1980s: By his late teens, he developed a friendship with Mamoun Darkazanli, a fellow Syrian, and both of them joined the Muslim Brotherhood
1991: Zammar goes to Afghanistan and trains at an elite camp linked to Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.
1993: According to CIA documents, US intelligence first becomes aware of Mamoun Darkazanli at this time, when a person arrested in Africa carrying false passports and counterfeit money is found with Darkazanli’s telephone number. Darkazanli is a Syrian businessman residing in Germany.
1995: He fights in Bosnia with other Arabs against the Serbians.
1995-1998: A Saudi company called the Twaik Group deposits more than $250,000 in bank accounts controlled by Mamoun Darkazanli.
In roughly the same time period, hundreds of thousands of additional dollars are deposited into Darkazanli’s accounts from a variety of suspicious entities, including a Swiss bank owned by Middle Eastern interests with links to terrorism and a radical Berlin imam.
1996: German authorities begin investigating Mamoun Darkazanli for money laundering. Spanish intelligence learns that al-Qaeda leader Mustafa Setmarian Nasar, a.k.a. Abu Musab al-Suri, has visited Mamoun Darkazanli in Hamburg this year.
He goes to Afghanistan again and formally pledges allegiance to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.
Zammar’s traveling brings him to the attention of Turkish intelligence, and it notifies German intelligence about his radical militant links.
1997: Wadih El-Hage has been bin Laden’s personal secretary since the early 1990s. When US agents raid his house in Nairobi, Kenya, they seize his address book which contains the names and phone numbers for many al-Qaeda operatives. Mamoun Darkazanli is among them.
1998: Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, who is also accused of attempting to help bin Laden obtain enriched uranium, was arrested in Munich in September 1998 at the request of the United States. Investigators learn the co-signatory on his Hamburg bank account is Mamoun Darkazanli, also his home number was programmed into Salim's cell phone..
1999: CIA reportedly begins attempts to recruit Darkazanli. Any attempt to recruit Darkazanli on behalf of the CIA would have to be made by operatives of the LFV.
2000: An LFV agent approaches Darkazanli to ask if he was interested in becoming a spy. Darkazanli replied that he was just a businessman who knew nothing about al-Qaida or terrorism.
2001: Two days after the Sept. 11 attacks, Darkazanli was brought in for questioning by the German federal police, and his apartment thoroughly searched. The police, Darkazanli later said, found nothing.
Oct. 31, 2001: A curious event now happens. A young Serbian immigrant, with a record of convictions for burglary, walks into the fortress like headquarters of the Hamburg police. The man presented astonished detectives with a bag full of documents that appeared to have been taken from Darkazanli's files. After accepting the purloined documents, the police arrested the man for burglary.
According to the burglar's story, he had discovered the documents stashed in a small summer house outside Hamburg that he had broken into. He had first gone with the documents to the U.S. Consulate in Hamburg, where it had been suggested that he take them to the police. But when police asked the burglar to show them the house where he had found the documents, he couldn't locate it.
"We all thought, CIA," one German investigator said.
2004: German intelligence has reportedly concluded that Twaik, a $100 million-a-year conglomerate, serves as a front for the Saudi Arabian intelligence agency. It has ties to that agency’s longtime chief, Prince Turki al-Faisal.
Darkazanli received at least $16,000 from Mohamed Kaleb Kalaje Zouaydi, a wealthy Spanish-Syrian arrested in Madrid and accused of funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars to al-Qaida and other radical Islamic organizations.
Darkazanli was previously employed by Abdul-Matin Tatari, an Aleppo-born textile exporter in Hamburg whose own links to the Sept. 11 hijackers are under investigation by German police.