The Longest War (5 page)

A year earlier, Salem bin Laden, Osama’s oldest brother, had died in a plane crash in San Antonio, Texas. Within a year Osama bin Laden had lost both his most important mentor and the brother who headed the bin Laden clan. They were perhaps the only two people in the world who might have been able to pull him back from the project he was just beginning: the establishment of al-Qaeda as an armed jihadist group with large ambitions. A relative lamented, “If Salem had still been around no one would be writing books about Osama bin Laden. Salem had
a volcanic temper
. … Salem would have grabbed Osama by the lapels and taken him back to Saudi Arabia.”

The minutes of al-Qaeda’s founding meetings
did not mention the United States as an enemy but rather described the group’s goals in the broadest and vaguest of terms: “to lift the word of God, to make His religion victorious.” The minutes did note that the “work” of al-Qaeda commenced on September 10, 1988. Almost exactly thirteen years later the organization carried out the 9/11 attacks, inflicting more direct damage on the United States during a morning than the Soviet Union had done during decades of the Cold War.

So what had changed in the meantime? Or to put it another way: Where did bin Laden’s anti-Americanism stem from? It was far from predictable that bin Laden would turn against the United States; several of his half brothers and sisters maintained vacation homes in the States and had substantial business interests there, while
about a quarter
of Osama’s fifty-three siblings had studied there at some point. And in 1979, when he was twenty-two, bin Laden himself traveled to the United States with his wife Najwa and their two infant sons. On the two-week trip the bin Ladens visited Los Angeles and Indiana. His wife recalled that the visit was uneventful: “
My husband and I
did not hate America, yet we did not love it.”

Over the course of the 1980s, bin Laden’s indifference to the United States would gradually harden into hostility because of its support for Israel. The al-Qaeda leader explained that he made a speech in 1986
urging Muslims to boycott American products
because “the Americans take our money and give it to the Jews so they can kill our children with it in Palestine.” Bin Laden stopped drinking
Pepsi and Coca-Cola
and his son
Omar recalls
that his father
refused to let his kids consume American soft drinks. (They would drink them anyway, behind his back.)

Bin Laden’s anti-Americanism, hardly uncommon in the Muslim world, blossomed into full-blown hatred, springing, famously, from the rejection of his offer to deploy his army of veterans from the Afghan anti-Soviet jihad to defend the Saudi kingdom following Saddam Hussein’s invasion of neighboring Kuwait in August 1990. The head of Saudi intelligence, Prince Turki, recalled bin Laden’s offer of his men to help defeat Saddam’s army, which was then the fourth largest in the world: “
He changed
from a calm, peaceful and gentle man interested in helping Muslims into a person who believed that he would be able to amass and command an army to liberate Kuwait. It revealed his arrogance.”

Bin Laden’s offer was summarily dismissed by the royal family and instead the Saudis sought the protection of Uncle Sam. Five hundred thousand American soldiers, including a number of women, soon arrived on Arabian soil, a force that bin Laden took to be “infidels” trespassing on the holy land. Omar bin Laden remembers his father ranting, “
Women! Defending Saudi men!
” The contemporaneous fatwas of the firebrand Saudi clerics Salman al-Awdah and Safar al-Hawali also had
an important impact
on bin Laden. Awdah and Hawali were among the first Saudi clerics to issue cassette tapes of sermons railing against the U.S. presence in Saudi Arabia.

By now bin Laden had become something of a thorn in the side of the absolute Saudi monarchy, not only because of his defiant stance against the American presence in the kingdom but also because he kept trying to insert himself into the affairs of neighboring Yemen. For bin Laden the first order of business as the Afghan jihad wound down was to dislodge the socialist government of southern Yemen, which had ruled over the bin Ladens’ ancestral land since 1967, when the British protectorate of Aden was replaced by a government that aligned itself with the Soviets. As he had in Afghanistan, bin Laden envisaged
raising his own jihadist army
to help overthrow the socialist Yemeni government. Abu Musab al-Suri, a Syrian militant close to bin Laden, recalled that during this period, “Osama’s main passion was the jihad in South Yemen.”

