Dirty Wars Read online

  Nasser wanted to raise Anwar as an American, not just in nationality but also in character. In 1971, when the family moved so Nasser could complete his PhD at the University of Nebraska, they signed young Anwar up for swimming lessons at the local YMCA. “He was actually swimming when he was only two and a half years old,” Nasser recalled. “And he was very brilliant at it.” As we sat in his living room at his home in Sana’a, Nasser pulled out the family photo album and showed me pictures of little Anwar, posed on a rug in a staged picture taken at a shopping mall. Eventually, the family settled down in St. Paul, where Nasser got a job at the University of Minnesota and enrolled Anwar at Chelsea Heights Elementary School. “He was an all-American boy,” he said, showing me a picture of Anwar in his classroom. Anwar, with long, flowing hair, is smiling as he points out Yemen on a globe. Another family photo shows a lanky adolescent Anwar wearing sunglasses and a baseball hat at Disneyland. “Anwar was really raised like any other American boy, he used to like sports and he was very brilliant at school, you know. He was a good student, and he participated in all kinds of sports.”

  In 1977, Nasser decided to move the family back to Yemen—for how long he did not know. Nasser believed he had an obligation to use his US education to help his very poor home country. He knew that he wanted Anwar to return to the United States one day for university, but he also believed it would be good for the young boy to learn about his family’s homeland. So, on the last day of 1977, the family returned to Sana’a. Six-year-old Anwar could barely speak Arabic, though he quickly picked it up. He had risen to number four in his class in Sana’a by the end of his first semester and within a year was speaking Arabic with ease. Nasser and his colleagues eventually started a private school that taught in both English and Arabic. Anwar was in the first class, along with Ahmed Ali Abdullah Saleh, the son of Yemen’s president. The two boys would be classmates for eight years. Ahmed Ali would go on to become one of the most feared men in Yemen and the head of its Republican Guard. Anwar, meanwhile, set off on a course to follow in his father’s academic footsteps.

  Anwar would spend the next twelve years in Yemen, as his father became closer to his American friends in Sana’a. Nasser and several other US- and British-educated Yemenis worked with the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and started a college of agriculture with $15 million in funding from the United States. In 1988, Nasser was appointed Yemen’s minister of agriculture. After Anwar finished high school in Yemen, a colleague of Nasser’s from USAID offered to help find a good college for Anwar in the United States. Nasser wanted his son to study “civil engineering, particularly regarding hydraulics, and the problem of water resources in Yemen. Because Yemen is really suffering from the shortage of water.” His USAID friend suggested Colorado State University (CSU) and helped Anwar get a US government scholarship. In order for Anwar to get the scholarship, he had to have a Yemeni passport. “At that time, I was just a regular university professor, I didn’t have the finances to send my son to study in the United States at my own expense,” recalled Nasser. “So the American USAID director told me it is easy, if Anwar can get a Yemeni passport, then he will be qualified for the scholarship from USAID. So, we got Anwar a Yemeni passport.” The Yemeni authorities listed his birthplace as Aden, Yemen. This would later cause trouble for Anwar.

  ANWAR LANDED AT O’HARE AIRPORT in Chicago on June 3, 1990, and then moved to Fort Collins, Colorado, to study civil engineering. “His dream, as a young man, was really to finish his studies [in the United States] and come and serve in Yemen,” said Nasser. During Anwar’s first year at the university, the United States launched the Gulf War against Iraq. Nasser recalled a phone call he received from Anwar when the US bombs started falling on Baghdad. He was watching Peter Arnett, the famed CNN correspondent, reporting from the Iraqi capital. “He saw pictures from CNN that it was a complete blackout over Baghdad. So Anwar was thinking that Baghdad was really, completely destroyed. Baghdad has a lot of cultural meaning to Muslims, because it was the site of the Abbasid dynasty. So he was really disappointed at what happened. And so at that time he started really to worry about general Muslim problems.”

  Anwar admitted that when he first went to the United States for college, he “was not [a] fully practicing” Muslim, but after the Gulf War began he started to become politicized and eventually headed up the Muslim Student Association on campus. Anwar had also become interested in the war in Afghanistan and, during winter break in 1992, Anwar traveled to the country. The US-backed mujahedeen had expelled the Soviet occupiers in 1989, yet Afghanistan remained embroiled in civil war and the country was a popular destination for young Muslims, including a staggering number of Yemenis, to explore a front of jihad. “The invasion of Kuwait took place, followed by the Gulf War. That is when I started taking my religion more seriously,” Anwar later recalled. “I took the step of traveling to Afghanistan to fight. I spent a winter there and returned with the intention of finishing up in the US and leaving to Afghanistan for good. My plan was to travel back in summer; however, Kabul was opened by the mujahedeen and I saw that the war was over and ended up staying in the US.”

