The Looming Tower (28 page)

T
WO MEN WITH SUCH SIMILAR DREAMS
as bin Laden and Turabi could scarcely be more different. As terse and laconic as bin Laden was, Turabi was fluent and endlessly theoretical, a brilliant windbag. He held soirees in his house, where on any evening heads of state or distinguished clerics would be perched on the green corduroy settees pressed against the walls of Turabi’s salon, drinking tea and listening to his prolonged monologues. He could speak without pause for hours, unprompted except for the presence of an audience, gesturing with both hands and punctuating his witticisms with nervous laughter. He was slight and very dark, which, contrasted with his immaculate white robe and turban and his bright, toothy grin, made him appear all the more vivid.

Nearly every month bin Laden would attend one of these events, more out of courtesy than curiosity. He disagreed with almost everything Turabi said, but he was no match for the professor in his drawing room. The Islam that Turabi was straining to create in such a radical, nondemocratic fashion was, in fact, surprisingly progressive. Turabi advocated healing the ancient breach between the Sunni and the Shia branches of Islam, which was heresy in bin Laden’s eyes. Turabi spoke about integrating “art, music, singing” into religion, offending bin Laden’s Wahhabi sensibilities. Early in his career, Turabi had made his reputation as an Islamic thinker by his advocacy of women’s rights. He thought that Muslim women had suffered a long retreat from the comparative equality they once enjoyed. “The Prophet himself used to visit women, not men, for counseling and advice. They could lead prayer. Even in his battles, they are there! In the election between Othman and Ali to determine who will be the successor to the Prophet, they voted!”

Now that he was finally living in a radical Islamist state, bin Laden would ask practical questions, such as how the Islamists intended to apply Sharia in Sudan and how they proposed to handle the Christians in the south. Often he did not like the answers. Turabi told him that Sharia would be applied gradually and only on Muslims, who would share power with Christians in a federal system. Bin Laden would stay ten to thirty minutes and then slip away. He couldn’t wait to get out of there. “This man is a Machiavelli,” bin Laden confided to his friends. “He doesn’t care what methods he uses.” Although they still needed one another, Turabi and bin Laden soon began to see themselves as rivals.

K
HARTOUM BEGAN AS THE HAPPIEST PERIOD
in bin Laden’s adult life. He opened a small downtown office on Mek Nimr Street in a sagging, single-story building with nine rooms, a low ceiling, and a heavy air conditioner that dripped on the sidewalk. Here he started Wadi El Aqiq, the holding company for his many enterprises, named after a river in Mecca. Across the street was the Ministry of Islamic Affairs, in a building that had been a famous brothel during the British occupation. “Osama just laughed when I told him that,” recalled Hasan Turabi’s son Issam.

Bin Laden and Issam became friends because of their common passion, riding. There are four million horses in Sudan, a country that relies on them for transportation and farm work but loves them for sport. Although Issam was only twenty-five when bin Laden arrived in Sudan, he was already one of the country’s top breeders, and he kept a stable at the Khartoum track. One Friday bin Laden came shopping for a mare, and Issam showed him around the fly-ridden stalls. Issam was very struck by his Saudi visitor. “He was not tall, but he was handsome—his eyes, his nose—he was beautiful.” Bin Laden settled on a stately thoroughbred from another breeder, and Issam arranged to buy the horse without asking a commission. Bin Laden was so used to people taking advantage of his money that this simple courtesy impressed him. He decided to quarter his horses with Issam. He added four more Sudanese thoroughbreds for himself and bought his children about ten local horses, which he bred to some Arabians he had flown in from the Kingdom. Issam was disdainful of what he saw as bin Laden’s romantic attachment to native stock. “Here we are trying to go toward the thoroughbred, away from the Arabian. But he wanted to establish a breeding scheme of his own.”

