“…superbly trained and disciplined warriors whose missions are compact, highly focused, usually swift, often secret, inescapably perilous, and – if successful – likely to pay off in big ways.”

- Derek Leebaert

Domino’s Pizza deliverymen from Houston aren’t reknowned for being horribly bright. However they’re not typically involved in international terrorist plots either, so the JFK Airport immigration official who detained him must’ve been duly surprised to find Ahmed Mohammad Ajaj carrying a cornucopia of terrorist paraphernalia: How-To manuals and instructional videos on mixing explosives, detonators for those explosives, and a propaganda video showing the American Embassy in Kenya being suicide-bombed.

And one of these manuals carried on its cover a word that would soon become synonymous with international terrorism: al-Qaeda.

This paraphernalia, and the fact the picture on his suspicious Swedish passport was conspicuously peeling off, was enough to cause Mohammad Ajaj’s detention. But little did the official know, Ajaj was only serving as a mule for the man who would within just two months become the most accomplished and notorious terrorist operator ever to graduate from training in Pakistan’s terror camps.

Ramzi Yousef, the identity-consuming alias of Abdul Karim Basit, slipped by security after being disgorged from the same New York-bound flight as Ajaj in September of 1992.

The $2,700 bribe to an official in Pakistan, his forged $100 passport, whatever money he spent on his silk suit, and the story Yousef had concocted about political persecution in Iraq paid off – he was waved through immigration and into the heart of New York City, free to roam the streets as he pleased.

He was a remarkable man in many ways, but one of his friends noted that the most remarkable thing about him was “his apparent pleasure in learning about new languages, cultures, and peoples, then proceeding to blow them up.”¹

Yousef’s first order of business was a tête-à-tête at Brooklyn’s al-Kifah Refugee Center on Atlantic Avenue with the “Blind Sheikh,” a radical cleric expelled from Egypt because of his suspected involvement in the 1981 assassination of Anwar Sadat. Sadat’s assassination was a crucial moment in the nucleation of Islamic fundamentalism which can – and will later – be used as a link to an uncanny amount of the terrorism carried out by Muslim extremists against the West.

The Blind Sheik himself, Omar Abdul-Rahman, holds a place of particular importance in the formation of modern Islamic extremism. In the parlance of the recent social theory which explains societal mass behavior as a finely-tuned orchestra of thresholds, he is a Connector.

This Tipping Point theory posits that social epidemics – be they fashion trends, fads, contagious diseases, or revolutions – hinge on the passage of information and behavioral habits through a system of discrete sorts of people, who act either as Connectors, Salesmen, or Mavens. When this system magnifies a sufficient volume of material it hits a Tipping Point, and a new concept can sweep across an entire society. Sometimes this new concept is an ideology, the kind that fuel campaigns of terrorism.

So what’s a Connector?

Connectors are the people who make parlor games like the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” possible. The name of that game has its origins in an experiment run by the most revolutionary social scientist of our time, Stanley Milgram, who in the late 1960s mailed a packet to one-hundred and sixty people in Omaha, Nebraska.

In the packet was the name of a stockbroker living in Boston who Milgram had selected at random. Each person who received the packet was asked to write his name on it, and then mail it on to someone they knew who they thought might get the packet closer to the stockbroker. Without the stockbroker’s exact street address, they were forced to mail it to someone they knew who they figured might actually know the stockbroker – or at least someone who would then send the packet on to someone they knew, who in turn might know the stockbroker in Boston.

Milgram discovered that most of the packets made their way to the stockbroker in five or six steps, which is where we get the concept of “six degrees of separation.” But not only did following the paths the packets took in this experiment show proof for this concept, it traced the outline of a larger social reality.

Out of the one-hundred and sixty packets, half of the letters passed through the hands of three men – identified by their last names as Jacobs, Jones, and Brown. From the millions and millions of possible acquaintances – family, college roommates, coworkers, childhood friends – just three men were in fact linked to half of the initial group. This doesn’t mean that each of us is linked to the other by just six steps, but that “a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through these special few.”² Those few are the Connectors.

Connectors such as Paul Revere have directed the course of world history by serving as an active conduit through which vital military information was disseminated. His importance to the early success of the American Revolution, which is humbly enshrined in classroom poetry, is rarely given the credit it is due for preventing the British from striking a decisive first blow. Because when an idea comes close to a Connector, it gains the power and opportunity to spread through society with a fury that “exponentially” only begins to hint at.