SEAL Target Geronimo: The Inside Story of the Mission to Kill Osama Bin Laden (12 page)

Williams’s message continues, and recommends a half-dozen courses of action that would have put the 9/11 hijackers out of business. It landed on a desk at FBI headquarters and was ignored.

Almost by accident, FBI agents did arrest one of Al Qaeda’s 9/11 hijackers. Zacarias Moussaoui was picked up on an immigration violation after he had told an incredulous flight instructor that he was interested in piloting only large passenger aircraft, and that he didn’t need to learn how to take off or land—only to fly.

Moussaoui was taken into custody, but FBI headquarters refused seventy requests from field agents to authorize examination of his laptop computer or search his apartment. The FBI agent in charge of the investigation, Colleen Rowley, correctly named Zacarias Moussaoui as a handpicked member of an Al Qaeda hijacking team. In her repeated memos, Rowley stated that Moussaoui was in contact with people targeting buildings in New York City.

Her messages, too, were ignored by FBI headquarters.

For her efforts, Ms. Rowley was booted out of the FBI thirty-six months after 9/11. Hounded by her former organization, she was forced to invoke federal whistleblower protection status to shield both herself and her family.

But it wasn’t necessary to read top secret message traffic to predict an airborne terrorist attack against the United States. All anyone had to do was open a newspaper. On the night of September 11, 1994, Frank Eugene Corder stole a Cessna 150 from Aldino Airport in Maryland. Though monitored by radars at Andrews Air Force Base and D.C.’s National Airport, Corder managed to penetrate controlled airspace and fly around the Washington Monument. Over Pennsylvania Avenue, Corder switched off his engine, conducted a “dead stick” approach, and smashed his airplane into the front of the White House. The burning wreckage came to rest two stories below President Clinton’s bathroom window.

The first family was not in the White House at the time, and Corder’s light plane did little damage, but he had succeeded. Seven years to the day before the 9/11 attacks, the civilian airplane was validated as a weapons system.

If conclusions might not have been drawn from the suicide attack on the White House or the National Intelligence Council report, warning might have been gleaned from classified exercises conducted by the U.S. military. Throughout the eighties and nineties SEAL Team Six demonstrated that airliners could be commandeered in flight and their autopilots used to program crashes into specific targets. After setting the flight controls SEALs parachuted from the aircraft. Besides proving that this threat was real, these operations confirmed that even non-martyrdom hijackers could use airliners as a weapon.

Following 9/11, two myths have persisted: the first is that the airline suicide attacks were an Al Qaeda innovation. This is patently false. The controlled flight of civilian aircraft into an important target had already succeeded, and that target had been the White House.

The second fiction perpetuated after 9/11 was that suicide hijacking could not have been prevented, because no one perceived that such a threat existed. This, too, is nonsense.

There was no failure to anticipate the 9/11 attacks. A blue-ribbon intelligence committee had stated specifically that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda were likely to carry out an attack using hijacked airplanes as weapons. That global transportation systems and airline passengers remained open to terrorist exploitation was a failure of policy makers and elected officials who ignored, disregarded, or failed to grasp the deadly serious nature of the threat.

The only people who weren’t paying attention were the ones at the top.

RICH KID

MARCH 1957–DECEMBER 1979

OSAMA BIN LADEN WAS BORN
on March 10, 1957, the son of Saudi millionaire Mohammed bin Laden and Hamida Ghanem, a woman who was in bonded service to the Bin Laden family. When Sauda Arabia finally outlawed all forms of slavery in 1962, Osama became a full-fledged Bin Laden son. In 1967, when he was just ten years old, two events occurred that would shape the terrorist leader. The first was personal: His father was killed in an airplane crash. This brought Osama and his mother closer to the bosom of the Bin Laden family in Jeddah, where his eldest brother, Salem bin Laden, enrolled Osama in the al Thagher Model School, where a core component of the curriculum was compulsory Islamic studies. The other event that was to shape him irrevocably was the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.

