It would be a turkey shoot. Or so Bin Laden thought.
Abdullah Azzam, eager to get back into Osama’s good graces, later would spin a mythical version of the “battle,” claiming that the Russians attacked with more than ten thousand troops against a mere seventy determined Jihadis.
Osama dramatically yelled “Allah’u Akbar” and the three mortars at his command opened fire. They were aimed with enough precision to stop the Russians’ commanding officer and temporarily halt the attack.
The Russians dialed in their mortars. Osama, expecting the attack, ordered his troops underground, and accompanied a personal protection unit to a bunker on a nearby hill. He watched as a rippling barrage sent geysers of dirt up from the Lion’s Den. Osama’s men were safely underground, and he was on a different peak. He thought, as did his bodyguards, that he was safe from harm.
They had been spotted and the Russians shifted fire onto their position. He took cover and waited out the barrage. By nightfall the Russians lost interest. Osama and his men scuttled back to the deep tranquility of the bunkers in the Lion’s Den.
Day and night the Soviets rained 120 mm mortars on the camp. Napalm strikes set the tall pines ablaze. The ground was churned up and craters pockmarked the mountainside. Though no one was killed or even wounded, some of Osama’s more high-strung fighters began to show symptoms of shell shock. One ran out into the barrage waving a Koran over his head as the shells screamed in around him. He lived through the experience and would tell the tale frequently.
Osama had never in his life been under a sustained artillery barrage. His cover was solid—rock solid—but he feared that the Soviets might be maneuvering under the covering fire and take the camp by main force. Consulting his own safety, Osama ordered the Lion’s Den abandoned.
During a lull a van pulled up to take Osama and his men to the rear. As he drove away he rather dramatically ordered the rearguard to put the camp to the torch. A small detachment tossed the mortar tubes and base plates off a cliff and lobbed hand grenades into the mess hall.
When the evacuees reached the headquarters of Abdul Sayyaf, the regional Jihadi commander, he was furious. The cover at the Lion’s Den was truly bombproof—Sayaff was incensed that so strong and impregnable a position had been cowardly abandoned.
Osama and his men had been under a spectacular barrage but their cover had been solid. However loud it had been, it had killed or wounded no one. Sayaff immediately ordered Osama to reoccupy the position.
To make sure it happened, he sent a reliable platoon of Afghanis to chaperone the Arabs back to their position.
Bin Laden waited until the next morning to travel back to the Lion’s Den, arriving after the position was deemed safe. He showed up with a small bodyguard unit in the middle of the morning. It was Eid ul-Fitr, the feast day that marks the end of Ramadan. It would be a dismal celebration.
Following Osama’s orders the retreating fighters had spoiled the remaining supplies to prevent them from falling into the hands of the Russians. Now his men scrounged through the wreckage for something, anything, to eat. They found nothing but some lemons.
Upon returning to the camp, Osama seems to have undergone some sort of collapse. He gave no orders, and allowed Zawahiri’s military adviser Abu Ubaydah to again dispatch him to the forward edge of the battle area.
He probably had no idea people other than the Russians might want to see him dead. He and his small group made their way to the left flank of the camp. It was daylight, and Osama had incautiously advanced with his party toward a densely wooded hilltop. There he spread them out into a ragged skirmish line.
Osama had blundered to within a hundred yards of a Russian scout team. For some unknown reason Osama climbed a tree—something that, despite what one sees in John Wayne movies—is almost instantly fatal in combat. He was immediately taken under fire and a rocket-propelled grenade was fired at him. It exploded in a fireball of bark and pine needles, shaking the tree so badly that Osama nearly fell to his death.
Osama’s recollection of this contact with the enemy is bizarre but has about it the ring of truth. Lawrence Wright quotes him thus:
“It [the rocket] passed by me and exploded nearby, but I was not effected by it at all—in fact, by the grace of Allah, the exalted, it was as though I had nearly been covered by a handful of mud from the ground. I descended calmly and informed the brothers that the enemy was on the central axis and not on the left wing.”
