On August 7, 1998, Al-Qaeda suicide bombers attacked the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killing at least 258 people and injuring more than 5,000 others. President Clinton's response-lobbing a few (mis-directed) cruise missiles at suspected Al-Qaeda installations in Afghanistan and Sudan-was clearly viewed by Osama bin Laden as a mere slap on the wrist. What the attacks had shown was that a few suicide bombers using everyday means of transport as a delivery mechanism could achieve complete surprise and inflict thousands of casualties on two or more targets at once by carefully coordinated action. With this, Al-Qaeda had found the weapon for which it had been searching-and which it was to use again with even greater effect on September 11, 2001.

On August 25, 1998, just 18 days later, a pipe bomb exploded in the Cape Town Planet Hollywood, killing one and wounding 27. The local police concluded that-because the target had sounded American and because a pipe bomb had been used-this was probably the work of PAGAD (People Against Gangsterism And Drugs), an Islamic fundamentalist vigilante movement based in Cape Town's Coloured community, which includes half a million Muslims. This was simply because PAGAD was in the habit of using pipe bombs. No suspect was ever apprehended, despite the fact that the African National Congress (ANC) Minister for Safety and Security, Sydney Mufamadi, had announced that an arrest was expected at any moment. Later Mufamadi changed tack, seeming almost to blame the United States for the bomb, suggesting that it was a predictable reprisal for the cruise missile attack on Sudan.

The FBI, acting together with U.S. military units stationed in Kenya, was more successful, quickly arresting three suspects for the embassy bombings: Mohamed Saddeck Odeh, Rashed Daoud Al-Ouhali and Wali al-Hage. The latter, caught in an unnamed African country in September 1998, had earlier served as personal secretary to Bin Laden. All three were flown to the United States and held there, where they confessed that the kingpin of the operation, Haroun Fazil, had rented a villa outside Nairobi from May to August 1998, where the bomb had been constructed. Fazil, though only 26, had been trained in Afghanistan; was a computer and explosives expert; spoke Swahili, English, French and Arabic; and was suspected of also having masterminded the Dar es Salaam bombing. On August 7, he had guided the white explosives-laden lorry and was driven by his operatives to the U.S. embassy. Straight after the bombing, he had taken a flight to his native Comoros Islands.

The FBI swarmed all over East Africa in the wake of the bombings. Guided by information they had doubtless extracted from the three embassy bombing suspects, they searched a Nairobi hotel and found a record of a phone call made from one of its rooms to the Comoros. On August 20, they asked the help of the Comoros government in tracing the call. Fazil, clearly tipped off, fled to Dubai just as the FBI arrived in the Comoros-where they found incriminating CDS in his family home. His relatives were grilled and admitted that Fazil had told them he had done "military service" in the Sudan. A check of airline records showed that in 1997 Fazil had repeatedly paid cash for air tickets to Khartoum, Karachi and Nairobi. Now, having gotten to Dubai just ahead of the FBI, he vanished.

This event drew attention to the existence of a Muslim network running down the east coast of Africa, from the Persian Gulf to Cape Town. It raised the possibility that there were sufficient Al-Qaeda sympathizers within the Muslim community to strike at will. South Africa itself has many attractions for Muslim terrorists: Durban, after all, is home to Africa's richest Muslim community (there I found without difficulty a street vendor selling Bin Laden t-shirts), and the town's International Islamic Center was built thanks mainly to a personal donation by Bin Laden. Indeed, it is often forgotten that the whole row over Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, and the resulting fatwa against him, originated in Durban. As important, large sums of money can move easily through the Durban Indian community to Mauritius, Nairobi or Cape Town-and, indeed, to its overseas branches in London, Toronto and Sydney. South Africa is, in any case, one of the world capitals of money laundering. One way or another, within that network one can find enough Al-Qaeda sympathizers, enough money and enough ways of making sure the two remain connected to make this region a major front in the terrorist war.

