Jamal al-Fadl

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Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl is a Sudanese militant and associate of Osama bin Laden in the early 1990s.

Al-Fadl was recruited to the Afghan mujaheddin "through the Farouq mosque in Brooklyn" (presumably in the later 1980s), and he became a "senior employee" of al-Qaeda. After embezzling $110,000 from the organization, al-Fadl "defected". He contacted the CIA via the US's Eritrean embassy and, receiving encouragement from Jack Cloonan (second-in-command of the CIA's Bin Laden unit) and others, returned (after staying in Germany for a while) to the United States, in spring 1996.

For the next three years Cloonan and his colleagues baby-sat al-Fadl in a safe-house. From December 1996 Al-Fadl began to provide "a major breakthrough of intelligence on the creation, character, direction, and intentions of al Qaeda"; "bin Laden, the CIA now learned, had planned multiple terrorist operations and aspired to more" — including the acquisition of weapons-grade uranium. Al-Fadl, who had "passed the polygraph tests he was given", became a key witness in the US v. bin Laden trial that began in February 2001.

[edit] Legal 'Creation' of Al-Qaeda

In January 2001 the trial began in New York of four men accused of the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in east Africa . The U.S also wanted to prosecute Osama bin Laden in his absence under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). To be able to do this under American law, the prosecutors needed evidence of a criminal organisation, which would then allow them to prosecute the leader, even if he could not be linked directly to the crime.

Jamal al-Fadl was taken on as a key prosecution witness, who along with a number of other sources claimed that Osama bin Laden was the leader of a large international terrorist organisation which was called "al-Qaeda".