Dirty Wars (8 page)

Nasser wanted to raise Anwar as an American, not just in nationality but also in character. In 1971, when the family moved so Nasser could complete his PhD at the University of Nebraska, they signed young Anwar up for swimming lessons at the local YMCA. “He was actually swimming when he was only two and a half years old,” Nasser recalled. “And he was very brilliant at it.” As we sat in his living room at his home in Sana'a, Nasser pulled out the family photo album and showed me pictures of little Anwar, posed on a rug in a staged picture taken at a shopping mall. Eventually, the family settled down in St. Paul, where Nasser got a job at the
University of Minnesota
and enrolled Anwar at Chelsea Heights Elementary School. “He was an all-American boy,” he said, showing me a picture of Anwar in his classroom. Anwar, with long, flowing hair, is smiling as he points out Yemen on a globe. Another family photo shows a lanky adolescent Anwar wearing sunglasses and a baseball hat at Disneyland. “Anwar was really raised like any other American boy, he used to like sports and he was very brilliant at school, you know. He was a good student, and he participated in all kinds of sports.”

In 1977, Nasser decided to move the family back to Yemen—for how long he did not know. Nasser believed he had an obligation to use his US education to help his very poor home country. He knew that he wanted Anwar to return to the United States one day for university, but he also believed it would be good for the young boy to learn about his family's homeland. So, on the last day of 1977, the family returned to Sana'a. Six-year-old Anwar could barely speak Arabic, though he quickly picked it up. He had risen to number four in his class in Sana'a by the end of his first semester and within a year was speaking Arabic with ease. Nasser and his colleagues eventually started a private school that taught in both English and Arabic. Anwar was in the first class, along with Ahmed Ali Abdullah Saleh, the son of Yemen's president. The two boys would be classmates for
eight years. Ahmed Ali would go on to become one of the most feared men in Yemen and the head of its Republican Guard. Anwar, meanwhile, set off on a course to follow in his father's academic footsteps.

Anwar would spend the next twelve years in Yemen, as his father became closer to his American friends in Sana'a. Nasser and several other US- and British-educated Yemenis worked with the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and started a college of agriculture with $15 million in funding from the United States. In 1988, Nasser was appointed Yemen's minister of agriculture. After Anwar finished high school in Yemen, a colleague of Nasser's from USAID offered to help find a good college for Anwar in the United States. Nasser wanted his son to study “civil engineering, particularly regarding hydraulics, and the problem of water resources in Yemen. Because Yemen is really suffering from the shortage of water.” His USAID friend suggested Colorado State University (CSU) and helped Anwar get a US government scholarship. In order for Anwar to get the scholarship, he had to have a Yemeni passport. “At that time, I was just a regular university professor, I didn't have the finances to send my son to study in the United States at my own expense,” recalled Nasser. “So the American USAID director told me it is easy, if Anwar can get a Yemeni passport, then he will be qualified for the scholarship from USAID. So, we got Anwar a Yemeni passport.” The Yemeni authorities listed his birthplace as Aden, Yemen. This would later cause trouble for Anwar.

ANWAR LANDED AT
O'HARE AIRPORT
in Chicago on June 3, 1990, and then moved to Fort Collins, Colorado, to study
civil engineering
. “His dream, as a young man, was really to finish his studies [in the United States] and come and serve in Yemen,” said Nasser. During Anwar's first year at the university, the United States launched the Gulf War against Iraq. Nasser recalled a phone call he received from Anwar when the US bombs started falling on Baghdad. He was watching Peter Arnett, the famed CNN correspondent, reporting from the Iraqi capital. “He saw pictures from CNN that it was a complete blackout over Baghdad. So Anwar was thinking that Baghdad was really, completely destroyed. Baghdad has a lot of cultural meaning to Muslims, because it was the site of the Abbasid dynasty. So he was really disappointed at what happened. And so at that time he started really to worry about general Muslim problems.”