The 1967 Arab-Israeli war had been an unmitigated disaster for the Egyptian and Syrian people, and the war in 1973 was hardly an unalloyed success. Though Arab military dictators managed to hold on to power and muzzle dissent, the Arab people seethed.

The military defeats handed out by Israel in 1967 loomed on the Arab world’s geographical and intellectual horizons. In addition to the loss of tens of thousands of troops and hundreds of millions of dollars in military hardware, the Arab countries of the region were swamped with refugees. Wherever the Israelis advanced, Palestinian civilians ran away. More than a million noncombatants fled the rampaging Israeli army and crowded into squalid camps in Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon. There, they strained resources to the breaking point.

As Osama entered puberty, hatred for Israel and fear of its military might were pervasive. When the smoke cleared, Arab politicians, students, and religious scholars were left to ponder: How could this have happened? Following the Arab defeats in 1967, voices were heard in the mosques saying that the root cause of the disaster was not military buffoonery, but the will of God. The Arab nations had been defeated because they had turned their back on Islam. This message began to gain intellectual traction—even as Syria, Iraq, and Egypt cracked down on religious dissenters.

Members of the Muslim Brotherhood preached that the Arabs had been beaten because of the treachery of Israel and the military support of the United States. They believed that the Muslim people were being chastised by God, because they had turned away from the one true faith. They believed the only way to destroy the nation of Israel was for the Arab people to unite under a Muslim government. These fundamentalists asserted, like the godless Marxists before them, that violence was the only legitimate means of social change. Their creed was absolutist. The only way to bring peace and justice to the world was for mankind to accept Islam, both as a religion and as a unifying world government. To those young Muslim men who wanted payback for years of Arab humiliation, this call to holy war was irresistible.

At al Thagher, Osama came in contact with Jihadi philosophy through one of his teachers, a religious refugee from Syria. Osama bin Laden was an unlikely revolutionary. He’d lost his father as a young boy, but had grown up without ever tasting want or recognizing the injustices that made his family’s wealth possible. He was a child of privilege who could buy whatever he wanted, live the way he wished, and use the family airplane whenever he felt like it. He was religious, but not a fanatic. He had a pretty good life.

Neither Osama bin Laden’s stepfather nor his mother were overtly pious. It is not likely that he heard either hatred or bigotry at home. Friends and family members have both stated that in the course of his studies at al Thagher, Osama became increasingly religious. By age fourteen, Osama had set a goal for himself to become a
hafiz,
a person who has memorized the entire Koran. It’s doubtful if he ever finished. But he became part of a small clique of students who were zealous in prayer and talked about the Koran late into the night.

Osama often wore wrinkled clothing, in imitation, he thought, of the Prophet Muhammad. He grew a wispy beard and quit wearing shorts to soccer practice because he considered short pants to be un-Islamic. Across the globe, in the United States, certain groups of college students just as firmly embraced Christianity. They witnessed on street corners and also affected the laid-back manner of their own prophet, Jesus Christ. In America, these students were fondly referred to as “Jesus freaks.” Religious students in Saudi Arabia didn’t have a nickname. Saudi Arabia is a profoundly religious country, and to find that some of its students were fervently devoted to Islam was a surprise to no one. Osama bin Laden was a long way from wishing harm on anyone and even further from espousing violence.

When Osama was sixteen, he married his first cousin, Najwa Ghanem. He was still in high school; she was fourteen. They had known each other all of their lives. The young couple settled into a small apartment in his mother’s home just off the Jeddah highway and started to build a life together. That they were teenagers was unremarkable. It was not unusual for upper-class Saudis to marry young. Osama’s own mother had given birth to him when she was just fifteen.

Unlike many of his brothers and sisters, Osama chose not to attend university abroad. Though he had been a mediocre student, his wealth would have bought admission at any university he chose—several Bin Ladens have attended first-rate American universities, including Harvard. Osama’s decision to attend King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah was based not so much on a loathing of the West, but on a desire to remain close to his family.

