The Western Roots of Al-Qaeda and the Terrorist Attacks of the 1990s
USA, March 23, 2025 – The terrorist attacks of the 1990s were instrumental in launching the next phase of the “new world order”. Initially, Al-Qaeda was just a name used for training camps for future terrorists and a database of mujahideen recruited and trained with the help of the CIA. Osama bin Laden was the 17th of 54 children of Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden, a wandering laborer from Yemen. Mohammed bin Laden arrived in Jeddah from his native Yemen in 1930, took a job as a bricklayer for Aramco, and later founded his own construction company. His honesty and the quality of his work caught the attention of King Ibn Saud, the Minister of Finance, who gave him the opportunity to renovate the palace and then, satisfied with his work, gave him several important construction contracts. The family became one of the wealthiest in the Saudi kingdom.
By the mid-1980s, Osama bin Laden, who used his family connections to collect donations from wealthy Saudis and transport them to Pakistan to aid the militants, was known as one of the main sponsors of the Afghan cause in the Arab world. In 1984, Osama co-founded the Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK), which the US government later described as a “precursor to al-Qaeda.” This soon attracted the attention of other figures in the Afghan war.
Al-Zawahiri, the head of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, who later became Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man, “formulated the organization’s ideological line and developed operational plans.” According to the authors of the official history of al-Qaeda, Zawahiri was a lifelong radical who joined the Muslim Brotherhood in 1965. However, witnesses who came into contact with him in the mid-1970s reported that he did not speak or behave like a “traditional Muslim.”
The executed Muslim Brotherhood leader Seyyid Qutb was known for inspiring a generation of radical Muslims to wage jihad against the West and establish a new caliphate. Less commonly mentioned is Qutb’s claim that in the 1960s, when Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal openly colluded with the CIA and Aramco to mobilize anti-socialist Muslim groups and undermine pan-Arabism and Arab nationalism, “America created Islam.”
Seyyid Qutb was convicted in 1966 of plotting to assassinate Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. By the mid-1980s, all of the major figures who would later be associated with the emergence of modern Islamic terrorism and the founding of al-Qaeda – Azzam, Osama, Zawahiri and their early associates – were directly involved in the war in Afghanistan. Together, they formed the backbone of what later became known as the “Afghan Arabs”.
CIA funding of the Afghan jihad is estimated at over $3 billion. In 2003, MSNBC’s chief correspondent Michael Moran wrote:
“Bin Laden, along with a small group of Islamic fighters from Egypt, Pakistan, Lebanon, Syria and Palestinian refugee camps in the Middle East, became the CIA’s ‘trusted’ partners in the war against Moscow.” More than money, however, bin Laden needed the protection of various intelligence agencies to turn a blind eye to his boys’ activities. The first glimmers of this protection can be seen in the efforts of the Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK) to recruit and train mujahideen for the Afghan jihad in the United States. The MAK had 30 branches in American cities, including its most important location, the al-Kifa Refugee Center, which was located on the grounds of the Farook Mosque in Brooklyn. The CIA’s role in assisting the MAK and the al-Kifa in their recruitment efforts has been acknowledged for decades. In 1995, New York Magazine wrote:
“The main attraction for regular visitors to the center was a series of inspirational lectures on jihad, given by CIA-sponsored speakers. It could be a CIA-trained Afghan insurgent traveling on a CIA-issued visa, or a Green Beret lecturing on the importance of being part of the mujahideen.”
How al-Qaeda was born
Bin Laden claims that al-Qaeda was initially just a name used for mujahideen training camps in 1988, and “that name has stuck.” In 2005, former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook said that al-Qaeda was literally a “database,” a “computer file” of thousands of mujahideen recruited and trained with the help of the CIA to defeat the Russians. J. Michael Springmann, a visa officer at the U.S. Consulate in Jeddah from 1987 to 1989, testified that his decisions to deny visas to enter the United States to apparently unfit applicants were routinely overruled by CIA officials at the consulate as part of their efforts to “help Osama bin Laden’s mujahideen in Afghanistan.” Summarizing his experiences in Jeddah in 1994, Springmann named Sheikh Abdel-Rahman (“the Blind Sheikh”) as one of the “CIA agents” with “terrorist connections” who were aided by the program. In the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, terrorists entered and left the United States whenever they wanted, even though were on the watch list.
