The Bin Ladens

by Steve Coll

  20. THE ARMS BAZAAR

  AROUND THE TIME he moved with his family to Peshawar, Osama made a new request of Salem. This time it wasn’t money; he told his brother that he needed weapons, and he specifically asked for portable anti-aircraft missiles.1

  Osama entered the international arms market because he had decided, for the first time, to create his own jihadist militia. He found the Arab volunteer movement in some disarray early in 1986. Azzam’s Services Office, which Osama had funded with about a half million U.S. dollars to this point, was fracturing over petty disputes and prideful slights. As more Arabs arrived, Azzam’s inclusive governing system of committees and consultative councils fell under strain. Bin Laden’s aide, Abu Haji Al-Iraqi, recalled “an increase of complaints” that led to a decision to “change the administrative staff.” Increasingly, leading figures in the group irritated one another and engaged in tedious debates about money and theology. Ayman Al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian doctor who had been tortured in Cairo prisons for his involvement in violent conspiracies, arrived in Peshawar with other radical Egyptian exiles. Zawahiri cultivated a relationship with Osama, motivated as Azzam had been earlier—the doctor was ambitious but poor, and he needed Osama’s financial patronage. He stirred bitter disputes in Peshawar salons over jihad strategy. He found Arab allies ripe with grievance. Azzam had promoted the Afghan war as a province of miracles and beautiful sacrifice; the volunteers summoned up this stairway to heaven found the reality of the war to be cold, brutal, disputatious, and poorly organized.

  In April some Arab volunteers participated in a brutal four-week battle at Jawr, a fortified rear base located in high, sandy ridges near the Pakistan border, in an area controlled by a fierce Afghan commander named Jalaladin Haqqani. The fight went badly. Bin Laden decided that the Arabs needed to strengthen themselves in these border areas. He moved away from Peshawar’s debilitating office culture and began to build his own brigade of Arab jihadis up in the mountains along the Afghan-Pakistan border. His aim was to participate directly in the war; it was for this that he required his own portable missiles, to challenge Soviet helicopter-borne assault teams.2

  “It is well known that there are two elements of fighting,” Osama said later. “There is the fighting itself and then there is the financial element, such as buying weapons. This is emphasized in many verses of the Koran, such as the following: ‘God has purchased the persons and possessions of the believers in return for the Garden.’”3

  Salem turned to a German friend with an Afghan connection: Thomas Dietrich. They had first met in Cairo; Dietrich was an amateur pilot on vacation, and they fell into a friendship centered on flying. As a boy, Dietrich had lived in Kabul; his father was a West German foreign aid official. He became a fixture in Salem’s European entourage. In the mid-1980s, he was enrolled at a university in Stuttgart, but he found time to ski and fly with Salem and some of his brothers and sisters, particularly at resorts in the Alps.

  At Offley Chase, his estate outside London, Salem summoned Dietrich to his room. “We need to help my brother,” Salem told him, as Dietrich recalled it.

  “You’ve got many of them.”

  Salem talked about Osama; Dietrich had heard some about him but not a lot. “He is now very religious,” Salem said. “He is now in Afghanistan, and the Russians are there. People are getting killed. And I know that you lived there—and you need to help him.” Osama had identified two priorities: missiles that could shoot down helicopters, and equipment that would allow Arab volunteers to manufacture ammunition for AK-47 assault rifles, by filling spent shells with new rounds.4

  The war was intensifying. After a policy review in the spring of 1985, the United States decided secretly to escalate its support for the Afghan mujaheddin; for the first time, the U.S. identified victory over the occupying Soviet army as an objective. The CIA rapidly increased the quantity and quality of the weapons it sent in through Pakistan. The Soviets introduced more aggressive tactics as well, ordering elite helicopter-borne Special Forces units, called Spetsnaz, to Afghanistan; these assault troops flew raids against rebel supply lines and wreaked havoc along the Pakistan border. To thwart the Spetsnaz, the CIA agreed in 1986 to send heat-seeking U.S.-made Stinger missiles to the Afghans; the missiles were particularly lethal against helicopters. The initial shipments occurred during the first half of the year, just as Osama was moving with his family to Peshawar. An Afghan commander fired the first Stingers on the Afghan battlefield in September, at Jalalabad. The missiles destroyed several Soviet helicopters that day, and they quickly acquired an almost mythical reputation for potency among both the mujaheddin and the Soviets.5

