Martyrs for The Sheik

By MARGUERITE MICHAELS

As Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman sat in an upstate New York prison infirmary complaining about the food and the timing of his insulin injections, halfway around the world President Hosni Mubarak cracked down decisively on the sheik's fundamentalist followers in Egypt. Seven men, one just 18 years old, were hanged, beginning at dawn last Thursday, on charges of attacking foreign tourists and conspiring to assassinate government officials. Thirteen more have been sentenced to death, and 770 are about to go on trial before military tribunals. "This is remarkable, serious stuff," says Robert Satloff, director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "There is clearly an effort in Cairo to cut the legs off the Islamic movement."

Frustrated for months by Sheik Abdel Rahman's growing visibility, enhanced by his ties to some suspects in the World Trade Center bombing and the foiled conspiracy to bomb a handful of other New York City sites, Mubarak was also impatient with the presumption of innocence accorded the sheik by U.S. law. Once the Justice Department decided to detain the blind diabetic cleric, however, Mubarak approved the executions, apparently calculating that a Sheik Abdel Rahman in jail was far less likely to make trouble for him than one on the loose.

Just how long that calculation will hold is now up to a phalanx of lawyers. Last Friday the Board of Immigration Appeals in Washington rejected the sheik's bid for asylum and upheld a March ruling that he could be deported. He can appeal in federal court -- but that process could be short-circuited by an extradition request filed in early July by Egypt. Cairo has requested his return to stand trial for inciting a 1989 riot outside a mosque in Faiyum, southwest of the capital. But Abdel Rahman is almost certain to fight extradition on grounds that he is charged with a political crime. If in the < end he is deported rather than extradited, the sheik can argue it should be to Sudan, since his last visa was issued in Khartoum, now a hot spot of Islamic fundamentalism.

As far as officials in Washington and Cairo are concerned, jail -- anywhere -- is a far safer place for the sheik to be. Since he first rose to global prominence last February, the state-influenced Egyptian press has been warning darkly of a "crisis" in U.S.-Egyptian relations. Rattled by reports in the U.S. media that depicted Abdel Rahman as "a new Khomeini" and Egypt as a state on the edge of a fundamentalist revolution, Egyptians sniped back that the Americans were bungling the entire affair and turning an otherwise inconsequential cleric into a hero for Egypt's disaffected youth. Mubarak was quoted in the Egyptian press as saying "the sheik has been a CIA agent since his days in Afghanistan. The visa he got was not issued by mistake. It is because of the services he did."

The State Department has admitted that it should not have granted Sheik Abdel Rahman a multiple-entry visa in 1990 since he had been on the watch list for suspected terrorists since 1987. A classified report by the department's inspector general concludes that it was issued by mistake. But Egyptian fears will be fed by one discovery: sources have told Time that the U.S. diplomat who approved the sheik's visa application in Khartoum was a CIA officer working under cover in the consular office when the sheik's case came up. A CIA spokesman says the agency has found no record of a relationship of any sort with the sheik. Former CIA official Vincent Cannistraro, who once chaired the interagency Afghanistan Working Group, also says that "the sheik was never an agent, he was never an informant," and he had no role in the CIA's Afghanistan operation. By the time the sheik was recruiting for the mujahedin, the Soviets had left. Moreover, he backed an anti-American rebel faction shunned by the CIA.

Many Egyptians may still doubt U.S. denials about Abdel Rahman's ties to the CIA, but their immediate concern is focused on the consequences of Mubarak's intensified antiterrorist campaign. Within hours after the seven were hanged last week, the militant Islamic Group that claims its inspiration from Sheik Abdel Rahman distributed leaflets in Cairo mosques charging Mubarak with "digging his dark grave with his own hands. He gives reasons to kill and destroy him every day of his black rule." Cairo's hard-line approach may succeed in frightening the fundamentalists into submission. But it may just as well make martyrs of those Mubarak punishes and thus increase the risk of even bloodier confrontations.

With reporting by Dean Fischer/Cairo and Jay Peterzell/Washington