The spy who came in for the heat

WHAT CAN THE FIRST ATTACK ON THE WORLD TRADE CENTER IN 1993 TEACH US ABOUT THE ATTEMPTED CAR BOMBING OF TIMES SQUARE? THAT WITHOUT

HEROES LIKE EMAD SALEM, THE WAR ON TERROR COULD BE ENDLESS

SEVENTEEN YEARS BEFORE

parked an SUV with an improvised bomb near Times Square, another Islamic terrorist, Ramzi Yousef, parked a Ryder truck with a similarly configured weapon of mass destruction beneath the World Trade Center. That 1,500-pound bomb exploded, killing six and injuring 1,000. While Yousef's scheme was more complicated and exten­sive, the methodology of the terrorists had not changed much in two decades. In both cases a spiritual leader had inspired the attacks, a shadowy network of money men had financed them and overseas camps had provided training to rabid fundamentalists willing to risk their lives (o take those of Americans. The one significant difference between then and now? Back in 1993 the FBI had a cou­rageous undercover asset who had buried himself inside the terrorist cell and was able to thwart a much bigger plot

to blow up the United Nations building and the bridges and tunnels into Manhattan.

Indeed, the initial euphoria over the New York Cjty police department's 53-hour investigation and arrest of Shah/ad hid the most terrifying aspect of the takedown: The FBI's elite Joint Terrorism Task Force had the Pakistani-born U.S. citizen under investigation for six years prior to the bust, to little effect. Even more troubling: As early as 1999 the feds were onto a United States-born Yemeni cleric who not only influenced Shahzad but also inspired the Army major accused in the Fort Hood massacre and the 23-year-old Nigerian who tried to annihilate 289 people on a North­west flight into Detroit on Christmas Day.

Why has the FBI lagged in its efforts to infiltrate and quash Al Qaeda's terror campaign in the United States? Why, after so many years, was our only defense in this last attack the fortunate miswiring of a powerful car bomb? For

answers one must go back to 1993 and examine how the FBI handled its best asset—a heroic undercover informant who risked liis life lor his country.

Last year I was in Manhattan to deliver a lecture on terror­ism at New York University when I received a cryptic e-mail informing me that a man named Kmad Salem might meet me after the talk. I was surprised. Salem was a former Egyptian army major and an undercover operative for the FBI. But after my speech, Salem, who had entered the witness protection program in 1993 and had not been heard from since, never showed.

There was no message for me when I got back to my hotel, either. So I went to bed. Then, around two a.m. the phone rang. A voice said, "26 Federal." It was the address of the FBI's New York Office. I jumped into a cab and rushed down to Foley Square in lower Manhattan, where a heavy set man stepped from the shadows to greet me. It was Salem, and he wanted to talk.

1 had told fragments of Salem's story in my book 1000 Years for Revenge, wliich is ultimately why he contacted me six years later. His heroics had been related to me by agents who were unhappy with how he had been treated as an informant.

The gist of it: Salem had infiltrated the terrorist cell run by Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and uncovered a plot to blow up 12 "Jewish" locations in Manhattan. However, missteps by the FBI forced Salem out of the cell and paved the way for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. That attack was designed by Ram/.i Yousef, whose uncle and collaborator Khalid Sheikh Mohammed went on to finish the job in 2001.

"You have to wonder what course liistoiy would have taken if Kmacl Salem had continued liis role as an informant," says NYPD detective James Moss, who has teen working a famous Al Qaecla murder mystery based on new leads from Salem. "Certainly the

first World Track; Center attack would have been thwarted."

In a series of conversations beginning that night last Novem­ber, Salem told me his story of espionage and life on the run, starting with his attempts to help a slow-moving FBI snare Sheik Rahman, the father of all tilings Al Qaeda in America, and ending with information the NYPD feels may resolve Moss's unsolved murder case. Also, Salem now lectures special agents at Quantico, desperately tiying to school the bureau on how to recruit, a new generation of undercover assets. "This needs to happen immediately," says Salem, "before somebody parks a suitcase nuke in midtown Manhattan. But these agents 1 lecture at the FBI Academy have been slow to understand. It took tlie bureau how long to infiltrate tlie Mafia for the same reasons? The scaiy thing is, we don't have that much time.

