CHAPTER 16
When the news had come through of Saddam’s invasion in August 1990, Osama Bin Laden knew exactly how he could help. He got in touch with the comrades who had fought with him in Afghanistan, both Arabs and Afghans, and came up with a plan—they would revive the old Saudi-Afghan alliance. He and his mujahideen companions had defeated the Soviets in the mountains. Now they would chase Saddam and his Iraqis through the streets of Kuwait and back to Baghdad. Muslims would flock from around the world, he was sure, to help push back this un-Islamic aggression.
The triumph of Afghanistan had inspired Osama to see jihad as a process that he could take anywhere, with himself as one of its leaders. Before leaving Afghanistan he had recast his organization, giving it a new name—Al-Qaeda.
“He rang me to explain,” remembers Jamal Khashoggi, the young journalist who had first interviewed Bin Laden in Afghanistan in the 1980s. “He said that Al-Qaeda was an organization to record the names of the mujahideen and all their contact details: a database, which is one of the things that qaeda means in Arabic. So wherever jihad needed fighting, in the Philippines or central Asia or anywhere in the world, you could get in touch with the fighters quickly.”
Osama’s first plan, before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, had been to set up some Afghan-style training camps in the mountains of Yemen, where the craggy terrain provided ideal guerrilla territory. Islamists along the Saudi border were bidding for power against the Communists of the south, offering Osama the chance to advance the Salafi cause in the homeland of his father.
“He had developed this love for revolution and fighting,” remembers Prince Turki Al-Faisal. “Battle was becoming his solution for everything. He saw his mujahideen fighting all over the world, winning victory after victory for Islam. He was not best pleased when I told him he should stay out of Yemen. The Saudi government was not interfering there, I told him. He should not even think of it. When the invasion of Kuwait happened that summer, I think he reckoned he’d give us one last shot.”
Osama had worked out a step-by-step strategy to cross the Saudi border and infiltrate Kuwait, then wage an urban guerrilla campaign, fighting from house to house until the Iraqis were expelled. It was far from implausible, and he decided to present his proposal to a senior prince to whom he and his family felt particularly close, Ahmad bin Abdul Aziz, the vice minister of the interior.
Forty-eight years old in 1990, Ahmad was the youngest of the seven Sudayri brothers. He was one of the first sons of Abdul Aziz to be educated in America, where he studied political science at Redlands University, in California. Within the family he had a reputation for quiet seriousness. In 1980 his elder brother Fahd had chosen him to investigate the grievances of the Shia following the Qateef uprisings of the previous December, and it had been Ahmad’s proposals that started the program of infrastructure building in the east that was later continued by Mohammed bin Fahd. For a dozen years Ahmad had labored as the loyal assistant to his brother Nayef at the Interior Ministry, concentrating on security issues. As deputy governor of Mecca before that, he had grown close to the Bin Laden family, so he seemed the ideal conduit for Osama’s Kuwait liberation plan.
“Bin Laden was greatly concerned about security,” recalls Prince Ahmad. “He said that King Fahd should move out of his palace in Jeddah because he thought that it was too close to the sea—it could easily be attacked. He had brought along his eldest brother, Bakr [head of the Bin Laden company] to show that he was serious and that he had the family backing. He was very keen to show that he was a good Saudi citizen, and he was very proud of this plan he had devised to raise volunteers for the safety of his country.”
Ahmad was not convinced.
“His idea did not seem practical to me. It did not sound organized or professional. Nor did it begin to match the scale of the problem.”
Like Turki Al-Faisal, Ahmad noted Bin Laden’s eagerness for a fight—almost for its own sake.
“He several times used the word jihad. I knew that he had been speaking a lot in mosques. It was clear that he had got used to fighting and was finding it hard to give it up. But jihad means that you go to war, then stop.”
The prince responded with courtesy.
“I thanked him very much. I told him that we were very grateful for the help he was offering of these volunteers, but that we had professionals who were preparing a strategy and that we hoped that the situation would not come to that. I told him that the Bin Laden family had always been loyal friends to our family, and that we looked forward to many more years of that friendship. We would get in touch with him if we thought it necessary.”