Osama made it away from the tree as a mortar strike tore apart the hillside. He somehow found cover, likely in a predug firing position. The trees and vegetation around him were sufficiently dense and he was able to hide from the Russians as they determinedly advanced, sweeping the hill with automatic weapons fire and trying to flush out Osama and his men.
Back at the Lion’s Den, Abu Ubaydah showed his mettle. He led a counterattack that managed to flank the Russians and drive them back down the hillside. At one point during the engagement, Osama claims that he took a nap.
The story of Osama’s battlefield slumber was told by Azzam and others of proof of his steadfast resolve and manly courage. It is more likely that he lost consciousness due to the effects of Addison’s disease. Upon his death, a DNA sample would reveal that Osama suffered from this failure of the adrenal gland; it is a life-threatening condition that can cause sudden unconsciousness, especially under conditions of stress.
As the firefight sputtered on, Osama came to and had the calm presence of mind to remain hidden as the counterattack drove the Russians back. Abu Ubaydah and others would claim that thirty Russian Spetsnaz troopers were killed in the action.
Whatever the number, Osama was presented by his men with a snappy AKSU carbine they had collected from the battlefield. Called a suchka by the Russians, the AKSU was a signature weapon of the Spetsnaz and is much prized for its compact firepower. Until the end of his life, Osama would keep this weapon by his side, and pose with it whenever the opportunity arose.
After five humiliating forays into combat, Osama had a real battlefield victory to his credit. The win persuaded the Pakistanis to allow the Services Bureau to continue operations. The daylong firefight was polished in the retelling into an almost mythical triumph of good over evil.
His followers, already religious men, began to attribute their survival to the intervention of angels. Osama had nearly lost his base, his reputation, and his life. His insubordinate and unskilled mob of Arab fighters had redeemed themselves—they were no longer hapless, “military guests” but had acquired a reputation for improvisation and almost reckless courage under fire.
Osama had been vindicated as well. With this one victory he reestablished his reputation as a Jihadi, an Islamic warrior and the emir of the Afghan Arabs.
Osama bin Laden had become a legend.
THE EMIR
OSAMA RECOUPED FROM BATTLE in the company of his four wives and a growing brood of children—now numbering more than ten. A man who was willing to kill boys and girls on three continents was loving and gentle to his own children. In August 1988, in Peshawar, Abdullah Azzam chaired a meeting called to discuss the future of Jihad. Also in attendance were several of Zawahiri’s henchmen, including Abu Ubaydah. Bin Laden sat at the head of the table—he was the real power in the room.
Relations between Osama and Azzam were still cordial, but cooling rapidly. Osama wanted to form a three-hundred-man force selected from non-Afghan volunteers. He proposed to develop this new unit around a command element of battle-tested leaders, and the most promising recruits now graduating from training.
Though he had asked the conference to vote on his proposal, Osama had already created Al Qaeda on May 17—designating a group of approximately a dozen men to form a training cadre and nucleus around which he could grow the new organization. The purpose of the conference was to get the project out into the open.
This was the first time most of the assembled Jihadis had heard the words “Al Qaeda.” Abdul Azzam had long suspected tha
t Bin Laden was going to keep a “force in being” after the conclusion of the Afghan war; now he had it spelled out for him.
The founding documents of Al Qaeda divided the “military work” to be undertaken in two parts: operations of “limited” and “open” duration. “Limited duration” meant continuing Arab participation in the Afghanistan resistance. These operations would be terminated when the Russians pulled out. Ominously, military work of “open duration” implied that at the conclusion of hostilities with the Soviets, this new organization would wage Jihad against targets outside Afghanistan.
Placed into the minutes of the meeting were the ideal qualities of a new recruit. These included virtues that seemed lifted from a Boy Scout handbook: “good manners … rising early in the morning … and an ability to take orders.” The new regulations also required that Al Qaeda members swear an oath of al bayat to Osama himself. The previous pledge of allegiance had been to Abdullah Azzam.
Osama would later say of the founding of Al Qaeda, “Brother Abu Ubaydah formed the camp to train youth to fight the oppressive, atheist and truly terroristic Soviet Union. We call that place Al Qaeda, in the sense that it was a training base, and that is where the name came from.”
