However, Mohamed's behavior led his commanding officer, Lt. Col. Robert Anderson, to believe he was still a US intelligence asset. ("I assumed the CIA", said Anderson.) In 1989 Mohamed trained anti-Soviet fighters in his spare time, apparently at the al-Khifah center in Brooklyn. He was honorably discharged from the US military in November 1989. Another individual associated with the Brooklyn center was the "Blind Sheikh" Omar Abdel-Rahman, a leading recruiter of mujaheddin, who obtained US entry visas with the help of the CIA in 1987 and 1990. Bin Laden's early years: terrorist financier Sometime in late 1988 or early 1989, Bin Laden set up al-Qaeda from the more extreme elements of the Services Office. However, it was not a large organization at the time; when Jamal al-Fadl (who had been recruited through the Brooklyn center in the mid-1980s) joined in 1989, he was described as Qaeda's "third member". Congressional testimony from then-DCI George Tenet speaks of knowledge and analysis of Bin Laden, from his early years as a terrorist financier to his leadership of a worldwide network of terrorism based in Afghanistan. According to Tenet, Bin Laden gained prominence during the Afghan war for his role in financing the recruitment, transportation, and training of Arab nationals who fought alongside the Afghan mujahedin against the Soviets during the 1980s. Tenet denied there had been any US government involvement with him until the early nineties. Intelligence and terrorism in the 1990s The 1990s were characterized by a wide range of terrorist activities, from a religious cult that used WMDs, to an attack on the World Trade Center by an ad hoc jihadist group, to coordinated al-Qaeda attacks. Accounts differ on when the United States recognized bin Laden as an individual financier of terror, as opposed to when al-Qaida was recognized as a group. In the early 1990s, Ali Mohamed, a former United States Army Special Forces supply sergeant, returned to Afghanistan, where he gave training in al-Qaeda camps. According to FBI special agent Jack Cloonan, in one of Mohamed's first classes were Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and other al-Qaeda leaders. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, he was involved in planning the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Africa. 1990 Eventually, the Services office and Al-Kifah were also linked to Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, an Egyptian religious leader later jailed for the planned New York bombings. He had entered the US with