RELEVANT. READ AND JUDGE FOR YOURSELF. JUST ONE OF MANY INCIDENCES THAT MOST DO NOT KNOW ABOUT.

For years, the United States had been one of the main fund-raising destinations for Arab and Afghan mujahideen. Sheikh Abdullah Azzam blazed a trail through the mosques of Brooklyn, St. Louis, Kansas City, Seattle, Sacramento, Los Angeles, and San D...iego--altogether there were thirty-three cities in America that opened branches of bin Laden and Azzam's organization, the Services Bureau, in order to support the jihad. The war against the Soviet Union had also created an interntional network of charities, especially dense in the United States, which remained in operation after the Soviet Union broke into splinters and the Afghans turned against each other. Zawahiri hoped to tap this rich American vein for al-Jihad.

Zawahiri's guide in the United States was a singular figure in the history of espionage, Ali Abdelsoud Mohammed. Six-foot-one, two hundred pounds, and exceptionally fit, Mohammed was a martial artist and a skilled linguist who spoke fluent English, French, and Hebrew in addition to his native Arabic. He was disciplined clever, and gregarious, with a marked facility for making friends--the kind of man who was going to get to the top of any organization. He had been a major in the same unit of the Egyptian Army that produced Sadat's assassin, Khaled Islambouli, and the government rightly suspected him of being an Islamic fundamentlist (he was already a member of al-Jihad). When the Egyptian Army cashiered him, Zawahiri gave him the daunting task of penetrating American intelligence.

In 1984, Mohammed boldly walked into the Cairo station of the CIA to offer his services. The officer who assessed hm decided he was probably a plant by Egyptian intelligence; however, he cabled other stations and headquarters to see if there was any interest. The Frankfurt station, which hosted the Iranian office of the agency, responded, and soon Ali found himself in Hamburg as a novice intelligence man. He entered a mosque associated with Hezbollah and immediately told the Iranian cleric in charge that he was an American spy assigned to infiltrate the community. He didn't realize that the agency had already penetrted the mosque; his delcaration was immediately reported.

The CIA says that it terminated Mohhammed, sent out cables labeling him highly untrustworthy, and place him on the State Department watch lit to prevent him from entering the United States. By that time, however, Mohammed was already in California on a visa-waiver program that was sponsored by the agency itself, one designed to shield valuable asssets or those who have performed important services for the country. In order to stay in the United States, he would need to become a citizen, so he married a California woman, Linda Sanchez, a medical technician, whom he met on the transatlantic flight to the United States.

A year after Mohammed arrived, he returned to his military career, this time as an enlisted man in the U.S. Army. He managed to get stationed at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Even though he was only a supply sergeant, Mohammed made a remarkable impression, gaining a special commendation from his commanding officer "-for esceptional performance" and winning fitness awards in competition against some of the most highly trained soldiers in the world. His awed superiors found him "beyond reproach" and "consistently accomplished."

Perhaps the secret to preserving his double identity was that he never disguised his beliefs. He began each morning with dawn prayers, followed by a long run while listening on his Walkman to the Quran, which he was trying to memorize. He cooked his own meals to make sure they followed Islaamic dietary rules. In addition to his military duties, he was pursuing a doctorate in Islamic studies. The American army was so respectful of his views that it asked him to help teach a class on Middle East politics and culture and to make a series of videotapes explaining Islam to his fellow soldiers. According to Mohammed's service records, he "prepred and executed over 40 county orientation for teams deploying to the Middle East." Meantime, he was slipping maps and training manueals off base to downsize and copy at Kinko's. He used these to write the multivolume terrorist training guide that became al-Qaeda's playbook. On weekends he commuted t Brooklyn and Jersey City, where he trained Muslim militants in military tactics. Among them were members of al-Jihad, including el-Sayyid Nosair, a fellow Egyptian who would kill Rabbi Meir Kahane, the Jewish extremist, in 1990.

In 1988 Mohammed casually informed his superior officers that he was taking some leave time to go "kill Russians" in Afghanistan. When he came back, he showed off a couple of belt buckles he said he took from Soviet soldiers he killed in ambush. In fact, he had been training the first al-Qaeda volunteers in techniques of unconventional warfare, including kidnappings, assassinations, and hijacking planes, which he had learned from the American Special Forces.

Mohammed left active military service in 1989 and joined the U.S. Army Reserve. He and his wife settled in the Silicon Valley, He managed to hold a job as a security guard (for a defense contractor that was developing a triggering device for the Trident missile system) despite the fact that he sometimes disappeared for months, ostensibly to "buy rugs" in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Meanwhile, he continued his attempts to penetrate American intelligence. He had applied for a position as a translator at both the CIA and the FBI while in North Carolina.

