THE TERRORIST AND THE PROSTITUTES
Before he was killed by a Predator drone, al Qaeda’s chief propagandist was nearly brought down by his own hypocrisy
With the exception of Osama bin Laden, Anwar alAwlaki was the most fearsome member of al Qaeda ever faced by the United States. The Americanborn Awlaki preached jihad from Yemen and directed plots like the underwear bomber and the attempt to blow up cargo planes. But in the days after 9/11, Awlaki was something else — an imam who denounced the attacks and presented himself as a moderate to the media. In this excerpt from his new book, “Objective Troy,” journalist Scott Shane reveals the ironic reason Awlaki fled the US.
ONDec. 13, 2001, a mild but blustery day, Anwar alAwlaki drove his white Dodge Caravan across the Potomac into Washington and parked west of Dupont Circle. He’d purchased the used minivan when he’d moved to Virginia to accommodate his growing family — after seven years of marriage, he and his wife, Gihan, had three children.
Such solo drives had become routine for him, though the settings varied; sometimes it was a motel in a seedier part of the city, or tonier lodging in the sprawling Virginia suburbs. This time it was the Marriott Residence Inn on P Street toward the end of the holy month of Ramadan. In a Washington Post online chat a few weeks earlier, he had explained that Muslims abstained from sexual activity during Ramadan between sunrise and sunset. It was 2:30 p.m. when he made his way to Room 1010, where a young woman from Texas awaited.
He was a computer engineer, born in India and now living in California, Awlaki told her. He was polite and apologized for sneezing so much, explaining that he was suffering from hay fever. He handed over $220 and she performed oral sex on him. He “finished very quickly” and asked her for another round, the woman would later recount. But she was trying to raise the money to go to college in Florida and said he’d have to pay another $220. He said he’d pay again only for full sexual intercourse. She declined and he went on his way. He was a busy man, after all.
Awlaki was becoming one of the most famous Muslim clerics in America, imam at the big Dar AlHijrah mosque in Falls Church, Va. After 9/11, he was a fixture on television and in newspapers, denouncing the attacks and saying that Americans had nothing to fear from Islam.
The FBI wasn’t so sure. After a series of testy, inconclusive interviews with Awlaki in September 2001, the bureau assigned the Special Surveillance Group to keep tabs on him, to see if he was keeping any secrets.
He was. But it had nothing to do with terrorism.
THE HYPOCRITE
In the months after 9/11, the watchers from the SSG followed Awlaki to assignations with prostitutes at the Wyndham City Center, the Melrose, the Monarch, Avenue Suites, the Swissotel, and more.
Agents would follow up with the women later the same day or the next day, asking about Awlaki’s words and actions. He liked the lights on, the agents learned. He found the escort services online and booked their services un der his real name. Sometimes he asked for intercourse, sometimes oral sex, and sometimes he just watched the woman stimulate herself while he masturbated.
The women had no complaints (though one, checking him out through the peephole in the hotel room door when he knocked, thought he resembled Osama bin Laden). He was “clean,” “sweet” and “very nice,” they said. If he harbored antiAmerican feelings or was concocting secret terrorist sschemes, he showed no sign of it.
The pages and pages of scribbled notes from the surveillance teams and the typed interviews with escorts contained few surprises. Awlaki had been picked up twice in San Diego for soliciting prostitutes, but he had not been detterred. Despite his more demandiing schedule and the higher stakes nnow that a spotlight was trained on him in Washington, it had become a habit he could not, or did not want to, break. His FBI tails even followed him as he took the subway to the Pentagon to appear as a lluncheon speaker.
The imam who had preached at the Capitol, whose CDs were in the homes of the devout, who was regularly quoted as a spiritual authority, skulked secretly around the city, violating the moral rules he taught. In one surveillance photo, he made his solitary way down a city sidewalk to his next assignation, hands in the pockets of his trench coat, seemingly lost in thought. It is a glum picture, and the FBI files make for dispiriting reading — the cringeworthy wanderings of this married father of three and the depressing snippets of the biographies of the women. (“She comes from a poor family in New Hampshire,” the agents reported of the woman at the Melrose, “and is doing this kind of work strictly for the purpose of making
money.”) As a humiliating coda, the FBI tails also dutifully followed his wife on her shopping trips and the entire family on outings to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and dinner at a Phillips Seafood restaurant.
For a man in his position, his actions were stunningly reckless. As many a Christian minister had discovered the hard way, a public sex scandal could blow to bits a promising religious career.
Awlaki was violating fundamental tenets of the conservative Islam he preached: repeatedly committing adultery; lying about his background, even as he revealed to a series of prostitutes his real name; squandering his family’s limited budget at a rate of $300 or $400 an hour. In one of his sermons, he had denounced zina, or fornication, blasting American television for spreading zina all over the world and declaring that Allah had sent AIDS as punishment.
“The movies and the nudity and the destruction of this culture is now global,” he declared.
To be exposed now before his congregation and his growing national and international audience as a hypocrite and flagrant sinner would be a devastating blow, almost certainly careerending.
