On September 11, in less than two hours, more than 5,000 people perished in the most catastrophic act of terrorism in the history of the United States. The dual attacks in New York and Washington were the deadliest salvo in the so-called holy war being waged by the wealthy Saudi terrorist Osama bin Laden against the United States—a war that had begun almost a decade earlier with the little-noticed bombing of two Yemeni hotels that housed American soldiers. An Australian tourist died in that assault, but no Americans. With every passing year since then, the attacks have become more sophisticated, and more deadly. The bombings in 1998 of two U.S. Embassies in Africa killed more than 200 people; the October 2000 bombing of an American warship, the U.S.S. Cole, in Yemen, left 17 American sailors dead.
Although the September attacks were unprecedented, U.S. intelligence officials and Middle Eastern sources familiar with the bin Laden organization were generally aware that bin Laden had been planning attacks on American targets in the summer of 2001; exactly when and where they might take place was less certain. In June the U.S. Embassy in Yemen was shut down for all but essential purposes when police arrested a group of bin Laden’s followers with explosives and maps of the area. That same month two men arrested by Indian police said they were planning to bomb the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, on instructions from a key bin Laden lieutenant. The following month the State Department issued a stern warning that there were “strong indications that individuals may be planning imminent terrorist actions against U.S. interests in the Arabian Peninsula.”
But it was a 100-minute propaganda tape made by al-Qaeda, bin Laden’s terrorist organization—it surfaced in Kuwait in June and then quickly spread around the Middle East—that gave the clearest signal that bin Laden was embarking on a new phase in his holy war against the United States. It even followed bin Laden’s pattern of subtly telegraphing his intentions.
On the tape, bin Laden rages over the injustices visited upon Muslims in countries from Chechnya to Kashmir and from Iraq to Israel in speeches laid over footage of Muslims being beaten and killed. But the theme to which he returns again and again—one he has been sounding for more than a decade—is that the greatest insult to Muslims remains the continued military presence of Americans in the holy land of Arabia. “These Americans brought … Jewish women who can go anywhere in our holy land,” he says. The charge that “Arab rulers worship the White House” is made over images of the Saudi royal family meeting various American politicians. Bin Laden declares that President Clinton is a “slaughterer.”
Bin Laden’s message is qualitatively different from the slogans of earlier Arab militants, who were focused on the more strictly political goals of Pan-Arabism or the creation of a Palestinian state. Bin Laden is truly conducting a religious war, not only against the infidel West but also against every apostate regime in the Middle East, as well as countries such as India and Russia that oppress Muslims.
“If you don’t fight,” promises bin Laden, “you will be punished by God.” The Saudi exile then outlines the solution to the problems Muslims face: they should travel to the perfect Islamic state of Afghanistan to be tutored in the arts of holy war. The tape then shows scores of bin Laden’s masked followers training at a sprawling camp in the deserts of eastern Afghanistan. The fighters demonstrate a wide range of paramilitary skills—throwing grenades into buildings which they then storm, firing rocket-propelled gre-nades (R.P.G.’s), and letting off crude bombs. Surrounded by a cadre of his followers, bin Laden himself kneels on the ground and shoots some rounds from an automatic rifle. The tape also shows dozens of young boys, many no older than 11, dressed in military camouflage uniforms tackling obstacle courses: the next generation of bin Laden’s holy warriors.
Toward the end of the tape, bin Laden explains that the attack on the U.S.S. Cole was only the beginning of the holy war against the United States: “The victory of Islam is coming. And the victory of Yemen will continue.” A Middle Eastern source familiar with al-Qaeda told me that some weeks before the Trade Center attacks there was talk among Saudis who had traveled to Afghanistan for holy-war training of a big upcoming operation.
The grafting of modern techniques onto the most radical reading of holy war (jihad) is the hallmark of bin Laden’s network. The head of the secretive U.S. National Security Agency has said that bin Laden has better technology for global communications than the United States. The Saudi militant’s followers communicate by fax, satellite phone, and E-mail. They encrypt memos on their Macintosh and Toshiba computers. And in the mid-1990s members of al-Qaeda made a CD-rom containing hundreds of pages of information about various kinds of weaponry, as well as how to build bombs and conduct terrorist and paramilitary operations. Bin Laden’s methods of travel are equally modern: when he lived in Sudan in the early 90s, he generally kept a couple of pilots on call and had a personal jet.
A fruitful way to think of al-Qaeda is as a sort of multinational holding company, headquartered in Afghanistan, under the chairmanship of bin Laden. The traditional structure of a holding company is a core management group controlling partial or complete interests in other companies. Holding companies are also sometimes used by criminals to disguise their illegal activities and are often based in countries where they can operate with little or no regulatory scrutiny. True to form, al-Qaeda incorporates, to various degrees, subsidiary militant organizations from Egypt, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Algeria, Libya, Yemen, Syria, and Kashmir.
Al-Qaeda’s Afghan training camps have also attracted a rainbow coalition of Jordanians, Turks, Palestinians, Iraqis, Saudis, Sudanese, Moroccans, Omanis, Tunisians, Tanzanians, Malaysians, Bangladeshis, Indians, Filipinos, Chechens, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Chinese Uighurs, Burmese, Germans, Swedes, French, Arab-Americans, and African-Americans. The graduates of those camps have gone on to export terrorism and holy war to pretty much every corner of the world. As bin Laden himself put it, “I would say that the number of the brothers is large, thank God, and I do not know everyone who is with us in this base or this organization.”
The prototype of the technologically savvy, worldly young men who are the shock troops of al-Qaeda is Ramzi Yousef, the operational leader of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York. Yousef, whose family are Baluch Pakistanis, was brought up in Kuwait. He was educated as an electrical engineer in Wales, learning excellent English, and his terrorism career took him to Afghanistan, New York, Thailand, the Philippines, and Pakistan. While in Pakistan, Yousef tried to assassinate the country’s first female prime minister, Benazir Bhutto.