Abu Ubaydah had been continually at Osama’s side since the Lion’s Den fight; he and the other Egyptians were exerting greater and greater influence over Osama’s daily affairs. This worried Azzam, but he felt that he could still talk sense to Osama, particularly as he felt that the Egyptian hard-liners were crackpots.
Al Qaeda’s purpose was to assemble an all-star outfit; it was to be a mirror-image of JSOC—the best and the brightest. Especially prized were individuals with backgrounds in engineering, chemistry, computers, and media and those with proficiency in foreign languages.
Once a recruit passed screening, he would be put through a series of “testing camps” to gauge his determination and religious zeal. Besides a shot at martyrdom and eternal glory, Al Qaeda offered temporal rewards as well. Those who made it through training would receive a salary of a thousand dollars a month, and married men would get an extra five hundred. Medical care was provided, as was a month of vacation and a round-trip ticket home once a year.
News of the recruiting drive spread in eager whispers all over Peshawar. Soon, Jihadists from a dozen countries were lining up to fill out Al Qaeda’s multipage application form and swear their loyalty. Everybody wanted in, and paradoxically, the more Osama tried to keep Al Qaeda a secret, the more widely known it became.
Abdul Azzam appears to have viewed Al Qaeda with skepticism. Would it not become a mercenary army? Could paid soldiers remain true to the principles of Islam?
Azzam was a Palestinian, and he had seen with his own eyes what happened when men put paychecks and leader oaths above a cause. The Abu Nidal Group was a cultlike splinter group of the PLO. Its members swore al bayat to their founder, Abu Nidal, a violent, paranoid psychopath who set himself up as a freelance operator, hijacking planes and carrying out murders for hire. Abu Nidal was also an atheist, and Azzam could at least reassure himself that Bin Laden was neither an unbeliever nor overtly insane. Still, he worried that a group of privately recruited fighters, loyal first to the man who paid them, had the potential to do evil as well as good.
Azzam was aware that his own star was waning. This was driven home when Osama won a unanimous election to head the new group. Azzam took his demotion in stride—he had been a mentor and now he was minion. He was faced with two options—he could get on the bus, or he could get run over. With some misgivings, Azzam went along for the ride.
Training facilities at the Lion’s Den were expanded, and other camps were opened. Volunteers were tested and selected on a two-track system. The lucky ones were those whose applications listed Western academic training or language skills. These men were groomed for international missions and sent to an advanced course lasting three months.
Those in the second rank were Jihadists without higher education and those who had less fervent ideas about martyrdom. These men were given three weeks of infantry training, an AK-47, and a blanket and were sent into Afghanistan to harass the fleeing Russians. They were cannon fodder.
The advanced camps were open to second-tier recruits who distinguished themselves in combat, but Osama could afford to be choosy about whom he trained. No one was admitted who did not meet Osama’s increasingly bigoted religious convictions.
Though he was not at the meeting, Ayman Zawahiri had been instrumental in urging Osama to form Al Qaeda. Zawahiri knew that Abdul Azzam objected strongly to both his Takfiri leanings and the Egyptian’s growing influence over his former student.
The prize was more than Osama’s esteem and affection: It was his money. For Azzam, who was less mercenary than Zawahiri, this behind-the-scenes struggle was not for capital, but for the soul and purpose of the Afghan Jihad. Azzam cared deeply about what would happen to both the Afghan people and the Arab fighters he had assembled to help fight the Russian invaders.
For Zawahiri, the squabble was not about the Afghan Jihad, but about a broader conflict—a battle for the entire world. Zawahiri did not care a fig for the Afghan people, and not much more about Osama bin Laden. He had repeatedly urged Osama to put himself into harm’s way. When the Russians failed to make a martyr out of him, Zawahiri sought to convert Osama to his own opinions about global Jihad, and take over Al Qaeda from the inside, by surrounding the pliable young millionaire with yes-men and his own cronies. The prize for Zawahiri was the fortune amassed by the Services Bureau: almost unlimited cash with which to wage his own version of Jihad—first against Egypt and then against the entire world.
