Behind Islamic terror: Syria and Iran are scorned in much of the Western world for supporting terrorism, but neither one is the puppeteer directing the worldwide terror network—Russia is

New American, The, Sept 3, 2007 by William F. Jasper

The authors of the 2002 Wall Street Journal article, Andrew Higgins and Allen Cullison, are inexplicably willing to accept at face value Dr. Zawahiri's wildly implausible explanation for his travels in Russia and his even more unbelievable account of his release. Higgins and Cullison write:

   The [Russian] judge rejected prosecution demands for a three-year
   sentence and gave the men only six months. They'd already been in
   jail five months, so the Russians soon freed them.

      "God blinded them to our identities," Dr. Zawahiri wrote later,
   in his account of his trip. "God's mercy accompanied us during these
   months." The Russians returned the cash, the communications gear,
   and the computer, its mostly Arabic-language documents nearly all
   unread. Abulkhalik Abdusalamov, their court-appointed lawyer, says
   he never got close to his clients and couldn't figure out what they
   were up to or why they were carrying so much electronic equipment.

      Freed from Russian jail in May 1997, Dr. Zawahiri found refuge
   in Afghanistan, yoking his fortunes to Mr. bin Laden. Egyptian
   Jihad, previously devoted to the narrow purpose of toppling secular
   rule in Egypt, became instead the biggest component of al-Qaeda and
   major agent of a global war against America.

"Eight months after the Russian fiasco," Higgins and Cullison continue, "Dr. Zawahiri and Mr. bin Laden announced an alliance dedicated to killing Americans, a task they called the 'duty of every Muslim.'"

Another news account quotes an FSB spokesman named Sergei Ignatchenko who says that Zawahiri "had four passports, in four different names and nationalities. We checked him out in every country, but they could not confirm him. We could not keep him forever, so we took him to the Azerbaijani border and let him go." Which is even more fantastic than the Journal's account.

Keep in mind that this episode takes place during a period when the FSB and the Russian military were waging a vicious genocidal war against Chechnya because, they said, the Chechens, aided by outside Islamic fundamentalists, were carrying out a terrorist campaign against Mother Russia. Now think in terms of how the Russian FSB might respond to three foreign Arabic men who are traveling under false identity, have multiple aliases and passports, claim to work for a non-existent company, possess sophisticated communications equipment and a laptop with coded messages, and are detained trying to sneak through a little-used back door to the embattled area, under the pretext of checking out the market potential for health foods and leather goods. After their arrest, guards report that the men are visited by Islamic radicals who petition for their release and leave coded messages that investigators cannot decipher. Would the FSB not have uncovered their identities, and have let them go?

"Perhaps most difficult to believe from Zawahiri's version is that his captors would not have read the Arabic information contained within his laptop computer," commented Dr. Evgenii Novikov, a Russian defector and scholar in Islamic affairs who is now a senior fellow at the Jamestown Foundation in Virginia. "Russian intelligence has probably the best Arabists in the world.... These individuals would have been able not only to read Zawahiri's Arabic text, but also to decode his encrypted messages without any problem."