Yousef plugged into the al-Qaeda network on numerous occasions: training at a bin Laden camp on the Afghan-Pakistani border; working closely with one of bin Laden’s followers in the Philippines; and staying at a bin Laden guesthouse in Pakistan. Yousef’s terrorist plots against the West culminated in plans for blowing up a dozen or so American passenger jets, assassinating Pope John Paul II, and crashing a plane into the C.I.A. headquarters in Virginia. The plots were discovered when Philippine police found outlines for them on Yousef’s laptop computer in his Manila apartment in 1994 and subsequently interrogated one of his co-conspirators, who supplied details of the plan the terrorists had code-named “Bojinka.”
When Yousef was finally captured in 1995, in Pakistan, F.B.I. agents transported him back to New York. The helicopter that would take Yousef to his American jail cell in Manhattan flew past the World Trade Center. “Look, it’s still standing,” one of the agents said to Yousef. “They wouldn’t be if I had had enough money and explosives,” came the reply.
Al-Qaeda would have more of both, and the plotters who began arriving in the United States as early as 1994 would execute a breathtakingly ambitious plan: the simultaneous hijacking of four airliners that would destroy the Trade Center and severely damage the Pentagon. The al-Qaeda plan combined, in effect, the most spectacular elements of the 1993 Trade Center attack with the Bojinka plot.
My quest to meet Osama bin Laden began in North London early in 1997. In the Dollis Hill section, I contacted Khaled al-Fauwaz, the spokesman for a Saudi opposition group, the Advice and Reformation Committee, which bin Laden had founded. I called al-Fauwaz from the United States to ask if CNN could interview the Saudi exile. He said it might be possible.
During a series of meetings in London, al-Fauwaz gave me a preliminary picture of his friend Osama, describing him as “humble, charming, intelligent.” Bin Laden’s role in the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s had made him a hero around the Middle East. Al-Fauwaz said bin Laden was now back in Afghanistan, and was “violently opposed to the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia,” troops that had arrived there as a result of Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
Soon al-Fauwaz told me he had received a call from bin Laden’s media adviser, who was favorably disposed to having the BBC, CBS’s 60 Minutes, or CNN do bin Laden’s first television interview in the English-speaking world. Al-Fauwaz said he supported either CBS or CNN. After pointing out that CNN’s programs were shown in more than 200 countries, I went home and waited for his call.
It came a month later. We were on, so I contacted the members of my team. The correspondent was Peter Arnett, who had won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting in Vietnam and whose courageous decision to remain in Baghdad during the Gulf War had helped put CNN on the map. The cameraman was a former British Army officer, Peter Jouvenal, who had probably spent more time inside Afghanistan than any other journalist.
We met up with our guide, whom I’ll call Ali, in London and flew to Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad. A couple of days later we loaded our van and set out through the Khyber Pass to Afghanistan.
The extreme Islamist militia called the Taliban controlled most of the country. These warriors seemed to have taken Ayatollah Khomeini’s memorable pronouncement—“There is no fun in Islam”—to heart. They had banned kiteflying, music, and television and had barred females from schools and jobs. Convicted robbers had their hands amputated, adulterers were stoned to death, homosexuals were crushed under stone walls, and murderers could be personally executed by the victim’s family. Amputations and executions were performed in public.
Shortly after we cleared the border, we passed a graveyard dotted with green flags marking the graves of Arabs who had died fighting the Soviets. The Russians had destroyed thousands of villages, creating six million refugees and killing at least one million Afghans.
In Jalalabad, we were visited by bin Laden’s media adviser, a young man whose headdress and sunglasses concealed much of his face. Following a perfunctory survey of our camera and sound equipment, he announced, “You can’t bring any of this for the interview.” He said we could shoot the interview with his handheld digital camera. Bin Laden was concerned that strangers with electronic equipment might be concealing some type of tracking device.
Late the next afternoon, a beat-up blue Volkswagen van drew up at our hotel. Ali motioned for us to get in and then pulled the curtains over the windows. Inside the van were three well-armed men. After we drove through a long tunnel, Ali said, “This is the point in the journey when guests are told if they are hiding a tracking device, tell us now and it will not be a problem.” We took it that any potential “problem” would likely result in a swift execution.
Soon we turned off onto a track heading into mountainous terrain. When we arrived at a small plateau, we were told to get out. Each of us was given a pair of glasses with cardboard inserts stuffed in the frames, which made it impossible to see. We were then transferred into another vehicle. Several times we were stopped by men armed with Russian PK submachine guns and R.P.G.’s. Eventually we drove into a rock-strewn valley at about 5,000 feet and were led to a rough mud hut lined with blankets. Bin Laden’s men served us a dinner of rice, nan bread, and some unidentifiable meat.
It was sometime around midnight when bin Laden appeared with a translator and several bodyguards. He seemed tired and walked with a cane. Bin Laden is well over six feet, and his lean face is dominated by an aquiline nose. He has the ascetic look of a Muslim cleric. We were told we would have about an hour with him. Dressed in a turban, white robes, and a green camouflage jacket, bin Laden sat down, propping next to him a Kalashnikov rifle his followers said he had taken from a Russian he killed.
Jouvenal, after fiddling with the camera, said, “We have speed,” which is cameramanese for “We’re ready.”
Without raising his voice, bin Laden began to rail against the injustices visited upon Muslims. He opened with a salvo against the United States and his native Saudi Arabia: “By being loyal to the U.S. regime, the Saudi regime has committed an act against Islam.” Bin Laden made no secret of the fact that he was interested in fomenting a revolution in Saudi Arabia, and that his new regime would rule in accordance with the seventh-century precepts of the prophet Muhammad.