Ahmad’s rejection could not have been more polite, nor more summary. According to some sources, Osama attempted to present his proposals to other senior members of the family and met with the same response—Thanks, but no thanks. According to someone who was present at another meeting to which Osama brought a five-page document setting out his strategy, Bin Laden’s face went “black” with anger when his proposal was dismissed.
When the House of Saud turned down Osama’s mujahideen in favor of the godless Americans, they did not just offend his pride. They offended his religious beliefs—and those of many other pious Saudis. “Let there not be two religions in Arabia,” ran the text thundered out in sermons across Arabia following the arrival of the American troops, in contemptuous defiance of the ulema’s government-supportive fatwa.
“To defend ourselves we have invited the help of our real enemies,” complained Dr. Safar Al-Hawali, a young middle-ranking cleric who was not afraid to take on the establishment. “The point is that we need internal change. The first war should be against the infidels inside. Then we will be strong enough to face our external enemy.”
Al-Hawali was the dean of theology at Umm Al-Qura, the Islamic University of Mecca, where he had made his name with his thesis “Al-Ilmaniya” (“Secularism”). This, he argued, was a Western concept insidiously designed to undermine Islam from within—and the arrival of the Americans was proof of it. The Gulf War had been coordinated, as Hawali saw it, first to control and eventually to destroy Islam, and would result in Western military bases being set up around the Gulf. It was a sin, in his opinion, to have allowed “crusader” troops—Christians, Jews, and women—into the land of the two holy mosques.
Abdul Aziz Bin Baz, who had played a leading role in coaxing the ulema to support the government, took issue with Al-Hawali and the other Sahwah (Awakening) preachers. The two holy mosques were on the opposite side of Arabia, he pointed out in press interviews—621 miles distant from the American troops stationed beside Kuwait and the Iraqi border.
“The Americans,” he argued, “have come to protect, not to seize the haramain [holy places]. They have come to repel the aggression and to remove injustice.”
He then embarked on a discussion of the Koran’s Al-Maeda sura, in which God listed the foods forbidden to Muslims: “dead meat, blood, the flesh of swine, that which has been killed by strangling, or by a violent blow, or by a headlong fall, or being gored to death.” The sura concludes by telling Muslims that while these foods are forbidden, they can be eaten by someone who is starving. So today, on the same basis, argued Bin Baz, “the state has had to use some infidel states to stop this brutal enemy.”
It may have pleased some of the blind sheikh’s listeners to hear America’s troops compared to the flesh of swine, but the devotees of the Awakening were not impressed. Bin Baz, they said scornfully, had become “a government sheikh.”
The fertile farming area of Qaseem, northwest of Riyadh, is famous for its dates, and famous also for its Wahhabism. When it comes to holiday jobs, the date farmers select only the most serious young Muslims as fruit pickers. So during the Gulf War harvests of 1990 and 1991, the date groves of Qaseem were centers of particular Islamic fervor, seething with indignation at the Al-Saud’s embrace of the infidels. In Qaseem the Sahwah’s eloquent mouthpiece was Sheikh Salman Al-Awdah, a black-bearded cleric who had been preaching the Awakening quietly in Buraydah before the war. Now he proclaimed it loudly, and his sermons circulated around the peninsula in best-selling tapes.
“This country is different,” he proclaimed. “It is united under the banner of Islam, not because of this person or that person . . .”
“. . . Or because of that family,” was the additional message readily captured by his listeners. The sheikh was proposing a religiously based, non-Saudi identity for Saudi Arabia. In his best-selling tape “Why Do States Disintegrate?” Al-Awdah talked scornfully of the Egyptian pharaohs, who would hand out money to their subjects but were hated all the more for that. As the sheikh described how the pharaohs showed their contempt for their people’s minds, interfering with their religion and restricting their intellectual freedoms, it was not difficult to work out who his real target was.
All Saudi mosques broadcast their Friday sermons loudly to the neighborhood via their minaret loudspeakers, so it became the weekend chore for junior diplomats in Riyadh to go and sit in their cars outside the capital’s most radical pulpits and make recordings of what the imams were declaiming.
Inside the U.S. embassy, David Rundell spent hours listening to the Sahwah tapes.
