SEAL Target Geronimo: The Inside Story of the Mission to Kill Osama Bin Laden (13 page)

It was while he was a student at Abdul Aziz University that Osama was introduced to the works of the Islamist radical Sayyid Qutb. Executed by Anwar Sadat in 1966, Sayyid Qutb was the guiding light of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Qutb’s works were published widely in the Muslim world and became the intellectual foundation of the philosophy of Jihad. Upon his death, Qutb became the Muslim Brotherhood’s principal martyr.

Qutb had traveled to the United States in the 1950s and was badly shaken by the experience. He found life in the United States “spiritually primitive” and was appalled by what he called “the loose sexual openness” of American women. Qutb wrote contemptuously of America’s then burgeoning jazz culture, calling it “the music that Negroes invented to satisfy their primitive inclinations, as well as their desire to be noisy on the one hand and excite their bestial tendencies on the other.”

Strangely, despite his racial bigotry, Qutb was capable of writing spiritual meditations on God and man. But democracy, he claimed, was a failed system. It was corrupt because mankind had been corrupted. Qutb’s writings enjoined Muslims that Jihad against unbelievers was a holy obligation.

For Qutb, Jihad meant not just the defense of Muslim lands, but a worldwide revolution, “to safeguard the mission of spreading Islam.” Qutb maintained that the entire world was in a state of
jahiliyah
—a condition of subhuman stupidity and chaos where ignorance clouded mankind’s understanding of God. Since chaos and the will of God cannot coexist, offensive Jihad was necessary to destroy corrupt societies and bring the world to Islam.

Qutb wrote and preached that Islam offered a perfect system of justice and morality. For Qutb and the Muslim Brotherhood armed struggle was the necessary means to bring about paradise on Earth. He believed Islam was surrounded by enemies. Whether democratically elected, monarchical, or rooted in military dictatorship, any regime that did not practice sharia law was apostate, and therefore a legitimate target. An Islamic revolution, in Qutb’s view, was necessary to bring about a change in both government and the hearts of men.

Qutb’s acolytes designated what they called “near enemies”; these included Israel and every secular government in the Arab world. They named also a group of “far enemies”—including the United States—whose unpardonable crime was moral corruption and military support for the nation of Israel.

Sayyid Qutb was both a warrior and a poet who believed that the souls of martyrs would be carried to heaven in the bellies of green birds. His writings were woven through with mysticism, misogyny, and relentless bigotry. But Qutb and the Muslim Brotherhood did not spill out their venom on the great Satan alone. The far enemies also included the European powers that had once held dominion over colonies in the Middle East: Great Britain, France, and Italy.

It’s doubtful that Osama read very deeply into Sayyid Qutb’s thirty volumes of Koranic commentary. But he got the gist. Like millions of other young Muslim men, Osama, through his readings, came to believe that the Jihadis had the answer to the world’s problems.

And that answer was bloodshed.

*   *   *

How did the concept of Jihad hijack the soul of Islam? What made the prospect of bloody sectarian war so attractive to generations of young Arab men? To answer that question, to find out what animated Osama bin Laden’s personal concept of Jihad, it’s necessary to make a brief trip through the history of the Middle East, as seen through
Arab
and not occidental eyes.

An old SEAL adage says, “See it like your enemy.” That means in order to understand a tactical problem, or to try to guess an opponent’s next move, a SEAL needs to think like his opposite number. One way to do that is to learn what the enemy has learned—assemble his “fact set” and look at the problem from his side of the fence. This doesn’t mean you have to agree, but you will be in a much better position to anticipate his actions. To that end, let’s consider it from the
Arab point of view
: The conflict at hand is called the Global Salafist Jihad. Those who wage it call themselves Jihadis, and they are attacking the West for religious reasons. But the mainspring of their grievances is not a religious disagreement, but a geopolitical inequity. The central issue, for the Arabs, is the question of Palestine.

It is one of the ironies of history that the most emblematic weapon of Islamic terrorism, the truck bomb, was invented not by a Muslim fundamentalist, but by a radical Jew. Menachem Begin, the son of a Russian timber merchant, came to Palestine as a member of the Polish army. Born in the city of Brest-Litovsk in Belarus, Menachem Begin had earned a law degree by the age of twenty-seven, and served two years in Stalin’s gulag for political agitation. Starvation and torture left a mark on him.

