The Looming Tower (17 page)

Bin Laden opened a halfway house for the recruits and even put them up in his own apartment. In the summers, he ran special military camps for high school and college students. Despite his youth, he rapidly emerged as a talented fund-raiser. Wealthy individuals, including members of the royal family, eagerly contributed. The Saudi government encouraged these efforts by offering steep discounts on the national airline for flights to Pakistan, the dropping-off point for jihad. Crown Prince Abdullah personally donated dozens of trucks for the cause. It was a thrilling national effort, although it established charitable habits and associations that would later become ruinous. The people who rallied to the Afghan jihad felt that Islam itself was threatened by the advance of communism. Afghanistan meant little to most of them, but the faith of the Afghan people meant a great deal. They were drawing a line against the retreat of their religion, which was God’s last word and the only hope of human salvation.

Jamal Khalifa was completely persuaded by Azzam’s arguments. Later, he spoke to his friend Osama and declared that he had decided to go to Afghanistan. As a sign of his approval, bin Laden proposed that Jamal marry his favorite sister, Sheikha. She was divorced and several years older than Osama, who was taking care of her and her three children. Because Jamal wasn’t allowed to see her at first, his friend extravagantly praised her pleasant nature, her humor, and her piety.

“What are you talking about?” Khalifa said. “Suppose I go to die?”

But he agreed to meet her as soon as it could be properly arranged. When he did, he decided that Sheikha was “the best I ever met in my whole life.” He put off the marriage for a year, however, in case he was martyred in Afghanistan.

Bin Laden also wanted to go openly to Afghanistan, but he could not get permission from the authorities. “The Saudi government asked me officially not to enter Afghanistan due to how close my family is to the Saudi leadership,” bin Laden later said. “They ordered me to stay in Peshawar, because if the Russians arrested me that would be proof of our support against the Soviet Union. I didn’t obey their order. They thought my entry into Afghanistan was damning to them. I didn’t listen.”

He would have to defy another authority as well, which was even more difficult for him. His mother forbade him to go. He begged for her permission, saying that he would be going there only to take care of the families of the mujahideen. He said he would call every day. Finally he promised, “I won’t even get near Afghanistan.”

5

The Miracles

O
NE MONTH AFTER THE SOVIET INVASION,
Prince Turki al-Faisal paid a visit to Pakistan. He was shaken by the Soviet takeover of Afghanistan, which he saw as the first step in a march toward the warm waters of the Persian Gulf. Pakistan would be next. He believed the Soviet Union’s ultimate target was to control the Strait of Hormuz at the base of the Gulf, where Oman reaches toward Iran like a fishhook for an open mouth. From there, the Soviets could control the supply route for the supertankers that ferried the petroleum from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, and Iran. Whoever commanded the strait had a knife at the throat of the world’s oil supply.

Turki’s colleagues in the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) briefed him on the Afghan resistance, then took him to the refugee camps outside Peshawar. Turki was appalled by the scale of the suffering. He went back to the Kingdom vowing to dedicate more money to the mujahideen, although he believed that these ragged soldiers could never defeat the Red Army. “Afghanistan was gone,” he decided. He only hoped to delay the inevitable Soviet invasion of Pakistan.

Similar thinking was going on in Washington, especially by Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was the U.S. national security advisor for the Carter administration. Brzezinski, however, saw the invasion as an opportunity. He wrote to Carter immediately, saying, “Now we can give the USSR its own Vietnam war.” Looking for an ally in this endeavor, the Americans naturally turned to the Saudis—that is, to Turki, the American-educated prince who held the Afghan account.

Turki became the key man in the covert alliance of the United States and the Saudis to funnel money and arms to the resistance through the Pakistani ISI. It was vital to keep this program secret in order to prevent the Soviets from having the excuse they sought to invade Pakistan. Until the end of the war, the Saudis would match the Americans dollar for dollar, starting with only seventy-five thousand dollars but growing into billions.

