SEAL Target Geronimo: The Inside Story of the Mission to Kill Osama Bin Laden (20 page)

Placed into the minutes of the meeting were the ideal qualities of a new recruit. These included virtues that seemed lifted from a Boy Scout handbook: “good manners … rising early in the morning … and an ability to take orders.” The new regulations also required that Al Qaeda members swear an oath of
al bayat
to Osama himself. The previous pledge of allegiance had been to Abdullah Azzam.

Osama would later say of the founding of Al Qaeda, “Brother Abu Ubaydah formed the camp to train youth to fight the oppressive, atheist and truly terroristic Soviet Union. We call that place Al Qaeda, in the sense that it was a training base, and that is where the name came from.”

Abu Ubaydah had been continually at Osama’s side since the Lion’s Den fight; he and the other Egyptians were exerting greater and greater influence over Osama’s daily affairs. This worried Azzam, but he felt that he could still talk sense to Osama, particularly as he felt that the Egyptian hard-liners were crackpots.

Al Qaeda’s purpose was to assemble an all-star outfit; it was to be a mirror-image of JSOC—the best and the brightest. Especially prized were individuals with backgrounds in engineering, chemistry, computers, and media and those with proficiency in foreign languages.

Once a recruit passed screening, he would be put through a series of “testing camps” to gauge his determination and religious zeal. Besides a shot at martyrdom and eternal glory, Al Qaeda offered temporal rewards as well. Those who made it through training would receive a salary of a thousand dollars a month, and married men would get an extra five hundred. Medical care was provided, as was a month of vacation and a round-trip ticket home once a year.

News of the recruiting drive spread in eager whispers all over Peshawar. Soon, Jihadists from a dozen countries were lining up to fill out Al Qaeda’s multipage application form and swear their loyalty. Everybody wanted in, and paradoxically, the more Osama tried to keep Al Qaeda a secret, the more widely known it became.

Abdul Azzam appears to have viewed Al Qaeda with skepticism. Would it not become a mercenary army? Could paid soldiers remain true to the principles of Islam?

Azzam was a Palestinian, and he had seen with his own eyes what happened when men put paychecks and leader oaths above a cause. The Abu Nidal Group was a cultlike splinter group of the PLO. Its members swore
al bayat
to their founder, Abu Nidal, a violent, paranoid psychopath who set himself up as a freelance operator, hijacking planes and carrying out murders for hire. Abu Nidal was also an atheist, and Azzam could at least reassure himself that Bin Laden was neither an unbeliever nor overtly insane. Still, he worried that a group of privately recruited fighters, loyal first to the man who paid them, had the potential to do evil as well as good.

Azzam was aware that his own star was waning. This was driven home when Osama won a unanimous election to head the new group. Azzam took his demotion in stride—he had been a mentor and now he was minion. He was faced with two options—he could get on the bus, or he could get run over. With some misgivings, Azzam went along for the ride.

Training facilities at the Lion’s Den were expanded, and other camps were opened. Volunteers were tested and selected on a two-track system. The lucky ones were those whose applications listed Western academic training or language skills. These men were groomed for international missions and sent to an advanced course lasting three months.

Those in the second rank were Jihadists without higher education and those who had less fervent ideas about martyrdom. These men were given three weeks of infantry training, an AK-47, and a blanket and were sent into Afghanistan to harass the fleeing Russians. They were cannon fodder.

The advanced camps were open to second-tier recruits who distinguished themselves in combat, but Osama could afford to be choosy about whom he trained. No one was admitted who did not meet Osama’s increasingly bigoted religious convictions.

Though he was not at the meeting, Ayman Zawahiri had been instrumental in urging Osama to form Al Qaeda. Zawahiri knew that Abdul Azzam objected strongly to both his
Takfiri
leanings and the Egyptian’s growing influence over his former student.

The prize was more than Osama’s esteem and affection: It was his money. For Azzam, who was less mercenary than Zawahiri, this behind-the-scenes struggle was not for capital, but for the soul and purpose of the Afghan Jihad. Azzam cared deeply about what would happen to both the Afghan people and the Arab fighters he had assembled to help fight the Russian invaders.

