Against them make ready your strength to the utmost of your power, including steeds of war, to strike terror in the enemies of Allah.
—Koran, verse 8:60
Bin Laden departed from Khartoum on a small private jet to Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan on May 18, 1996. Accompanying him was his fifteen-year-old son, Omar, and two of his top military commanders, Abu Hafs the Egytian and Saif al-Adel.I
In many ways bin Laden’s voyage to Jalalabad was a flight into the unknown. Much had changed since al-Qaeda’s leader had last visited Afghanistan more than half a decade earlier. Following the fall of the Afghan communist regime in 1992, a brutal civil war had torn the country apart. Rather than the Soviets, it was the Afghans who had destroyed Kabul. Out of the chaos of the civil war had emerged a mysterious group with an innocuous name, Taliban, meaning “religious students.” The Taliban took over much of Afghanistan, promising a return to law and order under a draconian theocracy.
The Taliban were led by Mullah Omar, a reclusive one-eyed cleric who rose from being an obscure village mullah to become the “Commander of the Faithful.” Mullah Omar was declared so by a convocation of clerics on April 4, 1996; it was a title that immodestly claimed that Mullah Omar commanded all Muslims around the world.
Two months before bin Laden had returned to Afghanistan, Mullah Omar wrapped himself literally and metaphorically in the “Cloak of the Prophet,” a religious relic purported to have been worn by the Prophet Mohammed that had been kept in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar for centuries and had almost never been displayed in public. Mullah Omar took the garment out of storage and, ascending to the roof of a building, draped the cloak on himself before a crowd of hundreds of cheering Taliban.
Despite his title of Commander of the Faithful, the Taliban leader was determinedly provincial; in the years that he controlled Afghanistan he rarely visited Kabul, his own capital, considering it to be Sodom and Gomorrah. Mullah Omar personally distributed money from his treasury like a medieval monarch, issuing his funding orders on small slips of handwritten paper. Mullah Omar’s understanding of the outside world was virtually nonexistent. On a rare occasion when he met with a group of Chinese diplomats, they presented him with a small figurine of an animal as a gift. The Taliban leader reacted as if they had handed him a live hand grenade, so acute was his religious aversion to images of living beings.
When the Taliban first emerged in Afghanistan under the leadership of Mullah Omar, they enjoyed quite a high degree of popularity and legitimacy, as they brought order and a measure of peace to a country that had suffered through a decade and a half of war. Initially, the Taliban were also seen as incorruptible and little interested in assuming power for themselves. However, the maxim that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely” is an almost perfect description of how the Taliban regime evolved over the years. The Taliban increasingly turned their law-and-order government into a polity that aspired to be a truly totalitarian Islamic state.
They banned music and television, and barred females from schools and jobs. Men were not allowed to shave or trim their beards. Women had to wear the all-enveloping burqa and stay at home unless accompanied by a male relative. The Taliban’s edicts were enforced by the religious police of the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, who raced around in pickup trucks looking for malefactors to beat with sticks or take to jail. Vahid Mojdeh, a former Taliban official, said, “The Taliban were ruthless torturers, their most commonly used technique was beating people with electric cables.” In Kabul, one of the few diversions available were the public executions in the soccer stadium.
When bin Laden landed at Jalalabad airport he was greeted by commanders from the Younis Khalis faction. They were not part of the Taliban, but were a mujahideen group who had fought against the communists. Based on bin Laden’s service to the Afghan jihad, Khalis welcomed bin Laden warmly and gave him housing outside Jalalabad in a neighborhood called Hadda, which bin Laden’s men called Najm-al-Jihad, the “Star of Jihad.”
Bin Laden’s “Star of Jihad” compound was spread over two acres, a complex of some seventy-five rooms. Across the road was another large al-Qaeda compound with a secret chamber that extended at least fifty feet underground. Bin Laden came and went using four-wheel-drive vehicles with blacked-out windows, and he didn’t hire locals as guards or cooks. Arab guards patrolled his perimeter at night.
He was also given a chunk of land in the Tora Bora mountains, a region he knew from the anti-Soviet jihad when he had built crude roads there to transport his men from Jaji through the mountains to the ill-fated battle of Jalalabad. He decided to split his time between the city of Jalalabad and the mountains of Tora Bora.
Bin Laden was thrilled to be back in Tora Bora, a bone-shattering three-hour drive from Jalalabad up a narrow, rocky mountain road. There he built an Afghan-style mud house for his family, part of which was embedded in a large cave. From bin Laden’s house all he could see was his own littl feudal fiefdom; the nearest village was out of sight thousands of feet below down a scree-covered slope. Bin Laden’s three wives and their dozen children joined him there in early September 1996. They did not share bin Laden’s enthusiasm for Tora Bora, where the only heat in winter was from a wood-burning stove around which the wives and children huddled, shivering during the bitter blizzards. Each wife was given a one-ring gas burner to cook on, and the bin Laden family lived on a subsistence diet of eggs, potatoes, rice, and bread. On rare occasions they might get a can of tuna, which was thrilling for the younger children, who were always hungry.
His first wife, Najwa, was pregnant with their ninth child. She could have complained to her husband about the spartan living conditions as she was expecting a new baby, but after more than two decades of marriage she knew her husband well enough to know that he reveled in having his family live like medieval peasants in his cave-house.
Bin Laden updated the survivalist hikes that he had forced his family to take across the deserts of Sudan and adapted them for the mountains of Afghanistan, taking his older sons on all-day walking expeditions across the valleys and peaks of Tora Bora. He loved these forced mountain marches, telling his sons, “We never know when war will strike. We must know our way out of the mountains.” He told visitors to his Tora Bora retreat, “I really feel secure in the mountains. I really enjoy my life when I’m here.”
