The Looming Tower (29 page)

Besides being bin Laden’s friend, Abu Hajer was his imam. There were remarkably few among the members of al-Qaeda who had any extensive religious training. Despite their zealotry, they were essentially theological amateurs. Abu Hajer had the greatest spiritual authority, by virtue of having memorized the Quran, but he was an electrical engineer, not a cleric. Nonetheless, bin Laden made him head of al-Qaeda’s fatwa committee—a fateful choice. It was on Abu Hajer’s authority that al-Qaeda turned from being the anti-communist Islamic army that bin Laden originally envisioned into a terrorist organization bent on attacking the United States, the last remaining superpower and the force that bin Laden and Abu Hajer believed represented the greatest threat to Islam.

Why did these men turn against America, a highly religious country that so recently had been their ally in Afghanistan? In large part, it was because they saw America as the locus of Christian power. Once, the piety of the Muslim mujahideen and the Christian leaders of the U.S. government had served as a bond between them. Indeed, mujahideen leaders had been considerably romanticized in the American press and had made tours through American churches, where they were lauded for their spiritual courage in the common fight against Marxism and godlessness. But Christianity—especially the evangelizing American variety—and Islam were obviously competitive faiths. Viewed through the eyes of men who were spiritually anchored in the seventh century, Christianity was not just a rival, it was the archenemy. To them, the Crusades were a continual historical process that would never be resolved until the final victory of Islam. They bitterly perceived the contradiction embodied by Islam’s long, steady retreat from the gates of Vienna, where on September 11—that now resonant date—in
1683,
the king of Poland began the battle that turned back the farthest advance of Muslim armies. For the next three hundred years, Islam would be overshadowed by the growth of Western Christian societies. Yet bin Laden and his Arab Afghans believed that, in Afghanistan, they had turned the tide and that Islam was again on the march.

Now they faced the greatest military, material, and cultural power any civilization had ever produced. “Jihad against America?” some of the al-Qaeda members asked in dismay. “America knows everything about us. It knows even the label of our underwear.” They saw how weak and splintered their own governments were—empowered only by the force of America’s need to maintain the status quo. The oceans, the skies, even the heavens were patrolled by the Americans. America was not distant, it was everywhere.

Al-Qaeda economists pointed to “our oil” that fueled America’s rampant expansion, feeling as if something had been stolen from them—not the oil, exactly, although bin Laden felt it was under-priced—but the cultural regeneration that should have come with its sale. In the woefully unproductive societies they lived in, fortunes melted away like snow in the desert. What remained was a generalized feeling of betrayal.

Of course, oil had brought wealth to some Arabs, but in the process of becoming rich hadn’t they only become more Western? Consumerism, vice, and individuality, which the radical Islamists saw as the hallmarks of modern American culture, threatened to destroy Islam—even the idea of Islam—by blending it into a globalized, corporate, interdependent, secular commercial world that was part of what these men meant when they said “America.” But by defining modernity, progress, trade, consumption, and even pleasure as Western assaults on Islam, al-Qaeda thinkers left little on the table for themselves.

If America owned the future, the Islamic fundamentalists laid claim to the past. They were not rejecting technology or science; indeed, many of the leaders of al-Qaeda, such as Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Hajer, were men of science themselves. But they were ambivalent about the way in which technology weakened the spirit. This was reflected in bin Laden’s interest in earth-moving machinery and genetic engineering of plants, on the one hand, and his rejection of chilled water on the other. By returning the rule of Sharia, radical Islam could draw the line against the encroaching West. Even the values that America advertised as being universally desirable—democracy, transparency, the rule of law, human rights, the separation of religion from governance—were discredited in the eyes of the jihadis because they were Western and therefore modern. Al-Qaeda’s duty was to awaken the Islamic nation to the threat posed by the secular, modernizing West. In order to do that, bin Laden told his men, al-Qaeda would drag the United States into a war with Islam—“a large-scale front which it cannot control.”

I
NDIGENOUS
S
ALAFIST MOVEMENTS
were arising spontaneously across the Arab world and parts of Africa and Asia. These movements were largely nationalist, but they needed a place to organize. They found safe harbor in Khartoum, and naturally they mingled and learned from one another.

