Issue of 2000-01-24
Posted 2001-09-13

In the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, intelligence experts focussed on the possible role of Osama bin Laden, the Saudi multimillionaire who has been held responsible for a number of terrorist actions, including the bombing of the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. This piece, from last year, profiles bin Laden.

In August of 1998, the mysterious Saudi multimillionaire Osama bin Laden was declared Washington's most-wanted fugitive. The previous February, he had called on his followers to kill Americans around the world, and now he was being accused of the bombings of two United States Embassies, in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. Not long after the embassy attacks, American cruise missiles struck targets in Afghanistan believed to be bin Laden training camps, killing a number of people but not bin Laden, who was then forty-three years old. Today, a year and a half later, after one of the costliest and most complicated international criminal investigations in United States history, the government seems divided on how to deal with him. Every strategy has backfired, from covert operations, to what is now euphemistically called "bringing bin Laden to justice," to our missile attacks, whose clear but unstated objective was to kill bin Laden and his key aides. Some American officials I spoke to conceded that they could only hope reports that bin Laden is seriously ill—reports he has denied—prove to be true.

Perhaps as bedevilling as anything else has been bin Laden's silence in the past eleven months. Last February, he "disappeared" somewhere in the mountains of Afghanistan. Then, during the summer, the C.I.A. issued a series of intelligence reports warning that bin Laden appeared to be about to strike again. These findings, based on telephone intercepts, were greeted skeptically by some within the United States intelligence community. Other American intelligence warnings came and went, and there were scores of arrests around the world—most recently last month, when an Iraqi, an Algerian, and eleven Jordanians were arrested in Amman after entering Jordan from Afghanistan. All the men had trained with explosives at one of bin Laden's military camps and, according to Jordanian officials, were in the early stages of planning a series of terrorist attacks against Biblical and tourist sites. Some days afterward, an Algerian named Ahmed Ressam was detained as he entered the United States with an arsenal of bomb-making components in the trunk of his car; arrests of other Algerians quickly followed, in and around Seattle, in Vermont, and in New York. According to knowledgeable officials in the American intelligence community, Ressam, along with a number of the others now under arrest, has been linked to Algeria's extremist Armed Islamic Group—an organization that bin Laden has been funding for a number of years.

As a result of the intelligence warnings, the Secretary of Defense cancelled a scheduled trip abroad. On the anniversary of the embassy bombings and during the millennium celebrations, Americans around the world were told to be alert. At its Washington headquarters, the F.B.I. abruptly suspended public tours.

These developments, however, have obscured the larger questions facing the government: how to respond to an enemy who is a man and not a state; who has no structured organization, no headquarters, and no fixed address; and whose followers live in different countries and feel a loyalty not so much to that man as to the ideology of militant Islam. According to several intelligence officials, the Clinton administration's answer, to a large extent, has been to do precisely what Osama bin Laden himself has been doing over the years: it has mythologized him.

In November of 1998, three months after the embassy bombings, the Justice Department handed down a two-hundred-and-thirty-eight-count indictment charging bin Laden with conspiracy to kill Americans and accusing him of involvement (without detailing his specific role) in much more than the embassy attacks. It charged that, as the leader of a terrorist conspiracy for nearly ten years, bin Laden had attempted to procure the components of nuclear and chemical weapons. According to the indictment, bin Laden also had a logistical and training role in the 1993 killing in Somalia of eighteen American servicemen, one of whose bodies was seen on television being dragged through the streets by a mob. (In an interview broadcast on CNN in May of 1997, bin Laden himself boasted that his followers had played a role in those deaths.)

Yet the indictment did not provide persuasive evidence that bin Laden personally commanded the bombings of our embassies in East Africa, and the government has still not produced such evidence. Ambassador Robert Oakley, who led the State Department's Counter-Terrorism Office, called bin Laden's boast of involvement in the Somali deaths "preposterous." And when President Clinton said that bin Laden was responsible for a 1995 assassination attempt in Addis Ababa against Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian President, one member of Egypt's largest militant Islamist group to whom I spoke was outraged: the group, Gama'a al-Islamiya, had labored for more than a year to plan and execute the attempt, he said. Given bin Laden's genius for self-promotion, a worried United States official told me, the Administration's unsophisticated attempts at international spin control only help him. In fact, the real bin Laden is more interesting, and perhaps more dangerous, than the fantasies that have surrounded him.

