One of the MDC activists deputed to watch Moosa was Richard, a keen body builder who works out every morning in a gym called the Muscle Factory in the Greendale neighborhood of Harare. In early September 2001, Richard noticed that Moosa and two Afghan companions had begun to frequent the same gym. Using contacts within the MDC, I got in touch with Richard-a hugely muscled youngish man, his vast arms bulging jet black out of a tight white t-shirt. On September 12, the day after the attack on the twin towers, Richard walked across the gym to where Moosa's party were exercising and asked them what they thought of the previous day's events. "They were vehemently anti-American and clearly pro-Taliban", he told me. "They said the Americans had got exactly what they deserved. They seemed to be bursting with a mixture of elation and bitterness. To be frank, I think they blurted out more than they meant to because they disappeared from the gym for a few days after that."

Richard continued. "Then in the week following they reappeared, this time with eight other Afghans. These guys looked tired, as if they'd been traveling, which I guess they had. One of them was wearing a Tamil Tiger t-shirt. My immediate guess was that these were escaping Taliban or Al-Qaeda fighters. I've had military training myself, and these men were fighters. If you're a fighter you've got to stay fit, even if you're stressed and traveling. That's why I think they were at the gym. They only came that once and then disappeared."

At this I went back to Arthur, who put out feelers among his former colleagues in the CIO. One of them, he confirmed to me a few days later, had told him that in mid-September, he had been asked to produce ten false passports for the same number of Libyans. These were delivered on September 20. When I queried whether the recipients were genuinely Libyans, it became clear that he could not vouch for this. All he had been told was that they had been traveling on Libyan passports-not very convenient travel documents in a post-September 11 world-and needed passports which would make their travel easier. It is obviously possible that the ten people concerned were simply of Middle Eastern or Afghan provenance and that the CIO officer concerned was told they were Libyan simply because that is the main Arab country with which Zimbabwe is currently involved. The possible tie-up between these ten passports and the eleven men seen by Richard at the gym hardly needs emphasis, particularly since Richard must have seen them in the week of September 12-19. The inference is that when he saw them, they were waiting for these new (false) passports to be delivered. Arthur said his former colleague had had the impression that the passports were for fairly immediate use.

If correct, this means that Mugabe had not agreed to provide full-blown bases for Al-Qaeda but merely transit and laundering facilities. That is to say, the ten men may have arrived on Libyan passports with their identities already penetrated or clearly vulnerable. By providing them with new passports, and thus new identities, Zimbabwe would ensure that the trail was broken and that once they left Zimbabwe they would be invisible. Arthur thought it possible that they might have gone to a neighboring country such as Zambia, Mozambique or the Congo, in all of which possibilities exist to live in remote locations far from the knowledge of the host governments.

More Damning Evidence

SUCH WAS THE picture I had put together by early 2002. In the nature of things it was hardly conclusive, depending as it did on so many shadowy sources in or close to the CIO. But in the period which has since elapsed, several other items of information have come my way, rounding out the picture somewhat.

The first of these came from a contact inside the organization of John Bredenkamp, the hugely wealthy white businessman and arms dealer who is close to Mugabe. Members of the Bredenkamp organization are in constant touch with Mugabe's office and the top echelons of his ruling Zanu-PF party, but in mid-January 2002 they discovered that they couldn't reach any of these contacts because they were all closeted with "the Iranian delegation." The interesting thing about this visit was its secrecy. Normally any foreign visitor to Harare is trumpeted as a major diplomatic triumph for Mugabe, but neither the Herald nor ZBC made any mention of the visit, and normally well-informed sources, including intelligence sources, knew nothing of it.

There is, of course, no evidence that this meeting had any connection with terrorism, but one has to wonder. Doubtless, Mugabe would have an interest in procuring oil and financial support from Tehran-but what could it have wanted back from him which could only be discussed in such extreme secrecy?