In early July 1996 near Jalalabad bin Laden met once again with Robert Fisk, the reporter for the British Independent newspaper, whom he had spoken with three years earlier in Sudan. In this interview bin Laden dropped his “I’m just a businessman” schtick that had been his public posture in Sudan. Surrounded by armed guards carrying submachine guns, he railed against the Saudi monarchy and the U.S. military presence in the Saudi kingdom, occasionally picking his teeth with a piece of miswak wood, as had also been the practice of the Prophet Mohammed.
On August 14, 1996, the U.S. State Department issued an unusual, detailed fact sheet that identified bin Laden as “one of the most significant financial sponsors of Islamic extremist activities in the world today.” The State Department outlined bin Laden’s role in the Afghan War, his business interests in Sudan, his attempts to kill American troops in Yemen, and detailed his financial support for militants around the Middle East. It also specifically mentioned the formation of al-Qaeda, which was the first time that the U.S. government had publicly used the term. The State Department noted that Ramzi Yousef, who had masterminded the bombing of the World Trade Center three year earlier, had lived at a bin Laden guesthouse after the attack.
On the same day that the State Department released the bin Laden fact sheet, the New York Times ran a front-page story under the headline, “Funds for Terrorists Traced to Persian Gulf Businessmen,” that described bin Laden as the financier of “a host of hardline groups from Egypt to Algeria.”
A little over a week later bin Laden issued his first public statement that he was at war with the United States. Issued on August 23, it was titled “Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places [Saudi Arabia].” The declaration was melodramatically datelined, “From the Peaks of the Hindu Kush, Afghanistan,” making clear that bin Laden had written the declaration while he was at his cave-house in the mountains of Tora Bora. He had turned one of the rooms of the cave into a simple study lined with wooden bookshelves that were weighed down by multiple treatises on Islamic law. Bin Laden’s statement also said that it had been written in Khorasan, which was the Arabic name for the Afghan region during the era of the Prophet Mohammed.
The “Declaration of War” celebrated the U.S. withdrawal from Beirut after the Marine barracks bombing in 1983 and a decade later the American withdrawals from Yemen and Somalia. Bin Laden wrote that “the latest and the greatest of these aggressions, incurred by the Muslims since the death of the Prophet, is the occupation of the land of the two Holy Places.” He was referring to the presence of tens of thousands of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia. The statement also attacked the Israelis for the seizure of Palestinian territory in East Jerusalem as a result of the 1967 war. He wrote that “the wound of al-Quds [the Islamic holy site in East Jerusalem] is like a fire burning in my heart.” The declaration demanded that all Muslims help with the forceful expulsion of the Americans and the Jews from Islamic lands. Al-Qaeda’s leader criticized those who wouldn’t take action: “I reject those who enjoy fireplaces in clubs discussing eternally.… The walls of oppression and humiliation cannot be demolished except in a rain of bullets.”
Al-Qaeda was now officially at war with the United States, although only a handful of Americans were aware of this yet.
Al-Qaeda’s man in London, Khalid al-Fawwaz, received a copy of the declaration of war, which he then gave to Abdel Bari Atwan, the editor of the Arabic newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi, one of the few independent Arab media outlets that wasn’t controlled by the Saudis. Atwan printed the declaration in full, which was quite the scoop: A scion of the fabulously rich bin Laden family was declaring war against the United States!
The Taliban seized Jalalabad on September 12, and bin Laden waited nervously to find out how the new rulers of Afghanistan would react to al-Qaeda basing itself in their country. But he had nothing to fear. A Taliban cabinet minister met with bin Laden in Jalalabad and told him, “We serve the ground on which you walk.” Another senior Taliban minister told bin Laden, “God will never be ashamed of you because you are the champion of the oppressed and you have waged holy war alongside the downtrodden.” According to senior Taliban officials, bin Laden also ingratiated himself by buying expensive vehicles for Mullah Omar. Where bin Laden had obtained the funding for these gifts isn’t clear, because at this point he was cut off from his inheritance and had to leave his assets in Sudan.
Atwan, the editor of Al-Quds Al-Arabi, landed the first interview with bin Laden after his embrace by the Taliban. In November Atwan was taken to bin Laden’s wintry fastness in Tora Bora, where he had a “really awful” dinner with al-Qaeda’s leader and a dozen of his followers. It consisted of rotten cheese, potatoes soaked in cottonseed oil, half a dozen fried eggs, and bread caked with sand. During his two-day stay in Tora Bora, Atwan had a bad case of diarrhea and insects bit him all night in the rudimentary bed that he slept in.
The journalist found bin Laden to be likable, humble, and a good listener, unlike the blustery Arab leaders he had interviewed in the past. Still, bin Laden delivered a tirade at the Americans who were “occupying” Saudi Arabia and were “desecrating” the holy land, and he declared war against the United States. Bin Laden said he even wanted to defeat Americans when it came to agriculture, and made the juvenile boast that he had managed to produce sunflowers that were bigger than any American sunflower.
Atwan asked bin Laden why he wasn’t fighting the Israelis, telling him, “You know, you are criticized because of this.” Bin Laden seemed surprised by this question and didn’t have a good answer for it. He then volunteered that he considered Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator, to be an atheist and that he hated him because of that—an interesting observation considering that seven years later senior George W. Bush administration officials would publicly make the case that bin Laden and Saddam were allied as part of their justification for the impending Iraq War.
Bin Laden took Atwan on an early-morning tour of Tora Bora. It was freezing but when the sun came out the snow-covered mountains were quite beautiful. He showed Atwan the mud houses of his followers where children were playing in the snow; a small al-Qaeda oasis.
Atwan asked bin Laden, “If you are kicked out of Afghanistan one day the way that you were kicked out of Saudi Arabia and Sudan, where will you go?”
