Public Enemy No. 2

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.

INTERACTIVE GRAPHICS Map: Hunting Osama Map: Nukes Pipeline Interactive: Taliban P.O.W. Revolt More Graphics Tora Bora Nukes Pipeline Taliban Revolt Last Bastions Women & Islam No Refuge Taliban on the Run Afghan Caves Mood of the Nation Mazar-I-Sharif Terrorist Timeline Al-Qaeda Suspects Flu/Anthrax Sharing Secrets Al-Qaeda's World Ground War 11.4.01 Bush Team Grades Bioterror Threats War in Winter Workplace Safety Afghan Targets Anthrax Pathogen A Ground War An Uneasy Ally Targets Hit Search & Destroy Firepower & Food Frozen Assets Safety Guide Mideast Leaders Agents of Death Afghanistan Military Buildup Terrorist Cells Our Weapons Deadly Paths Twin Terrors   CNN.com Latest news: War Against Terror RECENT COVER STORY Closing In Dec. 24, 2001 Past Issues Taliban Last Days Dec. 17, 2001 ----------------- Lifting the Veil Dec. 3, 2001 ----------------- Hunt for bin Laden Nov. 26, 2001 ----------------- Thanksgiving 2001 Nov. 19, 2001 ----------------- Inside Al-Qaeda Nov. 12, 2001 ----------------- Defender In Chief Nov. 5, 2001 ----------------- Going In Oct. 29, 2001 ----------------- The Fear   Factor Oct. 22, 2001 ----------------- Facing   the Fury Oct. 15, 2001 ----------------- How Real   Is the Threat? Oct. 8, 2001 ----------------- Life on the   Home Front Oct. 1, 2001 ----------------- One Nation,   Indivisible Sept. 24, 2001 ----------------- Day of Infamy Sept. 14, 2001   PHOTO ESSAYS Kabul Unveiled Taliban on the Run More Photos >>> MORE STORIES Where's OBL: Letter from Tora Bora Anthrax: Where the Investigation Stands TIME/CNN POLL: Americans Standing By Bush's War More Stories >>>

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.