Ali Mohammed

Ali Mohammed has one hell of a resume. A sergeant in the Egyptian Army, a sergeant in the U.S. Special Forces, and a member of al Qaeda who served as Osama bin Laden's chief of security. Along the way, he did a stint as an FBI informant and a CIA agent.

Little is known of his childhood, other than that he was born in 1952 in Egypt. He joined the Egyptian Army (which has a compulsory service requirement) sometime around 1970 and remained for 14 years, advancing to the rank of sergeant in the field of military intellgence.

In the early 1980s, he took part in an Army exchange program with the Green Berets, at which time he learned English. Around the same time, according to his own account, he connected with members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a terrorist group headed by Ayman Al-Zawahiri.

After he left the Egyptian military in 1984, Mohammed's official resume included a stint as airline security consultant, but he claimed that he actually worked for the CIA. At the time, the CIA and Saudi intelligence were richly funding a jihad against the Soviet Union by Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan.

According to the CIA's version of events, Mohammed had approached them about working as an informant. The agency tried him out for a while, but they claim that they fired him because he made unauthorized contacts with Hezbollah operatives.

Ali Mohammed had envisioned a career path with the U.S. government, and by gum, he was going to live his dream. He moved to the U.S. in 1985, winning citizenship by marrying a woman he met on the flight over. He enlisted in the U.S. Army a year later.

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