting Americans who met him in his duplex in Santa Clara knew
him as Ali A. Mohamed, a cordial, under-employed Egyptian immigrant with an
Army background, a U.S.-born wife and frequent business abroad.
But to his fellow terrorists, he was Abu Mohamed ali Amriki -- "Mohamed
the American" -- a hard-driving military taskmaster who trained bin Laden's
own personal security cadre and was a top aide and confidant of the shadowy
terrorist kingpin himself.
Until his 1998 arrest for plotting the terror bombing of two U.S. embassies
in East Africa, Mohamed "was the California connection, period," for bin
Laden, said lawyer Sam A. Schmidt, who defended another accused terrorist
in the embassy bombing trial this year.
Now in prison and presumed to be a government informant, Mohamed could be a
key connection for U.S. investigators probing bin Laden's links to the
suicide hijackers who flew jetliners into the World Trade Center and
Pentagon last week, some experts say.
In remarks to a judge last year when he pleaded guilty to terrorism
charges, Mohamed admitted a long list of such crimes: training guerrillas
who attacked U.S. soldiers in Somalia in 1993; arranging a summit
conference of anti-U.S. terrorist organizations in Sudan in 1994; plotting
the suicide bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which
killed more than 200 people and injured thousands.
Other suspected activities during his California days include raising
money for the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, implicated in the 1981
assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, and smuggling sleeper
agents for bin Laden into the United States from Canada.
For the U.S. government, Mohamed is important today because he has
extraordinary insights into the inner workings of bin Laden's al Qaeda
organization, says Yonah Alexander, director of the Potomac Institute's
Center for Terrorism Studies in Washington, D.C., who has researched
Mohamed's life. He may even have had personal contacts with some of the
hijackers responsible for last week's attacks.
"In his previous life, perhaps he trained some of these people,"
Alexander said. "Clearly (the government) has interrogated him, and we
assume they are doing it now, because he is a very important source."
Mohamed's story also is important because it shows how easily even a top-
level terrorist can operate unmolested and undetected from the very heart
of the United States.
Terrorist groups have "woven themselves into the fabric of America," said
Harvey Kushner, an international security expert and professor at Long
Island University. "That is why this is going to be a long, protracted war
(against terrorism). The enemy is not outside, it's within us."
TRIAL RECORDS REVEAL MOHAMED'S SECRET LIFE
The details of Mohamed's two lives were obtained from court records
generated during two major terrorism trials, from defense lawyers and
security experts who have investigated his background and from people
who knew him in California.
By these accounts, Mohamed, 49, is a well-educated Egyptian national,
fluent in English, who graduated from both the University of Alexandria
and a Cairo military academy. In about 1971, he joined the Egyptian army,
rising to the rank of major.
As he told a federal judge in New York last year, his links to Middle
Eastern terrorist groups go back 20 years: In 1981, he joined the Egyptian
Islamic Jihad, a group of radical Muslim fundamentalists opposed to the
Egyptian government's ties to the United States and Israel that included
members of the Egyptian military.
That same year Mohamed first visited the United States, graduating from a
special program for foreign officers at the U.S. Army Special Forces
school at Fort Bragg, N.C., according to a report by Steven Emerson, an
author and terrorism expert.
Mohamed left the Egyptian army about three years after Sadat's death, then
worked for a time as security adviser for EgyptAir, the national airline,
said attorney David Ruhnke, who researched Mohamed's history for the
embassy bombing trial.
Shortly after that, the terrorist operative returned to the United States
and established himself in the Bay Area after romancing an American
divorcee whom he met on a transatlantic flight in 1985.
Mohamed was traveling from Egypt to New York, he said, while the divorcee,
a medical technician from Santa Clara, was returning to the West Coast
after a vacation in Greece, according to two longtime acquaintances who
asked not to be named because of safety concerns.
Within a few days of arriving in the United States, Mohamed phoned the
divorcee and then turned up in the Bay Area, according to the
acquaintances.
After a six-week courtship, they were married in Reno.
Mohamed's wife seemed genuinely devoted to her husband, but the
acquaintances suspected that, for him, it may have been "a marriage of
convenience," as one put it -- a way to obtain a "green card" and an
American home.
Mohammed moved into his new wife's Santa Clara duplex. People who met him
there said he was cordial, well-spoken and physically fit; he described
himself as a former Egyptian army officer who hoped to do intelligence work
for the United States.
But that didn't pan out, and after a year of unemployment, he enlisted in
the U.S. Army. While his wife remained in California, Mohamed became a
sergeant and was again stationed at Fort Bragg's Special Warfare Center,
where he trained officers in Middle Eastern culture and geography.
He also became a U.S. citizen, his associates said.
But even while an American soldier, court records show, Mohamed worked on
behalf of militant Islamic groups.
In the late 1980s, he turned up in a Brooklyn, N.Y., refugee center for
people displaced by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, according to
evidence in the 1995 trial of El Sayyid Nosair, an Egyptian terrorist
convicted of plotting to bomb the U.N. headquarters in New York.
