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 had 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 lull-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.
Those who do not understand Arabic—these authors included—might interpret these utterances as the birth of the dragon that the Western media now calls “al Qaeda.” Not so, recent scholarship suggests. The word does mean “the foundation” or “the base”—and other things, for such is Arabic. More than one future bin Laden militant, though, would say he never heard the name “al Qaeda”—referring to an organiza
tion or fighting entity—before 9/11. Bin Laden himself would not refer to “members of al Qaeda” until shortly before 9/11.
“He rang me to explain,” Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi said of a call from bin Laden after the anti-Soviet conflict. “He said al Qaeda was an organization to record the names of the mujahideen and all their contact details: a database.… So wherever jihad needed fighting, in the Philippines or Central Asia or anywhere in the world, you could get in touch with the fighters quickly.”
All the same, a seed had been sown.
The ISI chief of the day, Hamid Gul, was asked in 1989 whether it had not been “playing with fire” to bring in Muslim radicals. “We are fighting a jihad,” Gul replied. “The communists have their international brigades, the West has NATO, why can’t the Muslims unite and form a common front?”
Gul was replaced as head of ISI by Benazir Bhutto, the moderate, Western-educated prime minister who had come to power in Pakistan the previous year. At a private meeting with President George H. W. Bush, she said, “I mentioned that in our common zeal to most effectively combat the Soviets in Afghanistan, our countries had made a strategic decision to empower the most fanatical elements of the mujahideen.… I sadly said to President Bush, ‘Mr. President, I’m afraid we have created a Frankenstein’s monster that could come back to haunt us in the future.’ ”
THE FUTURE CAST of 9/11’s characters was now waiting in the wings. Ayman al-Zawahiri, a doctor by training, led a clique of militant Egyptians in Afghanistan. Though his specialty was eye surgery, he had dealt with every sort of injury and ailment during the conflict—including bin Laden’s chronic low blood pressure. One day, he would become bin Laden’s principal cohort. Bin Laden and Mohammed Atef, who would become his strategist and senior commander, had fought side by side. All three of them knew Omar Abdel Rahman, the incendiary preacher later to be known in the West as the “Blind Sheikh.”
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who would one day claim to have been the principal planner of 9/11, was in his mid-twenties in 1989. Ramzi Yousef, who would lead a first attempt to destroy the World Trade Center, was still at college. Both of them were passionately hostile to the United States because of its support for Israel.
Mohamed Atta, who was to lead the 9/11 hijackers, was just twenty-one and studying architecture at Cairo University. His future fellow “pilots,” Hani Hanjour, Ziad Jarrah, and Marwan al-Shehhi, were seventeen, fourteen, and eleven.
As a little boy, Jarrah had lived near the refugee camp where hundreds of Palestinian refugees had been slaughtered—by Christian militiamen with the knowledge of Israeli commanders—during Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon.
The plight of the Palestinians, the rise and rise of Israel, and America’s consistent support of Israel preoccupied bin Laden from very early on. His mother has recalled him, as a teenager, being “concerned, sad, and frustrated about the situation in Palestine in particular.” It was essential, bin Laden said even then, “to reclaim Palestine.”
By the mid-1980s, bin Laden was already speaking out publicly about boycotting American products. He would not drink Coca-Cola, Pepsi, or 7-Up, or allow his children to drink such beverages. “The Americans take our money,” he recalled saying, “and give it to the Jews so that they can kill our children with it in Palestine.” “Our” children, because Palestinians were fellow Arabs, part of the wider Arab community. He was to raise the Palestine issue and excoriate American support for Israel time and again—until as recently as 2009.
The 1982 Israeli assault on Lebanon, bin Laden said after 9/11, made a lasting impression on him. “America allowed the Israelis to invade Lebanon,” he declared. “They started bombing, killing and wounding many.… I still remember those distressing scenes: blood, torn limbs, women and children massacred.… It was like a crocodile devouring a child, who could do nothing but scream.… The whole world heard and saw what happened, but did nothing.”
It was then, bin Laden asserted, that something like 9/11 first occurred to him. He watched, presumably on television, as Israel bombarded the high-rise apartment blocks that housed many Palestinians in Beirut. “The idea came to me,” he asserted, “when things went just too far with the American-Israeli alliance’s oppression and atrocities against our people in Palestine and Lebanon.… As I looked at those destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me to punish the oppressor in kind by destroying towers in America, so that it would get a taste of its own medicine.”
“The events of Manhattan,” he would say on an audiotaped message broadcast after 9/11, “were retaliation against the American-Israeli alliance’s aggression against our people in Palestine and Lebanon.”
