The Looming Tower (24 page)

Zawahiri, who had developed a reputation among the Arab fighters as being a medical genius, drove over from Peshawar two or three times a week to treat the injured. His main patient, of course, was bin Laden, who needed intravenous glucose treatments to keep from fainting. Bin Laden would lie for hours on the floor of the cave, in pain and unable to move. The diagnosis was low blood pressure, which is usually a symptom of another ailment.
^*
Whatever bin Laden’s health problems were, the friendship between him and Zawahiri would always be complicated by the fact that one placed his life in the hands of the other.

Afghan bombers flew twenty sorties a day, pummeling the mujahideen infantry with cluster bombs. Bin Laden and his men were dug into a trench between two mountain positions. On one occasion, bin Laden was awaiting a glucose transfusion from Zawahiri, who set up a metal pole to hold the bottle and then inserted the IV tube into the bottle. Bin Laden rolled up his sleeve and waited for his doctor to slip the cannula into his vein. Just then, a bomber roared overhead at a low altitude, followed by explosions that shook the mountains. Smoke and dust blanketed the mujahideen, who crept out of the trench to see what had been hit. As it turned out, the bombs had fallen on the peak above them, but the hail of rocks had knocked over the glucose stand.

Zawahiri calmly set the stand back up and untangled the IV tube. He got another sterile cannula, but once again, just as bin Laden stretched out his arm, a series of explosions pelted the men with rocks and blasted the wooden beams supporting the walls of the trench. The bombs were right on top of them. The men hugged the earth and waited until the aircraft disappeared. Then Zawahiri collected the stand and the same glucose bottle, which this time had been hurled across the trench. By now the men had become fixated on the bottle, “as if it were a living entity with a secret,” Deraz recalled.

One of the men complained to Zawahiri, “Don’t you see? Every time you put that bottle on the stand, we are bombed!”

Zawahiri laughed and refused to switch to another glucose bottle. “It’s merely a coincidence,” he said. But as he prepared to insert the needle, yet another terrifying series of explosions shattered the landscape and sent the men diving to the ground, crying out and mumbling verses from the Quran. The timbers holding the roof were blown apart and the trench was opened to the sky. Then came a cry that they were being attacked with poison gas. They quickly put on their gas masks. In the midst of the smoke and fear and confusion, Zawahiri patiently reassembled the metal stand, and again he picked up the glucose container.

Everyone in the trench began to shout at him, “Throw the bottle outside! Don’t touch it!”

Bin Laden tried to remind them that evil omens are forbidden in Islam, but as Zawahiri started to attach the IV tube, one of the Saudis stood up and wordlessly took the glucose bottle out of Zawahiri’s hands and hurled it out of the trench. Everyone laughed, even bin Laden, but they were all happy to see the bottle gone.

T
HERE WAS A YOUNG MAN
fighting beside bin Laden during the siege of Jalalabad named Shafiq. Less than five feet tall, weighing perhaps ninety pounds, he was one of the few original Saudis who remained loyal despite the Egyptian entourage that encircled his leader. Jamal Khalifa, who was his teacher in Medina, remembered Shafiq as a polite, neatly groomed young man who had dropped out of school when he was sixteen to join the jihad. His father had soon come to Afghanistan to fetch him home. Khalifa was shocked when he saw his former student once again in Saudi Arabia. His hair was matted and hanging over his shoulders, and he wore dirty shoes and Afghan pants. The schoolboy had been completely transformed into a toughened warrior who couldn’t wait to return to battle. Only a few weeks had passed before Shafiq snatched his passport from where his father had hidden it and returned to the war—a decision that had historic consequences.

One day a sentry in Jalalabad noticed Afghan army helicopters bearing down on the Arab position, followed by tanks and infantry. They were being led by a traitorous mujahid who had sold them out. The sentry called to bin Laden’s men to evacuate the cave where they were hunkered down, but by that time the armored units were upon them, ready to annihilate the entire outpost.

Bin Laden hurried away with the rest of his soldiers except for Shafiq, who single-handedly covered their retreat with a small mortar. Without the few moments of relief that Shafiq provided, bin Laden would likely have died in Jalalabad, along with his unrealized dream. Eighty other Arabs did die there, including Shafiq, in the greatest disaster of the Arab Afghan experience.

