The Finish (6 page)

Bin Laden became a “divine enforcer.” As a young man, he was not a scholar or much of a thinker, and he lacked Qutb’s eloquence. Those who knew him found him tongue-tied and unimpressive. But he was ambitious, and rich. His billionaire father was killed in a plane crash in 1967, leaving behind enough of a fortune to make all of his offspring at least multimillionaires. Bin Laden’s inheritance at age ten was estimated in the tens of millions. He had no interest in using his wealth to build a fine home or adopt a luxurious lifestyle, though, as many of his siblings did. His inclinations ran the opposite way. He had been educated in a private secular school, but by the time he attended King Abdulazzi University, where he studied economics and business management, he was already preaching simplicity and seemed primarily interested in religion and charitable work. He continued to pursue these interests until the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and launched him on the path toward his life’s work.

Huthaifa Azzam was just fourteen years old when he answered a bell on the gate outside his father’s house in Jordan. He found a very tall, very thin, swarthy and bearded young man wearing Arab robes and a simple white turban, not the typical red-and-white-checked headdress, or
shemagh,
worn by most Saudi men. The visitor asked, shyly, “Is this the house of Dr. Abdullah Azzam?”

Azzam was a prominent Palestinian Islamist and scholar whose fatwa, “Defense of the Muslim Lands: The First Obligation After Faith,” had caused a stir in the Arab world, summoning the faithful to Afghanistan to resist the infidel Soviets. Azzam had done more than preach. He had relocated to Pakistan to take part in the holy war himself. Based in Peshawar, close to the Afghan border, he had established what he called the “Services Office,” to recruit and train young Arab volunteers to join the fight. Magazines, photos, and videos prepared by the office spread news of the heroic religious resistance throughout the Arab world . . . and had found their way to young bin Laden. Azzam was taking a short holiday break with his family in Jordan when the young Saudi made the four-hour trip to ring his bell. This volunteer was different from most, of course, because of his fortune. Azzam must have been delighted. The two men spoke for hours that day, and by evening bin Laden was a recruit. He pledged himself to the cause. He was still enough of a loyal Saudi subject, however, that he delayed traveling back with Azzam in order to seek permission from King Fahd. He arrived in Peshawar several weeks later.

At that point, bin Laden’s money was more valuable to the cause than his leadership or even his life, and so during those first years with Azzam he stayed safely behind the lines, working at the Services Office and helping to attract other young fighters to the cause. This was not destined to last. Bin Laden was a romantic, and a zealot, and he had not made his jihad to live safely behind the lines. He grew apart from Azzam, increasingly falling in with Ayman al-Zawahiri, the radical Egyptian physician who had left his home country after serving three years in prison. Zawahiri worked at a Red Crescent hospital in Peshawar. Although only six years older than bin Laden, he was a man of wider experience and education, and had been deeply embittered by the torture he had undergone at the hands of Egyptian police. His angry radicalism stirred bin Laden to play a more active role in the holy war—to become a full-fledged
mujahid
himself.

Bin Laden’s growing extremism began to trouble his Palestinian mentor. Azzam, a college professor, balked at bin Laden’s refusal to send his children to school. The younger man wanted Arab recruits to form separate, religiously pure fighting units, while Azzam believed the Arabs would be better employed if mixed with the savvier, more experienced Afghan militia. He also resisted his protégé’s growing carelessness about human life. Bin Laden had embraced a broad definition of “infidel.” Until that point, the enemy had been understood to be Russian soldiers and Afghans who fought with them. They were at war, after all. Bin Laden had expanded the definition. It now applied to any Russian, even any non-Muslim. He was fighting a bigger war than the one being promoted by Azzam. The older man’s wife, Samira, remembers her husband arguing with bin Laden about the younger man’s plan to place a bomb on a bus full of Russians visiting Pakistan.

“You entered Pakistan on a visa,” Azzam reminded him. “The visa is a contract. You signed when you obtained the visa that you would not be a troublemaker nor break the laws. A Muslim should not break a contract.”

