there was a spate of terrorist activity, much of it by Palestinian organizations. In 1986 the CIA founded the Counterterrorist Center, an interdisciplinary body drawing its personnel from the Directorates of Operations, Intelligence, and other US intelligence organizations. It first got to grips with secular terrorism, but found the upcoming Islamist terror much more difficult to penetrate. In the 1990s the latter became a major preoccupation of the center. Afghanistan and its consequences Blowback (referring to operations launched against an enemy which eventually hurt their originators) into the United States may have come from a pipeline, from Brooklyn, New York, to Peshawar, Pakistan, the gateway to joining the Afghan mujahedin. The Brooklyn end was at the Al Kifah Refugee Center, funded by Operation Cyclone, and the associated Afghan Refugee Service. The Maktab al-Khidamat ("Office of Services") was founded in Peshawar in 1984 by Abdullah Azzam and Osama bin Laden to finance and support this effort. "Cold warriors" in the CIA and US State Department looked favorably on these efforts, and considered that they should be formally endorsed and expanded, perhaps along the lines of the international brigades of the Spanish Civil War. "Bin Laden actually did some very good things", said Milton Bearden, chief of the CIA's Islamabad station in the later 1980s. "He put a lot of money in a lot of right places in Afghanistan. He never came on the screen of any Americans as either a terrific asset or someone who was anti-American." The CIA denied, however, actually assisting the "Arab-Afghans", or having direct contact with Bin Laden. Arrested in the US for the 1998 embassy bombings, was a former Egyptian soldier named Ali Mohamed (sometimes called "al-Amriki", "the American"), who is alleged to have provided training and assistance to Bin Laden's operatives. At that time, however, he was a member of the United States Army Special Forces. FBI special agent Jack Cloonan calls him "bin Laden's first trainer". Originally an Egyptian army captain, in the 1980s Mohamed came to the US and became a supply sergeant to the Green Berets in Fort Bragg. At the same time he was involved with Egyptian Islamic Jihad (which "merged" with al-Qaeda in the 1990s), and later with al-Qaeda itself; he boasted of fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. He had worked for the CIA in the earlier 1980s, but the agency supposedly dropped him after he boasted of his relationship.