The Looming Tower (31 page)

Zaki estimated that, at most, the donations produced by these visits to California mosques amounted to several hundred dollars. Ali Mohammed put the figure at two thousand dollars
.
Whatever the case, Zawahiri returned to Sudan facing a dispiriting choice: whether to maintain the independence of his bootstrap organization that was always struggling financially or to formally join forces with bin Laden.

When they had met nearly a decade before, Zawahiri was by far the more powerful figure; he had an organization behind him and a clear objective: to overthrow the government of Egypt. But now bin Laden, who had always had the advantage of money, also had his own organization, one that was much more ambitious than al-Jihad. In the same way that he ran multiple businesses under a single corporate tent, bin Laden sought to merge all Islamic terrorist groups into one multinational consortium, with common training and economies of scale and departments devoted to everything from personnel to policymaking. The protégé had begun to outstrip his mentor, and both men knew this.

Zawahiri also faced the prospect of being overshadowed by the blind sheikh and the activities of the Islamic Group. Despite the fact that Zawahiri had assembled a capable and dedicated cadre, many of them well-educated, skilled operatives like Ali Mohammed, who moved easily from the suburbs of Silicon Valley to the dusty streets of Khartoum, al-Jihad had not undertaken a single successful operation. Meanwhile, the blind sheikh’s followers had undertaken an unparalleled rampage of murder and pillage. In order to weaken the government and prod the masses into rebellion, they chose to attack tourism, the tent pole of the Egyptian economy, because it opened the country to Western corruption. The Islamic Group initiated a war on Egypt’s security forces by announcing the goal of killing a policeman every day. They also targeted foreigners, Christians, and particularly intellectuals, beginning with the shooting death in 1992 of Farag Foda, a secular columnist who had suggested in his final article that the Islamists were motivated less by politics than sexual frustration. The blind sheikh also issued a fatwa against Egypt’s Nobel Prize–winning writer, Naguib Mahfouz, calling him an infidel, and in 1994 Mahfouz suffered a near-fatal stabbing. There was a sad irony in this attack: It was Sayyid Qutb who first discovered Mahfouz; later, when Mahfouz was famous, he returned the favor by visiting Qutb in prison. Now Qutb’s progeny were savaging the intellectual circle that Qutb had, to some extent, produced.

Zawahiri thought such actions pointless and self-defeating. In his opinion, they succeeded only in provoking the security forces and reducing the opportunity to make an immediate, total change by a military coup, his lifelong goal. In fact, the government crackdown on militants that followed these attacks nearly eliminated both organizations in Egypt.

Zawahiri had imposed a blind-cell structure on al-Jihad, so that members in one group would not know the identities or activities of those in another; however, Egyptian authorities fortuitously captured the one man who had all the names—the organization’s membership director. His computer contained a database with every member’s address, his aliases, and his potential hideouts. Supplied with this information, the security forces reeled in hundreds of suspects and charged them with sedition. The press labeled the group “Vanguards of Conquest,” but it was actually a faction of al-Jihad. Although the evidence against them was thin, the judicial standards weren’t very rigorous.

“The government newspapers were elated about the arrest of 800 members of the al-Jihad group without a single shot being fired,” Zawahiri bitterly recounted in his brief memoir. All that remained of the organization he had struggled to build were scattered colonies in other countries—in England, America, Denmark, Yemen, and Albania, among others. He realized he had to make a move in order to keep the fragments of his organization together. To do that he needed money.

Despite Jihad’s financial precariousness, many of its remaining members were suspicious of bin Laden and had no desire to divert their efforts outside Egypt. Moreover, they were incensed by the roundup of their colleagues in Cairo and the show trial that resulted. They wanted to strike back. Nonetheless, around this time, most of the members of al-Jihad went on the al-Qaeda payroll. Zawahiri viewed the alliance as a temporary marriage of convenience. He later confided to one of his chief assistants that joining with bin Laden had been “the only solution to keeping the Jihad organization abroad alive.”