A
L
-Q
AEDA HELD
its first recruitment meeting in the Farouk camp near Khost, Afghanistan, shortly after the debacle in Jalalabad. Farouk was a
takfir
camp, established by Zawahiri and Dr. Fadl, devoted entirely to training the elite Arab mujahideen being groomed to join bin Laden’s private army. Although the Lion’s Den was just across the mountain, the Farouk camp was kept isolated from the others so that the young men could be closely watched. Those chosen were young, zealous, and obedient. They were given a bonus and were told to bid farewell to their families.

The majority of the leadership council set up to advise bin Laden were Egyptians, including Zawahiri, Abu Hafs, Abu Ubaydah, and Dr. Fadl. Also represented were members from Algeria, Libya, and Oman. The organization opened an office in a two-story villa in Hayatabad, the suburb of Peshawar where most of the Arabs resided.

New recruits filled out forms in triplicate, signed their oath of loyalty to bin Laden, and swore themselves to secrecy. In return, single members earned about $
1,000
a month in salary; married members received $
1,500.
Everyone got a round-trip ticket home each year and a month of vacation. There was a health-care plan and—for those who changed their mind—a buyout option: They received $
2,400
and went on their way. From the beginning, al-Qaeda presented itself as an attractive employment opportunity for men whose education and careers had been curtailed by jihad.

The leaders of al-Qaeda developed a constitution and by-laws, which described the utopian goals of the organization in clear terms: “To establish the truth, get rid of evil, and establish an Islamic nation.” This would be accomplished through education and military training, as well as coordinating and supporting jihad movements around the world. The group would be led by a commander who was impartial, resolute, trustworthy, patient, and just; he should have at least seven years of jihad experience and preferably a college degree. Among his duties were appointing a council of advisors to meet each month, establishing a budget, and deciding on a yearly plan of action. One can appreciate the ambition of al-Qaeda by looking at its bureaucratic structure, which included committees devoted to military affairs, politics, information, administration, security, and surveillance. The military committee had subsections dedicated to training, operations, research, and nuclear weapons.

After the failure of Jalalabad, the Afghan mujahideen succumbed to a cataclysmic civil war. The strongest parties in this fratricide were Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Ahmed Shah Massoud. Both were ruthless, charismatic leaders from the north, bent on establishing an Islamic government in Afghanistan. Hekmatyar, the more skilled politician, was a Pashtun, the dominant tribe in both Pakistan and Afghanistan. He had the backing of the Pakistan ISI, and therefore of the United States and Saudi Arabia. Massoud, one of the most talented guerrilla leaders of the twentieth century, was Tajik, from the Persian-speaking tribe that is the second-largest ethnic group in Afghanistan. Based in the Panjshir Valley north of Kabul, Massoud rarely traveled to Peshawar, the hotbed of intelligence agencies and international media.

Most of the Arabs sided with Hekmatyar, excepting Abdullah Anas, the son-in-law of Abdullah Azzam. Anas talked the sheikh into visiting Massoud, to see for himself what kind of man he was. The trip to visit the Lion of Panjshir required eight days of walking across four peaks in the Hindu Kush Mountains. As they hiked through the mountains, Azzam reflected on the Jalalabad fiasco. He worried that the Afghan jihad had been a disorganized, misguided failure. The Soviets were gone and now the Muslims were fighting each other.

Massoud and a guard of a hundred men met them on the Pakistan border and led them down into the Panjshir Valley. Massoud lived in a cave with two bedrooms—“like a Gypsy,” said Anas, who translated for the two men. Azzam was charmed by Massoud’s modesty and admired the discipline of his troops, which stood in such contrast to the other mujahideen irregular forces. “We are your soldiers,” Azzam pledged. “We love you and we are going to help you.”

When he returned to Peshawar, Azzam made no secret of his revised opinion of Massoud. He even traveled to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, saying, “I have seen the true Islamic jihad. It is Massoud!” Hekmatyar was enraged by Azzam’s turnaround, which could cost him the support of his Arab backers.

Azzam had already accumulated many enemies with dark hearts and bloody hands. Bin Laden begged Azzam to stay away from Peshawar, which had become too dangerous for his former mentor. One Friday, Hekmatyar’s men discovered and disarmed a powerful bomb in the mosque near Azzam’s house. It was an anti-tank mine planted under the rostrum that Azzam stood upon when he led prayers. Had it exploded, hundreds of worshippers could have been killed.

