FOUR

The Young Man from Saudi Arabia

There is no eyewitness account of Osama bin Laden’s first meeting with Abdullah Azzam, though some things about it can be supposed. Probably it took place in one of the gated houses in Peshawar that Azzam used in his recruitment efforts. The two men would have sat on a carpet on the floor in traditional Arabic fashion, leaning their backs against the wall, drinking sugared tea and, in the spirit of Islamic piety, sprinkling their conversation with references to Allah, phrases like, “God willing,” or “Praise be to God.” The reports on bin Laden at the time have it that he was charming, modest, deferential. After only a few weeks in Peshawar, he seems to have gone back to Saudi Arabia and raised money for Azzam’s cause, and then, when he returned to Pakistan, his largess gained him a reputation as a loyal friend of what were coming to be called the Arab Afghans, the men from all over the Arab world who were making common cause with the Afghan guerrillas in the anti-Soviet struggle.

Bin Laden, who, at six-five was visually striking, doled out gifts—money to bereaved families, cashew nuts and chocolates to wounded fighters, watches or shoes to people who didn’t have watches or shoes. He became an emir, an informal title for a man of distinction and substance to whom respect and loyalty are due. Reporters covering the war in Afghanistan began hearing stories of the Saudi Good Samaritan who had imported bulldozers and other equipment to build roads and tunnels in Afghanistan, even that he used to drive the bulldozers himself, despite the Soviet helicopter gunships that flew overhead.1 Eventually bin Laden and Azzam settled into a large house on Syed Jalaluddin Afghani Road in University Town, a quiet district of large masonry houses where the bougainvillea cascades over wrought-iron railings and the occasional Mercedes-Benz pulls through the metal security gates of a driveway. The leaders of various Afghan factions took over some of the houses there and they would hold court in them, receiving visitors while all around men in turbans and brown homespun vests worn over flowing tunics sat on rugs and leaned their backs against the walls listening to the visitor and their leader converse. Azzam and bin Laden’s house was given the name Beit al-Ansar, House of the Faithful. Bin Laden liked to stay up late there discussing theological matters—the passages in the Koran in which the Prophet expounded on a Muslim’s obligations to Allah or the histories of the great warriors of Islamic history, like Saladin, who defeated the Crusaders.

Not far from the Beit al-Ansar in University Town was the American consulate and the American Cultural Center, with its library and cafeteria. There is no record that bin Laden ever visited there, but he might have. His hatred of America seems to have come later. Now, the United States itself was apt to see the anti-Soviet forces in Afghanistan as “freedom fighters,” not potential terrorist enemies, so bin Laden and Washington were on the same side. In 1981, as the United States began publicly to support the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan with money and weapons, President Ronald Reagan dedicated a space shuttle flight to the insurgents who he clearly saw as a Cold War weapon. “We cannot and will not turn our backs on this struggle,” Reagan said, making his dedication standing next to an Afghan student named Nahid Mojadidi. At the time, there was no good reason to suspect that a person like bin Laden would be any more hostile than that Afghan student. Indeed, had anybody thought much about him at the time, which nobody did, they would have concluded that he would be a likely American ally. He was from Saudi Arabia, a friendly, moderate Arab country. Unlike most of the Arab fighters who came to the Beit al-Ansar, bin Laden knew the West. He had vacationed in Sweden with his family when he was a boy. He wore bell-bottomed pants that summer and short-sleeved shirts. As a teenager, he had spent a summer in Oxford, England, studying English. Before that, back in Saudi Arabia, he had studied at an elite Western-style school called Al-Thagh, where an English tutor, Brian Fyfield-Shayler, remembers him as a shy boy, tall and good-looking.