Among these groups were the two main Egyptian organizations, Zawahiri’s al-Jihad and Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman’s Islamic Group, as well as nearly every other violent radical group in the Middle East. The Palestinian group Hamas aimed to destroy Israel and replace it with a Sunni Islamist state; it was known for murdering Israeli citizens, and torturing and killing Palestinians who it believed had been collaborating with Israel. Another Palestinian group, the Abu Nidal Organization, was even more violent and rejectionist, having killed more than nine hundred people in twenty different countries, aiming mainly at Jews and moderate Arabs. Its best-known operations included the machine-gunning of a synagogue in Vienna, the grenade attack on a Parisian restaurant, the bombing of a British Airways office in Madrid, the hijacking of an Egypt Air flight to Malta, and bloody attacks on the airports of Rome and Vienna. Hezbollah, which aimed to set up a revolutionary Shia state in Lebanon, had murdered more Americans than any other terrorist organization at the time. Sponsored by Iran, Hezbollah specialized in kidnapping and hijacking, although it was also responsible for a series of bombings in Paris. The most wanted terrorist in the world, Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, known as Carlos the Jackal, also took up residence in Khartoum, posing as a French arms dealer. A Marxist and a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Carlos had kidnapped eleven members of the oil-producers’ cartel, OPEC, in Vienna in 1975 and flown them to Algiers for ransom. Havinig lost faith in communism, he now believed that radical Islam was the only force sufficiently ruthless to destroy America’s cultural and economic dominion. Wanted all over the world, Carlos could easily be found in the mornings drinking coffee and eating croissants at Khartoum’s Meridien Hotel.

Although bin Laden distrusted Turabi—hated him, even—he experimented with one of Turabi’s most progressive and controversial ideas: to make common cause with Shiites. He had Abu Hajer advise the members of al-Qaeda that there was only one enemy now, the West, and the two main sects of Islam needed to come together to destroy it. Bin Laden invited Shiite representatives to speak to al-Qaeda, and he sent some of his top people to Lebanon to train with the Iranian-backed group Hezbollah. Imad Mugniyah, the head of Hezbollah’s security service, came to meet bin Laden and agreed to train members of al-Qaeda in exchange for weapons. Mugniyah had planned the 1983 suicide car bombings of the U.S. Embassy and the U.S. Marine Corps and French paratrooper barracks in Beirut, which killed more than three hundred Americans and fifty-eight French soldiers and had led to the prompt withdrawal of American peacekeeping forces from Lebanon. That precedent had made a profound impression on bin Laden, who saw that suicide bombers could be devastatingly effective and that, for all its might, America had no appetite for conflict.
^*

On December
29, 1992,
a bomb exploded in the Mövenpick Hotel in Aden, Yemen, and another blew up prematurely in the parking lot of a nearby luxury hotel, the Goldmohur. The bombers had targeted American troops who were on their way to Somalia to participate in Operation Restore Hope, the international famine relief effort. In fact, the soldiers were staying in a different hotel altogether. Bin Laden would later claim credit for this blundered attack, which was barely noticed in the United States, since no Americans died. The troops went on to Somalia as scheduled, but the triumphant leaders of al-Qaeda told themselves that they had frightened the Americans away and scored an easy victory.

And yet it had come at a price. Two people died, an Australian tourist and a Yemeni hotel worker, and seven others, mostly Yemenis, were severely injured. Behind the delirious, self-congratulatory chatter in Sudan, moral questions posed themselves, and members of al-Qaeda began to wonder exactly what kind of organization they were becoming.

