Bin Laden's man " Mohamed the American" in Silicon Valley
Patty
"Mohamed the American' orchestrated terrorist acts while living a quiet suburban
life in Santa Clara
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?"
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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.