The Khartoum track is a chaotic bowl of dust. Wild dogs romp across the grassless infield, chasing after the horses. The rickety grandstand is divided between the lower half, where the common people stand, and the upper half, with the superior view, where the social elite and horse owners sit in relative comfort. Osama insisted on watching the races in the lower part, even though Issam was on the track’s board of directors and enjoyed a prime box. In Sudan, the races are wild and the audiences are boisterous, given to dancing and singing. The famous mujahid would plug his ears with his fingers whenever the band played. It ruined the experience for him. When he asked people to stop singing, they told him to get lost.

“It’s not your fault the music is there,” Issam would gently remind bin Laden. “You didn’t rent the band.” Bin Laden was unappeased. “Music,” he declared, “is the flute of the devil.” Eventually he stopped coming to the races altogether.

He bought a three-story red stucco villa in a district of Khartoum called Riyadh. Across the unpaved street, he acquired an unfurnished guesthouse that he used for entertaining. The neighbors claimed he received fifty people a day, starting at five in the afternoon, most of them Arabs wearing calf-length
thobes
and long beards—a parade of fundamentalists. His barefoot young sons would pass among the men, offering sweetened hibiscus tea. Every day he slaughtered a lamb for his expected visitors, but he ate very little himself, preferring to nibble what his guests left on their plates, believing that these abandoned morsels would gain the favor of God.

Sometimes bin Laden would take his sons for picnics on the shore of the Nile, with sandwiches and sodas, and in the packed sand along the river bank he taught them to drive. Bin Laden adopted humble Sudanese attire, a white turban and gallabea, and he carried a typical walking stick with a
V
-shaped handle. “He was becoming Sudanese,” Issam observed. “It seems he wanted to stay here forever.” Bin Laden was finally at peace. He kept members of al-Qaeda busy working in his burgeoning enterprises, since there was little else for them to do. On Fridays after prayers, the two al-Qaeda soccer teams squared off against each other. There was training going on, but at a low level, mainly refresher courses for men who had already been in Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda had become largely an agricultural organization.

I
N
S
UDAN,
bin Laden had the opportunity to imitate his father’s career as a road builder and businessman. He was “the great Islamic investor,” as Turabi called him at a reception he gave soon after bin Laden arrived. Although it was true that he was Sudan’s major tycoon, he was also practically the only one. The Sudanese dinar was sinking and the government was constantly in arrears. The ongoing civil war between the largely Arab, Islamic north and the black Christian south was draining the treasury and scaring away investors, who were already appalled by the confluence of terrorists and the experimental nature of Islamist rule. That bin Laden was willing to put his money into such an economy made him all the more prized. Exaggerated rumors about his wealth were circulating; people said that he was investing $350 million—or more—in the country, which would certainly be its salvation. It was said that he capitalized a bank with $50 million, which was well beyond his financial capacity.

Through al-Hijira, his construction company, bin Laden built several major roads in Sudan, including one to Port Sudan. When the government was unable to pay him, he took large plots of land in trade. One parcel alone was “larger than Bahrain,” he bragged to his brothers. The government also threw in a tannery in Khartoum, where bin Laden’s employees prepared leather for the Italian market. Another bin Laden venture, al-Qadurat, imported trucks and machinery from Russia and Eastern Europe.

But it was farming that captivated his imagination. The government barter had made him perhaps the largest landowner in the country. He had a million acres in the Gash River Delta in northeast Sudan; a large plot in Gedarif, the most fertile province in the eastern section, and another in Damazine, which lies along the western bank of the Blue Nile near the Ethiopian border. Through his agricultural company, al-Thimar al-Mubaraka, bin Laden enjoyed a near monopoly on Sudan’s major farm exports—sesame, white corn, and gum arabic. Other bin Laden subsidiaries produced sorghum, honey, peanuts, chickens, livestock, and watermelons. He declared that Sudan could feed the entire world if it were properly managed, and to prove the point he showed off a prize sunflower he had grown in Gedarif. “It could be in the Guinness Book of World Records,” he told the minister of state.

