Ali Mohamed
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Ali Mohamed was an Egyptian-American former U.S. Army sergeant whose career, per John Kiriakou, ran simultaneously through Egyptian intelligence, the U.S. military, and eventually al-Qaeda's own network. Kiriakou calls him one of the most mysterious characters connected to the run-up to the September 11 attacks.

Background and training

According to Kiriakou, Mohamed worked for both Egyptian intelligence and American intelligence, trained at Fort Bragg, and eventually made his way into al-Qaeda's network, where he trained some of the future 9/11 hijackers and joined a mosque in Brooklyn.

1993 arrest and release

In 1993, Mohamed was arrested in Canada by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. After he called the FBI, he was released, a decision Kiriakou calls very bizarre. Later that year, his proteges carried out the original World Trade Center bombing, and investigators subsequently found Mohamed's own Fort Bragg training manuals in their homes.

1998 embassy bombings and disappearance

Mohamed himself later participated in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Africa and was arrested. Under the George W. Bush administration, he disappeared, and Kiriakou says nobody knows his whereabouts today.

Kiriakou's double-agent theory

Kiriakou connects the Mohamed case to what he describes as a broader CIA failure: starting in the 1990s, the agency increasingly prioritized electronic intelligence collection over the harder, slower work of training officers to recruit human spies. He argues this shift in institutional priorities contributed to failures like the Mohamed case.

Kiriakou speculates that Mohamed was not a genuine CIA recruit but instead played his handler, appearing to have been recruited while actually acting as a double agent for al-Qaeda, learning what the CIA knew about the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1998 embassy bombings, and the run-up to 9/11.

Kiriakou separately notes reports that Mohamed spoke fluent Hebrew without an accent, a skill he associates with intelligence officers trained by Israeli services, who are taught to speak Arabic (and, in this reading, Hebrew) like native speakers, without a telltale accent, leading him to suspect Mohamed may have been an intelligence officer in that mold.

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Alex Station
- CIA,FBI interagency rivalry and 9/11