At university, Osama studied business administration. When he did go to class, he was driven in a chauffeured Mercedes-Benz. He traveled frequently to visit his mother’s village in Syria, and also occasionally to Beirut. Accompanied by other young Saudi millionaires, Osama would hunt big game in Africa, keep an aerie of expensive falcons, and find time to climb mountains in Turkey. Although his Islamic beliefs were firm, Osama was not didactic. He had yet to show the almost masochistic avoidance of luxury that he would exhibit in his thirties and forties. He spent money on himself and others. He was an excellent horseman and owned a ranch south of Jeddah.

While at al Thagher, Osama continued his fascination with the ideas of Islamic fundamentalists, notably those of the Muslim Brotherhood, and a curious scholar-poet turned revolutionary, Sayyid Qutb.

So powerful were these ideas that they would change Osama bin Laden from the underachieving son of a Saudi millionaire, to the most feared terrorist on Earth.

LEARNING TO HATE

IN 1977, OSAMA BECAME A FATHER
. His wife, Najwa, was fifteen years old and the birth of their son, Abdulla, was a source of joy to them both. Osama attended classes at Abdul Aziz University, played with his son, and lived on a stipend from his family.

Oil money continued to pour into Saudi Arabia. The price of Saudi crude oil leapt sixfold after the Arab oil embargo in the early seventies. Petroleum revenues for the kingdom were $4.5 billion in 1973; in 1981 they totaled almost $102 billion. With the petro-dollars came big-ticket construction projects, and the Saudi Bin Laden Group continued to expand.

Inundated with cash, the Saudi monarchy jetted around the world, dropping millions in casinos and living a stratospheric high life. The boozy hijinks of Saudi princes became legendary. King Faisal made known his displeasure, commenting that, “In one generation we went from riding camels to driving Cadillacs.” His majesty did his best to curb the worst excesses of the Saudi princes, but he had little effect on the jet-setting royal progeny.

Faisal bin Musaid was a nephew of the king who had been sent abroad to study political science. At the University of Colorado, he lived a beatnik life, drinking and womanizing. In Boulder, Colorado, Musaid was arrested for drug possession, and pleaded guilty to conspiring to sell LSD. He dropped out of the University of Colorado, turned up briefly at UC Berkeley, flunked out, and wafted back to Saudi Arabia and a frosty royal reception.

In 1965, Musaid’s brother was shot and killed by Saudi riot police during a protest against a television studio in Riyadh. The protesters were religious fundamentalists who feared that television was undermining the faith of Islam. For ten years, Faisal bin Musaid held a smoldering grudge for his brother’s death.

In 1970, he added religion to a deadly mix of alcohol and pills, and on March 25, 1975, Musaid decided to strike a blow to both avenge his brother and cleanse the Islamic faith. Musaid slipped into a royal reception, produced a .38 caliber pistol, and fired three shots at King Faisal. The King’s bodyguard pounced on Musaid and the mortally wounded King was rushed to Central Hospital in Riyadh. He died hours later of his wounds.

The kingdom was in shock. The Bin Laden family had built its wealth and its construction empire on the patronage of King Faisal. In a country where construction projects were awarded on the basis of royal favor, it was left to Salem bin Laden to forge a new relationship with Crown Prince Fahd, who would soon assume duties as the monarch of Saudi Arabia.

By the time King Faisal was assassinated, Osama bin Laden was a fully admitted member of the Muslim Brotherhood. He was neither a well-read Islamic scholar nor a keen student of politics, but he accepted the political line of the Muslim Brotherhood, which held that the only legitimate governments were those based firmly on Islamic precepts. Members of the Muslim Brotherhood were Salafists, meaning that they closely adhered to the manners and customs of the prophet Muhammad’s earliest companions.

Salafi Muslims seek also to reestablish the caliphate—that is, Islamic domination of all the lands from Spain to China occupied at the high point of the Muslim conquest. Osama embraced the concept of the new caliphate, but was ambiguous about who should rule the Muslim world. The fortunes of the Bin Laden family, and Osama’s monthly stipend, were inextricably tied to the fortunes of the Saudi monarchy. Muslim Brother or not, Osama saw the assassination, as did the world, as the act of a lunatic. Osama did not condone regicide, or the overthrow of the Saudi monarchy. That would come later.