He was a comparatively generous employer by Sudanese standards, paying $200 per month to most of his workers, with senior managers making from $
1,000
to $
1,500.
He imposed corporate management techniques on his organization, requiring that forms be filled out in triplicate to purchase tires, for instance. Those employees who were actual members of al-Qaeda received a monthly bonus, between $50 and $
120,
depending on the size of the member’s family and his nationality—Saudis got more and Sudanese got less—along with free housing and medical care. There were about five hundred people working for bin Laden in Sudan, but there were never more than a hundred of them who were active members of al-Qaeda.

Bin Laden shied away from the intractable conflict in the southern region of Sudan that was costing the impoverished Sudanese government $1 million a day and would eventually claim more than a million lives. Issam, a veteran, considered the war a jihad, and it seemed wrong to him that the famous Islamic warrior held himself apart from it. Bin Laden explained that he was through with warfare. He said he resolved to quit al-Qaeda altogether and become a farmer.

He made similar statements to many of his friends. He was at a crossroads. Life in Sudan was pleasantly monotonous. In the mornings he walked to his local mosque to pray, followed by a gaggle of acolytes and admirers; he lingered to study with the holy men, often breakfasting with them before going to his office, or to visit one of the various factories that were part of his expanding portfolio, or to hop on a tractor and plow the fields on one of his massive estates. Although he was the CEO of a burgeoning empire, he continued his lifelong habit of fasting on Mondays and Thursdays. Before Friday prayers, he would sometimes speak in the main Khartoum mosque, urging his fellow Muslims to discover the blessings of peace.

There was one galling fact that prevented bin Laden from relaxing into the life of business and of spiritual contemplation that so strongly beckoned: the continued presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia. King Fahd had pledged that the nonbelievers would be gone as soon as the war was over, and yet months after the Iraqi defeat coalition forces were still entrenched in Saudi air bases, monitoring the cease-fire agreement. Bin Laden agonized over what he believed was a permanent occupation of the holy land. Something had to be done.

C
OINCIDENTALLY
, A
MERICAN TROOPS
were stopping over in Yemen on their way to Somalia. The famine had drawn international attention, and the United States sent a modest force to protect the United Nations aid workers against the marauding local clans.

The strategists in al-Qaeda felt encircled, however, and they read this latest development as a direct assault: Americans already controlled the Persian Gulf, and now they were using the excuse of the famine in Somalia to occupy the Horn of Africa. Yemen and Somalia were the gateposts to the Red Sea, which could easily be pinched off. After all the plans al-Qaeda had nurtured to spread an Islamist revolution, it was America that appeared to be waxing in influence across the region, seizing control of the pressure points of the Arab world and pushing into al-Qaeda’s arena. The net was closing. Sudan could be next. This thinking took place at a time when the United States had never heard of al-Qaeda, the mission to Somalia was seen as a thankless act of charity, and Sudan was too inconsequential to worry about.

Every Thursday evening, al-Qaeda members would gather in bin Laden’s Khartoum guesthouse to hear lectures from their leaders. On one of these Thursdays at the end of
1992,
they discussed the threat of the expanded U.S. presence. Al-Qaeda as a terrorist organization was really born in the decisions that bin Laden and his
shura
council would make in this brief period when bin Laden was wavering—the lure of peace being as strong as the battle cry of jihad.

Bin Laden’s religious advisor was his close friend Mamdouh Salim, also known as Abu Hajer al-Iraqi. He was a dashing, hard-headed Kurd who made a striking impression on everyone he met. Solemn and imperious, with a trim goatee and penetrating black eyes, Abu Hajer had been a colonel in Saddam’s army during the war with Iran, specializing in communications, until he deserted and fled to Iran. He and bin Laden were the same age (thirty-four in 1992). They had worked together in the Services Bureau in Peshawar and fought together in Afghanistan, forging such powerful bonds that no one could get between them. Unlike nearly everyone around bin Laden in Sudan, Abu Hajer had never sworn fealty to him; he saw himself as an equal, and bin Laden treated him as such. Because of his piety and learning, Abu Hajer led the prayers; his voice, singing the verses of the Quran in a melancholy Iraqi style, was so lyrical that it made bin Laden weep.