A Few Loyal Men Direct Bin Laden's Sprawling Network

By Michael Dobbs
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 27, 2001; Page A01

Last January, a wedding ceremony took place in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar that illustrated the tightly knit family and organizational ties that U.S. investigators believe lie at the heart of the devastating terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

The father of the groom was Osama bin Laden, the fugitive Saudi millionaire accused by the Bush administration of masterminding a global jihad, or holy war, against the United States. The father of the bride was his longtime aide, Mohammed Atef, a former Egyptian policeman described by terrorism experts as military commander of the terrorist network al Qaeda.

The guest of honor was a physician, Ayman Zawahiri, leader of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad organization, which has claimed responsibility for a series of terrorist attacks in Egypt. Three years ago, Zawahiri formally merged his group with al Qaeda, creating a movement that called itself the World Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders.

According to U.S. officials and counterterrorism experts, Zawahiri and Atef are bin Laden's most important lieutenants, the ideological and military brains behind an escalating wave of terrorist attacks targeted primarily at the United States. Their hallmarks -- breathtaking audacity and meticulous planning -- appear consistent with the methods displayed by the organizers of the latest attacks.

At least one and possibly several organizational layers separate the tight circle around bin Laden and the men who hijacked the aircraft on Sept. 11, according to a variety of experts who have analyzed past cases in which bin Laden's network has been described.

Vincent Cannistraro, a former chief of counterterrorism for the CIA, said al Qaeda has relied on "field commanders" to transmit bin Laden's wishes and detailed instructions to the "foot soldiers" who carry out the attacks. One such field commander, according to testimony in court trials in the United States and Jordan, is a Saudi-born Palestinian known as Abu Zubaydah, also known as Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn. Investigators are said to believe that Abu Zubaydah helped coordinate plans for a terrorist assault timed to coincide with the millennium celebrations in December 1999, including attacks on Los Angeles International Airport and hotels in Jordan, that were foiled by law enforcement authorities.

It is still unclear who filled the role of field commander in the Sept. 11 attacks, although the FBI is looking at the role played by another bin Laden lieutenant, Shaykh Saiid, one of 13 alleged al Qaeda sympathizers whose assets were frozen by the U.S. government this week. According to an informed source, the FBI believes that Saiid may have been the paymaster of the operation, funneling money and passports to the hijackers.

While al Qaeda has supporters in dozens of countries from Algeria to Indonesia, its leadership appears to be tightly knit. It is made up primarily of Saudi and Egyptian dissidents who developed their ideas of jihad during the CIA-funded insurrection against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989. As a result of last January's wedding in Kandahar, the Egyptians and the Saudis are now related by marriage as well as by ideology.

"Bin Laden is using the tactics of Zawahiri and the Islamic Jihad," said Fawaz Gerges, a professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y. "These explosive operations are very reminiscent of the way Islamic Jihad used to operate in Egypt."

Operations carried out by Islamic Jihad in Egypt include the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in 1981, for which Zawahiri served a three-year prison sentence as an alleged accomplice, and the killing of dozens of foreign tourists in the southern city of Luxor in 1997. Since 1997, many Islamic Jihad members have been forced to flee Egypt because of a far-reaching crackdown by the government.

According to some terrorism experts, Egypt's victories over the Islamic fundamentalist movement at home could have had the paradoxical effect of making it much more dangerous internationally. "The defeated remnants of the militant Islamist movements had nowhere else to go, except to Afghanistan and bin Laden," said Gerges.

Here are thumbnail sketches of some of the key people around bin Laden:

・The ideologist. Born to a wealthy Egyptian family in 1951, Zawahiri is four years older than bin Laden. The two men appear to have met for the first time in the late 1980s in Peshawar, the Pakistani city that served as one of the bases for mujaheddin fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Like bin Laden, Zawahiri was a disciple of a Palestinian scholar-guerrilla organizer, Abdullah Azzam, who recruited thousands of Arab volunteers to fight in Afghanistan. Zawahiri worked as a doctor in the rest house and hospital that Azzam set up in Peshawar for Afghan mujaheddin. (Azzam was killed in a 1989 car bombing in Peshawar that continues to be shrouded in mystery.)