  Separately, at some point during this period (it is not clear when), the Reagan administration team supervising U.S. involvement with the Afghan war discussed whether to provide aid directly to the Arab volunteers based in Peshawar. The CIA ran most of the secret war from day to day, but an interagency group at the White House, chaired by Assistant Undersecretary of Defense Michael Pillsbury, decided on the war’s broader policies. Twice Pillsbury flew by helicopter to the Afghan frontier to review training facilities and to meet Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, two rebel leaders who were particularly close to the Arabs. During these meetings, Pillsbury asked about the military effectiveness of the Arab volunteers. He concluded, he recalled, that the Afghan commanders didn’t want aid or supplies to be diverted to the Arabs; the Afghans saw these relatively small bands of shaheen, or “martyrs,” as righteous warriors but also as sacrificial pawns of marginal military value. The Afghans wanted all the weapons for themselves.6

  After he received Osama’s requests, Salem made several attempts to contact the Pentagon to see if he could arrange to supply Osama with portable missiles, according to a business partner who participated in these inquiries. Salem tried to locate the right person in the American defense bureaucracy, but he was unsuccessful, the partner said. It is not clear whether the Reagan administration ever made a formal decision to refuse to supply weapons to the Arab volunteers—no such document or account has ever surfaced—but conclusions such as those formed by Pillsbury after his inquiries in Pakistan clearly influenced American thinking about the matter. Pillsbury said he knew of no explicit decision to refuse aid to the Arab volunteers and that he would have known if such a decision had been made; still, they were not a priority.

  Salem felt he had no recourse but to use the private arms market, according to interviews with Dietrich and two other individuals in the private sector who joined discussions with Salem about supplying arms to Osama. Salem did receive some financial support from the Saudi government, according to these individuals, but he received no known aid from the United States. As Dietrich recalled it: “The problem was there was no clearance from any of the Western governments” to supply the Arab volunteers “with anti-aircraft missiles.”7

  Dietrich had contacts at Heckler & Koch, the German arms manufacturer. Through them, Dietrich recalled, he arranged several meetings between Salem and salesmen at the firm who specialized in ammunition and rifle manufacturing. A second partner of Salem confirmed these negotiations; the partner said he warned Salem to not get involved, because it was a private transaction of uncertain legality, but that Salem went ahead anyway.8

  It was not entirely clear to Dietrich why Osama wanted to make his own bullets. Like many of the mujaheddin, his volunteers carried mainly Chinese-made assault rifles based on a Soviet design; Pakistani markets were awash with ammunition for these guns. Osama seemed in part to regard remanufacture from spent shells as some sort of virtuous, efficient cottage industry; it was also the sort of technology that was sometimes advertised in the pages of mercenary magazines like Soldier of Fortune. Dietrich found an arms salesman who understood the process and flew with him to Dubai to meet with Salem and Osama. “We sat together and said, ‘It does not really make sense to refill the bullets there,’” Dietrich recalled. The technical problems were too great. The arms salesman suggested that Osa
ma simply purchase the ammunition he needed from suppliers they could locate in South America.

  To discuss buying missiles, Osama flew to London and met with Salem, Dietrich, and Dietrich’s contacts in a suite at the Dorchester Hotel on Park Lane, according to Dietrich. They met two or three times at the hotel over a period of six to eight weeks during 1986, he said. Before one meeting, Salem and Dietrich were horsing around in their usual way. As they walked from one room of the suite into a second room, where Osama was waiting, Salem admonished, “Don’t do any jokes with my brother. He’s very religious.”

