SEAL Target Geronimo: The Inside Story of the Mission to Kill Osama Bin Laden (17 page)

Arriving fighters pledged loyalty,
al bayat,
to Sheik Azzam, but everyone knew who was paying for the show. Eventually arriving fighters would render
al bayat
to Osama himself—but that was in the future. Osama was content to be treated obsequiously by both his Pakistani hosts and his employees at the Services Bureau. He visited wounded fighters in the hospital and contributed money to start the University of Dawa and Jihad (the university of Outreach and Struggle) across the border in the tribal areas. Run by Abdul Sayyaf, the school would later gain notoriety as the world’s premier training facility for terrorists.

To Pakistani and Saudi intelligence, the charismatic Azzam was the brains of the outfit, both a military leader and a religious scholar. Osama was reticent and soft-spoken; he had soft hands and a cryptic smile on his face that struck more than one person as being hopelessly naïve.

The several hundred Arabs who assembled under the auspices of the Services Bureau were christened “the Brigade of Strangers.” They did not seek to integrate themselves into the Afghani forces they had pledged to help. Of almost one million Afghans who would give combat to the Soviet juggernaut, these “Afghan Arabs” never comprised more than 1 percent of the total armed force. They didn’t do much fighting, either. Most of them never left Peshawar.

Many were Islamic radicals on the lam from their own governments at home. Some were merely seeking adventure, but a small number actually believed that fighting the Russians was a firm religious duty. They all found that as soon as they joined the Brigade of Strangers, they were unwanted at home. Many Arab governments used Bin Laden’s offer of free transportation to rid themselves of troublesome fundamentalists.

Bin Laden and Azzam had established a suicide travel bureau and disaffected Muslim drifters came from all over the world. They were Sunni, mostly, and tended toward the absolutist, Wahabi strain of Islam. Theirs was an underground and revolutionary existence. It was not uncommon for comrades not to know each other’s real names. In the Brigade of Strangers, no one really asked where a man came from— it didn’t matter. And besides, they had all come to Peshawar for the same thing, to martyr themselves.

*   *   *

Osama bin Laden did not create the Jihad movement or contribute in any real way to its cultural, religious, or intellectual underpinnings. That was for men like Abdullah Azzam and later, Ayman Zawahiri. Osama was an impresario. By all accounts he was not a particularly charismatic person, nor did he speak well in public. Why, then, did Muslim men answer this call to doom? What compelled them to travel to a faraway land and throw down their lives in what seemed to be an almost hopeless struggle against a Russian superpower?

Since the first days of the Soviet invasion, preachers in Wahabi mosques thundered that the rewards for martyrdom were an eternity in paradise. Most of the men who heard these sermons were not unintelligent. The vast majority wondered that if paradise were so readily at hand, why didn’t the preachers just get on an airplane and rush into the fight?

So who answered this call to Jihad?

Radicalism can only take root in the absence of hope. The Nazis rose to power in the poisonous environ forced upon the German people by military defeat and economic crisis. In a like manner, the Global Salafist Jihad was a siren call to a generation of Muslim men who felt thwarted and embittered.

From Pakistan, the Gulf states, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and North Africa, Azzam and Bin Laden gathered lost Muslim souls who had given up on both themselves and their futures. These were men who lived on the margins of society—beaten down by military dictatorships, or frustrated and thwarted by rigid monarchies where freedom of expression and social mobility was vastly curtailed. In these dark corners of the world, there was no art, literature, or theater. There was no indigenous cinema, and there was little music or entertainment that was not prepackaged and state approved. But there were sociological and cultural reasons why they joined as well. Across the Muslim world a stifling, priggish culture was spreading; a new, all-consuming, religious masochism that forbade young men and women from socializing. And in Lebanon, where it was still possible for men and women to meet each other, they could not; almost the entire country was a battlefield.

In the 1980s, there was not one functional democracy in the Arab world. The humiliation of continuous defeats at the hands of the Israeli army engendered a simmering hatred that was palpable. The heat was on, and the pot’s lid was screwed down tight.

Azzam’s books and sermons promised a quick and painless fix to these multifarious problems: martyrdom. The world could not be fixed—it was too evil, too corrupt, too sinful. The answer lay on the other side, in paradise.

