That aside, it was feared that the Soviet thrust heralded an eventual threat to Saudi Arabia itself. Prince Turki was soon shuttling between Riyadh and Pakistan, networking with Pakistan’s Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence—ISI—triggering a relief effort that was to last far into the future.
On another tack, and in great secrecy, the GID and the CIA worked together to support the Afghan rebels’ fight against the Soviets. Thanks to huge sums of money funneled through a Swiss bank account, modern weaponry began to make the rebels a more viable fighting force.
“When the invasion of Afghanistan started,” bin Laden once said, “I was enraged and went there at once. I arrived within days, before the end of 1979.” At GID headquarters, Prince Turki and his aide Badeeb noted bin Laden’s potential. Youthful though he was, as a member of the bin Laden conglomerate he had clout. He had, above all, religious drive and commitment.
“To confront those Russian infidels,” bin Laden said, “the Saudis chose me as their representative in Afghanistan. When they decided to participate actively in the Islamic resistance they turned to the bin Laden family … which had close links to the royal family. And my family designated me. I installed myself in Pakistan, in the frontier region bordering on Afghanistan. There I received the volunteers who arrived from Saudi Arabia and all the Arab and Muslim countries.”
Prince Turki has admitted having met bin Laden a couple of times in that early period, while avoiding going into detail. His former chief of staff Badeeb has been more forthright. Bin Laden, he has said, “had a strong relation with the Saudi intelligence and with our embassy in Pakistan.… He was our man.… We were happy with him.… He had a good relationship with the ambassador, and with all Saudi ambassadors who served there. At times, the embassy would ask bin Laden for some things and he would respond positively.… The Pakistanis, too, saw in him one who was helping them do what they wanted done there.”
According to one of the most well-informed sources on the conflict, the journalist Ahmed Rashid, Pakistan’s ISI had wanted Turki “to provide a royal prince to lead the Saudi contingent.” In bin Laden, with his family’s links to the Saudi royals, they got the next best thing.
What was required of him in the early 1980s was not to fight but to travel to-and-fro, spread money around, cultivate Afghan contacts, make sure that cash got to the right people. Then his activities became entwined with those of Abdullah Azzam, the jihadist whose lectures he had attended at university. The duty of jihad “will not end with victory in Afghanistan,” Azzam was heard to declare. “Jihad will remain an individual obligation until all other lands that were Muslim are returned to us.”
With Saudi support, Azzam moved full-time to Pakistan, and so eventually did bin Laden—at his mentor’s request. By 1986 they were running the office that processed Arab donations and handled recruits rallying to the cause. Funded with money from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, and his own wealth, bin Laden ensured that arrivals were housed, cared for if they were sick or wounded, and fed Islamic propaganda.
Newcomers stayed initially at a building called Beit al-Ansar, which translates as Place of the Supporters. That was a reference to an episode in the story of the Prophet Mohammed, but it resonates today in another way. Twelve years later, some of the future 9/11 hijackers would give their apartment that name. Azzam, for his part, toured the United States regularly, raising funds and starting what eventually became a nationwide support system.
At some point, according to a source quoted by Barnett Rubin, now a senior State Department adviser on Pakistan and Afghanistan, the CIA “enlisted” Azzam. Did the Agency have any involvement with bin Laden himself?
The CIA had significantly ratcheted up its support for the anti-Soviet forces by the mid-1980s. U.S. funding, $470 million in 1986, continued to soar, and the agency saw to it that more and better weapons reached the Afghans. Under a supposedly strict, immutable arrangement, however—necessary to the United States to ensure deniability, to Pakistan to retain control—all this assistance was handled by the ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence service. Officials of the day have played down the notion that there was American contact with bin Laden, or anyone else in the field.
Reputable authors have reported how the CIA on occasion circumvented the rules. While the bulk of the mujahideen were trained by Pakistani officers, some of the officers were trained in the States. U.S. and British Special Forces veterans entered Afghanistan and operated alongside the fighters. American cash went to at least one Afghan commander who collaborated with bin Laden.