Bin Laden coughed softly throughout the interview and nursed a cup of tea. He continued: “We declared jihad against the U.S. government because … it has committed acts that are extremely unjust, hideous, and criminal, whether directly or through its support of the Israeli occupation of [Palestine]. And we believe the U.S. is directly responsible for those who were killed in Palestine, Lebanon, and Iraq.… It transgressed all bounds and behaved in a way not witnessed before by any power or any imperialist power in the world. Due to its subordination to the Jews, the arrogance and haughtiness of the U.S. regime has reached to the extent that they occupied [Arabia]. For this and other acts of aggression and injustice, we have declared jihad against the U.S., because in our religion it is our duty to make jihad so that God’s word is the one exalted to the heights and so that we drive the Americans away from all Muslim countries.
“We have focused our declaration on striking at the soldiers in the country of the Two Holy Places. [This is bin Laden’s name for Saudi Arabia, a term he avoids using because he loathes the Saudi royal family. The holy places are Mecca and Medina.] In our religion, it is not permissible for any non-Muslim to stay in our country. Therefore, even though American civilians are not targeted in our plan, they must leave. We do not guarantee their safety.”
This was the first time that bin Laden had told members of the Western press that American civilians might be casualties in his holy war.
He went on to say, “The collapse of the Soviet Union made the U.S. more haughty and arrogant, and it has started to look at itself as a master of this world and established what it calls the New World Order.”
Bin Laden envisaged his own counterpoint to the march of globalization: the restoration of the khilaafa, or caliphate, which would begin from Afghanistan. Not since the demise of the Ottoman Empire had there been a Muslim entity which more or less united the umma, the community of Muslim believers, under the green flag of Islam. The treaties that followed World War I had arbitrarily carved up the Ottoman Empire, “the Sick Man of Europe,” into entities such as Iraq and Syria. Bin Laden aimed to create the conditions for the rebirth of the khilaafa, where the umma would live under the revelations of the Koran in a swath of green from Morocco to Indonesia.
Bin Laden continued angrily: “The U.S. today has set a double standard, calling whoever goes against its injustice a terrorist. It wants to occupy our countries, steal our resources, impose on us agents to rule us … and wants us to agree to all these. If we refuse to do so, it will say, ‘You are terrorists.’ With a simple look at the U.S. behavior, we find that it judges the behavior of the poor Palestinian children whose country was occupied: if they throw stones against the Israeli occupation, it says they are terrorists, whereas when the Israeli[s] bombed the United Nations building in Qana, Lebanon, while it was full of children and women, the U.S. stopped any plan to condemn Israel.” (On April 18, 1996, Israeli forces shelled the building in Qana, killing 107 civilians. The U.N. later said that some Hezbollah fighters had taken refuge there and that the attack may not have been accidental.)
“At the same time that they condemn any Muslim who calls for his rights, they receive [an] official of the Irish Republican Army [Gerry Adams] at the White House as a political leader. Wherever we look, we find the U.S. as the leader of terrorism and crime in the world. The U.S. does not consider it a terrorist act to throw atomic bombs at nations thousands of miles away … at entire nations, including women, children, and elderly people, and up to this day the traces of those bombs remain in Japan.”
Bin Laden then surprised us by claiming that Arabs affiliated with his group had been involved in killing American troops in Somalia in 1993, a claim he had earlier made to an Arabic newspaper. He told us, “Resistance started against the American invasion because Muslims did not believe the U.S. allegations that they came to save the Somalis. With Allah’s grace, Muslims in Somalia cooperated with some Arab ‘holy warriors’ who were in Afghanistan. Together they killed large numbers of American occupation troops.” Years later, bin Laden exulted in the fact that the United States withdrew its forces from Somalia, pointing to the withdrawal as an example of the “weakness, frailty, and cowardice of U.S. troops.”
Asked what message he would send then president Clinton, bin Laden answered, “Mentioning the name of Clinton or that of the American government provokes disgust and revulsion. This is because the name of the American government and the name of Clinton and [George] Bush [Sr.] directly reflect in our minds … the picture of the children who died in Iraq. [By May 1996, an estimated 500,000 Iraqi children had died of starvation and disease as a result of U.N. sanctions imposed on Iraq in 1990 for its continued violations of U.N. resolutions.] … If there is a message that I may send through you, then it is a message I address to the mothers of the American troops who came here with their military uniforms, walking proudly up and down our land.… I say that this represents a blatant provocation to over a billion Muslims. To these mothers I say if they are concerned for their sons, then let them object to the American government’s policy.”
After the interview, bin Laden lingered for a few minutes, courteously serving us cups of tea. The talk turned to Iraq and Saddam Hussein, whom Arnett had interviewed during the Gulf War. Bin Laden was quite disparaging about Hussein, saying that the Iraqi dictator wanted the oil of Kuwait for his own aggrandizement, and was not a true Muslim leader. Then, after posing for a couple of photos, bin Laden left as quickly as he had arrived.
On May 10, 1997, we broadcast our bin Laden story around the world. For the most part, it had little impact. But the final line kept resonating in my mind. When asked about his future plans, bin Laden replied, “You’ll see them and hear about them in the media, God willing.”
Osama bin Laden’s father, Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden, emigrated from the region of Hadhramaut in Yemen to what would soon become the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia around 1930. He found work first as a porter on the docks in Jidda, and in 1931 founded a construction company. During the reign of King Saud in the 1950s and 1960s, he underbid other contractors to work on the king’s palaces. Mohammed was later named minister of public works, and the bin Laden construction company became known as “the king’s private contractors.”
Osama, “young lion” in Arabic, was born on March 10, 1957, in Riyadh. He was the 17th son of Mohammed, who sired 50 or so sons and daughters. Osama’s mother, a Syrian, bore Mohammed several daughters but no other sons. According to an insider, the bin Ladens do not consider Osama’s mother part of the family, since she was divorced from Mohammed decades ago.
