For the most part, I’d enjoyed serving under a succession of first-rate leaders, several of whom were truly exceptional. And I had been blessed to build lasting relationships of respect and trust with people like John Vines and Dave Rodriguez, who would be lifelong friends. Finally, I served alongside a new generation of army soldiers. At the time, they were young privates or sergeants. Years later, on distant battlefields, I’d serve again with many of them—all seasoned soldiers and many of them fathers. The wars they’d fight in years later had their roots in events occurring then, amid the final act of the Soviet-Afghan War.
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My first contact with Al Qaeda actually took place a year before it existed, in a curious encounter outside Cairo in August 1987. After completing Ranger company command in May, I’d joined the battalion staff. One of my first missions was to lead an advance element to Egypt in preparation for the battalion’s participation in Exercise Bright Star 1987. Programmed to conduct operations during the exercise with Egyptian commandos, we set up our small team on the commandos’ base and initiated final coordination.
After we arrived, the U.S. 5th Special Forces Group lent us an Egyptian-born U.S. Army sergeant to interpret for us. Normally a supply sergeant, the athletic, outgoing man, named Ali Abdelsoud Mohammad, was quickly invaluable as he accompanied me to some initial meetings. After several days, Ali Mohammad and I went to the headquarters of the Egyptian 45th Commando Brigade. Ali Mohammad was a gifted translator, but the atmosphere with the Egyptians was uncomfortably cool. It was difficult to determine why. Descending the stairs after the meeting, we passed two Egyptian Army majors, and Ali Mohammad greeted them as old friends. They were friendly but reserved, and we left.
On the way back to our tent area, Ali Mohammad explained that before coming to the United States he had been a major in the commandos, and those were old comrades. The next day he was gone. The Egyptians had asked that he leave the country immediately, which he apparently did. The brigade commander later confirmed it but offered no additional explanation.
I never saw him after that. Only years later did I find out about his subsequent membership in Al Qaeda, after he was arrested in conjunction with the August 1998 embassy bombings in Africa, and his public discussions about Al Qaeda as an organization.
The group Ali Mohammad joined was born in 1988 in Peshawar, Pakistan. Peshawar had been a key node from which Afghan mujahideen, split among seven groups of differing ideology, ethnicity, and sophistication, had waged a guerrilla war against the Soviet forces and those of their communist satellite state. Mixed into Peshawar were Arabs who had traveled to central Asia to wage jihad.
The Arab volunteers never had a large role in the anti-Soviet guerrilla war itself. Only fifteen Arabs, by a veteran’s account, had joined the jihad by 1984, rising to two hundred in 1986 when they began to fight on their own. But with victory over the Soviets assured in 1988, the Arabs—then estimated by the Islamabad CIA office to be four thousand strong—further asserted themselves.
One of the most influential Arabs was Osama bin Laden, the rich thirty-one-year-old son of a Saudi construction magnate. Born into privilege, as a teenager Osama had become increasingly fundamentalist in his religious views and since his first trip to Pakistan in 1980 had become deeply involved in the Afghan war against the Soviets.
Bin Laden began to develop a mystique through his charitable work. Tales fluttered of the Saudi personally sitting behind the wheels of the bulldozers, supplied by the Bin Laden Group, moving dirt to make defensive positions and roadways for the jihadists in the Afghan ridges. He was known around Peshawar for his visits to the bedsides of the wounded in the hospitals, his uniform—traditional Afghan salwar kameez top, English trousers, and Beal Brothers boots—partly that of the respected Saudi scion and partly that of jihadist patron, with the balance between the two quickly shifting.
With impending victory over the Soviets, a central question now divided the “Afghan-Arabs” in Peshawar: Where should the jihad go next? Abdullah Azzam, an itinerant Palestinian cleric, wanted the focus to remain on Afghanistan, ensuring that it became an Islamic state. He had preached that Muslims needed a literal “firm base”—al-qaeda al-sulbah—from which to spread the fight. In opposition, Ayman al-Zawahiri, a dour physician and veteran militant in that sphere, wanted to immediately extend the jihad in order to topple Arab regimes, starting with his homeland of Egypt. He and his fellow Egyptians felt a mobile army—a vanguard of jihadists—could undo these regimes through coordinated coups. These issues were not fully resolved but were in some sense transcended from the get-go through the organization’s ambitious, if vague, agenda. Al Qaeda’s bylaws were as broad as they were soaring: “To establish the truth, get rid of evil, and establish an Islamic nation.”