Other voices claim there was an early link between the CIA and bin Laden himself. Michael Springmann, who in 1986 and 1987 headed the Non-Immigrant Visa Section at the U.S. consulate in Jeddah, said that the CIA forced him against his will to issue visas to people who would otherwise have been ineligible. “What I was protesting was, in reality, an effort to bring recruits, rounded up by [the Agency and] Osama bin Laden, to the U.S. for terrorists training by the CIA. They would then be returned to Afghanistan to fight against the Soviets.”
Simon Reeve, a British author, cited a “former CIA official” as saying that “U.S. emissaries met directly with bin Laden.” According to this source it was bin Laden, acting on advice from Saudi intelligence, who suggested that the mujahideen be supplied with the Stinger missiles that proved devastatingly effective against Soviet airpower.
“Bin Laden,” wrote former British foreign secretary Robin Cook, “was a product of a monumental miscalculation of Western security agencies. Throughout the 80s he was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan.”
In a little-known interview, bin Laden himself appeared to offer a revelation. “I created my first camps,” he said in 1995, “where these volunteers underwent training, instructed by Pakistani and American officers [authors’ italics]. The arms were provided by the Americans and the money by the Saudis.”
Then, a year later, bin Laden reversed himself. “Personally,” he said in 1996, “neither I nor my brothers saw evidence of American help.”
Statements by Osama bin Laden—and for that matter those of intelligence officials—rarely contribute much to historical clarity.
THE USE THE GID SAW for bin Laden initially put him nowhere near the combat zone. “The Saudi government,” he would recall, had “officially asked me not to enter Afghanistan, due to how close my family is to the Saudi leadership. They ordered me to stay in Peshawar [Pakistan], because in the event the Russians arrested me that would be a proof of our support for the mujahideen.… I didn’t listen to them, and went into Afghanistan for the first time.”
Quite early in the 1980s, back in Jeddah, Najwa bin Laden heard her husband tell other family members that he had entered the Afghan war zone. He mentioned, too, that he had handled the controls of a helicopter. She began to probe a little but he merely said, “Najwa, stop thinking.” As a dutiful Saudi wife, she knew it was not her place to ask what her husband did outside the home.
Many Arabs who answered the call to jihad never saw actual fighting, but bin Laden saw to it that some of them did. He eventually set up a base at Jaji, ten miles inside Afghanistan and not far from a Soviet base, and called it Maasada, or the Lion’s Den. It was there that he and his Arabs had their baptism of fire.
One of Azzam’s sons recalled how, greenhorn that he was, bin Laden initially reacted to explosions by running away. Soon, however, he and his men gained a reputation for breathtaking bravery in terrifying circumstances—for a reason that Westerners can barely begin to understand. One observer saw a man in tears because he survived an attack. For jihadis, Azzam would say, had a “thirst for martyrdom.” The fact that he himself had not taken part in the fighting earlier, bin Laden said, “requires my own martyrdom in the name of God.”
“As Muslims,” he explained to the British journalist Robert Fisk, “we believe that when we die we go to heaven. Before a battle, God sends us seqina, tranquillity.” “I w
as so peaceful in my heart,” he said of one experience under bombing in Afghanistan, “that I fell asleep.”
In 1989, after the deaths of more than a million Afghans and some fifteen thousand Soviets, the Russians pulled out of Afghanistan. With the Afghan communist regime still in place, however, the conflict merely entered a new phase. Bin Laden and an Arab force, who took part in an attempt to take the eastern city of Jalalabad, suffered appalling casualties. Their contribution had been botched and ill-planned, but Saudi propaganda mills continued to profile bin Laden as a champion of Islam.
He “took charge of the closest front lines to the enemy,” trumpeted Jihad magazine, “started attacking with every hero that God gave him. Their number increased in view of their desire to take part in the deliverance of Jalalabad under the command of Osama bin Laden.” And: “the land of Jalalabad swallowed one lion after another. Osama had pain every time he said goodbye to one mujahid. And every time he would say goodbye a new rocket would come and take another.”