Bin Laden replied, “I will go to the mountains of Yemen because it is exactly like Tora Bora. I love the mountains.”II
After Atwan returned to London, Al-Quds Al-Arabi published the interview with bin Laden, in which he frequently spoke of Westerners as “Crusaders,” which was an attempt to elevate his status as a great Islamic holy warrior from the Middle Ages on par with Saladin. All the copies of the Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper with bin Laden’s interview sold out within an hour. Atwan believed it was an important interview for bin Laden because he wanted media exposure and to declare war on the Americans to a wide audience in the Arabic-speaking world.
He would have an opportunity to do this again, although it took a few tries. The first try came courtesy of the Taliban. On September 26, 1996, they swept into Kabul. The following day the U.S. State Department spokesman stated, “We’ve seen some of the reports that they’ve moved to impose Islamic law in the areas that they control. But at this stage, we’re not reading anything into that. On the face of it, nothing objectionable at this stage.” Similarly, Robin Raphael, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for South Asia, said of the Taliban two months later, “The real source of their success has been the willingness of many Afghans, particularly Pashtuns, to tacitly trade unending fighting and chaos for a measure of peace and security, even with severer social restrictions.”
Hamid Mir was a reporter for Daily Pakistan, an Urdu-language newspaper that was popular in Pakistan. He received an invitation to speak to Mullah Omar after he wrote a column saying that American officials were backing the Taliban. Mir met Mullah Omar in Kandahar in December 1996. The Commander of the Faithful was sitting on the floor of a mosque where he served Mir green tea and a modest lunch of potatoes, soup, and bread. Mir was surprised by the lack of lavish ceremony that was typical when he met with Pakistan’s leaders.
Mullah Omar told Mir, “Iranian media has created a lot of problems for me. They are quoting your column every day saying Hamid Mir, a famous Pakistani journalist, is saying that Mullah Omar is working for the American CIA. I’m not CIA.” Mullah Omar repeated again and again that he had nothing to do with the CIA.
He added that he could prove he wasn’t a CIA agent, saying, “I have a friend who is a great enemy of America and he is my guest in Afghanistan. Do you know him, Osama bin Laden?”
Mir knew so little about bin Laden that when he was back home in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, he went to the U.S. embassy and asked the librarian there, “Do you know anything about Mr. bin Laden?” The librarian said, “Please give me in writing how that is spelt.” Mir wrote down the name and the librarian provided him with a couple of articles.
Mir wasn’t sure if the interview was even worth doing, but he agreed to meet the mysterious Mr. bin Laden in Tora Bora in March 1997. There Mir was subjected to a body search by bin Laden’s bodyguards, who put their hands inside his underwear.
Mir was furious, shouting, “You are gays!”
The bodyguards replied, “This is our duty.”
They argued back and forth for many minutes until bin Laden finally arrived and said in English, “Sorry Mr. Mir. Sorry Mr. Mir.”
Before Mir started his interview, bin Laden read from a file that contained Mir’s bank account number, the amount of money in his account, the names of his family members and even of his girlfriend, conveying the message “Don’t play any games with me.”
Bin Laden said, “You are a journalist. I am a freedom fighter. And I hope you will behave like a journalist, you will not behave like an informer or a spy.”
Mir found little depth in bin Laden’s thinking. He kept returning to his main grievance: Why were there thousands of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia? Bin Laden also angrily denounced the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, calling him a “socialist motherfucker.”
When Mir’s story was published in Pakistan it made no impact whatsoever as no one then knew who bin Laden was. Mir’s editor was puzzled that Mir had spent so much effort to interview bin Laden in Afghanistan, asking him, “Why did you waste so much time and so much energy and space in the newspaper?”
Bin Laden was a news junkie who listened to the BBC World Service on the radio and also watched Al Jazeera on satellite television, the Arabic-language network that had started broadcasting the same year bin Laden had moved to Afghanistan. Bin Laden soon realized that his threats against the United States and his rationales for those threats were going largely unnoticed in the English-speaking world. He began to contemplate whether he should do his first-ever television interview with a British or American network, such as the BBC, CBS, or CNN. Bin Laden believed that he had an Islamic duty to warn his enemies before he attacked them.
Following the release of the State Department fact sheet about bin Laden during the summer of 1996, I tracked down Khalid al-Fawwaz, bin Laden’s de facto media adviser in London. I was working as a producer for CNN and asked Fawwaz if the network could do an interview with bin Laden. I was intrigued by the possibility that he might have been in some way responsible for the bombing of the World Trade Center three years earlier. The investigation of the Trade Center attack had an unresolved quality since it was clear that the group of militants who attacked the building had some kind of organized link to the Afghan War. Was bin Laden their leader? I then spent some weeks in London meeting with Fawwaz and other Islamist militants who knew bin Laden. Ultimately, al-Qaeda officials decided that bin Laden’s first television interview would be with CNN. The network had a reputation for fairness as a result of the Gulf War seven years earlier, when it had provided round-the-clock coverage of the conflict from inside Iraq.
The CNN team consisted of Peter Arnett, a blunt, courageous war correspondent originally from New Zealand who had won a Pulitzer Prize during the Vietnam War and was key to CNN’s coverage of the Gulf War. The cameraman was Peter Jouvenal, a British Army veteran who had made dozens of reporting trips covering the Afghan wars, and I was the producer.
Abu Musab al-Suri accompanied us from London to Afghanistan. Suri, a Syrian who could have passed as a German because of his red hair and red beard, presented himself as an Islamist journalist who ran the Bureau for the Study of Islamic Conflict and who had long-standing contacts with the Afghan Arabs. Suri said he had lived most of the past fifteen years in the West and had married a Spaniard. This was true, but it was far from the full story, as we would discover almost a decade later. That’s when Suri released a public statement saying, “I was honored to know Sheikh Osama since 1988, and I was honored to join al-Qaeda and to work in it until 1992. I also taught in its training camps and other Afghan Arab camps, especially in my area of expertise: explosives, special operations and guerrilla warfare.”