  Ultimately Dietrich heard that his contacts had helped arrange for the purchase in South America of both Russian-made SA-7 shoulder-fired missiles and ammunition for Chinese-made AK-47 rifles; the missiles and bullets were shipped to Karachi. One snag was that Osama’s sponsors in the transaction wanted to pay for the ammunition not with cash, but with crude oil. According to Dietrich, they expected the seller to accept “just a tanker offshore, which was not easy to accomplish because a company like Heckler & Koch, they don’t want oil, they want money.”9

  Dietrich had “no idea” where the money or oil for these arms purchases originated. The best available evidence suggests it probably came at least in part from the Saudi government. Certainly Salem and Osama were working in concert with official Saudi policy at this time. Also, Osama’s arms purchases, as described by Dietrich, seem to fit inside a larger pattern. In late 1985, the Saudi government entered into a multibillion-dollar arms deal with the British government, called Al-Yamamah. The transaction had a number of unconventional aspects. The Saudi government allocated between four hundred thousand and six hundred thousand barrels of oil daily as barter currency to finance the purchase of major weapons systems from British companies. By using oil instead of cash, the Saudis were able to quietly evade official oil production caps imposed by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), according to an authorized biography drawing on extensive interviews with Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the longtime Saudi ambassador in Washington. According to this account, the financing umbrella arranged for the Al-Yamamah deal also supported a number of Saudi Arabia’s covert anti-communist programs, including “arms bought from Egypt and other countries, and sent to the mujaheddin in Afghanistan.”10

  Other evidence about possible Saudi government participation in Osama’s arms supplies during this period is more fragmentary. Ahmed Badeeb, the Saudi intelligence officer who worked closely with Osama, acknowledged in an interview that he had purchased SA-7 missiles and supplied them to the Afghan fighters, although he did not specify Osama as a recipient. Salem also negotiated during this period to purchase weapons for Osama from South African arms dealers, according to two individuals familiar with those transactions. One individual who participated in these discussions, which were separate from those involving Dietrich, recalled that some of the funding came from the Saudi royal family.11

  During 1986, in Peshawar, Osama delivered his first known speeches denouncing the United States because of its support for Israel; as Osama later recalled his words, he preached that “Americans take our money and give it to the Jews, so they can kill our children with it in Palestine.” It is possible that his hostility toward America, inculcated by Abdullah Azzam, was further inflamed when Salem informed him that his attempt to buy Stingers had been rebuffed at the Pentagon. In any event, by comparison, Osama was fiercely protective of the Saudi royal family during this same period. A Palestinian journalist who worked at Al-Jihad magazine recalled Osama lashing out when colleagues suggested during 1986 that King Fahd was not a legitimate Muslim because Queen Elizabeth had presented him a medal that resembled a Christian cross: “For God’s sake, don’t discuss this subject—concentrate on your mission,” Osama said, as the journalist recalled it. “I don’t permit anyone to discuss this issue here.” He was at war with the enemies of Saudi Arabia, not with its throne.12

  BEGINNING IN THE SUMMER of 1986, Osama spent more of his time around Jaji, in the Afghan province of Khost, near a protrusion of Pakistani territory called Parrot’s Beak. This was an area of increasing strategic importance in the broader Afghan war. A number of important Afghan rebel fighting units with strong Islamist credentials—those led by Haqqani, Sayyaf, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and Younus Khalis—operated in this vicinity. They tried to pressure Kabul and its outskirts. Sayyaf, in particular, ran a training facility near Jaji. It was the theatrical site he had used to host Arab donors, but increasingly his camp was situated in a hot battle zone.

  Pakistani intelligence officers who directed supplies and tried to manage war strategy on the front lines decided to fortify the border area around Jaji, to preserve their supply lines and protect Afghan fighters from the Soviet raids. Osama joined in this effort. He built infrastructure that served the Islamist Afghan commanders, and for himself, he constructed a new camp near Sayyaf ’s Jaji facility, which he called the Lion’s Den. The number of volunteers who initially joined him there in the autumn of 1986 was tiny—as few as a dozen, many still in their teens. Abdullah Azzam was uneasy about Osama’s solo venture. He was still financially dependent upon his protégé. Among other things, he feared that Soviet troops might kidnap Bin Laden and fly him off to Kabul as a propaganda prize. Azzam sent Arabs from his own nearby camp to join and protect Bin Laden; by the end of the year, the militia at the Lion’s Den had grown to about fifty.13

