- What drove a rich Saudi boy to become a terrorist
mastermind? After months of interviews, and gathering startling new
testimony
from al-Qaeda associates and enemies around the world, Afghanistan
specialist
Jason Burke sifts fact from rumour to provide the fullest account yet of
the life of Osama bin Laden.
-
-
- At every corner in the darkened village, guards stood
with their Kalashnikovs and rocket-launchers at the ready. Sitting on rugs
spread on the dirt floor of a mud-brick and wood house, two men ate a meal
of rice, grilled mutton and vegetables. High above, the warplanes of
America
could be heard growling in the night.
-
- The men, both in their mid-forties, bearded and dressed
in the local traditional baggy long shirt and trousers, washed, ate, prayed
and then talked.
-
- Osama bin Laden, the world's most wanted man, and Mullah
Mohamed Omar, supreme leader of the Taliban regime, had a lot to discuss.
A few days earlier, at 8.45pm on 30 September, US and British cruise
missiles
had started hitting targets across Afghanistan in retribution for the
terrorist
attacks that had killed 5,000 people in New York and Washington nearly
three weeks earlier. Now death and destruction had come to villages, cities
and military camps throughout Afghanistan. Several missiles had landed
near the village where the two men were meeting. Many more had landed on
the southern city of Kandahar, the spiritual and administrative base of
the Taliban. The two men were there to decide their response to the war
they had suddenly found themselves fighting.
-
- The meeting, revealed to The Observer by sources in
a Gulf intelligence agency, did not last long. That was partly due to
security
concerns: a well-placed Tomahawk cruise missile could have wiped out both
of the Pentagon's main targets. Partly it was because the two were in
agreement
on almost everything. Mullah Omar reaffirmed his support, affection and
respect for his Saudi-born friend. Bin Laden replied in kind. The two
swiftly
reached a decision on tactics. They would jointly resist any aggression,
they would work to create and exploit divisions in the coalition ranged
against them, and they would exploit the humanitarian crisis - and any
civilian casualties - to create global anger against the bombing campaign.
Then the two embraced and went their separate ways. They are not thought
to have met since.
-
- In 1930, a powerfully built dockside labourer, six feet
tall and with one eye, decided there was more to life than loading ships
in the ports of his poverty-stricken native province of Hadramaut in Yemen.
He packed a bag, bought a place on a camel caravan heading to the newly
created kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and set off on a thousand-mile trek to
seek his fortune.
-
- The man, who would go on to father a terrorist sought
by the military might of the Western world, got his first job as a
bricklayer
with Aramco - the Arabian-American oil company - earning a single Saudi
riyal, about 10p, a day. He lived frugally, saved hard, invested well and
went into business himself. By the early 1950s Mohamed bin Laden was
employed
in building palaces for the House of Saud in Riyadh. He won the contracts
by heavily undercutting local firms. It was a gamble that paid off.
-
- Bin Laden's big break came when a foreign contractor
withdrew from a deal to build the Medina-Jedda highway and he took on the
job. By the early Sixties he was a rich man - and an extraordinary
one.
-
- 'He couldn't read or write and signed his name with a
cross all his life, but he had an extraordinary intelligence,' said a
French
engineer who worked with him in the Sixties. The engineer remembered that
the former labourer never forgot his roots, always leaving home 'with a
wad of notes to give to the poor'.
-
- Such alms-giving is one of the fundamentals of Islam.
Bin Laden senior was a devout man, raised in the strict and conservative
Wahhabi strand of Sunni Islam. Later he was to boast that, using his
private
helicopter, he could pray in the three holiest locations of Islam -Mecca,
Medina and the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem - in a single day. Visiting
the former two sites must have been especially satisfying, for it was the
contract to restore and expand the facilities serving pilgrims and
worshippers
there that established the reputation of his company, confirmed its status
as the in-house builders of the Saudi ruling clan and made him stupendously
wealthy. Though at one stage he was rich enough to bail out the royal
family
when they fell on hard times, the tatty bag he had carried when he left
the Yemen remained on display in the palatial family home. He was killed
when his helicopter crashed in 1968.
-
- Mohamed bin Laden had, in the words of the French
engineer,
'changed wives like you or I change cars'. He had three Saudi wives,
Wahhabis
like their husband, who were more or less permanent. The fourth, however,
was changed on a regular basis.
-
- The magnate would send his private pilot all over the
Middle East to pick up yet another bride. 'Some were as young as 15 and
were completely covered from head to toe,' the pilot's widow recently
recalled.
'But they were all exceptionally beautiful.'
-
- Bin Laden's mother, Hamida, was not a Saudi or a Wahhabi,
but a stunningly beautiful, cosmopolitan, educated 22-year-old daughter
of a Syrian trader. She shunned the traditional Saudi veil in favour of
Chanel trouser suits and this, coupled with the fact that she was foreign,
diminished her status within the family. She was Mohammed bin Laden's tenth
or eleventh spouse, and was known as the 'the slave wife'.
-
- Mohamed bin Laden gave even his former wives a home at
his palaces in Jedda and Hijaz. Hamida was still married to the millionaire
when he died and so, amid a huge family and the solid gold statues, the
ancient tapestries and the Venetian chandeliers, this is where Osama bin
Laden, Mohamed's seventh son, 'the son of the slave', grew up.