At first, not many answered this mournful call to death, but they came, in ones and twos and then in dozens. Men with nothing to lose, and no other dream than to give up their lives. These men would later become the nucleus of Al Qaeda—but first, they had to defeat the Russians.

*   *   *

In 1985, Osama bin Laden began his short, star-crossed career as a combat leader. Together with sixty of the Brigade of Strangers, he crossed into Afghanistan, hoping to join forces with Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, then engaged in battle with Soviet forces near a place called Jihad Wal.

They arrived in the middle of the night, lights blazing on their vehicles, weapons unsafe, chattering among themselves, their pockets full of raisins and chickpeas by way of rations. They were not an inspiring sight, these Jihadi reinforcements, and promptly the next morning the Afghani commander told them their services were no longer required.

Abdullah Azzam was quick enough to understand that they presented a ridiculous spectacle, but Bin Laden was not used to being told what to do. He wanted to enter the fray.

When told that the Russians had retreated, Osama asked why they all did not give chase. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar explained to the eager young Saudi some of the realities of combat with a superpower. The Soviets had the advantage in numbers and possessed both helicopter gunships and fighter-bombers armed with guided missiles. Their midnight arrival might easily have brought down an air strike. In the light of dawn, Hekmatyar got a glimpse of Osama’s troops. Some had brought white-colored tents—and when asked about them they said that they wanted to become targets: martyrdom was their goal. The Afghanis have traditionally practiced a moderate form of Sunni Islam; over the course of their military history they have not enthusiastically endorsed suicide as a military tactic. What Gulbuddin Hekmatyar needed on the front lines were trained and disciplined fighters, not instant heroes.

Azzam and Bin Laden handed over their weapons and ammunition to Hekmatyar’s fighters, plodded onto a trio of buses, and were driven back to Peshawar.

The Afghanis started to call them the Brigade of the Ridiculous.

Osama and Azzam continued to take in money and direct volunteers to training camps and combat across the border. This is what they were good at, and for a while they stuck to it. Azzam made frequent fund-raising trips far afield, and in 1986 he went on a speaking tour of the United States, collecting money in mosques in Dallas, Kansas City, and Los Angeles. He told stories of miracles on the battlefield—of a single determined Mujahideen who scattered a platoon of Soviet tanks, of bullets that bounced off copies of the Koran and left fighters unharmed, of martyrs’ corpses that never decomposed, of bombs sent astray by clouds of birds that were the heaven-bound souls of Jihadists. Azzam’s words brought in money and new recruits. His sermons resonated where the rewards of living were few and hard to find; Mujahideen came from Saudi Arabia mostly, but also from the oppressive military dictatorships of Yemen and Syria. Some even came from the United States.

*   *   *

Money rolled in and the Services Bureau grew. Hassan al Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, had written that “Martyrdom is art.” Osama’s art was luring fighters through the publication of his glossy magazine
al Jihad
, studded with photographs of burning Soviet tanks and dead Russian soldiers. Volunteers came, many of them Saudis on school vacations who flew to Pakistan on discounted airfares for a week or two spent at the Services Bureau guesthouses. The money kept coming.

Bin Laden eventually brought his wives and children to live with him in Peshawar. It was 1986, and the Soviets were discovering what the British had learned in 1820: Afghanistan was not to be conquered.

America had added to Russia’s nightmare by providing shoulder-launched Stinger antiaircraft missiles to the Mujahideen. These man-portable heat-seekers were death to Russian helicopter gunships, and kept Soviet fighter-bombers at altitudes that made precision bombing impossible. Stinger missiles contributed to the Soviet’s looming defeat, but they were not the war-winner that some military pundits would claim. The toughness of the individual Afghan is what won the war.

Thirty years later, when it came America’s turn to invade Afghanistan, the Stingers would be gone, but the fight would be just as unwinnable.

The Soviets were on the ropes and arms from around the world arrived in the port of Karachi in cargo containers filled to bursting. The Pakistanis had to find a place to store this embarrassment of weapons, and a great number of rifles and rocket launchers were hidden in a cave complex excavated by Bin Laden southwest of the Khyber Pass. The area was called the Parrot’s Beak.