How Terrorist Attacks Were Prepared
For example, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, al-Zawahiri, the future leader of al-Qaeda, visited the United States at least three times. Despite being imprisoned in Egypt for three years after Sadat’s assassination, and despite playing a prominent role as the leader of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Zawahiri managed to enter the United States posing as a representative of the Kuwaiti Red Crescent Society. This trip was made possible by one of his intelligence agents, Ali Mohamed, who organized the trip and provided him with a fake passport. It is in the story of Ali Mohamed, nicknamed the “double agent,” that the incredible links between American intelligence and al-Qaeda are revealed. Even his commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Anderson, was impressed by the rise of this registered Muslim radical:
“I think you or I would have a better chance of winning the lottery than the Egyptian major from the unit that killed Sadat, of getting a visa, of getting to California… and being assigned to the Army, to a Special Forces unit. It just doesn’t happen.”
Mohamed became an FBI informant while leading terrorist cells that were linked to the World Trade Center bombings, the bombings of American embassies in Africa, and other attacks in the 1990s. In 1954, they activated their dormant military intelligence cell in the country for a daring mission. The plan, codenamed Operation Suzanne, was to carry out a spectacular series of bombings in Cairo and Alexandria. After decades of internal Israeli investigations, accusations, political scandals, and high-ranking resignations, the full truth about Operation Suzanne remains shrouded in official secrecy. The Israeli government did not even officially acknowledge the incident until 2005. However, the motives for the operation emerged during one of the investigative commissions set up to examine the case. According to an officer who received verbal instructions directly from the head of Israeli military intelligence, Benjamin Gibli, “[Our goal] is to undermine Western confidence in the existing [Egyptian] regime… The actions were to provoke arrests, demonstrations, and expressions of revenge. The Israeli origin was to be completely concealed and attention was to be diverted to any other possible factor. The goal is to prevent Western economic and military aid to Egypt.”
In short, the Israelis launched a false flag operation in the hope of blaming the Muslim Brotherhood or the Communists for the spectacular acts of violence in order to destabilize Nasser’s government, undermine Western confidence in their Egyptian ally, and persuade the British military to remain at their base in Suez. The operation failed on every count. The cell was exposed and its members imprisoned. Their actions did not destabilize Nasser’s government or affect relations between Egypt and the West. And the British did indeed abandon their base in 1956, when the United States and the Soviet Union ended the failed Israeli-British-French invasion of the region. But it did give Western military planners the idea that terrorist attacks could be staged and blamed on Muslim scapegoats to achieve their own political goals.
In this official narrative, Osama bin Laden, once an “anti-Soviet warrior on a path to peace,” became the head of international terrorism. The story that became the official narrative of September 11, 2001, runs as follows: the September 11 plot was conceived by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in 1996; it was directed by the master terrorist, Osama bin Laden; and it was executed by al-Qaeda so flawlessly that the intelligence services could not have foreseen it, let alone prevented it. As even popular authors such as Jason Burke have been forced to admit, the al-Qaeda concept is untenable: “a coherent, structured terrorist network with organized capabilities simply does not exist.” It was a convenient fiction created by the FBI so that it could prosecute bin Laden in absentia for the bombings of two American embassies in East Africa in 1998. In order to prosecute bin Laden, they had to prove that al-Qaeda “coordinates the activities of its members worldwide” and that bin Laden, as the group’s leader, was responsible for all the actions attributed to the organization.
In 1990, in New York, a certain Said Nosairi shot and killed the far-right Israeli social activist Rabbi Meir Kahane. Nosairi was acquitted… Nosairi’s acquittal was welcomed by his followers, the same group of radicals trained by Ali Muhammad that the FBI had monitored at the shooting range and that had begun planning another spectacular terrorist attack: the bombing of the World Trade Center in February 1993. And as it turned out a few years later, an “FBI informant” was also at the center of that conspiracy.
On February 26, 1993, a terrorist attack took place in the underground parking garage of the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York. A booby-trapped truck exploded. Six people were killed. Emad Salem, an “FBI informant,” was linked to the incident. Emad Salem, a former lieutenant colonel in the Egyptian army who had come to the United States in 1988, began working as an FBI agent. His task was to infiltrate the Blind Sheikh’s circle, which he succeeded in doing relatively quickly, and within a few weeks, Salem had become one of the bodyguards who personally drove the Blind Sheikh to Detroit to give fundraising speeches. Salem learned that the terrorist group intended to blow up twelve “Jewish sites” in and around Brooklyn and Manhattan. Salem was soon recruited to participate in the operation that would eventually lead to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. As preparations for the bombing began, Salem’s role in the FBI’s special operation became clear: he was to lead the cell and replace the explosives with harmless powder. Then, when the cell was ready to attack, the FBI would intervene and arrest the conspirators. But that did not happen. The new head of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division demanded that Salem wear a wire, and Salem, refusing because it would endanger his life, left the agency.