Osama bin Muhammad bin Awad bin Laden was born in 1955, the youngest of some twenty surviving sons of one of Saudi Arabia's wealthiest and most prominent families. He is part puritanical Wahhabi, the dominant school of Islam in Saudi Arabia, yet at one time he may have led a very liberated social life. He is part feudal Saudi, an aristocrat who, from time to time, would retreat with his father to the desert and live in a tent. And he is of a Saudi generation that came of age during the rise of OPEC, with the extraordinary wealth that accompanied it: a generation whose religious fervor or political zeal, complemented by government airline tickets, led thousands to fight a war in a distant Muslim land. That Pan-Islamic effort, whose fighters were funded, armed, and trained by the C.I.A., eventually brought some twenty-five thousand Islamic militants, from more than fifty countries, to combat the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The United States, intentionally or not, had launched Pan-Islam's first jihad, or holy war, in eight centuries.

Bin Laden's father was a Yemeni who had immigrated to the kingdom and had made a fortune by building a construction company into a financial empire. Osama's mother, a Syrian beauty, was his father's fourth, and final, official wife (the other three were Saudis), and she was considered by the conservative bin Laden family to be far ahead of her time. (For instance, she refused to wear a burka over her Chanel suits when she travelled abroad.) Osama was her only son. Tutors and nannies, bearers and butlers formed a large part of his life. He and his half brothers—and, to a lesser extent, his thirty half sisters—were playmates of the children of the kingdom's most prominent families, including various royal princes and princesses. Nonetheless, his childhood has been described as an often lonely one. "It must have been very difficult for him," one family friend told me. "In a country that is obsessed with parentage, with who your great-grandfather was, Osama was almost a double outsider. His paternal roots are in Yemen, and, within the family, his mother was a double outsider as well—she was neither Saudi nor Yemeni but Syrian."

In 1968, Osama's father (along with his American pilot) died in a helicopter crash, and Osama, at the age of thirteen, inherited eighty million dollars. When he was fifteen, he had his own stable of horses, and at nineteen he entered King Abdul-Aziz University, in Jidda, where he received a civil-engineering degree in 1979. A barber who saw him often in the early nineteen-seventies has told the Mideast Mirror that in Beirut's flashy night clubs and bars his client was known as a free-spending, fun-loving young man—"a heavy drinker who often ended up embroiled in shouting matches and fistfights with other young men over an attractive night-club dancer or barmaid."

There is no evidence that bin Laden showed any interest in politics before 1979, when three events shook the Middle East: Egypt and Israel signed a peace treaty; the Soviets invaded Afghanistan; and the Iranian Revolution toppled the Shah. Years later, looking back on the invasion of Afghanistan, bin Laden told an interviewer from the Arabic-language Al-Quds al-Arabi, "I was enraged, and went there at once."

Friends of the bin Laden family told me that the truth wasn't quite so dramatic. Osama spent the first years of the war travelling throughout Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf and raising millions of dollars for the jihad. Some of the funding came directly from the Saudi government, some from official mosques, and some from the kingdom's financial and business élite—including his late father's construction empire, the Bin Laden Group, which by then had interests on three continents.

In 1984, bin Laden moved to Peshawar, a Pakistani border town near the Khyber Pass which served as the key staging area for the jihad in Afghanistan. That year, I and other journalists in the region began to hear of a man known as the Good Samaritan or the Saudi Prince. He would arrive unannounced, it was said, at hospitals where wounded Afghan and Arab fighters had been brought. He was lean and elegant, and dressed in the traditional shalwar kameez of the Afghan tribes—a blousy knee-length tunic top—over tailored trousers of fine English cloth, and he always wore English custom-made Beal Brothers boots. According to the stories that we heard, he was soft-spoken, and went from bed to bed dispensing cashews and English chocolates to the wounded and carefully noting each man's name and address. Weeks later, the man's family would receive a generous check.