Bin Laden had for some time been having disagreements with his mentor, Azzam. That year, however, their differences became moot. Azzam and two of his sons were assassinated as they drove to the mosque to pray. Who was behind their murder was never established, let alone the motive. Bin Laden had left for Saudi Arabia a few weeks earlier, to be met with a hero’s welcome.
He was greeted in Jeddah, by one account, by the crown prince himself, Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz. The great and the good of Jeddah feted bin Laden, threw feasts to celebrate his prowess. He gave talks on his experiences at the mosque and in private homes. Bin Laden recordings about the Afghan campaign circulated on audiocassette, and he featured largely in a film that was being made.
Heady stuff for a man who had just turned thirty-two. For a while, to Najwa’s relief, he went back to work for the bin Laden construction company. Since the start of Osama’s involvement in Afghanistan, there had been many changes in their domestic life.
He had taken a second wife, then a third, then a fourth. Though it is proper under religious law to take up to four wives, this had at first troubled Najwa. She reconciled herself to the new arrangements, she said, when her husband explained that “his aim was purely to have many children for Islam.” Religion did dominate bin Laden’s thinking, but—with male acquaintances—he joked about his polygamy. “I have four wives waiting for me,” he would say. “Time for some fun.”
The fun certainly produced his quota of bin Laden children for Islam. There were eleven children by late 1989, and more would follow. A total as of 2001—with one intervening divorce, an annulment, and one more wife along the way—of twenty.
His friend Jamal Khalifa thought bin Laden was good with his children. “I never saw him shouting at his kids, hitting his kids. Even his wives, they never say he has treated them bad … his wives, they like him so much.” As time passed, meanwhile, it became clear that—wealthy though he might be—bin Laden believed that being “a good Muslim” required severe austerity. He decreed, Najwa has said, “that our home furnishings should be plain, our clothes modest in number.” He considered Islamic beliefs to have been “corrupted by modernization,” and forbade his wives to use the air-conditioning or the refrigerator. To ensure a supply of fresh milk, he kept cows.
Bin Laden was more severe with his children than Khalifa saw. “We were allowed to speak in his presence,” recalled his son Omar, “but our voices must be kept low.… We were told that we must not become excited.… We should be serious about everything.… We were not allowed to tell jokes.… He would allow us to smile so long as we did not laugh. If we were to lose control of our emotions and bark a laugh, we must be careful not to expose our eye teeth. I have been in situations where my father actually counted the exposed teeth, reprimanding his sons on the number their merriment revealed.”
The entire family was supposed to “live just as the Prophet had lived, whenever possible.” Unless a family member were to become mortally ill, they were forbidden to use modern medicines. For asthma, which afflicted all the boys, bin Laden insisted on a natural remedy—breathing through a honeycomb rather than using an inhaler. Instead of toys, Omar recalled, “Father would give us some goats to play with, telling us that we needed nothing more than God’s natural gifts to be happy.…
“From the time we were toddlers, he demanded that we be given very little water.… Our father would transport his sons into the dry desert … bin Laden sons must be physically immune to inhospitable desert heat.” Bin Laden was teaching them, Khalifa has said, “how to be a mujahid, trying to bring them up on jihad, on jihad thinking.” He had taken his eldest son, Abdullah, into the Afghan war zone when he was only ten years old.
The “shy” side of bin Laden was no longer so evident. His experience in Afghanistan had given him confidence. At meetings there, speaking clearly in elegant, classical Arabic, “like a university professor,” he had sat at the head of the table handing down decisions. “We will do this,” he would say. “We will do that …”
Canadian journalist David Cobain, who had encountered bin Laden outside Afghanistan, noted his “still, silent intensity,” the way he would sit “gazing unblinkingly at everything.… He had the extraordinary quality of attracting and holding one’s attention inactively, by his presence, by the impression he gave of other-worldliness.”
AS THE STRUGGLE against the Soviets ended, the CIA thought the most radical Islamic groups—backed by Pakistan’s ISI—would be most effective in the effort to remove the residual communist regime. Far from showing gratitude for the U.S. contribution to beating the Soviets, however, the fundamentalists proved virulently anti-American.