THE COINCIDENCES
The feds were not especially interested in Awlaki’s peccadilloes. But they continued to document his life in excruciating detail. Even if they found no evidence of terrorist ties, they might be able to use the file on his visits to prostitutes to pressure him to become an informant or, if they decided he was a dangerous influence, to discredit him with a federal criminal case.
The underlying problem was that even after months of intensive scrutiny of his past and present, the investigators were still sufficiently worried about his possible connections to terrorism that they did not feel they could clear him.
Coincidences worried them. Acouple of the 9/11 hijackers had worshipped at mosques Awlaki preached at, and at least one had been seen meeting with him. Awlaki had been vice president of a charity run by a Yemeni cleric later designated as a terrorist by US authorities.
A neighbor in San Diego said that when Awlaki moved to Virginia, he told him, “I don’t think you’ll be seeing me. I won’t be coming back to San Diego again. Later on, you’ll find out why.”
But nothing was ever proven, and officials would continue to struggle to answer a basic question: Before 9/11, had Awlaki been a secret militant with a connection to the plotters of the worst terrorist attack in American history? Or was he more or less what he claimed to be in 2002 — a conservative Muslim cleric who was critical of American actions abroad but condemned mass violence?
‘STAYING FOREVER’
To his brother Ammar, Awlaki was most definitely the latter. In interviews, Ammar said that Anwar denounced 9/11, and when he asked the preacher how long he intended to stay in the United States, “he goes, like, ‘Forever,’ ” said Ammar, whose American English is even more colloquial than his brother’s was.
But just a few days after their conversation, Ammar found his brother looking pale and more upset than he had ever seen him. “He was in such a mental state, so devastated that he couldn’t even lead the prayer. . . . He was angry, upset, sad, maybe confused.”
The next day, he accompanied his brother to a library or some other public place — Ammar can picture the setting but doesn’t remember exactly where they were. Anwar found a meeting room where they could be alone and astonished him with his next request: “He told me to take the battery out of my phone, and he did the same.” Then his brother explained to Ammar what had so distressed him.
“He said, ‘Something happened last night that made
me reconsider my stay here in the States. I was told that the FBI has a file on me, and this file could destroy my life. I’m nowrethinking myoptions, and one of them might be as drastic as leaving the States.’ ”
Anwar said he was leaving in a few days for a longplanned visit to the United Kingdom, where he was scheduled to speak at a Quran Expo in Birmingham. He just might not come back, he said.
Anwar did not tell his brother who had revealed the existence of the FBI file on him or what it contained. Given Anwar’s evident anguish and secretive manner, Ammar did not press him for details. He knew vaguely that some Dar AlHijrah members had connections to Hamas, the Palestinian group that had been designated by the United States since 1997 as a terrorist organization, and he wondered whether allegations of support for Hamas might be involved. But he found the episode as bewildering as it was upsetting.
THE ESCAPE
A longsecret document reveals just how Awlaki learned on that night in March 2002 of his FBI file and what it contained. The bureau had not confronted him, nor had any of Awlaki’s friends or colleagues learned of the file’s existence and tipped him off about it.
Instead, the tip came from inside Awlaki’s secret life in the hotels and motels around the nation’s capital: He had received a warning call from a manager of one of the escort services he regularly patronized who told him that “an agent named ‘ Wade’ had been there asking questions about him.” The agent, Wade Ammerman, later told four interviewers from the 9/11 Commission that he believed the escort manager’s call — monitored by the bureau under a court order approving eavesdropping — made Awlaki “nervous” and prompted him to change his plans.
Awlaki would have realized for the first time that his many visits to prostitutes had been monitored by the FBI. The nature of the questions that agents had asked the escort service manager likely would have made clear that they knew a great deal about his extraclerical activities.
He was right: However thin the evidence tying him to militancy, the bureau’s Awlaki file was overflowing with lurid details of his paid sexual encounters.
It was an intolerable threat that Awlaki did not dare confront and could not mitigate. He could only flee.
In a tale full of twists that might have gone a different way, this was an especially provocative turn. The FBI’s blanket surveillance was intended to find his ties to terror, and what it found did not add up to anything close to a criminal terrorism case. But because the bureau stumbled onto his visits to prostitutes, and because Awlaki found out about it, he abandoned his life in the United States, with dire ultimate consequences both for American security and for Awlaki himself.
In other words, his main reason for leaving the United States was not Americans’ antiIslamic prejudice, as many have assumed, but his own antiIslamic behavior.
THE KILLING
Awlaki would preach in London to more and more extremist circles, and eventually traveled to Yemen, where he became the chief propaganda officer for al Qaeda’s branch there. Besides encouraging violent jihad in general, he personally coached Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to blow up a plane using a bomb in his underwear, and helped send explosives hidden in printer cartridges aboard American cargo planes. On Sept. 30, 2011, the CIA killed Awlaki — the first American citizen to be hunted and deliberately killed in a drone strike.