It was a surreal moment — here I was, an FBI agent on the Joint Terrorism Task Force, standing on a street corner in Jersey City, going jaw to jaw with the infamous spiritual leader of the Islamic Group, the “Blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel-Rahman. An Egyptian cleric marinated in ideological hatred by the Muslim Brotherhood, the man who issued the “fatwa” to assassinate Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, now spewed forth vitriol toward me and the United States government. I knew this hatred intimately, having once dodged an irate mob of Saudi Arabian villagers who took serious offense to a cross necklace I was wearing.
In the hookah bars and mosques of New York and New Jersey, our JTTF teams stared down the early networks or cells of jihadis, men who would go on to perpetrate the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. In those early days of counterterrorism, the threat was raw, tactical, and operational. We spent our days conducting physical surveillance and cultivating informants. Ironically, these were some of the same radicals endorsing American consumerism on television, even shopping at Sam’s Club, to project a desire to assimilate.