-
- Born in 1957 - the year 1377 of the Islamic calendar
- he was 11 when his father died. He never saw much of him. A flavour of
the bin Laden household comes from a document provided to the American
ABC TV network in 1998 by 'an anonymous source close to bin Laden'. It
offers unprecedented insights into Osama's childhood. 'The father had very
dominating personality. He insisted to keep all his children in one
premises,'
it reads. 'He had a tough discipline and observed all the children with
strict religious and social code. At the same time, the father was
entertaining
with trips to the sea and desert,' the document goes on. 'He dealt with
his children as big men and demanded them to show confidence at young
age.'
-
- Brian Fyfield-Shayler, 69, gave the then 13-year-old
bin Laden and 30 other privileged classmates attending al-Thagh school,
an élite Western-style Saudi school in Jedda, four one-hour English
lessons a week during 1968 and 1969. He described bin Laden as a 'shy,
retiring and courteous' boy who was unfailingly polite.
-
- 'He was very courteous - more so than any of the others
in his class. Physically, he was outstanding because he was taller, more
handsome and fairer than most of the other boys. He also stood out as he
was singularly gracious and polite, and had a great deal of inner
confidence,'
said Fyfield-Shayler.
-
- Bin Laden was 'very neat, precise and conscientious'
in his work. 'He wasn't pushy at all. Many students wanted to show you
how clever they were. But if he knew the answer to something he wouldn't
parade the fact. He would only reveal it if you asked him.'
-
- In bin Laden's early teens there was little sign of the
fanatic he would become. In 1971 the family went on holiday en masse to
the small Swedish copper mining town of Falun. A smiling Osama - or 'Sammy'
as he sometimes called himself - was pictured, wearing a lime-green top
and blue flares, leaning on a Cadillac.
-
- Osama, then 14, and his older brother Salem had first
visited Falun a year before, driving from Copenhagen in a Rolls-Royce flown
in from Saudi Arabia. Oddly, they stayed at the cheap Astoria hotel, where
the owner, Christina Akerblad, recalled them spending the days out 'on
business' and the evenings eating dinner in their rooms. 'I remember them
as two beautiful boys - the girls in Falun were very fond of them,' she
said. 'Osama played with my two [young] sons.'
-
- Akerblad remembered the wealth she found on display when
cleaning the boys' rooms. 'At the weekends we saw they used the extra bed
in their rooms to lay out their clothes. They had lots of white silk shirts
packaged in cellophane. I think they had a new one for every day - I never
saw the dirty ones. They also had a big bag for their jewellery. They had
emeralds and rubies and diamond rings and tie pins.'
-
- Nor was there any sign of incipient fervour in a bucolic
summer at an Oxford language school in the same year. Bin Laden and his
brothers befriended a group of Spanish girls and went punting on the
Thames.
-
- Last month one woman showed a Spanish newspaper a photos
of herself and girlfriends - one in hotpants - with three bin Laden boys.
Bin Laden, wearing flares, a short-sleeved shirt and a bracelet, looks
like any other awkward teenager. His two older brothers look more assured.
The young Saudi even once stayed on London's Park Lane. He had forgotten
the name of the hotel his Saudi parents had checked into, he told a
reporter
several years ago, but he recalled 'the trees of the park and the red
buses'.
-
- Quite how much of a personal fortune bin Laden had
inherited
is uncertain. It may well be a lot less than the huge sums (up to $250
million) often cited. The young bin Laden was never interested in money
for its own sake. In fact, the very things that had made the father huge
riches had begun to trouble the son. The early Seventies were a time of
huge cultural change in the Middle East. Oil revenue, the wars with Israel
and, above all, increasing contact with the West forced a profound
re-examining
of old certainties. For most of Mohamed bin Laden's numerous progeny, the
answer lay in greater Westernisation and the elder members of the family
set off for Victoria College in Alexandria in Egypt, Harvard, London or
Miami. But not bin Laden. Like tens of thousands of other young men in
the region at the time, Osama had become increasingly drawn to the cool,
clear, uncluttered certainties of extremist Islamist ideology.
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- 1974-84: The Devout Scholar Turns Holy
Warrior
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- After finishing high school in Jedda in 1974, bin Laden
decided against joining his siblings overseas for further education. Salim,
the head of the clan, had been educated at Millfield, a Somerset boarding
school. Another, Yeslam, went to university in Sweden and California. Osama
entered the management and economics faculty at King Abdul Aziz University.
There are some reports, again unconfirmed, that he married his first wife,
a Syrian related to his mother, when he was 17. Salim, the elder brother
who had run the bin Laden corporation after their father's death, hoped
Osama would take up a useful role in the family business and ensured that
a key element of his university course was civil engineering. Bin Laden
himself preferred the Islamic Studies component of the course. Later, he
was to combine the two in a radically effective way.
-
- At university he heard tapes recorded by the fiery
Palestinian-born
Jordanian academic Abdallah Azzam, and these had a powerful impact. Azzam's
recorded sermons - much like Osama's videotapes today - brilliantly caught
the mood of many disaffected young Muslims.
-
- Jedda itself - and King Abdul Aziz university - was a
centre for Islamic dissidents from all over the Muslim world. In its
mosques
and medressas (Islamic schools) they preached a severe message: only an
absolute return to the values of conservative Islam could protect the
Muslim
world from the dangers and decadence of the West. One bin Laden brother,
Abdelaziz, remembers Osama 'reading and praying all the time' during this
period. Osama certainly became deeply involved in religious activities
at university, including theological debates and Koranic study. He also
made useful contacts, striking up a crucial friendship with Prince Turki
ibn Faisal, a young royal and the future chief of Saudi intelligence
services.
