The Looming Tower (16 page)

Turki worked out a strategy that would minimize casualties and damage to the holy shrine. The first priority was intelligence, and for that he called on the bin Ladens. The brothers had maps and electrical layouts and all the technical information about the mosque that would be critical for the assault that Turki was contemplating.

Salem bin Laden, the oldest of the brothers and the head of the clan, arrived on the hood of a car brandishing a machine gun. Salem was a wonderful character, so much the opposite of his pious, remote, and taciturn father. He was known throughout the Kingdom for his bravado and his nutty humor, traits that endeared him to the king, who loved him despite the practical jokes that Salem sometimes played on him. A daredevil pilot, Salem would buzz the ruler’s desert camp and carry on such antics in the sky that the king eventually banned him from flying.
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Once, according to family legend, Salem had a hemorrhoid operation, and he had a videotape of the procedure sent to the king. In this stoic culture, few people—perhaps no one else—exercised such rough liberties.

Oteibi and his followers had control of the mosque’s public address system, and they were using this opportunity to broadcast their message to the world. Despite the government’s efforts to marginalize the insurgents as religious fanatics upset by the spread of video games and football, Oteibi’s brazen demands echoed through the streets of Mecca, electrifying the coffee houses and sheesha bars of the Kingdom.

Oteibi insisted on the adoption of Islamic, non-Western values and the rupture of diplomatic relations with Western countries, thus rolling back the changes that had opened the society to modernity. The Saudi Arabia these men wanted to create would be radically isolated. The royal family would be thrown out of power, and there would be a full accounting of the money that they had taken from the Saudi people. Not only the king but also the ulema who countenanced his rule would be denounced as sinful and unjust. Oil exports to the United States would be cut off, and all foreign civilian and military experts would be expelled from the Arabian Peninsula. These demands foreshadowed those that Osama bin Laden would make fifteen years later.

B
Y
F
RIDAY,
the fourth day of the siege, Saudi forces had regained the upper stories of the Grand Mosque and two of the minarets. Battles flared in the covered corridors surrounding the Kaaba, and the stench of death clouded the air. The bodies of dead rebels had been mutilated—their faces shot off by female insurgents—to keep them from being identified. One of the bodies government troops recovered more or less intact was that of Mohammed Abdullah al-Qahtani, the purported Mahdi, whose jaw was blown away. But even the death of the Mahdi did not put an end to the rebellion.

Using maps of the compound provided by Salem, Turki oversaw a series of reconnaissance probes by Special Security Forces, who slipped in and out among the hundred doors, retrieving bodies of fallen soldiers. But Turki wanted to see for himself. He exchanged his ministerial robes for the khaki uniform of an ordinary soldier; then he and a handful of men, including his brother, Prince Saud, and Salem bin Laden, entered the holy mosque.

The mosque’s lengthy arcades and grand plaza were eerily vacant. Turki and his companions discovered that the main body of rebels had taken refuge in the warren of underground prayer rooms carved into the lava that underlay the great courtyard. The subterranean hive that the rebels now occupied was easily defended. The government had no idea how long the insurgents could hold out on the dates and water they had cached in the storerooms; nor was there any possibility of an assault upon this labyrinth, which offered infinite opportunities for ambush. Thousands of soldiers and an unknown number of hostages would die. For half an hour, the two sons of Faisal and the eldest son of Mohammed bin Laden crept about, sketching the sight lines of the rebels’ positions and their probable lines of defense. The Kingdom itself weighed in the balance of their actions, for if they failed to secure the holy ground, they would lose the trust of the Saudi people. Nothing in the world was more sacred to them and to Muslims everywhere than this mosque. Now it was a surreal battlefield. The early bombardment had done appalling damage. Turki noticed that even the pigeons had fled; from the earliest accounts by pilgrims, pigeons were constantly circumnavigating the holy mosque in the same counterclockwise manner. It seemed to him that the devotion of nature had been interrupted by this bloody human quarrel.

One of the ideas the government entertained was to flood the underground chambers, then electrocute everyone inside with high-voltage cables. Such a plan, however, did not distinguish the hostages from their captors, and besides, Turki realized, “you would need the entire Red Sea to fill it.” Another notion was to put explosive-laden saddles on dogs and detonate them by remote control.