"You cannot get next to these people without under­standing the radical Islamic mind-set," says Salem. "More important is how we think in the Aral) world. If the approaching asset doesn't speak Arabic, know the Koran or understand the most basic of Middle Eastern customs, he doesn't stand a chance."

Ever since he was a seven-year-old at the American School in Cairo, Emad Eldin Aly Alxlou Salem had nurtured an abiding affection for the U.S. He spent 18 years in the Egyptian army and rose to the rank of major. As a soldier he had a conven­tional Islamic anti-Semitic worldview.

"Growing up, I had seen Jews as they were poitrayed in the Egyptian newspapers," says Salem. "They were like demons. They had horns and big noses. That's the box of hate I lived in." All that changed in 1973 when he encountered the first Jewish prisoners captured during the Yom Kippur War. "For tlie first time I saw them as people," he says. "They were afraid. They were human. Tliis was the first crack in my box of hate."

Salem's ultimate epiphany came late one night in 1986 when he was invited to the basement of a Cairo federal police precinct. There, an iron door opened and he saw a naked man hanging upside down being tortured mercilessly.

Salem hid his shock. He had no desire to find himself hang­ing in the next cell. "But the sight of that man shattered my box forever," he says. He quickly put in for retirement and got a visa to tin1 U.S., where he became a naturalized citizen.

Prior to his disillusionment with the Egyptian ruling class, Salem had been something of a fixer in Cairo. I le was the go-to guy if you needed anytliing—from a private tour of the pyramids at Giza to some backstage time with the lead belly dancer at the Hilton.

Once a friend of his put down 30,000 Egyptian pounds as a deposit on an apartment, but (continued on page 118)

THE SPY

(continued from page 48) the unscrupulous landlord simply kept it. So the friend called Salem for help. He showed up with a pair of uniformed men. He pulled out a black hood and threw it over the landlord's head. "I told him that if we didn't get the money back for her, he would disappear," Salem says. At first the landlord stcxxl his ground and claimed he didn't have the money. Then Salem took the hood off and went eyeball-to-eyeball with him. Though short in stature he has an imposing presence. lie was a champion wrestler in Cairo and a second-degree black belt in judo. His biceps were the size of beef shanks. The landlord swallowed hard and gestured for them to remove a wall picture, lie then opened the safe and handed back the money. "My friends always knew they could count on me," says Salem, who to this day remains close with perhaps the world's most famous Egyptian, Omar Sharif.

As an officer in Egypt he was chauffeured around in a private car and had a house full of servants. But once he made the move to New York, he found himself struggling as an immigrant, reduced to working as a cabdriver and a security guard. Then he got a job as the night manager at the Hotel Woodward at 55th Street and Broadway, a rundown desti­nation for Russian UN diplomats who used the fleabag for trysts with hookers.

One night Nancy Floyd, a special agent for the FBI, walked in. She was a petite tough-talking redhead from Texas who was working Russian Foreign Counterintelligence. Floyd asked Salem if he might do her a favor and examine the room of one of the Russians who'd checked into a suite on an upper floor. When she told him she had to get a warrant, Salem was ready to use his passkey on the room.

Anxious to prove his worth, Salem did his own black-bag job, meticulously removing the outside wrapper of a Russian cigarette pack for prints and copying the full contents of the diplomat's briefcase. It turned out to be an inspired move—the documents pro­vided the bureau with new details on the emerging Russian mob.

After another six months helping Floyd and an INS agent on a series of cases, Salem announced to her that "there is a man in this city more dangerous to America than the worst KGB hood."

"Who?" asked Floyd. Salem told her about Rahman. At the time, the sheik was preach­ing at two mosques in Brooklyn and a third in Jersey City.