Working with the United States, bin Laden was to say, had all along been only a “tactical alliance.” America’s motive in Afghanistan had merely been self-interest. “The United States was not interested in our jihad. It was only afraid that Russia would gain access to warm waters [i.e., the Gulf].… The United States has no principles.
“In our struggle against the communists, our aim was the Islamic revolution, whoever our allies might be.… We got involved as Muslim fighters against Soviet atheism, not as American auxiliaries. The urgent thing was to deal with communism, but the next target was the United States.… I began by allying myself with them, and I finished without them.”
“Every Muslim,” bin Laden was to claim, “hates Americans, hates Jews, and hates Christians. This is a part of our belief and our religion. For as long as I can remember, I have felt tormented and at war, and have felt hatred and animosity for Americans.”
Three firsthand accounts indicate that bin Laden was hostile to Westerners by the time the Soviets left Afghanistan.
Dana Rohrabacher, former Reagan White House aide and future congressman, recalled coming across an unusual encampment near Jalalabad. “We could see these tents, luxurious tents … more like a modern-day camping expedition by some rich people with SUVs than a mujahideen camp.… I was told immediately that that was the camp of the Saudis and that I should keep my mouth shut and no English should be spoken until we were far away … because they said there was a crazy man in that camp who hated Americans, worse than he hated the Soviets.… They said, ‘That man’s name is bin Laden.’ ”
A few months later, two experienced war reporters had separate encounters with bin Laden near Jalalabad. Edward Girardet, a Swiss American with long experience of the conflict, found himself confronted by “a tall, bearded man flanked by armed men,” demanding in English, with a slight American accent, “to know who I was and what I, a kafir [infidel], was doing in Afghanistan. For the next forty-five minutes we had a heated debate about the war, religion, and foreigners. Haughty, self-righteous, and utterly sure of himself, he proceeded to lambast the West for its feebleness and lack of moral conviction.” When Girardet held out his hand to say goodbye, the tall man refused to shake. Instead, he threatened, “If you ever come again, I’ll kill you.”
The BBC reporter John Simpson and his crew also ha
d an unpleasant encounter with the tall, bearded figure. This time, the man actively urged the mujahideen present to kill Simpson and his colleagues. No one obliged—the group around bin Laden included more moderate Afghan fighters. The driver of an ammunition truck, offered $500 to run down the “infidels,” also declined.
The murderous threats aside, Girardet and Simpson both thought there was something peculiar about the man in white. “The best description I can give,” Girardet said, “is that he sort of came across as being a rather spoiled brat, like he was sort of ‘playing at jihad.’ Kind of an ‘I’m here now, look at me,’ sort of thing.”
John Simpson, for his part, witnessed something bizarre. Toward the end of the encounter, when the tall Arab ran off toward the mujahideen sleeping area, the BBC crew followed—only to find their would-be nemesis “lying full-length on a camp-bed, weeping and beating his fists on the pillow.”
Looking back, Simpson vividly remembered how the Arab who wanted him dead had looked at that moment. He remembered especially the eyes: with that “crazy, handsome glitter—the Desert Sheikh meets Hannibal Lecter.”
Only years later, when the news was filled with stories and photographs of bin Laden, did Girardet and Simpson realize just who the menacing Arab had been.
THE MEN AROUND bin Laden had indeed long since deferred to him, as they had to his mentor, Azzam, before his death, as sheikh. Azzam had said jihad needed a “vanguard,” a leadership that would give the dreamed-of future Islamic society a “strong foundation.” The Arabic words he used for “strong foundation” were “al-qaeda al-sulbah.”
A few months later, in 1988, Azzam, bin Laden, and a handful of comrades had discussed plans for how to make progress once the Soviets finally left. Initially, they planned, they would maintain a militia of some three hundred men. Those who enlisted would make a pledge, “so that the word of God will be the highest and his religion victorious.” The camps in which they would train would be “al-qa’ida al’askariyya”—the Military Base.
The Eleventh Day Page 22