“He also stood out as he was singularly gracious and polite,” Fyfield-Shayler told an English newspaper, “and had a great deal of inner confidence.”2

One of the first to come to the Beit al-Ansar was a young Algerian named Boujema Bounouar, who went by the nom de guerre Abdullah Anas. Anas had a long career with bin Laden, beginning in the mid-1980s and lasting until he defected in the 1990s, and he is a rare eyewitness to the program created by Azzam and bin Laden to forge a Muslim international out of the turmoil of the Afghan war. Anas, who told his story in London where he now lives, was a teacher in Algeria in 1984 when he read in a weekly news magazine about a fatwa, a religious ruling, making it a Muslim duty to wage war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. It was the kind of pronouncement that emerged out of the theological netherworld in those days, with religious leaders like Azzam himself drawing on more ancient theories of Islamic revivalism, striving to re-create the glorious days of Saladin and other champions of the faithful who fought and defeated the infidels, especially, in Saladin’s case, the Crusader infidels. That year, Anas participated in the hajj, the annual pilgrimage that brings millions of Muslims every year to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, and there, standing in the marble expanse of the Great Mosque with 50,000 others, a friend pointed out Azzam himself. Anas introduced himself. The two men talked. A week later Anas was on a flight from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan.

In Peshawar he called the only number he had, and Azzam offered him a place to stay in his own house, a bustling salon frequented by students and scholars inspired by the battles being fought against godless Communism in Afghanistan. It was there that Anas caught sight of Azzam’s youngest daughter, whom he would marry five years later. And it was there that Azzam introduced him to bin Laden, identifying him in the traditional Arabic way, as Abu Abdullah, the father of Azzam’s eldest son, Abdullah. Anas had heard of the famous youngest son of the more than twenty sons of the man who owned one of the largest construction companies in the Arab world, the man who was donating his wealth to the Islamic cause.

The two men exchanged pleasantries. They discussed the war and the role in it to be played by volunteers from the Middle East like Anas himself. They talked in particular about how the Middle Easterners could teach the Afghans more about Islam and, indeed, Anas’s first role was to teach the Koran to Afghan mujahedeen. The Afghans learned it by rote in Arabic, the holy language of Islam, which none of the Afghans understood. At the time, according to Anas, there were no more than a few dozen Arabs in the country, working with the rebels. None spoke the Afghan languages—Pashtun or Dari or Hazari or Uzbek. After a few months, Anas trekked into Afghanistan to join a combat unit, one of three Arabs traveling with a caravan of six hundred Afghan soldiers. He learned Dari, the Persian dialect that is Afghanistan’s lingua franca, and took on the role of mediator, traveling to different rebel camps and trying to smooth over the frequent feuds that erupted among them. He spent most of each year inside Afghanistan, eventually becoming a top aide to Commander Ahmed Shah Massoud, the legendary Uzbek fighter whose troops controlled northern Afghanistan—and who was assassinated in a suicide bombing just days before September 11.

At some point in the mid-1980s, bin Laden, who had commuted back and forth from Pakistan to Saudi Arabia, where he raised money directly and through a burgeoning network of supposedly charitable organizations, moved permanently to Peshawar. “He was one of the guys who came to jihad in Afghanistan,” Anas said. “But unlike the others, what he had was a lot of money. He’s not very sophisticated politically or organizationally. But he’s an activist with great imagination. He ate very little. He slept very little. Very generous. He’d give you his clothes. He’d give you his money.”

Bin Laden would sleep at the guest house in Peshawar on a cushion on the floor, and the simplicity of his lifestyle added to his growing reputation. Anas remembers Azzam saying, “You see this man has everything in his country. You see he lives with all the poor people in this room.” As Azzam raised money for his Office of Services, dispatching followers or going himself to Islamic centers around the world, including the United States, bin Laden became his chief partner, providing financial support and handling military affairs. He was a natural leader, possessed of a tranquil authority and an unshakable resolve.

“When you sit with Osama, you don’t want to leave the meeting,” Anas said. “You wish to continue talking to him because he is very calm, very fluent.”

In some ways Osama bin Laden is a prototype of a common kind of modern-day political figure, the child of wealth and privilege who devotes himself to overturning the establishment that gave him his privileges in the first place. Others among the dramatis personae in this story share that characteristic. Revolutions are not made by the downtrodden. The downtrodden are too preoccupied with sheer survival to devote themselves to revolutions, which require men and women from the middle class or higher, people with education, ambition, social consciences. And bin Laden was certainly well educated; economically, he was a good deal more than middle class, and he had a keen, if peculiar, social conscience.