Born in 1938 near the Nile delta, Sheik Omar lost his eyesight as an infant. But by the age of 11, reading in braille, he had memorized the entire Koran. He earned a Ph.D. in Islamic studies, and after escaping house arrest in Egypt following the assas­sination of Anwar Sadat, he made his way to Peshawar, Pakistan (close to the reported birthplace of Times Square bomber Faisal Shah/ad). There he served as one of the CIA's point men in the smuggling of $3 bil­lion in covert arms to the mujahideen rebels fighting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Then, in 1990, with reputed help from the agency, Rahman slipped past a watch list and flew to New York City. Within months of his arrival, one of his followers, an Egyp­tian named F.I Sayyid Nosair, gunned down Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the Jewish Defense League, in a bloody shoot-out at the Marriott Hotel on Lexington Avenue.

The brazenly public murder moved the bureau to act. Salem was enlisted to risk his life and go undercover. I Iis handlers gave him three months to infiltrate the sheik's cell; he did it in three weeks. In fact, he got so close that a bearded Salem (in trench coat) turned up in news photographs escorting Rahman.

S(X)n he was driving the sheik on a fund-rais­ing trip to a Detroit mosque in a van provided by the FBI. The sheik's new handler also went up to Attica to visit Nosair, who had been convicted on gun diarges in the rabbi's mur­der. Posing as a bomb maker, Salem vamped through a plot hatched by Nosair to blow up a dozen Jewish taigets, including a series of syna­gogues and the 47th Street diamond district.

F.ach night Salem, who wasn't wearing a wire, was compelled to spill what he'd uncovered. Unfortunately his FBI control agents, John Anticev and Detective Lou Napoli of the Joint Terrorism Task Force, often proved to be unavailable. Instead, Nancy Floyd worked double duty, debriefing Salem at the T.G.I. Friday's near 2fi Federal Plaza. She would then run upstairs to type the required serial reports tx'fore driving home to Stamford and commuting back in the morning to work Russians again.

"Salem was hanging his ass on the line," says retired special agent Lcn Predtechenskis (Floyd's mentor in Russian Foreign Counter-intelligence). "If these terrorists around him had gotten even a whiff that he was work­ing for the G, they'd have slit his throat, lie was getting the job done, spying on the cell, and then Carson Dunbar took over the JTTF and blew the deal." Dunbar, a former New Jersey state trooper with no background in counterterrorism, didn't like the tough-talking Floyd and, according to Salem, resented him even more.

"Carson called me into his office," says Salem, "wliich was really reckless tx-cause I was undercover and the sheik's people were everywhere. I sat in a chair by liis desk. He got up and sat down across from me, kicking off liis sIkx's. He eyed me for a minute and then said, 'You think you can come here from I'-RyP1 w'm san(l in your sIkx's and tell me how to do my job?' I looked at him and said, 'I'm doing your job, sir. Who else do you have who could get this dose to the sheik?' He didn't have an answer for that except to tell me to get out of his office." Dunbar then insisted that Salem take a series of polygraphs—in effect, demanding that the ex-F'.gyptian major re-audition for the undercover job months after he'd penetrated the sheik's cell.

"The first two tests were 'incondusive,'" says Salem, who had learned how to "beat the box" years earlier, in the Egyptian military. "Then they sent in the head FBI polygraph man from Washington. He was cocky. He said, 'These; other operators who tested you before were trained by me. They made mis­takes. I don't do mistakes.'" At that point the lie detector specialist wrote the numbers one to 10 on a piece of paper and taped it to the

wall, telling Salem to choose a number, write it down and stick it into his pocket.

"Then he ran through the numbers," says Salem. "'Is it one, two, three?' I answered no to all 10. And then the guy started to look confused. Finally he said, 'It's either five or six,' and I made a noise like a buzzer on a game show—'Annnnh. Wrong. It was num­ber lour.' The guy was livid. lie stormed out of the room. Later, word came back from D.C. that the test was 'inconclusive,' but they changed it to 'deceptive.'"