Together with Suri we flew from London to Pakistan and then crossed over the Khyber Pass to Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan, where we checked into the zero-star Spinghar Hotel and waited for a few days. A young man with long hair who described himself as a media adviser to bin Laden came to tell us, “You can’t bring any of your equipment; to do the interview we’ll give you our own camera.” Members of al-Qaeda were concerned about a tracking device being hidden in CNN’s camera. They also told us not to bring anything except the clothes we were wearing, including leaving our watches behind. This too was aimed at preventing us from carrying any kind of tracking device.
One evening a van pulled up filled with heavily armed men. We all piled in and were given glasses with pieces of cardboard stuck in them that acted as crude blindfolds and were driven up into the mountains surrounding Jalalabad. By then it was night and we passed through cordons of security. Bin Laden’s bodyguards, armed with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades, occasionally checked us as we drove slowly up a rocky track into the dark peaks of Tora Bora.
We were told that now was the time to admit if we had a tracking device secreted on our persons and nothing would happen to us. However, if they were to find such a device later on, there would be serious consequences. The cameraman, Peter Jouvenal, interpreted this as meaning, “Your head’s going to get chopped off.”
At one point bin Laden’s men ran some kind of detector up and down our bodies. As it turned out, the detector wasn’t working, but al-Qaeda’s leaders thought it was important to make the CNN crew believe that it was, which they later joked about with bin Laden.
We arrived at a small plateau in the center of which was a mud building, likely for sheltering sheep in the bitter winters. Inside there were a dozen armed men. After some hours bin Laden appeared out of the darkness walking with the aid of a cane. Al-Qaeda’s leader was very tall, rail thin, soft-spoken, and comported himself like a cleric. He had a feline presence, which was quite different from the angry table-thumping revolutionary we expected. Bin Laden shook Jouvenal’s hand. It was a limp, cold handshake, sort of like shaking hands with a fish.
Seated on the floor, wearing a camouflage jacket, his AK-47 propped next to him and sipping copious amounts of tea, bin Laden said that he was declaring war against the United States because of the seemingly permanent U.S. military presence in the holy land of Arabia and also because of American support for Israel. During the interview an ambiguous, thin smile sometimes played across bin Laden’s face. He said nothing about opposing Western freedoms or values, motivations that would later be ascribed to him by the Bush administration as the reason that he had attacked the United States on 9/11.
Bin Laden took some credit for the Black Hawk Down incident in Somalia four years earlier, saying, “We learned from those who fought there, that they were surprised to see the low morale of the American fighters in comparison with the experience they had with the Russian fighters.” He wanted to remind the world that his men had fought the Soviets. He also remained convinced that he had played a key role in the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.
At the end of the interview Peter Arnett asked him, “What are your future plans?”
With a touch of menace bin Laden said, “You’ll see them and hear about them in the media, God willing.”
His followers hung on his every word, and when they talked about him it was with great reverence for “the Sheikh.” During the interview bin Laden had become increasingly fired up about his anger against the United States. When it was finished he observed in English with a smile that he had gotten “hot” during the discussion.
The CNN interview was the first time that bin Laden told Western reporters he was declaring war on the United States, but the story, which aired on May 10, 1997, didn’t get much attention, likely because bin Laden was still thought of as a financier of extremism, rather than the leader of a terrorist organization. After all, how much harm could someone do who was based in the remote country of Afghanistan, which the Taliban were doing their best to thrust back into the Middle Ages? In Saudi Arabia authorities confiscated copies of the popular Al-Hayat newspaper that had run some quotes from bin Laden from the CNN story.
Taliban ministers started visiting bin Laden in Jalalabad and consulted him about technical issues in their ministries, especially related to agriculture and construction since he had expertise in those areas. They hoped that he might invest in Afghanistan as he had in Sudan, but in reality bin Laden was close to bankruptcy. Through his ministers Mullah Omar also wanted to convey to bin Laden that he should stop doing bellicose media interviews since they were alienating other countries. Bin Laden pretended to agree but continued to do as he pleased. “Control of bin Laden was not easy. His gentle disposition hides a wild horse that no one can control, nor can he control himself,” observed Abu Walid al-Misri, who edited the Arabic-language magazine of the Taliban.
Bin Laden wrote to Mullah Omar, making the case that he should be allowed to talk to news organizations and underlining how important he believed the “media war” to be. He told the Taliban leader, “Many international media agencies corresponded with us requesting an interview with us. We believe that this is a good opportunity to make Muslims aware of what is taking place in the land of the two Holy Mosques [Saudi Arabia] as well as what is happening here in Afghanistan. It is obvious that the media war in this century is one of the strongest methods; in fact, its ratio may reach ninety percent of the total preparation for the battles.”
Mullah Omar was ostensibly concerned about bin Laden’s safety in the city of Jalalabad, which was not as firmly under Taliban control as was Kandahar, the de facto capital of the Taliban in southern Afghanistan. So Mullah Omar invited bin Laden to move to Kandahar, where he would certainly be more secure, but also where the Taliban would have much more ability to block bin Laden from giving incendiary interviews to journalists. The Saudis were one of only three governments in the world that recognized the Taliban, and Mullah Omar had no interest in alienating them as they were also subsidizing his impoverished government.
In early April 1997 bin Laden and his family and the other members of al-Qaeda and their families flew by military plane to Kandahar, some 250 people in total. Mullah Omar offered bin Laden the use of some well-equipped buildings in Kandahar city that were once used by the electricity company, or the use of Tarnak Farms, a former Soviet agricultural station that was now almost totally destroyed by years of war about twenty miles outside Kandahar. There was no running water or plumbing at Tarnak Farms. Bin Laden chose the harsher location, renovating the structures at Tarnak Farms and building some new ones so that the base eventually consisted of eighty buildings and a mosque. Bin Laden also established Al-Farouq training camp for his new recruits.
