Ali Mohamed

Ali Mohamed

Ali Abdul Saoud Mohamed, (علي محمد) (born June 3, 1952) is a double agent who worked for both the CIA and Egyptian Islamic Jihad simultaneously, reporting on the workings of each for the benefit of the other.

He came to the United States working as a translator for Ayman al-Zawahiri, who toured California mosques to raise money to fight the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. While there, Zawahiri encouraged him to infiltrate the United States, to whom he later presented himself as defecting. Since he simply walked into the CIA office in Cairo and asked to speak to the station chief and offered his services, the Americans assumed he was an Egyptian spy, but nevertheless recruited him to be a junior intelligence officer. When tasked to infiltrate a mosque with ties to Hezbollah, he simply informed the leadership he was an American spy intending to collect information; since a loyal American spy was also in the congregation, he reported Mohamed's bizarre behaviour to the CIA, who dismissed him and sought to ban him from entering the United States. Ironically however, he was simply picked up by the Special Forces in the American army, who sent him to the Special Warfare school and encouraged him to pursue a doctorate in Islamic Studies and teach courses on the Middle East.

In the 1980s Mohamed trained anti-Soviet fighters en route to Afghanistan. FBI special agent Jack Cloonan called him "bin Laden's first trainer". Mohamed was charged with the August 7, 1998 bombings of the United States embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. In October 2000, he pleaded guilty to five counts of conspiracy to kill nationals of the United States and to destroy U.S. property.

Mohamed has been described as "Six-foot one, 200 pounds, and exceptionally fit, ... a martial artist and skilled linguist who spoke fluent English, French, and Hebrew in addition to his native Arabic. He was disciplined, clever, and gregarious, with a marked facility for making friends."

Mohamed was a major in the Egyptian army's military intelligence unit, until being discharged for suspected fundamentalism in 1984. He enlisted in the U.S. Army and used U.S. military information to train al-Qaeda and other Muslim militants, and write al-Qaeda's multivolume terrorist training guide.