Dunbar then insisted Salem wear a wire. "At that point Kmad had family in Egypt, and they would be at risk if he was exposed," says Predtechenskis. Salem was also sleeping on the floors of mosques, where the guards around the sheik could easily pat him down for a recording device. So with the rules of engagement altered, Salem was effectively terminated. "The FBI lost its eyes and ears inside this incredibly dangerous Al Qaeda conspiracy," says Predtechenskis.

"What happened next," Salem tells me, "is the blind sheik contacted Sheik Osama, and they sent a world-class bomb maker to New York. His name was Ramzi Ahmed Yousef."

Yousef, an engineer trained in Wales, arrived at JFK in early September 1992 and began building a bomb with the intent of producing a "Hiroshima event" beneath the Twin lowers. Working out of an apartment on Painrapo Avenue in Jersey City, Yousef was aided and abetted by the identical cell Salem had infiltrated—some of whose mem­bers the FBI had had under sui"veillance from the summer of 1989, when agents followed them from a Brooklyn mosque to a Long Island shooting range. Two of the principals were Mahmud Alxnihalima, a six-foot-two redheaded Egyptian cabdriver, and Moham­med Salameh, a short, bearded Palestinian.

Now out of the cell, Salem kept his ear to the ground at the Al-F'arook mosque in Brooklyn. He soon learned that a major bomb plot was afoot. A month after Yousef's arrival in 1992, Salem met Nancy Floyd at the Subway sandwich shop near the FBI's New York Office and warned her to tail Abouhalima. "If you do this, Nancy," Salem told her, "the Red will lead you to the man building the bomb."

But by then interoffice politics had ham­strung the FBI. Floyd had been described by a senior agent as "the bitch" he had to get off the case. She warned Salem that she didn't think Dunbar would approve the surveillance. With that, Salem delivered a chilling warning: "Don't call me when the bombs go oil."

Around noon on February 26, 1993, Yousef's urea-nitrate fuel-oil bomb deto­nated on the B-2 level beneath the north tower. Blowing through four floors of 11-inch-thick reinforced concrete, it was a formal declaration of war by Al Qaeda that would culminate in the destruction of the World Trade Center eight years later.

"After the 1993 bombing, when those peo­ple died, including a pregnant woman, I blamed myself," says Salem. "I thought that if I had only stayed inside that cell I could have stopped it. That's when the F'BI called me back, and I said, 'Whatever it takes. Wire

me up. I'll go back under. I don't care, live or die. Nobody harms my America.'"

It t<x)k liim live months. "We set up a bomb factory in Queens," says Salem, "and we were building live devices the size of Youscf's bomb. One day Sheik Omar asked me to sweep his apartment, and I called John Anticev and Louie Napoli to get me a device. Carson sent them to Radio Shack. They had a black limo they used to ferry me around, and for four hours these agents went from store to store, calling Dunbar for approval on the purchase, lie kept saying, 'No, that's too much.' Can you imagine? I'm this close to one of the world's most dangerous men and Dunbar is nickeling-and-diming. I had to get this device or the sheik would be suspicious. So finally I went to the Spy Shop and bought my own."

Salem then conc<x:ted an ingenious plan by which he set the sweeping device's levels such that it appeared the sheik's entire apart­ment except the tiny kitchen was bugged. And that's where on FBI tape CM #28 he has the spiritual head of Al Qaeda uttering the words that would finally convict him: "Find a plan to inflict damage on the American Army itself." It turned out to be the most dangerous moment in Salem's undercover infiltration.

"Because the sheik cannot see, he has hypersensitive hearing," recalls Salem, who was armed with a crude Nagra reel-to-reel

recorder hidden in a briefcase. The (let Smart-era technology put Salem at high risk of exposure—he had to put chewing gum on the briefcase to hide a flashing red light the FBI had installed to indicate when the tapes were running. "Keep in mind that there are a half dozen guys in the front room with I Izis and AK-47s who will blow me apart if they know what I am doing. The feds needed me to get an actual threat on tape, so I am lifting the briefcase up to my face level because he is leaning in to whisper the fatal words to me. All this time my heart is pounding because I am convinced he will hear the handle of the briefcase creak and I will be blown."