On the northern slope of the Khyber Pass, Osama made for himself an underground lair consisting of barracks, field hospitals, food and fuel storage, and of course, armories containing weapons and magazines for explosives and ammunition. The hard rock made the caves practically unassailable, and years later, during the American invasion, Osama would make a stand there. The place was called Tora Bora, meaning “Black Rock,” and it was one of the most secret and important supply centers for Mujahideen during the war.

In May 1986, Osama made his third combat foray, returning again to Jaji, in an area then controlled by the warlord Abdul Sayyaf. The deployment again descended into black comedy.

Bin Laden and a small group of fighters were tucked into pup tents overnight, and failed to detect when a passing Soviet aircraft sowed their camp with “butterfly bombs.” These are green, plastic antipersonnel mines that fall to earth spinning like the seeds of maple trees. They contain just enough explosive to blow off a man’s foot—they are designed to wound, rather than kill, on the theory that one wounded man takes three people out of the fight: the casualty and two men to carry him.

At dawn, a cook stepped on one of the mines. There was a flash of light and a thud, followed by a scream and someone yelling “God is Great! God is Great!” Osama and his men were thrown into a panic. The light revealed that hundreds of butterfly bombs littered the camp. As they tried to pick their way out of the mined area, crawling on hands and knees, a second air strike thundered into a cliff face near by, spraying the confused men with shrapnel and splinters of granite.

Osama and his men were engulfed in a roiling, black cloud of cordite. The blast turned their tents inside out, scattered men and equipment, and killed a Jihad tourist from Egypt. When the dust cleared, four men had been seriously wounded, and all were badly shaken.

Abdul Sayyaf took Bin Laden aside and gently suggested that he take the wounded back to Peshawar. It was not necessary to add that they had made asses of themselves.

Three times Osama had tried to join in the fighting and three times he had succeeded only in making a target out of himself. Bombed out of thin air, he had yet to fire a shot in anger, or even point a rifle at a Russian soldier. Word of his haplessness preceded him, and soon no Afghan commander would allow Osama’s Arab Mujahideen anywhere near the front lines.

There are few people who will speak truth to power, or say no to money. In December, Osama arranged to have an “all Arab” base camp constructed near Jaji. He would call it “The Lion’s Den.” It was badly situated, exposed to the elements, and in close proximity to an active and alert Soviet encampment.

Abdul Azzam tried to talk Osama out of having a frontline base and he encouraged Osama not to keep Arab fighters sequestered from the Afghan-commanded combat units—those who were doing the actual fighting.

A rift was forming between Osama and Azzam, and it was bigger than the tactical importance of a single encampment. Abdul Azzam had issued a call to Jihad, and had done so to all Muslims. It was his aspiration to bring together the
ulma,
all of the Muslims together, to drive the Soviets from Afghanistan. Wherever possible, Azzam preferred to disperse Arab volunteers into Afghan units. This made military sense. Azzam knew that the Arab volunteers were fervent, but they lacked basic military skills. They did not speak the local languages. Azzam felt that concentrating the Arab fighters in a fixed base was to invite catastrophe. This was, after all, a guerrilla war. Bases were targets.

Azzam was thinking in the here and now, but Osama was thinking of the future. The Soviets were already crafting an exit strategy. Osama was looking ahead to a fight that he thought would come with Islam’s second enemy: the West. Bin Laden was planning the creation of an Arab legion of Mujahideen, a private army of fighters that could carry Jihad to the world. Azzam was an intelligent man, and knew that Bin Laden’s funding was vital to his own plans and to the Afghanis’ continuing struggle against the Soviets. He pleaded with Bin Laden not to place himself in needless danger. Osama would not listen.

Finally, Azzam enlisted the aid of Bin Laden’s brother-in-law Jamal Khalifa. Khalifa was married to Bin Laden’s sister. He was a shadowy character with ties to Saudi intelligence, and ran a series of front companies and sham Islamic charities that would later finance Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s worldwide network of terror. Together with local warlord Abdul Sayyaf, they went to talk sense to Osama at the Lion’s Den.