  Anwar’s grades started slipping at the university as he became more invested in politics and religion. He later claimed that he lost his scholarship because of his activism. “Word came to me from a connection at the US Embassy in Sana’a, that they have been receiving reports about my Islamic activities on campus and the fact that I have traveled to Afghanistan and this was the single reason for the termination of my scholarship,” he alleged. In retrospect, this appears to have been a defining moment in Anwar’s trajectory. A spark had been created that, when combined with the events that followed it, altered his path. Years later, Anwar theorized that the scholarship he was given was part of a US government plot to recruit students from around the world as agents for America. “The US government through its programs of scholarships for foreign students has created for itself a pool of cadres around the world. From among these are leaders in every field, heads of state, politicians, businessmen, scientists, etc. They have one thing in common: They were all students in American Universities,” he wrote. “These programs have helped the US bolster its strength worldwide and spread out its control. The way the US is managing an empire without calling it an empire is one of the great innovations of our time.” The story he told about himself was one of a rare individual who had resisted this imperial design. “The plans to have me as one of the many thousand men and women around the world who have their loyalty to the US did not go through. I wasn’t suitable for that role anymore. I was a fundamentalist now!”

  The members of the Awlaki family did not consider themselves particularly religious, just good Muslims who prayed five times a day and tried to live their lives in accordance with the Koran. Religion was not unimportant by any means, but for the Awlakis, their tribal identity came first. They were also modern people with relationships with international diplomats and businessmen. As he was becoming politicized, Anwar attended a mosque near his university in Colorado and the local imam asked him to deliver a sermon one Friday. Anwar agreed and realized he had a gift for public speaking. He began to think that maybe preaching, not engineering, was his true calling. “He was a very, very, very promising person. And we were hoping for a good future for him,” recalled Anwar’s uncle, Sheikh Saleh bin Fareed, a wealthy businessman and the head of the Aulaq tribe in Yemen. “I think Anwar was born to be a leader. It was in his blood, and his mentality.”

  Anwar graduated from CSU in 1994 and decided to stay in Colorado after graduation. He married a cousin from Yemen and took a job as an imam at the Denver Islamic Society. Nasser told me that Anwar never spoke of becoming an imam when he left for America but that he fell into it after being asked to preach a few times. “He thought this is an area where he can be [of help] and can do something. So I guess it started just by coincidence. But then I guess he liked it, so he decided to shift from professional engineering” to a vo
cation preaching Islam. Anwar became interested in the writings and speeches of Malcolm X and concerned about the plight of the African American community. In Denver, “He started to think about social issues in America, and he knew many black people and he went to see them in prisons, tried to help them,” said Nasser. “So he became more involved in the social problems in the United States, regarding Muslims, and other minorities.” A member of his mosque in Denver later said of Awlaki, “He could talk to people directly—looking them in the eye. He had this magic.” An elder from Awlaki’s Denver mosque later told the New York Times that he’d had a dispute with Awlaki after the young imam advised a young Saudi worshipper to join the Chechen jihad against Russia. “He had a beautiful tongue,” the elder said. “But I told him: Don’t talk to my people about jihad.”

  On September 13, 1995, Anwar’s wife gave birth to their first child, a boy named Abdulrahman. A year later, in 1996, Anwar moved his young family to San Diego, California, where he became an imam at the Masjid al Ribat al Islami. He also began working on a master’s degree in education leadership at San Diego State University. In the late 1990s, as the United States was gearing up for the 2000 presidential election, Nasser traveled to the United States to receive medical treatment and visited his son in San Diego. Nasser showed me a photo of a full-bearded Anwar on a boat, holding up a massive fish he caught. “He was already an imam with a big beard, you know,” Nasser recalled, smiling at the picture of his son, who wore a yellow T-shirt emblazoned with the logo of a local Islamic organization and a baseball cap. A former San Diego neighbor of Awlaki’s, Lincoln Higgie III, described Awlaki as “very outgoing and cheerful,” with a “very retiring wife” and an “adorable” child. “He liked to go albacore fishing,” Higgie recalled, “so every once in a while he would bring me some albacore fillets that his wife cooked up.”