-
- But events were to overtake him. In February 1979
Ayatollah
Khomeini returned to Iran, overthrew the Shah and established an Islamic
Republic. A shudder of excitement and fear ran through Muslims everywhere.
In November - and bin Laden was later to refer to this as a crucial,
formative
event - Islamic radicals seized the grand mosque at Mecca and held it
against
Saudi government forces. Bin Laden, young, impressionable, increasingly
devout but still unsure of himself and his vocation, was stunned.
Eventually,
after much bloodshed, the rebels were defeated. 'He was inspired by them,'
a close friend told The Observer last month. 'He told me these men were
true Muslims and had followed a true path.'
-
- Sooner than anyone expected, bin Laden got his chance
to follow them. In the last days of the year Soviet tanks rolled into
Afghanistan.
-
- It is just 30 miles from the Afghan border to the febrile
Pakistani city of Peshawar. The road winds down through the Khyber Pass,
through the badlands ruled by the violent and unruly Pashtun tribes, past
the relics of battles fought by men from a score of armies - Greek, Arab,
Mongol, Sikh and British - and then disappears into the choking mayhem
of the city's bazaars.
-
- In the spring of 1980, with yet another army's tanks
parked up against the frontier, Peshawar was seething with soldiers, spies,
gun-runners, drug dealers, Afghan refugees, exiles, journalists and, of
course, the thousands of sympathisers who had flocked from all over the
Muslim world to fight the Soviet forces.
-
- One of them, distinctive in his carefully tailored
shalwar
kameez and English handmade leather boots, was Osama bin Laden. 'I was
enraged and went there at once,' he has told interviewers. He was 23 and
had found the cause he had been looking for.
-
- Bin Laden's time fighting the Russians was critical.
It was during this period that he changed from a contemplative, scholarly
young man to a respected, battle- hardened leader of men. And though he
had yet to fully develop his extremist ideas, the war in Afghanistan gave
him crucial confidence and status.
-
- 'He came to the jihad a well-meaning boy and left a man
who knew about violence and its uses and effects,' said one former
associate
interviewed by The Observer in Algeria last year.
-
- According to Gulf intelligence sources, bin Laden's first
trip to Peshawar lasted little more than a month. He returned to Saudi
Arabia and started lobbying his brothers, relatives and old school friends
to support the fight against the Soviet Union. When he went back to
Pakistan
with the huge sum of money he had collected, he took with him several
Pakistanis
and Afghans who had been working in the bin Laden company. They set about
organising an office to support the Mujahideen and the Arab
volunteers.
-
- Within weeks of his first arrival in Pakistan, Osama
had been introduced to Abdullah Azzam, the charismatic preacher whose taped
sermons had made such an impression at university. The pair got on well.
The energy, administrative talent and contacts of the young Saudi
complemented
the profound Islamic knowledge and commitment of the older man. Azzam,
then 38, was a founder of the Hamas guerrilla group on the occupied West
Bank and Gaza and thus had the experience to run a major organisation.
For the next two years, bin Laden commuted between the Gulf and Pakistan.
All the time his relationship with Azzam grew stronger.
-
- At first, bin Laden kept a low profile. Journalists in
Pakistan at the beginning of the Eighties remember hearing stories about
the 'Saudi sheikh' who would visit wounded fighters in the university
town's
clinics, dispensing cashew nuts and chocolates. The man would note their
names and addresses and soon a generous cheque would arrive at their family
home. Such generosity - perhaps learnt from his father with his wad of
notes for the poor - is something that almost all who have fought for or
alongside bin Laden mention.
-
- Some - such as one former al-Qaeda member interviewed
by The Observer in Algeria - speak of $1,500 donations for marriages,
others
talk of cash doled out for shoes or watches or needy relatives. His
followers
say that such gifts bind them to their emir as effectively as the bayat
or oath that many of them swear.
-
- Sometimes his time was as valuable as his money. One
former Afghan Mujahideen remembered how he had befriended bin Laden because
he wanted to learn Arabic. The young Saudi spent many hours tutoring him,
in the language of the Koran. Despite his tough reputation, he was still
the quiet and softly spoken young man his teachers had remembered.
-
- By 1984, bin Laden and Azzam had rented a house in the
Peshawar suburb of University Town and established a logistics base for
the thousands of Arab fighters arriving in the city. It was called
Beit-al-Ansar
(the House of the Faithful).
-
- 'Bin Laden ... would receive the Arab volunteers, vet
them and then send them on to the various Afghan factions,' said one former
associate. The venture was condoned by the CIA, the powerful Pakistani
intelligence service, the ISI, and the Saudi agency, the Istakhbarat, soon
to be headed by his old friend Prince Turki. None, though, gave bin Laden
any American aid.
-
- Beit-al-Ansar was on Syed Jalaluddin Afghani Road, a
quiet backstreet full of bougainvillea and large houses built for the local
élite. By the mid-Eighties the area had become a centre for the
Afghan resistance. All the leaders of the various groups had offices there.
There were two newspapers - one published by Abdullah Azzam and bin Laden.