At every turn, Salem continued to demon­strate incredible courage, even after someone leaked word to the media that the FBI was working an undercover asset who had pene­trated a txmibing conspiracy "I was livid," says Salem, "but by then I'd risked my life for months, so I decided to brass it out. I called Siddiq Ali, the head of the cell, who had waved an I Jzi at me a few days before. I pointedly told him about this news story and that it must have been one of the others and we should shut the operation down. I used the anger I had with the FBI, and he believed me. He said, 'No. Let's keep going.'"

Still mistrustful, the FBI kept Salem in the dark about its plans until the day of the plot's takedown. He and his family were given no notice about how the endgame would be

handled. "The agents who came in for the arrest roughed me up pretty badly," says Salem, who was hospitalized witii chest pains. "Then they told my wife and kids we had three hours to pack." The FBI Hostage Res­cue Team quickly grabbed Salem's family and moved them to a safe house. That's when Salem dropped his own bomb. He'd been so mistrustful of Dunbar and other FBI bosses that in addition to taping the bad guys he'd made his own tapes of the feds. "I was afraid that if something went wrong, they would blame me," Salem now says. "Dunbar and James Roth, the head lawyer in the New York Ollice, went nuts." Under federal law the red-faced prosecutors in the U.S. attorney's office were now forced to turn over this second set of 70 "bootleg" tapes to the defense.

In one of those tapes Salem is heard tell­ing Anticev and Napoli that he'd warned them the Trade Center had been a target. They denied it, but in another tape Anticev admitted, "You were right...we were stupid in a lot of ways." Salem responded, "If we was continuing what we was doing, the bomb would never go oil." At that point Anticev said, "Absolutely. But don't repeat that."

On another recording the outspoken Floyd described her Ixkscs in the New York Ollice as "gutless" and "chickenshits" for the way they'd treated Salem. Her honesty almost derailed her career. Instead of getting a corner office in tiie Hoover Building for recruiting perhaps

the most impoitant undercover asset in recent FBI history, Floyd found herself the foais of a multiyear internal affairs investigation by the bureau's Office of Professional Responsibility. Before it was over she was suspended for two weeks. "They took her badge and her gun and put her on the street," says Predtechens-kis. The reason? "Insubordination to Carson Dunbar." Worse yet, someone leaked a story to the Nan York Post suggesting she'd been hav­ing an affair with Salem.

Under the banner headline temptress & 11 if. spy, Floyd found herself portrayed as a kind of bureau Mata Ilari when in fact the bootleg tapes proved conclusively that she'd been 100 percent professional with Salem. "This stoiy was the ultimate cheap shot," Predtechenskis tells me, "an attempt by people in the New York Office to smear a great young agent."

Years later, when I interviewed him, Dun-bar was unrepentant, calling Salem "a prolific liar" and an informant who was "out of con­trol." But when it counted, at trial, Salem and Floyd, who was also subject to brutal cross-examination, canie through. When he described how he'd used the briefcase tape recorder to trap the sheik in a seditious threat to the U.S. military, the 57-year-old cleric screamed, "Satan! Infidel!"—issuing a de facto fatwa, or death warrant, against Salem. The blind sheik and nine others, including Kahane's killer Nosair and Clement Rodney Ilanipton-F.l, an American Black Muslim who had offered to supply explosives and weap­ons, were convicted of seditious conspiracy for the Day of Terror plot—their plan to blow up the United Nations, the FBI's New York Office, the CJcorge Washington Bridge and the tunnels leading into Manhattan. "The U.S. is Hying to kill me with a slow death," hissed the sheik. "But Ckxl is great, and he will be revengeful." There was little doubt, as he was led out of the courtroom, that the central focus of his vengeance would be Emad Salem.

So lethal was Rahman's grip on Osama bin

Laden and Al Qaeda's number two, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, that even from prison the blind sheik inspired the Luxor, Egypt massacre in 1997, the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998 and the attack on the USS Cole in 2(XK)—acts of terror committed in his name that collectively left hundreds dead.

Facing three separate death threats, Salem and his family had either to move or to change their identities multiple times in the lirst two years. lie practically lived in a Kevlar vest.