His own father, Mohamed Awad bin Laden, was an illiterate bricklayer from the Hadramout Valley in Yemen, blind in one eye, who went to Saudi Arabia as a young man in the way that ambitious young Americans might have gone to Texas at that time—to make his fortune. It was 1930 or 1932; accounts on the exact date differ. Saudi Arabia had only recently been officially promulgated. Its leader was the vigorous Abdul-Aziz ibn Saud, who had combined the strict religious doctrine known as Wahhabism with the conquest of neighboring tribes to unify most of the Arabian Peninsula—except for Yemen in the south and the Gulf principalities to the east—and place it under his rule. The senior bin Laden’s first job was as a bricklayer with Aramco, the Arabian-American Oil Company. Soon he started his own construction company and somehow developed a close relationship with Abdul-Aziz, winning a major contract to build a highway from Jeddah, the Saudi capital, to the resort town of Taif. After that, he got a contract to extend the Holy Mosque complex in Mecca, and then a foreign contractor withdrew from a deal to build a highway between Medina and Jeddah, and bin Laden got that job too.

He became exceedingly wealthy. In an interview with the Al Jazeera cable television station in Qatar in 1998, his son Osama told how his father restored the Saudi holy places free of charge, as a sign of his piety, but while he may well not have charged for his work, he does not seem to have been an especially religious man. By the 1970s, he had used his favored standing with the royal family to become the biggest construction magnate in Saudi Arabia, a country where there was a great deal of construction, paid for by the vast quantities of oil money that poured into the national treasury, and into the profligate hands of the many princes of the royal family. It is not clear exactly how rich bin Laden became—some say he was worth about $5 billion. Whatever the exact figure, like many wealthy men of the Middle East and elsewhere, he used his wealth to support his four wives and fifty-two children in lavish style.

Bin Laden senior died in a helicopter crash when Osama was eleven years old and some writers have seen a key to the son’s personality in that fact. Various reports on bin Laden give widely different figures for the amount of money that he inherited, anywhere from a few million to $300 million. In any case, he was rich, and over the years he used his money to attach himself to a series of older men, mentors, father figures, for guidance, Abdullah Azzam being among the first and most important of them. Whether or not that is the psychological truth, there was certainly something in Osama that made him different from the other bin Laden children—in fact that made him different from all the other children of the monied Saudi elite. Osama’s mother is the only one of Mohamed’s four wives who was not Saudi when he married her; she was a Syrian named Hamida, the daughter of a trader. Mohamed’s three Saudi wives were permanent, but he changed the fourth wife regularly, dispatching his pilot around the Middle East to bring candidates back to him, some of them as young as fifteen. A French engineer, interviewed by an English newspaper, said that Mohamed “changed wives like you or I change cars.”3

Hamida was twenty-two years old when Mohamed married her. Unlike the other wives, all of them traditional members of the orthodox Wahhabi sect, she was more inclined to wear Chanel suits than the veil. It is not clear whether Hamida was still married to Mohamed at the time of his death—the available reports differ on this point—but Mohamed was known to treat his former wives very well, setting them up in palaces of their own in Jeddah and Hijaz. Still, the status of his mother is one thing that might have set Osama, Hamida’s only child, apart from the children of Mohamed’s other wives. As the constantly rotating fourth wife, known as “the slave wife,” a foreigner, not devoutly religious, she was an outsider within both Saudi society and the house of bin Laden.

After Mohamed died, the family lived the life of the oil-rich elite, sending their sons to school abroad, taking European vacations. A family friend told the Times of London that in the nightclubs of Beirut, Osama was known as “a heavy drinker who often ended up embroiled in shouting matches and fistfights with young men over an attractive dancer or barmaid.” But clearly there was something in that life that the teenaged Osama rejected. Unlike some of his brothers, he did not go to school abroad. Instead he went to King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah to study management and economics, and it seems to be there that he was introduced to Islamic revivalism. He engaged in religious debates. He prayed and read. He also became a friend of Prince Turki bin-Faisal, a Saudi prince who later became chief of the Saudi intelligence service. Very likely he listened to tapes of Abdullah Aziz’s sermons.