There was even a 'neutral' office, in a building rented by bin Laden, where
Mujahideen groups could thrash out their differences.
-
- Conditions were spartan - almost deliberately so. The
volunteers, and bin Laden too, used to sleep a dozen to a room on thin
pallets laid out on the hard floor of their offices. According to former
associates, bin Laden used to sit up late into the night discussing Islam
and Middle Eastern history. The young Saudi was yet to develop his radical
ideology. Instead his views were a mixture of half-remembered history and
heavily skewed, and often ill-informed, analyses of current affairs. Bin
Laden was particularly angry about what he called the betrayal of the Arabs
by the British after the First World War. He also criticised the Saudi
royal family, saying they had exploited the Wahhabi to gain power.
-
- At other times bin Laden would lead religious debates
among the volunteers. Many centred on Sura Yasin - the key passage known
as 'the heart' or 'the source' of the Koran, when Muhammad the prophet
reveals the message and the task that God has entrusted him with. 'He used
to talk a lot about the warriors of Islamic history such as Salauddin
[Saladin],'
said one associate. 'It was as if he was preparing himself.'
-
- 1984-90: The Battle-hardened Fanatic Tastes
Power
-
- Just over the border from Peshawar into Afghanistan is
the small village of Jaji. In 1986 the Soviet garrison there was under
heavy attack from the resistance. One morning a senior commander was
sheltering
from a bombardment by Russian mortars in a bunker when a tall Arab dived
through the door as explosions shook the earth. It was bin Laden. His
'ground
war' had started.
-
- In the mid-Eighties - partly due to a massive increase
in American funding for the resistance - the war in Afghanistan
intensified.
Thousands of young Muslims were filling the university town dormitories.
Though their motives were varied - some came for adventure, camaraderie
or to escape from the law - most came for one reason only. 'I went to fight
for my faith,' one Egyptian former mujahid told The Observer in London
last year.
-
- Through the summer of 1986 bin Laden was in the centre
of the fighting around Jaji. Once, with a force of about 50 Arabs, he
fought
off a sustained assault by Soviet helicopters and infantry. 'He was right
in the thick of it,' Mia Mohamed Aga, a senior Afghan commander at the
time and now with the Taliban, said last week. 'I watched him with his
Kalashnikov in his hand under fire from mortars and the multiple-barrelled
rocket launchers.'
-
- Over the next three years, bin Laden fought hard, often
exposing himself to extreme physical danger. One leader of the hardline
Hezb-i-Islami group said he remembered bin Laden holding a position under
heavy bombardment after being surrounded by Soviet soldiers. At least a
dozen other senior veterans, many of whom are now opposed to bin Laden,
corroborate the accounts of his combat role. They all mention his lack
of concern for his own safety. The devout boy was turning into the holy
warrior.
-
- Bin Laden's fanaticism was shared by his men. 'I took
three Afghans and three Arabs and told them to hold a position [during
the battle for the eastern city of Jalalabad in 1989]. They fought all
day, then when I went to relieve them in the evening the Arabs were crying
because they wanted to be martyred. I told them that if they wanted to
stay and fight they could. The next day they were killed. Osama said later
that he had told them that the trench was their gate to heaven.'
-
- Bin Laden shared more than their fanaticism. 'You never
knew he was so rich or the commander of everyone. We used to all sit down
together and eat like friends,' another veteran said.
-
- On some occasions he took it on himself to broker truces
between Afghan factions. His self-assumed responsibility for supplying
the Mujahideen continued. CIA sources estimated he was bringing in at least
$50m a year for the jihad. One veteran said that during the fighting for
Jalalabad, he had seen the Saudi by a roadside, caked in mud, organising
food, boots and clothes for the Mujahideen.
-
- However, there were tensions with those who did not share
his hardline Islamism. Said Mohamed, another Afghan veteran, said bin Laden
had refused to deal with him during one battle because he was clean shaven.
Bin Laden was learning the power of the media too. Reports of his exploits,
by Arab journalists based in Peshawar, were published throughout the Middle
East. They brought him a flood of recruits as well as a respect and a
status
that he had never had before. The 'son of the slave' was now a sheikh
himself.
-
- In 1979 the Soviet forces pulled out of Afghanistan and
left a puppet government in Kabul. The Mujahideen were now battling other
Afghans. - and each other. There was little to keep the thousands of
battle-hardened
fighters of the Arab 'international brigade' in Afghanistan. Many left
to continue their jihad in their home countries. Bin Laden, hating the
internecine squabbles, was one.
-
- 'He was very frustrated by it all. He is a very honest,
very clean man, and when he saw the Arabs were arguing among themselves
he was sickened by it,' said Jammal Nazimuddin, a former fighter. 'He used
to tell them that they had defeated the Soviet empire alone because they
were united and Allah had blessed them. If they were not united, he said,
they could not do Allah's will.'
-
- Bin Laden, aged 33, went home.
-
- 1990-96: Saudi Disillusion and Exile in
Sudan
-
- Prince Abdullah, the effective regent of Saudi Arabia,
placed a soft, plump hand on his young compatriot's shoulder, smiled and
spoke of friendship and loyalty. His words were smooth and conciliatory,
but there was no doubting the harsh threat that lay beneath them.
-
- 'The family of Mohamed bin Laden have always been
faithful
subjects of our kingdom and have helped us greatly in our times of need,'
he told the gathering. 'We are sure that nothing will be allowed to mar
our good relations in the future.'