The immediate problem Turki faced was that the mujahideen were little more than disorganized mobs. There were about 170 armed Afghan militias in the mid-1980s. In order to manage this chaos, the ISI anointed six major émigré parties as the designated recipients for aid. Afghan refugees, who numbered
3.27
million by
1988,
had to sign up with one of the six official parties to qualify for food and supplies. The two largest of these, headed by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Burhanuddin Rabbani, each had
800,000
people in Peshawar under their authority. Turki forcibly created a seventh official party that would better represent Saudi interests. Ittihad-e-Islami (Islamic Union) was privately funded through bin Laden and others and headed by Abdul Rasul Sayyaf. An imposing and dashing Afghan warlord, six feet three inches tall, who draped himself in colorful blankets, Sayyaf spoke excellent classical Arabic from his years studying at al-Azhar University in Cairo. His devout Wahhabi beliefs were out of step with the Sufi traditions that predominated in Afghanistan before the war, but they were very much attuned to the interests of the Saudi Arabian government and its religious establishment. These seven mujahideen leaders came to be known, by the CIA and other intelligence agencies that were their principal means of support, as the Seven Dwarves.

Turki saw trouble ahead with the greedy and contentious Dwarves, and he repeatedly urged these competing groups to unify under a single command. In 1980 he brought the mujahideen leaders to Mecca. Ahmed Badeeb, Turki’s assistant, escorted them. Badeeb discovered that the most expedient way of silencing the discord among the resistance leaders was to lock them up in a jail in Taif until they agreed to pick Sayyaf—Turki’s man—as their leader. But as soon as they left the Kingdom, the jailhouse agreement fell apart. “They went back to their old ways,” Turki complained.

“F
EAR OF BODILY PARTICIPATION”
kept bin Laden well away from the battlefield in the early years of the war, a fact that later caused him great shame. He limited his trips in Pakistan to Lahore and Islamabad, not even venturing as far as Peshawar, then shuttling back home to Jeddah. These frequent excursions eventually cost him his job. By walking away from the Saudi Binladin Group’s reconstruction of the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, he forfeited his share of the profit—an amount that Abdullah Azzam calculated was 8 million riyals, about $
2.5
million.

In 1984 Azzam persuaded him to cross the frontier into Jaji, where Sayyaf had a camp high in the mountains above a major Soviet outpost. “I was surprised by the sad state of the equipment and everything else—weapons, roads, and trenches,” bin Laden recalled. “I asked forgiveness from God Almighty, feeling that I had sinned because I listened to those who advised me not to go…. I felt that this-four-year delay could not be pardoned unless I became a martyr.”

At seven in the morning on June
26, 1984,
during the month of Ramadan, most of the mujahideen in the Jaji camp were still sleeping, since they had been praying and eating late into the night after fasting during the day. The sound of a Soviet jet rudely brought them back to consciousness. The men dove for the shallow trenches. “The mountains were shaking from the bombardment,” bin Laden noted. He was shocked by how low the planes flew as they attacked. “The missiles that landed outside the camp were making a huge noise that covered the sound of the mujahideen cannon as if they did not exist. Bear in mind that if you heard these sounds alone, you might say that there could not be anything louder! As to the missiles that landed inside the camp, thanks to God, they did not explode. They landed as iron lumps on the land. I felt closer to God than ever.”

Bin Laden recorded that the mujahideen shot down four Soviet aircraft that morning. “I saw with my own eyes the remains of [one of] the pilots,” he marveled. “Three fingers, a part of a nerve, the skin of one cheek, an ear, the neck, and the skin of the back. Some Afghan brothers came and took a photo of him as if he were a slaughtered sheep! We cheered.” He also noted admiringly that the Afghans had not bothered to jump into the trenches with the frightened Arabs when the attack began. “Not one of our brothers had been injured, thank God. This battle gave me in fact a big push to continue in this matter. I become more convinced of the fact that no one could be injured except by God’s will.”

Bin Laden immediately returned to Saudi Arabia, and before the end of Ramadan he raised a fortune for the mujahideen—“between five and ten million dollars,” Abdullah Azzam airily recalled. “I don’t remember for sure.” More than $2 million of that came from one of bin Laden’s half sisters. Until now bin Laden had been seen mainly as a promising acolyte of Sheikh Abdullah’s, but suddenly he eclipsed his mentor as the chief private financier of the jihad.

