The Looming Tower (20 page)

On April 17, 1987, before the snows had fully melted, bin Laden led a force of 120 fighters to harass an Afghan government outpost near Khost. He chose to attack on a Friday because he believed Muslims all over the world would be praying for the mujahideen. Both Sayyaf, the Arabic-speaking Afghan commander, and Hekmatyar agreed to provide covering artillery fire. The attack was set for six o’clock in the evening—time enough for a quick strike, followed by darkness that would protect the men from the Soviet aircraft that would soon be raining bombs upon them. Sheikh Tameem begged to be a part of the action, but bin Laden ordered him to remain in the Lion’s Den.

The impending battle was months in the planning and had been well advertised back in Peshawar. “I heard about this attack and decided to join,” Abu Rida, the Kansas City mujahid, later recalled. “I took my car. I didn’t know much about the plan, but I found so many donkeys and horses carrying weapons in the valley.” When he arrived at the staging area, he discovered chaos among the Arabs. At the time of the scheduled attack, none of the positions had been supplied with ammunition, which was stuck in a car at the end of a road some distance away. The men were frantically transporting rockets and mortars on their backs or on the four mules they had available. Some fighters were already so exhausted that they slipped back to the Lion’s Den to sleep, and those who stayed were famished and upset because the food had run out. At the last minute, one of the commanders discovered that no one had brought the electrical wire to connect the rockets to the detonators. He dispatched a man on a horse to gallop back to camp. On top of this, bin Laden was ill—as he often was before battle—although he tried to remain composed in front of his men.

Sheikh Abdullah Azzam gave a rousing speech about the need to stand firm, but before the Arabs were ready to charge, an Afghan government soldier overheard their preparations and single-handedly kept them pinned down till nightfall with a Gorjunov machine gun. Bin Laden ordered his troops to withdraw. Amazingly, only one Arab was killed and two badly injured, but their pride was shattered—they had been defeated by one man! The Afghan mujahideen were laughing at them. As a result of this fiasco, the Pakistanis began closing down the Arab guesthouses in Peshawar. It seemed that the Arab Afghan misadventure had come to an ignominious finale.

The following month, a small band of Arabs engaged in another skirmish, this one planned by their Egyptian military commander, Abu Ubaydah, who led a flanking maneuver against a group of Soviet troops. “There were nine of them and myself,” bin Laden later recounted. “No one hesitated.” The Soviets fell back, and the Arabs were jubilant. But their brief victory prompted a stern Soviet counterattack against the Lion’s Den. According to Abdullah Azzam’s mythmaking account, the Soviets assembled nine or ten thousand troops—including Soviet Special Forces and Afghan regulars—against only seventy mujahideen.

Sheikh Tameem pleaded with bin Laden to place him on the front lines, but bin Laden told him he was too fat for active fighting. He consigned Tameem to the communications room deep in an underground chamber. The Arabs waited until the entire Soviet convoy was within range of their three mortars. When bin Laden cried,
“Allahu akhbar!”
the Arabs opened fire, and the surprised Russians fell back. “The brothers were in a state of elation and total ecstasy,” Azzam wrote. They watched ambulances arriving to collect the fallen soldiers, who included the military commander of the Jaji district.

Expecting another, larger Soviet counterattack, bin Laden divided his force in half, stationing thirty-five men to guard the Lion’s Den. He and nine others advanced to the top of a hill, where they observed two hundred Russian Special Forces creeping toward the camp. “Suddenly, mortar rounds began to pour on us like rain,” said bin Laden. Miraculously, the Arabs escaped harm. An hour later, the Russians confidently resumed their advance. “When they reached the peak, we began our attack,” bin Laden continued. “A few of them were killed, and the rest fled.”

For weeks, the Soviets shelled the mujahideen position around the Lion’s Den with 120 mm mortars and napalm bombs, which caused such devastation that Azzam wept and prayed for the safety of the fighters. The trees burned, even in the rain, illuminating the night. One morning, in this storm of shrapnel and fire, Sheikh Tameem emerged from the communications cave with his Quran in hand and began to wander around in the clearing, ignoring the pleas of his comrades as he recited the Quran and prayed aloud for martyrdom, his round wire-rimmed glasses tilted toward the sky. The ground shook and bullets and explosions tore the forest around him. It was near the end of Ramadan, and Tameem believed that his death on such an occasion would be especially blessed.