  Osama built this initially unimposing brigade—barely a platoon, actually—with active support from his family. In addition to helping him buy weapons, the Bin Ladens shipped construction equipment during 1986 to support Osama’s projects on the border. Bin Laden company engineers had volunteered in Peshawar earlier, and some construction equipment probably arrived during that earlier period as well. A large batch reached Pakistan between October and December of 1986.14 Afterward, Osama expanded construction activity around Jaji and built roads north toward the mountain redoubt of Tora Bora, which Pakistani intelligence officers had identified as an area where caves and storage depots could be fortified and defended. None of this support from the Bin Ladens—apart from the missiles and ammunition—would have seemed exceptional; it differed little in character from the defense construction work they had done for the Saudi government for years on the Yemen frontier, among other places. Osama later described the scope of his imports:

  In spite of the Soviet power, we used to move with confidence and God conferred favors on us so that we transported heavy equipment from Saudi Arabia estimated at hundreds of tons altogether that included bulldozers, loaders, dump trucks, and equipment for digging trenches. When we saw the brutality of the Russians bombing mujaheddin positions, we dug a good number of huge tunnels and built in them some storage places and in some others we built a hospital. We also dug some roads.15

  Ahmed Badeeb recalled that Osama was “very professional” as he built these underground fortifications. Indeed, Bin Laden was literally operating at times as a construction professional, under contract with Pakistani and probably also Saudi intelligence. He chose a group of young Saudi volunteers from Medina, the city where he had so recently served as a Bin Laden executive, to work with him. The Bin Laden office in Cairo, in cooperation with the Saudi Ministry of Interior, obtained visas for young Egyptian Islamists who wanted to volunteer in Afghanistan. By one account, Bin Laden companies also contracted to build hospitals and other facilities for Islamic charities in Peshawar. These Peshawar building projects generated several hundred jobs for Arab workers from Egypt and elsewhere, by this account; the workers poured concrete nine to five and some toured the jihad on weekends.16

  Osama was no longer a tourist to the war, however; he was now shaping the battlefield in a strategically important region at a time of military escalation. His ragtag unit of volunteers might be of little importance, but his construction work was significant, at least in the evaluation of American and Pakistani intelligence officers who monitored the overall war effort. Recalled Milton Bearden, th
e CIA station chief in Pakistan at the time, speaking of Osama: “He put a lot of money in a lot of the right places in Afghanistan.” With his cash and bulldozers, he won allegiance from Arab fighters who saw him as “more practical” than the preachy Azzam.17

  “HISTORY RECOUNTS THAT AMERICA supported everyone who waged jihad and fought against Russia,” Osama once noted in passing. It is the only time he is known to have spoken positively about the American role in the anti-Soviet Afghan war. The great majority of his other comments have emphasized American hypocrisy during the conflict and his own staunch independence from the CIA. Even in radical Islamist circles, the canard occasionally circulated that Bin Laden had been a CIA client or paid agent during the 1980s. An Al-Jazeera interviewer once put the question to him directly, and Osama offered a lengthy, defensive reply, one that combined theological and realpolitik justifications for the proximity between his own activities and those of the CIA:

  It’s an attempt to distort by the Americans, and praise be to God that He has thwarted their conspiracy…As for their claim that they supported the jihad and the struggle against the Soviets, well, this support came from Arab countries, especially from the Gulf…The Americans are lying when they claim they helped us at any point, and we challenge them to present a single shred of evidence to prove it. In fact, they were a burden on us…We were doing our duty, which is supporting Islam in Afghanistan, even if this did coincide with American interests. When the Muslims were fighting the Byzantines, during the fierce war between the Byzantines and the Persians, no one in their right mind could say that the Muslims were fighting as agents of the Persians against the Byzantines. There was merely a common interest…Unintended confluence of interests does not mean there is any kind of link or tacit agreement.18