Confused and despondent because of the civil war among the mujahideen, and still suffering from the embarrassment of Jalalabad, bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia for consultations with Saudi intelligence. He wanted to know which side to fight on. Prince Turki’s chief of staff, Ahmed Badeeb, told him, “It’s better to leave.”

Before he quit Peshawar entirely, bin Laden returned to say farewell to Azzam. Bin Laden’s rise had left Azzam vulnerable, but somehow their friendship had survived. They embraced for a long time, and both men shed many tears, as if they knew that they would never see each other again.

On November
24, 1989,
Azzam rode to the mosque with two of his sons, Ibrahim and Mohammed, who was the driver. As Mohammed was parking, a roadside bomb made from twenty kilograms of TNT exploded with such force that the car shattered. Body parts were strewn over the trees and power lines. A leg of one of his children flew through a shop window a hundred yards away. But Azzam’s body, it is said, was found peacefully resting against a wall, completely intact, not at all disfigured.

Earlier that Friday, on the streets of Peshawar, Azzam’s main rival, Ayman al-Zawahiri, had been spreading rumors that Azzam was working for the Americans. The next day, he was at Azzam’s funeral, praising the martyred sheikh, as did his many other jubilant enemies.

7

Return of the Hero

F
AME CREATES ITS OWN AUTHORITY,
even in Saudi Arabia, where humility is prized and prestige is carefully pruned among non-royals. It is a country that forbids the public display of portraits, except for the faces of the omnipresent ruling princes, who also name the streets and hospitals and universities after themselves, hoarding whatever glory is available. So when bin Laden returned to his hometown of Jeddah in the fall of
1989,
he presented a dilemma that was unique in modern Saudi history. Only thirty-one years old, he commanded an international volunteer army of unknown dimensions. Because he actually believed the fable, promoted by the Saudi press, that his Arab legion had brought down the mighty superpower, he arrived with certain unprecedented expectations of his future. He was better known than all but a few princes and the upper tier of Wahhabi clergy—the Kingdom’s first real celebrity.

He was rich, although not by royal standards or even those of the great merchant families of the Hijaz. His share of the Saudi Binladin Group at the time amounted to 27 million Saudi riyals—a little more than $7 million. He also received a portion of the annual earnings from the company that ranged from half a million to a million riyals a year. He settled back into the family business, helping to build roads in Taif and Abha. He kept a house in Jeddah and another in Medina, the city he had always loved the most, where he could be close to the Prophet’s Mosque.

The young idealist returned to the Kingdom with a sense of divine mission. He had risked death and had been, he thought, miraculously spared. He had gone as an acolyte of an iconic Muslim warrior, and he returned as the undisputed leader of the Arab Afghans. He had a commanding air of confidence, which was all the more seductive because of his instinctive humility. In a time when Saudis were increasingly uncertain about their identity in the modern world, bin Laden appeared as an unsullied archetype. His piety and humble manner reminded Saudis of their historic image of themselves as shy and self-effacing, but also fierce and austere. Some of his young admirers called him “the Othman of his age,” a reference to one of the early caliphs, a wealthy man known for his righteousness.

Inevitably, bin Laden’s fame cast an unwelcome light on the behavior of the Saudi royal family, led by King Fahd, who was known for his boozing and carousing in the ports of the French Riviera, where he docked his 482-foot yacht, the $100 million
Abdul Aziz.
The ship featured two swimming pools, a ballroom, a gym, a theater, a portable garden, a hospital with an intensive-care unit and two operating rooms, and four American Stinger missiles. The king also liked to fly to London in his $150 million 747 jet, equipped with its own fountain. He lost millions in the casinos on these excursions. One night, upset with the curfew imposed by British gaming laws, he hired his own blackjack and roulette dealers so that he could gamble in his hotel suite all night long. Other Saudi princes enthusiastically followed his example, notably King Fahd’s son Mohammed, who accepted more than $1 billion in bribes, according to British court documents, which he spent on “whores, pornography; fleets of more than 100 high-performance cars; palaces in Cannes and Geneva; and such luxuries as powerboats, chartered jets, ski-chalets, and jewelry.”