With such hopeless alternatives in front of him, Turki could have called upon the American Central Intelligence Agency, which was training Saudi Army Special Forces in the nearby city of Taif. But he had found that when immediate action was needed, the French were less complicated than the Americans. He consulted the legendary spy Count Claude Alexandre de Marenches, who was then head of the French secret service. A huge, commanding presence, de Marenches recommended gas. Turki agreed, but insisted that it be nonlethal. The idea was to render the insurgents unconscious. A team of three French commandos from the Groupe d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale (GIGN) arrived in Mecca. Because of the prohibition against non-Muslims entering the holy city, they converted to Islam in a brief, formal ceremony. The commandos pumped gas into the underground chambers, but perhaps because the rooms were so bafflingly interconnected, the gas failed and the resistance continued.

With casualties climbing, Saudi forces drilled holes into the courtyard and dropped grenades into the rooms below, indiscriminately killing many hostages but driving the remaining rebels into more open areas where they could be picked off by sharpshooters. More than two weeks after the assault began, the surviving rebels finally surrendered.

Oteibi was among them, looking like a wild man with his matted hair and beard, which jutted defiantly toward the television cameras that recorded the emergence of the rebels stumbling out of the underground chambers. His defiance had faded once the tragedy concluded. Turki went to see him in the hospital, where his wounds were being attended. Oteibi jumped off the bed, grabbed the prince’s hand, and kissed it. “Please ask King Khaled to forgive me!” he cried. “I promise not to do it again!”

Turki was too startled to answer at first. “Forgiveness?” he finally said. “Ask forgiveness of God.”

The government divided Oteibi and sixty-two of his disciples among eight different cities where, on January
9, 1980,
they were beheaded. It was the largest execution in Saudi Arabian history.

The Saudi government admitted that 127 of its men had been killed in the uprising and 461 injured. About a dozen worshippers were killed, along with 117 rebels. Unofficial accounts, however, put the number of dead at more than
4,000.
In any case, the Kingdom was traumatized. The holiest place in the world had been defiled—by Muslims. The authority of the royal family had been openly challenged. After this, nothing could remain the same. Saudi Arabia had come to a place where it would have to change, but in which direction? Toward openness, liberality, tolerance, modernity, and Western ideas of democratic progress, or toward greater authoritarianism and religious repression?

In the early days of the siege, Osama bin Laden and his brother Mahrous were arrested. They were driving home from Al-Barood, the family farm off the road from Jeddah to Mecca. Authorities spotted the dust trail of their car coming out of the desert and thought they were fleeing rebels. At the time of their arrest, the brothers professed to be unaware that the siege had taken place. They stayed in custody for a day or two, but their social prominence protected them. Osama remained secluded in his house for a week. He had been opposed to Oteibi and the extreme Salafists who surrounded him. Five years later, however, he would tell a fellow mujahideen in Peshawar that Oteibi and his followers were true Muslims who were innocent of any crime.

I
N THE MONTH
between the surrender of the rebels and their mass execution, there was a new shock to the Islamic world: on Christmas Eve 1979 Soviet troops entered Afghanistan. “I was enraged and went there at once,” bin Laden later claimed. “I arrived within days, before the end of 1979.” According to Jamal Khalifa, bin Laden had never even heard of the country of Afghanistan until that point and did not actually go there until
1984,
which is when he first became noticed in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Bin Laden explained that the trips he made before then were “a big secret, so that my family wouldn’t find out.” He became a courier, he said, delivering charitable donations from wealthy Saudis. “I used to hand over the money and head straight back, so I wasn’t really familiar with what was going on.”

The most influential figure in bin Laden’s involvement with the Afghan cause was a charismatic Palestinian scholar and mystic named Abdullah Azzam. Born in Jenin in
1941,
Azzam fled to Jordan after Israel captured the West Bank in 1967. He went to al-Azhar University in Cairo, where he gained a doctorate in Islamic jurisprudence in
1973,
two years behind his friend Omar Abdul Rahman, the blind sheikh. He then joined the faculty of the University of Jordan, but his Palestinian activism got him dismissed in 1980. Soon he found a job leading prayers in the school mosque at King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah.