Osama graduated in 1979 with the expectation that, like Mohamed’s other sons, he would go into the family business, now headed by Salem, his older half brother. But he didn’t. Certainly he knew of the exciting, thrilling, watershed events that took place that year. In February, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini established an Islamic republic in Iran, and declared the United States, the supporter of the overthrown former government of Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi, to be “the Great Satan.” The importance of Khomeini’s rise from years of imprisonment and exile to being the undisputed ruler of the ancient Persian civilization cannot be overestimated. Even though Iranian Muslims are Shias—followers of Ali, a nephew of the Prophet—and have bitter sectarian disputes with the orthodox Sunni sect, Khomeini was the first religious leader to take political power in centuries in Islam, and his model was a tremendous inspiration for the Islamic movement in general.

“After 1979, there was nobody within the Muslim world or outside it who was unaware of militant Islamism,” Gilles Kepel, a French scholar of Islam, has written. Khomeini’s principle grievance, moreover, was one that would be adopted by bin Laden and motivate his own campaign. More than anything else, it was the presence of American soldiers on Iranian soil, required by Iran’s dependence on American military equipment, that led him, as early as 1964, to accuse the shah of treasonously bartering away Iran’s sovereign dignity to the infidel Americans. When he came to power in 1979 after fifteen years of exile, Khomeini brought with him bands of followers thrilled with the idea of spreading the Islamic revolution elsewhere, and, among the slowly growing aftereffects of his seizure of power was the growth of Muslim-oriented parties among what had been secular movements.4 Azzam himself represents just such a tendency inside the Palestinian movement. Within a few years, other armed Islamic groups were emerging with direct Iranian sponsorship, including, most notably, the Hezbollah, or Party of God, of Lebanon, which formed in the Bekaa Valley to fight the country regarded as Islam’s main enemy, Israel. Among Khomeini’s great contributions to militant Islam, in addition, was the very public humbling of the United States, which took place when Iranian students, tacitly supported by their government, seized the American embassy in Teheran in 1979 and held the fifty-three Americans working there for more than a year. The only American attempt to rescue the hostages, an ill-conceived commando raid using helicopters based on ships in the Persian Gulf, ended disastrously, with the crash of one of the helicopters and the death of eight Americans in the desert. The failure of the rescue effort, with its widely disseminated pictures of Iranian soldiers poking at dead American soldiers with their bayonets, is still celebrated as a national holiday in Iran.

The Iranian revolution thus seemed both to promise a new dawn for the Islamic revival and to demonstrate the weakness of the United States, its existence as what the Chinese leader Mao Zedong used to call a paper tiger. And the prospect of revivalism on one side and decline on the other were surely inspiring to the young bin Laden. But there were other events in 1979 that also had an impact on him. In November, Islamic radicals seized the Holy Mosque in Mecca, and held it until they were defeated by government troops. This was an event that, bin Laden said in later interviews, powerfully affected him. And then, in the last few days of the year, the Soviet Union invaded Muslim Afghanistan, thereby unintentionally giving purpose and mission to the young Osama bin Laden, who, a few months later, turned up at Abdullah Azzam’s house in Peshawar.