Then in May 1993, an FBI agent in San Jose named John Zent approached Mohammed, inquiring about the trade in fake driver's licenses. Still hoping to get recruited by American intelligence, Mohaammed steered the conversation toward radical activities in a local mosque, and he told some eye-opening tales about fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. Because of the military nature of these revelations, Zent contacted the Department of Defense, and a team of counter-intelligence specialists from Fort Mead, Maryland, came to San Jose to talk to Mohammed. They spread out maps of Afghanistan on the floor of Zent's office, and Mohammed indicated the mujahideen training camps. He mentioned the name of Osama bin Laden, who Mohammed said was preparing an army to knock off the Saudi regime. Mohammed also spoke about an organization, al-Qaeda, which was operating training camps in Sudan. He even admitted that he was providing the members instruction in hijacking and espionage. The interrogators apparently made nothing of these revelations. It would b three critical years before anyone else in American intelligence wouldhear of al-Qaeda.

Perhaps Mohammed was revealing these details because of some psychological need to elevate his importance. "He saw himself as a James Bond," an FBI agent who later talked to him observed. But it is more likely that this highly directed operative was seeking to fulfill Zawahiri's assignment of penetrating American intelligence. Al-Jihad and al-Qaeda were still separate entities in the spring of 1993, and Zawahiri had not yet signed on to bin Laden's campaign against America. Apparently, Zawahiri was willing to sell out bin Laden in order to get access to American intelligence that would benefit his own organization.

If the FBI and the Department of Defense's counter-intelligence team had responded to Mohammed's overture, they would have had a dangerous, formidably skilled double agent on their hand. Mohammed openly revealed himself as a trusted member of bin Laden's inner circle, but that meant nothing to investigators at the time. Agent Zent filed a report, which went to FBI headquarters and was forgotten. Later, when the bureau sought to retrieve the notes of the conversation with the counter-intelligence specialists from Fort Meade to find out what else had been discussed, the Defense Department said they had been lost.

MONEY FOR AL-JIHAD was always in short supply. Many of Zawahiri's followers had families, and they all needed food and housing. A few had turned to theft and shakedowns to support themselves. Zawahiri strongly disapproved of this; when members of al-Jihad robbed a German military attache in Yemen, he investigated the incident and expelled those responsible. But the money problem remained. He hoped to raise enough money in America to keep his organization alive.

Zawahiri had none of the blind sheikh's charisma or fame, so when he appeared after evening prayers a the al-Nur Mosque in Santa Clara, presenting himself as "Dr. Abdul Muiz," nobody knew who he actually was. Ali Mohammed introduced him to Dr. Ali Zaki, a gynecologist in San Jose, and asked him to accompany them on Dr. Muiz's tour of the Silicon Valley. Zaki took Zawahiri to mosques in Sacramento and Stockton. The two doctors spent most of their time discussing medical problems that Zawahiri encountered in Afghanistan. "We talked about the injured children and the farmers who were missing limbs because of all the Russian mines," Zaki recalled. "He was a well-balanced, highly educated physician." At one point, the two men had a tiff over what Zaki thought was Zawahiri's narrow-minded view of Islam. Like most jihadis, Zawahiri followed the Salafist teachings of Ibn Tamiyyah, the thirteenth-century reformer who had sought to impose a literal interpretation of the Quran. Zaki told Zawahiri that he was leaving out he other two streams of Islam: the mystical, which was born in the writings of al-Harith al-Muhasibi, the founder of Sufism; and the rationalist school, which was reflected in the thought of the great sheikh of al-Azhar, Mohammed Abdu. "Your brand of Islam will never prevail in the West, because the best thing about the West is the freedom to choose,: Zaki said. "Here you see the mystical movement spreading like fire, and the Salafis didn't even convert a single person to Islam!" Zawahiri was unmoved.

Zaki estimated that, at most, the donations produced by these visits to California mosques amounted to several hundred dollars. Ali Mohammed put the figure at two thousand dollars. Whatever the case, Zawahiri returned to Sudan facing a dispiriting choice: whether to maintain the independence of his bootstrap organization that was always struggling financially or to formally join forces with bin Laden.

When they had met nearly a decade before, Zawahiri was by far the more powerful figure; he had an organization behind him and a clear objective: to overthrow the government of Egypt. But now bin Laden, who had always had the advantage of money, also had his own organization, one that was much more ambitious than al-Jihad. In the same way that he ran multiple businesses under a single corporate tent, bin Laden sought to merge all Islamaic terrorist groups into one multinational consortium, with common training and economies of scale and departments devoted to everything from personnel to policy making. The protege had begun to outstrip his mentor, and both men knew this.

Zawahiri also faced the prospect of being overshadowed by the blind sheikh and the activities of the Islamic Group. Despite the fact that Zawahiri had assembled a capable and dedicated cadre, many of them well-educated, skilled operatives like Ali Mohammed, who moved easily from the suburbs of Silicon Valley to the dusty streets of Khartoum, al-Jihad had not undertaken a single successful operation. Meanwhile, the blind sheikh's followers had undertaken an unparalleled rampage of murder and pillage. In order to weaken the government and prod the masses into rebellion, they chose to attack tourism, the tent pole of the Egyptian economy, because it opened the country to Western corruption. The Islamic Group initiated a war on Egypt's security forces by announcing the goal of killing a policeman every day. They also targeted foreigners, Christians, and particularly intellectuals, beginning with the shooting death in 1992 of Farag Foda, a secular columnist who had suggested in his final article that the Islamists
were motivated less by politics than sexual frustration. The blind sheikh also issued a fatwa against Egypt's Nobel Prizze-winning writer, Naguib Mahfouz, calling him an infidel, and in 1994 Mahfouz suffered a near-fatal stabbing. There was a sad irony in this attack: It was Sayyid Qutb who first discovered Mahfouz: later, when Mahfouz was famous, he returned the favor by visiting Qutb in prison. Now Qutb's progeny were savaging the intellectual circle that Qutb had, to some extent, produced.