"It's difficult for the average person to understand what you give up when you do this," says Salem. "I can no longer pull out my resume for a job. I can't say I have an engineering degree. My wife, who is a jewelry designer, can't mention her master's degree or ever set foot in a jewehy exchange again. We're alive, but we are also ghosts."

Alter 24 months of constant movement by the U.S. Marshals Servian, Salem, his German wile, Kaiin, and their two children, Sheiif and Noha, were finally able to breathe. The feds had given them new names: Ibm and Yvette Parks. The kids (then 13 and 17) were called Mike and Jennifer. Salem used $1 lfi,(XX) of the funds he'd earned from the Rahman conviction to buy a house in Orange County, California.

"For the lirst time we were beginning to feel stable," he says now. "Then one day at school Noha's teacher had a newspaper with my pic­ture in it. Innocently my daughter said, 'Iliat's my dad who stopped those terrorists.'"

"Die next morning there was a kiuxi at the door," says Karin. "Again the marshals gave us just hours to pack." A convoy of black Subur­bans showed up, and suddenly the Salem-Parks had to abandon their home—whisked by jet to a new city, where their identities were washed and they had to start all over again.

"We lost the house," says Salem. "It was a brutal reminder of how fragile our life was." His son, Sheiif, says, "The roughest part was

going from school to school and always hav­ing to be somebody else." And that meant short stays of two to three months in Tennes­see, Minnesota, Virginia and California.

"They'd pick us up in a van witli no windows and take us to a hangar," says Salem. "We'd board a jet, and tiiey wouldn't get their flight plan until we were airborne, Then we'd land in an unknown city and go into another van and into a garage somewhere and up an elevator and finally out into a hotel, where we'd live for a while—until the marshals picked up wind of another threat and we'd have to move."

By 1996 the ex-Egyptian army engineer and his family were tired of running. "We were exhausted," he says. "So 1 asked Hal and Mark, two of the marshals in my detail, 'Please go and get the rest of my money.' 'How much?' they asked me. I told them all of it, and I wanted it in cash in a large duffel bag. So they literally went to the U.S. Treasury and withdrew $750,000 in cash and took me to a bank, where I put it in a safe-deposit box."

Salem and his family have nothing but praise for the witness protection program and the marshals who kept them alive all those years. They were finally able to settle in one city somewhere in the continental U.S. They put down roots, bought a modest house and ran a relatively successful small business until the recession hit.

They were forced to leave the Witness Security Program after Salem's sister, whom he'd had the feds bring over from Kgypt for her safety, decided she wanted to go home. "It was too big a risk," says Salem, who is still wanted by Al Qaeda, Sudanese intelligence and Siddiq Ali, the emigre from Khartoum who hatched the bridge-and-tunnel plot.

Now that he's out of the program, Salem spends his nights waiting for some rabid jihadist to jump out of the dark to even the score. "1 know that as long as I live, I'll be a target," he says. "You don't put the prince of jihad away for life and expect to walk away." Still, despite the price he's paid, Salem is remarkably free of remorse about his deci­sion to risk his life to go undercover for the feds. "America is the country I chose. I love it beyond anything you can imagine, and I'll never let anybody harm this country."

F.mad Salem succeeded in spite of the FBI, not because of it. Sadly, liis experience points to the FBI's long-standing inability to effectively combat outlaw organizations from the inside. F.ven having a single F'BI agent go undercover to gain the trust of a low-level wiseguy in the Bonanno family proved daunting.

The sting of Benjamin "Lefty" Ruggiero by Special Agent Joe Pistone (a.k.a. Donnie Brasco) was touted by the bureau as so sig­nificant that it spawned a series of books and a feature film starring Johnny Depp as Pis-tone and Al Pacino as Ruggiero. "In truth, Lefty was a low-level petty thief who had the IQofa mothball," says retired detective Joe Coffey, former commanding officer of the NYPD's Organized Crime-Homicide Task Force. "The feds spent millions to get Pistone in, and he didn't really develop anything. He never put a hole in the Bonannos."