This in turn leads one to consider the situation of Zimbabwe which, under Robert Mugabe's terror, has deteriorated rapidly from being one of Africa's most developed states to a failed state of near-Somalian proportions. Prior to that, one would hardly have considered it as a possible base for Islamic terrorists-the country's Muslim population is both small and moderate: when the Bulawayo synagogue was restored in 2003 after it had burnt down in an accidental fire, the imam of the local mosque participated in the synagogue's re-dedication ceremony as a gesture of goodwill towards Zimbabwe's exiguous Jewish community. At the same time, during the innumerable trips I have made to Zimbabwe in the last few years, the subject of Islamic terrorism has begun to crop up.

Mugabe and Islamism

Mugabe's failed state has created a major opportunity for Islamic terrorism throughout southern Africa. Mugabe is already both violently at odds with all the West (and thus has little to lose by annoying it more) and quite desperate to get his hands on foreign exchange by any available means. Is it possible that, under these straitened circumstances, he had begun to sup with the devil? One advantage consequent upon the decay of Mugabe's state, I discovered as I started to delve into the matter, was that some members of Mugabe's secret police, the Central Intelligence Organization (CIO), were feeling sufficiently disaffected to talk frankly, though of course anonymously, about the subject. What I have discovered could transform the perception of the Mugabe regime from being merely a parochial racist tyranny to being a safe harbor for Islamist terrorists in a global struggle.

Mugabe's relationship with radical Islam goes back to 1978 when Libya's President Muammar Qaddafi provided arms and training for his ZANLA guerrillas in Mozambique and, after Zimbabwean independence, trained 700 policemen for the new government. Mugabe was, however, well aware that Libya's sponsorship of various terrorist groups made friendship with Qaddafi extremely unwise, and he kept relations formal and distant. This remained the case even after the Reagan Administration's 1986 air strikes against Libya. Qaddafi, whose adopted daughter was killed in the raid and who narrowly escaped with his own life, was badly shaken and arrived at the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) summit in Harare a few months later thirsting for revenge. He tried to enlist Mugabe and the NAM in an anti-American crusade. Mugabe, hosting the summit, was carefully unreceptive, and Qaddafi stormed out in a huff.

Relations between the two men remained cool until 1999. I managed to find a CIO officer, a man I shall call John, who had followed the relationship from his desk in Harare. John was furious with the way Zimbabwe was being progressively mortgaged to the Libyans in order to pay for oil. He was motivated to speak by feelings of patriotism, he told me. And as there are not many such folk left in Zimbabwe, I lent a skeptical ear. But what he said made sense.

John argued that Mugabe's rupture of relations with the IMF and World Bank had left the country in a financial crisis, certainly, but what had really changed things, he said, was the appearance of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC)-the first substantial challenge to Mugabe's power. When the MDC easily defeated Mugabe in the February 2000 constitutional referendum, the writing was on the wall. Mugabe quickly approached Qaddafi to ask for help with oil supplies and foreign exchange. With his regime now increasingly under threat and isolated on the world stage, Mugabe needed help wherever he could find it. Qaddafi responded positively, and the relationship between the two leaders became increasingly warm and close. The Libyans demanded in return investment opportunities in Zimbabwe, and both their stock of assets and the number of their personnel there began to increase rapidly. Libyan MIGs and transport planes were stationed inside Zimbabwe. Qaddafi came to Harare to attend the OAU summit while Mugabe made repeated visits to Libya. And more generally, Mugabe became increasingly sensitive to the currents and wishes of the Muslim world, particularly since the Mahathir regime in Malaysia remained one of his few other friends.

