Public Enemy No. 2

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ut 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.