That minor infiltration of La Cosa Nostra pales in comparison with what Salem accom­plished by stinging the spiritual head of Al

Qaeda. But his success against the blind sheik is a bitter reminder of how littJe the FBI has progressed since then in developing undercover assets. Worse, it still can't seem to connect the dots when confronted with compelling evidence of a terror threat.

Case in point: Anwar al-Awlaki. Within days of Faisal Shahzad's arrest for the Times Square bomb attempt, he reportedly admitted that he was influenced by the 11 .S.-born radical Yemeni cleric—the same imam who had inspired Major Nidal Malik I Iasan to open lire at Ford I Io<xl, killing 13 and wounding 38. More sh<xJdng, Awlaki was also linked to 23-year-old Nigerian II mar Farouk Abdulmutallab, accused of trying to down Northwest flight 253 with an under­wear IFD on Christinas Day.

The bureau's failure to put the bracelets on Awlaki is a metaphor for its seeming inabil­ity to thwart the radical Islamic threat. Not only was the then 30-ycar-old imam linked to three of the 9/11 hijackers back in 2001, but he was interviewed multiple times by special agents before skipping the country in 2002.

He then audaciously returned to JFK, where he was detained by Customs agents after his name turned up on a watch list. But after a few hours he was released when an FBI agent called to clear him. Now Awlaki is considered such a threat to U.S. interests that he became the first Ameri­can citizen on the CIA's list of terrorists approved as a target for assassination.

Nearly a decade after 9/11, one has to ask whether the FBI has any better idea of how to stop terrorism on American soil now than it did before the emergence of Al Qaeda. Officially the bureau has 6,000 operatives assigned to counterterrorism, yet there are still fewer than 50 Arabic-speaking agents. Recently, the bureau admitted its second attempt to create a computerized "virtual case file system" to replace its paper-driven records system was months away from deployment almost eight years after its inception. Its soaring development costs arc now approaching half a billion dollars.

Meanwhile, in his PowerPoint presentations at the FBI Academy, Salem tries to attack Al Qaeda at its roots. I Ie says agents need to gain an understanding of how men like Bin Laden preach a "distortion of the prophet's words."

"You may think that as a devout Muslim I view you as an infidel," he tells me after I relate how I spent my grammar school years as a Catholic altar boy. "But the Prophet Muhammad says that no one who is a believer can be punished this way. In the Koran there are five pillars that make up a believer. If you embrace these five, you cannot l)c condemned with a fatwa. First, do you believe in Ckxl? Sec­ond, do you believe in his angels? Third, do you believe in the prophets, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Jesus and Muhammad? Fourth, do you believe in the holy books, the Torali, the New Testament and the Koran? lastly, do you believe in the Day of Judgment? Ninety-five percent of Christians and Jews believe in these live pillars, which means they are believers and cannot be seen as infidels."

So how is it, I ask him, that the Al Qaeda hierarchy can get away with branding the Jews and "the Crusaders" as infidels, subject to death—its justification for the

murder of thousands on 9/11?

"These men have corrupted Muhammad's words," insists Salem. "And they have done it for profit." He says that when the blind sheik declared it "permissible" to attack Coptic Christians in Kgypt, he was after their wealth. "When Sheik Omar was arrested in 1993, the feds searched his apartment and found tens of thousands of dollars in cash under his bed," he says. "The very reason he came to New York was to grab the mil­lions still being raised for the mujahideen in Afghanistan who had battled the Soviets."

The literal translation of/I/ Qaeda is "the base." Named for the database of thousands of so-called Afghan Arabs who came to fight Russians during their occu­pation of Afghanistan, Bin Laden's terror network was bankrolled via the Makhtab al-Khidamat—the so-called services office for the mujahideen—a worldwide organization of brick-and-mortar fund-raising centers.

The largest center in the U.S. was called the Alkifah and was based at the Al-Farook mosque on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. At one point in the early 1990s the Alkifah was bringing in millions of dollars a year in cash. "One of the reasons Sheik Omar came to New York," says Salem, "was to take over the

Alkifah, and he did it by ordering a hit more grisly than any Malia execution."

