Public Enemy No. 2

By Richard Lacayo

In addition to being mentor, confidant and chief accomplice to Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri is a physician. It is not recorded whether he ever pledged to honor a doctor's first obligation: to do no harm. If he did, he didn't mean it. Over the past two decades, he has had a hand in some of the most murderous terrorist attacks in the world. In 1995 his suicide bombers destroyed the Egyptian embassy in Pakistan, where 15 died and 60 more were injured. All the while, al-Zawahiri was laying the groundwork for the East African terrorist operation that would drive truck bombs into the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, killing 224 people and injuring thousands more.

Then came the attacks of Sept. 11. In the view of many experts on terrorism, it was al-Zawahiri as much as bin Laden who launched them. Placid looking, almost avuncular--especially for a man who has been sentenced to death in absentia by the Egyptians--al-Zawahiri, 50, is by choice a less visible symbol of terror than bin Laden. Three years ago, at a small press conference in the Afghan city of Khost, bin Laden announced the formation of the World Islamic Front for the Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders, an umbrella group of radicals from across the Islamic world. You could easily have missed al-Zawahiri, the stocky bearded man in owlish eyeglasses seated beside him. But when bin Laden described to reporters the individual duty he was placing on all Muslims--"to kill Americans and their allies"--it could have been al-Zawahiri doing the talking.

The vision of worldwide jihad is one that al-Zawahiri has imparted steadily to bin Laden since 1985, when they first worked together on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Back then, bin Laden, the scion of a rich Saudi family, was helping finance Arab volunteers in the Afghan war. Al-Zawahiri was working in field hospitals treating Afghan and Arab fighters. He was also, however, already the effective head of Al Jihad, the secretive Egyptian terrorist group bent on overthrowing the government of Egypt's President, Hosni Mubarak. And al-Zawahiri was becoming further convinced that establishing Islamic rule throughout the Arab world required not just struggle against illegitimate rulers but also a worldwide jihad against infidels who support them. That meant targeting the U.S. and its interests around the world. Bin Laden had the dollars; al-Zawahiri had the dream.

"Ayman is for bin Laden like the brain to the body," says Montasser al-Zayat, a lawyer in Cairo who has represented many Islamic militants and who was jailed with al-Zawahiri in the early 1980s. "When Osama went to Afghanistan, he was just a young man supporting the Afghans. He did not have a political outlook. Ayman controlled Osama completely. He convinced him of the principles of jihad." Azzam Tamimi, director of the Institute of Islamic Political Thought in London, says that al-Zawahiri is now the chief ideologue of Takfir wal Hijra (Anathema and Exile), the very bleakest offshoot of Islamic extremism, which freely targets as infidels not only Westerners but also other Muslims. In December a Takfir gunman killed 20 worshipers at a mosque in Khartoum, Sudan, one of several such attacks. "According to him the majority of Muslims around the world are not Muslim," says Tamimi. "His ideas negate the existence of common ground with others, irrespective of their religion. Life for him is a continuous conflict with 'the Other.'"

Fluent in English, al-Zawahiri often serves as an interpreter for bin Laden, who grew up in the enclosed and relatively provincial world of Saudi Arabia in the 1960s. "Ayman is much more politically skilled than bin Laden," argues Mary Anne Weaver, author of A Portrait of Egypt: A Journey Through the World of Militant Islam. "He's better educated. He has a larger worldview." Weaver recalls that when she met al-Zawahiri in 1978, he was orchestrating a demonstration by religiously orthodox female students at the University of Cairo who demanded separate medical-school classes for women. "He was much more political than religious," Weaver recalls. "His battle was always to overthrow the Egyptian regime."

For al-Zawahiri, that battle was against the very world that had produced him. He grew up in Maadi, a fashionable suburb of Cairo, home to wealthy Egyptians and foreign diplomats, where his elderly mother still lives with one of his brothers. (Another of his brothers has dedicated himself, like Ayman, to a life in the terrorist underground.) In Cairo relatives and friends remember him as being polite, composed, well read and even funny. His paternal grandfather had been the sheikh, or chief religious figure, at Al Ahzar, the world's most prestigious Islamic university. His maternal grandfather had been president of Cairo University, where his father was dean of the pharmacy school. His uncle had been first secretary-general of the Arab League, the organizational vessel for the pan-Arab dreams of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser.

But following the calamity of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, which discredited secular nationalism throughout the Arab world, many younger Arabs turned to Islamic fundamentalism. Al-Zawahiri was one. By 1979, when Egypt signed the Camp David accords with Israel, al-Zawahiri had embraced Al Jihad, a violent and highly secretive organization dedicated to establishing Islamic rule in Egypt and across the Arab world. Adopting a strict and belligerent brand of Islam, al-Zawahiri steeped himself in the absolutist beliefs of Sayyid Qutb, who was executed in 1966 for plotting against Nasser's government. Qutb's book Signposts Along the Road, a formative influence on the current generation of Islamic militants, calls for the aggressive pursuit of a holy war against the West, which he saw as home to a return of jahiliyya, the pagan barbarism that existed in the Arab world before Muhammad.