-
- It was the autumn of 1990 and Abdullah was addressing
Afghan veterans in a beautifully furnished lounge in his palace in Riyadh.
Although the men nodded respectfully at the prince's words, the man to
whom they were directed could barely conceal his anger. 'He was seething,'
one of the Afghan commanders said. 'You could see it in his eyes.'
-
- A few months earlier, on 2 August, Saddam Hussein had
invaded Kuwait. Osama bin Laden, then living in his home town of Jedda,
had immediately sent a message to the Saudi royal family offering to form
an army of 30,000 Afghan veterans to defeat the Iraqi dictator. The men
who had defeated the Russians could easily take on Saddam, he said, and
he was clearly the man to lead them.
-
- Bin Laden was in for a rude - and profoundly upsetting
- shock. The last thing the House of al-Saud wanted was an army of zealous
Islamists fighting its war. Bin Laden was received by senior royals, but
his offer was firmly rejected.
-
- Worse was to come. Instead of the Islamic army he
envisaged
protecting the cradle of Islam, the defence of Saudi Arabia - and thus
of the holy sites of Mecca and Medina - was entrusted to the Americans.
Bin Laden, seething with humiliation and rage, could do nothing but watch
as 300,000 US troops arrived in his country and set about building bases,
drinking Coke and alcohol and sunbathing. Bin Laden saw their presence
as an infidel invasion. It even appeared to defy directly the dying words
of the Prophet Muhammad: 'Let there be no two religions in Arabia.' The
33-year-old started lobbying religious scholars and Muslim activists
throughout
the Gulf. Playing on his celebrity status, he lectured and preached
throughout
Saudi Arabia, circulating thousands of audio tapes through mosques.
-
- He started recruiting his army and sent an estimated
4,000 men to Afghanistan for training. The regime grew uneasy, raided his
home and put him under house arrest. Bin Laden's family, worried that his
activities might jeopardise their close relations with the ruling clan,
tried to bring him back into the fold but were forced eventually to
effectively
disown him. The pressure mounted.
-
- In late 1990 an escape route appeared. Bin Laden received
an offer of refuge from Hassan al-Turabi, the charismatic Islamist scholar
in effect running Sudan. Turabi believed that the total defeat of Iraq
and the discrediting of 'secular' Arab regimes would lead to an opportunity
to set up a 'pure' Islamic government across the Muslim world. It was a
seductive message. And the Saudi regime were thankful for an opportunity
to get rid of him. They pushed bin Laden further in the hope that he would
leave. Bin Laden cracked. He fled Saudi Arabia for Khartoum, the Sudanese
capital. He was never to return to his homeland.
-
- Bin Laden set up a home in a rich suburb of Khartoum
with his four wives, his children and a core of close retainers. Then he
flew in several hundred Arab veterans from Afghanistan to provide the basis
of a broader organisation. Life in Sudan was odd. There were football
matches and bathing trips to the Blue Nile, and long junior common
room-type
arguments over whether Shia and Sunni Muslims should unite to fight the
common enemy, and points of Islamic doctrine. Bin Laden even opened a
personal
bank account in his own name. And most of the time of 'the sheikh' was
spent making money, rather than spreading global jihad.
-
- 'The biggest myth concerns his wealth,' Ghazi Algosaibi,
Saudi Arabia's veteran ambassador to London, said recently. 'I have read
reports that he has $300 to $400 million stashed away. This is simply not
true. When he left Saudi Arabia he did not take anything like that amount
of money, and the Saudi authorities have taken great care to make sure
he does not receive any money from the kingdom.'
-
- In the group's offices in Khartoum, bin Laden, as
befitted
the boss, had the largest office. The group was run like any other
organisation.
There was a board of directors, a series of sub-committees and too many
meetings. Employees nursed grievances over wages, healthcare, and alleged
favouritism. Perks included travel (using the passports of Arab volunteers
killed in Afghanistan), free tea and groceries.
-
- The organisation ran a trading company called Laden
International,
a foreign exchange dealership, a civil engineering company and a firm
running
farms growing peanuts and corn. In payment for building a 700-mile road
from the capital to Port Sudan, the government gave Bin Laden the monopoly
on sesame seed export. Sudan is one of the world's three largest sesame
producers, so it was extremely lucrative.
-
- Other ventures were less successful. A plan to import
bicycles from Azerbaijan was a total flop. Other hare-brained schemes were
hatched, half-implemented and then went nowhere. But there was still
enough
cash to keep al-Qaeda's core business ticking along. The chief executive
never lost sight of his main purpose. More than $100,000 in cash went to
Islamists in Jordan, funds were sent to Baku to set up an operation
smuggling
Islamic fighters into Chechnya, another $100,000 went to an Eritrean
Islamist
group.
-
- At one point bin Laden bought a plane for $250,000 and
hired a pilot. The plane soon crashed. He also set up several military
training camps, and hundreds of Algerians, Palestinians, Egyptians and
Saudis received instruction in bomb-making and terrorist tactics. Many
of them had fought in Afghanistan and now, like bin Laden, were at a loose
end. There was talk of assassinating President Mubarak of Egypt, though
nobody was sure how to go about it, and there was some haphazard
surveillance
of possible targets for a bombing in East Africa, including the Nairobi
embassy of the US.