For several years, as long as the anti-Soviet struggle took everything the foreign Muslims in Pakistan and Afghanistan were able to give it, the cooperation between bin Laden and Azzam seemed smooth. Azzam himself tirelessly set up offices abroad, including the one at the Al Kifah Center in Brooklyn, dispatching a follower named Mustafa Shalabi, an Egyptian, to run it. There, Arabs living in the United States congregated, some of them going to Afghanistan, others discussing the deplorable condition of the Arab world. The Al Kifah Center became a kind of American echo of Azzam’s Beit al-Ansar in Peshawar, a gathering point for disaffected Muslims drawn by the theories and goals of the Islamic Brotherhood, troubled by the secularism, the poverty, and the dictatorships of the Middle East. They read Al Jihad, an Arabic-language magazine put out by Azzam’s center in Peshawar but widely circulated in the United States and dedicated to heroic stories, illustrated in color, from the mujahedeen front lines in Afghanistan. According to Steven Emerson, Al Jihad had a circulation of about fifty thousand, half of it in the United States. Azzam himself made an American trip, attending an Islamic conference in Oklahoma City in 1988, where he gave a keynote address exhorting his listeners to jihad. Emerson, who has studied videotapes of the conference, reported that Islamic militants from around the world were there, including representatives of such radical organizations as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which set up stands for recruitment and fund-raising.5

But even as Islamic militants took advantage of the openness of American society to raise money and to recruit followers, divisions were appearing within the Office of Services back in Peshawar. Increasingly, the young Arabs who continued to be drawn there, and who were powerfully disaffected from the regimes that ruled their home countries, became frustrated over Azzam’s insistence that the movement support only the Afghan cause, which, it seemed to them, would have little effect on the plight of their own homelands. Azzam aimed in Afghanistan at attaching Arab-Afghans to Afghan guerrilla units headed by Afghan fighters, his belief being that they would be more readily accepted in Afghanistan that way. But the radical Arabs’ goal was to form a separate independent front made up of Arab troops who would then be available for other battles. Azzam’s vision in this sense was limited. Despite his superheated rhetoric, he seems to have been relatively cautious in action. He hesitated to extend the jihad to other countries, especially to Arab countries, and he knew that separately formed and led Arab fighting units would, as one observer of the debates on this question in Peshawar put it, be “uncontrollable” once the Afghan war was over and they returned to their home countries.6 But overthrowing those home governments was exactly what the more radical figures who came to Peshawar wanted, and they eventually won the all-important money man, bin Laden, to their point of view.

The quarrel with Azzam brought about several major changes. Among the most important, it gave prominence to the radical Egyptians, more sophisticated than Osama, older, more seasoned in the struggles of Islamic fundamentalism, who were soon to give a new shape to bin Laden’s role, to direct his attention from Afghanistan itself to other places in the world. Eventually, the Egyptians came to occupy most of the high positions in bin Laden’s terrorist organization Al Qaeda, especially the military positions—and the word military in Al Qaeda means terrorist operations, not conventional war. After September 11, the military commanders, most notably Mohammed Atef and the man known as Abu Zubeidah, became top targets of the American war in Afghanistan. But in these early stages, the two men who seem to play the key roles, both in fomenting discord among the Arab-Afghans and bringing jihad to the rest of the world, were Ayman Zawahiri and Omar Abdel Rahman.

Both of them had been implicated, though never convicted, in the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981. Both had spent time in Egyptian prisons and, when freed, had made their way to Abdullah Azzam’s house in Peshawar. Both believed in expanding the concept of jihad to include the causes of the Palestinians and of the downtrodden masses in Muslim countries ruled over by what they regarded as apostate Arab rulers, like Sadat himself. Zawahiri was a doctor from a distinguished family in Egypt who gave up the easy life to wage religious warfare. Abdel Rahman was a simple preacher from rural Egypt, a blind man, who, though now serving a life sentence in the United States for plotting terror attacks in New York, still has an avid, loyal, worshipful following among militant Muslims around the world.

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There is some videotape, shown on a Frontline television documentary, of Zawahiri behind bars in Egypt after the Sadat assassination, and only a brief look at it conveys the power of his personality. It was an extraordinary moment in Middle Eastern history. Sadat, the only Arab ruler up to then to make peace with Israel, had been murdered by his own troops during a military parade. The government of his successor, President Hosni Mubarak, began a wholesale roundup of Islamic militants, members of the Muslim Brotherhood and several more radical splinter groups who were suspected of having played roles in the assassination. There were widespread reports, denied by the Egyptian authorities, of torture. But during the trial, with the defendants grouped together behind barred cages, the militants themselves had a chance to speak while the cameras of the international press were rolling.

