News of the decision to allow in U.S. troops stunned ordinary Saudis. For bin Laden, it came as a cultural thunderbolt. “Pollution,” he said, hung in the air around anyone who was not a Muslim. As a renowned Afghan war hero, with a following of loyal veterans, he fooled himself into thinking he could offer a viable alternative.
Bin Laden obtained meetings with several royals, including Interior Minister Prince Naif and Defense Minister Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz. An imam present at one of the audiences, Professor Khalil-Khalil, recalled how bin Laden “kept asking the government officials in the room why they had brought the Americans into this war … said he wanted to fight alongside the Saudi army. The Prince asked bin Laden whether or not he had his own army. Bin Laden said that he did, and that he had a 20,000 person standing army, with 40,000 in reserves.” His proposals were militarily preposterous on their face.
Not satisfied with seeing senior ministers, however, bin Laden requested an audience with the king himself. The request went nowhere, not least because bin Laden had said that he “didn’t care about King Fahd, only about Allah.” He was sent on his way with a royal “Don’t call us. We’ll call you.”
Bin Laden personally got away with this. The hundred or so war veterans he had brought into the country, however, and some of his personal staff were arrested. They were released only after bin Laden had made a string of calls to various princes. Unrepentant, he then began speaking out in public, arranging the distribution of flyers and audiotapes that claimed Saudi Arabia was becoming “a colony of America.”
The United States, meanwhile, leading a coalition of troops from thirty-two nations—including Saudi Arabia and several Muslim countries—duly recaptured Kuwait. Iraq was routed, at huge cost in men and matériel, in the brilliant operation remembered as Desert Storm. Even had bin Laden been able to resign himself to a temporary American presence, however, there was now a further affront. After the war, contrary to what he and like-minded objectors had hoped, some five thousand American troops and several bases remained. The American military did not leave Saudi Arabia.
IT WAS, FATEFULLY, bin Laden who departed. The precise reason that he left, and under what conditions, is lost in the fog of conflicting information supplied by Saudi and CIA sources. The shapes in that fog may tell us something.
To at least some in the Saudi government, bin Laden had become a political pest at a difficult time. In the groundswell of protest over the U.S. presence, his very public dissent was galling. So was his attempt to use his veterans for a new jihad, against the communist regime that controlled part of neighboring Yemen. Bin Laden’s passport was reportedly seized, his movements within Saudi Arabia restricted.
Then suddenly, in April 1991, he was cleared to travel. “One day,” his son Omar recalled, “my father disappeared without telling us anything.” He had gone to Pakistan—supposedly to attend an Islamic conference, or look after a business matter. “We didn’t say, ‘Get out!’ ” Prince Bandar has said. “He left because he thought it was getting to the point where what he was saying and doing was not going to be accepted.”
The truth was probably not so simple. The whole purpose of confiscating bin Laden’s passport, after all, had been to prevent him going abroad to make trouble. Why return it? One Saudi intelligence source said bin Laden was told he should leave because “the U.S. government was planning to kill him … so the royal family would do him a favor and get him out of the kingdom for his own protection.” This makes no sense. Bin Laden had as yet perpetrated no crimes against the United States. As yet, Washington had no motive to want him dead.
Accounts vary as to the circumstances of bin Laden’s departure. Former senior CIA officer Michael Scheuer has written that he managed to leave by “using the intervention of his brothers to convince the Saudi officials to let him travel on condition he would return.…” Author Lawrence Wright, for his part, wrote that many “prominent princes and sheikhs” interceded on his behalf. Interior minister Naif authorized the departure, but only after bin Laden signed “a pledge that he would not interfere with the politics of Saudi Arabia or any Arab country.”
Out of the Kingdom, bin Laden would be free to pursue jihad. That, in the context of fighting for Islam, would be very much in line with Saudi foreign policy. If this scenario is accurate, the long-term implications are grave.
