Americans were spotted in terror training camps
By Hal Bernton Seattle Times staff reporter
PARIS - John Walker Lindh may not be the only American from California who trained in Osama bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan.
At least two other Californians, neither of Middle Eastern descent, traveled to Afghanistan in the late 1990s to train in the camps, according to French intelligence reports. Both intended to return to their home state once their terrorist training was completed.
The reports were based on witness accounts of another camp participant, who says he encountered the two Americans while training in the camps. The informant was interviewed during a 1998 French judicial investigation, and his information was checked by French intelligence sources and passed on to U.S. officials.
By then, French terrorism investigators were already aware of European recruits to the Islamic terrorist network. The informant's account points to a recruitment effort within the United States that may have included young men not of Muslim heritage.
"So what does this mean?" asked Jean-Louis Bruguière, a French judge who is a veteran investigator of Islamic terrorism. "It means that the phenomena that existed in Europe could have existed equally on the North American continent. So that complicates things, because how are you going to detect these people?"
Bush administration officials say the training and support provided in Afghanistan have been a key part of bin Laden's attempt to fashion a global terrorist network. In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and outside Washington, D.C., the White House has made the destruction of these camps a major goal of the U.S. military campaign.
The two Americans reportedly spotted by the French informant would not have included Walker, who was not in Central Asia then.
Walker, 20, grew up in suburban San Francisco and started using his mother's maiden name after his parents separated. He converted to Islam in his teens. He told a Newsweek reporter that he had walked into Afghanistan earlier this year and trained in an al-Qaida camp before joining the Taliban to "help build a pure Islamic state."
He was taken into custody Saturday morning at the tail end of a bloody prison uprising near the northern Afghanistan town of Mazar-e-Sharif.
Most of the thousands of recruits to the Islamic-militant camps came from Muslim countries or are Muslims who emigrated from those countries to Europe and North America. Many of these recruits stayed in Afghanistan to aid the Taliban, offering some of the fiercest military resistance to Northern Alliance and other anti-Taliban forces. Others returned to Europe and North America; they have become the focus of terrorism investigations on both continents.
But the Islamic militants also have been able to reach out to attract at least a few unlikely recruits born to families with no ties to the Muslim world. Those recruitments caution against the stereotype that all militant recruits are Muslims of Middle Eastern, North African or Asian heritage.
As far back as 1996, French investigators became aware of white Frenchmen who were drawn into Islamic militancy.
Christophe Cazé, a French medical student who converted to Islam, was named by French officials as the head of a gang of bank robbers in northern France with ties to an Islamic cell in Montreal. Cazé was killed in the spring of that year in a shootout as he tried to escape a police roadblock in Belgium. One of the gang members, Lionel Dumont, also was a French convert to Islam.
French officials also have investigated David Courtailler, a young Frenchman from the alpine town of Bonneville, who converted to Islam. Courtailler has denied any involvement in terrorism acts but admitted joining in military training in the Afghan camps in 1997 and 1998. Courtailler's brother, Jerôme, another convert, was arrested Sept. 13 in the Dutch city of Rotterdam for allegedly possessing fake documents. He is under investigation for possible involvement in a foiled attempt to bomb the U.S. Embassy in Paris.
"We've focused our investigations for many years on the military training in Afghanistan, and we've learned a lot of invaluable information," said Bruguière, the French judge.
U.S. intelligence officials have tracked and at times collaborated in the European investigations.
"We've know for some time that are a number of Caucasians who have been recruited for jihad," said Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA counter-terrorism official who now consults on security issues. "I don't think there are lot of them. Most appear to be Europeans, but I don't discount that there might have been some Americans."
Cannistraro said that some of the Afghanistan camps specialized in military training to support Taliban causes, and he suggested that Walker had trained in one or those camps.
"Walker was clearly just cannon fodder for the front lines," Cannistraro said.
Other camps provided specialized training for terrorism, and recruits to these camps were carefully selected. Cannistraro said the most deeply ingrained terrorist cells remain in Europe, rather than the U.S.