The Looming Tower (22 page)

I
T WAS SNOWING IN FEBRUARY 1988
when an Egyptian filmmaker, Essam Deraz, and his hurriedly assembled crew arrived at the Lion’s Den. Mujahideen wearing bandoliers and carrying Kalashnikovs guarded the entrance to the main cave, under an overhanging cliff. The sight of the video cameras alarmed them. Deraz explained that he had permission from bin Laden to visit the Lion’s Den and film the Arabs, but he and his crew were forced to wait outside for an hour in the bitter cold. Finally a guard said that Deraz could enter, but his team would have to stay outside. Deraz indignantly refused. “Either we all come in or we all stay out,” he said.

In a few minutes, Zawahiri appeared, identifying himself as Dr. Abdul Mu’iz. He apologized for the ungracious welcome and invited the men inside for tea and bread. That night Deraz slept on the floor of the cave, next to Zawahiri, who was there to oversee the building of a hospital in one of the tunnels.

The Egyptians maintained their own camp within the Lion’s Den complex. Bin Laden had put them on his payroll, giving each man
4,500
Saudi riyals (about $
1,200
) per month, to support their families. Among the Egyptians was Amin Ali al-Rashidi, who had taken the jihadi name of Abu Ubaydah al-Banshiri. Abu Ubaydah was a former police officer whose brother had participated in the Sadat assassination. Zawahiri had introduced him to bin Laden, who found him so irreplaceable that he made him the military leader of the Arabs. Abu Ubaydah had already earned a reputation for bravery on the battlefield, fighting first under Sayyaf’s banner and then bin Laden’s. He was credited with the Arabs’ mythic victory over the Soviets several months before. He seemed to Deraz as shy as a child. Second in command under Abu Ubaydah was another former police officer, Mohammed Atef, who was called Abu Hafs. He had dark skin and shining green eyes.

A moody hothead named Mohammed Ibrahim Makkawi had recently arrived expecting to be awarded the military command of the Arab Afghans because of his experience as a colonel in the Egyptian Army’s Special Forces. A small, dark man, Makkawi kept his clean-shaven military look despite the fundamentalist beards all around him. “The other Arabs hated him because he acted like an officer,” said Deraz. He struck some of the Islamists as being dangerously unbalanced. Before he left Cairo in
1987,
Makkawi deliberated whether he should go to the United States and join the American army or to Afghanistan and wage jihad. At the same time, he told an Egyptian lawmaker about a scheme to crash an airliner into the Egyptian parliament. Makkawi may be the same man who took the nom de guerre Saif al-Adl. Only their common determination to overthrow the Egyptian government kept Makkawi and Zawahiri together.

Deraz became bin Laden’s first biographer. He soon came to notice how the Egyptians formed a barrier around the curiously passive Saudi, who rarely ventured an opinion of his own, preferring to solicit the views of others in his company. This humility, this apparent artlessness, on bin Laden’s part elicited a protective response from many, including Deraz. He claims he sought to counter the influence of his countrymen, but whenever he tried to speak confidentially to bin Laden, the Egyptians would surround the Saudi and drag him into another room. They all had designs on him. Deraz thought bin Laden had the potential to be “another Eisenhower” by turning his wartime legend into a peaceful political life. But that wasn’t Zawahiri’s plan.

I
N
M
AY 1988
the Soviets began a staged withdrawal from Afghanistan, signaling the end of the war. Slowly, Peshawar shrank back into its shabby former self, and the Afghan mujahideen leaders started stockpiling weapons, preparing to confront their inevitable new enemies—each other.

Bin Laden and his Egyptian handlers were also surveying the future. Zawahiri and Dr. Fadl constantly fed him position papers outlining the “Islamic” perspective, which reflected their takfiri tendencies. One of bin Laden’s close friends paid a call on him in Peshawar during this period and was told that bin Laden was unavailable because “Dr. Ayman was giving him a class in how to become the leader in an international organization.”

As he groomed bin Laden for the role that he envisioned for him, Zawahiri sought to undermine Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, the single great competitor for bin Laden’s attention. “I don’t know what some people are doing here in Peshawar,” Azzam complained to his son-in-law Abdullah Anas. “They are talking against the mujahideen. They have only one point, to create
fitna
”—discord—“between me and these volunteers.” He singled out Zawahiri as one of the troublemakers.

Azzam recognized that the real danger was
takfir.
The heresy that had infected the Arab Afghan community was spreading and threatened to fatally corrupt the spiritual purity of jihad. The struggle was against nonbelievers, Azzam believed, not within the community of faith, however fractured it might be. He issued a fatwa opposing the training of terrorists with money raised for the Afghan resistance, and he preached that the intentional killing of civilians, especially women and children, was against Islam.

And yet Azzam himself was in favor of forming a “pioneering vanguard” along the lines called for by Sayyid Qutb. “This vanguard constitutes the solid base”—
qaeda
—“for the hoped-for society,” Azzam wrote in April 1988. Upon this base the ideal Islamic society would be built. Afghanistan was just the beginning, Azzam believed. “We shall continue the jihad no matter how long the way, until the last breath and the last beat of the pulse—or until we see the Islamic state established.” The property he surveyed for the future of jihad included the southern Soviet republics, Bosnia, the Philippines, Kashmir, central Asia, Somalia, Eritrea, and Spain—the entire span of the once-great Islamic empire.