In early 1991 police discovered the rav­aged body of Mustafa Shalabi, the Kgyptian who ran the Alkifah center. He had been punctured and slashed with 30 stab wounds and shot six times. "After the sheik branded him a bad Muslim, Shalabi became terrified," says Salem. "lie sent his wile, Zinab, home to F.gypt with their child, and he was packing up to join her when he met that terrible death." The murder sent a message throughout the radicalized Arab community in America.

In 1993, after the Day of Terror bust, the feds reopened the case. Ilampton-F.l was iden­tified as a prime suspect. Also implicated was Mahmud Abouhalima, the redheaded Kgyp­tian cabbie who had been the sheik's personal driver. And by November the U.S. attorney's office had issued grand jury subpoenas in the probe. Then, for unknown reasons, the feds mysteriously backed away from the case. It was ice-cold until Salem started talking to me.

During our intei"views he casually revealed that he'd worn a wire and taped a conversation with Hanipton-Kl, the American Muslim who had confessed to being a participant in the crime. "He told me that the sheik had niled that Shalabi's blood had become permissible," says Salem. "So they went to his house and

shot him, and then they said, 'Okay, it's time to cut him and move him upstairs to make it lcx)k like the Jews did it as revenge.'"

After Salem gave me that account I met with NYPD detective James Moss and passed on a detail alxuit the homicide from Salem (via I Iampton-Kl) that had never been in the press. Within days the NYPD reopened the case, and Moss flew to meet Salem in the state where he lives with his family under an assumed name.

"Kmad Salem is the most interesting per­son I've interviewed in my 19 years in law enforcement," says Moss. "He may he the only man in America with unique firsthand knowledge into both the World Trade Cen­ter bombing and the Day of Terror plot. He single-handedly put away the blind sheik, who has to be maytx1 the most dangerous terrorist ever convicted. Salem has given us invaluable leads. His information is accurate, captivating and frightening." After reopen­ing the Shalabi case, Moss made a startling discoveiy: Key forensic evidence on the hit was taken from the NYPD property clerk's office in fall 1993—months after the feds had restarted the murder investigation and used a grand jury to work the Shalabi probe. After the feds shut the case down in 1994, the evidence was not returned.

In late June, after pressing the feds for additional information on the case, Moss learned that a member of the cell Salem had infiltrated had given a full confession to the murder, but it had been buried for years in the files of the Joint Terrorism Task Force. "Kmad Salem has ripped the lid off one of the great murders in the history of the war on terror," says Moss. "And we can now say that the discovery of the killers' identities became known to us now largely because of him."

"I told Detective Moss that if they bring charges, I will testify in open court," says Salem, who would once again be risking his life by coming out of hiding. For now, he lives quietly with Karin, with whom he recently celebrated his 20th wedding anniversary. Almost every month the FBI flies him to the academy at Quantico, where he lectures the special agents and assistant special agents in charge—men at the same level as Carson Dunbar—who Salem hopes will adopt a more aggressive approach to counterterrorism.

If he can change anything, Salem would love to address the problem that lies in the vast divide within the FBI between the street agents and management. "In the bureau you have two divisions," he says. "The humps and the suits. The humps are the agents like Nancy Floyd who do the heavy lifting. The suits are the managers who sit behind their desks and worry more about failing than succeeding." Salem pauses and thinks back. He still unfairly blames himself for not stopping Ramzi Yousef's first date with the Twin lowers. Finally, he goes on.

"I close each lecture at Quantico by tell­ing these assistant special agents in charge that the suits need to behave more like the humps. Maybe if that happens and these FBI bosses start to understand how A! Qaeda thinks, we can stop the next big one. And it's coming. We got very lucky with that kid in Times Square. But we can't keep counting on luck. It's just a matter of time."

ASSET DOESN'T SPEAK

39

_ STAND A CHANCE.

"The humps are the agents who do the heavy lifting.

The suits are the managers

who sit behind their desks

and worry more about

failing than succeeding."