Soon we began to hear other tales. In the ungovernable tribal areas on the Pakistani-Afghan frontier, and in the military training camps outside Peshawar and in Afghanistan, jihad trainees and clerics began to speak of another enigmatic Saudi. He had arrived in an unmarked military transport plane, and brought in bulldozers and other pieces of heavy equipment, which he deployed to design and construct defensive tunnels and storage depots, and to cut roads through the deep valleys of Afghanistan. According to one frequently told story, the man often drove one of the bulldozers himself across the precipitous mountain peaks, exposing himself to strafing from Soviet helicopter gunships. This man also turned out to be bin Laden, and the equipment that he brought in was furnished by the Bin Laden Group.

Four years had passed since the C.I.A. began providing weapons and funds—eventually totalling more than three billion dollars—to the various Afghan resistance groups, all of which were, to varying degrees, fundamentalist in religion, autocratic in politics, and venomously anti-American. During (and also after) the jihad in Afghanistan, bin Laden met frequently with Hassan al-Turabi, an erudite Islamist who now effectively controls the rigid Islamic government in Sudan. He dined regularly with President Zia ul-Haq, Pakistan's military ruler, who was a conduit for the C.I.A. arms. He cultivated generals from the Pakistani intelligence service. And he befriended not only some of the most anti-Western of the Afghan resistance leaders fighting the jihad but also the Egyptian cleric Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, who is now serving a life sentence in a Minnesota prison for conspiracy to "wage a war of urban terrorism" against the United States.

The C.I.A. station chief in Pakistan from 1986 to 1989 was Milt Bearden, an avuncular, barrel-chested man with an easy smile. He arrived with the first shipments of Stinger missiles that Washington dispatched to the combatants, and he spent a good deal of time in the mountains with the resistance groups. Not long ago, I asked Bearden, who is now retired, if he had known bin Laden during the war years.

"No," he replied. "Did I know that he was out there? Yes, I did, but did I say that this tall, slim, ascetic Saudi was instrumental? No, I did not. There were a lot of bin Ladens who came to do jihad, and they unburdened us a lot. These guys were bringing in up to twenty to twenty-five million dollars a month from other Saudis and Gulf Arabs to underwrite the war. And that is a lot of money. It's an extra two hundred to three hundred million dollars a year. And this is what bin Laden did. He spent most of the war as a fund-raiser, in Peshawar. He was not a valiant warrior on the battlefield."

According to Bearden, bin Laden and the Saudi contingent "fought in only one important battle that I know of: the battle of Ali Khel"—in Paktia province, not far from the area struck by United States cruise missiles in August of 1998. "The Soviets ran out of steam just before we ran out of supplies. There were perhaps twenty or twenty-five Saudi shaheeds"—martyrs. Bin Laden, fighting under the nom de guerre Abu Abdullah, appeared to have modelled himself on the twelfth-century military hero Salah al-Din, who effectively checked the Crusaders and reconquered Jerusalem.

"As time went on," Bearden told me, "the story of the battle of Ali Khel grew, as did that of the Saudis' battlefield role. Part of the myth of bin Laden and of the Saudi fighters sprang from this. The U.S. government, along with others, sang the ballad of the Saudi shaheeds, and, dollar for dollar, King Fahd matched our funds. We put five hundred million dollars into Afghanistan in 1987 alone, and the Saudis matched us bill for bill."

In 1989, when the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in defeat, bin Laden returned to Jidda, and to his place in the family's business empire. But with the collapse of the oil boom Saudi Arabia faced growing economic and social problems. According to the State Department's annual human-rights reports, the kingdom's royal family was also becoming increasingly repressive and corrupt. Bin Laden began to criticize the feudal Saudi regime openly, and to support its opposition groups. His half brothers and some of his royal friends—including Prince Turki, the chief of Saudi intelligence, and Prince Salman, the governor of Riyadh, with whom bin Laden had worked during the jihad—attempted to restrain him, and for a time he devoted himself to personal matters: expanding his holdings (which are based, in large part, on more than sixty companies, many of them in the West) and producing heirs. He now has four wives, carefully chosen for their political connections or their pedigree, and some ten children.

