The Looming Tower (33 page)

His business career was a terrible failure. He had started his life in Sudan by spreading money around, loaning the government hard currency to purchase wheat, for instance, when an acute shortage caused breadlines to form; helping to build the Sudanese radio and television facilities; and occasionally picking up the tab for the nation’s oil imports when the government was short. In such an impoverished country, bin Laden’s modest fortune almost constituted a second economy. But he cared little about running his companies or overseeing his investments. Though he had an office with a fax machine and a computer, he rarely spent much time there, preferring to tinker with his agricultural projects during the day and entertain dignitaries and mujahideen in his evening salons.

He had sunk much of his money into enterprises he knew little about. His interests now included rock-crushing machines, insecticides, soap making, leather tanning—dozens of unrelated projects. He set up accounts in banks in Khartoum, London, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Dubai, each in the names of different al-Qaeda members, which made them difficult for intelligence agencies to trace, but also nearly impossible to manage. He drifted into projects without much thought. When one of his aides thought it would be a clever investment to import cheap bicycles from Azerbaijan to Sudan, where no one rides them, all that was needed was to have three al-Qaeda managers sign a form and bin Laden was in the bicycle business.

These extremely diverse enterprises were haphazardly grouped under various corporate entities. From the first, the men who oversaw bin Laden’s business interests realized that there was trouble ahead. In a 1992 meeting with bin Laden, Jamal al-Fadl and Abu Rida al-Suri asked him if it was really necessary for his companies to make money. “Business is very bad in Sudan,” they warned him. Inflation was over 150 percent, and the Sudanese currency was constantly losing value against the dollar, undermining the entire portfolio. “Our agenda is bigger than business,” bin Laden carelessly replied—a statement that ran a sword through any responsible management practices. When bin Laden’s Saudi allowance was suddenly cut off, he had to confront a river of deficits and no reliable stream of income. “There were five different companies, and nothing worked,” Abu Rida, his main business advisor, said. “All these companies lost. You cannot run a business on remote control.”

The crunch came at the end of 1994. Bin Laden told the members of al-Qaeda that he would have to reduce their salaries because he had “lost all my money.” When L’Houssaine Kherchtou, one of bin Laden’s pilots, mentioned that he needed to go to Kenya to renew his pilot’s license, which he had gained after three years of study on al-Qaeda’s payroll, bin Laden told him to “forget about it.” A few months later, Kherchtou’s pregnant wife needed a Caesarean section, and he asked the al-Qaeda paymaster for $500 for the operation. “There is no money,” the man told him. “We can’t give you anything.”

Suddenly Kherchtou felt expendable. The camaraderie that sustained the men of al-Qaeda rested on the financial security that bin Laden provided. They had always seen him as a billionaire, an endless font of wealth, and bin Laden had never sought to correct this impression. Now the contrast between that exaggerated image of bin Laden’s resources and the new destitute reality caused some of the men to begin looking out for themselves.

Jamal al-Fadl, who was one of bin Laden’s most popular and trusted men, had been chafing at the differential pay scale, which favored the Saudis and the Egyptians. When bin Laden refused to give him a raise, the Sudanese secretary reached into the till. He used the money to buy several plots of land and a car. In the narrow circles of Khartoum, such a burst of affluence was quickly noticed. When confronted, Fadl admitted to taking $
110,000.
“I don’t care about the money, I care about you. You are one of the best people in al-Qaeda,” bin Laden told him. “If you need money, you should come to us.” Bin Laden pointed to other members of the organization who had been given a new car or a house when they asked for help. “You didn’t do that,” said bin Laden. “You just stole the money.”

Fadl begged bin Laden to forgive him, but bin Laden said that would not happen “until you bring all the money back.”

Fadl considered the offer, then disappeared. He would become al-Qaeda’s first traitor. He offered to sell his story to various intelligence agencies in the Middle East, including the Israelis. He eventually found a buyer when he walked into the American Embassy in Eritrea in June 1996. In return for nearly $1 million, he became a government witness. While in protective custody, he won the New Jersey Lottery.

A
FRICA WAS BLEEDING
in the mid-1990s. Major wars and civil conflicts in Liberia, Angola, Sierra Leone, Congo, Nigeria, Rwanda, Burundi, and Zimbabwe took millions of lives. For bin Laden, the strife represented an opportunity to spread al-Qaeda’s influence. He sent Ali Mohammed to Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, to conduct surveillance on American, British, French, and Israeli targets. They were chosen because of their involvement with Operation Restore Hope in Somalia, which was still going on at the time.

Ali Mohammed walked around Nairobi posing as a tourist. Among the possible targets he considered were the French Cultural Center and the British-owned Norfolk Hotel, one of the great artifacts of the colonial period. The Israeli Embassy was too heavily fortified, and the El Al office in a local strip mall was surrounded by security.

The American Embassy stood out as a rich, vulnerable target. There was no setback from the road, making it easy for a car bomb to get close enough to do great damage. Mohammed carried two cameras, one around his neck, like a tourist, and another, a tiny Olympus, that he cupped in his hand. For four or five days he passed by the building, snapping pictures at different times of the day, noticing the traffic patterns and the rotation of the security guards. He spotted the closed-circuit television cameras and determined their range. He developed the photos himself and then buried them in a stack of other pictures so they would appear inconspicuous. He drew up a plan of attack, which he placed on an Apple PowerBook
140;
then he returned to Khartoum to make a presentation to bin Laden.

“Bin Laden looked at the picture of the American Embassy and pointed to where a truck could go as a suicide bomber,” Mohammed eventually testified. But when the international community withdrew from Somalia and that miserable country collapsed back into a hopelessness from which it has yet to recover, al-Qaeda lost its pallid excuse for attacking the embassy in Nairobi. The plan was not forgotten, however; it was only filed away.