Thanks to an introduction from John, I managed to make contact with a high-ranking CIO officer who had served much of his career in Islamic countries, including Libya. Since anyone writing for the Western press was by this time unwelcome in Zimbabwe, my own presence in Harare was a somewhat delicate matter, while the CIO officer in question-he told me his name was Walter but doubtless it wasn't-could hardly risk being seen talking to me. I had watched the Minister of Information, Jonathan Moyo, the Goebbels of the regime, denounce me on television and say more than once that I was not welcome in the country. As far as I could see, Moyo did not realize I was already there, but the point was clear enough. I had, moreover, been condemned in no uncertain terms in the state-owned Zimbabwe Herald and physically threatened by war vets, so that one way or another, my welcome seemed to be wearing out. Accordingly, we met via complex intermediation and at night. I drove to a friend's who then guided me through the Harare suburbs to a place where a second car was parked, which in turn then led me through a further zigzag course, which ended up with both of us driving by moonlight with our headlamps switched off so as to attract as little attention as possible. The car stopped ahead of me at a house, and the driver-to me a mere silhouette, with whom I exchanged not a word-gestured that I should go in there and then drove away. Inside the otherwise empty house I found Walter.

Walter told me that he had not been long in the Middle East before he had realized that Qaddafi's links with terrorism had not ceased after 1986 but had, perforce, merely become more discreet. Qaddafi, still animated by a desire for revenge against America, maintained contact with and sometimes funded a variety of Islamic terrorist groups but tried simultaneously to ensure that the United States would have no excuse to repeat the 1986 raid. "I was surprised", Walter said, that "Libya was still far more active in training and assistance to terrorist groups than was commonly realized. They sometimes trained such organizations in third countries such as Egypt and Yemen in order not to attract further U.S. attention towards Libya itself." He continued: "Most of the core Taliban fighters were Libyan trained, you know. Libya also gave a lot of support and training to the fundamentalist FIS (the Islamic Salvation Front) in Algeria, and Algeria was sometimes used as an external training ground by Libyan instructors, for example in the training of Hamas, most of whose operatives are Libyan-trained. Hamas has very close links to Libya."

He mentioned as a key Libyan contact a terrorist leader who had accidentally blown himself up in Yemen in February 2002-"if they'd captured that guy they would have found out a whole big story tracing things back to Libya." Lebanese and Iraqi groups had also benefited from Libyan training, as had the PLO, he said. "From what I've seen, the Libyans are the best in the world at terrorist techniques."

But what about Al-Qaeda itself, I asked? Well, naturally Qaddafi maintained links with Al-Qaeda as well, Walter averred, but he had never come close to exercising the quasi-control over it that he did over some terrorist groups simply through the weight of his patronage. But any Middle Eastern terrorist group which needed help would be likely to beat a path to Qaddafi's door. This was how it came about in September 2000 that Qaddafi asked Mugabe to receive an Al-Qaeda contact, Ayman Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's Egyptian deputy. "In a way there'd been a dry run", Walter said. "Mugabe already had close relations with Yasir Arafat and when Arafat visited Mugabe in 1998, he brought with him six Lebanese members of Islamic Jihad. These guys were all men wanted by the Israelis but they stayed on in Harare for two weeks after Arafat left before exiting via Zambia to Libya"-a fact later confirmed to me by another ex-CIO operative. "Qaddafi learned all about this from Arafat-the two men are close-and clearly realized that Mugabe might be willing to host wanted Arab terrorists."

Al-Qaeda in Zimbabwe

Ayman Mohammed Rabie al-Zawahiri is one of the world's most wanted men-even at that stage he had been indicted in U.S. courts for his role in the East African bombings. He is also wanted in his native Egypt for the November 1995 suicide bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad and was sentenced to death by the Egyptian military for the multiple activities of his Al-Jihad group, including the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981. A former pediatrician, Zawahiri is regarded as the brains of Al-Qaeda-he is known as "The Doctor" or "The Teacher", as befits a man who has been a fundamentalist militant since 1966. Fully one-third of Al-Qaeda's fighters come from his Al-Jihad movement, including Mohammed Atta, the man who flew the first airliner into the Twin Towers.

But why should Qaddafi want to introduce Zawahiri to Mugabe? "We surmised that what had happened was that Osama had sent Zawahiri to Qaddafi to ask for his help", said Walter. "At the time, of course, we were in the dark but after the September 11 attack, everything suddenly made sense. You see, this was exactly a year before 9/11, and Al-Qaeda must have been planning that event well over a year ahead. They must have known that one of the things they needed most were safe bases far from the action. Qaddafi could hardly provide anyone with that-he would be an immediate suspect and anyway was eager to keep the Americans off his back. But Zimbabwe would have occurred to him right away-by then he was very close to Mugabe-and because we're not a Muslim country no one would suspect us."