-
- There also appears to have been an unsuccessful attempt
to buy components for nuclear weapons in Eastern Europe and a bid to
smuggle
hundreds of Kalashnikovs on camels across the desert to Egypt. A shipload
of guns was sent to Yemen and operatives dispatched to help tribesmen fight
US troops in Somalia.
-
- The CIA claim that bin Laden was behind the attacks on
their troops in Mogadishu in 1993. However, there is little evidence that
al-Qaeda were heavily involved. 'During bin Laden's stay in Sudan
anti-American
incidents happened in many places but none were conducted by his group
in the usual sense of an order passed down a chain of command,' one
intelligence
source said. 'They were done by people who had trained in Afghanistan and
had enough anti-American drive. Bin Laden may have sanctioned them but
that was all.'
-
- It was a pattern that was to be often seen in the years
to come. A car bomb in Riyadh in 1995 was blamed on him, with the Saudis
producing video 'confessions' from four Afghans for the attack. The Khobar
Towers bombing a year later was also blamed on bin Laden, though Iranian
agents are now the prime suspects. In 1994, when the Saudis publicly
withdrew
his citizenship, bin Laden's response was to exploit the power of the
media.
It is believed he set up a London office called the Advice and Reform
Committee
(ARC). Its job was allegedly propaganda, issued vitriolic criticism against
the Saudi regime. It was run by Khalid al-Fawwaz, now fighting extradition
to the United States from the UK.
-
- By January 1996, Khartoum was increasingly uneasy about
its guest. Turabi contacted the Sudanese ambassador to Afghanistan, Atiya
Badawi, who was based in Peshawar. Badawi, who had learnt the Pashtun
language
while fighting the Russians, had excellent contacts with his former
comrades
among the Mujahideen and, with Afghanistan split into hundreds of warring
bandit fiefdoms, it was easy to persuade three of the most senior
commanders
in the Jalalabad area that a wealthy Saudi under their protection might
give them an edge over their rivals. The three men - all of whom are now
dead - flew to Sudan to ask bin Laden to return to the land of the
jihad.
-
- 1996-98: Building an Army of
Terror
-
- It was a cool autumn evening in Kabul. Outside a
high-walled
house in the northern suburb of Wazir Akbar Khan were a dozen Japanese
pickup trucks. The guards and drivers lounged against them. Though the
area had escaped the worst of the fighting in the seven years since the
Russians had withdrawn, shrapnel scars still pitted the walls and sandbags
were stacked around every home. It was October 1996 and Osama bin Laden
was in Kabul to meet the Taliban. It was his first visit to the city and
his first encounter with the hardline Islamic militia army who had captured
it a month earlier. In May a specially chartered cargo plane carrying the
39-year- old, three of his four wives, half a dozen children and a hundred
of his Arab fighters had landed at Jalalabad airport. But the three
Mujahideen
commanders who had invited him back from Sudan had since been ousted and
bin Laden, politic as ever, knew he needed to ingratiate himself with the
new regime.
-
- A month earlier he had sent a Libyan associate to Taliban
leader Mullah Omar in Kandahar. Omar ordered Mullah Mohamed Rabbani, the
deputy leader and mayor of Kabul, to meet bin Laden and see if he was as
much of a friend as his subordinate had claimed. Their meeting was wary
but friendly. Bin Laden spoke first. Ignoring their doctrinal differences,
he praised the militia's aims and achievements and pledged his
unconditional
moral and financial support. Rabbani, pleased and flattered, offered the
protection of the regime. 'Everybody left smiling,' a witness said.
-
- The meeting signified more than an alliance between the
world's most wanted terrorist and the world's most reviled regime. It was
the start of the final - and most critical - phase of bin Laden's
development.
Having secured the Taliban's protection, he was free to start building
the most efficient terrorist organisation the world had ever seen.
-
- The jihad against the Russians had given bin Laden
much-needed
confidence, contacts throughout the Islamic world and a taste for fame,
respect and adulation. His authority and profile had been boosted further
by his stance against Saudi Arabia and exile. And in Sudan he had been
able to start the serious work of building al-Qaeda - a global umbrella
group of Muslim extremists dedicated to overturning 'unIslamic' governments
throughout the Middle East and further afield. But in terms of military
capacity and strategic thinking bin Laden's group was still weak. In
Afghanistan,
he swiftly found a solution.
-
- He had returned to a land that had known anarchy for
six years. Thousands of Islamic militants were based in the old Mujahideen
complexes in the east of the country. Many were sponsored by the Pakistani
secret services who wanted zealots to fight India in Kashmir. Others were
backed by a variety of Islamic groups from all over the world. In the camps
the volunteers were trained in guerrilla warfare. Many had fought for the
Taliban. Bin Laden's first problem was partially solved almost immediately.
He had inherited an army.
-
- In Afghanistan he found himself surrounded by men who
could help him, especially dozens of exiled Egyptian extremists. They
included
Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri, a 37-year-old surgeon and a founder of the effective
and sophisticated Egyptian al-Jihad group. Another was Mohamed Atef, the
group's hard and competent military commander. Al-Zawahiri taught bin Laden
about the political realities of global war. Atef lectured him on the
military
necessities. After several security scares, he moved his household to
a former Mujahideen base at Tora Bora high in the mountains south of
Jalalabad.
-
- The Egyptians told him the best form of defence was
attack.