Al-Qaeda’s management structure consisted of a military committee, a public relations committee, a finance committee, an administrative section for its training camps, and even a farming committee, which took care of the group’s agricultural pursuits. Each section filed regular reports to the group’s leadership on a computer, and bin Laden met regularly with the head of each committee “to discuss their issues,” according to Abu Jandal, one of bin Laden’s bodyguards who was constantly at his side.
Al-Qaeda was a highly bureaucratic terrorist organization, which was a reflection of bin Laden’s background working for his family’s company and his undergraduate studies in business administration. A detailed application form that potential recruits had to fill out before they were accepted at one of al-Qaeda’s training camps asked them about their education level, religious background, arrival in Afghanistan, military skills, involvement in other jihads, marital status, language skills, and political affiliations. The application form also outlined al-Qaeda’s requirements for those entering its camps, including that they agree not to leave before their basic two-month training course was finished and that they not bring any “forbidden items” such as tape recorders, radios, and cameras. They were reminded to pack appropriate running shoes and clothes suitable for paramilitary training.
It was bin Laden who set the group’s strategy, and key members of the group had sworn a binding religious oath of obedience to the man they referred to as their “emir,” or prince. Below bin Laden were his deputies, who enforced the organization’s strict conduct rules and handled the operational details of terrorist plots. They managed all this with a flow of paperwork more reminiscent of an insurance company than a group dedicated to revolutionary jihad.
Bin Laden exercised near-total control over al-Qaeda, whose members had to swear a religious oath personally to him, ensuring blind loyalty. One of bin Laden’s men outlined the dictatorial powers that bin Laden exercised over his organization: “If the Shura council at al-Qaeda, the highest authority in the organization, had a majority of 98 percent on a resolution and it is opposed by bin Laden, he has the right to cancel the resolution.” The legal, media, and economic committees of al-Qaeda were all set up to service the military committee, and they all followed bin Laden’s orders. The men who worked for bin Laden typically requested permission before they spoke with their leader by saying, “Dear prince: May I speak?”
To bin Laden’s followers he was truly an extraordinarily charismatic man; someone who they knew had given up a life of luxury to live a life of danger and poverty in the cause of jihad. He slept on the floor, ate little, and showed disarming personal modesty along with an almost freakish religiosity. They also admired that he modeled his life of jihad on the life of the Prophet Mohammed.
His followers described their first encounter with bin Laden as an intense spiritual experience. Bin Laden’s bodyguard Abu Jandal described meeting with bin Laden in 1997 as “beautiful” and that he came to look on him “as a father.” Shadi Abdallah, a Jordanian who was another of bin Laden’s bodyguards, explained bin Laden’s attraction: “A very charismatic person who could persuade people simply by his way of talking. One could say that he ‘seduced’ many young men.” John Miller, a correspondent for ABC News who interviewed bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1998, noticed that bin Laden’s followers spoke with great excitement about “the Sheikh.” Miller observed, “There is that charismatic aura or scent that made people follow him; either you have it or you don’t.”
When bin Laden wasn’t engaged in the affairs of al-Qaeda he enjoyed playing volleyball with his men; typically bin Laden was placed on one team while his military commander Abu Hafs was put on the other because they were both tall and skillful. Bin Laden also occasionally indulged his childhood passion for soccer, but because of pain in his back, which forced him to walk with the help of a cane, he kept that sport to a minimum. And he continued riding whenever he could. Bin Laden loved horses because the Prophet Mohammed had supposedly said, “There is always goodness in horses until the Day of Judgment.” He sometimes arranged horse races among his followers, and he would ride for long excursions of up to forty miles without stopping.
Bin Laden continued his practice of taking his wives and children out into the desert to toughen them up. He and his guards drove out from Kandahar for an hour or so while his large family followed in a bus. They stopped in a remote desert region where he taught his wives how to use firearms. He also preached self-reliance to his sons, telling them, “Sons, your father’s millions about which you hear are not for your father to use. This money is for the Muslims and I hold it in trust for the cause of God. Not one riyal [the equivalent of 30 cents] of it is for you. Each of you is a man. Let him rely on himself.”
One of bin Laden’s sons, Saad, once asked his father for a money gift so that he could get married. Bin Laden replied, “This does not concern me. Rely on yourself.”
Saad asked, “What should I do?”
Bin Laden replied, “Take this plot of land. Till the land and from the revenue that you get, save money and get married.” Saad followed his father’s advice.
It was around this time that bin Laden was joined in Afghanistan by the Egyptian militant Ayman al-Zawahiri, who would become a key public face of al-Qaeda and eventually bin Laden’s top deputy. But for now, Zawahiri was mostly a supplicant in bin Laden’s world. That’s because he had made the ill-fated decision to go to Chechnya, where a small group of Arabs were fighting the Russians alongside Chechen insurgents. There Zawahiri hoped to relaunch his organization, the Jihad Group, now that it too had also been expelled from Sudan.
On December 1, 1996, Zawahiri and two other Egyptian militants traveled into Russia hoping to reach Chechnya. They were arrested by Russian police as they had no visas and were put in jail for six months. The Russians had no idea who they had in custody, and when the militants’ case came to trial the three men all lied about their identities, pretending they were businessmen who somehow had become confused about their location.
Zawahiri was released by his Russian jailers in May 1997 and then made his way back to Afghanistan, where bin Laden was now the unquestioned leader of the Arab militants in the country. Toward the end of the anti-Soviet jihad when they were both living in Peshawar, bin Laden had been a political neophyte who was still defending the Saudi royal family, while Zawahiri was already a hardened revolutionary who had served three years in Egypt’s brutal jails. As a result, during the late 1980s Zawahiri had influenced bin Laden’s thinking about the need to fight the “near-enemy” Arab regimes such as Egypt. But now, a decade later, their relative importance on the “field of jihad” had changed quite dramatically. Zawahiri was a penniless refugee with virtually no followers, whereas bin Laden was a well-known jihadist hero the Taliban had appointed to be responsible for all of the Arabs living in Afghanistan.