For Zawahiri, the squabble was not about the Afghan Jihad, but about a broader conflict—a battle for the entire world. Zawahiri did not care a fig for the Afghan people, and not much more about Osama bin Laden. He had repeatedly urged Osama to put himself into harm’s way. When the Russians failed to make a martyr out of him, Zawahiri sought to convert Osama to his own opinions about global Jihad, and take over Al Qaeda from the inside, by surrounding the pliable young millionaire with yes-men and his own cronies. The prize for Zawahiri was the fortune amassed by the Services Bureau: almost unlimited cash with which to wage his own version of Jihad—first against Egypt and then against the entire world.

To accomplish these ends, Zawahiri intended to take Azzam out of the picture, politically, if possible, but physically if necessary. The doctor started a rumor that Osama decided to form Al Qaeda because Azzam’s creation, the Services Bureau, had been infiltrated by the Central Intelligence Agency. In the armed and dangerous atmosphere of Peshawar, Zawahiri’s rumor mongering was much more serious than mere gossip.

The currents swirling around Osama were Byzantine. Prince Turki, the chief of Saudi intelligence, also wanted Azzam taken down. Abdullah Azzam was a Palestinian, and had helped to found the terrorist organization Hamas just the year before. Saudi intelligence was always suspicious that Azzam’s ultimate loyalties were not to Osama or the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, but to Palestine. They worried that an Al Qaeda headed by Azzam would pull young Saudi fighters into the orbit of the Muslim Brotherhood, the same men who killed Anwar Sadat. Still reeling from the assassination of King Faisal, Saudi Arabia did not want a problem on the home front.

Saudi Prince Turki knew that civil war in Afghanistan was a foregone conclusion. Even as victory loomed bright, the several Afghani insurgent groups were turning on each other. The Saudis wanted an organization to see to their interests as Afghanistan was either divided up or brought to heel after the Soviet departure. Prince Turki wanted Al Qaeda in the hands of someone he thought would be compliant. Turki knew Bin Laden well enough to know that he was easy to influence—what the prince did not count on was that someone as manipulative as he was had inserted themselves close to Osama and was now pulling the strings.

As the summer burned, Zawahiri turned up the heat on his rival Azzam, this time accusing him of diverting money from the Services Bureau for his own use. These charges were false, but the principle of
al-Takeyya
allowed Zawahiri to lie about anything he wanted. The embezzlement scandal echoed through Peshawar, and redoubled when Zawahiri had placards put up around the city demanding that Azzam face trial. The personal enmity between the two men grew as Zawahiri forced Abdullah Azzam off the boards of several mosques and hospitals and continued a vindictive campaign to discredit him.

Abdullah Azzam was highly educated and politically adroit, but he did not comprehend the forces lining up against him. His underestimation of Ayman Zawahiri would cost him dearly.

On August 17, 1988, a C-130 aircraft carrying the president of Pakistan, Zia ul Huq, took off from Bahawalpur airbase three-hundred miles south of the capital Islamabad. Ground control radar tracked the aircraft as it suddenly pitched into a near vertical dive, smashed into the ground, and exploded. Killed instantly along with Pakistan’s president were the American ambassador, Arnold Raphel, the chief of staff of the Pakistani armed forces, and several dozen high-ranking Pakistani military officers. There were no survivors.

The nation of Pakistan was stunned and teetered on the brink of revolution.

The public summaries of a pair of top secret investigations pointed to a catastrophic failure of the aircraft’s hydraulic system. This seemed an impossibly unlikely event, as the C-130 had a decades-long record as an extremely reliable and durable aircraft, even in combat. No one wanted to call it a bombing.

The Pakistani investigation hinted obliquely that the crash might have occurred because the pilots became “incapacitated.”

Just who killed President Zia may never be known, but the head of Pakistan’s intelligence service, General Hammed Gul, was convinced that the crash was the result of a “conspiracy involving a foreign power.”

Almost three decades later, American intelligence officials would admit privately that the Soviet Union was probably behind the crash. It was KGB payback for nine years of bloody, miserable war.

Osama, and those around him, took it for granted that President Zia had been killed by the Russians.

In May, a Soviet-made antitank mine was found in a mosque attached to a Services Bureau facility. The bomb had been intended to kill everyone in the building. Al Qaeda redoubled its security efforts, triple-screened all new applicants, and reformed Osama’s personal protection detail.