When Osama was 10, his father died in a plane crash, and the estate passed on to the children in the form of shares in the company. Osama’s inheritance would amount to about $35 million. Salem, one of Osama’s older brothers, took over the business and soon turned it into an international conglomerate, including industrial and power projects, oil exploration, mining, and telecommunications. In the late 70s, Salem branched out into the United States. His interests there were represented by Houston entrepreneur James Bath, who, among other things, invested in an oil company run by a young businessman who would go on to bigger things: George W. Bush.
Bush was the controlling partner in an energy business called Arbusto (Spanish for “bush”). In 1979 and 1980, Bath invested $50,000 for a 5 percent share of Arbusto. President Bush has admitted that he was aware his friend Bath represented Saudi interests in the United States, but that he always believed the stake in Arbusto came from Bath’s own money. In the mid-80s, Arbusto morphed into Harken Energy, and Bush cashed out in 1990, walking away with more than $800,000.
Salem bin Laden died in a plane crash in 1988, and the Saudi Binladin Group (S.B.G.) is now run by another of Osama’s brothers, Bakr. By the late 1990s, S.B.G. had grown into an estimated $5 billion colossus, handling such projects as the construction of a new suburb outside Cairo; a hotel in Amman, Jordan; and a $150 million base continued from page 257 for more than 4,000 American soldiers in Saudi Arabia. It has also nearly doubled the size of the Grand Mosque in Mecca to accommodate nearly a million worshipers.
A devout young man, Osama married the first of his four wives at 17. He graduated from Jidda’s prestigious King Abdul-Aziz University in 1981 with a degree in economics and public administration. At the university, bin Laden became associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group, and his teachers included Abdullah Azzam and Muhammad Qutb, whose influence on him cannot be overestimated. Azzam would go on to create the modern world’s first international jihadist network, and Muhammad Qutb was the brother of Sayyid Qutb, who wrote Signposts, the key text of the jihadist movement. It’s as if Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman’s brother had instructed bin Laden in capitalism.
The year 1979 was one of tremendous ferment in the Muslim world. In January the Shah of Iran was overthrown, and in February the Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Teheran. In March, to the consternation of many Muslims, Egypt and Israel signed a peace deal. In November hundreds of armed Saudi Islamist militants seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca and engaged in a battle with security forces that left more than a hundred dead. In December the Soviets invaded the sovereign Muslim nation of Afghanistan.
Devout Muslims around the world were galvanized by the invasion. Just as in the 1930s, when young men from far and wide—including George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos—were drawn to Spain and the fight against Franco’s Fascists, so the Afghan war in the 80s drew Muslims from around the globe to fight the U.S.S.R. Afghanistan became Russia’s Vietnam, and more—arguably the fatal blow inflicted on the already slowly expiring Soviet regime. For Muslims like bin Laden, it was a life-transforming experience.
Within weeks of the Soviet invasion, bin Laden, then 22, started lobbying his family and friends to provide money to support the Afghan mujahideen (holy warriors), and in the early 80s he made his first trips into Afghanistan, taking with him hundreds of tons of construction equipment, bulldozers, and dump trucks. The machinery was used to lay roads, dig tunnels, build hospitals, and set up minesweeping operations. Although the United States was also supporting the mujahideen, bin Laden was already voicing anti-American sentiments.
In 1984, bin Laden set up a guesthouse in Peshawar, Pakistan, for Muslims drawn to the jihad. It was called Beit al-Ansar, or House of the Supporters, a reference to the prophet Muhammad’s followers in Medina who helped him when he had to flee his native Mecca. Bin Laden also funded his former professor Abdullah Azzam’s establishment in Peshawar of the Maktab al-Khidamat, or Services Office, which published reports about the Afghan war and engaged in a global campaign to recruit Muslims for the jihad.
The recruits would soon be known as the Afghan Arabs. They came from all over the Muslim world, but mainly, according to Jamal Ismail, an Arab journalist based in Pakistan, from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Algeria. By Ismail’s account, a total of 50,000 came. Bin Laden’s friend Khaled al-Fauwaz told me the figure was 25,000.
The combined strength of the various Afghan mujahideen factions averaged somewhere between 175,000 and 250,000 in any given year. The war was won primarily with the blood of these Afghans and secondarily with aid from the United States and Saudi Arabia, which between them provided $6 billion in support. Although in the grand scheme of things the Afghan Arabs had only a walk-on part in the holy war, it was the lessons they learned from the jihad, and what they did after the defeat of the Soviets, that gave them their significance.
In 1986, bin Laden moved to Peshawar and directed his operation from a villa in the suburb of University Town. He also founded his first camp inside Afghanistan, named al-Ansar, near the village of Jaji in Paktia Province. In Jaji, bin Laden and about 50 other Arabs received their baptism of fire when they fought off a land-and-air siege by Soviet forces. A dozen Arabs were killed. It was the first time that the Afghan Arabs had stood their ground against the Soviets. By bin Laden’s own account, he and Abdullah Azzam led fighters in a two-week battle against a combined force of Soviet and Afghan Communist troops.
Arab journalists based in Peshawar wrote daily dispatches about bin Laden’s battlefield exploits, which were widely published in the Middle East and brought a flood of new recruits to the Afghan jihad. Osama was lauded for leaving behind the typical rich Saudi’s life of Jidda palaces for the dangers of war in Afghanistan. In a book about him, the Egyptian journalist Essam Deraz made some interesting observations. He said the Saudi millionaire suffered from low blood pressure and was often forced to lie down for hours at a time.
Bin Laden later said of the Afghan experience: “It would have been impossible for me to gain such a benefit from any other chance.… What we benefited from most was [that] the glory and myth of the superpower was destroyed not only in my mind but also in [the minds] of all Muslims.” He also said years later, “We think that the United States is very much weaker than Russia.”
