I cut him off. “That’s all interesting, Colonel. But what does this have to do with Obama?”

“I was just about to get there,” he said.

“In 1981, we know Barack Obama traveled to Pakistan. But he never wrote about it in his book. He rarely talks about it, certainly never in detail. What was he doing here?”

The colonel then ushered me forward. He pushed open the door with his shoulder. The air was musty. But it was like we entered a time capsule. It was obvious that very few people, if any, had been in this place in years. And yet it looked as if those who had once resided there just left for a moment. Korans, pictures, and papers were scattered about.

The colonel led me to a corner.

“What Obama was doing here was joining the Afghan jihad. Yes, the politically astute know that Obama visited Pakistan in 1981. What most don’t know is that he spent most of his college vacations here and all his vacations as a community organizer. Barack Hussein Obama joined the Afghan jihad as Osama bin Laden’s American apprentice.”

The colonel then pointed to a picture hanging on the wall. It was of Obama and bin Laden. Obama was sporting the college Afro we often see in pictures from his college days. Bin Laden had his arm around him and they were smiling. As I looked more closely at the other pictures in the compound, there were many more of Obama. There was Obama and bin Laden drinking tea together, giving each other high-fives, holding a dead goat, and wielding shoulder-fired missiles, the kind that ultimately helped the Afghans defeat the Soviets. There was even one where the two were playing what appeared to be a version of pin the tail on the donkey but instead of a pin they seemed to be using a knife and instead of a donkey there was a picture of Salman Rushdie.

“I thought the fatwa on Rushdie was issued in 1989,” I said. “And why would a Sunni outfit like al-Qaida listen to a fatwa from a Shia cleric?”

“Iran and al-Qaida have always had a connection. And blasphemy is blasphemy,” the colonel explained. “As for 1989, it was a jihadi reunion. It was their last time together at the compound, as far as I can tell.”

I looked a little closer at some of the pictures. Besides bin Laden and Obama, a lady was present in many of them. She looked familiar.

“Valerie Jarrett,” the colonel said. “She often traveled with him to the compound. She is said to be the only woman bin Laden ever allowed into the Shura council meetings.”

Before I could process what he said, the colonel then pointed me to a book. Inside were a few pages of Arabic text and then a multitude of signatures. One of them was Obama’s.

“No terrorism expert believes that al-Qaida began earlier than the end of the 1980s as the Afghan jihad was winding down. Many believe it began much later and some don’t think al-Qaida as a formality ever really existed. But they are all wrong. What you are looking at is the founding papers of al-Qaida from 1986. The Arabic text lays out al-Qaida’s principles. Those signing the document were also swearing an oath of allegiance—Bay’ah, in Arabic—to the group’s leader, Sheikh Osama. As you can see, Obama was among them.”

I stood there for a moment taking it all in. I went over to the pictures again and examined them. They looked real. I snuck one of them in my pocket so I could further examine it back in the States.