But bin Laden found a way to use Zawahiri for his own purposes—to advance his goals instead of those of this fellow jihadist whose focus was not on the United States but on Egypt. Bin Laden released a statement on behalf of the “World Islamic Front,” a joint declaration made by himself, Zawahiri, and other militant leaders from Bangladesh, Egypt, and Pakistan on February 22, 1998. The declaration said, “The United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula.… On that basis, and in compliance with Allah’s order, we issue the following fatwa to all Muslims: The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.” The declaration claimed it was now a religious duty for any Muslim to kill American civilians anywhere in the world, which was a sharp amplification of al-Qaeda’s rhetoric.
A well-known verse in the Koran, which for believers is the Word of God, commands Muslims to “kill the unbelievers wherever you find them, seize them, besiege them, ambush them.” When bin Laden made this formal declaration of war against “the Jews and the Crusaders” he cited this verse at the beginning of his declaration. (The same verse also adds that if the nonbelievers repent and pay a tax to Muslims, then they may be spared, but this caveat did not appear in bin Laden’s declaration of war.) Of course, bin Laden’s beliefs were not a mainstream view among Muslims, but assertions that Islamist terrorism has nothing at all to do with Islam are as nonsensical as claims that the Crusades had nothing to do with Christian beliefs about the sanctity of Jerusalem.
This declaration of war made no mention of Zawahiri’s lifelong goal of overthrowing the “near-enemy” Egyptian regime and instead was focused on bin Laden’s “far-enemy” goal of attacking America. Nor did the declaration cite Sayyid Qutb, Zawahiri’s key ideological guide, who had made the case in the 1960s that secular Arab regimes should be overthrown. Instead, the declaration cited the medieval Islamic scholar Ibn Taymiyya, who had advanced the idea that jihad was the most important duty of a Muslim after belief in Allah. Bin Laden had co-opted Zawahiri to be part of his holy war against the United States, not the other way around, which was the dominant narrative in the years after the 9/11 attacks.III
Within a day of bin Laden issuing his declaration of war, his adviser in London, Khalid al-Fawwaz, phoned Abdel Bari Atwan, the editor of Al-Quds Al-Arabi, saying, “I want to come to you to see you.” Fawwaz came with a faxed copy of the fatwa and Atwan looked at it realizing that it was dangerous, as it was claiming a religious basis for murdering Jews and Americans. It was shocking even for Fawwaz, who told Atwan, “I don’t know who influenced Osama bin Laden to issue this fatwa. This is unacceptable and I am against it.”
The text of this fatwa was published in Al-Quds Al-Arabi on February 23, 1998. A CIA memorandum noted, “These fatwas are the first from these groups that explicitly justify attacks on American civilians anywhere in the world.”
Neither bin Laden nor Zawahiri were scholars of Islamic law eligible to issue fatwas, so bin Laden was thrilled when three months later a group of ulema (clergy) in Afghanistan issued a fatwa ruling that U.S. forces had to move out of the Gulf region. This gave bin Laden some clerical cover for his holy war, and he was quick to endorse the ruling of the Afghan clerics. In a report about this fatwa in Al-Quds Al-Arabi, bin Laden said, “the fatwa proves with irrefutable religious evidence that it is impermissible for US forces” to be in Saudi Arabia.
The U.S. State Department report “Patterns of Global Terrorism 1997,” released in April 1998, noted that “bin Laden continued to incite violence against the United States.” The following month bin Laden issued a statement that seemed to revel in the attention that he and the Taliban were receiving from the U.S. government, saying, “So congratulations to the Taliban government on the medal of honor presented by America through the decision to charge it with sponsoring terrorism.”
Around the same time bin Laden issued another statement following the Indian government’s successful test of a nuclear weapon at a desert site less than one hundred miles from its border with Pakistan. He wrote, “We call upon the Muslim nation in general, and Pakistan and its army in particular, to prepare for the jihad imposed by Allah and terrorize the enemy by preparing the force necessary. This should include a nuclear force.” This was bin Laden’s first public statement that Muslims needed to acquire nuclear weapons.
In mid-May, Hamid Mir, the Pakistani journalist, spent two days with bin Laden at his base near Kandahar. He suggested to Mir that he sit in on one of his lectures to dozens of his followers. Bin Laden pasted a map of the Middle East on a big board and asked, “Why are Americans present in Kuwait? Why are Americans present in Yemen? Why are they present in Saudi Arabia? What are they doing in Bahrain?”
Bin Laden answered his own question: “They are there to plunder our oil wealth, and they want to destroy our Holy Land.”
The fighters chanted, “Allah Akbar! Allah Akbar!” “God is great!” “Death to America!”
One of bin Laden’s sons, a teenager, was sitting with his father and a gun was lying in his lap. Mir asked bin Laden, “He is a young boy. Why is he carrying a gun?” Bin Laden said it was his son’s decision.
Mir asked the son, “Are you following the footsteps of your father?”
The boy answered very confidently, “No. I am following the footsteps of my Prophet.”
Bin Laden told Mir that his father, Mohammed bin Laden, was “very keen that one of his sons should fight against the enemies of Islam. So I am the one son who is acting according to the wishes of his father.” Even though bin Laden told his own sons that he had met his father on only five occasions, in bin Laden’s mind he was the only son of Mohammed bin Laden who was truly fulfilling his father’s wishes.
Mir repeatedly pressed bin Laden with versions of the same question, asking, “How can you prove in the light of Islamic teaching that it’s permissible to kill Americans?”
Mir pointed out, “The Koran says that the blood of an innocent non-Muslim is equal to the blood of a Muslim. If you are killing an innocent non-Muslim Christian who is an American citizen, if you are killing an innocent non-Muslim Jew, this is a violation of the Koranic teachings. How can you prove that your fatwa is correct?”