This mad excursion seemed to have a calming effect on the others. “We came under fire quickly,” bin Laden recalled. “When the fire stopped for about thirty seconds, I told the people I was with that I thought we were going to die. But within minutes, the fire started again and I was reading the Holy Quran until we were saved and were able to move to a different location. We hadn’t moved seventy meters when we were hit again, but we felt completely safe, as if we were in an air-conditioned room.”

Despite the bravado, bin Laden worried that his men would all be killed if they stayed any longer. He would have to abandon the Lion’s Den. It was the worst defeat he had ever suffered. His men were shocked at his decision. When one of them protested, bin Laden “shouted at me and told me some words which I heard for the first time from him.” Sheikh Tameem bellowed and pulled the hair from his beard. “I thought he was possessed,” recalled bin Laden. He scolded Tameem, saying that he was endangering all the fighters by his intransigence. “Sheikh Tameem, the men are in the car,” bin Laden warned him. “If a single one of them is killed the sin will fall on your neck and you will be responsible for his blood on Judgment Day.” Sobbing, Sheikh Tameem joined the other men in the van.

Those who were able to walk followed behind, after destroying much of the Lion’s Den so that there would be nothing for the Soviets to pillage. They rolled their cannons into the ravines and buried their automatic weapons. One of the men threw a grenade into the pantry. The camp that they had labored so mightily to construct was now a ruin. A small squad stayed behind to provide cover for the retreating guerrillas.

Once again, Bin Laden was ill. “I was very tired, and could barely walk twenty meters before I had to stop and drink water. I had been under great emotional and physical duress.” His ordeal had only just begun.

Sayyaf was fuming when the bedraggled Arabs reached his camp. By now he had come to see the value of the Lion’s Den, which overlooked a strategic caravan route for the supply of the mujahideen. He abruptly countermanded bin Laden’s order and told the Arabs to return; he also sent some of his reliable Afghan warriors back to the camp with them to make sure that they held the position.

Embarrassed and exhausted, the fighters returned to the Lion’s Den in groups of five or ten. Dawn found twenty-five Arabs and twenty Afghans gathered in the ruins of the camp, dismally celebrating the feast day at the end of Ramadan. There was practically nothing to eat since the kitchen had been blown up. Each man received three lemons. Later in the morning, Bin Laden returned with ten more fighters. Chastened and unwilling to assert his authority, he let his Egyptian military commander, Abu Ubaydah, take charge. The sight of the needless destruction of his camp at his own hand must have been unbearable.

Abu Ubaydah decided to give him something to do. “Go and guard the left side of the camp,” Abu Ubaydah told him. “I think they will only enter from this place because it is the shortest path.”

Bin Laden led the men to a promontory and spread them out among the trees. They could see a Russian force only seventy meters away. Bin Laden called out to his men to advance, but his voice was hoarse and they didn’t realize he was talking to them. He climbed a leafless tree so that they could hear him and immediately drew fire. A rocket-propelled grenade nearly knocked him out of the tree. “It passed by me and exploded nearby,” bin Laden said in one account, “but I was not affected by it at all—in fact, by the Grace of Allah, the Exalted, it was as though I had merely been covered by a handful of mud from the ground. I descended calmly and informed the brothers that the enemy was in the central axis and not on the left wing.” In another retelling, bin Laden’s most intense experience of combat seems less composed. “There was a terrible battle, which ended up with me half sunk in the ground, firing at anything I could see.”

Bin Laden and his men were pinned down all day by enemy mortar fire. “I was only thirty meters from the Russians and they were trying to capture me,” he said. “I was under bombardment but I was so peaceful in my heart that I fell asleep.” The story of bin Laden’s nap is often told as evidence of his grace under fire. He may simply have fainted. He suffered from low blood pressure, which often made him light-headed. He always carried a bag of salt with him, and whenever he felt dizzy, he would wet a finger and stick it in the bag, then suck on the salt to keep his blood pressure from sinking.

Amazingly, by five o’clock in the afternoon, the Arab forces, led by Abu Ubaydah, succeeded in outflanking the enemy. Without air support, the main body of the Soviet troops withdrew. “There were only nine brothers against one hundred Russian Spetsnaz Special Forces troops, but out of sheer fright and panic in the dense forest, the Russians were unable to make out the number of brothers,” bin Laden related. “All in all, about thirty-five Spetsnaz soldiers and officers were killed, and the rest fled…. The morale of the mujahideen soared, notonly in our area, but in the whole of Afghanistan.”