In 1987, bin Laden met for the first time with members of Egypt’s Jihad Group, the organization behind the 1981 assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. One of the leaders of the group, Ayman al-Zawahiri, had settled in Peshawar and was working as a physician at a hospital for Afghan refugees. In 1989, bin Laden founded al-Qaeda (“the base”), which would eventually merge with al-Zawahiri’s Jihad Group and become the basis of his terrorist organization. Today, al-Zawahiri is bin Laden’s top adviser and has been called by one Egyptian Islamist “bin Laden’s mind.”
After the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in February 1989, bin Laden turned his attention to other struggles. One of his initial targets was the first woman to lead a modern Muslim nation: Pakistan’s prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, whom the country’s Islamist groups regarded as a threat.
I met with the former prime minister at a suburban New Jersey home in March 2000 and asked her when she had first heard of bin Laden. “In 1989, during a no-confidence vote against my government. Four parliamentarians came to me with briefcases of money. They had twelve and a half lakhs of rupees—about $80,000 to $100,000—they had been given to vote against me. They said the money came from Saudi Arabia.… I sent a delegation to Saudi Arabia to ask why are the Saudis funding this. The reply came: ‘There is a rich Saudi individual who is doing this, Osama bin Laden.’”
On November 24, 1989, bin Laden’s mentor Abdullah Azzam was assassinated, a crime that remains unsolved. By then there was little reason for bin Laden to linger in Pakistan. He was persona non grata with the new Pakistani government, the Soviets had withdrawn from Afghanistan, and his closest collaborator was dead. So he returned to his native country. He was 32.
Various books and multiple news reports have charged that the C.I.A. armed and trained the Afghan Arabs, and even bin Laden himself, as part of its operation to support the Afghan rebels fighting the Soviets. While the charges may make good copy, they don’t make good history. The truth is more complicated, and tinged with varying shades of gray. The United States wanted “deniability” that the C.I.A. was funding the Afghan war, so its support was funneled through Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence agency (I.S.I.). In turn, the I.S.I. made the decisions about which Afghan factions to arm and train, tending to favor those that were the most Islamist and pro-Pakistan. The Afghan Arabs generally fought alongside those factions, which is how the charges arose that they were creatures of the C.I.A.
Actually, the Afghan Arabs demonstrated a pathological dislike of Westerners. Peter Jouvenal says, “I always kept away from Arabs [in Afghanistan]. They were very hostile.” BBC reporter John Simpson had a close call with bin Laden himself outside Jalalabad in 1989. Traveling with a group of Afghan mujahideen, Simpson and his television crew bumped into an Arab man beautifully dressed in spotless white robes who began shouting at Simpson’s escorts to kill the infidels and offered a truck driver $500 to do it. Simpson’s Afghan escorts turned down the request, as did the driver. Only when bin Laden became a public figure a decade later did Simpson realize that he had been the mysterious Arab who wanted him dead.
In short, the C.I.A. had very limited dealings with the Afghans, let alone the Afghan Arabs. And since the Afghan Arabs functioned independently and had their own sources of funding, the C.I.A. did not need them and they did not need the C.I.A.
Afghanistan was bordered at that time by countries whose regimes were hardly sympathetic to American interests: Khomeini’s Iran, the U.S.S.R., and China. The only possible conduit to the rebels was through Pakistan. American assistance to the Afghans began in 1980 at the relatively modest level of $30 million a year, rising to $630 million a year by 1987. In all, more than $3 billion was funneled to the Afghan resistance.
Along with simply handing the I.S.I. $3 billion of American taxpayers’ money, the C.I.A. also granted the Pakistanis complete control over how the funds were distributed. That turned out to be a rather expensive mistake. By the most conservative estimates, $600 million went to the Hizb Party, headed by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an Islamist zealot. Hizb, one of the seven Afghan resistance parties, had the dubious distinctions of never winning a significant battle during the war, of killing large numbers of mujahideen from other parties, and of taking a virulently anti-Western line. Hekmatyar also received the lion’s share of the aid from the Saudis.
Bin Laden and Hekmatyar worked closely together. During the early 1990s, al-Qaeda’s Afghan training camps in the Khost area of eastern Afghanistan were situated in a region controlled by Hekmatyar’s party.
Was there an alternative to Hekmatyar to whom American support might have been better directed? The answer is a resounding yes. Afghan commander Ahmed Shah Massoud was a moderate Islamist and a brilliant general, who withstood nine attacks by the Soviets but never received American aid proportionate to his battlefield exploits. Richard Mackenzie, who spent more time with Massoud than any other journalist, says, “He wasn’t going to bring in the Magna Carta, but he would have been a voice for fairness and a more democratic state in Afghanistan.”
It was Massoud, not Hekmatyar, who captured Kabul in April 1992 from the Afghan Communist regime that had taken the place of the departing Soviets in 1989. While Hekmatyar went into exile in Iran, Massoud continued to battle the Taliban until days before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001, when he was conveniently assassinated, reportedly by bin Laden’s followers.
If backing Hekmatyar was a disaster, the U.S. decision in 1986 to provide the mujahideen with American Stinger missiles changed the course of the war. The Stinger was the most effective handheld anti-aircraft missile in use, a “fire and forget” weapon which locked onto the exhaust heat from the engines of both helicopters and planes. Once the Stingers were deployed, the Soviets lost the air superiority they had formerly enjoyed. As Massoud observed, “There are only two things the Afghan must have: the Koran and Stingers.”
After bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia in 1989, he was in demand as a speaker, and hundreds of thousands of copies of his recorded speeches circulated in the Saudi kingdom. One of his principal themes was the necessity for a boycott of American goods because of U.S. support for Israel.
Bin Laden also turned his attention to a holy war against the Marxist government of the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, which for more than 20 years had controlled southern Yemen, where the bin Laden family originated. Bin Laden delivered lectures to drum up volunteers to go and fight in Yemen. The Saudi government, which did not want a strong, united Yemen on its southern border, tried to silence him. (The two Yemens were unified in May 1990.)