“Pakistan is a Muslim country,” bin Laden told him, by which he meant that non-Muslims had no business coming there.

It was one thing, Azzam argued, to kill Russians who invaded Afghanistan and held it by force, quite another to target innocent civilians on a holiday to a country that welcomed them.

“So what will happen if Russia loses a bus full of people?” bin Laden said dismissively. “It is not going to matter.”

He had moved beyond the conflict in Afghanistan. His faith empowered him. God had touched him. This gave him the right to decide, to kill.

Bin Laden also felt that jihad demanded that he actually fight as well, not just take part in recruiting, training, and paying others to do so. The older man argued with him for months, no doubt convinced that a multimillionaire Saudi was worth more to the cause alive than dead. But bin Laden had made up his mind. He was going to cross the border and join the battle. In 1987, he split with Azzam. He recruited his own band of about two dozen Arab fighters, creating the kind of fighting unit he preferred—a pure, all-Arab force of men who fought for religious reasons alone, not just for the principle of Afghan nationalism. Equipped with weapons and bulldozers, they drove ten miles or so into Afghanistan, joined up with some like-minded Afghan fighters, and set about building a mountain outpost near the village of Jaji. Bin Laden fortified a series of ridges and began building roads and other structures—he said a school and a hospital—that advertised their presence. It was in easternmost Afghanistan, in rugged country, and was not a strategically important spot, at least not in any conventional sense. Bin Laden called it al-Masada, the Lion’s Den. It was near a much larger Soviet garrison and its primary purpose was to provoke an attack. To a practical man like Azzam (who would be assassinated two years later) this probably appeared foolhardy, but bin Laden lived in a world of romantic fantasy, and in that realm, al-Masada made perfect sense. The battle was not just for Afghanistan, but for the whole world. It was the beginning of a new caliphate, the dawn of a new Muslim age. He was a holy warrior, and warriors did not win battles by writing checks and making videos and leading from the rear. In his view, the idea wasn’t to defeat the Soviets in battle, or even to survive, but to display such heroism and resolve that it would inflame the fighting spirit of the greater Muslim Nation.

“God willing, we want the Lion’s Den to be the first thing that the enemy faces,” bin Laden told a Syrian journalist. “Its place as the first camp visible to the enemy means that they will focus their bombardments on us in an extreme manner.”

And the Soviets obliged, dropping napalm and so many tons of conventional explosives that the outpost and the area around it were denuded of trees and vegetation. Then they attacked directly, encircling the outpost. The siege lasted for twenty-two days, with a heavy toll on both sides. Some of bin Laden’s men were more skilled fighters than he was. Abu Hafs (Mohammed Atef, an Egyptian policeman who would be killed in 2001) and Abu Ubaidah (Ali Amin al-Rashidi, also a former Egyptian policeman, killed in 1996) led punishing counterattacks. The Soviets eventually gave up and retreated, handing the Arab fighters an inspirational victory. It had unfolded for bin Laden miraculously, a clear sign from heaven.

He would later tell the Syrian journalist, “At seven on the twenty-seventh morning of Ramadan 1407 [April of 1987], most of the people were sleeping in the camp because it was Ramadan. Then I saw things that, by God, I have never seen before. A Soviet airplane, a MIG, I believe, passed by in front of us, when a group of our Afghan
mujahidin
brothers grouped together [and attacked]. The plane then broke into pieces and fell right in front of our eyes. This battle is what gave me the strong will to continue with this war.”

By all accounts bin Laden fought bravely, exposing himself to danger and the extremes of deprivation and cold like everyone else in the camp. He was injured during the fighting and, at one point, he later told an interviewer, he lay unconscious and bleeding in a trench, surrounded by his dead comrades. He was ultimately rescued, but only after losing a lot of blood, an incident that he would later say had given him chronically low blood pressure. Bin Laden’s willingness to place himself at risk greatly enlarged his reputation. It mattered little in the end that the battle had been meaningless in practical terms. The Battle of Jaji was proclaimed a great victory, and bin Laden, having conceived it, was its hero. Reporters trekked out to al-Masada to meet this Saudi multimillionaire who fought with suicidal conviction. One of them, Ahmad Zaidan, a Pakistani newspaper reporter working for a group of Arab newspapers, found an extraordinarily pious young man in complete command, who had supplanted the role once played by the far more famous Azzam, and who was surrounded by devoted followers. Bin Laden had transformed himself from a rich-kid backer on the sidelines into a frontline
mujahidin
leader.