I
N
1995
BIN
L
ADEN
began to have second thoughts about his life. He was struggling to keep his businesses afloat and his organization from flying apart. He could no longer afford to be a dilettante, but he was unwilling to cut loose his unprofitable projects and was paralyzed by the unfamiliar predicament of being broke. He was also pining for the familiar. “I am tired,” he told one of his followers. “I miss living in Medina. Only God knows how nostalgic I am.”

Al-Qaeda so far had come to nothing. It was another of his tantalizing enthusiasms that had no leadership and no clear direction. Al-Qaeda’s treasurer, Medani al-Tayeb, who had married Osama’s niece, had been urging bin Laden to reconcile with the king as a way of rectifying the organization’s dire finances. The Saudi government sent several delegations to see him in Khartoum. According to bin Laden, the government offered to return his passport and his money provided that “I say through the media that the king is a good Muslim.” He also claimed that the Saudis offered two billion riyals ($533 million) to his family if he abandoned jihad. He was torn between his righteous stance against the king and his sudden need for funds to keep al-Qaeda alive. When he rejected the offer, Tayeb defected, causing panic among the members when he turned up back in Saudi Arabia. Some accounted for his shocking desertion by saying that he was under a magical spell.

Bin Laden wanted to go home as well, but his loathing for King Fahd was so great he could never call him a “good Muslim.” During this time he had a dream of being in Medina, where he heard the sound of a great celebration. He looked over a mud wall and saw that Prince Abdullah was arriving. “It means that Abdullah will become king,” he told Abu Rida. “That will be a relief to the people and will make them happy. If Abdullah becomes king, then I will go back.”

But Abdullah was still crown prince. Bin Laden wrote a cagey and conciliatory note to him, trying to sound him out. He learned that the Saudi government was agreeable to his return if he pledged to give up jihad, otherwise, he would be jailed or put under house arrest.

His family heard about his yearning to come home, and they turned to a longtime friend of his, the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who had covered bin Laden’s exploits in Afghanistan. Khashoggi’s job was to get Osama to grant an interview in which he renounced violence. That would be a very public signal to the government that he accepted its terms.

Bin Laden cheerfully received his friend. Khashoggi had visited him several times before in Khartoum. Previously, when Osama was beginning his press campaign against the Saudi government, Khashoggi found him surrounded by young Saudi dissidents, who fetched newspaper clippings for him whenever he wanted to make a point. This time there were no articles. Bin Laden was subdued and introspective, and he kept his automatic weapon beside him. They had dinner on the terrace beside his house, next to the garden. There were a couple of Saudis, a Sudanese, and Abu Hajer, the Iraqi. They ate around nine, when the temperature became just bearable. Sudanese servants spread plastic on the ground and laid out a platter of rice and lamb, Saudi style.

Khashoggi explained his mission, and in clear, unambiguous language, bin Laden condemned the use of violence inside the Kingdom. Khashoggi pulled out his tape recorder. “Why don’t you say that on the record?” he asked.

“Let’s do that tomorrow night,” said bin Laden.

The next day, bin Laden took Khashoggi to visit his genetics laboratory, where he spent hours discoursing on the Muslims’ duty to aquire technology to improve their lives. For example, the Dutch have a monopoly on the best banana pods. Why can’t Muslims devote themselves to horticulture with the same level of sophistication? Here, in this laboratory, bin Laden was trying to develop high-quality seeds appropriate for Sudan. He also discussed another major highway he was about to construct. He seemed to be utterly engaged in his projects—buoyant, content, peaceful, but homesick.

Then at dinner, bin Laden unexpectedly began boasting about al-Qaeda. He said he was convinced that the Americans could be easily driven out of the Arabian Peninsula. He gave the example of Yemen. “We hit them in Aden and they left,” he said proudly. “We hit them in Somalia, and they left again.”

“Osama, this is very dangerous,” Jamal replied. “It is as if you are declaring war. You will give the right to the Americans to hunt for you.”

Bin Laden just smiled.

Again, Khashoggi pulled out his tape recorder. Again, his friend declined to speak on the record.

The following night, Khashoggi came to dinner for the last time. They sat once more on the floor of the terrace. It was exactly the same simple meal he had enjoyed the previous nights—rice and lamb. Bin Laden sometimes ate with a spoon, but he preferred to use the fingers of his right hand, because it was Sunna—the way the Prophet did it. He rhapsodized about how much he missed Medina and how he would like to go back and settle there. Khashoggi responded that all he had to do was state on the record what he’d already said privately—that he renounced the use of violence.

Just then someone approached bin Laden and whispered in his ear. Osama stood up and went into the garden. In the shadows, Khashoggi could see two or three men quietly speaking in Egyptian accents. Five minutes later, bin Laden returned, and Khashoggi posed the question again.

“What will I get for that?” bin Laden asked.

Khashoggi was caught by surprise. Osama had never acted like a politician before, negotiating for a personal advantage. “I don’t know,” Khashoggi admitted. “I’m not representing the government. Just say something, break the ice! Maybe there will be a positive reaction. Don’t forget you said a few nasty things about the Kingdom.”

Bin Laden smiled. “Yes, but a move like that has to be calculated.” He aired a couple of possible sweeteners: a full pardon for him, a timetable for the complete withdrawal of the American forces from the peninsula.

Khashoggi had the feeling that his friend was losing his hold on reality. Bin Laden began to speak fondly about Sudan, saying what great investment opportunities there were. He asked Khashoggi about a couple of mutual friends, and suggested that they should come investigate the agricultural prospects. He would be happy to show them around.

“Osama, any Saudi person would be afraid to be seen with you in public,” said Jamal. “Why can’t you see that?”