The Looming Tower (32 page)

The young, poor, and largely urban guerrillas drawn to the Algerian revolt coalesced under the banner of the Groupe Islamique Armé (GIA). For the next five years they drenched the country in blood. The progression followed a predictable
takfiri
path. The Islamists began by killing non-Muslims, concentrating on priests and nuns, diplomats, intellectuals, feminists, doctors, and businessmen. According to the logic of GIA, democracy and Islam were incompatible; therefore, anyone who had a voting card was against Islam and deserved to be killed. The warrant was extended to include anyone who worked in establishments allied with the government, such as public schools. In two months of 1994 alone, thirty teachers and principals were killed and 538 schools were torched. The GIA terrorists were not only killing teachers and democrats, however. The inhabitants of entire villages were slain in midnight massacres. These atrocities were celebrated in GIA’s weekly newspaper,
Al-Ansar,
published in London, which featured headlines such as “Thank God, We Have Cut 200 Throats Today!” and “Our Brother Beheaded His Father for the Sake of Allah.” The religious madness culminated in a declaration that condemned the entire population of Algeria. A GIA communiqué stated the equation starkly: “There is no neutrality in the war we are waging. With the exception of those who are with us, all others are apostates and deserve to die.” This formulation was appealingly available to those who saw the conflict in apocalyptic terms.

Even bin Laden recoiled—if not from the violence itself, then from the international revulsion directed at the Islamist project. He sought to create a “better image of the jihad.” When some of the leaders of GIA came to Khartoum to beg for more funds, they had the temerity to criticize him for being “too flexible” with democrats, which made him appear “weak.” Bin Laden was furious and withdrew his support entirely. But his forty thousand dollars had already helped to create a catastrophe. More than a hundred thousand people would die in the Algerian civil war.

A
T THE END OF 1993,
a rumor raced through Khartoum that a Sudanese general had gotten his hands on some black market uranium. Bin Laden was already interested in acquiring more powerful weapons to match his enlarged vision of al-Qaeda as an international terrorist organization. He was working with the Sudanese government to develop chemical agents that could be used against the Christian rebels in the south and smuggling weapons from Afghanistan on Sudan Airways cargo planes. He bought an American military jet, a T-
39,
specifically to transport more Stingers. So, naturally, when word of the uranium reached him, he was excited. He sent Jamal al-Fadl to negotiate the price.

By his own account Fadl was the third person to pledge allegiance to al-Qaeda, giving him a special claim on bin Laden’s affections. He was a wiry and nimble athlete who played center on bin Laden’s soccer team. Fadl was always smiling, and he had an infectious horse laugh that caught people by surprise. Like many of al-Qaeda’s inner circle, he had come to jihad from America, having worked in the Services Bureau office on Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue. Because Fadl was Sudanese and knew the local real estate market, bin Laden had entrusted him with the money to buy the property for al-Qaeda’s farms and houses before the organization relocated to Khartoum.

The general wanted $
1.5
million for the uranium plus a commission. He produced a cylinder, two and a half feet long and about six inches in diameter, and some documents showing that the canister had come from South Africa. Bin Laden was satisfied by this information and paid Fadl ten thousand dollars for his part of the exchange. As it turned out, the canister was filled with a substance called red mercury—also known as cinnabar—that physically resembles uranium oxide although chemically it is quite different. Red mercury has been used in nuclear scams for more than twenty-five years. Despite this expensive lesson, bin Laden continued his search for enriched uranium or Russian nuclear warheads that were said to be available in the ruins of the Soviet Union.

At this point, in the early nineties, bin Laden was still refining the concept of al-Qaeda. It was only one of his many enterprises, but it offered him a potentially extraordinary base of power. His actions, such as his foray into Somalia, were small and speculative; but with sufficiently powerful tools—nuclear or chemical weapons, for example—al-Qaeda could change the course of human events.

B
Y
1994
BIN
L
ADEN’S LIFE
had reached a pinnacle. His first two years in Sudan had been full of pleasure and good fortune. His wives and families were all together in his large villa; his business interests were expanding; al-Qaeda was gaining energy and momentum—but also raising alarms. Although Western intelligence agencies were still largely unaware of bin Laden, or simply failed to appreciate the scale of his enterprise, the Saudis and the Egyptians had taken notice of the activities in Sudan. Al-Qaeda proved difficult to penetrate, however. Loyalty, kinship, and fanaticism were formidable barriers against curious outsiders.