Zawahiri thought such actions pointless and self-defeating. In his opinion, they succeeded only in provoking the security forces and reducing the opportunity to make an immediate, total change by a military coup, his lifelong goal. In fact, the government crackdown on militants that followed these attacks nearly eliminated both organizations in Egypt.

Zawahiri had imposed a blind-cell sructure on al-Jihad, so that members in one group would not know the identities or activities of those in another; however, Egyptian authorities fortuitously captured the one man who had all the names--the organization's membership director. His computer contained a database with every member's address, his aliases, and his potential hideouts. Supplied with this information, the security forces reeled in hundreds of suspects and charged them with sedition. The press labeled the group, "Vanguards of Conquest," but it was actually a faction of al-Jihad. Although the evidence against them was thin, the judidicial standards weren't very rigorous.

"The government newspapers were elated about the arrest of 800 members of the al-Jihad group without a single-shot being fired," Zawahiri bitterly recounted in his brief memoir. All that remained of the organization he had struggled to build were scattered colonies in other countries--in England, America, Denmar, Yemen and Albania, among others. He realized he had to make a move in order to keep the fragments of his organization together. To do that he needed money.

Despie Jihad's financial precariousness, many of its remaining members were suspicious of bin Laden and had no desire to divert their efforts outside Egypt. Moreover, they were incensed by the roundup of their colleagues in Cairo and the show trial that resulted. They wanted to strike back. Nonetheless, around this time, most of the members of al-Jihad went on the al-Qaeda payroll. Zawahiri viewed he alliance as a temporary marriage of convenience. He later confided to one of his chief assistants that joining with bin Laden had been "the only solution to keeping the Jihad organization abroad alive."

ZAWAHIRI HAD CERTAINLY NOT ABANDONED his dream of capturing Egypt. Indeed, Sudan was an ideal spot from which to launch attacks. The long, trackless, and almost entirely unguarded border between the two countnries facilitated secret movements; ancient caravan trails provided convenient routes for smuggling weapons and explosives into Egypt on the backs of camels; and the active cooperation of Sudan's intelligence agency and its military forces guaranteed a sanctuary for Zawahiri and his men.

Al-Jihad began its assault on Egypt with another attempt on the life of the interior minister, Hasan al-Alfi, who was leading the crackdown on Islamic militants. In August of 1993 a bomb-laden motorcycle exploded next to the minister's car, killing the bomber and his accomplice. "The Minister escaped death, but his arm was broken," Zawahiri lamely noted.

It was another failure, but a significant one, because with this action Zawahiri introduced the use of suicide bombers, which became the signature of al-Jihad assassinations and later of al-Qaeda "martyrdom operations". The strategy broke a powerful religious taboo against suicide. Although Hezbollah, a Shiite organization, had employed suicide truck bombers to attack the American Embassy and the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, such actions had never been undertaken by a Sunni group. In Palestine, suicide bombings were virtually unknown until the mid-nineties, when the Oslo Accords began to unravel. Zawahiri had been to Iran to raise money, and he had sent Ali Mohammed, among others, to Lebanon to train with Hezbollah, so it is likely that the notion of suicide bombings came from this source. Another of Zawahiri's innovations was to tape the bomber's vows of martyrdom on the eve of his mission. Zawahiri distributed cassettes of the bomber's voice justifying his decision to offer his life.

In November, during the ongoing trials of al-Jihad, Zawahiri attempted to kill Egypt's prime minister, Atef Sidqi. A car bomb exploded as the minister was driven past a girls' school in Cairo. The minister, in his armored car, was unhurt, bu the explosion injured twenty-one people and killed a young schoolgirl, Shayma Abdel-Halim, who was crushed by a door blown loose in the blast. Her death outraged Egyptians, who had seen more than 240 people killed by the Islamic Group in the previous two years. Although there was only this one by al-Jihad, little Shayma's death captured people's emotions as nothing else had. When her coffin was borne through the streets of Cairo, people cried, "Terrorism is the enemy of God!"

Zawahiri was shaken by the popular outrage. "The unintended death of this innocent child pained us all, but we were helpless and we had to fight the government,: he wrote in his memoir. He offered to pay blood money to the girl's family. The Egyptian government arrested 280 more of his followers; 6 were eventually totally given a sentence of death. Zawahiri wrote: "This meant that they wanted my daughter, who was two at the time, and the daughters of other colleagues, to be orphans. Who cried or cared for our daughters?"