The logic was indeed obvious. From Al-Qaeda's point of view, Zimbabwe would have had many advantages. Once an atrocity on the scale of September 11 took place, the United States would clearly scan the Muslim world for possible Al-Qaeda hideouts. Sudan and Afghanistan were clearly already potential targets, as were Somalia, Yemen and, after the bombing of the U.S. embassies in East Africa, so were any African countries with large Muslim populations. But Zimbabwe? No chance. And the country also had, as most African countries do not, the modern communications and banking facilities Al-Qaeda needed. It was also conveniently close to Nairobi, Durban and Cape Town-the three centers where Bin Laden already had links. In addition, Walter said, there were small Afghan communities in both Cape Town and Port Elizabeth (they had come there originally as seamen) and there was a lively trade between them and a small number of Bolivians in both places. Hashish from the Khyber Pass was brought through Cape Town and traded for cocaine from the Bolivians. These networks were also useful for smuggling personnel or equipment, or laundering money.

According to Walter, Zawahiri spent four or five days in Zimbabwe and met with Mugabe, Vice President Simon Muzenda, the late Defense Minister Moven Mahachi, Sydney Sekeremai, the minister in charge of the CIO, and other top ranking officials. He offered large sums of money to Mugabe personally. His instructions from Bin Laden were to acquire an Al-Qaeda base in Zimbabwe where, far from the scene of the crime, it could train its militants and plan its military strikes.

Walter knew nothing of the outcome of Zawahiri's negotiations with Mugabe, though he knew that they went on for days, and Walter thought it improbable that Mugabe would have turned down a gift in hard currency. The Al-Qaeda strikes against the U.S. embassies in East Africa could not have left Mugabe in any doubt as to what he was dealing with, nor that he was risking extreme U.S. displeasure-particularly since it must have been obvious that Al-Qaeda was planning further large-scale strikes against U.S. targets. Later, Walter added, Zawahiri returned a second time to Zimbabwe, this time staying for two weeks, but he knew little more. However, this return visit and Zawahiri's quick fade into invisibility are perfectly consistent with what one would expect if, as Walter was inclined to believe, Al-Qaeda had then proceeded to construct some sort of safe-house in Zimbabwe. Walter recounted all this to me while gripping the arms of his chair tightly and was clearly nervous at every extra minute he spent in my presence. As soon as he'd finished he slipped away into the night-as did I, after waiting the ten minutes he requested.

In considering this information, it is important to remember that from 2000 on, with his position now clearly under tremendous threat, Mugabe's relationship with Qaddafi became of central importance to him-while for Qaddafi, Mugabe's collapse into almost complete reliance on him presented a heaven-sent opportunity to extend his influence in Africa and acquire a commanding position within the new African Union. Mugabe had already begun to explore plans for exile in Namibia, whose president, Sam Nujoma, is his passionate admirer and follower. Mugabe's nephew, ironically christened Innocent and, conveniently, a high-ranking CIO officer himself, was instructed to take up an undercover job in the Zimbabwean High Commission in Windhoek, Namibia, where he was told to buy a suitably large and secure house for his uncle. However, Innocent was almost immediately killed in a car crash, so while plans went ahead for Mugabe's purchase of a large cattle ranch in Namibia, the Windhoek house project was put on hold.

Qaddafi, hearing of this mishap, offered to build a house in Libya instead, where Mugabe could live in secure exile. Mugabe determined to look into this new offer seriously, and accordingly, together with his young wife, Grace, flew to Tripoli, spending ten days as Qaddafi's guest and receiving a large gift of money from him. Not long after came another seven-day trip there.

