Customer Reviews

My Jihad: One American's Journey Through the World of Usama Bin Laden--as a Covert Operative for the American Government

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

I was drawn to this book because I feel that much of what Islam and Jihad are about have been grossly misrepresented by the media and our American tendency to over-generalize. I was also interested to hear it explained by an American so that cultural and ethnic filters wouldn't cloud the message.

I wasn't disappointed by the message but I was generally put off by the messenger. While his commitment and his physical courage are certainly remarkable he struck me at times to be little more than an egotistical wrong-side-of-the-tracks punk with a death wish. At other times he seemed to be very genuine and thoughtful and it is this schizophrenic back and forth that seemed to define his life and this book.

His accounts of his combat exploits really had me wondering if his survival was due more to dumb luck than skill. It wasn't that his combat experiences were really extraordinary or spectacular, it was more that he was such a disorganized clod. It seemed that half of the book was about how he managed to get separated from his gear time and time again leaving his basically empty handed in a war zone. This coupled with seeming complete lack of a plan that the other mujahs had made me wonder if any of them had a clue what they were doing.

While I admire his devotion it is difficult to have much respect for his methods. He seemed to be just wandering around war zones looking for trouble pumped up with "fool's courage" and not really accomplishing much other than killing a few Russians, getting his wives pregnant and losing his leg. In the end, given what it cost him personally with regard to his health and his family, I can't help but wonder what good he accomplished.

The book's title is also misleading when it comes to the author's involvement in counterterror operations and his involvement with Bin Laden's Al Qaeda network. Basically he spent some time goofing around in a muddy camp in Pakistan over a year before that same camp was later hit by cruise missiles in a symbolic retaliation for one of the terrorist attacks that took place in the late nineties. Likewise his involment with Osama Bin Laden are equally dubious. As for his "counterterror" work he had basically goofed around on the FBI's payroll and had some more comically inept operations that definitely make it easier to understand how 9/11 could have happened without our intelligence people being any wiser and why our taxes are so high.

Despite my reservations this book is an interesting read and while it will not give you any direct insights into what happened on 9/11 it will give you a glimpse into the maddening realm of the Third World and our own government's tomfoolery that made it possible for these madmen to get as far as they have in the world. Also, while the author claims to represent "true Islam" I would take that with a grain of salt. I wouldn't know a true Muslim from a hole in the ground but the author's messed up life view makes me wonder if his perceptions can be trusted.

Anyone who wants to understand the U.S. intelligence failures in the War Against Terrorism needs to read this book. The author, an American jihadi who could pass without question among the most extreme elements of the Islamist movement, was frustrated at every turn by his efforts to act as an undercover agent for the U.S. among the Islamists. So extreme were the self-imposed limitations on the use of counter-intelligence agents by the FBI and CIA that the author had to vow not to be engaged in military activities when acting as a CIA spy in Chechenya, even though he would be going there as a purported guerilla fighter. Then the CIA insisted that it would have to inform both the Russian and Azerbaijan governments that the author would be entering Chechenya through Azerbaijan due to an agency rule requiring the "host" government be informed any time a U.S. agent entered its territory. This despite the author's first hand experience that both the Russian and Azerbaijan governments were thoroughly penetrated by the Islamists and their organized crime colloborators. Finally the author's opportunity to meet directly with Bin Laden himself is vetoed by his CIA/FBI handlers. If these are reflective of policies imposed by the Clinton Administration then clearly Clinton merits the charge that he sabotaged U.S. intelligence gathering activities in the 90s. However, it is by no means clear where the policies in question came from nor whether the current administration has jettisoned them. Indeed, what make Collins's account so plausible is that he himself makes no efforts to relate his experience to the American blame game and instead is simply intent on telling his own story.

