How The Sheik Got In

By Jay Peterzell/Washington

EVER SINCE SHEIK OMAR AHMED ALI Abdel Rahman arrived in America in July 1990, he has confounded the U.S. government. His incendiary sermons at mosques in Jersey City, New Jersey, and Brooklyn, New York, have called for the violent overthrow of the Egyptian government. Now six of Sheik Abdel Rahman's followers have been indicted in connection with the bombing of the World Trade Center. Little wonder that the U.S. State Department is trying to figure out how the sheik got to America in the first place.

What's known for certain is that the American embassy in Khartoum gave him a visa in May 1990. This shouldn't have happened: since 1987, the blind Egyptian cleric had been on the State Department's watch list for suspected terrorists. When Sheik Abdel Rahman arrived at the U.S. embassy in Khartoum in May 1990 and asked for a visa, a Sudanese employee checked his name against a list of names on microfiche from the department's Automated Visa Lookout System. The employee said there were no "hits" against the name.

After the World Trade Center bombing, Assistant Secretary of State Edward Djerejian told the U.S. Congress the sheik "did not give the accurate spelling of his name." Egyptian passports, however, give names in both Arabic and English. The English name on the sheik's passport, according to sources who have examined the document, was exactly the same as on AVLOS microfiche. "We had the right name, the right nationality and the right date of birth," says a senior official. The State Department is now trying to find out whether the embassy employee, who still works in Khartoum, made a mistake, did not check -- or was told by Sudan's radical Islamic government to help the sheik.

The Khartoum embassy realized its mistake three days later, when it received a cable from a U.S. official in Cairo saying Sheik Abdel Rahman was heading for Sudan. The embassy sent an urgent message informing the State Department that the sheik had been given a visa by mistake. Khartoum officials, who hoped to snag the sheik and revoke the visa, thought he would leave for the U.S. on a specific flight. But the sheik flew to Pakistan instead.

State Department officials believe a copy of Khartoum's cable was sent to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, but the INS says it has not found it. All sides agree, however, that when the Khartoum embassy failed to cancel the visa, Washington should have been alerted so that it could tell INS to put Sheik Abdel Rahman on its own watch list. In April 1991 the immigration service made an unexplained error when it gave the sheik a green card attesting permanent resident status, although his visa by then had been revoked and he was in the U.S. illegally. At that point, says a U.S. diplomat, "the Egyptians went ballistic" and insisted that the U.S. expel Sheik Abdel Rahman. His residency status was lifted last year, but his case could be tied up in court for years.

The FBI has been unable to find evidence linking the sheik to the Trade Center bombing. But when he traveled around the U.S. in March, the bureau kept such a close eye on him that the agents felt they had to concoct a reason for the surveillance: they told the sheik that they were there to protect him.