As the Saudi government soured on bin Laden, he decided to flee his homeland in the spring of 1991. Abu Jandal, a Yemeni who became the al-Qaeda leader’s chief bodyguard in Afghanistan, says that his boss
was given a passport
to leave the country because of his connections with members of the
royal family so that he could travel to Pakistan to liquidate his investments there. The passport was given on the condition that bin Laden would then return to Saudi Arabia and live there under house arrest. Instead the al-Qaeda leader traveled to Pakistan, never to return to his native land.

Around the same time that bin Laden went back to Pakistan, increasing pressure was being exerted on the Pakistani government by a number of Middle Eastern states to expel the hundreds of Arab militants then living in the country, particularly in Peshawar. Bin Laden decided to pull his group out of Pakistan, sending a Sudanese member of al-Qaeda to find suitable property to purchase in Sudan so that he and other members of his organization could settle there. By 1992, bin Laden and his men had
sold their properties
in Peshawar and moved their operations to Sudan.

It was in Sudan that al-Qaeda’s plans to attack American targets first matured. The presence of U.S. soldiers in Saudi Arabia continued to anger bin Laden deeply. In 1992, he gathered together his followers to tell them, “We cannot let the American army stay in the Gulf area and take our oil, take our money. We have to fight them.” And in December 1992, following the arrival of American troops in Somalia as part of a humanitarian mission to help starving Somalis, bin Laden became even more adamant, saying, “The Americans have now come to the Horn of Africa, and we have to stop the
head of the snake
.”

Al-Qaeda saw the arrival of those troops—just two years after the United States had based hundreds of thousands of soldiers in Saudi Arabia—as part of a larger American strategy to colonize ever greater chunks of the Muslim world. In late December 1992, an al-Qaeda affiliate bombed two hotels in Yemen housing U.S. soldiers in transit to Somalia. The bombs killed a tourist but no Americans. It seems to have been
the first attack against an American target
by al-Qaeda or one of its affiliates anywhere in the world.

Bin Laden also sent his men from Sudan to Somalia to explore ways that al-Qaeda could kill Americans there. In 1993, one of bin Laden’s military commanders, Mohammed Atef,
traveled to Somalia
to determine how best to attack U.S. forces, later reporting back to bin Laden in Sudan. On October 3 and 4, 1993,
eighteen American soldiers
were killed and a U.S. helicopter was brought down by a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) in an intense firefight in Mogadishu during a botched mission to try to snatch a Somali warlord. At least five hundred Somalis were also killed. Somalis trained by Arab veterans of the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan had been taught that
the most
effective way
to shoot down a helicopter with an RPG was to hit the vulnerable tail rotor.
Within a week
of the Mogadishu battle, the United States announced plans for its pullout.

Given the fog of war, it remains unclear who exactly brought down the American helicopter in Mogadishu. But what is clear is that by 1993, half a decade after its founding, al-Qaeda now conceived its central mission to be attacking American targets. That year al-Qaeda started five years of planning to launch major attacks on U.S. targets in Africa, which resulted in the August 1998 bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Bin Laden took a strong interest in the details of those plots. Ali Mohamed, an Egyptian member of al-Qaeda, was dispatched by bin Laden to the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, in late 1993 to conduct surveillance of the U.S. embassy. Ali Mohamed then traveled to Khartoum, “where my surveillance files and photographs were
reviewed by Osama bin Laden
.” After looking over the pictures of the embassy, bin Laden, who had spent years working in his family’s construction business, pointed out the best place to position a truck bomb.

In 1996 the Sudanese government came under increasing pressure from the governments of the United States and Saudi Arabia to expel bin Laden and his small army of militants. Prince Turki, the head of Saudi intelligence at the time, recalled that the Saudi government had been carefully monitoring bin Laden’s training camps in Sudan, where he was “recruiting persons from different parts of the Islamic world, from Algeria to Egypt, from East Asia to Somalia, to get them trained at these camps.
It was an unacceptable activity
.”

In mid-May 1996, under intense pressure from the Sudanese government, bin Laden left for Afghanistan, an exile—or in Arabic, a
hijra
—that the hyper-religious al-Qaeda leader no doubt interpreted as a distant echo of the
hijra
that the Prophet Mohammed had himself made fourteen centuries earlier to escape the pagans of Mecca and to build up his perfect Islamic society in the nearby town of Medina. Bin Laden would even come to refer to Afghanistan as the
Medina of the new age
.