While the bespectacled Zawahiri has little of bin Laden's charisma, and prefers to avoid the limelight, many former associates see him as the brains behind al Qaeda. "He has been in the struggle longer than bin Laden, and he is more familiar with the techniques of urban warfare, which is his speciality," said Muhammad Massari, a Saudi dissident in London. "His knowledge of Islamic law is also greater than bin Laden's."

Zawahiri's influence over bin Laden can be seen in the 1998 declaration of jihad on "Jews and crusaders," which the two men signed jointly. Before 1998, bin Laden focused primarily on expelling U.S. forces from his native Saudi Arabia, the site of Islam's holiest places. After 1998, he broadened his agenda to include denunciations of the U.S. alliance with Israel and its "aggression" against Iraq.

・The military commander. Born in Egypt about 1944, Atef is a former Zawahiri aide who has worked closely with bin Laden for more than a decade. According to U.S. prosecutors investigating the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Atef sits on al Qaeda's military committee and had "primary responsibility" for supervising the training of new al Qaeda members at camps in Afghanistan. The United States has offered a $5 million reward for information leading to his arrest or conviction.

The indictment in the embassy bombings charged that Atef encouraged attacks on U.S. troops in Somalia in October 1993, as a result of which 18 U.S. Rangers were killed while hunting for Somali warlord Mohamed Farah Aideed and trying to apprehend some of his aides. At the time, both Atef and bin Laden were based in neighboring Sudan. According to the indictment, Atef traveled to Somalia several times in 1992 and 1993 to provide "military training and assistance to Somali tribes opposed to the United Nations intervention in Somalia."

Evidence presented during the embassy bombings trial also showed that Atef kept in touch by satellite phone with the conspirators preparing to strike the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. He was in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and held meetings with the conspirators in Peshawar, serving as an intermediary between them and bin Laden, according to the indictment.

In addition to acting as al Qaeda's military commander, Atef was bin Laden's media adviser, according to Western journalists who have had dealings with him. Peter Bergen, a producer for CNN who met with bin Laden in Afghanistan, said he exchanged faxes and phone calls with Atef after the United States fired cruise missiles at a suspected al Qaeda training camp in August 1998 in retaliation for the embassy bombings.

Like his chief, Atef is publicly contemptuous of U.S. leaders and American military power. "They are only human beings whose power has been exaggerated because of their huge media and the control they exert over the world's media," he told an Arab journalist in 1999.

・The operations chief. Born in Saudi Arabia in 1973, Abu Zubaydah represents the new generation of terrorism organizers around bin Laden. Some time after the East African embassy bombings, he appears to have replaced Atef as the primary contact for recruits and as the organizer of overseas operations.

A detailed description of Abu Zubaydah's role was provided by Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian convicted of attempting to carry out a terrorist attack in Los Angeles to coincide with the millennium celebrations in December 1999. In court testimony in a case related to the millennium plot in July, Ressam described Abu Zubaydah as "the person in charge" of terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. "He receives young men from all countries. He accepts you or rejects you," he said.

After Ressam graduated from the Khalden training camp in Afghanistan at the end of 1998, he checked in again with Abu Zubaydah en route to Canada. Ressam testified that Abu Zubaydah asked him to acquire Canadian passports for other terrorists to enable them "to carry out operations in the U.S."

A Jordanian military court last year sentenced Abu Zubaydah in absentia to death for allegedly coordinating a plot to attack tourist sites in Jordan around the time of the millennium celebrations. According to U.S. and Jordanian officials, his contacts in Jordan included Khalil Deek, a naturalized U.S. citizen who allegedly was one of the organizers of the millennium plot.

Staff writer John Mintz contributed to this report.