I stumbled upon the amazing Thomas Smallwood while researching the domestic slave trade. He liberated more of the enslaved than the great Harriet Tubman, wrote newspaper dispatches about the escapes mocking enslavers, and he gave the underground railroad its name. Yet he's little known.

Awlaki's remarkable story -- his talents, his radicalization, the radical response of the US government in killing him, his online afterlife -- seems to me to capture the twists and ironies of the post-9/11 era. You can see if you agree: www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/236340...

Anwar was not even religious, let alone a jihadist. It was about 17 years later that he joined Al Qaeda and began his plotting. So USAID -- which certainly should have discovered his falsified birthplace -- could hardly have predicted that he would one day become a terrorist.

Of course, in 1990, when USAID gave Anwar al-Awlaki money to pay for his engineering degree at Colorado State University, he was a promising teenager and the son of a prominent Yemeni citizen who cherished his years as a student and professer in the US.

In recent days, Fox News, The New York Post and lots of others have seized on this document to bolster the Trump-Musk campaign against USAID, saying (as Fox put it) that “USAID reportedly bankrolled al Qaeda terrorist's college tuition.”

The very first document was part of Anwar al-Awlaki's application to USAID for a college scholarship. I noted that Awlaki had falsified his birthplace, claiming to have been born in Yemen and not the US, in order to get a tuition grant reserved for foreign citizens.

I told this story in my 2015 book, OBJECTIVE TROY: A Terrorist, A President and the Rise of the Drone. When it was published, I posted at the National Security Archive a collection of documents.

In 2011, after a Justice Department opinion advised President Obama that it was legal to put a US citizen on the kill list, a US drone strike killed Awlaki. His "martyrdom" hugely increased his influence, and he posthumously inspired dozens of deadly terror attacks in the west.

He became the leading voice for Al Qaeda in English, reaching a huge audience via YouTube and his own website. He coached the so-called underwear bomber, helped plant bombs on caargo planes, and generally tried his best to kill Americans.

Anwar al-Awlaki was an American-born Islamic cleric who became prominent in the US in the months after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, explaining Islam to Americans via major media outlets. He later moved to England and grew steadily more radical, finally joining Al Qaeda in Yemen.

For some folks the link at scottshane.org is mysteriously not working. If you have trouble try the Reviews link in the last post!

Weird. Works fine for me! I'll do some checking

But mostly, folks have kindly told me FLEE NORTH is a great read about the darkest American history and its unsung heroes. Maybe that got it on the best-of-2023 lists of Publishers Weekly, Amazon, The New Yorker, AARP and more. Reviews here: scottshane.org/reviews. Thanks, all!

Many readers learned for the first time about the domestic slave trade, which made huge profits by forcing 1 million people to the deep south between 1808 and the Civil War. Such sales tore families apart, separating wives from husbands, parents from children – usually forever.

Most readers are stunned that they’ve never heard of Thomas Smallwood, born into slavery, who bought his freedom and repeatedly risked his life to help hundreds escape. He wrote about the escapes in scathing, hilarious newspaper dispatches – and gave the underground railroad its name.