He had achieved his greatest victory immediately following his worst defeat. After the battle of the Lion’s Den, Abu Ubaydah gave bin Laden a trophy from a dead Russian officer—a small Kalikov AK-74 assault rifle, with a walnut stock and a distinctive rusty red ammunition magazine that marked it as the advanced paratroop version of the weapon. In the future, it would always be on his shoulder.

The entire action lasted three weeks. It was actually waged more by Sayyaf (who then took over the Lion’s Den) than bin Laden, but the Arabs gained a reputation for courage and recklessness that established their legend, at least among themselves. Their guesthouses quietly reopened in Peshawar. From the Soviet perspective, the battle of the Lion’s Den was a small moment in the tactical retreat from Afghanistan. In the heightened religious atmosphere among the men following bin Laden, however, there was a dizzying sense that they were living in a supernatural world, in which reality knelt before faith. For them, the encounter at the Lion’s Den became the foundation of the myth that they defeated the superpower. Within a few years the entire Soviet empire fell to pieces—dead of the wound the Muslims inflicted in Afghanistan, the jihadis believed. By then they had created the vanguard that was to carry the battle forward. Al-Qaeda was conceived in the marriage of these assumptions: Faith is stronger than weapons or nations, and the ticket to enter the sacred zone where such miracles occur is the willingness to die.

6

The Base

B
Y 1986 MILLIONS OF AFGHAN REFUGEES
had flooded into Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province, turning Peshawar, the capital, into the prime staging area for the jihad against the Soviet invasion. The streets of the city were a welter of languages and national costumes, achieving a strange and exhilarating cosmopolitanism that cast a spell over everyone who passed through it. Aid workers and freelance mullahs and intelligence agents from around the world set up shop. The underground flow of money and arms created an economic boom in a town that had always feasted on contraband. Already the treasures of the Afghan national museum—statuary, precious stones, antiquities, even entire Buddhist temples—were being slipped into the Smugglers’ Market, an openly run bazaar on the outskirts of the city, and into the gift shops of the shabby hotels where the throng of international journalists holed up to cover the war. Afghan warlords moved their families into University Town, where the professional class lived among the eucalyptus and the magnolia trees. The warlords became rich by skimming off the subsidies that the Americans and the Saudis were providing. Their murderous rivalries, along with weekly bombings and assassinations by the KGB and KHAD (the Afghan intelligence service), made the death toll of Afghan commanders higher in Peshawar than on the field of battle. In a city that moved around mainly on hand-painted private buses and smoky motorcycle rickshaws that ripped the air like chain saws, suddenly there were new Mercedes Sedans and Toyota Land Cruisers navigating among the donkey carts. The air was a blue soup of diesel smoke. “Peshawar was transformed into this place where whoever had no place to go went,” Osama Rushdi, one of the young Egyptian jihadis, remembered. “It was an environment in which a person could go from a bad place to a worse place, and eventually into despair.”

After finishing his contract with the medical clinic in Jeddah in
1986,
Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri joined the growing Arab community in Peshawar. Rounder now than he had been during his previous visits before his prison years, he boasted that Pakistan was like a “second home” to him, since he had spent time as a child in the country when his maternal grandfather served there as the Egyptian ambassador. He quickly adapted to wearing the
shalwar kameez,
the traditional long shirt and loose-fitting pants of the region. His brother Mohammed, who had loyally followed him since childhood, joined him in Peshawar. The brothers had a strong family resemblance, though Mohammed was darker and slightly taller and thinner than Ayman. Soft-spoken and deferential, Mohammed set up al-Jihad’s financial pipeline, which ran from Cairo to Pakistan via Saudi Arabia.

Zawahiri established his medical practice at a Kuwaiti-backed Red Crescent hospital, which, like most of the aid institutions in the city, was dominated by members of the Muslim Brotherhood. They hated him because of a lengthy diatribe he wrote, called
Bitter Harvest,
in which he attacked the Brothers for collaborating with infidel regimes—that is to say, all Arab governments. He called the Brotherhood “a tool in the hands of tyrants.” He demanded that they publicly renounce “constitutions and man-made laws, democracy, elections, and parliament,” and declare jihad against the regimes they formerly supported. Privately funded, this handsomely produced book appeared all over Peshawar. “They were available free of charge,” one of the Brothers, who was working in Peshawar at the time, recalls. “When you would go to get food, the clerk would ask if you wished to have one of these books, or two?”