Bin Laden further embarrassed the Saudi regime with lectures he gave in 1990 warning of an impending invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein. As bin Laden has said, “No one believed me.… It was after it happened that they started believing me.”
On August 2, 1990, Hussein’s forces did invade the small, oil-rich state, threatening the security of neighboring Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden immediately volunteered his services and those of his holy warriors, explaining that the combination of the Saudi army and his men would be enough to defend the kingdom. After all, hadn’t his troops just helped evict the Russians from Afghanistan?
The Saudis did not accept bin Laden’s offer and—despite the billions of dollars they had spent on their own army—turned instead for help to the U.S. government and President Bush, who had made his fortune in the oil business and understood exactly what was at stake in Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. So was launched Operation Desert Shield, later to become Operation Desert Storm, in which more than half a million U.S. soldiers would be sent to the Persian Gulf.
On August 7 the first American troops were dispatched to Saudi Arabia. For bin Laden, this meant that infidels of both sexes were trespassing on the holy land of the Arabian Peninsula, and thereby transgressing the dying words of the prophet Muhammad: “Let there not be two religions in Arabia.” (It is hardly a coincidence that exactly eight years later, on August 7, 1998, two U.S. Embassies were blown up in Africa by men linked to him.)
Essam Deraz remembers visiting bin Laden in Saudi Arabia around this time. “He told me he was going to move to Sudan. I told him, ‘Don’t do it.’” Deraz remembers that the multimillionaire continued to live the modest lifestyle he had adopted in Pakistan and Afghanistan: “The house was nothing. People were sleeping on the ground. His office was there, and the other floors were for his family.”
The Saudi government, tired of bin Laden’s criticism, put him effectively under house arrest. Using his family connections with King Fahd, he convinced the authorities that he needed to leave the country to sort out some business matters in Pakistan. Once there, he sent a letter to his family telling them that he would not be able to return home. After some months in Afghanistan, in late 1991 he arrived in Sudan, where he was warmly welcomed by Hassan al-Turabi, the leader of the country’s National Islamic Front (N.I.F.) and the de facto ruler of Sudan.
In al-Turabi, bin Laden found a natural ally and a convenient symbiotic relationship. Bin Laden invested millions of dollars in the desperately poor country, and al-Qaeda purchased communications equipment, radios, and rifles for the N.I.F. The Sudanese government returned the favor by providing 200 passports to the group so that its members could travel with new identities.
In Sudan, bin Laden lived a double life. On one hand, with money from his inheritance he built up a business empire—estimated at that time by U.S. officials to be worth $250 million—by investing in banks and agricultural projects and constructing a major highway. At the same time he organized training camps for hundreds of his followers.
Al-Qaeda was as globally minded as any international company. To facilitate business, the group maintained accounts at banks in Cyprus, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Dubai, Vienna, and London. Al-Qaeda members purchased trucks from Russia and tractors from Slovakia, and went on business trips to Hungary, Croatia, China, Malaysia, and the Philippines. Most of the thousands of employees in bin Laden’s vast array of businesses, however, had no idea that al-Qaeda existed.
Bin Laden’s five years in Sudan were also a period of intense activity for him as the mastermind of paramilitary operations against American targets. In one of the few instances where bin Laden and the U.S. government agree on anything, they both say that his Afghan Arabs had some role in the killing of 18 American soldiers stationed in Somalia in 1993, while he was based in Sudan.
Al-Qaeda viewed the arrival in Somalia of 28,000 troops to aid in hunger-relief efforts as part of a strategy by the United States to take over ever larger chunks of the Muslim world. So the fatwa committee of al-Qaeda issued calls to attack U.S. troops in Somalia, and bin Laden gave lectures to members of his group saying they had to “cut off the head of the snake.” In late December 1992, al-Qaeda affiliates in Yemen bombed the hotels housing American troops transiting the country on their way to Somalia. The bomb killed a tourist, but no Americans.
Bin Laden and his followers became increasingly radicalized during their time in Sudan. By 1991 there were somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 members of al-Qaeda in Sudan, and within three years bin Laden had set up a number of military training camps in the country.
Between 1990 and early 1993, some members of the group undertook the massive task of writing Mawsoua al-Jihad al-Afghani, the “Encyclopedia of the Afghan Jihad.” This multi-volume series, thousands of pages in length, details everything the Afghan Arabs learned in the war against the Soviets. It has 800 pages on weaponry, including how to use American Stinger missiles, and 250 pages on how to mount terrorist and paramilitary attacks.
The first attempt to destroy the World Trade Center in New York occurred on February 26, 1993. The bombing killed six people, injured hundreds, and inflicted half a billion dollars’ damage to the Twin Towers. The operational leader of the bombing was Ramzi Yousef, who was captured in 1995, but the spiritual guide was the blind Egyptian cleric sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, who is now in prison in Minnesota. Two of the sheikh’s sons have reportedly since joined al-Qaeda.
In 1995, Hassan al-Turabi organized an Islamic People’s Congress, where bin Laden was able to meet with leaders of militant groups from Palestine, Pakistan, Algeria, and Tunisia. At the same time, al-Qaeda sought to forge alliances with other militant groups, such as the Iranian-backed Hezbollah, based in southern Lebanon. Despite their disputes over religious doctrine—Hezbollah is a Shiite group, and bin Laden espouses a conservative Sunni Islam—the two groups buried their differences to make war against the United States.
Al-Qaeda made several other important contacts with overseas groups while it was based in Sudan. The group opened a satellite office in Baku, Azerbaijan; sent fighters to Chechnya at a cost of $1,500 each; dispatched holy warriors to Tajikistan; trained members of the Philippine Moro Front; delivered $100,000 to affiliates in Jordan and Eritrea; and smuggled weapons into Yemen and Egypt.