Bin Laden finally said, “Actually, this is not my fatwa. Actually, the fatwa is issued by some very big Islamic scholars. I’m just following that fatwa.”
In an attempt to make this case, bin Laden gave Mir a copy of a fatwa by the Blind Sheikh, Omar Abdel Rahman, who was the spiritual leader of a major Egyptian terrorist group. Two years earlier Rahman had been sentenced to life imprisonment in the United States for his role in fomenting terrorist plots in New York City. The fatwa called on Muslims to kill Americans everywhere, stating in Arabic, “If they [the Americans] kill me, which they will certainly do—hold my funeral and send my corpse to my family, but do not let my blood be shed in vain. Rather, extract the most violent revenge.… And so all Muslims everywhere: Cut off all relations with [the Americans, Christians, and Jews], tear them to pieces, destroy their economies, burn their corporations, destroy their peace, sink their ships, shoot down their planes and kill them on air, sea, and land. And kill them wherever you may find them.”
Sheikh Rahman’s fatwa was the first time that a prominent Muslim cleric had given his religious sanction to attacks on American aviation, shipping, and economic targets. The fatwa, with its exhortations to “shoot down their planes,” “burn their corporations,” and “sink their ships,” would turn out to be a slowly ticking time bomb that would explode first on October 12, 2000, when a suicide bombing by members of al-Qaeda blew a hole the size of a small house in the USS Cole in Yemen, killing seventeen American sailors, and then again with even greater ferocity on 9/11.
Like Abdullah Azzam, Sheikh Rahman had a doctorate in Islamic jurisprudence from Al-Azhar University in Cairo, while bin Laden had no standing as a religious scholar. He knew he needed some theological cover for his future campaign against American civilians and only someone with Sheikh Rahman’s religious credentials could give him that.
Two weeks after his interview with Mir, on May 26, bin Laden held his first and only press conference. Fourteen journalists attended, and bin Laden made quite an entrance. The moment he stepped out of his vehicle he was surrounded by two dozen bodyguards wearing hoods. As he alighted, gunmen on nearby peaks started frenzied shooting and fired rocket-propelled grenades, an awesome display of firepower that went on for many minutes, lighting up the darkening sky.
Rahimullah Yusufzai, one of the most respected journalists in Pakistan, was attending the press conference and asked the men who were shooting off their weapons if they were part of al-Qaeda. Speaking in Pashto, the local language, the men told Yusufzai that they were not part of al-Qaeda and instead were locals who had been asked to bring their guns and put on this show for the journalists.
Bin Laden told the assembled journalists that he had “formed with many other Islamic groups and organizations in the Islamic world a front called the International Islamic Front to do jihad against the Crusaders and Jews.” Zawahiri provided some useful window dressing for the claim of an “International Islamic Front” because even though Zawahiri had only a tiny number of followers, he was still an Egyptian militant living in Afghanistan. He sat prominently by bin Laden’s side during the press conference, which bolstered the impression that bin Laden’s organization was truly global.
Also at the press conference were two sons of the Blind Sheikh, Omar Abdel Rahman. Rahman’s sons distributed what they described as the “will” of their father on laminated cards to several of the journalists. It was the same fatwa that bin Laden had handed to Hamid Mir two weeks earlier that gave religious sanction to the killing of American civilians anywhere in the world.
Bin Laden knew that the planning for the bombings of the two U.S. embassies in Africa—in Kenya and Tanzania—was nearly complete when he held his press conference in late May 1998. He wanted to signal both that he was at war with the United States and that he had the theological justification to carry out that war.
During the press conference he said that there was going to be some sort of action by his group in the near future, saying there would be “some good news in the weeks ahead.” The prominent Pakistani newspaper The News ran a story about the press conference, describing bin Laden’s “choked voice” as he described the “infidel” soldiers deployed by the United States in the holy land of Saudi Arabia.
Mullah Omar was furious when he heard about bin Laden’s press conference. The Taliban leader called Rahimullah Yusufzai demanding, “How come Osama bin Laden has given a press conference without my permission? There can only be one ruler in Afghanistan.” Mullah Omar’s anger was shared by a number of leaders in the Taliban movement who were annoyed that bin Laden’s grandstanding threats were interfering with their efforts for greater acceptance and recognition on the world stage. Mullah Khakshar, the Taliban’s powerful deputy minister of the interior, even proposed to a group of other Taliban leaders that they talk to Mullah Omar about expelling bin Laden. But it never happened, because they didn’t have the courage to say this to the Taliban leader, who seemed oddly in thrall to bin Laden.
Mullah Omar himself did ask bin Laden, “Look, can you stop talking to the media?” Bin Laden replied, “Look, Mecca is the most sacred place on the face of the earth and I left it and I came here because I want to express myself. Now, if you want me to keep quiet, I’m going to leave Afghanistan.” Bin Laden argued that his stance was sanctioned by the Koran and the hadith, the sayings of the Prophet. Mullah Omar usually backed down when bin Laden made these religious arguments to him.
So bin Laden continued his interviews. Around the same time as his press conference, he also gave an interview in Afghanistan to John Miller of ABC News, one of the three major American television networks. Miller spoke to Zawahiri about the need to get some “B roll” shots of bin Laden that showed him doing something other than just sitting. Zawahiri said, “This is not like your Sam Donaldson [then the White House correspondent for ABC News] and the president walking through the Rose Garden. Mr. bin Laden is a very important man.”
Miller replied, “We are not just going to put bin Laden on for half an hour talking. We need to build a story around elements.”
Zawahiri said, “Elements, we will get you elements.”
When bin Laden arrived for the interview a dozen bodyguards surrounded him. Then suddenly there was a barrage of rockets and tracer bullets fired up into the night sky. Zawahiri noted, “There is always a great celebration when Sheikh bin Laden comes.” Miller got his elements.