Mugabe was clearly overwhelmed by the generosity of the Libyan dictator-who gave him such gifts as a new armored stretch limo and several 4x4 vehicles-and increasingly took on Qaddafi's lifestyle himself, using his doctors and even getting Qaddafi's interior decorators and landscape gardeners to come out to Harare to redesign his house and garden in the approved Qaddafi style. By this stage Qaddafi was not only supplying Zimbabwe with its oil but had become a major investor there. The Libyan dictator was keen to set up Quranic schools in Zimbabwe and propagate Islam-but was also not content with a minority share in Noczim, Zimbabwe's state-owned oil company. Qaddafi wanted to take it over completely. Significant numbers of Libyans moved into Zimbabwe to manage these assets and to provide intelligence and military backup for Mugabe.

Heading the Libyan team was Mustapha Khaled, known as Hossan, who arrived shortly after Zawahiri's visit in September 2000. Hossan stayed two months at the Meikles Hotel in central Harare before relocating to the farms Libya had acquired in the Zanu-PF heartland of Mashonaland Central. As more Libyans arrived, they moved straight to these farms. Conscious of the growing significance of the Libyans, next time I was in Harare I managed to contact Arthur, a somewhat shadowy figure who had, he told me, left the CIO a year previously in order to join the opposition MDC-while maintaining sufficient contact with friends in the CIO to know what was going on. This somewhat equivocal position meant one not only had to go through various cloak-and-dagger contortions to meet Arthur, but it was safest to assume that he might be trading information back with the CIO. The thing about Arthur was that he kept a particularly close eye on whatever the Libyans were up to. I finally met him in a parking lot overgrown with weeds outside a bedraggled shopping center with many of the shops boarded up, a commonplace sight in today's Zimbabwe.

I asked Arthur about Hossan. "He's one of the most powerful men in Zimbabwe", he averred. "While he was staying at Meikles Hotel I stole his cell phone and checked the numbers on it: Hossan had on it all the private cell phone numbers of the whole government, including Mugabe himself. You must realize how rare that is."

Arthur had replaced the cell phone so that Hossan had never realized it was gone. "Hossan's team knows all about rough stuff. They've been providing the key training for the Green Bombers (Mugabe's youth militia)-in fact they're the ones who gave them their green "Third Chimurenga" t-shirts. They were also the source of the drugs needed to make those kids sufficiently aggressive to beat and torture people they might have regarded as friends only weeks before." This, I later discovered, was veterinary PCP, a heroin derivative-more commonly known as Angel Dust. But at that point in our talk, three other black Zimbabweans hove into view, much to Arthur's discomfort, and he made a point of greeting them elaborately and would not acknowledge me again while they remained in sight.

"The Libyans stayed close to Mugabe throughout his presidential re-election campaign [in April 2002] and were clearly under orders from Qaddafi to look after him", Arthur continued. "A big delegation-including two of Qaddafi's General People's Congress central committee members-attended Mugabe's final rally in Bulawayo. Hossan's team had orders to remain with Mugabe through the election aftermath and, should there have been enough serious trouble for it to be advisable for Mugabe to leave, they were to fly him away to Libya. Mugabe told them that in that case he would need two weeks to destroy incriminating files and other evidence in Harare."

Arthur also reminded me that when Qaddafi had passed through Harare en route to the African Union meeting in Durban, he had lectured the local Muslim Asian community on the need for them to be more militant and had even threatened to have PAGAD strong-arm men sent up from Cape Town to knock them into line if necessary. This confirmed what I had learned from other sources about a possible link between Qaddafi and PAGAD.

Arthur had reminded me to recall that almost on the eve of 9/11, Mugabe had been Qaddafi's guest in Tripoli for the 32nd anniversary of Libya's "national revolution." This stirred distant memories of reading Qaddafi's speech in the Herald on that occasion, so I set off to try to track that down. It was distinctly unsafe for me to go into the Herald building-Jonathan Moyo's hangout and the sort of place where I might well meet the Zanu-PF war vets who had tried to beat me up on my last visit to Zanu-PF headquarters-but there was nothing for it. It took me the best part of a day to overcome the endless bureaucratic and other difficulties in getting back copies of the Herald but I finally found what I wanted.