First, however, was Palestine. Azzam helped create Hamas, the Palestinian resistance group, which he saw as the natural extension of the jihad in Afghanistan. Based on the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas was meant to provide an Islamic counterweight to Yasser Arafat’s secular Palestine Liberation Organization. Azzam sought to train brigades of Hamas fighters in Afghanistan, who would then return to carry on the battle against Israel.

Azzam’s plans for Palestine, however, ran counter to Zawahiri’s intention of stirring revolution within Islamic countries, especially in Egypt. Azzam fiercely opposed a war of Muslim against Muslim. As the war against the Soviets wound down, this dispute over the future of jihad was defined by these two strong-willed men. The prize they fought over was a rich and impressionable young Saudi who had his own dreams.

W
HAT DID BIN
L
ADEN WANT?
He did not share either Zawahiri’s or Azzam’s priorities. The tragedy of Palestine was a constant theme in his speeches, yet he was reluctant to participate in the intifada against Israel. Like Azzam, bin Laden hated Yasser Arafat because he was a secularist. Nor did he relish the prospect of war against Arab governments. At the time, he envisioned moving the struggle to Kashmir, the Philippines, and particularly the Central Asian republics where he could continue the jihad against the Soviet Union. Notably, the United States was not yet on anyone’s list. The vanguard he would create was primarily to fight against communism.

One fateful day in Peshawar, August
11, 1988,
Sheikh Abdullah Azzam called a meeting to discuss the future of jihad. Bin Laden, Abu Hafs, Abu Ubaydah, Abu Hajer, Dr. Fadl, and Wa’el Julaidan were present. These men were bound by uncommon experiences but profoundly divided by their goals and philosophies. One of Azzam’s objectives was to make sure that, in the event of an Afghan civil war, the Arabs were not involved. His former stance of scattering the Arabs among the various commanders could prove disastrous if the Afghans began fighting each other. He had come to agree with bin Laden about the need to establish a separate Arab group, although they differed on the direction it should take. The takfiris—Hafs, Ubaydah, and Fadl—were mainly interested in taking over Egypt, but they wanted to have a say in the latest venture. Abu Hajer, the Iraqi Kurd, was always suspicious of the Egyptians and inclined to oppose them on principle, but he was also the most militant among them, and it was difficult to know which side he would support. Although Azzam chaired the meeting, the comments were directed at bin Laden, because everyone understood that the fate of jihad was in his hands, not theirs.

According to Abu Rida’s sketchy handwritten notes of the meeting, the men began with three general talking points:

a. Did you take the opinion of Sheikh Abdullah
knowing that the Sheikh’s military gang has ended.

b. This future project is in the interest of the Egyptian brothers.

c. The next stage is our foreign work
disagreement is present
weapons are plenty.

The men observed that it had been more than a year since the construction of the Lion’s Den, but it was little more than a training camp. Arabs were still excluded from the real fighting. Educating the youth is important, the men admitted, but it was time to take the next step. “We should focus on the original idea we came here for,” Abu Rida noted in his pinched handwriting. “All this is to start a new project from scratch.”

In response, bin Laden, who was now being called the Sheikh in deference to his increased stature among the Arabs, reflected on his experience in Afghanistan so far: “I am only one person. We have started neither an organization nor an Islamic group. It was a space of a year and a half—a period of education, of building trust, of testing the brothers who came, and a period of proving ourselves to the Islamic world. Although I began all these matters in the darkest of circumstances and in such a brief time, we still made huge gains.” He gave no credit to Azzam, the real progenitor of the Arab Afghans; it was bin Laden’s saga now. One can hear for the first time the epic tone that began to characterize his speech—the sound of a man in the grasp of destiny.

“As for our Egyptian brothers,” bin Laden continued, mentioning what was obviously a contentious subject with many of his followers, “their standing with us in the worst of times cannot be ignored.”

One of the men then said that although the main goals of the Arabs had not yet been achieved, “we worked with what we had,” but “we lost a lot of time.”

“We have progressed well,” bin Laden responded, perhaps defensively. He pointed to the “trained, obedient and faithful youth” who could readily be put to use.

Although the notes don’t reflect it, a vote was taken to form a new organization aimed at keeping jihad alive after the Soviets were gone. It is difficult to imagine these men agreeing on anything, but only Abu Hajer voted against the new group. Abu Rida summarized the meeting by saying that a plan must be established within a suitable time frame and qualified people must be found to put the plan into effect. “Initial estimate, within 6 months of al-Qaeda, 314 brothers will be trained and ready.” For most of the men in the meeting, this was the first time that the name al-Qaeda had arisen. The members of the new group would be drawn from the most promising recruits among the Arab Afghans, but it was still unclear what the organization would do or where it would go after the jihad. Perhaps bin Laden himself didn’t know.