Just who did launch bin Laden on his career as international terrorist? In a little noted passage, the 9/11 Commission Report stated as fact that he had gotten out of Saudi Arabia “with help from a dissident member of the royal family.” The Commission had this information from three of bin Laden’s close associates. Some believe that there were dissidents among the royal princes, men who continued to sympathize with bin Laden’s views and to support him for years to come. Until and perhaps even after 9/11.
Troubling clues that raise suspicion as to the true role of the Saudis, and particularly the activity of certain Saudi royals, proliferate throughout this story.
“GO TO SUDAN,” a friend in the government had advised bin Laden. “You can organize a holy war from there.”
An Islamic regime had recently come to power in Sudan, and bin Laden had been buying up land in that desperately poor North African country. So it was, in the summer of 1991, that he made Khartoum his destination. His four wives and their children—fourteen by now—arrived later direct from Saudi Arabia. They were whisked through the airport, ushered into luxury cars, and driven away in style. As a hero of jihad, and a very generous millionaire, bin Laden was the guest of Sudan’s president.
Bin Laden and his family were to stay for five years. They took over several houses in a wealthy suburb of Khartoum, a three-story home and large garden for the wives and children, three houses for the servants and security men, an office, and a guesthouse where bin Laden received visitors. The family dwelling had some European furniture and a profusion of blue cushions laid out Arab-style but not a single picture to decorate the walls.
In this new setting, bin Laden continued to insist on austerity. Modern conveniences were to his mind contrary to Muslim law or just plain extravagant. On a visit to Sudan, the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi asked him why his robe appeared all wrinkled. “You know how many kilowatts of electricity an iron consumes?” bin Laden asked. “I don’t need an iron. I’m trying to live my life without electricity.” He told his wives not to use the refrigerator, the electric stoves, or—in the searing heat—the air-conditioning.
Bin Laden’s sons attended the best private school in Sudan, while the girls went to no school at all. Instead, they got rudimentary lessons at home, from an aunt. Bin Laden did not approve of formal education for girls. He had more time for his children now, though they might have preferred otherwise. Omar recalled how he and his brothers were punished. “His wooden cane was his favorite weapon.… It was not unusual for the sons of bin Laden to be covered with raised welts on our backs and legs.”
If he thought his sons had defied him, bin Laden could turn apoplectic with rage. Once, when he told Omar to wash an honored guest’s hands—in line with bin Laden’s reading of the correct etiquette—the visitor demurred, saying he would wash himself. Omar handed over the water jug accordingly, only to have his father misconstrue what was happening. “Why do you embarrass me?” he bellowed. “Why should he wash your hands? You are a nobody!” So angry was his father, Omar recalled, that “spit spewed from his mouth.”
Notwithstanding patriarchal explosions, first wife Najwa found a measure of contentment in Sudan. “My husband did not travel so much.… He had arrangements with high officials in the Sudanese government to build roads and factories.… Osama’s favorite undertaking was working the land, growing the best corn and the biggest sunflowers.… Nothing made my husband happier than showing off his huge sunflowers.”
Eighteen months later, in his first interview of substance with a Western journalist, bin Laden described himself as merely an “agriculturalist” and “construction engineer.” Using
the bulldozers and other equipment he had once used to build roads for the mujahideen in Afghanistan, he said, he and his men had undertaken a major highway project for the benefit of the Sudanese people.
The reporter, the British Independent’s Robert Fisk, looked carefully at his interviewee. With his high cheekbones and narrowed eyes, resplendent in a gold-fringed robe, he thought bin Laden looked “every inch the mountain warrior of mujahideen legend.” Was there truth to the rumors, Fisk ventured, that he had brought his Arab veterans to the Sudan to train for future jihad? That, bin Laden said, was “the rubbish of the media.”
Bin Laden had not, however, forgotten jihad. Several hundred of his jihadis had indeed migrated to the Sudan. This was a place and a time for training—and hatching plots.
