The Triple Agent

Zawahiri had been on the CIA’s watch list since the mid-1980s, long before anyone had heard of bin Laden, and over the years the agency witnessed his rise from Egyptian revolutionary to international terrorist. He was the intellectual force behind many of al-Qaeda’s grandest ambitions, including its fledgling efforts to acquire nuclear and biological weapons. It was Zawahiri who decreed that al-Qaeda must take on the “far enemy”—the United States—before it could defeat its principal target, the “near enemy,” the pro-Western Arab regimes that stood in the way of the group’s dream of uniting all Muslims under a global Islamic caliphate.

“To kill Americans and their allies—civilian and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in every country in which it is possible to do it,” Zawahiri wrote in a 1998 manifesto.

As documented in the CIA’s case files, Zawahiri’s early life bore striking similarities to Balawi’s. Both were born to educated, middle-class parents from religiously tolerant communities, and both were drawn simultaneously to medical studies and radical Islamist ideology. Zawahiri, who grew up in a well-to-do Cairo suburb, was the son of a well-known professor of pharmacology, and his maternal grandfather was a president of Cairo University. As an earnest, bookish teenager Zawahiri was introduced to the writings of Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian author and intellectual who became one of the founders of modern Islamic extremism. Qutb’s execution by Egyptian authorities inspired the young Zawahiri to organize a group of like-minded friends into a secret society he called al-Jihad, or the Jihad Group. He continued his studies and eventually earned a medical degree, but all the while he looked ahead to a day when his al-Jihad would seek to overthrow Egypt’s secular government.

As a new doctor, Zawahiri spent time volunteering in refugee camps along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. There, while patching up the wounds of anti-Soviet mujahideen fighters, he first crossed paths with a charismatic young Saudi, bin Laden, who had also come to Afghanistan to support the ragtag rebels in their struggle against the Communist superpower. Not long afterward, upon returning to Egypt, Zawahiri and his small cell joined with other antigovernment factions in a series of plots to assassinate Egyptian leaders, culminating in the fatal attack on Egyptian president Anwar Sadat on October 6, 1981, as he sat in a reviewing stand to watch a military parade. Zawahiri was imprisoned for allegedly participating in the conspiracy to silence one of the Arab world’s most moderate and pro-Western leaders. He later claimed in a memoir that he was tortured by Egyptian security officials.

The experience left Zawahiri even more determined to undermine secular Arab governments and their financial underpinnings through spectacular acts of terrorism. His signature attack during his pre–al-Qaeda years was a savage 1997 assault on foreign tourists at Egypt’s famous Luxor ruins, in which gunmen systematically slaughtered sixty-two people, including Japanese tourists, a five-year-old British child, and four Egyptian tour guides.

Ordinary Egyptians, previously accustomed to thinking of al-Jihad as engaged in a grassroots struggle against corrupt and autocratic rulers, were repelled by the wanton slaughter, and support for Zawahiri and his Jihad Group evaporated. Soon afterward Zawahiri told followers that operations inside Egypt were no longer possible, and the battle was shifting to Israel and its chief ally, the United States. In 1998 the Jihad Group officially merged with bin Laden’s larger and better-financed al-Qaeda.

The newly expanded terrorist group immediately set out to make a splash with attacks on U.S. interests. First on the list were the U.S. embassies in the capitals of Kenya and Tanzania, which were bombed in 1998 in coordinated attacks that killed hundreds of people.

Three years later, working from al-Qaeda’s new base in Afghanistan, Zawahiri helped oversee the planning of the September 11 attacks. His primary mission, however, was to plan follow-on waves of terrorist strikes that would continue for months and years to come. He personally took command of an ambitious biological weapons program, establishing a laboratory in Afghanistan and dispatching disciples to search for sympathetic scientists.

U.S. intelligence officials believe that Zawahiri’s efforts to launch a large-scale anthrax attack might have succeeded had he not run out of time. Within weeks of the collapse of New York’s World Trade Center towers, the U.S.-backed military campaign that drove al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies out of power in Afghanistan forced Zawahiri to abandon his bioweapons lab and flee the country. U.S. forces were to discover the lab, along with Zawahiri’s detailed instructions to his aides to acquire a highly lethal strain of the bacterium that causes anthrax.