Azzam reacted by officially joining forces with his protégé. In September
1984,
during the hajj, the two men met in Mecca. Although he was quiet and deferential, bin Laden already had his own plan. Perhaps it had been born in that attack in Jaji, when the Arabs all dove for the trenches. He had observed that the Afghans treated them as “glorified guests,” not as real mujahideen. He suggested to Azzam that “we should take on the responsibility of the Arabs, because we know them better and can provide more rigorous training for them.” The two men agreed to create a more formal role for the Arabs in Afghanistan, although there were few Arabs actually fighting the jihad at that time. Bin Laden undertook to change that by offering a ticket, a residence, and living expenses for every Arab—and his family—who joined their forces. That amounted to about three hundred dollars per month for each household.

Azzam added to bin Laden’s stunning announcement by issuing a fatwa that electrified Islamists everywhere. In a book eventually published under the title
Defense of Muslim Lands,
Azzam argued that jihad in Afghanistan was obligatory for every able-bodied Muslim.
^*
He had given an advance copy of the text to Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Baz, Saudi Arabia’s chief cleric, who wrote a preface to the book and pronounced his own supporting fatwa in the bin Laden family mosque in Jeddah.

Azzam’s fatwa draws a distinction between a
fard ayn
and a
fard kifaya.
The first is an individual religious obligation that falls upon all Muslims, like praying and fasting. One cannot avoid such duties and be considered a good Muslim. If nonbelievers invade a Muslim land, it is
fard ayn
—a compulsory duty—for the local Muslims to expel them. If they fail, then the obligation expands to their Muslim neighbors. “If they, too, slacken, or there is again a shortage of manpower, then it is upon the people behind them, and on the people behind them, to march forward. This process continues until it becomes
fard ayn
upon the whole world.” A child does not need permission from his parents, nor a debtor from his creditor, nor even a woman from her husband to join the jihad against the invader.
Fard kifaya,
on the other hand, is a duty of the community. Azzam gives the example of a group of people walking along a beach. “They see a child about to drown.” The child, he suggests, is Afghanistan. Saving the drowning child is an obligation for all the swimmers who witness him. “If someone moves to save him, the sin falls from the rest. But, if no one moves, all the swimmers are in sin.” Thus Azzam argues that the jihad against the Soviets is the duty of each Muslim individually, as well as of the entire Muslim people, and that all are in sin until the invader is repelled.

Bolstered by the imprimatur of bin Baz and other distinguished clerics, news of the fatwa circulated immediately through Islamic communities everywhere. Although it’s true that the Arab Afghan movement began with these two events—bin Laden’s announcement of financial support for Arab mujahideen and Azzam’s searing fatwa—one would have to say that their initial efforts were largely a failure. Rather few Arabs actually obeyed the summons, and many who did were drawn as much by bin Laden’s money as by the obligation to defend Islam in the manner that Azzam prescribed.

As soon as they returned to Pakistan, bin Laden and Sheikh Abdullah Azzam set up what they called the Services Bureau (Makhtab al-Khadamat) in a house bin Laden was renting in the University Town section of Peshawar. Bin Laden provided twenty-five thousand dollars a month to keep the office running. The house also served as a hostel for Arab mujahideen and the headquarters of Azzam’s magazine and book publishing efforts. The Services Bureau was essentially a repository for the money that the two men were sweeping in through their intensive fund-raising efforts. Jamal Khalifa joined bin Laden and Azzam in the Services Bureau, and they struggled to ensure that the donations, which often came in suitcases full of cash, actually got into the hands of the refugees. Azzam’s long-standing membership in the Muslim Brothers gave him an international circuit to call upon for his ceaseless promotion of the insurgency. Still, his efforts did not compare with those of bin Laden, whom he called “this heaven-sent man,” with a direct connection to the Saudi royal family and the petro-billionaires of the Gulf.

Bin Laden also drew from his connection to Prince Turki. Twice a month Turki’s chief of staff, and bin Laden’s former science teacher, Ahmed Badeeb, traveled to Peshawar to deliver cash to the mujahideen leaders. The Saudi government contributed $350 to $500 million per year for the Afghan jihad. This money was placed in a Swiss bank account controlled by the United States government, which used it to support the mujahideen; but the Saudis also ran their own programs privately, raising millions of dollars for their favored commanders. More than a tenth of the private money went to supplement bin Laden’s unofficial activities.