Another avenue of enquiry was the involvement of Mugabe and the top Zanu-PF elite in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where Zimbabwean military involvement gave them control over several diamond mines, including a joint venture with Al Shanfari's Oryx Group in the Senga Senga mine. According to a confidential study prepared by Kroll Associates in 2002,

Al Shanfari and Oryx launder diamonds for several Lebanese traders linked to AI-Qaeda, including Ibrahim Bah. Diamonds are procured from Bah and other Islamist Lebanese intermediaries in Kinshasa and then flown to the Senga Senga mine at Mbuji Mayi where the diamonds are mixed with diamonds procured in the region.

Thus here too there was a direct--and profitable--relationship between Mugabe and Al-Qaeda, providing, incidentally, a route through which payment for other services could also be made.

In fact, Al-Qaeda involvement with blood diamonds seems to go back some way. According to several long and careful articles in the Washington Post from November 2001 on, clearly reflecting information from within the U.S. intelligence community, Al-Qaeda had been involved in blood diamonds in both Sierra Leone and the DRC since the mid-1990s. Two Al-Qaeda operatives specifically named by the Post on November 3, 2001, in this regard were Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani and Fazul Abdullah Mohamed. Ghailani, a Tanzanian, was also the man who bought the truck used in the truck-bombing of the U.S. embassy in Dares Salaam in 1998, while Fazul turns out to be one of the many aliases used by Haroun Fazil, still wanted as the alleged mastermind behind both of the East African embassy bombings.

THUS IT emerges that both the key architects of the East African embassy bombings emerged from an Al-Qaeda network active in southern Africa for some years before that, one which will have had many points of contact with the ruling Zimbabwean elite. This throws a new light on Zawahiri's alleged visits to Zimbabwe prior to 9/11--he was clearly traveling to an area in which he already had operatives and at least a rudimentary infrastructure. This would certainly have increased the likelihood that Al-Qaeda would have wanted to use Zimbabwe for the transit-and-laundering role we have seen. (Later a group of South African mercenaries tried to sell me a photo of Mugabe's right-hand man, Emmerson Mnangagwa, shaking hands as he boarded a helicopter with a man they identified as an Al-Qaeda operative at a Congo diamond mine--with child laborers clearly visible all around. I declined to buy but the images linger.)

Another straw in the wind was the revelation that closed circuit television cameras within the Planet Hollywood restaurant in Cape Town had recorded the image of a known Al-Qaeda suspect lolling against the restaurant's bar a month before the blast there. The South African authorities, who identified the man as a Moroccan based in Zimbabwe, refused to accept the images as having any significance, saying that there was nothing to connect the man's presence a whole month before the bombing with later events. It is tempting to link this attitude with the rapid and simultaneous volte face of the South African government on the issue of 9/11. By January 2002, overwhelming pressure had been brought to bear on ex-President Mandela by the ruling ANC publicly to recant his previous condemnation of Bin Laden and support for U.S. action, while Deputy President Zuma announced that the ANC government no longer saw 9/11 as a terrorist act but as a blow in a wider struggle against imperialism. Zuma simultaneously denounced Britain and America for their war on the Taliban which, he said, was aimed "against innocent Afghan civilians." Given President Mbeki's support for President Mugabe, it is possible that the South African authorities were not keen to see a line of enquiry opened up which led back to the presence of Al-Qaeda activists in Zimbabwe.

Meanwhile, joint U.S.-Kenyan activity continued to track down Al-Qaeda suspects throughout East Africa. The search was given added impetus by Al-Qaeda's open boast Terror, and that it was responsible for the attack on the Israeli-owned Paradise Hotel in Mombasa, Kenya, in November 2002, in which 15 were killed, and the simultaneous missile attack on an Israeli airliner as it took off from Mombasa airport. Both the United States and the UN cite Somalia as an Al-Qaeda haven, and a number of raids have taken place across that border to snatch suspects--most notably Suleiman Abdalla Salim Ahmed, one of those involved in the East African embassy bombings, who was grabbed in March 2003 thanks to a deal with a Somali warlord. Brigadier General Martin Robeson, the Marine commander of the U.S.-led anti-terrorism force now permanently stationed in East Africa, confirms that 25 Al-Qaeda suspects had been killed or captured by November 2003.