It brought him more than new recruits. It affirmed his sense of destiny. By then he had become the Sheik. He was thirty years old, tall and thin, with long full features and a long dark beard that further elongated his face. He preferred traditional Arab robes and cultivated a lofty, saintly mien, affecting abject humility. He was theatrically holy. From time to time he would receive audiences of reporters, and after each question he would sit silently for a few moments, mouthing prayers, as if waiting for the Almighty to formulate the response for him, and only then would he speak, in a voice so soft that everyone had to lean close to hear him. He fasted once or twice a week and rejected the simple comforts and conveniences of modern life that he could easily afford. He shunned electricity, doing without air-conditioning and refrigeration in even the warmest climates, as when he and his family lived in the Sudan. All the better to harden himself and his family for the privation of war, for life as a fugitive. Followers were now drawn to his renown, to his sincerity, to his daring and his conviction, but also to his money. His fortune was still key. For those who had experienced the heady days of jihad in Afghanistan and preferred to make a career of it, bin Laden could provide the means, and possessed the reckless vision. For most Arabs the caliphate was ancient history, but to the Sheik it was destiny. God had chosen him. Surviving the bitter Russian siege at Jaji reinforced those beliefs. Qutb had called for a pure Muslim state, a base from which to spread the cause. Afghanistan seemed to be the place. It had been called Khorasan when it was converted to Islam in the seventh century and had stood as one of the great pillars of the caliphate for centuries. Defeating the Soviets there would have deep resonance among believers. It was, perhaps, the right place. And in bin Laden’s mind, it had started at al-Masada, where the pure of heart, outnumbered and outgunned, had righteously defied Soviet MIGs and bombs and weeks of determined assault.

Then the impossible happened. Just as they had backed away from al-Masada,
in 1989 Russian armies retreated in frustration from Afghanistan. Within three years, the Soviet empire itself collapsed, closely followed by the regime it had left behind in Kabul. Bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia with an outsized reputation as author of this titanic accomplishment, and he gained even more disciples. He and the men who had fought with him at Jaji saw themselves as the fulcrum of this triumph and named themselves “the Base,” or al Qaeda. They were the soul of what bin Laden saw as the emerging caliphate, a true Muslim Nation.

It was, of course, absurd. If anything, the source of the
mujahidin
’s triumph had been the billions of dollars of U.S. aid and arms that Michael Vickers had helped steer to Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion. But bin Laden was less interested in the truth than in appearances, and in the latter, he and his followers excelled. Their style spoke volumes. Their long beards and hair and prayer caps and robes made them seem like men from an ancient, holier time. They adopted bin Laden’s asceticism. They embraced struggle and death, bragging that their desire for martyrdom trumped their attachment to life itself. They pitted themselves against power. They were natural men, real men. Their very shabbiness advertised their authenticity. They were pious. They believed that happiness and justice were not things civilization was evolving toward, but things that had been lost.

The fall of the Soviet Union had many causes, of course, and the drawn-out humiliation in Afghanistan was certainly among them, but for the devout there was only one cause: the hand of God had once more moved clearly in human history, just as it had in the legends of old. No serious scholar would credit bin Laden with a critical role in the effort, much less a role in the collapse of the Soviet state, but in the Sheik’s mind that was how it had gone. It made for a great story, the powerless but pure of heart overcoming impossible odds. The Sheik loved stories like these. He was a poet himself, a fantastical one, given to cosmic sweep and romantic cliché. He celebrated violence and death in the struggle to defend the faith, with centuries-old imagery of swords and steeds, soaring mountains, and fearless warriors.

He hunches forth,