FBI embarrassed. More incompetence exposed.
The past 10 years has been a parade of botched investigations, mismanagement and incompetence.
Isopatch
sfgate.com
<Al Qaeda terrorist worked with FBI. Ex-Silicon Valley resident plotted.embassy attacks
Lance Williams and Erin McCormick, Chronicle Staff Writers Sunday, November 4, 2001
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 sources familiar with his case.
Ali Mohamed, an Egyptian-born U.S. citizen and
longtime Silicon Valley resident who pleaded guilty
last year to terrorism charges, approached the
Central Intelligence Agency more than 15 years ago
and offered to inform on Middle Eastern terrorist
groups, a U.S. government official said.
Later, according to the sources, Mohamed spent
years as an FBI informant while concealing his own
deep involvement in the al Qaeda terrorist band:
training bin Laden's bodyguards and Islamic guerrillas
in camps in Afghanistan and the Sudan; bringing
Ayman al-Zawahiri, who is bin Laden's chief deputy,
to the Bay Area on a covert fund-raising mission;
and planning the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy
in Nairobi, in which more than 200 people died.
The story of Mohamed's dual roles as FBI informant
and bin Laden terrorist - - and the freedom he had to
operate unchecked in the United States -- illustrates
the problems facing U.S. intelligence services as they
attempt to penetrate the shadowy, close-knit world of
al Qaeda, experts said.
Mohamed "clearly was a double agent," Larry C.
Johnson, a former deputy director in the State
Department's Office of Counter Terrorism and a
onetime CIA employee, said in an interview.
Johnson said the CIA had found Mohamed unreliable
and severed its relationship with him shortly after
Mohamed approached the agency in 1984. Johnson
faulted the FBI for later using Mohamed as an
informant, saying the bureau should have recognized
that the man was a high-ranking terrorist, deeply
involved in plotting violence against the United States
and its allies.
"It's possible that the FBI thought they had control of
him and were trying to use him, but what's clear is
that they did not have control," Johnson said. "The
FBI assumed he was their source, but his loyalties
lay elsewhere."
The affair was "a study in incompetence, in how not
to run an agent," Johnson said.
FBI spokesman Joseph Valiquette declined to
comment on Mohamed, as did a spokesman for
Manhattan U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White, whose
office prosecuted the case of the 1998 bombings of
the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
A law enforcement source familiar with the case
said the FBI had followed appropriate procedures in
attempting to obtain crucial information from
Mohamed, whom he conceded was "double-dealing"
and difficult.
"When you operate assets and informants, they're
holding the cards," this source said. "They can
choose to be 100 percent honest or 10 percent
honest. You don't have much control over them.
"Maybe (the informant) gives you a great kernel of
information, and then you can't find him for eight
weeks. Is that a management problem? Hindsight is
20/20."
Mohamed, 49, 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, 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.
Mohamed's behavior and his background were so
unusual that his commanding officer, Lt. Col. Robert
Anderson, became convinced that he was both a
"dangerous fanatic" and an operative of U.S.
intelligence.
Anderson, now a businessman in North Carolina, said
that on their first meeting in 1988, Mohamed told him,
"Anwar Sadat was a traitor and he had to die."
Later that year, Anderson said, Mohamed announced
that -- contrary to all Army regulations -- he intended
to go on vacation to Afghanistan to join the Islamic
guerrillas in their civil war against the Soviets. A
month later, he returned, boasting that he had killed
two Soviet soldiers and giving away as souvenirs
what he claimed were their uniform belts.
Anderson said he wrote detailed reports aimed at
getting Army intelligence to investigate Mohamed --
and have him court-martialed and deported -- but the
reports were ignored.
"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 visa, getting to California . . . getting into the Army
and getting assigned to a Special Forces unit," he
said. "That just doesn't happen. "
It was equally unthinkable that an ordinary American
GI would go unpunished after fighting in a foreign
war, he said.
Anderson said all this convinced him that Mohamed
was "sponsored" by a U.S. intelligence service. "I
assumed the CIA," he said.
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.
The case shows "the sophistication of the bin Laden
network, and how they were toying with us," he said.
Some information about the nature of Mohamed's
contacts with the FBI and other law-enforcement
agencies is contained in an FBI affidavit filed in U.S.
District Court in New York at the time of his 1998
arrest. The document describes contacts between
Mohamed and the FBI and Defense Department
officials.
At times, Mohamed made alarming admissions about
his links to the al Qaeda terrorists, seemingly without
fear of being arrested. Mohamed willfully deceived
the agents about his activities, according to the
affidavit.
In 1993, the 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.
In August 1998, after the U.S. embassies in Kenya
and Tanzania were bombed, he told the FBI that he
knew who did it, but refused to provide the names.
Two weeks later, after lying to a U.S. grand jury
investigating the embassy bombings, he was arrested.
He pleaded guilty last year, but he has never been
sentenced and is once again believed to be providing
information to the government -- this time from a
prison cell.
"There's a hell of a lot (U.S. officials) didn't know
about Ali Mohamed," said Harvey Kushner, a
terrorism expert and criminology professor at the
University of Long Island. "He infiltrated our armed
services and duped them."
Yet, Kushner said, such duplicitous interactions may
be a necessary component of intelligence work.
"I hate to say it, but these relationships are something
we should be involved in more of. That's the nasty
(part) of covert operations. We're not dealing with
people we can trust."> |