In Brooklyn, Mohamed gave combat training to Muslim recruits bound for
Afghanistan to fight the Soviet invasion, said defense lawyer Roger Stavis.
Nosair was among the guerrilla fighters Mohamed trained, he said.
Although the United States was then providing training and money to the
anti-Soviet rebels, the government said Mohamed's activities were
unauthorized.
SPENDING MORE TIME AWAY FROM HOME
Mohamed was discharged from the army in 1989. He returned to Santa Clara,
where he served for a time in the Army Reserve and tried but failed to get
a job as an FBI interpreter, according to lawyers familiar with his
background.
He worked as a security guard at the old Sylvania plant in Mountain View,
acquaintances said, and ran a computer consulting firm out of his home.
Mohamed often complained that he couldn't find a good job and, after a
time, according to his acquaintances, he began spending months abroad,
saying he had found work in Egypt. For long periods he was out of touch.
His wife "would say he's in the desert, and he can't call me," one
acquaintance recalled.
For some of his overseas jobs, Mohamed seemed not to be paid in money.
Instead, "he'd bring back 24-karat gold bracelets," the acquaintance
recalled.
And at one point in the early 1990s, Mohamed's wife told one of the
acquaintances that her husband was in Afghanistan, training people for a
man named bin Laden. At the time the name was virtually unknown in this
country, and it seemed to mean nothing to the wife.
"Maybe I am dumb, but I did not know who this guy was, bin Laden," this
person said. "I just didn't know."
GETTING TOGETHER WITH BIN LADEN
Mohamed's 1980s work with the Egyptian Islamic Jihad eventually drew him to
bid Laden, the multimillionaire son of a Saudi construction magnate.
Bin Laden, who had helped finance and train the Islamic guerrillas who
finally expelled the Soviet invaders from Afghanistan in 1989, became
increasingly anti-American after the United States defeated Iraq in the
1991 Persian Gulf War, and he began advocating a holy war to drive America
from the Middle East.
He founded al Qaeda ("the base"), the terrorist organization implicated in
a long list of deadly anti-American attacks.
"I was involved in the Islamic Jihad organization, and the Islamic Jihad
organization had a very close link to al Qaeda, the organization for bin
Laden," Mohamed told the New York judge. "And the objective of all this,
just to attack any Western target in the Middle East, to force the
government of the Western countries just to pull out from the Middle East."
L'Houssaine Kherchtou, a onetime bin Laden guerrilla who turned U.S.
government witness in the embassy bombing trial, said he had met Mohamed
-- he called him "Amriki" -- in 1991 at a camp near Peshawar, Pakistan.
Mohamed, he said, was a high-ranking member of al Qaeda, a "very, very
strict and not gentle" taskmaster who trained cadre members in how to
reconnoiter targets for terror bombings.
Mohamed told the judge that in 1992 he had been in Afghanistan, providing
"military and basic explosives training" to bin Laden's terrorists. The
curriculum also included intelligence trade craft: "I taught my trainees
how to create cell structures that could be used for operations," he said.
There were other tasks as well. In 1991, Mohamed said, he helped relocate
bin Laden from Afghanistan to the African nation of Sudan, where the
multimillionaire set up another network of paramilitary camps.
In about 1992, Mohamed said, he helped set up an al Qaeda cell in Nairobi,
Kenya, along with a car business to earn money and a refugee-assistance
charity that provided fake IDs for the terrorist gang.
In 1993, Mohamed said, bin Laden told him to scout prospective bombing
targets in Nairobi, as bin Laden wanted a strike to retaliate for that
year's U.S. intervention in Somalia.
Mohamed said he had scouted the French Embassy, the U.S. AID office and
the U.S. Embassy. He took photos and maps to Khartoum for a meeting with
the terrorist boss.
"Bin Laden looked at the picture of the American Embassy and pointed to
where a truck could go as a suicide bomber," Mohamed told the court.
The Santa Clara resident also said he had arranged security for a
conference in which bin Laden's al Qaeda met with Imad Mughniyeh, security
chief for Hezbollah, the Iran-sponsored organization reputedly responsible
for attacks that included the 1983 bombing of a U.S. Marine barracks in
Lebanon that killed 241.
"Hezbollah provided explosives training for al Qaeda and (Egyptian Islamic)
Jihad," he said. "Iran supplied Egyptian Jihad with weapons."
In 1994, while he was at the al Qaeda cell in Nairobi, Mohamed came under
FBI suspicion in connection with a probe of Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, a
blind Islamic cleric arrested and ultimately convicted for masterminding
the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, which killed six and injured
1,000.
At the FBI's request, Mohamed said, he flew to the United States to be
interrogated. Mohamed lied to the FBI, claiming no links to terror,
admitting only that he had trained Islamic guerrillas to fight the Russians
in Afghanistan.
After that, Mohamed said, al Qaeda told him not to return to Nairobi.