Bin Laden’s fifteen-year-old son Omar was the only family member to travel in the small jet that flew the al-Qaeda leader from Sudan to Afghanistan (the rest of bin Laden’s family and other members of al-Qaeda would follow months later). Omar recalls that the expulsion from Sudan “
hugely embittered
” his father, who blamed it largely on the American government.

Underlining that bitterness, bin Laden’s first public statement that he was at war with the United States was issued on August 23, 1996, three months
after his expulsion from Sudan. It was titled “
Declaration of war
against the Americans occupying the land of the two holy places [Saudi Arabia],” the text of which was published within a few days in the pan-Arab newspaper
Al-Quds al-Arabi
. In the declaration, bin Laden mentioned that one of his gripes against the United States was the hounding of his group out of Sudan.

Al-Qaeda was now officially at war with the United States, although only a handful of Americans were aware of this yet.

As we have seen, one of the intellectual architects of that war was Sayyid Qutb, a nebbishy Egyptian writer with a Hitler mustache who arrived in the placid town of Greeley, Colorado,
in 1949
to attend college. A priggish intellectual, Qutb found the United States to be racist and sexually promiscuous, an experience that left him with a lifelong contempt for the West. One evening, the puritanical Qutb went to a dance at a local church hall, where the pastor was playing the big-band hit “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” The idea of a house of worship playing a secular love song crystallized Qutb’s sense that Americans were deeply corrupt and interested only in self-gratification.

On his return to Egypt, Qutb joined the Muslim Brotherhood. He was arrested in 1954 for supposedly plotting revolution and was then subjected to the most dreadful tortures. Writing from his prison cell, Qutb argued that Egypt’s secular nationalist government was presiding over a country mired in a state of pre-Islamic barbarity known as
jahiliyyah
and, by implication, that the government should be overthrown. Qutb’s
jail-cell manifesto
,
Milestones,
would become the primer for jihadist movements around the Muslim world. In it he insisted that jihad should be conducted offensively against the enemies of Islam. Qutb wrote, “As to the persons who attempt to defend the concept of Islamic jihad by interpreting it in the narrow sense of the current concept of defensive war … they lack understanding of the nature of Islam and its primary aim.” In other words, fighting preemptive wars against Islam’s enemies is the very essence of the Islamic project.

What was truly revolutionary was Qutb’s insistence that Islam’s enemies included Muslim governments that did not implement true
sharia
law. Qutb wanted secular Middle Eastern governments excommunicated from the Muslim community. That process of declaring other Muslims to be apostates,
takfir
, would become a key al-Qaeda doctrine.

Qutb was executed in 1966, but he would profoundly influence the young Ayman al-Zawahiri, who set up a jihadist cell when he was only fifteen dedicated to the Qutbian theory that Egyptian government officials were apostates
from Islam and therefore deserved death. In Zawahiri’s autobiography he repeatedly cited Qutb, saying that he “was the spark that ignited the Islamic revolution against the enemies of Islam at home and abroad.” And Qutb’s brother, Mohamed, the keeper of his brother’s flame after his death, occasionally gave lectures at King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah in the late 1970s, which bin Laden would attend.

Qutb’s claim that Muslim rulers who presided over countries in what he considered to be the state of pagan ignorance known as
jahiliyyah
were effectively non-Muslims provided the intellectual underpinning for the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981. Sadat had signed Egypt’s cease-fire agreement with Israel two years earlier, thus effectively signing his own death warrant, too. In 1981, Zawahiri was arrested for his alleged role in Sadat’s assassination, then imprisoned and tortured by Egyptian authorities just as Qutb had been, an experience that further radicalized him.

Sprung from jail, Zawahiri moved to Pakistan in 1986, where he eventually met bin Laden. For bin Laden, the slightly older, cerebral Zawahiri presented an intriguing figure, someone far more experienced politically than himself. For Zawahiri, bin Laden also presented an interesting opportunity: someone who was on his way to becoming a genuine war hero in the jihad against the Soviets and whose deep pockets were well-known. They would go on to embark on a marriage of convenience that would have hellish consequences.