I note that certain reviewers are rating this book according to whether they admire the author or not. This is not, in my view, an appropriate use of the review process. The author is the product of a severely disfunctional family and was well on his way to becoming a professional criminal when he found a religion which provided a means for sanctifying his already well-established proclivities towards violence. His performance in the jihad in many way illustrates all that is repugnant about U.S. foreign policy - strident self-righteousness, profound ignorance about foreign cultures, unwillingness to cooperate with others, open racism, and easy betrayal of friends. None of this changes the fact that this book offers a virtually unprecedented direct look into the life of a genuine jihadi, as well as a compelling illustration of why U.S. human intelligence has fallen into such a disasterous state.

After finishing this book, I read the reviews on amazon.com. The other readers' reviews of this book are dead on. Both the positive and negative reviews develop points that are correct. The book is not well written or edited. However, the author is not a professional wordsmith. The book, is written by a former car thief and "stick up man." He converted to Islam while in the California Youth Authority. I am sure he didn't spend much time studying literature.
I feel the books best value is the author's description of working as a Confidential Informant or "snitch" with both the CIA and FBI. He describes how our intelligence agencies are mired with incompetent ladder climbers more concerned with their respective careers than the mission. Even worse are the insanely stupid bureaucratic regulations, which hamstring our nations intelligence gathering. A perfect example of this is described in the book where the CIA would not allow the author to go to Chechnya unless he "promised not to engage in combat" due to rules prohibiting it's operatives from doing that.
Even scarier, on several occasions the CIA wanted to notify various foreign intelligence agencies of the author's status as an agent. His account of the way in which some of his handlers worked with him also raises red flags. One of them was a "born again Christian" who allowed his personal views to affect his agent handling.
All in all I think this is a very interesting account of the experiences of a "front line soldier of Islam." It is very current and should be read by anyone concerned with intelligence gathering or curious about it.

I have a personal interest in this book because I wrote the index for it. I have to say, I found it hard to put down. Sure, it's not Pulitzer prize material, and the author is a bit of an egomaniac, but I still found myself completely engaged. I've been recommending it to everyone I know, and believe me, there are few books that I've read, much less indexed, that left me thinking about them months later.

I write this as a Muslim, who was born in the US, studied traditional knowledge in Eygpt, and believes in intellectual revival of Islam through spiritual and political revival.

This book sheds light on the problem of Muslims from many different angles. It also shows the frustration many Muslims feel throughout the world. It is a book on the reflection of how our government has lumped all types of Practicing Muslims in one catagory. It forces the Muslims to think what is "my jihad"--- in a sense I never thought that the jihadi movements lack soo much discipline, knowledge, and the true Islamic spirit. The worst of it was how Muslims who were supposedly involved in Jihad were saying things, without meaning it.

This book is a wake up call for the Muslims, every Muslim should read,and every Non Muslim should read it. I especially think people in authrority should read this book.

While there was very little to admire about the author of this book, I must say that it was hard to stop reading it. The author was very involved in the pre-9/11 world of Jihad, so his travels paint a vivid picture of the people and world of this sub-culture. I guess I found it distrubring that one claiming to be inspired by religion would be so obessed with the details of war - and killing people. But I found myself continuing to read this book because it did give me insights into who these people are and why they do what they do.

Instead of seeing a well run secret organization out of a James Bond novel one is pretty surprised how disorganized the terrorist groups can be. I was also pretty surpised to read the accounts of the Russian military and find out how corrupt they could be. In one chapter you find out that the Russian border guards are taking bribes to let in fighters who will be killing their own. Of course on the other side you also read accounts of infighting and sell-outs of the Jihad inspired organizations. To top it off his insights on American intelligence organizations show their efforts in a less than positive light. One hopes that we can learn from these insights and apply the lessons.

I would recommend the book to anyone trying who is trying to get a better idea about the sub-culture of terrorism. While I couldn't agree with the point of view of the author, I found the book a pretty good source for insights into this underground world. Having seen the results of terrorism upclose my feelings are that it's a subject that needs to be explored further.