Plans were also in place for attacks in Saudi Arabia. On November 13, 1995, a car bomb went off outside the Saudi National Guard building in Riyadh, a joint Saudi-U.S. facility, killing five Americans and two Indians. On June 25, 1996, a bomb in a fuel truck parked outside the Khobar Towers military complex in Dhahran set off a huge explosion, killing 19 U.S. servicemen and injuring hundreds of others. The subsequent arrest of 600 Afghan Arabs suggests that the Saudis, at least initially, believed bin Laden veterans might be responsible. In June 2001, 13 members of the Saudi Hezbollah, a Shiite Muslim group with ties to Iran, would be indicted in the United States for the Khobar Towers bombing.
In his 1997 interview with our CNN team, bin Laden praised as heroes those behind both the Riyadh and Dhahran bombings, but denied any involvement himself: “I have great respect for the people who did this. They are heroes. What they did is a big honor that I missed participating in.”
At the same time that bin Laden was plotting to attack American targets, he was involved in a more strictly political effort to undermine the Saudi regime. The Saudi exile founded the Advice and Reformation Committee (A.R.C.), which the U.S. government portrays as an extension of his al-Qaeda paramilitary operation, but which seems more likely to be an outgrowth of a gathering opposition movement to the Saudi monarchy.
The A.R.C. issued numerous communiqués, including one, No. 17, of August 3, 1995, demanding the resignation of King Fahd. By 1994 the Saudi government had frozen bin Laden’s assets in the country and stripped him of his citizenship. At this point bin Laden’s family cut him off. His brother Bakr, who runs the family businesses, issued a statement in February 1994 expressing “regret, denunciation, and condemnation” of all acts bin Laden may have committed.
By 1996 intense pressure had been placed on the Sudanese government by the United States and Saudi Arabia to expel bin Laden from Sudan, which drove him to return to his familiar stomping grounds in Afghanistan. Forcing bin Laden to move to Afghanistan would turn out to be a little bit like the German High Command’s sending Lenin to Russia during World War I. From Afghanistan, bin Laden was able to function unimpeded and to attract Muslim militants to a country that was becoming the modern world’s first jihadist state. After he arrived in Afghanistan on May 18, 1996, Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar sent a delegation to assure him that the Taliban would be honored to protect him because of his role in the jihad against the Soviets. In his expulsion from Sudan, however, bin Laden had to leave his substantial investments in that country behind. A Middle Eastern source familiar with al-Qaeda suggests he lost as much as $150 million.
On February 22, 1998, bin Laden declared the formation of the World Islamic Front for Jihad Against the Jews and the Crusaders (meaning Christians, and specifically Americans). His co-signatories included Ayman al-Zawahiri of Egypt’s Jihad Group, Rifa’i Ahmad Taha of Egypt’s Islamic Group, and the leaders of Pakistani and Bangladeshi militant organizations. The document is worth quoting at some length:
Since Allah spread out the Arabian Peninsula, created its desert, and drew its seas, no such disaster has ever struck as when those Christian legions spread like pest, crowded its land, ate its resources, eradicated its nature, and humiliated its leaders.… Since about seven years, America has been occupying the most sacred lands of Islam: the Arabian Peninsula. It has been stealing its resources, dictating to its leaders, humiliating its people, and frightening its neighbors. It is using its rule in the Peninsula as a weapon to fight the neighboring peoples of Islam.… Although the Americans’ objectives of these wars are religious and economic, they are also to serve the Jewish state and distract from its occupation of the Holy Land and its killing of Muslims therein. The most evident proof thereof is their persistence to destroy Iraq, the most powerful neighboring Arab state.… All those crimes and calamities are an explicit declaration by the Americans of war on Allah, His Prophet, and Muslims.… The judgment to kill and fight Americans and their allies, whether civilians or military, is an obligation for every Muslim who is able to do so in any country.… We call upon every Muslim who believes in Allah and asks for forgiveness to abide by Allah’s order by killing Americans and stealing their money anywhere, anytime, and whenever possible. We also call upon Muslim scholars, their faithful leaders, young believers, and soldiers to launch a raid on the American soldiers of Satan and their allies of the Devil.
On May 14, 1998, following tests by the Indian government of several nuclear devices, bin Laden issued a call for a Muslim nuclear weapon in a document entitled “Dangers and Signs of the Indian Nuclear Explosion.” He wrote: “We call upon the Muslim nation in general, and Pakistan and its army in particular, to prepare for the jihad.… This should include a nuclear force.” At a press conference that day, bin Laden sat at a table flanked by his senior adviser, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and military commander, Muhammad Atef. He began the conference by noting that a number of his followers had been arrested in Saudi Arabia in January in possession of a Stinger missile and a number of SA-7 surface-to-air missiles. Bin Laden explained to the journalists that he was inaugurating his World Islamic Front for Jihad. According to Pakistani journalist Ismail Khan, bin Laden concluded by implying that there would be some sort of action by the group. “He spoke of some good news in the weeks ahead,” said Khan.
On May 28, bin Laden gave an interview to ABC News in Afghanistan which made it plain that he was calling for the deaths of all Americans. “We do not differentiate between those dressed in military uniforms and civilians; they are all targets,” he said, and he predicted a “black day for America.” Bin Laden obviously knew by then that the plots to bomb two American Embassies in Africa were in their advanced stages.
As early as 1993, members of bin Laden’s group had been planning an attack on the American Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya. Egyptian-American Ali Mohamed, who is now in American custody, would testify that he traveled to Nairobi in late 1993 to “conduct surveillance of American, British, French, and Israeli targets,” including the American Embassy. Mohamed then went to Khartoum, Sudan, where bin Laden examined his surveillance files and photographs and, according to Mohamed, “looked at the picture of the American embassy and pointed to where a truck could go as a suicide bomber.”