Saturday, September 1, 2001, had indeed found Mugabe in Tripoli once more as Qaddafi's guest. Qaddafi called on his assembled African allies-Sudan's President Moar Bashir, Chad's President Idriss Deby and Benin's General Mathieu Kerekou-"to support the hero, President Mugabe, since Zimbabwe is a strategic country." But Qaddafi seemed to have remained close enough to Al-Qaeda to have a pretty good idea that a major blow was about to be struck against the Americans-this was just ten days before 9/11-for he openly boasted of Bin Laden's prowess and mocked the United States for failing to catch him after the East Africa embassy bombings:

"We no longer wage war with the old weapons. Now they can fight you with electrons and viruses. The crazy world powers that have invested huge amounts of money in weapons of mass destruction have found themselves unable to fight the new strain of rebellion. As a simple example, the U.S.A. is unable to fight someone called Osama bin Laden. He is a tiny man, weighing no more than 50 kg. He has only a Kalashnikov rifle in his hands. He doesn't even wear a military uniform. He wears a jalabiyah and turban and lives in a cavern, eating stale bread. He has driven the U.S.A. crazy, more than the former Soviet Union did. Can you imagine that?"

This whole passage-quoted approvingly in the Herald-suggests strongly that Qaddafi had been in recent contact with Bin Laden, was aware of his living conditions in the caves of Afghanistan and also knew that some fiendish new strike, employing unconventional weapons, was about to hit the United States. It seems quite possible that Qaddafi imparted what he knew to Mugabe, for he must have realized that any such strike would have major implications for anyone who had been lending assistance to the likes of Zawahiri.

When the September 11 strike took place, Qaddafi quickly distanced himself from it as publicly as he could, clearly fearing U.S. reprisals. Mugabe himself said nothing-but within the CIO in Harare there was panic. "Those of us who knew about the contacts with Zawahiri were scared stiff", Walter had told me. "We thought this might be the end of everything. We had visions of b-52s over Harare. One thing I can tell you is that that whole style of suicide bombing bears the Libyan hallmark. They are the modern masters of kamikaze warfare and they have taught those who practice it all they know. None of us who spent much time in Libya had much doubt that Qaddafi's hand was present in the September 11 events."

The printing of Qaddafi's September 1 speech in the Herald had caught the eye of several MDC members, including a white farmer I knew from other contacts. "When September 11 occurred, I went back and looked at it again", he told me. "We began to wonder who represented Afghanistan in Harare." I had wondered about that myself and had driven round to where the old phone book said the embassy had been. It was empty, and no one in the Spanish embassy next door could remember when it had last been open. In the end, I discovered that the ex-ambassador, Mohammed Sahi Daneshjo, still lived in Harare. But the embassy had been closed in 1992, four years before the Taliban had come to power in Kabul. "We checked all that out too", said my white farmer friend. "But then we noticed an Afghan we call Mr. Moosa who clearly had far more clout." Moosa, who was in the motor trade, had got into a trifling dispute with a florist near his premises over parking spaces. Amazingly, the CIO immediately materialized and warned off the florist in no uncertain terms. Mr. Moosa was, they said, a very important person and under the government's protection. The same happened when some of Moosa's workers complained they had not been paid and threatened a strike. Again the CIO arrived in force to warn the workers that they had better not dream of upsetting a person enjoying President Mugabe's protection. "Quite clearly", my farmer friend told me, "Moosa has the ability to pick up the phone to the presidency or the CIO and make things happen double-quick. So we managed to get through to one of the very top people in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and ask him what was so special about Moosa. He confirmed that Moosa was a special case and that 'we're looking after him.' For us that was virtual confirmation that he was effectively the Taliban ambassador, perhaps even the Al-Qaeda ambassador. He clearly has a hotline to Mugabe which in turn means they have some on-going deal."

My farmer friend had organized a few fellow MDC members to take a quiet look into Moosa's affairs. His business was situated on an industrial estate on the outskirts of Harare but whenever anyone went there to buy anything from him they were always told that that item was not in stock. "We concluded it was a front company, providing a phone, fax, e-mail, a bank account and able to take delivery of containers. After a while we concluded that that was the real Taliban embassy here. They obviously wouldn't have wanted to have one openly", my farmer friend concluded.

