March 1995: US Slow to Show Interest in Al-Qaeda Training Manual

Belgian investigators find a CD-ROM of a recently published al-Qaeda training manual and begin translating it a few months later. Versions of the manual will later circulate widely amongst radical militants. [New York Times, 1/14/2001] The Arabic manual is called the Encyclopedia of the Afghan Jihad and it is over 7,000 pages long. It explains in simple terms how to build bombs, shoot down aircraft, conduct surveillance, and so on. Much of the material is culled from US and British military manuals. [Gunaratna, 2003, pp. 93-94] A former CIA official will later claim the CIA did not obtain a copy of the manual until the end of 1999. “The truth is, they missed for years the largest terrorist guide ever written.” He blames CIA reluctance to scrutinize its support for the anti-Soviet jihad in the 1980s. [New York Times, 1/14/2001] ABC News, which was first to report on the manual, also claims the CIA did not get a copy until December 1999 from a suspect in Jordan (see 1998-December 11, 1999 and December 11, 1999). [ABC News, 9/18/2000] The CIA, however, claims that the manual is not that important, and that in any case it had copies for years. [New York Times, 1/14/2001] According to another account, the CIA first received a copy from Jordan in 1997. [Gunaratna, 2003, pp. 94]