One Thursday evening, Abu Hajer addressed the ethics of killing innocent people. He spoke to the men about Ibn Tamiyyah, a thirteenth-century scholar who is one of the primary references for Wahhabi philosophy. In his day, Ibn Tamiyyah confronted the problem of the Mongols, who savaged Baghdad but then converted to Islam. Was it proper to take revenge against fellow Muslims? Ibn Tamiyyah argued that just because the Mongols had made the profession of faith, they were still not true believers, and therefore they could be killed. Moreover, as Abu Hajer explained to the thirty or forty al-Qaeda members who were sitting on the carpet in bin Laden’s salon, propping their elbows on the bolsters and sipping mango juice, Ibn Tamiyyah had issued a historic fatwa: Anyone who aided the Mongols, who bought goods from them or sold to them or was merely standing near them, might be killed as well. If he is a good Muslim, he will go to Paradise; if he is bad, he will go to hell, and good riddance. Thus the dead tourist and the hotel worker would find their proper reward.

A new vision of al-Qaeda was born. Abu Hajer’s two fatwas, the first authorizing the attacks on American troops and the second, the murder of innocents, turned al-Qaeda into a global terrorist organization. Al-Qaeda would concentrate not on fighting armies but on killing civilians. The former conception of al-Qaeda as a mobile army of mujahideen that would defend Muslim lands wherever they were threatened was now cast aside in favor of a policy of permanent subversion of the West. The Soviet Union was dead and communism no longer menaced the margins of the Islamic world. America was the only power capable of blocking the restoration of the ancient Islamic caliphate, and it would have to be confronted and defeated.

9

The Silicon Valley

I
N THE EARLY MORNING,
when the sun hit the towers of the World Trade Center, the twin shadows stretched across the entire island of Manhattan. The object of the buildings was to be noticed. They were the two tallest towers in the world when they were finished in 1972 and
1973,
a record that didn’t last long, since architectural egos are always straining for the sky. Vanity was their most obvious quality; otherwise, the buildings were bland and impractical. Tenants felt isolated; just descending to earth and going out to lunch meant a time-consuming drop through several elevators and a brisk walk across the concourse to what was, finally, the welcome smell and clatter of the city. The “tube” construction that held up these stupendous stilts required columns spaced only twenty-two inches apart, which gave the impression, inside the offices, of being in a cage. But the vistas were glorious: the endless snake of lights on the New Jersey Turnpike; the bustling harbor with the diminutive Statue of Liberty; tankers and cruise ships slicing through the bending horizon of the Atlantic; the gray shores of Long Island; the trees beginning to turn in Connecticut; and recumbent Manhattan stretched out like a queen on her great bed between the rivers. Such momentous constructions are bound to intrude on the subconscious, as they are meant to do—“those awesome symbolic towers that speak of liberty, human rights and humanity”—as bin Laden labeled them.

The most impressive view of the Trade Center was just across the Hudson River in Jersey City; there, in a neighborhood known as Little Egypt, followers of Omar Abdul Rahman, the blind sheikh, conspired to bring the towers down. Abdul Rahman was seeking asylum in the United States, despite being listed as a terrorist on the State Department watch list. As he had done in Egypt, he issued a fatwa in America that permitted his followers to rob banks and kill Jews. He traveled widely in the United States and Canada, arousing thousands of young immigrant Muslims with his sermons, often directed against Americans, who he said are “descendants of apes and pigs who have been feeding from the dining tables of the Zionists, Communists, and colonialists.” He called on Muslims to assail the West, “cut the transportation of their countries, tear it apart, destroy their economy, burn their companies, eliminate their interests, sink their ships, shoot down their planes, kill them on the sea, air, or land.”

And indeed his followers were laboring to bring about this apocalypse. They hoped to paralyze New York by assassinating several political figures and destroying many of its most important landmarks—the George Washington Bridge, the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, Federal Plaza, and the United Nations—in simultaneous bombings. They were reacting to American support for the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, whom they intended to kill when he came to New York. The FBI later learned that Osama bin Laden was financially backing the blind sheikh’s efforts.

Few Americans, even in the intelligence community, had any idea of the network of radical Islamists that had grown up inside the country. The blind sheikh may as well have been speaking in Martian as Arabic, since there were so few Middle East language specialists available to the FBI, much less to the local police. Even if his threats had been heard and understood, the perception of most Americans was dimmed by their general insulation from the world’s problems and clouded by the comfortable feeling that no one who lived in America would turn against it.