Bin Laden’s mentor, Azzam, had once called for worldwide war to recover all territory that had historically been part of Islam. “Jihad,” he had written, “will remain an individual obligation until all other lands that were Muslim are returned to us … before us lie Palestine, Bokhara [part of Uzbekistan], Lebanon, Chad, Eritrea, Somalia, the Philippines, Burma, Southern Yemen, Tashkent [also in Uzbekistan] and Andalusia [the region of southern Spain that the Arabs had ruled until the late fifteenth century].”
If bin Laden’s ambitions did not reach as far into a fantasy Islamic future as Azzam’s, they were grand nonetheless. The task of the young men who joined jihad, bin Laden was to say, was to struggle in “every place in which non-believers’ injustice is perpetrated against Muslims.” With his approval and often with his funding, terrorism in the cause of Islam was on the rise.
• • •
AT ALMOST EXACTLY the time bin Laden arrived in Sudan, another man began working with a Muslim separatist group in the Philippines. He told his contacts he was an “emissary from bin Laden,” acting on behalf of Blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman—by then preaching jihad in the United States. He used many names, but the name by which the self-proclaimed “emissary” is known today is Ramzi Yousef.
Bin Laden was one day to claim he did not know Yousef. Yet the links were there. And soon, Yousef would lead the first attempt to bring down the World Trade Center.
TWENTY
HE WAS IN HIS MID-TWENTIES, LEAN, DIMINUTIVE. HE HAD DEGREES in chemistry and electrical engineering. At college in the United Kingdom, where he had studied, he was thought of as “hard-working, conscientious.” A senior FBI official would one day describe him as “poised, articulate, well-educated.” He spoke not only English but several other languages.
Ramzi Yousef was more political than he was fanatically religious. The Palestinian blood he claimed, he said, made him “Palestinian by choice,” and he believed America’s support for Israel gave all Muslims “the right to regard themselves as in a state of war with the U.S. government.”
It had been the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, however, that first brought Yousef to jihad. In the Afghan training camps, during a break from his studies in Britain, he learned about explosives—learned so well, some said, that he rapidly became an instructor. Fellow trainees dubbed him “the Chemist.”
Once America had become the enemy, Yousef’s talent made him a deadly adversary. In midsummer 1992, speaking in code on the phone with a like-thinking friend, he referred to his “chocolate training.” The friend did not at first understand so he said simply, “Boom!,” adding that he was going to work in the United States. The friend got the gist.
In New York two years earlier, Blind Sheikh Rahman had preached the need to “break and destroy the morale of the enemies of Allah.” It should be done, he said, by “exploding the structure of their civilized pillars … the touristic infrastructure which they are proud of, and their high buildings.” He and those around him, an FBI informant recalled, often talked of “targeting American symbols.”
The same month Yousef spoke of a mission to America involving explosives, the Blind Sheikh made a phone call to Pakistan. Within weeks, arriving on September 1, the Chemist and an accomplice flew First Class from Karachi to New York’s Kennedy Airport.
The mission almost failed before it began, when the accomplice was stopped by Immigration. He was found to be carrying a false Swedish passport, a Saudi passport that had been altered, Jordanian and British passports, instructions on document forgery, rubber stamps for altering the seal on Saudi passports—and what turned out to be bomb-making instructions. Yousef also raised suspicions. In addition to an Iraqi passport, which turned out to be phony, he was carrying ID in the name of his traveling companion.
The companion was detained and would later be jailed. Yousef, who requested asylum on the grounds that he was fleeing persecution in Iraq, was admitted to the country pending a hearing. He headed at once, investigators later came to believe, for the Al Khifa center in Brooklyn, a focal point for Arabs bound for and returning from Afghanistan. A contact there took him, at least once, to see Blind Sheikh Rahman, the man who had called for exploding America’s “high buildings.”
Over the months that followed, in various apartments in Jersey City—just across the Hudson River from his target—Yousef the Chemist did the work he had come to do. He and accomplices acquired what he needed: 1,000 pounds of urea, 105 gallons of nitric acid, 60 gallons of sulfuric acid, three tanks of compressed hydrogen. At the apartment where the chemicals were mixed, walls became stained, metal items corroded.