For the ABC News interview bin Laden sat down in front of a map of the world, which Miller thought was designed to transmit that al-Qaeda was a worldwide organization and that bin Laden was its leader. As always, bin Laden had his AK-47 with him, which he propped up against the wall during the interview.
Miller asked bin Laden about the killing of American civilians, citing the World Trade Center bombing in 1993. Miller observed, “It’s not like fighting the Russians on the field of battle. This is targeting innocents and civilians.”
Bin Laden replied, “This is a very strange question coming from an American. Was it not your country that bombed Nagasaki and Hiroshima? Were there not women and children and civilians and noncombatants there? You were the people who invented this terrible game and we as Muslims have to use those same tactics against you.”
Bin Laden told Miller, “We believe that the biggest thieves in the world are Americans and the biggest terrorists on earth are the Americans. The only way for us to defend against these assaults is by using similar means. We do not differentiate between those dressed in military uniforms and civilians. They’re all targets in this fatwa.” A year earlier bin Laden had told CNN that the targets of his fury were U.S. soldiers. Now he declared to an American television correspondent that U.S. civilians were also his targets. In the interview, which aired on ABC on June 10, 1998, bin Laden said, “I predict a black day for America.” When he made this prediction, bin Laden knew that al-Qaeda’s plans to blow up two U.S. embassies in Africa were very close to completion.
Miller’s “fixer” and translator on the trip was Tariq Hamdi, an Iraqi living in the United States who had connections among the Arab veterans of the Afghan War. Unbeknownst to Miller, Hamdi had brought with him to Afghanistan a critical battery for bin Laden’s satellite phone, which allowed al-Qaeda’s leaders to communicate with members of the group around the globe. While bin Laden was careful not to talk too much on his satellite phone, other al-Qaeda leaders used the phone often, logging hundreds of hours of calls between 1996 and 1998. Khalid al-Fawwaz, bin Laden’s representative in London, received the largest number of calls. Bin Laden and his top officials also made more than two hundred calls to Yemen and a smaller number of calls to Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan, although none were made to Iraq despite later claims by the Bush administration that al-Qaeda was allied to Saddam Hussein.
By now the Saudis were furious about bin Laden’s constant public critiques. In June 1998 the head of Saudi intelligence, Prince Turki, went to Kandahar to meet Mullah Omar to persuade him to hand over bin Laden. Mullah Omar seemed quite amenable to the idea, telling Prince Turki to inform the Saudi king that he wanted to set up a joint Saudi-Afghan commission to arrange procedures for the handover. A senior Taliban official traveled to Saudi Arabia the following month to finalize the details of the commission that would oversee bin Laden’s return to the Saudi kingdom.
Bin Laden was very close to being forced to return to his homeland. There he could face a trial for treason, which carried the death penalty.
I. Not on the flight to Afghanistan was bin Laden’s other key military commander, Abu Ubayda, who was in Africa laying the groundwork for al-Qaeda’s attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. He drowned in a ferry accident on Lake Victoria on May 21, 1996, along with hundreds of others, just days after bin Laden had arrived in Afghanistan.
II. In early 1997 bin Laden sent a small delegation of clerics to Yemen to meet with Sheikh bin Shagea, who controlled a sizable chunk of northern Yemen close to the Saudi border and the endless deserts of the Empty Quarter. The sheikh had met with bin Laden on a couple of occasions in Saudi Arabia during the 1980s, but he had little patience with bin Laden’s recent calls for holy war. Along with other tribal sheikhs, Sheikh bin Shagea told the clerics that bin Laden and his men could move to Yemen, but they would have to end “any political or military activities directed against other countries.” Sheikh bin Shagea recounted this episode to the author, in northern Yemen, close to the Empty Quarter, in December 2000.
III. The urtext for the view that Zawahiri wielded Svengali-like influence over bin Laden was Lawrence Wright’s story in The New Yorker, “The Man Behind Bin Laden,” published a year after the 9/11 attacks. The article asserted that “according to officials in the C.I.A. and the F.B.I., Zawahiri has been responsible for much of the planning of the terrorist operations against the United States.” In fact, there is no evidence that Zawahiri had a role in the planning of any of al-Qaeda’s major anti-American attacks against the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000, and 9/11 itself. Wright went on to win a Pulitzer Prize for his 2006 book, The Looming Tower, a book that has many strengths, but that also inflated Zawahiri’s role in bin Laden’s anti-American jihad. Wright did, however, note in The Looming Tower that when Zawahiri merged his small group into al-Qaeda in June 2001, it “was bin Laden’s organization, not Zawahiri’s.” I had also overestimated Zawahiri’s importance to bin Laden’s thinking in my 2001 book, Holy War, Inc. After examining all of the evidence, I have since concluded that Zawahiri was a marginal figure when it came to influencing bin Laden’s views, and he played only a minor role in the actions of al-Qaeda in the years leading up to the 9/11 attacks. This view is also shared by Michael Scheuer, who led the bin Laden unit at CIA from 1996 to 1999; by Daniel Coleman, the FBI agent who investigated bin Laden for six years before 9/11; and by the Egyptian dissident Montasser al-Zayyat, who spent years in prison in Egypt with Zawahiri. Zayyat explained, “Osama bin Laden had an appreciable impact on Zawahiri, though the conventional wisdom holds the opposite to be the case. Bin Laden advised Zawahiri to stop armed operations in Egypt and to ally with him against their common enemies: the United States and Israel.” This was also the conclusion of Noman Benotman, a former leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, who knew both bin Laden and Zawahiri, who said it was bin Laden who told Zawahiri, “Forget about the ‘near enemy’ [the Egyptian government]. The main enemy is the Americans because they dominate the whole area and they’re supporting these Arab regimes.” Abu Walid al-Misri, an Egyptian living in Afghanistan who knew both bin Laden and Zawahiri well, also says that Zawahiri played only a minor role in al-Qaeda before the 9/11 attacks.