'He did what they told him,' one security source said. After two months
at Tora Bora, he wrote and circulated a 12-page article, full of Koranic
and historical references, promising violent action against the Americans
unless they withdrew from Saudi Arabia. In a significant broadening of
his view - showing the influence of the Egyptians - he also spoke for the
first time of Palestine and Lebanon as well as 'the fierce Judaeo-Christian
campaign against the Muslim world' and 'the duty of all Muslims' to resist
it. Bin Laden bought four of the Stinger missiles that had been supplied
to the Mujahideen by the CIA and had them smuggled to Saudi Islamic
groups.
-
- When it discovered the plot, Riyadh was incensed. The
Saudi government, along with Pakistan, had supported the Taliban as a means
of countering Iranian and Russian influence in Afghanistan. Now the Taliban
were sheltering one of their most determined enemies and ignoring demands
to hand him over. More extreme measures were needed.
-
- In early 1997 the Taliban discovered what they said was
a Saudi plot to assassinate bin Laden. The Islamic militia, who by then
controlled about two-thirds of Afghanistan, invited bin Laden to move to
Kandahar for his own security. Bin Laden agreed and moved into an old
Soviet
air force base close to Kandahar airport. He cemented his relationship
with the Taliban's upper command by funding huge military purchases,
building
mosques and buying cars for the leadership. He even helped construct a
new residence for Mullah Omar and his family on the outskirts of the city
and started work on a huge compound to be used for prayers at the start
of Ramadan.
-
- Bin Laden set up a system to cream off the élite
from the existing training camps to al-Qaeda. The camp administrators told
the volunteers that the best of them would earn an audience with 'the
Emir'.
When bin Laden met them, his aides would pick the most promising and send
them to more specialised camps where, instead of basic infantry techniques,
they had psychological and physical tests, combat trials and finally
instruction
in the skills of the modern terrorist. Within a year, bin Laden had created
the terrorist version of special forces.
-
- Under al-Zawahiri's tutelage, bin Laden had also realised
he needed to internationalise his cause. Towards the end of 1997 he started
to work to unify Islamic movements under the al-Qaeda umbrella, using his
money, charm and reputation to draw in leaders from around the world. He
bolstered his support locally, giving money to village clerics to build
mosques and, according to one Taliban source, organising the import of
3,000 secondhand Toyota Corolla estates from Dubai. They were given to
the families of Taliban casualties so they could earn a living.
-
- Finally, in February 1998, he felt strong enough to issue
a fatwa in the name of the 'World Front for Jihad against Jews and
Crusaders'.
It was signed by bin Laden, al-Zawahiri and the heads of major Islamic
movements in Pakistan and Bangladesh and endorsed by dozens of other groups
throughout the region. It was, according to one Western scholar of Islam,
'a magnificent piece of eloquent, even poetic, Arabic prose'.
-
- There was nothing poetic about its message. The fatwa
said that killing Americans and their allies, even civilians, was a Muslim
duty. Shortly afterwards bin Laden told an interviewer that there would
be 'radical action' soon.
-
- At about 11am on 7 August, 1998, Mohamed Rashid Daoud
al-Owhali, a slim-shouldered, bearded 22-year-old Saudi, was standing in
front of a toilet bowl in the men's lavatories on the ground floor of a
hospital in a suburb of Nairobi. He was holding a set of keys and three
bullets. His clothes - jeans, a white patterned shirt, socks and black
shoes - were stained with blood. The keys fitted the lock on the rear doors
of a light brown Toyota pickup truck which 34 minutes earlier had ceased
to exist when the huge bomb it had been carrying had exploded. The blast
had demolished the US embassy, an office block and a secretarial college,
killing 213 people and wounding 4,600. Almost simultaneously a second bomb,
at the US embassy in Tanzania, exploded, killing 11.
-
- The driver of al-Owhali's truck, another young Saudi
called Azzam, had effectively been vapourised. The two had sung songs in
Arabic of martyrdom as they had driven to the embassy. Though at the time
they thought they were to die together, in the end they didn't. Azzam was
killed when, still sitting in the driver seat, he pressed a detonator
button
taped to the dashboard. But al-Owhali ran, and later told the FBI he had
been handpicked by bin Laden while training in Afghanistan early in 1997,
sent to fight for the Taliban that summer, then sent for more specialised
training in terrorism by al-Qaeda instructors in March of 1998 and finally,
in April, given his mission. Azzam had followed a similar path.
-
- Thirteen days after the bombs in Africa, 75 American
cruise missiles slammed into six training camps in the eastern Afghan
hills.
Other missiles demolished a medical factory in Sudan. The Muslim world
exploded in anger and outrage. Bin Laden was launched onto the global
stage.
-
- 1998-2001: Hidden in the Deserts of
Afghanistan
-
- Three months after the missile strikes two luxury jets
landed at Kandahar air base. One brought Prince Turki al Faisal, bin
Laden's
student friend and the head of Saudi Arabia's security services. The second
was empty. It was there to take bin Laden back to Riyadh.
-
- Prince Turki, who had been crucial in getting millions
of dollars of official aid for the Taliban, went straight to Mullah Omar's
residence where a magnificent lunch had been laid out. The prince began
to lecture the Taliban leader about his ingratitude to his former
benefactors.
In the middle of his tirade Omar took a water jug from an attendant and
emptied it over his head.