Z
AWAHIRI HAD CERTAINLY NOT ABANDONED
his dream of capturing Egypt. Indeed, Sudan was an ideal spot from which to launch attacks. The long, trackless, and almost entirely unguarded border between the two countries facilitated secret movements; ancient caravan trails provided convenient routes for smuggling weapons and explosives into Egypt on the backs of camels; and the active cooperation of Sudan’s intelligence agency and its military forces guaranteed a sanctuary for Zawahiri and his men.

Al-Jihad began its assault on Egypt with another attempt on the life of the interior minister, Hasan al-Alfi, who was leading the crackdown on Islamic militants. In August of 1993 a bomb-laden motorcycle exploded next to the minister’s car, killing the bomber and his accomplice. “The Minister escaped death, but his arm was broken,” Zawahiri lamely noted.

It was another failure, but a significant one, because with this action Zawahiri introduced the use of suicide bombers, which became the signature of al-Jihad assassinations and later of al-Qaeda “martyrdom operations.” The strategy broke a powerful religious taboo against suicide. Although Hezbollah, a Shiite organization, had employed suicide truck bombers to attack the American Embassy and the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in
1983,
such actions had never been undertaken by a Sunni group. In Palestine, suicide bombings were virtually unknown until the mid-nineties, when the Oslo Accords began to unravel.
^*
Zawahiri had been to Iran to raise money, and he had sent Ali Mohammed, among others, to Lebanon to train with Hezbollah, so it is likely that the notion of suicide bombings came from this source. Another of Zawahiri’s innovations was to tape the bomber’s vows of martyrdom on the eve of his mission. Zawahiri distributed cassettes of the bomber’s voice justifying his decision to offer his life.

In November, during the ongoing trials of al-Jihad, Zawahiri attempted to kill Egypt’s prime minister, Atef Sidqi. A car bomb exploded as the minister was driven past a girls’ school in Cairo. The minister, in his armored car, was unhurt, but the explosion injured twenty-one people and killed a young schoolgirl, Shayma Abdel-Halim, who was crushed by a door blown loose in the blast. Her death outraged Egyptians, who had seen more than 240 people killed by the Islamic Group in the previous two years. Although there was only this one by al-Jihad, little Shayma’s death captured people’s emotions as nothing else had. When her coffin was borne through the streets of Cairo, people cried, “Terrorism is the enemy of God!”

Zawahiri was shaken by the popular outrage. “The unintended death of this innocent child pained us all, but we were helpless and we had to fight the government,” he wrote in his memoir. He offered to pay blood money to the girl’s family. The Egyptian government arrested 280 more of his followers; 6 were eventually given a sentence of death. Zawahiri wrote: “This meant that they wanted my daughter, who was two at the time, and the daughters of other colleagues, to be orphans. Who cried or cared for our daughters?”

10

Paradise Lost

Y
OUNG MEN FROM MANY COUNTRIES
came to the dusty and obscure Soba Farm, ten kilometers south of Khartoum. Bin Laden would greet them, and then al-Qaeda trainees would begin their courses in terrorism. Their motivations varied, but they had in common a belief that Islam—pure and primitive, unmitigated by modernity and uncompromised by politics—would cure the wounds that socialism or Arab nationalism had failed to heal. They were angry but powerless in their own countries. They did not see themselves as terrorists but as revolutionaries who, like all such men throughout history, had been pushed into action by the simple human need for justice. Some had experienced brutal repression; some were simply drawn to bloody chaos. From the beginning of al-Qaeda, there were reformers and there were nihilists. The dynamic between them was irreconcilable and self-destructive, but events were moving so quickly that it was almost impossible to tell the philosophers from the sociopaths. They were glued together by the charismatic personality of Osama bin Laden, which contained both strands, idealism and nihilism, in a potent mix.

Given the diversity of the trainees and their causes, bin Laden’s main task was to direct them toward a common enemy. He had developed a fixed idea about America, which he explained to each new class of al-Qaeda recruits. America appeared so mighty, he told them, but it was actually weak and cowardly. Look at Vietnam, look at Lebanon. Whenever soldiers start coming home in body bags, Americans panic and retreat. Such a country needs only to be confronted with two or three sharp blows, then it will flee in panic, as it always has. For all its wealth and resources, America lacks conviction. It cannot stand against warriors of faith who do not fear death. The warships in the Gulf will retreat to the oceans, the bombers will disappear from the Arabian bases, the troops in the Horn of Africa will race back to their homeland.