Anwar admitted that when he first went to the United States for college, he “was
not [a] fully practicing
” Muslim, but after the Gulf War began he started to become politicized and eventually headed up the
Muslim Student Association
on campus. Anwar had also become interested in the
war in Afghanistan and, during winter break in 1992, Anwar traveled to the country. The US-backed mujahedeen had expelled the Soviet occupiers in 1989, yet Afghanistan remained embroiled in civil war and the country was a popular destination for young Muslims, including a staggering number of Yemenis, to explore a front of jihad. “The invasion of Kuwait took place, followed by the Gulf War. That is when I started taking my religion more seriously,” Anwar later recalled. “I took the step of traveling to Afghanistan to fight. I spent a winter there and returned with the intention of finishing up in the US and leaving to Afghanistan for good. My plan was to travel back in summer; however, Kabul was opened by the mujahedeen and I saw that the war was over and ended up
staying in the US
.”

Anwar's
grades
started slipping at the university as he became more invested in politics and religion. He later claimed that he lost his scholarship because of his activism. “Word came to me from a connection at the US Embassy in Sana'a, that they have been receiving reports about my Islamic activities on campus and the fact that I have traveled to Afghanistan and this was the single reason for the
termination of my scholarship
,” he alleged. In retrospect, this appears to have been a defining moment in Anwar's trajectory. A spark had been created that, when combined with the events that followed it, altered his path. Years later, Anwar theorized that the scholarship he was given was part of a US government plot to recruit students from around the world as agents for America. “The US government through its programs of scholarships for foreign students has created for itself a pool of cadres around the world. From among these are leaders in every field, heads of state, politicians, businessmen, scientists, etc. They have one thing in common: They were all students in American Universities,” he wrote. “These programs have helped the US bolster its strength worldwide and spread out its control. The way the US is managing an empire without calling it an empire is one of the great innovations of our time.” The story he told about himself was one of a rare individual who had resisted this imperial design. “The plans to have me as one of the many thousand men and women around the world who have their loyalty to the US did not go through. I wasn't suitable for that role anymore.
I was a fundamentalist now
!”

The members of the Awlaki family did not consider themselves particularly religious, just good Muslims who prayed five times a day and tried to live their lives in accordance with the Koran. Religion was not unimportant by any means, but for the Awlakis, their tribal identity came first. They were also modern people with relationships with international diplomats and businessmen. As he was becoming politicized, Anwar attended a mosque near his university in Colorado and the local imam asked him
to deliver a sermon
one Friday. Anwar agreed and realized he had a gift for public speaking. He began to think that maybe preaching, not engineering, was his true calling. “He was a very, very,
very promising person
. And we were hoping for a good future for him,” recalled Anwar's uncle, Sheikh Saleh bin Fareed, a wealthy businessman and the head of the Aulaq tribe in Yemen. “I think Anwar was born to be a leader. It was in his blood, and his mentality.”

Anwar
graduated from CSU
in 1994 and decided to stay in Colorado after graduation. He married a cousin from Yemen and took a job as an imam at the
Denver Islamic Society
. Nasser told me that Anwar never spoke of becoming an imam when he left for America but that he fell into it after being asked to preach a few times. “He thought this is an area where he can be [of help] and can do something. So I guess it started just by coincidence. But then I guess he liked it, so he decided to shift from professional engineering” to a vocation preaching Islam. Anwar became interested in the writings and speeches of
Malcolm X
and concerned about the plight of the African American community. In Denver, “He started to think about social issues in America, and he knew many black people and he went to see them in prisons, tried to help them,” said Nasser. “So he became more involved in the social problems in the United States, regarding Muslims, and other minorities.” A member of his mosque in Denver later said of Awlaki, “He could talk to people directly—looking them in the eye.
He had this magic
.” An elder from Awlaki's Denver mosque later told the
New York Times
that he'd had a dispute with Awlaki after the young imam advised a young Saudi worshipper to join the Chechen jihad against Russia. “He had
a beautiful tongue
,” the elder said. “But I told him: Don't talk to my people about jihad.”