Meanwhile, the group from the Brooklyn Al Kif Blind Sheikh Center (trained by Ali Mohammed) continued to plan their plot. They found a man named Yousef Ramzi to build the bomb. Although Yousef was caught and convicted of the World Trade Center bombing, little is known about his identity to this day. Like many other key players in the al-Qaeda story, Yousef evaded routine checks, crossed the border with false documents, and made his way to the United States. This “devout Muslim fundamentalist” reportedly hung out in karaoke bars and dated bisexual girls during his trips to the Philippines while his wife and daughters waited for him in Balochistan. In 1999, Swiss journalist Richard Labeviere reported:
“A secret FBI file shows that Yousef was recruited by the local CIA branch.” Then, on August 31, 1992, Yousef and Ahmad Ajaj, fellow mujahideen fighters, flew from Pakistan to the United States. Upon arrival at JFK Airport in New York on September 1, both men were detained by immigration officials. Ajaj was caught with a fake Swedish passport and taken to the service office for questioning. His suitcases were “stuffed with fake passports, fake IDs and instructions on how to deceive US immigration inspectors”. But that’s not all. Among his belongings, inspectors also found two notebooks full of bomb-making recipes, six bomb-making manuals that included pages from military manuals from Fort Bragg, weapons training and surveillance videos. Ajaj was charged with violating passport regulations and sentenced to six months in prison.
Meanwhile, his partner Yousef tried a different tack. Yousef carried an Iraqi passport without a US visa and declared himself a refugee seeking asylum from the oppressive Iraqi government. After questioning and fingerprinting, a vigilant immigration officer noticed his ties to Ajjaj and tried to detain him, but “there wasn’t enough room in the cell,” so he was released on the condition that he appear for an asylum hearing later. Are you still laughing? Let’s move on. Ahmad Ajjaj, who was caught with a stash of terrorist training materials and bomb-making manuals, stayed in touch with Yousef, speaking to him on the prison phone. Meanwhile, Emad Salem, who had been dropped from the case, tried to alert the FBI by meeting with his former guide, who had also been dropped from the case. The trail of the abandoned van rental led to Mohammed Salam, one of the same Ali Mohamed’s interns… And Ramzi Yousef boarded a plane to Karachi on the night of the bombing and then flew from country to country with impunity, planning assassinations and bombings in Pakistan, Thailand, the Philippines, and Iran, until he was finally caught in Pakistan in 1995 and disappeared.
When Pakistani federal investigators later checked their immigration records, they found that all documents related to Yousef’s 1992 trip to the United States, including his boarding pass, had “mysteriously disappeared.” At his trial two years later, however, former FBI agent Emad Salem had a surprise for the prosecution. He secretly recorded dozens of telephone conversations with his FBI colleagues—conversations that revealed for the first time the FBI’s true role in the World Trade Center bombing. Predictably, the media began to talk about “mismanagement” by the government after the bombing. The Blind Sheikh’s entry into the United States was a “mistake.” The New York Police Department’s refusal to investigate Nosair’s accomplices in the Kahane murder was merely a politically motivated omission. The FBI’s removal of its informant from an active terrorist plot before it escalated into a World Trade Center bombing was simply “incompetence.” The presence of a Green Beret from Fort Bragg, who was connected to the CIA, among this radical terrorist cell was merely an example of “retaliation.” And Ramzi Yousef’s amazing ability to enter and leave the country at will without proper documentation was merely the result of bureaucratic incompetence and over-engineering of the immigration authorities.
Others offered a less favorable interpretation of these events. Ron Cuby, a lawyer who, with William Kunstler, defended the defendants in the attack and their accomplices, was not shy about placing the blame for the World Trade Center bombing on the U.S. government:
“The inspiration for [the plot] is the United States government. It was a bogus, government-planned ‘conspiracy’ from the beginning. It would never have come to anything if the government had not planned it.” After learning of the February 26th bombing of the World Trade Center, Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert working for the infamous Rand Corporation, remarked:
“We can talk about the opening of a new conflict for the New World Order.”
Peter Weiss