“Ninety percent of it was ‘Don’t beat your wife and be a good neighbor, ’ ” he recalls. “But the remaining 10 percent was pretty virulent. The only one with a sense of humor was Safar Al-Hawali. He’d paint these unattractive word pictures of an overweight American, with his shirt unbuttoned, a thick gold chain around his neck, walking his dog while holding hands with his wife. ‘Be careful,’ he’d say, ‘or your daughter will end up working in a shoe store.’ ”
Dogs and shoes are unclean to all Muslims—hence the widespread Arab delight when an Iraqi protestor hurled both his shoes at George W. Bush in 2008—while Wahhabis take a dim view of wearing gold, holding hands in public, or unbuttoning your shirt to reveal chest hair.
For the radical young fatwa-issuing preacher Mansour Al-Nogaidan, America’s military “occupation” of his country in August and September 1990 was the first step on his own personal path to rebellion. Less than two months later came the second—the women’s driving demonstration in Riyadh. Al-Nogaidan had no doubt that the two events were connected.
“I got a phone call that day,” he remembers, “from a friend in Riyadh. ‘The women are driving!’ he told me in a panic. ‘Thank God the mutawwa have stopped them.’ ‘Thank God,’ I echoed. But as we found out more, it seemed very clear that Prince Salman was supporting the women.”
Al-Nogaidan was just twenty, opinionated beyond his years and well respected in his Salafi community. But he was beginning to fret at the passivity of his Buraydah brethren.
“We were always very pleased to hear the news from Afghanistan,” he recalls. “We were obviously happy at the success of our Muslim brothers. But we kept ourselves to ourselves. We were not passionately committed to the jihad—nor, for that matter, to the progress of the Sahwah.”
This reticence troubled him. Salman Al-Awdah was preaching a few mosques away from Mansour’s neighborhood in Buraydah, but the Brothers warned Mansour to keep his distance. “ ‘Those Sahwah sheikhs are accusing the government of infidelity,’ they said. ‘Be very careful.’ ”
Ultimately, the Brothers were conventional, loyal-to-the-emir Wahhabis in the Bin Baz mold, and Mansour was coming to reject this blind obedience that lay at the heart of the traditional Wahhabi mission.
“When I listened to the tapes of Al-Awdah, I got the message immediately. It was embedded in every sentence, and it was so very cutting—his criticism of the Al-Saud.”
Mansour was making new young mujahid friends who had fought in Afghanistan and who excited him with their proactive, vigilante-style approach.
“They laughed and were enthusiastic. They were so different from the passivity of the Brothers who were always saying, ‘We must accept the punishment of God.’ The mujahideen had trained themselves to make a difference. They had fought to change things in Afghanistan, and now they were mobilizing to change things at home.”
Mansour started going down to Riyadh to stay with his radical new friends in the neighborhood of Hay Al-Rabwah, where young Salafis bunked together in communal guesthouses, Afghanistan-style. This was where Juhayman had camped when he was rounding up recruits in support of the Mahdi, and now, a dozen years later, the climate again seemed ready for his fevered style of revivalism. Some young jihadis owned copies of the rebel’s famous Letters, which they read to one another and discussed. At night during the Gulf War they sat up on the roofs to watch Saddam’s Scud missiles fly overhead. Those who could afford a car would shuttle around picking up the others for Koran meetings or morning prayers.
“It was very Boy Scoutish and even cultlike,” recalls a jihadi from those days. “We organized sentries and lookouts, the whole communal thing. You felt like it was you against the world. There was no one who mattered outside your own tight little group.”
The neighborhood was so pious that there were no cigarettes in the shops.
“We watched a lot of videos of the jihad—the death and burial of Abdullah Azzam,” recalls Mansour Al-Nogaidan. “I admired these men who had fought in Afghanistan, and I wanted to go there myself. But when I went to get my passport, I was told I was banned from traveling. Why? I asked. ‘If you want to know,’ they told me, ‘you’ll have to go to the Ministry of the Interior.’ ”
By now Mansour had served three spells in jail—sixteen days for criticizing religious graduation ceremonies in 1987, fifty-five days in 1989 for his Youth World Cup protest, and forty-seven days in 1990 for a lecture he had delivered in Buraydah in which he had attacked the irreli giousness of the Saudi education system, and had encouraged pupils to forsake school as he had done. He was building up his credentials as a champion of the Islamist cause, and in the middle of 1991, only months after the Kuwait war had ended, he received an invitation that seemed the crowning accolade. Sheikh Osama was looking for someone with good religious knowledge who could teach in Jeddah. A house and salary went with the job.