Bin Laden's quietude, however, did not last long, as he increasingly came under the sway of two of Saudi Arabia's most militant clerics, Sheikhs Safar Hawali and Salman Awdah—whose views are considered revolutionary by the Saudi regime, and whose fatwas, or religious opinions, bin Laden still propagates. In 1991, the royal family expelled him from the kingdom for his political activities, and his family publicly renounced him. He sought refuge in Sudan.

After that, bin Laden's political evolution accelerated. His departure from his homeland coincided with the arrival there of tens of thousands of United States troops for the Persian Gulf War. When the Saudi regime permitted them not only to occupy its soil but to remain after the victory, bin Laden's antipathy to both the regime and the United States was inflamed. In his mind, the United States had become to Saudi Arabia what the Soviet Union had been to Afghanistan: an infidel occupation force propping up a corrupt, repressive, and un-Islamic government.

During five years of exile in Sudan, from 1991 to 1996, bin Laden placed his wealth—a fortune now estimated at more than two hundred and fifty million dollars, largely in foreign bank accounts—at the disposal of militant Islamist groups around the world. Whether he retains access to his family's fortune, which is estimated to be worth some five billion dollars, is a matter of dispute.

While bin Laden was based in Sudan, the Saudi regime warned him more than once that it would countenance no actions directed against the Saudi throne. He ignored the warnings. In the early nineties—during the Bush Administration, and presumably with the knowledge of the United States—the Saudis secretly dispatched hit teams to Khartoum with a contract on bin Laden's life. And in 1994, as a result of urging by the United States, the normally cautious House of Saud took what one Saudi expert told me was an astonishing step: it antagonized its fundamentalist community by publicly stripping bin Laden of his citizenship, citing his "irresponsible behavior and his refusal to obey instructions issued to him." The kingdom also stripped him of much of his Saudi property and many of his assets.

Then, inexplicably, in November of 1996, the Saudi royal family invited bin Laden to return home. Or so he claimed, in an interview with Al-Quds al-Arabi, and he added that the regime had also offered to restore his assets and the properties it had seized. In exchange, bin Laden was expected to swear an oath of allegiance to King Fahd. He refused. Saudi officials will neither confirm nor deny that the offer was made; indeed, over the years they have consistently refused to comment on anything about bin Laden—a testament, perhaps, to their continuing bewilderment about how to cope with him.

According to a declassified State Department report, when bin Laden was in Sudan he established and financed three terrorist training camps in the north of the country; bought two farms in the east; and paid to transport some five hundred "Afghan Arabs," as the foreign jihad fighters are called, to Sudan from Pakistan after Pakistani officials threatened to expel them. He mixed war and profit, establishing new companies and entering joint ventures with the Sudanese government. More and more Afghan Arabs came to Sudan to support his operations there. Some were instructors in his military training camps; others, management experts and economists, ran his businesses. Still others served as liaisons among a dozen or so bin Laden-supported militant Islamist groups.

Yet David Long, a former official in the State Department who is considered an expert both on the Saudis and on terrorism, said, "Is Osama bin Laden the exclusive font of terrorist evil? No. This is an informal brotherhood we are seeing now, whose members can draw on each other; it's not a clear, sterling network. Bin Laden's organization"—an umbrella group called al-Qaeda, or "the base"—"is not a terrorist organization in the traditional sense. It's more a clearing house from which other groups elicit funds, training, and logistical support. It's a chameleon, an amoeba, which constantly changes shape according to the whims of its leadership, and that leadership is Osama bin Laden. It's highly personalized." Long went on, "Bin Laden is a facilitator—a practitioner of the most ancient way of doing things in the Middle East. He does not have the brilliant, top-of-the-art international structure of Abu Nidal"—the Palestinian terrorist of the nineteen-seventies and mid-eighties. "If you were to kill Osama tomorrow, the Osama organization would disappear, but all the networks would still be there." Long believes that the more serious threat bin Laden poses to the interests of the United States lies in his ability to destabilize friendly Arab governments, such as Saudi Arabia's, whose support is geopolitically crucial to us. (In fact, bin Laden very likely sees his battle with the House of Saud as his most important struggle; from his perspective, the United States is of secondary concern.)