Zawahiri, the leader of the Egyptian Jihad, one of the radical Islamic groups that had broken away from the Muslim Brotherhood, was deputed to speak for them, and he did, shouting through the prison bars while the other prisoners from time to time interrupted his speech with chants. He wore a white skull cap and severe black-framed glasses. He had a thick black beard, and there is an ardent, urgent quality to his voice as he denounced, in close to perfect English, what he called “injustice, dictatorship, corruption.”

“We want to speak to the whole world,” he shouted. “Who are we? We are Muslims. We are Muslims who believed in their religion. We tried our best to establish a Muslim state and a Muslim society. We are the real Islamic Front against Zionism, Communism, and imperialism.” Zawahiri denounced the treatment of the several hundred men locked up with him. “We suffered the severest inhuman treatment. They kicked us, they beat us, they whipped us with electric cables, they shocked us with electricity, they hanged us from the edges of the door with our hands tied behind our backs.”7 Zawahiri at this point clasped his own hands together behind his back and raised them, imitating the torture. “They arrested our wives, our mothers, our fathers, our sisters and our sons in this trial to put the psychological pressure on these innocent prisoners.”

In fact, whether the prisoners were innocent or not is an open question, but there is no question about the righteous fury in Zawahiri’s voice. He is, in the words of W. B. Yeats, full of passionate intensity, and, it seems, he had been for most of his life.

Born in 1950 or 1951, Zawahiri came from one of Egypt’s best-known families. An uncle was the first secretary-general of the Arab League, his father a professor at Cairo University, his grandfather a famous religious scholar. But, like bin Laden, six years younger, Zawahiri rejected the privileged life he could have led. When he was fifteen years old, he was arrested for membership in the Muslim Brotherhood, which was outlawed in the time of Nasser. He went to medical school at Cairo University and while a student in the 1970s was a founder of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which was bitterly opposed to Sadat’s peace agreement with Israel and is believed to have recruited the army officers who assassinated him.

When, after the assassination, Zawahiri finished serving his three-year sentence in Egypt, he went back for a brief time to the practice of medicine near his family’s home in Cairo, but in 1984 he left Egypt for Pakistan in order to treat wounded guerrilla fighters. He became a kind of Islamic version of Che Guevara, the Argentine doctor who fought beside Fidel Castro in the Cuban revolution. According to an autobiography Zawahiri wrote and that was published in an Arabic newspaper in London, he set up an office of the Islamic Jihad in Peshawar in 1987 and published a magazine there called The Conquest. Like other Arab-Afghans, he made contact with Abdullah Azzam and, through him, met Osama bin Laden. The evidence is that, especially as bin Laden moved away from Azzam, Zawahiri became another of the older men to serve as models and guides for bin Laden.

Zawahiri’s own mentor was Omar Abdel Rahman, who, in that videotape of the Cairo trial, is seen sitting quietly in a cage as Zawahiri makes his oration. Abdel Rahman was accused of having issued the fatwa that justified the Sadat assassination. That was not proved at trial and Abdel Rahman went free. In fact, the issue is not whether he approved of the killing of Muslim rulers who do not rule according to sharia—he did, at least in theory. What could not be proved, as his lawyer, Saad Hasaballah, explained, was that he was referring specifically to Sadat.

“They asked for a religious stand about a ruler who is ruling against Islamic law,” Hasaballah said. Abdel Rahman replied that such a ruler should be pushed aside, but, according to Hasaballah, “He did not specify Sadat and the members of the Jihad Organization did not specify Sadat for him.”

Abdel Rahman was born in 1938 in the village of Al Gamalia, in the Nile Delta. In his autobiography, published in Egypt after the Sadat assassination, he wrote that he became blind when he was just ten months old, a handicap that propelled him into a life devoted to religion. Many Egyptian youngsters lose their sight because of parasites or diseases, and it is common for children with this affliction to be taken to the mosque in the hope that they will have the talent to become preachers.