If you ever wondered what goes through the mind of a Jihadist this is the book for you. Although the author is clearly unbalanced he provides some interesting insights into the international Jihadist movement. Now why do I say the guy is unbalanced? He claims he went to the Chechen Republic to defend Islam; but if you read between the lines you can see even the rebels got tired of him, bouncing him around from group to group because of his inability to follow orders. Additionally, he seemed to relish killing Russians just a little to much(also the author has this fixation about being considered a military man despite the fact that he has an obvious problem with authority, the guy would never last in a real army.) This all starts to make sense about half way through the book when we learn he converted to Islam in prison and had a way bad childhood. Ok so the guy is out there, still the book offers valuable insights.
For one, we learn that an uneducated, self-important no-goodnick, can do a pretty good job of infiltrating the Jihadist movement, at one point even meeting one of the 9-11 hijackers. What does this say about our intell services? Next, when for reasons never fully explained, the author decides to rat out his new found friends by becoming an informer we learn how incomptent our intell service are. This part of the book rings depressingly true. So in sum, you may not like the author, what he believes, or what he has to say, but...he does offer some very valuable insights based on first hand experience. For that reason alone the book is worth your time.

Aukai Collins is not the type of guy I'd like to meet in a dark alley although I wouldn't mind him having my back in a fight. This American Muslim's tale of jihad is both cautionary and enlightening.

Collins grew up as a street kid in California. After what must rank as one of the most dysfunctional childhoods on record (he practically saw his drug addicted alcoholic mother murdered before his eyes, and counts the words of his mother's killer as the most meaningful he has heard), Collins took up a life of petty crime. A stint in the California Youth Authority changed his life when he adopted Islam as his faith and decided to make Jihad, a holy war for the protection of fellow Muslims, his calling.

His wanderings on behalf of Jihad took him from Kashmir to Afghanistan (where he was trained by Al-Qeda operatives) to Kosovo to Chechnya. Along the way, Collins found his faith eroding as he came to the realization that not all Mujahidden were motivated by the same deep religious convictions he felt and they verbally espoused. It was at this point that he decided to work with the FBI and CIA in undermining Islamic terrorists.

Collins' experiences with the FBI/CIA are telling. Stuck in bureaucratic neutral and unable to discern between mainstream Muslims and self-serving fanatics, the U.S. Government kept attempting to have Collins infiltrate mosques while he insisted the real terrorists were elsewhere. Although he became friendly with several 9/11 operatives, his warnings were ignored by his handlers, and ultimately 9/11 happened.

Collins is a vivid storyteller, and his descriptions of life in Chechnya and Kosovo are rich in detail. Some of his war stories carry a whiff of fish, (he reflects that his war wounds must 'look cool'), but they are an engrossing read nonetheless. The book's great weakness is Collins' own: Insight.

Collins has a shortcoming common to tougher-than-nails men. He sees the world in black and white. Unable to detect shadings of gray, he repeatedly takes everyone he meets at face value, almost always believes what he is told, and is repetitiously disappointed, sometimes tragically so, as when he cannot rescue his Chechen wife and infant daughter from the war. His shock that his FBI handlers are "careerists" is poignant and touching. His outrage at Islamic terrorists is palpable, and carries a sense of personal betrayal that is almost adolescent in its profundity. He lionizes the Chechens despite their own less than spotless record of crimes against humanity, and damns the Russians universally as war criminals.

MY JIHAD is also short on background. After all, WHY Jihad? Why is there a war in Chechnya in the first place and why did Aukai Collins go there? WHY have certain "Islamic" factions decided to declare war on the West? Collins admits he is no Qu'ranic scholar, but these are questions that any man who finds himself face to face with an Azerbaijani assassin needs to ask himself at some point. Hopefully, when Collins does he will share the answers with us in his next book.