PERHAPS SO. While he was still the hero home from the war, though, a further grievance against the United States arose on his home territory—one that, for bin Laden and many other Saudis—loomed at least as large as Palestine.
NINETEEN
IN AUGUST 1990, OSAMA BIN LADEN STOCKED UP ON FOOD SUPPLIES, candles, gas masks, and portable communications equipment. In the event of the need for a quick getaway, he had a more powerful engine fitted to the boat he kept at the family marina. At home, he got his sons to help him cover the windows with adhesive tape. The tape, he explained, was in case of bombing, to protect the family from broken glass.
Bombing was a possibility. Saddam Hussein’s army had overrun neighboring Kuwait and appeared poised to push on into Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden despised the Iraqi president, whom he considered an unbeliever. Saddam, he predicted, “will attack Saudi Arabia for possession of the oilfields in the eastern province.”
Oil was what mattered, the one thing that really mattered, to all the nations involved. It was the only reason, certainly, that Saudi Arabia had ever mattered to the Americans. “The defense of Saudi Arabia,” President Franklin Roosevelt had said back in 1943, “is vital to the defense of the United States.” Half a century on and within twenty-four hours of the Iraqi invasion, the first President Bush now made a promise. “If you ask for help from the United States,” he told Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar, “we will go all the way with you.”
Four days later, at King Fahd’s seaside palace in Jeddah, a senior U.S. delegation told the monarch what a request for help would mean. Some 300,000 Iraqi troops and almost three thousand tanks were threatening the border. To drive them back and throw them out of Kuwait, General Norman Schwarzkopf explained, would mean “flooding his airfields, harbors and military bases with tens of thousands more Americans than Saudi Arabia had ever seen.”
To allow a foreign and overwhelmingly Christian army to enter the country—the sacred land of the Prophet—would be seen by much of the Saudi population as heinous sacrilege. Everything in the country, everything, revolved around religion. “This is something that a Westerner will never understand,” one of the royals, Prince Amr, later explained to a foreigner. “Religion is the law.… It is rooted in the history. It is part of the DNA, if you like, of the Saudis.”
At least a third of the Saudi school curriculum was devoted to religious study. Holy writ, children were taught, held that “the last hour won’t come before the Muslims fight the Jews and the Muslims kill them.” This was a land with a religious police, a Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, empowered to raid people’s homes, make arrests, and use physical force to compel obedience to religious rules. Censors blacked out any part of a foreign newspaper or magazine that contained comment on Saudi Arabia, any reference to Israel—or illustrations that showed even an inch of a woman’s limbs or neck.
This was a land where extremism ruled, from the preposterous to the barbaric: where oil dollars built a concert hall in which no performance was permitted, where Islamic courts ruled against the playing of music on phone recordings; where ownership of a Christian Bible could—and shortly would—lead to public execution by beheading.
According to the incumbent Grand Mufti, the nation’s highest official of religious law, it was “a requirement of Muslims to be
hostile to the Jews and the Christians and other polytheists.” “The unbelievers,” he wrote, “are the enemy, do not trust them.”
The notion of inviting in an American army to fight off the Iraqis, then, was unthinkable. At the meeting with the U.S. delegation, the royals present held a brief animated exchange in Arabic. Crown Prince Abdullah urged King Fahd not to make a decision until tribal and religious leaders had been consulted. Fahd, however, had already made up his mind. Better to take a risk domestically than to lose the throne, to lose the entire country, to Saddam Hussein. The king reportedly turned to Dick Cheney—then secretary of defense—and said, “Okay.”
With those two syllables, Fahd had authorized a U.S. military presence that would eventually total half a million men—and not only men. How, in Saudi Arabia, to deal with the problem of female American soldiers—working in the heat—showing their forearms in public? Schwarzkopf promised that no female entertainers would be brought in to entertain the troops—only for the king to complain when CNN ran pictures of soldiers applauding female dancers. Only the dancers’ legs were shown, but that was beyond the pale.
How to deal with Christmas carols in a Saudi war zone? Schwarzkopf solved the problem—more or less—by ensuring that only instrumental versions were broadcast. All Christian and Jewish emblems, he ordered, were to be concealed or removed from uniforms.
Where could Jewish soldiers serving with the U.S. force observe the Sabbath? The Americans told the Saudis they would ferry them to naval ships at sea for the occasion. Senior Saudis, for their part, agreed to turn a blind eye to American soldiers bringing Bibles into the country.
All those issues aside, the military offensive to oust the Iraqis had to be launched before March—the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden Page 23