Abdel Rahman had the talent. By the age of eleven, he had memorized the Koran, a feat that earned him admission to an Islamic boarding school and then to Al Azhar University in Cairo, the apex of the worldwide system of Islamic education. He graduated in 1965 and was sent to preach in a town called Fedemin on the outskirts of Fayoum, a city about sixty miles south of Cairo.

It was there, in a small mosque alongside the main road surrounded by mango trees, that Abdel Rahman first drew the attention of the authorities. In September 1970, Gamel Abdel Nasser, the secular, nationalist president of Egypt, died, and millions of worshipful followers massed in the streets of Egypt’s cities to mourn him. But Abdel Rahman, who opposed Nasser’s secularism, referring to him as “the wicked Pharaoh,” told his followers that it would be sinful to pray for the dead president because he was an infidel. Abdel Rahman’s rhetoric is saturated with the profound moral conservatism that is one of the main pillars of Muslim fundamentalism, with the belief that modern society is decadent and corrupt and needs a bracing dose of the old desert purism to cure it.

“The state allows adultery and creates the opportunity for it,” he later wrote in his autobiography. “The state organizes nightclubs and prepares special police to protect adulterers and prostitutes. Liquor factories are built by the state. Doesn’t this deny God’s laws?”

Abdel Rahman spent eight months in Cairo’s vast twelfth-century Citadel Prison, where he was detained without charges for his remarks. After his release, he benefited from a shift in the Egyptian government’s attitude toward Islam as President Sadat tried to enlist Islamic support in his contest against the Egyptian left. In a way, Sadat made the same mistake that the United States later made regarding Muslim militants in Afghanistan. He tried to enlist their support in Egyptian politics, using them as a counterweight to the pro-Soviet left, strengthening them in the process, only to have the clerics turn against him. In later years, the United States supported radical Muslims in the war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and, with the war over, found that it had armed and supplied a force that was inimical to it. In both instances, Abdel Rahman was at the center of the action.

There is no question that Abdel Rahman had close relations with the Sadat assassins, who were part of a larger group known as the Jihad Organization that formed in the late 1970s, and, early on, was supported by the Egyptian security police. The group, which was especially powerful in Asyut, had asked Abdel Rahman to serve as its religious leader.

When he was formally accused of involvement in the Sadat assassination and went on trial, Abdel Rahman was able to turn the event to his advantage, using it as a platform to speak for two days before a national audience and giving his vision of Islam. “In court, at his trial, when he defended himself he was very convincing,” said Abdel Hamouda, a magazine editor in Cairo. “The prosecutor did not know what he was saying. It was as though he had just prepared for a day or so. But Omar Abdel Rahman had a very strong point of view on Islamic jurisprudence, and he stated it well. Even those who did not sympathize with him had nothing to say in reply.”

After a few years preaching in Fayoum, Abdel Rahman rose to further prominence in the late 1980s when he became the spiritual leader of the Arab-Afghans. He never lived in Pakistan or Afghanistan for any length of time, but he went to Peshawar at least twice during the 1980s to urge on the anti-Soviet Arab fighters and he visited the Afghan battlefield itself at least once, in 1985. He is reported to have stayed outside Peshawar at the home of Mohammed Islambouli, an Arab-Afghan who was the brother of the man who organized the army faction that actually carried out the Sadat assassination. Abdel Rahman sent two of his own sons to fight in Afghanistan.

In 1989, after a riot at a mosque in Fayoum, where he was preaching during regular Friday prayers, Abdel Rahman was arrested and put on trial along with forty-eight other defendants. The government argued that he had instigated the riot; witnesses testified that the police had provoked the disturbance, bursting into the mosque during prayers, guns firing. In any case, from that point on, Abdel Rahman lived under virtual house arrest. The Egyptian Association for Human Rights visited his home in December 1989 and found it under what one association member, interviewed in Cairo, called a state of siege.