I know the author personally, and provided one of the two pre-publication endorsements, but the publisher has done a poor job of presenting information about this book, so I want to offer both the table of contents plus the two endorsements (Robert Young Pelton, author of "The World's Most Dangerous Places", did the other one). This will also ensure the folks that follow my reviews ("See more about me" should really say "See my other reviews") are alerted to this really exceptional first-person story from a blond, blue-eyed American mujahid.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: From San Diego to Afghanistan Through Frankfurt, Vienna, Pakistan, and Kashmir, 1993
Chapter 2: Afghanistan, Winter 1993-1994
Chapter 3: First Trip to Chechnya, 1995-1996
Chapter 4: Youth (How an American Came to Islam and Jihad)
Chapter 5: How the CIA (and the FBI) Betrayed Me, 1996-1999
Chapter 6: Chechnya Revisited, 1999-2000
Chapter 7: September 11, 2001

Endorsements

"This is a moving, detailed bird's eye view of both the realities of global conflicts in which innocents are called terrorists while governments do the terrorizing; and of the flagrant inadequacies of the CIA and the FBI, each full of good people trapped in monstrously politicized bureaucracies. I know and admire this mujahid--he is a loyal American, a faithful Muslim, and a speaker of truth. Hear him, and weep."

Robert David Steele, former CIA case officer and author of ON INTELLIGENCE: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World

"An important book that takes you deep inside the world of jihadis and a disturbing indictment on why 9/11 caught the U.S. intelligence community by surprise. If you want to understand the little-known world of Islamic jihad, read this book."

Robert Young Pelton, author of "The Hunter, the Hammer, and Heaven" and of "The World's Most Dangerous Places"

Now for an additional comment: both the author of this book, and Robert Young Pelton, among others, have published accounts of how the Russian government, and specifically its intelligence services, have been blowing up apartment buildings in Moscow and creating excuses for committing genocide against the Chechnyan Muslims. I myself had no personal knowledge of this until last week when I was in London and talking to very knowledgeable senior officers attending an intelligence seminar at Oxford University. Among the things we discussed: the public disclosure on Russian television that it was the Russian intelligence service that was caught moving explosives into the building of a basement. Tipped off by an alert citizen, the local police bagged all the perpetrators and went on television to claim credit for foiling a Chechnyan terrorist plot. To their shock, they shortly discovered it was the Russian FSB (successor to the KGB) doing the dirty work, and a profusely sweating police major general, reading stiffly from a prepared statement, was forced to go on television to state that the earlier report was in error, that the FSB was running an "exercise" to test police alertness. Right. I am fully satisfied, based on open sources, that the Russians are committing genocide against Chechnyan Muslims (as well as Russian Tatars, another little story our State Department does not like to see discussed in public).

It's time for the U.S. public to get a grip on international reality, because the U.S. government is deliberately avoiding public discussion of the harsh realities of the real world that make it highly unlikely our grand-children will enjoy anything near our level of prosperity and security, marginal as it is for many of us.

This book is from a guy just like any American with a blue-collar job--he's been there, he's lost a leg to combat wounds, he's lost his livelihood to FBI and CIA incompetence, he has a great deal to teach all of us about the narrow slice of life that he has experienced on our behalf. This is a very fine book, and I recommend it without reservation.

Firstly, I'd like to state that I loved this book. It was humorous, well written and thoroughly exciting book. The pacing was fast, the language is strong, and peppered with both American slang and Islamic references. For nothing else, it is a fun read.
I noticed though that many of the other reviewers called Aukai a "terrorist" or a "criminal" in their reviews though. This is not only incorrect, but also shows how jaded these people are. The fact that Aukai, irregardless of religious convictions, was willing to sacrifice his life in numerous countries to simply protect people that he had never met should be indication enough of the bravery and selfless nature of this man.
Is Aukai a flawless man? Hardly. But this does not make him a terrorist, or a criminal. Being that warfare still exists (Shockingly enough!), Aukai's killing of Russian soldiers is not a crime (At least not any more of a crime that any other soldier has ever commited during a war). I know that it may be a revelation to some of you, but a Moslem can be a fighter without being a terrorist too.