For aroused young Muslims such as Osama bin Laden, Sheikh Abdullah Azzam
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embodied in a modern fashion the warrior priest—a figure that was as well established in Islamic tradition as the samurai in Japan. Azzam combined piety and learning with a serene and bloody intransigence. His slogan was “Jihad and the rifle alone; no negotiations, no conferences, no dialogues.” Around his neck he wore the black-and-white Palestinian kaffiyeh, or scarf—a reminder of his reputation as a freedom fighter. By the time he arrived in Jeddah, he was already well known for his courage and oratory. Tall and sturdy, with an impressive black beard distinctively forked by two bright streaks of white and dark eyes that radiated conviction, he mesmerized audiences with his vision of an Islam that would dominate the world through the force of arms.

Despite his growing body of followers, Azzam was restless in Jeddah and eager to participate in the nascent Afghan resistance. “Jihad for him was like water for a fish,” his wife, Umm Mohammed, said. He soon found a position for teaching the Quran and Arabic language at the International Islamic University in Islamabad, Pakistan, and moved there as soon as he could, in November 1981.

Soon he was spending each weekend in Peshawar, which had become the headquarters of the Afghan resistance against the Soviet occupation. He visited the refugee camps and saw appalling suffering. He met with the leaders of the mujahideen—the “holy warriors”—who made Peshawar their base. “I reached Afghanistan, and I could not believe my eyes,” Azzam would later recall in his countless videos and speeches around the world. “I felt as if I had been reborn.” In his renderings, the war was primeval, metaphysical, fought in a landscape of miracles. The Afghans, in his tableau, represented humanity in a pristine state—a righteous, pious, pre-industrial people—struggling against the brutal, soulless, mechanized force of modernity. In this war, the believers were aided by the invisible hands of angels. Azzam spoke of Russian helicopters being snared by ropes, and he claimed that flocks of birds functioned as an early-warning radar system by taking wing when Soviet jets were still over the horizon. Repeatedly in his stories mujahideen discover bullet holes in their clothes when they themselves are not injured, and the bodies of those who are martyred do not putrefy but remain pure and sweet-smelling.

The struggle of Islam, as Qutb had framed it, and as Azzam deeply believed, was against
jahiliyya
—the world of unbelief that had existed before Islam, which was still corrupting and undermining the faithful with the lures of materialism, secularism, and sexual equality. Here in this primitive land, so stunted by poverty and illiteracy and patriarchal tribal codes, the heroic and seemingly doomed Afghan jihad against the Soviet colossus had the elements of an epochal moment in history. In the skillful hands of Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, the legend of the Afghan holy warriors would be packaged and sold all over the world.

Azzam returned to Jeddah frequently, staying in bin Laden’s guest flat on his trips to the Kingdom. He held recruiting sessions in bin Laden’s apartment, where he magnetized young Saudis with his portraits of the suffering of the refugees and the courage of the Afghan mujahideen. “You
have
to do this!” he told them. “It is your duty! You have to leave everything and go!”

Bin Laden revered Azzam, who provided a model for the man he would become. For his part, Azzam was enchanted by his well-connected young host with his monastic habits. “He lives in his house the life of the poor,” Azzam marveled. “I never did see a single table or chair. Any Jordanian or Egyptian laborer’s house was better than the house of Osama. At the same time, if you asked him for a million riyals for the Mujahideen, he would write you out a check on the spot.” Still, Azzam was a little discomfited when, in the sweltering Saudi heat, bin Laden left the air conditioner off. “If you have it, why don’t you use it?” he asked petulantly. Bin Laden reluctantly accommodated his guest’s request.

Soon Jeddah became a transit station for young men who were answering Sheikh Abdullah’s call to “join the caravan” of the Afghan jihad. Paid agents rounded up prospects, pocketing half of the money—typically, several hundred dollars—that the recruits received when they signed up. Young Muslim pilgrims were particular targets. To get them to the front, agents promised them jobs with aid organizations that never materialized. Fugitives from Algeria and Egypt slipped into the country and were provided with false papers by Saudi intelligence. The Saudi Binladin Group, which maintained an office in Cairo for hiring skilled laborers to work on the two holy mosques, became known as a pipeline for radicals who wanted to fight in Afghanistan. It is probable that Zawahiri connected to the Egyptians coming through Jeddah, and that would have brought him into bin Laden’s realm.