Other United States officials agree, and warn that bin Laden has given financial backing to anti-government groups in Egypt (where he has underwritten some of the activities of the Gama'a al-Islamiya and al-Jihad), Algeria, Yemen, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, and the Philippines. He has supported Islamic fighters not only in Afghanistan but also in Chechnya, Kosovo, Kashmir, Bosnia, and Tajikistan. But even though these groups may enjoy his patronage, he does not control them, and they are everything that his own organization is not: they are well structured, and most have long histories and specific (and often legitimate) complaints and concerns.

In May of 1996, under pressure from the United States and Saudi Arabia, the Sudanese government asked bin Laden to leave, and he returned to Afghanistan permanently, accompanied by two military-transport planes carrying some of his wealth, more than a hundred of his Afghan Arab fighters, and his four wives. Between two and three thousand of his other loyalists fanned out into Europe and across East Africa. "It was like sending Lenin back to Russia," an American diplomat said to me. "At least in the Sudan we could indirectly monitor some of his activities."

When bin Laden arrived in Afghanistan, the government that had eventually assumed power after the departure of the Soviets was being besieged by a fundamentalist student faction known as the Taliban. Its leader was Mullah Muhammad Omar, who, like bin Laden, had fought in the jihad. The two men had a similar ideology and complementary needs: bin Laden needed refuge, and the fledgling Taliban needed cash. Bin Laden gave the mullah an initial payment of three million dollars for the cause, and the Taliban was able to capture the key center of Jalalabad in September of 1996. Ten days later, the capital, Kabul, fell. And, sometime after that, according to United States officials, bin Laden, through the marriage of one of his daughters, became Mullah Omar's father-in-law.

The American war against bin Laden has affected United States policy throughout much of the Islamic world, particularly in South Asia and the Middle East. Memorably, on August 20, 1998, the Pakistani Army's chief of staff, General Jehangir Karamat, was playing host in Islamabad to his American counterpart, General Joseph Ralston, the vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Around ten o'clock in the evening, as the two men were having dinner, Ralston looked up from his chicken tikka, checked his watch, and informed his host that in ten minutes some sixty Tomahawk cruise missiles would be entering Pakistan's airspace. Their destination, he said, was Afghanistan, where bin Laden was believed to be operating four training camps. General Karamat was stunned, and appalled.

"It was a 'This is happening as we speak' kind of conversation," an American intelligence official told me. "Ralston was there, on the ground, to make absolutely certain that when the missiles flew across Pakistan's radar screen they would not be misconstrued as coming from India and, as a consequence, be shot down." The intelligence official paused for a moment, and then said, "This is one hell of a way to treat our friends."

By the following day, General Karamat's anger—and that of the government he served—had turned to rage. A number of the Tomahawks either had been poorly targeted or had not fallen where they were aimed. Two of the four training camps that were hit and destroyed, in the Zhawar Kili area of Afghanistan's Paktia province, were facilities of Pakistan's own intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence, or I.S.I. According to a highly placed official, five I.S.I. officers and some twenty trainees were killed. The government of Pakistan was not only furious but embarrassed, because it had not been taken into Washington's confidence. Why had there been only ten minutes' notice? And why had General Karamat been notified, instead of the Prime Minister?

Pakistan wasn't our only affronted ally. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority—indeed, much of the Islamic world—expressed dismay. The United States had reason to be embarrassed as well. For, despite President Clinton's claim, in a televised address a few hours after the missile strikes, that a "gathering of key terrorist leaders" had been expected to take place at one of the target sites, bin Laden and his top lieutenants were more than a hundred miles away when the missiles struck. The meeting that Clinton referred to had occurred a month earlier, in Jalalabad.

The United States had expended seventy-nine million dollars on satellite-guided cruise missiles to destroy just thousands of dollars' worth of obstacle courses, field barracks, and tents. Only one of the six facilities struck was a bin Laden training camp. "It was all rather Biblical," a former intelligence official told me at the time. "The President was very specific: he wanted two targets, for the two embassies that were bombed." (The second target was the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant, in Sudan, which the Administration claimed was used by bin Laden in either the manufacture or the distribution of chemical weapons. The Administration retreated from this theory last May, when, in refusing to answer a lawsuit, it released the frozen assets of the plant's owner.) Of the missile attacks, the former intelligence official asked, "Was it an intelligence failure or a policy failure? Or both?"