On Fridays, bin Laden normally went to pray in the Ansar al-Sunnah Mosque, across the Nile from Khartoum in the suburb of Omdurman. It was a Wahhabi mosque, frequented by Saudis. On February
4,
a small group of takfiris, armed with Kalashnikovs and headed by a Libyan named Mohammed Abdullah al-Khilaifi, brazenly broke into two police stations, killing two policemen and seizing weapons and ammunition. Khilaifi and two companions then went to the mosque just as the evening prayers concluded. They fired indiscriminately into the crowd, killing sixteen people at once and wounding about twenty others. The killers hid out behind the airport. The next day, driving around Khartoum seeking other targets, they shot at policemen on the streets and at some of bin Laden’s employees in the Wadi El Aqiq office downtown. They were wild and undisciplined, but it seemed clear that they were gunning for bin Laden.

At five in the afternoon, when he normally opened his salon to visitors, bin Laden was having a dispute with his eldest son, Abdullah. Since childhood, Abdullah had suffered from asthma, and the experience in Peshawar and Khartoum had been difficult for him. He was sixteen years old, and he longed to be with his friends and his cousins in Jeddah, just across the slender ribbon of the Red Sea. Abdullah was, after all, a member of a very wealthy clan, and in Jeddah he could enjoy the family beach resort, the yachts, the parties, the cars, and all the luxuries that his father abhorred. He also worried that his father’s home tutorials had left him far behind his peers—in fact, the bin Laden children of his first wife could scarcely read. Osama believed that his family was already much too comfortable in Sudan. He wanted to make their lives more austere, not less.

As the father and son were talking in bin Laden’s house, his guests began arriving at his office across the street. “At that moment, I heard the sound of a shotgun coming from the direction of the guesthouse,” bin Laden recounted. “Then several shots were fired at the house.” He took his pistol out of the pocket of his gallabea and handed another weapon to Abdullah.

The killers had driven into the street between bin Laden’s two houses and immediately opened fire. Khilaifi and his two companions had expected bin Laden to be entertaining at his office. “They had targeted the spot where I used to sit,” bin Laden said. He and Abdullah, along with Sudanese security men who were patrolling the area, shot at the attackers. Three of bin Laden’s guests were hit and several of the guards. Khilaifi was wounded and both of his companions killed.

Bin Laden obliquely blamed “regimes in our Arabic region” for the assaults. When his old friend Jamal Khashoggi asked him what he meant by that, bin Laden pointed to Egyptian intelligence. The CIA believed that the Saudis were behind the attempt. Turki’s chief of intelligence, Saeed Badeeb, said, “We never tried to assassinate him. We only wanted to cool him down.”

This near murder offered Zawahiri a superb opportunity to expand his influence with bin Laden. Zawahiri called in his own man, Ali Mohammed, to investigate the assassins. Mohammed learned that Khilaifi was a Libyan who had trained in Lebanon and then traveled to Peshawar in 1988. There he joined the mujahideen and met bin Laden. But he had also come under the influence of the takfiris. Khilaifi was a sociopath who used this philosophy to justify the murder of anyone he labeled an infidel. It was no different, except in the less ambitious scale of the enterprise, from what Zawahiri and bin Laden were doing.
Takfir
was a weapon that could blow up in anyone’s face.

Zawahiri arranged for Ali Mohammed to train bin Laden’s bodyguards, and he made sure that they were largely Egyptians—drawing even tighter the noose of influence he was casting around the Saudi. As for bin Laden, he gloomily concluded that his Sudanese idyll had come to an end. The picnics on the Nile, the meditative strolls to the mosque, the Friday horse races—all that was part of the past. He traveled in convoys now, and he always carried the Kalikov AK-74 that he had been awarded on the field of combat.

L
IFE AT HOME
also changed for bin Laden. As stern as he was toward his children, he was surprisingly permissive toward his career-oriented wives. Umm Hamza, the professor of child psychology, and Umm Khaled, who taught Arabic grammar, kept their university jobs and commuted to Saudi Arabia during the Sudan years. Umm Hamza lived on the ground floor of the Khartoum house, where she offered lectures to women about the teachings of Islam.

