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While the case against the guys in Lodi may well be exaggerated, this information about Zawahiri makes perfect sense and fits in well with a bunch of other information I'm aware of. There was an al-Qaeda cell in the San Francisco Bay area led by Ali Mohamed, and Zawahiri visited on past occasions. Here are a couple of entries I've recently written on the matter:
Spring 1993: Islamic Jihad Head Fundraises in US
Ali Mohamed helps Ayman al-Zawahiri enter the US for a fundraising tour and acts as his head of security during his stay. At the time, al-Zawahiri is known to have been the head of the militant group Islamic Jihad since the late 1980's. He is also al-Qaeda's de facto number two leader, though this is not widely known. This is apparently his second visit to the US; having previously paid a recruiting visit to the al-Kifah center in Brooklyn in 1989. The exact timing of this second visit is disputed, but New Yorker magazine will report that “people at the FBI” assert “al-Zawahiri arrived in America shortly after the first bombing of the World Trade Center” in February 1993. Al-Zawahiri stays at Mohamed's residence in Santa Clara, California, posing as a representative of a charity organization. It is said that not much money is raised. (New Yorker, 9/9/02)
Late 1994 or 1995: Islamic Jihad Head Fundraises in US Again
Ali Mohamed helps Ayman al-Zawahiri enter the US for another fundraising tour and acts as his head of security during his stay. At the time, al-Zawahiri is known to have been the head of the militant group Islamic Jihad since the late 1980's. He is also al-Qaeda's de facto number two leader, though this is not widely known. This is apparently his third visit to the US after recruiting and fundraising trips in 1989 and 1993. (New Yorker, 9/9/02) Al-Zawahiri travels on a passport forged by Mohamed and uses a false name. He pretends to be a doctor for a charity raising money for refugees in Afghanistan, but in fact raises money for his Islamic Jihad group. Some donors know his true purpose, and others do not. According to one security expert, he is also in the US “to see whom he could recruit here, what could be done here—preparing the establishment of a base.” Mohamed and Khaled Abu el-Dahab, the two known members of a Santa Clara, California, based al-Qaeda sleeper cell, host al-Zawahiri in Santa Clara and escort him to nearby mosques in Santa Clara, Stockton, and Sacramento. (San Francisco Chronicle, 10/11/01; Chicago Tribune, 12/11/01) He spends weeks in the US, traveling to other states such as Texas and New York to raise money from mosques there as well. He raises as much as $500,000. El-Dahab is later told some of the money collected is used later in the year to fund bombing of Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, killing 17 diplomats. (San Francisco Chronicle, 10/11/01) Accounts on the timing of the trip are vague, and differ as to whether it took place in late 1994 or some time in 1995. Perhaps coincidentally, Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, bin Laden's brother in law, is arrested in mid-December 1994 in Morgan Hill, California, approximately 30 miles from Santa Clara. The FBI finds and quickly translates literature in Khalifa's luggage advocating training in assassination, explosives, and weapons, bombing churches, and murdering Catholic priests, but seemingly inexplicably, they deport him a few months later.
1999: Clinton Officials Ask About Islamic Jihad Leader's US Visits, FBI Agents Respond: Don't Worry About It
Dan Benjamin and Steve Simon, director and senior director of the National Security Council's counterterrorism team, review some old intelligence files and learn that Ayman al-Zawahiri, head of Islamic Jihad and al-Qaeda's number two leader, had done fundraising in the US a few years earlier. They call FBI agents Michael Rolince and Steve Jennings to a meeting at the White House. Benjamin will recall, “We said to them: ‘This is incredible. Al-Zawahiri was here. He must have been fundraising, he had to have handlers. What can you tell us?’ And said, ‘We got it covered. Don't worry about it.’ And it was a blow-off.” Only later do Benjamin and Simon learn that one of al-Zawahiri's hosts had been Ali Mohamed, even though Mohamed is already in US custody and his arrest had been front page news by the time the White House meeting took place. The FBI still fails to pursue the connection and rejects an offer of new authority to monitor activity in radical mosques. (CBS News, 10/2/02; Washington Post, 10/2/02; New York Times, 10/30/98; Benjamin and Simon, 2002)
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In fact, Zawahiri spoke English and a number of other Western languages very well, and travelled in the West quite a lot in the 1990s using a number of aliases. He probably lived more in European countries like Switzerland than he did in Muslim countries for much of the 1990s, but no one really knows what he was doing there or whom he was associating with. He even got arrested in Russia in the mid-1990s and held in prison for six months (the Russians apparently never penetrated his alias, and let him go).
But what's curious is that Ali Mohamed was a double agent working for both al-Qaeda and US intelligence and US intelligence must have known about this by 1998. Further, Mohamed had just moved to Sacramento that year, so this story is especially stunning that Zawahiri would be seen near Sacramento at that time. In all likelihood, Mohamed was under heavy surveillance at the time.
This story raises a whole lot of questions about whom was really working for whom.
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