  While visiting his son, Nasser attended Friday prayers and watched Anwar preach. “It was regular mosque. It had a capacity of about four hundred people, and most of the people who came to the mosque were regular Muslims: engineers, doctors, and people who had restaurants and things like that. From all over the Muslim world, from the Arab world,” Nasser remembered. “I used to listen to his sermons. In fact, at that time, he was asking Muslims to participate in the democratic process in America, and he was encouraging—in fact, during the 2000 presidential campaign of George W. Bush, he thought the conservative Republicans would be better than the liberal Democrats, and he encouraged the Muslims there to elect George Bush. Because, he said, he was against abortions and things like that. These things conform to Muslim tradition,” Nasser recalled. “So he was very active with the Muslim community, actually, and he never supported any violent things. He was very peaceful in America. All he did, really, was to represent Islam in its best.”

  In 1999, Anwar had his first run-in with the FBI, when he was flagged by the Bureau because of his alleged contact with Ziyad Khaleel, an al Qaeda associate who US intelligence believed had bought a battery for bin Laden’s satellite phone. He had also been visited by a colleague of Omar Abdel Rahman, the “blind sheikh” convicted of masterminding the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The 1999 investigation reportedly uncovered other ties the FBI found troubling, such as to the Holy Land Foundation, a Muslim charity vilified for raising funds for Palestinian charitable institutions linked to Hamas, a US State Department–designated terrorist organization. For two years while in San Diego, according to tax records procured by the FBI, Awlaki was the vice president of another organization, the Charitable Society for Social Welfare (CSSW). According to an FBI agent, this was merely another “front organization to funnel money to terrorists.” Though no charges were ever brought against CSSW, federal prosecutors described it as a subsidiary of a larger organization founded by Abdul Majeed al Zindani, a well-known Yemeni with alleged al Qaeda ties. However, by this logic, the US Department of Labor would also be guilty by association, for providing CSSW projects with millions of dollars between 2004 and 2008. Anwar’s family dismisses the suggestion that Anwar was raising money for terrorist groups and insists he was raising money for orphans in Yemen and elsewhere in the Arab world. The US investigation into Anwar was soon closed, for lack of evidence. In March 2000, the FBI concluded that Awlaki “does not meet the criterion for [further] investigation.” But it wasn’t the last time Anwar would hear from the FBI.

  Two men who prayed at Anwar’s mosque in San Diego, Khalid al Mihdhar and Nawaf al Hazmi, would soon be among the nineteen hijackers who conducted the 9/11 attacks. When Anwar moved the family to Falls Church, Virginia, in 2000, Hazmi also attended his mosque. After 9/11, US investigators would charge that Anwar was al Hazmi’s “spiritual adviser.” Nasser told me he asked his son about his connections to Hazmi and Mihdhar and told me that Anwar had only a sporadic, clerical relationship with the men. “I asked him myself. He said, ‘They prayed in the mosque like anybody else, and I met them casually,’” Nasser asserted, asking, “How in the world do you think al Qaeda would have faith in Anwar to tell him about their biggest thing they were preparing for? It is unbelievable, because at that time he had no links whatsoever with any group like that. Definitely. And I’m 100 percent sure of that.”

  Listening to Anwar’s sermons from this era, there is no hint that he had any affinity for al Qaeda. In 2000, Anwar began recording CDs of his sermons and selling them as box sets. The sermons were extremely popular among Muslims in the United States and elsewhere in the English-speaking world. He recorded more than a hundred CDs in all, most of them consisting of lectures on the lives of the Prophet Muhammad, and on Jesus and Moses, as well as theories about the “Hereafter.” As the New York Times put it, “The recordings appear free of obvious radicalism.” Invitations began streaming in, inviting Awlaki to speak to mosques and Islamic centers across the United States and around the globe. “I was very pleased with him,” said Abu Muntasir, a founding member of a UK group called JIMAS, which hosted Awlaki several times. “He filled a gap for western Muslims who were seeking expressions of their religion which differed from the Islam of their parents’ generation, to which they found it difficult to relate.”

  Despite the nonpolitical nature of his preaching, Anwar later alleged that US intelligence agents had sent “moles” into his San Diego mosque to gather information on its activities. “There was nothing happening at the mosque that would fall under the loose category of what we today refer to as terrorism but nevertheless, it is my firm belief that the government, for some reason, was actively trying to plant moles inside the mosque,” he charged.