By February 25, 1993, all was ready. Yousef and two accomplices loaded the bomb, packed in four large cardboard boxes, into a rented Econoline van. The cylinders of hydrogen, along with containers of nitroglycerine, blasting caps, and fuses, were laid alongside them.
Just after noon the following day, the bombers parked the van in a garage beneath the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Yousef lit the fuses with a cigarette lighter, closed the doors, and made his escape in a waiting car.
The bomb exploded just before 12:18 P.M. At 1,200 pounds, the FBI would rate it “the largest by weight and by damage of any improvised explosive device that we’ve seen since the inception of forensic explosive identification”—more than sixty years earlier.
A mile away, people thought there had been an earthquake. Beneath the ground—the Trade Center reached seven stories below the surface—the bomb opened a crater four stories deep. Burning cars hung from ruined parking levels “like Christmas tree ornaments.” The explosion devastated an underground train station.
Above the explosion point, the blast rocketed upward, cut power, stopped elevators in mid-journey. One elevator, crammed with schoolchildren, was stranded for five hours. Smoke rose as high as the 82nd floor, and thousands of people rushed for the stairwells. Some crowded around windows as if planning to jump—eerily prefiguring the fatal plunges of almost a decade later.
Miraculously, for all the damage, only six people were killed—even though some hundred thousand people worked in or visited the Trade Center complex on an average weekday. More than a thousand were injured, however, sending more people to the hospital—it is said—than any event on the American mainland since the Civil War.
“If they had found the exact architectural Achilles’ heel,” an FBI explosives specialist said of the tower that was hit, “or if the bomb had been a little bit bigger—not much more, 500 lbs. more—I think it would have brought her down.” Yousef would later tell investigators he had wanted to bring the North Tower crashing down on its twin, killing—he hoped—the quarter of a million people he imagined used the complex each day.
He had arranged for a communiqué to be mailed to the press in the name of the “Liberation Army,” saying that the attack had been carried out in response to “the American political, economical, and military support to Israel.… The American people are responsible for the actions of their government.”
When Yousef learned that the bombing had only partially succeeded, he phoned an accomplice to dictate a new ending to the communiqué. It read: “Our calculations were not very accurate this time. However, we promise you that the next t
ime it will be very precise and the World Trade Center will continue to be one [of] our targets.”
Yousef apparently phoned in the amendment from a First Class lounge at Kennedy Airport. An hour or so later he was gone, safe aboard an airliner bound for Pakistan.
Thanks to brilliant forensic work, most of the accomplices Yousef left behind were swiftly tracked down and jailed. The bomber himself, though identified, remained at large to plot new mayhem. By January 1995, he was back in the Philippines, with a dual focus. He intended a bombing during the visit to the Pacific region by Pope John Paul II, and—most fiendish and complex of all—a series of bombings of American airliners.
The plot against the Pope proved Yousef’s undoing. The plot to bring down U.S. airliners—little understood at the time—was a turning point on the road to 9/11.
ON THE NIGHT of Friday, January 6, 1995, in Manila, smoke was reported billowing out of an apartment building just a block from the papal nunciature, where Pope John Paul would be staying. A patrolman reported that there was nothing to worry about—“Just some Pakistanis,” he said, “playing with firecrackers.”
Unconvinced, senior police inspector Aida Fariscal decided to take a look for herself. Told that the smoke had come from Suite 603 in the apartment building, and that its two tenants had fled during the initial panic, she asked to see inside. The apartment turned out to be crammed with chemicals in plastic containers, cotton soaked in acrid-smelling fluid, funnels, thermometers, fusing systems, electrical wiring, and explosives instructions in Arabic.
As Fariscal and the officers with her stared at their find, the doorman told them that one of the missing tenants had come back to retrieve something that had been left behind. He spotted the police and started running, but was caught and hauled back to headquarters. The man, who claimed he was “Ahmed Saeed,” an innocent tourist, was handed over to agents at a military installation. They were not gentle with him.
The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden Page 24