>From his home in Santa Clara, he began tracking the Rahman case for bin
Laden, relaying what he could learn about the progress of the FBI probe.
He also made telephone calls from his home in California to bin Laden
associates in Nairobi, according to court testimony.
While back in California, Mohamed said, he did other tasks for bin Laden.
Twice, he said, he aided the terrorist Ayman al-Zawahiri, a co-founder of
the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, by then an aide to bin Laden and later a
suspect in the embassy bombings, when he visited America to raise money.
Alexander, the Potomac Institute's terrorism expert, said intelligence
sources believed Mohamed also had helped smuggle bin Laden agents into the
United States via Canada.
Around 1997, Mohamed's acquaintances said, he and his wife moved to
Sacramento, where he worked for a video distribution company.
On Aug. 7, 1998, terrorist bombs exploded at U.S. embassies in Nairobi and
in Dar-Es-Salaam, Tanzania. Mohamed was again an FBI suspect. Court
records show that 10 agents searched his Sacramento apartment, downloading
the entire contents of Mohamed's two computers and photographing documents
in English and Arabic found inside.
Among the documents were terrorist training manuals, describing
surveillance and assassination techniques, and instructions on how to plant
explosives to blow up buildings.
When he pleaded guilty, Mohamed said that after the embassy bombings, he
had planned to leave the United States and return to Afghanistan to meet
with bin Laden. Before he could get away, he was subpoenaed to testify
before a U.S. grand jury in New York.
"I testified, told some lies and was arrested," he said.
ADMITS PLAN TO KILL SOLDIERS, DIPLOMATS
Mohamed was indicted along with bin Laden and 22 other alleged terrorists.
Only six were brought to trial. In October 2000, Mohamed, who was facing
the death penalty if convicted, pleaded guilty to five conspiracy charges,
including plotting to kill U.S. soldiers in Somalia and Saudi Arabia,
plotting to murder U.S. ambassadors and other embassy officials and
plotting to kill "United States civilians anywhere in the world," as
another prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, summarized the charges.
But he has never been sentenced, and defense lawyers and security experts
believe he had begun giving evidence about bin Laden to the government in
hopes of winning his release from prison.
Acquaintances said Mohamed's wife, who declined to talk to The Chronicle,
had expressed surprise after his arrest, but she remained loyal,
corresponding with him and visiting him in prison.
The acquaintances said they were shocked and troubled at how easily the
terrorist they knew as Ali Mohamed had duped them.
"It boggles the mind that anyone who lived this close here could possibly
have anything to do with something this horrible," said one.
"It makes you wonder about anyone else we were so taken in by."
Said the other: "I wonder sometimes, when he saw how we lived, if he wasn't
sorry. Or can they just live two lives?"
A TERRORIST'S DUAL LIFE
Ali Mohamed served as a key aide to terrorist leader Osama bin Laden, while
leading a double life as a Northern California suburbanite.
-- 1970 to 1984
Egypt: Officer in Egyptian army. In 1981, joins radical fundamentalist
group, Egyptian
Islamic Jihad, which is blamed for assassination of Egyptian President
Anwar Sadat.
-- About 1985
Santa Clara: Moves to U.S.; marries a Santa Clara woman.
-- 1986 to 1989
Fort Bragg, N.C.: Enlists in the Army; trains officers at a special warfare
center.
-- About 1989
Brooklyn, N.Y.: Trains rebel fighters for Afghan war at privately financed
recruiting center.
-- 1991
Peshawar, Pakistan: Trains terrorists in surveillance and explosives at bin
Laden's paramilitary camps.
-- 1991
Sudan: Secures safe transport for bin Laden from Afghanistan to new base in
Sudan.
-- Early to mid-1990s
Sudan: Arranges security for meeting between bin Laden and Imad Mughniyeh,
security chief for the Iran-sponsored terrorist group Hezbollah.
-- 1992to 1994
Nairobi, Kenya: Sets up bin Laden cell in Kenya and scouts for bombing
targets.
-- 1993 or 1994
Khartoum, Sudan: Shows bin Laden photo of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi. Bin
Laden points out where a truck could go in as a suicide bomber.
-- 1994
United States: Returns to U.S. from Nairobi for FBI interview.
-- 1994 to about 1998
FBI agents trace phone calls from Mohamed's California residences in Santa
Clara and, later, Sacramento to bin Laden associates in Nairobi.
-- Aug. 24, 1998
Sacramento: After embassy bombings, FBI searches Mohamed's Sacramento
apartment. They find documents describing embassy security and outlining
"how to avoid arrest" while conducting surveillance.
-- September 1998
New York: Mohamed is called to New York to testify to a grand jury and is
arrested for lying.
-- October 2000
New York: Pleads guilty to a conspiracy to kill Americans around the world.
Sources: Court records from U.S. District Court in New York; interviews
with defense lawyers and security experts.
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Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT
FROM THE DESK OF:
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The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends
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