On
September 13, 1995
, Anwar's wife gave birth to their first child, a boy named Abdulrahman. A year later, in 1996, Anwar moved his young family to San Diego, California, where he became an imam at the
Masjid al Ribat al Islami
. He also began working on a master's degree in
education leadership
at San Diego State University. In the late 1990s, as the United States was gearing up for the 2000 presidential election, Nasser traveled to the United States to receive medical treatment and visited his son in San Diego. Nasser showed me a photo of a full-bearded Anwar on a boat, holding up a massive fish he caught. “He was already an imam with a big beard, you know,” Nasser recalled, smiling at the picture of his son, who wore a yellow T-shirt emblazoned with the logo of a local Islamic organization and a baseball cap. A former San Diego neighbor of Awlaki's, Lincoln Higgie III, described Awlaki as “
very outgoing and cheerful
,” with a “very retiring wife” and an “adorable” child. “He liked to go
albacore fishing
,”
Higgie recalled, “so every once in a while he would bring me some albacore fillets that his wife cooked up.”

While visiting his son, Nasser attended Friday prayers and watched Anwar preach. “It was regular mosque. It had a capacity of about four hundred people, and most of the people who came to the mosque were regular Muslims: engineers, doctors, and people who had restaurants and things like that. From all over the Muslim world, from the Arab world,” Nasser remembered. “I used to listen to his sermons. In fact, at that time, he was asking Muslims to participate in the democratic process in America, and he was encouraging—in fact, during the 2000 presidential campaign of George W. Bush, he thought the conservative Republicans would be better than the liberal Democrats, and he encouraged the Muslims there to elect George Bush. Because, he said, he was against abortions and things like that. These things conform to Muslim tradition,” Nasser recalled. “So he was very active with the Muslim community, actually, and he never supported any violent things. He was very peaceful in America. All he did, really, was to represent Islam in its best.”

In 1999, Anwar had his
first run-in with the FBI
, when he was flagged by the Bureau because of his alleged contact with Ziyad Khaleel, an al Qaeda associate who US intelligence believed had bought a battery for bin Lad-en's satellite phone. He had also been visited by a colleague of Omar Abdel Rahman, the “
blind sheikh
” convicted of masterminding the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The 1999 investigation reportedly uncovered other ties the FBI found troubling, such as to the
Holy Land Foundation
, a Muslim charity vilified for raising funds for Palestinian charitable institutions linked to Hamas, a US State Department-designated terrorist organization. For two years while in San Diego, according to tax records procured by the FBI, Awlaki was the vice president of another organization, the
Charitable Society for Social Welfare
(CSSW). According to an FBI agent, this was merely another “
front organization
to funnel money to terrorists.” Though no charges were ever brought against CSSW, federal prosecutors described it as a subsidiary of a larger organization founded by
Abdul Majeed al Zindani
, a well-known Yemeni with alleged al Qaeda ties. However, by this logic, the
US Department of Labor
would also be guilty by association, for providing CSSW projects with millions of dollars between 2004 and 2008. Anwar's family dismisses the suggestion that Anwar was raising money for terrorist groups and insists he was
raising money for orphans
in Yemen and elsewhere in the Arab world. The US investigation into Anwar was soon closed, for lack of evidence. In March 2000, the FBI concluded that Awlaki “
does not meet the criterion
for [further] investigation.” But it wasn't the last time Anwar would hear from the FBI.

Two men
who prayed at Anwar's mosque in San Diego, Khalid al Mihdhar and
Nawaf al Hazmi
, would soon be among the nineteen hijackers who conducted the 9/11 attacks. When Anwar moved the family to Falls Church, Virginia, in 2000, Hazmi also attended his mosque. After 9/11, US investigators would charge that Anwar was al Hazmi's “
spiritual adviser
.” Nasser told me he asked his son about his connections to Hazmi and Mihdhar and told me that Anwar had only a sporadic, clerical relationship with the men. “I asked him myself. He said, ‘They prayed in the mosque like anybody else, and I met them casually,'” Nasser asserted, asking, “How in the world do you think al Qaeda would have faith in Anwar to tell him about their biggest thing they were preparing for? It is unbelievable, because at that time he had no links whatsoever with any group like that. Definitely. And I'm 100 percent sure of that.”