“He used to go out under guard,” said Adel el-Lamouni, his lawyer in Fayoum. “His son would guide him to the mosque for Friday prayers, but whenever he went, he would be followed by two cars full of policemen.”

Then early in 1990, Abdel Rahman made what has become, among his supporters in Fayoum, a legendary escape. One man said that the cleric was smuggled past his guards in a washing machine that was being taken out of his home. Another account, told by a resident in the neighboring village of Fedemin, was that the cleric left the house after another man, dressed up to look like the sheik, drew Abdel Rahman’s usual guards away from their posts. Abdel Rahman tried to leave Egypt on a pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia, but, according to Egyptian journalists, he was detained at passport control at the Cairo International Airport until after the plane had left. Barred from leaving the country by air, he went overland to the Sudan. There, even though he was on a list of suspected terrorists barred from entry to the United States, he was given a visa at the United States embassy and, after a trip to Pakistan, he arrived in New York in July 1990.

This would seem to have been a failure to be properly vigilant on the part of American authorities. An Islamic militant identified by American intelligence as a terrorist figure, the acknowledged spiritual leader of Zawahiri, the presiding eminence of Egyptian Jihad, was admitted to the United States. He began to preach at mosques in New York and New Jersey. These were the very mosques that served as gathering places for the Muslim immigrants in America who carried out the first major terrorist attack on American soil, the truck bombing of the World Trade Center on February 26, 1993.

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According to Abdullah Anas—and Western intelligence agencies agree with him in this—Ayman Zawahiri by the late 1980s was a commanding influence on bin Laden. And from that point on, the move to a broader definition for jihad was unstoppable, one that included the Muslim rulers of countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia who were to be deemed infidels. Azzam himself quarreled bitterly with the Egyptians. Once, Anas said, he witnessed an argument between Azzam and Omar Abdel Rahman during one of the blind Egyptian’s visits to Peshawar, during which Abdel Rahman maintained that Islamic rulers, including Mohammed Zia ul-Haq of Pakistan and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, were infidels, because they flouted sharia, Islamic law.

By around 1986, bin Laden began to chart a course separate from Azzam’s. He established his own training camp for Persian Gulf Arabs, a group of about fifty who lived in tents set apart from the other Afghan fighters. He called the camp Al Masadah—The Lion’s Den. And within a little more than a year, bin Laden and the Egyptians had founded Al Qaeda—the “base” for what they hoped would be a global crusade. Azzam confided to Anas that Egyptian ideologues had wooed bin Laden away from him, gaining access to his money.

“He told me one time: ‘I’m very upset about Osama. This heavensent man, like an angel. I am worried about his future if he stays with these people.’”

“The arguments were very secret,” Anas said. “Only three to four people knew about them at the time.” Azzam saw little difference between the United States and the Soviet Union, contending in his articles and speeches that both were hostile to Islam, but he nonetheless opposed terrorism against the West, according to Anas. The problem for him, especially by the late 1980s, was that the war against the Soviet Union was becoming less relevant. The United States had stepped up its aid to the Afghan guerrillas, most importantly by providing heat-seeking Stinger missiles that were soon knocking Soviet helicopter gunships out of the sky. Peshawar was still a magnet for disaffected young Muslims, and they still came to Azzam’s Beit al-Ansar, but they tended to share the views of the Egyptians and very often they had, in fact, very little concern with Afghanistan.

“Ten people would open a guest house and start issuing fatwas,” Anas recalled. “‘We are going to make revolution in Jordan, in Egypt, in Syria.’ And they haven’t got any contact with the real jihad in Afghanistan.”

By February 1989, the Soviets had withdrawn, leaving a puppet government in power in Kabul at the mercy of the Afghan guerrillas, who continued to fight, even as the United States lost interest in their factional quarrels. But with thousands of Arab-Afghans still in the region, the stage was set for a new kind of war. Abdullah Azzam’s group was splitting up and the radical Egyptians, with bin Laden now in their camp, were in control. It was then that extraordinary developments occurred both in Peshawar and in Brooklyn, New York, events that showed how closely those two places were linked.