Mansour flew down to Jeddah as soon as he could, going to Bin Laden’s famously austere house in Macarona Street. But by the time he got there, Osama was gone.
In a matter of months Osama Bin Laden had moved from being the applauded colleague and partner of the House of Saud to considering himself their dedicated foe. For many years his reflexive loyalty to his family’s patrons had been a quiet joke among the faithful. When King Fahd paid a state visit to Britain in 1987, the Queen had invested the Saudi ruler with the Royal Victorian Chain, whose elaborate insignia contains a large white enameled Maltese Cross, prompting people in Peshawar, when they saw the photographs, to whisper that the Saudi king must have forsaken Islam.
“For God’s sake,” Osama scolded them, “don’t discuss this subject. Concentrate on your mission. I don’t permit anyone to discuss this issue here.”
But eighteen months in the Kingdom had transformed Bin Laden’s attitude—he did not appreciate the double rejection by the Saudi government of his offers of help. He had already ignored Prince Turki’s prohibition and was starting to organize armed Al-Qaeda camps in Yemen.
“He introduced me one evening to some friends who were helping him fight the jihad in Yemen,” recalls Jamal Khashoggi. “He was proud of it. I told him, ‘You can’t do that without the government’s permission.’ He just looked at me and smiled.”
Soon barbed wire appeared along the top of the high wall surrounding Osama’s Macarona Street house.
“He must have feared some sort of retaliation from Yemeni agents,” says Jamal Khashoggi. “The government told him to take the wire down and to stop making speeches. His passport was confiscated.”
The liberal reformer and lawyer Mohammed Saeed Tayeb met Bin Laden in these months.
“It was at a weekly gathering in Mecca,” he recalls. “I saw this man, very tall and beautiful, sitting at the end of the majlis. He was wearing a pistol outside his thobe—which seemed normal in those months of the war with Iraq, though no one else was wearing a pistol. That was the only time in my life that I saw Bin Laden, and I was struck by how very quiet he was, and how polite. If anyone else started talking in the salon, he instantly stopped talking himself.”
Saeed Tayeb was a veteran of constitutional jostlings with the Al-Saud. By 1991 he had already been in and out of jail on three occasions for a total, at that date, of seven years behind bars (he has since racked up more). So when Bin Laden had stopped speaking about the need to battle the corruption and false façade of Communism in Afghanistan, Saeed Tayeb tackled him on the need for a battle closer to home.
“Mr. Bin Laden,” he asked. “Why have you been spending all your time and money fighting in a foreign land? The true corruption and the false façade is here—to our left and to our right. It is above our heads and below our feet.”
As an old-fashioned Arab nationalist (he named his first son Abdul Nasser in honor of the famous Egyptian leader), Saeed Tayeb had always been against the Afghan enterprise—he felt that Bin Laden and his fellow Islamists had been gulled into an essentially American project to defeat the Soviets. But Bin Laden refused to be drawn.
“Afghanistan,” he replied quietly, “has been a place for training our young men in how to fight and to use weapons.”
Osama declined the chance that he was being offered to engage in criticism of the Al-Saud, and he gave no clue as to his feelings. He was under official warning, after all, and his immediate priority at this moment was to regain his confiscated passport.
Using family connections, he managed to retrieve the passport in the summer of 1991, and instantly left the country for Afghanistan. Sources differ on how long he spent there—possibly more than six months—then he flew with his followers and friends to Africa. Hassan Al-Turabi, the ideologue of the recent Islamist coup in the Sudan, had invited Bin Laden to transfer his headquarters to Khartoum, and Osama had decided to take up the invitation. Here was a wonderful chance to locate his fighting “base” in a country where he was supported by a genuine Islamic government. How very different from Saudi Arabia—where, as events turned out, he would never set foot again.