At 10:35 a.m. on August 7, 1998, a bomb-laden car exploded outside the American Embassy in Nairobi. It killed 201 Kenyans and 12 Americans and injured 4,000 others. Five minutes later, another suicide bomber drove up to the American Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The bomb killed 11 Tanzanians, most of them Muslim. No Americans died in the attack. The Arabic-language television channel Al Jazeera aired an interview with bin Laden in which he exulted in the embassy bombing in Nairobi: “Thanks to God’s grace to Muslims the blow was successful and great. They deserved it. It made them taste what we tasted during the massacres committed in [Lebanon and Israel].”
On August 20, President Clinton authorized retaliation strikes on several camps in Afghanistan, where his advisers said a conference of the bin Laden leadership was scheduled, as well as on a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, which they believed produced a component of the nerve gas VX. Bin Laden, however, was elsewhere at the time of the cruise-missile attacks on the camps, and it was never satisfactorily proved that the factory in Khartoum made chemical weapons. Despite the fact that the strikes were hardly a success, a Western diplomat based in Pakistan said that they had served a useful purpose, because they showed “we have reach. They served as a marker—fuck with us and you have a major problem.” The attacks, however, had a major unintended consequence—turning bin Laden from a marginal figure in the Muslim world into a global celebrity.
On October 12, 2000, two suicide bombers packed between 500 and 700 pounds of explosives into a small fishing boat and steered it to the harbor in Aden, Yemen, where they blew a hole into the U.S.S. Cole, an American destroyer that was there for refueling. The explosion killed 17 American sailors, injured 39 others, and inflicted a quarter-billion dollars of damage to the ship. It is not clear what bin Laden’s direct role in the Cole explosion was, but the glee he took in the attack was undeniable. In Afghanistan in January 2001, at the wedding celebration for his oldest son, bin Laden declaimed a poem to hundreds of cheering guests: “A destroyer, even the brave fear its might. It inspires horror in the harbor and the open sea. She goes into the waves flanked by arrogance, haughtiness, and fake might. To her doom she progresses slowly, clothed in a huge illusion. Awaiting her is a dinghy, bobbing in the waves.”
In spite of these regular attacks on American targets, the average U.S. citizen remained statistically more likely to be killed by a bolt of lightning than by an act of terrorism. On September 11, all that changed.
There is no longer any question that bin Laden is at war with the United States, and it is a political war. The hijackers did not attack a Hollywood studio or Coca-Cola or Las Vegas. They attacked the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, pre-eminent symbols of U.S. military and economic might.
President George W. Bush is the commander in chief in a very different war from the one his father fought against Iraq. Many Arab nations—even countries such as Jordan and Yemen, which were sympathetic to Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War—are aiding the American-led coalition against bin Laden’s forces. Most of those Middle Eastern governments are implacably opposed to al-Qaeda and its affiliates, since they are well aware that they are also targets of violence.
What is the size and nature of the foe the coalition faces? The Taliban has 20,000 to 40,000 fighters with a real possibility of more recruits—especially if they’re able to portray the conflict as an ethnic war between the Pashtun (the Taliban) and the Tajik (the Northern Alliance, which controls about one-tenth of Afghanistan).
Bin Laden’s core group consists of several hundred men with intimate knowledge of the Afghan terrain. They are battle-hardened, highly motivated, armed with R.P.G.’s and submachine guns, and well trained in explosives and mines. Perhaps most disturbing, the group is armed with Stinger missiles, which will certainly be deployed against American aircraft. A C.I.A. official surprised me in late September 2001 by estimating that several hundred Stingers are still floating around Afghanistan.
Another advantage possessed by bin Laden and the Taliban forces is that of Afghanistan’s topography and weather. Northern and central Afghanistan are made up of craggy hills and mountains that lend themselves well to guerrilla warfare. Afghanistan’s winters in the north are legendarily harsh, and southern Afghanistan, by contrast, is bleak desert. These difficulties are compounded by the fact that Afghanistan is one of the world’s most heavily mined countries.
Will capturing or killing bin Laden spell the end of al-Qaeda? Others would surely replace him, starting with the éminence grise of the organization, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Muhammad Atef, the Egyptian military commander of the group. The latter is now the father-in-law of bin Laden’s son, Muhammad, who himself might one day lead al-Qaeda. And behind them are the many thousands of members and affiliates of al-Qaeda in 60 countries around the world.
While there is no evidence that al-Qaeda has access to biological-warfare weapons, it is clear from inquiries made by Mohammed Atta—one of the World Trade Center suicide hijackers—into the purchase of crop-dusting planes in Florida in early 2001 that the group is interested in expanding its capabilities in that direction. In October, a photo editor at the Sun in Florida died of anthrax contamination, and a co-worker was infected with anthrax spores. Soon other cases of exposure followed, at the offices of NBC and ABC in New York, in the office of Senator Tom Daschle, and in post offices in Washington and New Jersey. Another problem is that al-Qaeda may have purchased nuclear material. Bin Laden has the money and motivation to have made such a purchase, and it would be foolish to think that he has not at least attempted to do so.
What can be said with absolute certainty is that right now al-Qaeda is planning another attack on an American target in a place no one expects. Will it be somewhere in South America? The Philippines? Europe? Perhaps only the group of men huddled around bin Laden in some drafty cave in Afghanistan know.
That bin Laden has thought out his next move is also clear from a videotape which surfaced on October 7, the very night that the United States first launched cruise-missile attacks and bombing raids on Taliban and al-Qaeda targets. The message, calling for holy war against the United States, was delivered to every corner of the globe.
But the United States and its allies also have a plan of attack. And it is only a matter of time until the cordon sanitaire that has now been thrown up around Afghanistan, not only by the United States and its European allies but also by Muslim countries such as Pakistan, tightens like a noose around bin Laden and his allies. One can only hope that will pave the way not only for a more moderate Afghanistan but also for a new era of reconciliation between the great civilizations of the West and the Muslim world.
