Rohan Gunaratna: Inside Al Qaeda. Global Network of Terror. Berkley Books, New York, 2003.

Reviewed by: Anssi Kullberg, 23 Oct. 2003

One of the best and most insightful analysis is offered by Gunaratna's detailed and carefully compiled biographic sections on the key terrorists and ideologues of Al Qaida. Here Gunaratna has not only paid attention on giving a very deep and balanced picture of the ideological backgrounds and motivations of Al Qaida's leaders, but also he has taken up the trouble of refuting some of the most persistent journalistic myths and disinformation that so abundantly occurs in the world media. For example, Gunaratna refutes the myth of Abdullah Azzam having served the CIA, let alone Usama bin Ladin himself.

Besides bin Ladin's background, Gunaratna's book offers especially good information on the crucial roles played by two of the most influential terrorist leaders behind bin Ladin: the Baluchi-Kuwaiti operational mastermind Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, and the Egyptian ideological strategist and "political officer" Ayman al Zawahiri.

Khalid Sheikh Muhammad
One of the key biographies, that of Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, has been added to the introduction of the 2003 edition, which is a very important addition, as soon after the publication of Gunaratna's book, Khalid was arrested in a US-Pakistani joint operation in Rawalpindi, February 2003. It is not exaggerated to estimate that his arrest might have been the so far most important single victory of the war against terrorism. [Read in The Eurasian Politician about Khalid's arrest: http://users.jyu.fi/~aphamala/pe/2003/muhammed.htm ]

Gunaratna begins by considering Khalid to belong to the same top elite of terrorist leaders with Imad Mughniyeh of the Hizbollah and Illich Ramírez Sánchez, alias Carlos the Jackal. Khalid was an ethnic Baluchi, whose family was from the area of Quetta, the capital of Pakistan's Baluchistan. Also from there was Mir Aimal Kansi, who committed the attack against the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, in January 1993, and was executed in the US in November 2002. However, Khalid was born and raised in Kuwait, in a rich Gulf Arab milieu where the Indian, Pakistani and African guest workers are considered second-class people, without most citizen rights. In spite of Khalid's Baluchi background, most of the people closest to him in his terrorist career, however, were Arabs. (pp. xxviii-xxix)

After returning from North Carolina, where Khalid was studying, to Pakistan, he joined the jihad coordination organization Ittihad-i Islami, where there were already hundreds of Arabs involved. (xxix) According to Gunaratna, Khalid was the true mastermind and operational planner of the 9/11 terrorist attack, and already before that, he masterminded the WTC bombing of 1993, which his nephew and protégé Ramzi Yousef led on the field. Khalid also planned a murder plot against the Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in 1993, attacks against the US in Karachi, and led the grandiose "Oplan Bojinka" plan, in which Al Qaida failed. Khalid belonged to the supreme leading circle of Al Qaida, the Military Council. Moreover, Khalid served as a main link of Al Qaida to the Kashmiri radical jihadist organization Jaish-e Mohammed.

Yet Khalid's name has remained relatively unknown to the mass media, mainly due to the fact that Al Qaida managed to keep his crucial role in secrecy, and only in 2002 the intelligence agencies started to follow his tracks. Khalid's name was kept in secrecy even during Yousef's interrogations after the latter's arrest and hand-over from Pakistan to the US, to be convicted for the 1993 WTC bombing. Actually the US intelligence refused from believing in the references to Khalid, although such hints were gained from the interrogations of the Al Qaida pilot Abdul Hakim Murad and from Abu Zubaydah. It was only after the arrest of Ramzi bin al Shaibh that the CIA started to believe that Khalid was a key player. (pp. xxvii-xxviii)

Gunaratna believes that the murder of the Wall Street Journal investigative reporter Daniel Pearl was ordered by Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, although one of his protégés, the Jaish-e Mohammed operative Ahmed Said Omar Sheikh alias Sheikh Omar, notorious for the Kashmir kidnappings, carried out the murder. Omar Sheikh was arrested in Pakistan and in 2002, sentenced to death for Pearl's murder. Gunaratna believes, referring to ISI sources, that while investigating the background of the British Al Qaida terrorist, Richard Reid the "Shoe Bomber", Pearl ended up in Karachi and on the tracks of Omar Sheikh and Khalid. Khalid ordered his murder, because Pearl was getting too close to his identity. (pp. xx-xxi)

According to Gunaratna, Khalid not only consulted bin Ladin and Zawahiri (being the practical terrorist mastermind of the organization), but made great influence to the younger generation of Al Qaida key operatives, such as the head of the external operations Abu Zubaydah (31), the logistics officer Ramzi bin al Shaibh (30), and the Southeast Asian terrorists Muhammad Mansur Jabara (21) and Hambali (36). Khalid's closest protégés were his nephew Ramzi Ahmed Yousef (leader of the WTC bombing of 1993) and Abu Muhammad al Masri. (pp. xxii-xxiii) Gunaratna tells that even the "dirty bomber" applicant José Padilla, who was arrested on Chicago's O'Hara airfield on a hint from the ISI, had been sent for his mission by Khalid. (p. xxiii) Together with the Richard Reid incident, this indicates that Khalid, a key agent handler of Al Qaida, was effective in recruiting Westerners, who were recent converts to Islam.

Khalid's recruits included also Ramzi bin al Shaibh, the logistical chief of the September 11th strikes; Ahmed Said Omar Sheikh; and the Iraqi Zayn al Abidin Abu Zubaydah, who was Al Qaida's number three leader and head of external operations. Yousef was arrested in Pakistan when he had fled there from the Philippines in autumn 1996. Pakistani special troops in joint operation with the Americans arrested Abu Zubaydah in March 2002 in Faisalabad, and bin al Shaibh in Karachi in September 2002. (pp. xxii-xxiv, xxvii-xxxi). The career of Abu Zubaydah is still covered by mist. According to Gunaratna, he was a Saudi citizen with Palestinian origin, born in Gaza in 1971. According to Leitzinger, however, it was later found out that Abu Zubaydah was Iraqi, by his correct name Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, and his political background was in the ruling Baath party. (The New York Times, 14 Feb. 2002; Der Spiegel, 8, 18 Feb. 2002).