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.

In June 2003, five men of Arab provenance were arrested in Blantyre, Malawi, on charges of funneling money to Al-Qaeda. This turned out to be a blunder, with the five men indignantly emerging to tell their story some months later. The Malawi police, they said, had been solely responsible for the mistake and that at no stage in their confinement had the five men so much as met an American. They had been taken to Lilongwe, accused of belonging to Al-Qaeda, and then put on an Air Malawi flight to Lusaka. The flight was, however, redirected to Harare where they were delivered to the Zimbabwean police. They in turn held them for a month before flying them out to Khartoum where the Sudanese government released them. They might have languished much longer in Zimbabwe but for the fact that one of them, Khalif Abdi Hussein, was a Kenyan and that after questions were raised in the Kenyan parliament the Nairobi government announced it had traced them to Zimbabwe. The interesting point here was simply that Bakili Muluzi, the Malawian president, has been a strong supporter of Mugabe and clearly had the idea that Al-Qaeda suspects ought to be turned over to him rather than to the Americans.

In the meantime, of course, both the Mugabe and Mbeki governments had taken a strongly sympathetic line towards Saddam Hussein in the run up to the Iraq War and had denounced the Anglo-American involvement there. Mugabe made it clear indeed that he identified strongly with Saddam and that the Americans were "enemies" who were planning an invasion of Zimbabwe too. When a black Zimbabwean, Christopher Muzvuru, a bagpiper in the Irish Guards, was killed during the British attack on Basra on April 6, 2003, the Mugabe press angrily denounced him as a "traitor" and "sell-out", a "mercenary fighting for an enemy government." When Muzvuru's body was brought back home, the Mugabe government tried to deny it burial, and Zanu-PF activists desecrated the grave.

This past winter, finding myself in Harare again, I was struck by the fact that the U.S. embassy has put up posters offering a $2 million reward for Haroun Fazil--still on the FBI's list of the 21 Most Wanted as the man behind the East African embassy bombings. Quite clearly, the FBI believes either that he may be in Zimbabwe or that there may be people there who know him. I decided that this merited a visit to the Zimbabwean Criminal Investigation Department (CID)--a difficult venture for me since I may be wanted by them myself. But the CID are also the last remaining professional element within the Zimbabwean police, keen to remain in the good books of Interpol.

The CID have their headquarters in a vast police camp adjacent to Mugabe's presidential palace. Having got through the usual road blocks and security guards, I eventually found the office I was looking for, the one with a "Wanted" poster of Fazil from Interpol taped to its door. More interesting, though, was the poster mounted by the CID itself, showing a copy of Fazil's passport. For Fazil traveled to Nairobi to carry out the bombings from Harare and on a Zimbabwean passport. I was tempted to tell the desk officer that he might be able to learn more about that interesting circumstance by enquiring at the presidential palace next door but decided to leave that for another day.

IT IS NOT surprising that Mugabe's failed state should have become involved with terrorists: Mugabe has no scruple in deploying terror tactics against his own people and is desperate for friends and money. Moreover, even his thin list of friends has been rapidly diminishing. He remains on close terms with North Korea, and some of the uranium for that country's nuclear program is believed to have come from Zimbabwe. But with the retirement of Malaysia's Mahathir Mohamad and Qaddafi's decision in January 2004 to abandon his WMD program and seek d&ente with the West, it is not clear on whom, other than South Africa's Thabo Mbeki, Mugabe can now rely.

The hounds of hell still roam across Mugabe's lands. The real question is whether the major Western powers will continue to countenance a regime that commits human rights abuses on such a scale, or whether they will take the fairly modest steps required to bring Mugabe's house of cards tumbling down. When the regime does fall--and fall it must--there may be significant implications for the War on Terror, and several new pieces of the jigsaw puzzle could fall into place.

R.W. Johnson, former professor of political science and Emeritus Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford University, is the Southern African correspondent of the Sunday Times (London).