For Umm Abdullah, however, life in Khartoum was not so rewarding. Two of her sons, Abdullah and Omar, hated the deprivation and the hazards that their father imposed on them. And there was the ongoing problem of caring for Abdul Rahman, the retarded son, whose emotional outbursts were all the more difficult to deal with in the cramped household.

The fourth wife, Umm Ali, asked for a divorce. Bin Laden had expected this. “We have not been on good terms since the beginning,” he confessed to Jamal Khalifa. When Osama and Jamal decided back in their university days to become polygamists, they had made a pledge that they would never abuse their moral code by being the one to ask for a divorce. Instead of marrying scores of women, like his father had done, bin Laden intended to fulfill the Quranic injunction to treat his four wives equally. But that meant he had to wait patiently for UmmAli to make the request herself and put years of unhappiness behind them.

Under Islamic law, children younger than seven stay with their mothers; after that, the daughters go to their fathers. Sons over seven years old may choose between their parents. Eight-year-old Ali, the oldest, decided to stay with his mother. Umm Ali took her three children and returned to her family in Mecca. The daughters stayed with her, even as they grew.

Bin Laden valued loyalty; indeed, nearly all those around him had formally pledged themselves to him. He lived as feudal lord, controlling the destinies of hundreds of people. Betrayal, until now, was practically unknown in his dominion. The sudden desertion by several members of his family was a crushing loss to a man who held himself out as an exemplar of Islamic family values. The spartan virtues that he had pressed upon his children had turned some of them against him. And yet he willingly let them go.

B
IN
L
ADEN
also longed for home. The only times he got to see his mother or other members of his family were when the Saudi royal court sent them to Khartoum to command him to return. King Fahd was beside himself with this continuing display of disloyalty. Algeria and Yemen were furiously pressing the Saudis to put a stop to the man they saw as a source of the insurgencies in their countries. It was Egypt, however, that finally forced the Kingdom to choose between its prodigal son and continued good relations with a powerful ally. The Egyptians were fed up with the violence spilling out of Sudan and protested again and again that bin Laden was behind it. Finally, on March
5, 1994,
Fahd personally decided to revoke bin Laden’s Saudi citizenship.

Saudi Arabia is an intimate nation, with large families and tribes complexly knitted together. To be expelled from the country was to be banished from these intricate relationships that are so much a part of every Saudi’s identity. Citizenship is a closely guarded property, rarely awarded to foreigners, and the fact that the bin Laden family, of Yemeni origin, were full members of Saudi society indicated the honored—but vulnerable—place they held. Immediately after the king canceled bin Laden’s citizenship, Bakr bin Laden, the eldest brother, publicly condemned Osama, turning the family’s back to him. Many of bin Laden’s countrymen date the moment of his total radicalization to the announcement of the king’s decision. An emissary traveled to Sudan to formally deliver the news and demand bin Laden’s passport. Bin Laden threw it at the man. “Take it, if having it dictates anything on my behalf!” he declared.

Bitter and reproachful, bin Laden authorized his representatives to establish an office in London. (He considered seeking asylum in Britain himself, but upon hearing that possibility, the British home secretary immediately banned him.) The office, called the Advice and Reformation Committee, was run by Khaled al-Fawwaz, a Saudi, and two Egyptian members of al-Jihad. They sent faxes by the hundreds to prominent Saudis, who were stunned by bin Laden’s open denunciations of royal corruption and the family’s under-the-table deals with the Islamic clergy. These dispatches caused a sensation at a time when the fever for reform was already blazing. Bin Laden published an open letter to Sheikh bin Baz, chief of the Saudi ulema, denouncing his fatwas authorizing the royal family to keep the American forces in the holy land and to lock up dissident Islamic scholars.

“Bring this man to heel,” the Saudi king ordered Prince Turki. Assassination plots were considered, but the Saudis were not clever killers, nor did Turki have the stomach for such risky ventures. Instead, the Interior Ministry ordered bin Laden’s family to cut him off, and it seized his share of the company—about $7 million. As predictable as such moves were, bin Laden was taken by surprise. He depended on the monthly stipend the company paid him—in fact, it was his only real source of income.