Al-Zawahiri's own forte then was organization, not ideology. The most secretive of Al Jihad's leaders, he became a master of underground work, recruiting militants, many of them from the Egyptian armed forces, and organizing them into clandestine cells. He left few traces of his own involvements. After Anwar Sadat's assassination in 1981, al-Zawahiri was tried as one of hundreds of defendants, but prosecutors were unable to charge him with any direct connection to the plot. Court testimony alleged that he met with top conspirators on the night of Sadat's killing, then again a week later, after mass uprisings had been crushed by security forces. But as defendant No. 113, al-Zawahiri was convicted only on a weapons-possession charge and sentenced to three years in prison.

While there, he was tortured by the usual means: he was shocked, beaten and hung upside down. After his release in 1984, al-Zawahiri spent a year back at his Maadi clinic, but for Islamic radicals, the climate in Egypt had become too hot. Offered a job at a hospital in the Saudi port of Jidda, al-Zawahiri successfully sued Egyptian authorities who attempted to prevent him from leaving the country. It may have been in Jidda that he first met bin Laden. Within a year, he was working in Peshawar, Pakistan, giving medical care to bin Laden's anti-Soviet fighters.

As Afghanistan collapsed into factional fighting following the Soviet defeat in 1989, al-Zawahiri ushered back to Egypt many of the Arab veterans of the war. There they became Al Jihad operatives, dedicated to Mubarak's overthrow. Meanwhile, al-Zawahiri and bin Laden relocated to Sudan. Most of the missions that al-Zawahiri launched into Egypt, including separate attempts to assassinate the Prime Minister and a former Interior Minister, ended in failure. The successful bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Pakistan was the demented high point of the campaign. Mubarak's security forces responded with a ferocious crackdown in which hundreds of militants were arrested or driven into hiding or exile.

Those attacks were audacious enough. But investigators now believe that al-Zawahiri also made not one but two fund-raising trips to the U.S. in the 1990s. During the second, in 1995, he was introduced to worshipers at the An-Noor mosque in Santa Clara, Calif., as Dr. Abdel Muez, a representative of the Pakistani Red Crescent, the Islamic version of the Red Cross. Al-Zawahiri collected thousands of dollars from donors who were told the money was intended to help Afghan refugees. Dr. Ali Zaki, an Egyptian-born physician who is one of the leaders of the mosque, says he later accompanied the man he knew only as Dr. Muez on a visit to other Islamic centers in Stockton and Sacramento but did not learn the true purpose of the trip until he was contacted by the FBI in 1999.

When questioned by federal agents that year, Zaki told them that he met al-Zawahiri through two men he knew casually from the mosque, Ali Mohamed and Khalid Abu-al-Dahab. Both have since confessed to Egyptian authorities that they were terrorist operatives. In 1999 Abu-al-Dahab was tried in Egypt as one of a group of men accused of involvement in the terrorist campaign against the Mubarak government. In a written confession presented to the court, Abu-al-Dahab said that on the U.S. trip, al-Zawahiri netted only about $2,500, which was considered a poor showing. All the same, Abu-al-Dahab also claimed to have learned from Al Jihad leaders that the money had helped to underwrite the embassy bombing in Pakistan.

At the same trial, al-Zawahiri was sentenced to death in absentia. Some intelligence experts believe the failure of his terrorism campaign against the Egyptian government led him to refocus his war onto the U.S., which he hated for supporting Mubarak, the Saudi royal family and Israel. In 1996 U.S. pressure led Sudan to expel bin Laden's operation. Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri returned to Afghanistan, where the ferociously ascetic brand of Islam embraced by the emergent Taliban government was perfectly congenial to them.

In retrospect, it was a mistake to chase the two men out of Sudan. In the mountains and caves of Afghanistan, they were newly safe from prying eyes. In 1998 came the attacks on the U.S. embassies in East Africa, for which al-Zawahiri, like bin Laden, was later indicted in New York City. That attack also set off a U.S.-led manhunt throughout the world in which dozens of members of Al Jihad were arrested and extradited to Egypt, further crippling the organization's infrastructure. The besieged group split into two factions. One side angrily denounced al-Zawahiri for dragging members into a needless battle with the U.S. The other loyally followed him into a deeper alliance with bin Laden.

Largely because of al-Zawahiri, the ranks of al-Qaeda are full of Egyptians, a development resented by some of bin Laden's old Saudi confederates. Early on, al-Zawahiri also installed at bin Laden's side his own faithful lieutenant, Mohamed Atef, who serves bin Laden as both a military commander and personal security chief. Al-Zawahiri has with him in Afghanistan his wife and their children. He has told an interviewer that they understand their stay there to be similar to the Prophet Muhammad's Hegira, or migration from Mecca to Medina.

In recent weeks al-Qaeda operatives have been looking around for an Islamic publisher for a manuscript titled Cavaliers Under the Prophet's Banner. The book is said to be a mission statement that al-Zawahiri completed just before Sept. 11. The physician turned terrorist seems determined to leave his testament and inspirational manual, shaped by Qutb's work, to future generations. Ayman al-Zawahiri has never been one to think small.

--Reported by Helen Gibson/London, Scott MacLeod/Cairo and Amany Radwan/Tehran

With reporting by Helen Gibson/London, Scott MacLeod/Cairo and Amany Radwan/Tehran