American greases al-Qaida media machine

Evan Kohlmann Terrorism analyst

Al-Qaida has dramatically increased its media presence over the last year, capped off recently by a flurry of highly polished video and audio messages from fugitive leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri. But it is the videotaped rants of a 27-year-old American terrorist named Adam Gadahn that offer the most intriguing clues about the mechanics of al-Qaida’s propaganda machine and the sort of individual the shadowy terror organization is seeking to recruit.

The presence of Gadahn, also known as “Azzam the American,” is the clearest indication of al-Qaida’s effort to reach out beyond the typical profile of a terrorist recruit and make contact with a new breed of operative: native-born Europeans and Americans.

This recruitment can take place directly, as apparently occurred with al-Zawahri and the July 7, 2005, bombers in London. Or it can take place indirectly, with home-grown terrorist cells carrying out their own independent and deadly missions, as was the case with the March 11, 2004, train bombings in Madrid.

In the latter model, potential recruits of all nationalities are inspired by mass distributed al-Qaida video recordings, then progress along the extremist path by studying online training manuals and receiving additional support from al-Qaida facilitators on the Web. The ultimate success of this model for indirect recruitment rests upon the shoulders of those within al-Qaida who are capable of mass communications in the familiar political and social language of the Western world — people like Adam Gadahn. 

Gadahn has arguably the most unusual background of any known al-Qaida operative. Raised in Central California on a goat farm, Gadahn later wrote in a diary posted on the Internet that as a teenager he became “obsessed with demonic heavy metal music, something the rest of my family (as I now realize, rightfully so) was not happy with. My entire life was focused on expanding my music collection. I eschewed personal cleanliness and let my room reach an unbelievable state of disarray.”

According to Gadahn, the “turning point” came when he moved farther south to the home of his “computer whiz” grandmother in the city of Santa Ana. Using her America Online account, Gadahn began “scooting the information superhighway” in January 1995, spending many hours searching for information on employment and religion — where he “found discussions on Islam to be the most intriguing.”

Islamic conversion
Eleven months later, he formally converted to Islam at a ceremony held at the Islamic Society of Orange County, in the Los Angeles suburb of Garden Grove. “It feels great to be a Muslim!” he wrote a week later.

While living in Garden Grove, the young and impressionable convert came into contact with a group of militant Middle Eastern Islamists who shared his passion for technology and the Internet.  One of the men linked to Gadahn during this period is Palestinian-American Khalil al-Deek, a computer programmer who reportedly had helped al-Qaida encrypt training manuals and other tracts for distribution over the Internet.  He also is believed to have had direct access to terrorist recruiters based in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bosnia-Herzegovina and elsewhere.

Interactive Spreading terrorist dogma How al-Qaida gets its message from there to here

For an eager and tech-savvy junior recruit like Gadahn, Deek could not have been a better contact and entry point into the organization. When Khalil al-Deek disappeared into the Pakistani Mujahadeen underworld in the late 1990s, Gadahn followed him from California under the pretext of a religious pilgrimage.

Though al-Qaida’s media wing was officially established in the late 1980s, it produced little of note in its first decade of existence. But by 1998, with a renewed anti-American agenda and major terrorist attacks in the works, bin Laden could no longer afford to allow his media wing to languish.

To commemorate al-Qaida’s next “big attack” — a mission targeting a U.S. naval vessel off the coast of Yemen — bin Laden ordered the creation of a full-length propaganda film that would include actual footage of the attack. Though al-Qaida operatives ultimately failed to record footage of what would become a suicide bombing attack on the USS Cole in October 2000, the production of the video went ahead as planned. 

In early 2001, al-Qaida recruiters in Europe began to distribute an unusual new video from Pakistan titled “The Destruction of the USS Cole,” created by a mysterious entity known as the “As-Sahaab (‘Clouds’) Foundation for Islamic Media.”  Not only did As-Sahaab’s first video release contain startling and unprecedented footage of bin Laden, al-Zawahri and al-Qaida’s military training camps in Afghanistan, it was demonstrated that the propaganda arm was capable of producing remarkably high quality video and carefully scripted cinematic effects. Oddly, the nearly two-hour long video was even subtitled in near perfect English. At the time, the notion that an American convert to Islam who was barely 20 years old might be the creative brains behind al-Qaida’s new propaganda studio would have been scoffed at by most observers.

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