To accomplish these ends, Zawahiri intended to take Azzam out of the picture, politically, if possible, but physically if necessary. The doctor started a rumor that Osama decided to form Al Qaeda because Azzam’s creation, the Services Bureau, had been infiltrated by the Central Intelligence Agency. In the armed and dangerous atmosphere of Peshawar, Zawahiri’s rumor mongering was much more serious than mere gossip.
The currents swirling around Osama were Byzantine. Prince Turki, the chief of Saudi intelligence, also wanted Azzam taken down. Abdullah Azzam was a Palestinian, and had helped to found the terrorist organization Hamas just the year before. Saudi intelligence was always suspicious that Azzam’s ultimate loyalties were not to Osama or the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, but to Palestine. They worried that an Al Qaeda headed by Azzam would pull young Saudi fighters into the orbit of the Muslim Brotherhood, the same men who killed Anwar Sadat. Still reeling from the assassination of King Faisal, Saudi Arabia did not want a problem on the home front.
Saudi Prince Turki knew that civil war in Afghanistan was a foregone conclusion. Even as victory loomed bright, the several Afghani insurgent groups were turning on each other. The Saudis wanted an organization to see to their interests as Afghanistan was either divided up or brought to heel after the Soviet departure. Prince Turki wanted Al Qaeda in the hands of someone he thought would be compliant. Turki knew Bin Laden well enough to know that he was easy to influence—what the prince did not count on was that someone as manipulative as he was had inserted themselves close to Osama and was now pulling the strings.
As the summer burned, Zawahiri turned up the heat on his rival Azzam, this time accusing him of diverting money from the Services Bureau for his own use. These charges were false, but the principle of al-Takeyya allowed Zawahiri to lie about anything he wanted. The embezzlement scandal echoed through Peshawar, and redoubled when Zawahiri had placards put up around the city demanding that Azzam face trial. The personal enmity between the two men grew as Zawahiri forced Abdullah Azzam off the boards of several mosques and hospitals and continued a vindictive campaign to discredit him.
Abdullah Azzam was highly educated and politically adroit, but he did not comprehend the forces lining up against him. His underestimation of Ayman Zawahiri would cost him dearly.
On August 17, 1988, a C-130 aircraft carrying the president o
f Pakistan, Zia ul Huq, took off from Bahawalpur airbase three-hundred miles south of the capital Islamabad. Ground control radar tracked the aircraft as it suddenly pitched into a near vertical dive, smashed into the ground, and exploded. Killed instantly along with Pakistan’s president were the American ambassador, Arnold Raphel, the chief of staff of the Pakistani armed forces, and several dozen high-ranking Pakistani military officers. There were no survivors.
The nation of Pakistan was stunned and teetered on the brink of revolution.
The public summaries of a pair of top secret investigations pointed to a catastrophic failure of the aircraft’s hydraulic system. This seemed an impossibly unlikely event, as the C-130 had a decades-long record as an extremely reliable and durable aircraft, even in combat. No one wanted to call it a bombing.
The Pakistani investigation hinted obliquely that the crash might have occurred because the pilots became “incapacitated.”
Just who killed President Zia may never be known, but the head of Pakistan’s intelligence service, General Hammed Gul, was convinced that the crash was the result of a “conspiracy involving a foreign power.”
Almost three decades later, American intelligence officials would admit privately that the Soviet Union was probably behind the crash. It was KGB payback for nine years of bloody, miserable war.
Osama, and those around him, took it for granted that President Zia had been killed by the Russians.
In May, a Soviet-made antitank mine was found in a mosque attached to a Services Bureau facility. The bomb had been intended to kill everyone in the building. Al Qaeda redoubled its security efforts, triple-screened all new applicants, and reformed Osama’s personal protection detail.
The security situation in Peshawar was deteriorating: bombings, bank robberies, and politically motivated hits had become daily events and Osama thought it might be a good time to put himself beyond the reach of Soviet retaliation. He packed up to go home.
SEAL Target Geronimo: The Inside Story of the Mission to Kill Osama Bin Laden Page 15