In 1942, Begin talked his way out of a concentration camp by volunteering for military service under a Soviet puppet named Wladyslaw Anders. He was made an officer and sent with an expeditionary unit to Palestine. There, he quickly threw off his uniform, deserted, and joined the Zionist terrorist organization called Irgun. The group had formed earlier, in 1931, and was an offshoot of Haganah, another Zionist insurgent group. A brilliant orator and organizer, Begin rose rapidly within its ranks.

In 1948, the nation of Israel came into being after a prolonged campaign staged by Haganah. Both organizations waged armed struggle for a Jewish homeland, but the Irgun, led by Begin, was willing to use terror as a weapon. Under a policy called “Active Defense,” Irgun members in Palestine assassinated British military officers and Arab policemen, bombed marketplaces and movie theaters, and carried out a sustained series of attacks against Arab-owned businesses. A favorite Irgun tactic was to place a small explosive in a corner of a crowded market, detonate it, and then hit the rescuers with a second, even larger explosive.

At approximately 12:30 p.m. on the afternoon of July 22, 1946, a truck containing more than half a ton of high explosives was parked in front of the lobby of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. At the same time, a small explosive device was detonated across the street as the drivers of the truck scrambled into a getaway car.

It was a textbook Irgun operation. The smaller blast attracted a crowd. As lunchtime spectators milled around in the street, the larger truck bomb was detonated. At 12:27, an explosion shook the earth and smashed windows as much as a mile away. The detonation sheared off the southwest corner of the hotel, killing ninety-one people and wounding almost a hundred more. Scores of deafened, bleeding survivors staggered through the streets. Dozens of people were buried alive in the wreckage. It was one of the most vicious bombings in history, and horrendous in its calculation to maximize casualties.

British and Arab rescuers worked for three days pulling bodies from the rubble. Thirteen of the victims were never found—they had been vaporized by the explosion.

Not one to rest on his laurels, Begin continued to assassinate Palestinian officials, rob banks, and murder passengers in train stations. As a rule, the Irgun preferred soft targets, like officers’ clubs. Sometimes, they resorted to attacking civilian neighborhoods—as on April 9, 1948, when the Irgun attacked Palestinian civilians at the village of Yassin outside Jerusalem, killing at least a hundred people at a loss of fewer than ten to themselves.

In 1945, the British urged Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Yemen to form the Arab League to coordinate policy regarding Palestine. They held meetings and issued proclamations but accomplished nothing.

Two years later, in 1947, the United Nations General Assembly partitioned Palestine into two states, one Arab and the other Jewish. No one was happy with the outcome. Comprising approximately 35 percent of the population, Jewish settlers were given approximately 55 percent of the land. The area under Jewish control contained almost half a million Jews as well as four hundred and fifty thousand Arabs. The agreement stipulated that Jerusalem was to become a
corpus separatum,
and was to be administered by the United Nations.

Representatives of both the Arab League and the Palestinians furiously rejected the UN plan and questioned the authority that the United Nations had to partition their country.

On May 14, 1948, Israel declared itself a sovereign nation. The next day, Arab forces blockaded Jerusalem and attacked Jewish settlements throughout the countryside. Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and Iraq invaded. Saudi Arabia and Yemen also sent combat units into the fray. Their military mission was to establish a unitary Palestinian state, though the secretary of the Arab League, Azzam Pasha, clouded the issue when he declared that the Arabs were launching a war of extermination.

Joining the Egyptian army in its attack across the Suez Canal were thousands of members of the Muslim Brotherhood. On May 15, four thousand Jordanian troops entered Jerusalem. Bloody house-to-house fighting ensued. As many as ten thousand artillery shells a day were fired into Jewish urban centers and rural settlements. Arab attacks and Jewish counterattacks surged. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians began a nationwide evacuation, fleeing from the combat areas and crowding the highways north and east into Lebanon and Syria.