In the following year, there were approximately seventy temporary closings of American embassies and consulates after the C.I.A. warned that bin Laden appeared to be in the "advanced stages" of operational plans for another strike against an American facility abroad. But the agency conceded that it lacked precise information on where he might strike, or when. In a sense, bin Laden did not need to act; for, even without another bombing, he was holding the United States government hostage.

Before Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was deposed, in a military coup last October, one of his key officials said to me, "I think what the Americans are really trying to say to us is 'Why don't you do our dirty work—get bin Laden and deliver him or, preferably, eliminate him?' We've told the Americans, 'Provide the Taliban with evidence, and let them try bin Laden there.' "

The Taliban has offered to do just that, once it receives evidence from the United States, but Washington does not take the offer seriously. ("Disingenuous, even laughable" is the way one United States official described it to me.) More recently, as the Taliban scrambled to avert sweeping financial and commercial sanctions imposed by the United Nations at the insistence of Washington, the Taliban's leaders floated a proposal that a panel of Islamic judges be convened in Afghanistan to determine bin Laden's fate—presumably to decide whether to extradite him to a third country for trial or to exonerate him. United States officials were divided on whether the Taliban was attempting to find a face-saving way to expel bin Laden or was merely playing for time; the Clinton Administration rejected the proposal peremptorily. The United States was equally perplexed by a letter allegedly written by bin Laden to Mullah Omar—and leaked by the Taliban's official press on October 29th—in which bin Laden offered to leave Afghanistan in exchange for a guarantee that his new location would be known to only two Taliban officials, including his son-in-law.

As I thought about what the other options might be, I remembered something else that the Pakistani official had said to me: "Quite honestly, what would Pakistan gain by going into Afghanistan and snatching bin Laden for you? We are the most heavily sanctioned United States ally. We helped you capture Ramzi Yousef"—the convicted mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing in New York. "We helped you capture Mir Amal Kansi"—he has been sentenced to death for the murder of two C.I.A. employees outside the agency's headquarters in 1993—"and all we got were thank-you notes. You lobbed missiles across our territory with no advance warning! You humiliated our government! You killed Pakistani intelligence officers! And then you come to us and say, 'It's your problem. You've got to get Osama bin Laden for us.' "

Saudi Arabia, for its part, continues to permit American troops to billet in the country, but it has prohibited them from conducting air strikes against Iraq. And, despite the American presence—or, perhaps, because of it—the kingdom's princes and foundations and wealthy businessmen, who include a number of bin Laden's friends, remain the leading benefactors of many of the world's militant Islamist groups. Thus, in a barely disguised attempt not to further antagonize bin Laden and his followers, the royal family has not allowed the F.B.I. to interrogate any of the suspects allegedly involved in the 1995 and 1996 bombings of United States military installations in Riyadh and Dhahran, and in both cases it abruptly cut short any inquiry into the broader dimensions of the bombings. More recently, the House of Saud has refused to permit United States investigators to interrogate one of bin Laden's key financial aides—Sidi Tayyib, a man of some influence, whom Saudi intelligence officials either have arrested (at the strong urging of Washington) or have lured into changing sides. But the Saudis, following their own investigation, bluntly told their C.I.A. counterparts that there was no basis for treating Tayyib "like a criminal." Tayyib, who is married to one of bin Laden's nieces, probably knows as much as anyone else about bin Laden's intricate financial empire.

As bin Laden's international image and stature increase—along with his support, both ideological and financial, among some of the kingdom's élite and the élites of other states in the Persian Gulf—any Saudi hopes of quietly resolving its bin Laden problem by force become less tenable. And each time the Clinton Administration raises the stakes, and further enhances bin Laden's prominence, more and more disaffected Saudis flock to join the kingdom's militant Islamist underground, of which bin Laden remains a central part. That is one of the most worrisome consequences of America's obsession with one man.

For twenty years, Osama bin Laden has refashioned himself with extraordinary dexterity and skill. Now the House of Saud, ever fearful of the Islamist challenge to its throne, appears intent on a transformation of its own—to turn what has been an often complex battle of wills between the Saudi royal family and its errant son into a far simpler conflict, one that pits bin Laden and his followers against the United States.