The security situation in Peshawar was deteriorating: bombings, bank robberies, and politically motivated hits had become daily events and Osama thought it might be a good time to put himself beyond the reach of Soviet retaliation. He packed up to go home.

Abu Ubaydah took over the supervision of Al Qaeda’s training. Zawahiri could not go back to Egypt where it was likely that he would be killed as an informer. He surrounded himself with bodyguards and stayed on in Peshawar, solidifying his grip on Al Qaeda and stirring up trouble. Abdullah Azzam bravely started a round of shuttle diplomacy, trying to defuse tensions between a half-dozen Afghani warlords who now seemed more willing to fight one another than combine forces and take on the pro-communist government the Russians had left behind.

On the day of his departure, Osama said a tearful good-bye to Azzam. He was so distraught that Azzam also wept. Perhaps he knew who had placed the antitank mine at the Services Bureau mosque. Azzam’s security team had discovered the bomb on a morning he had been scheduled to lead Friday prayers. Osama and Azzam parted, never to see each other again. Bin Laden loaded his family aboard a chartered jet and flew back to Saudi Arabia.

On Friday, November 24, 1989, Azzam’s son Ibrahim turned the family car onto Gulshan Iqbal Road, in the University Town section of Peshawar. His father was to deliver a sermon at a mosque near their home. Abdullah Azzam was in the backseat, chatting with his second son, Mohammed. A car carrying bodyguards preceded them, and another trailed behind. The guards stopped at the mosque and the men deployed as Azzam and his sons turned left into the parking lot.

There was a flash—the noise was so overwhelming that the survivors could not even remember it—a white-orange-yellow ball of fire, then a searing, burning fist of heat. A one-hundred-pound bomb had been placed at the intersection of a narrow street adjoining the mosque. The concussive force shattered windows and blew the mosque’s front doors off their hinges. The explosive charge had been specially designed to concentrate the blast, and it tore through Azzam’s car, ripping his son Mohammed limb from limb and blowing his brother into pulp. The explosion tore off the car doors, peeled away the hood, bent the chassis, and sent human debris sailing a hundred yards to smash through shop windows and dangle off power lines. Azzam’s corpse was found, intact, lying against a wall.

It was said that the body had emerged from the blast without the least disfigurement. Perhaps it was a miracle.

It was certainly no accident.

A detonation wire was found across the street, leading to a hidden firing position near an open storm drain. Azzam’s killers had watched him arrive and set the bomb off electronically as his car slowed to enter the mosque. The murderers walked away in the confusion after the blast.

The next day, November 25, Ayman Zawahiri attended Azzam’s funeral. He was smiling.

*   *   *

Osama returned to the kingdom of Saudi Arabia as its most famous citizen. Stoked by media outlets controlled by the royal family, and wafting into town on a PR campaign of his own making, Osama returned to Jeddah and threw open his doors to the rich and powerful. Princes and Arab business magnates, most of them bearing checks, visited him. The last Soviet soldier had been withdrawn back in February, but recruits and money still poured in to Osama’s Services Bureau. Absurdly, now that the Russians were gone, more Arab fighters than ever flooded into Pakistan and Afghanistan.

They were carrying out Jihad, not against the godless Soviets, but against the last remnants of the Afghan army. The last, and most brutal farce of the Afghan war was unfolding, and now Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri were pitting Muslims against Muslims.

Back in Peshawar, Zawahiri was settling old scores with other Egyptian radicals. One who still remembered his treachery was Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman, the blind cleric who’d marked Sadat for death with a fatwa sanctioning the murder of apostate political leaders.

Zawahiri fended off the truth about his collaboration by pointing out the obvious fact that Sheik Rahman was blind—and that the Jihadist movement could hardly be led by a man who couldn’t see. The irony in this seemed to be lost on Zawahiri, who himself wore a set of heavy-rimmed, Coke-bottle glasses.

Both men battled over Osama’s official endorsement. Zawahiri won the mudslinging contest, and from Jeddah, Bin Laden wired $100,000 so the doctor could form a new organization called al Jihad. Eventually, Zawahiri would merge his organization with Al Qaeda when its brand name proved easier for Western media outlets to pronounce.