The author of these sentiments had never been to America, but he liked to have people around him—such as Abu Rida al-Suri, Wa’el Julaidan, Ali Mohammed—who had lived there. They reinforced the bloated and degenerate America of his imagination. Bin Laden could scarcely wait to drive a spear into the heart of the last superpower. He saw his first opportunity in Somalia.

In the triumphant months following the defeat of Saddam Hussein, Somalia arose as the initial test of America’s new world order. The UN was overseeing the international effort to end the Somali famine, which had already taken
350,000
lives. As in the Gulf War, there was an international coalition crowded under the UN umbrella and backed by American power. This time, however, there was no large Iraqi army to face, no Republican Guard, no armored divisions, only disorganized mobs with machine guns and RPGs. But the threat they posed was convincingly demonstrated by an ambush that killed twenty-four Pakistani soldiers.

Bin Laden claimed that he sent 250 men to Somalia to fight against U.S. troops. According to Sudanese intelligence, the actual number of al-Qaeda fighters was only a handful. The al-Qaeda guerrillas provided training and tried to fit into the anarchic clan war that was raging within the tableau of starvation that the hostilities had caused. Little the al-Qaeda men did impressed their hosts; for instance, the Arabs built a car bomb to attack the UN, but the bomb failed. “The Somalis treated us in a bad way,” one of the Arabs complained. “We tried to convince them that we were messengers for people behind us, but they were not convinced. Due to the bad leadership situation there, we decided to withdraw.”

One night in Mogadishu a couple of al-Qaeda fighters saw two U.S. helicopters get shot down. The return fire struck the house next to where the men were hunkered down. Terrified that the Americans would capture them, they left Somalia the next day. The downing of those two American helicopters in October
1993,
however, became the turning point in the war. Enraged Somali tribesmen triumphantly dragged the bodies of the dead crewmen through the streets of Mogadishu, a sight that prompted President Clinton to quickly withdraw all American soldiers from the country. Bin Laden’s analysis of the American character had been proven correct.

Even though his own men had run away, bin Laden attributed to al-Qaeda the downing of the helicopters in Somalia and the desecration of the bodies of U.S. servicemen. His influence magnified because of insurgent successes—as in Afghanistan and Somalia—that he really had little to do with. He simply appropriated such victories as his own. “Based on the reports we received from our brothers who participated in the jihad in Somalia,” bin Laden boasted on al-Jazeera, “we learned that they saw the weakness, frailty, and cowardice of U.S. troops. Only eighteen U.S. troops were killed. Nonetheless, they fled in the heart of darkness, frustrated after they had caused great commotion about the New World Order.”

B
IN
L
ADEN LURED
various nationalist groups under his umbrella by offering weapons and training. He had instructors with years of combat experience. Zawahiri’s double agent, Ali Mohammed, taught a course on surveillance, using the techniques he had picked up from the U.S. Special Forces (bin Laden himself took Mohammed’s first course as a student). The weapons came from the storehouses of leftover mujahideen arms in Tora Bora, which bin Laden was able to smuggle into Sudan. Bin Laden also provided seed money for revolution. It must have been gratifying to see how much he could accomplish with so little.

In Algeria in
1992,
a military coup prevented the election that an Islamist party, the Front Islamique du Salut (FIS) was expected to win. The following year, bin Laden sent Qari el-Said, an Algerian who was on the
shura
council of al-Qaeda, to meet with some of the rebel leaders who had taken refuge in the mountains. At that time, the Islamists were trying to pressure the unpopular military government to negotiate with them. The al-Qaeda emissary brought forty thousand dollars of bin Laden’s money. He warned the Islamist leaders that they were making jihad merely for politics, not for God, and that was a sin. There was no room for compromise with an impious government, he told them. Total war was the only solution. “This simple argument destroyed us,” recalled Abdullah Anas, who was part of the resistance. Those, like Anas, who favored dialogue with the government were pushed aside by other Arab Afghans in their midst who had been indoctrinated by
takfir
philosophy.