In Life of Double-Crosses, Egyptian Worked With Green Berets and Bin Laden
SHARON THEIMER Associated Press Writers
By Tom Hays and
Published: Dec 29, 2001
When the Green Berets needed insight on the Middle East, they turned to one
of the U.S. Army's own: Sgt. Ali Mohamed.
When Osama bin Laden wanted help training troops and raising money for his
al-Qaida terrorist network, he enlisted the same man, known as "Abu Mohamed
ali Amriki," or "Mohamed the American."
Now in U.S. custody at an undisclosed location, the Egyptian-born Mohamed,
49, ranks as one of the most puzzling figures in the war on terrorism.
His story shows how a terrorist managed to infiltrate American society and
join the Army, then turn his military training against his adopted country.
In the end he also betrayed bin Laden, supplying the FBI with inside
information on al-Qaida as part of a plea deal with federal prosecutors in
the 1998 terrorist bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa.
"He is one of the people who lurks in the background of this whole
conspiracy," prosecutor Kenneth Karas said at the embassy bombing trial in
New York earlier this year.
Court records, including Mohamed's own admissions in his guilty plea last
year, portray a man who mixed easily with civilians in California, soldiers
in Fort Bragg, N.C., and terrorists in Nairobi, Kenya.
The trail of double-crosses can be traced to 1981. That year, as an
Egyptian army captain fluent in English, he completed a program for foreign
officers offered by the Special Forces school at Fort Bragg.
There, Mohamed learned unconventional warfare - the same training given
Green Berets, minus classified classes. He has admitted that around the
same time, he became involved with Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a militant
Muslim group eventually absorbed by al-Qaida.
Mohamed left the Egyptian Army in 1984 and contacted the CIA, offering to
be a spy, according to a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The CIA learned he was boasting of a relationship with the agency, judged
him unreliable and dropped him as a source, the official said. He was later
placed on a U.S. government watch list, according to U.S. officials.
Mohamed moved to the United States in 1985, settling in northern California
and becoming a U.S. citizen. He married Linda Lee Sanchez of Santa Clara,
Calif., that year at The Chapel of the Bells in Reno, Nev. Sanchez, on
advice from her attorney, has declined to comment on Mohamed.
In 1986, at age 34, Mohamed joined the U.S. Army in Oakland, Calif. Army
officials said they did not know to what extent his background was checked.
He returned to Fort Bragg as an enlisted man in 1987, working as a supply
sergeant for Special Forces. He never became a Green Beret or received
security clearance, but he gave briefings on Islamic fundamentalism and the
Middle East at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School.
During one lecture, he told soldiers they had nothing to fear from devout
Muslims, court records show.
"The word fundamentalism scares people in the West," he said. "The word
fundamentalism does not mean extremism."
At the same time, Mohamed was moonlighting as a trainer for soldiers of a
different stripe: militant Muslims in Brooklyn hoping to join the fight
against a Soviet puppet government in Afghanistan.
One member of the group, Khalid Ibrahim, testified at a 1995 trial that
Mohamed trained them to fire AK47 assault rifles at a Connecticut shooting
range. The witness also told how Mohamed gave classes in a Jersey City,
N.J., apartment on "how to find your way by looking at the stars" and "how
to recognize some of the weapons if you see them, like tanks."
Some of Mohamed's students were later found guilty of plotting terrorist
attacks, including the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and a plot to
blow up New York City landmarks.
Seized from the apartment of one of the convicted terrorists were manuals
from the Kennedy school swiped by Mohamed, including an "enemy weapons
guide" describing the Soviet arsenal, according to court testimony. Defense
lawyers have said other documents included "top secret" plans for a Special
Forces training exercise for an attack on a section of Pakistan.
Army officials and prosecutors declined to discuss the specifics of the
documents that ended up in the hands of America's future enemy. But a
Special Forces spokesman, Maj. Gary Kolb, called the value of a late-1980s
training manual in today's Afghanistan "debatable."
Back then, no breach of security was evident at Fort Bragg. Kolb said an
officer who worked with Mohamed "did have some suspicions about what he
did, but nothing came as a result of it. It really depended on who you
believed."
Mohamed received at least two medals for "meritorious achievement" before
being honorably discharged in 1989.
After he left the U.S. Army, Mohamed took up al-Qaida's cause. Ibrahim
recalled encountering a westernized Mohamed at a mountain training camp in
Afghanistan in 1992. L'Houssain Kherchtou - a former bin Laden follower who
testified in the embassy bombings trial - remembered meeting Mohamed at a
training session in Pakistan in the early 1990s. Known as "Amriki," or "the
American," Mohamed was "very, very strict and not gentle" while giving
explosives and reconnaissance training.
Trainees were warned in advance that Mohamed "was a severe man" who was
"not a good practitioner of Islam," Kherchtou said through an interpreter.
"You can hear from him some bad words."
Mohamed, during his plea, admitted teaching al-Qaida foot soldiers how to
create cell structures that could be used for operations. He also trained
bin Laden's security detail.
The plea provided one of the most direct links between bin Laden and the
bombings that killed 231 people - 12 Americans and 219 Africans - at the
U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
Mohamed claimed bin Laden in late 1993 asked him to conduct surveillance of
American, British, French and Israeli targets in Nairobi. His diagrams and
photographs were reviewed by bin Laden, who "looked at the picture of the
American Embassy and pointed to where a truck could go as a suicide
bomber," he said.
Returning to California in the mid-1990s, Mohamed helped a top aide to bin
Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, raise money for the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. He
also monitored the trial of Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman - the blind Egyptian
cleric convicted in the 1995 New York terrorism trials - for bin Laden.
Once terrorists had struck the embassies, Mohamed said he planned to return
to Egypt and then join bin Laden in Afghanistan. But prosecutors have said
he also contacted the FBI, telling agents that bin Laden was responsible
for the attacks.
Mohamed was subpoenaed to testify before a New York grand jury before being
indicted on conspiracy charges. He pleaded guilty in October 2000.
"Abu Mohamed ali Amriki" has not been seen in public since.
It remains unclear how Mohamed managed to enter the United States and join
the Army in the 1980s, despite the CIA's misgivings. Equally unclear is how
he was able to maintain his terror ties in the 1990s without being banished
by either side, even after the Special Forces documents he stole turned up
in the 1995 New York trial.
The State Department, CIA and FBI declined to answer questions about
Mohamed. Officials have refused to discuss how much he has helped in their
investigations as he awaits sentencing, which has been postponed indefinitely.
Given what's known, Mohamed fits the profile of a double agent, said Larry
Johnson, former deputy chief of counterterrorism for the State Department.
He believes Mohamed was an FBI informant before the embassy bombings.
"I just see it as the FBI screwed up," Johnson said. "They didn't do a good
job of information management."
Rusty Capps, a retired FBI agent and president of the Center for
Counterintelligence and Security Studies, said Mohamed seemed too
interested in "trying to impress people" to be reliable.
"If I were al-Qaida, if I were the CIA, if I were the FBI, I would not want
to have a person like this anywhere within a thousand miles of me," Capps
said.
In the Army, Mohamed "was doing what was asked of him, and there was no
reason to suspect anything differently," Kolb said. "Would we like to go
back and change things? Definitely. Then maybe a lot of this would never
have happened."
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EDITOR'S NOTE - AP reporter Larry Neumeister in New York also contributed
to this story.
