The Management of Savagery. Max Blumenthal
during the 1941 Lviv pogrom; the brutal Argentinian former dictator Jorge Rafael Videla; and Guatemalan death squad leader Mario Sandoval Alarcón. Ignoring the rogue’s gallery that comprised WACL’s leadership, Reagan honored the group for playing “a leadership role in drawing attention to the gallant struggle now being waged by the true freedom fighters of our day.”
Before journalists Scott and Jon Lee Anderson published their damning investigative book on the WACL, Inside the League, in 1986, the unsavory connections fostered by the Reagan White House and its Republican congressional allies received little attention from the mainstream press. The same was generally true for Washington’s anticommunist proxies, from Central America to Afghanistan.
When mujahedin rebels committed atrocities, like the massacre by bin Laden’s fighters of seventy Afghan government officers who had surrendered at Torkham in 1988, newspaper editors generally turned their attention elsewhere. The rebels’ rampage on Kunduz in 1988, which saw rape and pillaging on a mass scale, also drew little attention. And when Hekmatyar’s forces butchered thirty fellow rebels—all top CIA trainees—State Department spokesman Richard Boucher casually dismissed a lone reporter’s critical questions: “I think what you’re doing is taking one incident and blowing it out of proportion,” Boucher protested.
A year later, with encouragement from the CIA to “put pressure” on Kabul, Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami opened up a campaign of terrorist bombings around the city. When Ed McWilliams, a foreign service officer at the US embassy in Kabul, attempted to report back to Washington about a car bombing by one of Hekmatyar’s men that had torn through a neighborhood of minority Hazaras and left a pile of dead civilians, he was rebuked. McWilliams explained to journalist Andrew Cockburn that the CIA had demanded that he “report a little less specifically about the humanitarian consequences of those vehicle bombs.”
The American covert war in Afghanistan helped inflame the worst refugee crisis in history, turning Afghans into the largest refugee group in the world at the time and what Rüdiger Schöch, a researcher for the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR), described as “victims of political instrumentalization” by the powers driving the conflict. According to Schöch, the Afghans were not received in Pakistan as refugees fleeing persecution in their own country, but rather as “partisan holy warriors in a struggle against atheist tyranny” who were “accepted practically under the condition of their outspoken opposition against the regime in Kabul.”
His report concluded that “even though UNHCR confines its humanitarian programme to persons of its concern, there is ample evidence that the [Pakistani] government as the operational partner is permitting, by acts of commission or omission, humanitarian assistance to flow into the hands of freedom fighters participating in the ‘Holy Jehad.’”
As the refugees from Afghanistan and other destabilized nations began to reach Europe during the 1980s, right-wing forces that had lain dormant since the end of World War II began to mobilize for a new Kulturkampf. In 1985, Norway saw its first right-wing terror attack with the firebombing of the Nor Mosque in Oslo, a congregation of the demonstratively “moderate” Ahmadiyya sect. The attack was preceded by public remonstrations by the right-wing National Popular Party against liberal politicians for allowing the entry of “thousands of Muslims who now demand the right to practice their religion.”
As the number of refugees rose in the late 1980s, far-right elements that had organized around their loathing of European Jews now transferred their resentment onto Muslims, declaring followers of Islam the main threat to the survival of Western civilization. As Norwegian social anthropologist Sindre Bangstad noted, the far-right Popular Movement Against Immigration drew its activist core from former volunteers for the Waffen SS Nordic division. Among them was Arne Myrdal, who publicly heralded the birth of a “resistance movement” that was “fighting against the Muslim invasion of our country and against the national traitors who assist them.”
Back in Washington, where the Reagan administration made the call to arm the most ferocious Islamist commanders of the Afghan mujahedin, the administration was becoming suspicious of America’s well-educated, rapidly assimilating Arab population. In 1987, Reagan’s Immigration and Naturalization Service drew up a formal blueprint to hold Arab Americans at a concentration camp in Oakdale, Louisiana, in the event of a future war with Middle Eastern countries. Slowly but surely, the government was establishing the groundwork for holding American Arabs and Muslims collectively responsible for the actions of the band of fanatics the government had secretly armed and trained.