-
- 'I nearly lost my temper,' he told the astonished prince.
'Now I am calm. I will ask you a question and then you can leave. How long
has the royalty of Saudi Arabia been the hired help of the Americans?'
Lunch went uneaten and the second plane returned to Riyadh empty. Shortly
afterwards bin Laden pledged allegiance to Mullah Omar and recognised him
formally as amir ul momineen - leader of the faithful. His fate and that
of the Taliban were now inextricably linked.
-
- He issued a statement denying all involvement in the
Nairobi attacks - though he said that he welcomed them. No one believed
him. The Taliban then said bin Laden had 'disappeared'. No one believed
them either. In fact he was spending most of his time at an old Soviet
agricultural collective, Farm Hadda, five miles south of Jalalabad.
-
- The Saudi's life there was described to The Observer
by a defecting al-Qaeda associate in June 1999. Bin Laden's daily routine
reflected the rigour of his surroundings. After dawn prayers, he studied
the Koran for several hours. Breakfast was dates, yoghurt, flat Afghan
bread and black tea. Lunch and dinner was equally plain. Bin Laden's life
was dominated by security concerns. Instead of using satellite phones -
he believed the Americans used their signals to track him - bin Laden
dictated
messages to an aide who telephoned them from a separate location. He is
currently guarded by a select group of mainly Arab fighters led by Saifu
al-Hasnain, a 35 year-old Egyptian.
-
- As al-Qaeda's operations expanded security has become
simpler. By the beginning of this year, according to Russian intelligence,
the group had more than 50 individual bases in Afghanistan. There were
units of Arab fighters on at least three front lines, others stationed
in Kabul and still more in newly built bases, some with airstrips, in the
desert south of Kandahar. Every location was - and is - another safe
haven.
-
- As al-Qaeda's infrastructure expanded inside Afghanistan
so did their profile beyond its frontiers. Throughout 1999 and 2000,
rattled
Western intelligence services blamed bin Laden for hundreds of threats
and scores of attacks all over the world. Though many were only tenuously
linked to him, bin Laden was happy to take the credit. Clever publicity
stunts helped too. When the Americans posted their reward for him,
100-rupee
notes were stamped with a picture of bin Laden and distributed throughout
Afghanistan. Thousands of cassettes of his speeches were distributed across
the region too and, according to a letter signed by bin Laden, journalists
were bribed.
-
- To reporters who did meet him he denied everything and
nothing at the same time. When asked if he had chemical weapons, he merely
said that the duty of all Muslims was to try to obtain the means to defeat
tyranny. Questioned about terrorist attacks, he denied responsibility,
but welcomed the actions of his 'Muslim brothers'. Last year suicide
bombers
attacked a US warship in a harbour in Yemen. Seventeen servicemen died.
Once again Bin Laden hinted at his involvement but nothing more. And he
made more threats.
-
- In June he released a video showing al-Qaeda operatives
training and footage of Palestinians killed by Israeli soldiers. He was
shown standing by a map of the world and promising spectacular events in
the near future. Also in the summer, arms dealers in Peshawar told The
Observer, bin Laden's representatives had started buying Stingers and other
surface-to-air missiles.
-
- He also made massive purchases of small arms and
ammunition
and gave them to the Taliban, possibly in a bid to build up his credit
with them. At a camp in the desert south-west of Kandahar - close to where
US Rangers landed nine days ago - al-Qaeda completed the construction of
a new airstrip. Every night throughout the summer, flights from the Middle
East brought extra recruits and supplies. A concerted fundraising operation
in the Gulf also replenished al-Qaeda's coffers. There is also evidence
that in the days before 11 September a number of al-Qaeda members tried
to flee Afghanistan. Several were arrested by Pakistani police.
-
- No one knows where bin Laden was when the Twin Towers
crumbled. Most sources believe that, though he has been 'sighted' at a
number of locations in Afghanistan, he was, and remains, in the desert
south of Kandahar or in the remote mountains of Oruzgan. We know he is
with al-Zawahiri, almost certainly with Mohamed Atef, a number of other
prominent extremists and probably his son. An elite group, drawn from the
three or four thousand Arab fighters currently in Afghanistan, is guarding
him, along with a detachment of Taliban. We know he met Mullah Omar close
to Kandahar a few days after the strikes began and analysis of the rocky
background in the video released on the day of the US attacks reveals the
tape was most likely filmed there or in the eastern province of Paktia,
close to the Pakistan border.
-
- 'These events have divided the world into two camps,
the camp of the faithful and the camp of the infidel' he said. 'Every
Muslim
must rise to defend his religion.' He ticked his targets off one by one
- the Israelis, the 'apostate, hereditary rulers' of Saudi Arabia, Jordan,
Syria and other Middle Eastern states, 'those killers who toyed with the
blood, honour and sanctities of Muslims'. And he listed the victims - the
Palestinians, the Iraqi children dying because of UN sanctions, the whole
Muslim nation.
-
- Five thousand people were dead in America. The greatest
power on the planet was angry and frightened and looking for him. Hundreds
of its warplanes filled the skies above his adopted homeland.
-
- At dusk tonight, somewhere in Afghanistan's blasted and
baked mountains and deserts, a small group of men will face the setting
sun and kneel. As is customary, the most senior and respected among them
will take a step forward and lead the group in prayer. Osama bin Laden
will give thanks to God.
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