  There is another strange mystery regarding Anwar’s early run-ins with the FBI, one that will likely never be solved. While he was an imam in San Diego, Anwar was busted twice on charges of soliciting prostitutes. In the first case, he pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and paid a $400 fine and in the other, he was fined $240, given three years’ probation and sentenced to two weeks of community service. The arrests would later be used to paint Anwar as a hypocrite, but the preacher offered up a different explanation: the US government was trying to blackmail him into becoming an informant. In 1996, Anwar claimed, he was in his minivan at a stoplight waiting for it to turn green when his vehicle was approached by a middle-aged woman who knocked on the passenger-seat window. “By the time I rolled down the window and before even myself or the woman uttering a word I was surrounded by police officers who had me come out of my vehicle only to be handcuffed,” he recalled. “I was accused of soliciting a prostitute and then released. They made it a point to make me know in no uncertain terms that the woman was an undercover cop. I didn’t know what to make of the incident.” Then, Anwar said, a few days later he was visited by two men he said identified themselves as federal agents, who told him they wanted his “cooperation.” Anwar said they wanted him to “liaise with them concerning the Muslim community of San Diego. I was greatly irritated by such an offer and made it clear to them that they should never expect such cooperation from myself. I
never heard back from them again until” a year later. That was his second bust for soliciting. “This time I was told that this is a sting operation and you would not be able to get out of it,” Anwar recalled.

  Perhaps he really was soliciting prostitutes, and his self-projection as a pious man was an elaborate deception. But there would be other indications later that Anwar Awlaki may not have been regarded by US intelligence simply as a target of investigation, but also as a potential collaborator.

  Anwar was unsettled by his run-ins with the law in California. “I believed that if the issue in San Diego was with local government I should be safe from it if I move somewhere else,” he recalled. Nasser arranged for him to get a partial scholarship at George Washington University in Washington, DC, to pursue a PhD. By that point, Anwar’s wife had given birth to their second child and he needed to find employment. So, he lined up work as a chaplain for the university’s interreligious council and landed a job as an imam at a popular mosque in Virginia, Dar al Hijrah. “Our community needed an imam who could speak English...someone who could convey [a modern narrative about Islam] with the full force of faith,” said Johari Abdul Malik, the outreach director at Dar al Hijrah. The mosque wanted someone who could present the messages of the Koran to an audience of American Muslims. Awlaki, Malik said, “was that person. And he delivered that message dutifully.” The family settled into suburban Virginia in January 2001. Although Anwar’s reflections years later indicate that his rage against the United States was building in the years preceding 9/11, if that was true, he did a great job of masking it with his public profile as a highly respected figure in the mainstream Muslim community.

  ON THE MORNING OF SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, Anwar Awlaki was sitting in the backseat of a taxi. He had just arrived at Reagan National Airport in DC and was heading home after catching a red-eye back from a conference in Irvine, California. He heard the news of the attacks in the taxi and told the driver to head straight for his mosque. Awlaki and his colleagues were immediately concerned that the mosque could be targeted in the rage that was brewing. That night, police were called to Anwar’s mosque after a man pulled his car up in front of the building and screamed threats at those inside for thirty minutes straight. The mosque closed for three days as a result and issued a press release condemning the attacks. “Most of the questions are, ‘How should we react?’” Awlaki said to the Washington Post, explaining the leadership’s reasons for shuttering the mosque. “Our answers are, especially for our sisters who are more visible because of the dress: Stay home until things calm down.” When the mosque reopened, a Muslim-owned security firm was hired to search cars and handbags and pat down people entering the building. Local churches offered support to Dar al Hijrah, including escorts for Muslim women afraid to venture out to mosque. This was a fact that Anwar lauded publicly to his congregation and to reporters, but he also kept worshippers informed about anti-Muslim prejudice and hate crimes—such as one incident in which a Muslim woman stumbled into the mosque on September 12 after being attacked by a man with a baseball bat. In his first sermon after the reopening of the mosque, Anwar condemned the attacks as “heinous.” “Our hearts bleed for the attacks that targeted the World Trade Center as well as other institutions in the United States, despite our strong opposition to the American biased policy towards Israel,” he said, reading a condemnation of the attacks from Sheikh Yusuf al Qaradawi, the famous, controversial Egyptian theologian. “We came here to build, not to destroy....We are the bridge between America and 1 billion Muslims worldwide,” Awlaki added.