Ali the American
In the United States, an archipelago of front organizations shepherded men and money to the Afghan battlefield right under the nose of the FBI. The top recruitment center in the United States was an inauspicious storefront on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn called the Al-Kifah Afghan Refugee Center. Acting as staffers of a relief organization, the center’s leadership dispatched impressionable young Muslim men to Afghanistan while raising money from private sources across the country. Al-Kifah was, in fact, the American branch of the Peshawar-based Services Bureau funded by bin Laden and overseen by his mentor, Azzam. Historian Alfred McCoy later described Al-Kifah as “a place of pivotal importance to [the CIA’s] Operation Cyclone, the clandestine American training effort to support the mujahadeen.”
An Egyptian immigrant, Mustafa Shalabi, directed the Al-Kifah operation and answered directly to Azzam. Throughout the 1980s, Azzam barnstormed America, rustling up money and manpower for the anti-Soviet jihad. Barnett Rubin, a scholarly expert on Afghanistan and Pakistan, told journalist Robert Friedman that Azzam “was ‘enlisted’ by the CIA to unite fractious rebel groups operating in Peshawar.” His anticommunist agenda dovetailed neatly with the CIA’s; indeed, few figures played as pivotal a role as Azzam did in exporting Islamism into secular Arab societies and undercutting socialist movements in the Middle East. Azzam coordinated his efforts abroad with Omar Abdel-Rahman, the so-called “Blind Sheikh” who was adored in jihadist circles for his masterfully accessible application of tracts by Ibn Taymiyyah and other proto-Wahhabist scholars to the contemporary crises facing the Islamic world. Credited with the fatwa that provided justification for the 1981 assassination of Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat, Abdel-Rahman wound up being expelled from Egypt instead of jailed. Like Azzam, the CIA paid Abdel-Rahman’s way to Peshawar, where he joined Hekmatyar, the CIA’s favorite warlord, and functioned as his charismatic sidekick.
Ayman al-Zawahiri, a wealthy surgeon who led Al-Jihad, rounded out the Services Bureau leadership by bringing Egypt’s most potent jihadist organization to the table. Unlike Abdel-Rahman, Zawahiri had done hard jail time for the Sadat assassination plot and suffered grisly abuses in the dungeons of Egyptian state security. After his release, Zawahiri testified to being whipped with electric cables and attacked by wild dogs that, according to journalist Lawrence Wright, had been trained to rape prisoners. Over time, Zawahiri became obsessed with revenge. “In striking the enemy, he would create a new reality,” Wright wrote. “His strategy was to force the Egyptian regime to become even more repressive, to make the people hate it.”
One of Zawahiri’s most potent weapons came in the form of an Egyptian special-forces soldier drummed out of the army for his untethered extremism. Muscular and six foot two, a martial arts expert who boasted a degree in psychology and proficiency in four languages, the army veteran had somehow managed to find work as a security advisor for Egypt Air, the national airline. Sensing an enticing opportunity, Zawahiri assigned the recruit with his first mission: scout out Cairo’s airport and prepare a detailed plan for an aerial hijacking. Thus began the saga of Ali Abdel Saoud Mohamed, a brazen and brilliant covert operator known in Al Qaeda’s inner circle as “Ali the American.”
With startling ease, Mohamed infiltrated the CIA, FBI and US Army, tapping his high-level government connections to evade investigation while he provided invaluable intelligence to the Al Qaeda handlers to whom he owed his loyalty. Though Mohamed’s case might seem extraordinary, it fit within the CIA’s Cold War–era modus operandi, which flagrantly disregarded national security imperatives to achieve imperial goals—in this case, anticommunism—that seemed much more urgent at the time.
Again and again, Mohamed furnished his superior officers with specific information