On the twenty-third of May, the American consul general, Thomas C. Wasson, was assassinated in West Jerusalem as he attempted to broker a cessation of hostilities. A tentative cease-fire was reached on June 11; it was a sham. Both sides used the pause to reinforce their positions and make preparations for further attacks. At the behest of Moscow, the communist government of Czechoslovakia sent more than twenty-five thousand rifles, five thousand machine guns, and fifteen million rounds of ammunition to the Israelis.

The truce held until the eighth of July, when the Israelis launched an offensive on three fronts. The Arab forces retreated. A second UN truce lasted from the eighteenth of July until the middle of October, when the Israeli army again came out swinging, attacking the Arabs on a broad front. In combat, the Israeli forces tended to better their foes, and in December 1948 the Arabs had suffered enough. The United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 194, mandating an end to hostilities.

In the months that followed, Israel concluded separate truce agreements with Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria. Armistice demarcation lines expanded territory under Israeli control by approximately a third. As a sop, the Gaza Strip remained in the control of the Egyptian army, and the West Bank was ceded to Jordan. The Israelis would seize control of both these territories in the next twenty years.

To the Arabs, the Israeli War of Independence was called
al Nakba,
“the Disaster.” More than a million Palestinians fled from their homes or were expelled by the Israelis. Across the nation of Israel, more than four hundred Arab villages were depopulated and bulldozed. In the years following the 1948 war, seven hundred thousand Jews immigrated to Israel and were settled mainly in territory captured from Egypt and Jordan.

The reverberations of
al Nakba
tore through the Arab world like an earthquake. In a matter of months, coup d’états would be staged in Egypt and Syria, the king of Jordan would be assassinated, and Yemen would disintegrate into an appalling civil war. It is impossible to overstate the effect of
al Nakba
on the Arab psyche. The nation of Palestine had been wiped off the map. The combined armies of seven Arab nations had been crushed and driven like cattle back across their frontiers. And this humiliation was kept bitter by a series of armed conflicts fought with the Israelis in 1967, 1973, 1982, and 2006. In all but one of these wars, the Israelis fired first, destroyed all opposing forces, and occupied ever-widening expanses of Arab land. From the Arab point of view
al Nakba
was not a single catastrophe, but a string of disasters heaped one atop the other.

In 1948, for the first time in fifteen hundred years, the city of Jerusalem was occupied by a conquering army. The Arabs blamed each other, and they blamed the rest of the world. Their sense of grievance over the loss of Palestine would continue unabated for the next half century.

When Osama bin Laden was born in March 1957, the nation of Israel was less than ten years old. Its very existence rankled Arab and Muslim sensibilities. The Arab press poured out hatred against Jews, and, increasingly, on the nation that was seen as Israel’s principal prop and ally: the United States of America.

As Osama grew to manhood, the problems posed by almost a million displaced Palestinians affected the entire Arab world. Within the Palestinian Diaspora, more than a dozen terrorist organizations reared their heads. Principal among them was the Palestinian Liberation Organization, headed by an Egyptian named Abdel Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini; the world would come to know him as Yasser Arafat. Though he was a non-observant Muslim, Arafat’s strategy of global terror would have a profound effect on the tactics used by Osama bin Laden. The PLO’s bloody playbook of international mayhem would become a legacy to Bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

Osama bin Laden would become a “distance learner” of the PLO’s terror training camps. As Arafat bombed, hijacked, and murdered, Osama drew two important conclusions: First, that it was possible for a small, secretive organization to fight globally against a superpower; and, second, that by attacking “soft targets” like airliners, and groups of civilians, it was possible to provoke an enemy into massive retaliation, brutal counterviolence that swayed world opinion against the aggressor and joined the oppressed into a cohesive determined whole.

From Arafat, Bin Laden also learned how to organize. Arafat ruled the PLO through a maze of committees, fronts, armed factions, and splinter groups. He was a terrorist, an apologist, a dissembler, and an old-fashioned Arab sheik who took care of a “tribe” of subordinates and supplicants. He was a master manipulator, who sowed discord among his people, his competitors, his allies, and even his enemies. He could have a rival knocked off on Thursday and show up to his funeral on Friday, sobbing openly. Arafat was a chameleon and master of the grand gesture; an archetypal Arab hero to some, complex and resourceful.