CHAPTER 22
By the spring of 1997 Osama Bin Laden had been living in Afghanistan for nearly a year. He had been working with the Taliban to set up a new generation of multinational jihadi training camps, and the recruits were flowing in—including a young electrical engineer from Jeddah, Khaled Al-Hubayshi.
“Go to Afghanistan,” Al-Hubayshi had been told by all the veterans he consulted. “That is the only place you can learn the real jihad.” The twenty-year-old had already tried the Philippines. In 1996 he had sold his car to finance a trip to the southern island of Mindanao, where he spent several months with Muslim separatists who were training at “Camp Vietnam.”
But the Filipino rebels were too casual, in Khaled’s opinion. They did not practice with live ammunition. Having studied electricity, he wanted to develop his expertise in the field of bombs and explosive circuits—and he found all he hoped for when he made his way the next year to Khost, in southern Afghanistan, near the border with Pakistan. It was May 1997.
Bin Laden had been a hero of Khaled’s since his Afghan exploits were reported in the Saudi press in the late 1980s, which got the boy thinking that he might follow in the great man’s footsteps. While studying at technical college, Khaled had been enraged by videocassettes that showed Muslims suffering at the hands of the Serbian army in Bosnia.
“Women were being raped and children killed just because they were Muslims,” he remembers. “I had that young man’s feeling that I had to do something myself. It was genocide. I could not sleep for the thought. Our religion tells us that Muslims must help each other, and the idea of jihad lifted my feeling of helplessness. When I finally got to camp and started training I slept well for the first time in months.”
Khaled Al-Hubayshi’s Guantánamo interrogation sheet sets out the formidable list of terrorist skills that he acquired from 1997 onward under the patronage of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban: “The detainee attended three courses at the Kaldan Camp; the Basic, the Gunnery and the Tactics. . . . The detainee’s Basic Course consisted of training on the AK-47 Kalashnikov 7.62 assault rifle, the Seminov SKS/Type-56 7.62 mm semiautomatic rifle, the RPD 7.62 light machine gun, the PK 7.62 mm medium machine gun, the Dushka Dshk-38 12.7 mm heavy machine gun, the RPG-7 (antitank rocket propelled grenade), and the Grenov (RPG-18).”
The mind-boggling array of Russian weaponry is a reminder of the very practical ways in which Al-Qaeda’s war on the West was built on the West’s secret war against the Soviets ten years earlier. It also showed how comprehensively the late-twentieth-century jihadists went about their training.
“We woke before sunrise for Fajr [the dawn prayer],” remembers Khaled. “Then we paraded, all in lines—there must have been 150 of us at Kaldan. We did a warm-up, some physical training, before we went off for two hours running in the mountains, carrying our weapons. Every so often we would stop to do press-ups. We got very fit. I discovered that you’re gonna lose weight if you train with Al-Qaeda!”
Back in civilian life today, the comfortably padded Al-Hubayshi grins wryly at the memory.
“Breakfast was eggs, bread, and ful medames [Arab baked beans]. The food in the Al-Qaeda camps was good and healthy. Then through the day we did our classes. There was a lot to learn: map reading, camouflage, urban warfare, weaponry, explosives—how to blow up a building, a tree, a bridge, a person. Each subject had a different instructor. I remember our explosives instructor, in particular. He was an Egyptian with blond hair, Ahmed Abdullah.”
None of the jihadis used their real names, usually adopting nicknames in the style of Bin Laden’s “Abu Abdullah” (“Father of Abdullah”). Khaled had no children, so he called himself “Abu Sulayman” (“Father of Solomon”), using the name of his own father on the assumption that he would one day pass on that name to his firstborn.
“We looked at all newcomers very suspiciously,” he remembers. “We knew that the Saudi government, the Egyptians, and the Yemenis were all sending spies. So new arrivals had to prove themselves.”
There was a hierarchy among the jihadis.
“The Yemenis were at the bottom,” remembers Khaled. “They were so poor, they were sort of stuck. They were probably better off in Afghanistan than they were at home, and they couldn’t travel anywhere in any case. They couldn’t get the visas. The Egyptians couldn’t travel much either, and they certainly couldn’t go home. They were wanted men, without much money. The Saudis were top of the heap because we had money. A Saudi wasn’t desperate for $150. His family could wire him $500 anytime. He had a car in his country. He could go home anytime. So if he was here, he’d come to die. He could do the big job.”
It has been said that Osama Bin Laden deliberately chose Saudis to fill the planes on 9 /11 in order to drive a wedge between the Kingdom and its American supporters, and that makes perfect sense. But there was also a practical element. Until 9 /11 citizens of Saudi Arabia—unlike Egyptians, Yemenis, or most other Arabs—could travel in and out of America with relative ease, since it was assumed that, sooner or later, they would end up back at home.
“You would buy the ticket,” remembers one frequent traveler of those days, “and your travel agent would get the U.S. visa automatically. You didn’t even have to go to the embassy.”
In the 1990s the Saudi government did not allow young Saudi males to travel directly to Afghanistan, but it did not make much effort to stop those who traveled to the camps via Pakistan. Islamic charity workers came and went freely. Using a false passport, Khaled Al-Hubayshi was able to break off his training and resume his job in Jeddah for a spell before going back to Afghanistan to an Al-Qaeda-sponsored camp.
“Each camp,” he recalls, “had its own private sponsors and supporters—a lot of them were funded by charity money. Al-Qaeda camps were for the elite: they had the best training.”
Pakistani support for the camps was indicated by the numbers of young men who were sent off to fight in Kashmir in the campaign against India, while Bin Laden dispatched some of his graduates to stiffen up the Taliban’s military efforts against the Afghan Northern Alliance. It was rent for the hospitality he was receiving from Mullah Omar. But there was not much love lost between the visiting Saudis and local Afghanis.
“We traveled everywhere with a hand grenade,” Khaled remembers. “It was much better protection than a pistol. If there was any trouble with an Afghan, you’d just remove the pin and wave it in front of them. ‘I came here to die,’ you’d say. You could see the fear in their eyes. They would kill you for a hundred dollars—so you had to scare them by acting crazy.”
Khaled was devout, but he had little respect for the religiosity of the Taliban.
“It was just a mask,” he says today. “And, in my opinion, a mask for racism. They believed that their people, the Pashtun, should be rulers of all Afghanistan, so they used religion to control the people. I remember one taxi driver who played music in his cab. The Taliban beat him up and took his car for a week. That was their technique—to scare people, so everybody kept in line. And most of the time it worked pretty well. Nobody fucked up.”
It made for difficulties, however, when the video machine broke down in Khaled’s camp.
“We’d been using the machine to play videos in our lessons about jihad and military techniques. It was not illegal. But when the repairman came, he came creeping in with his tool case, looking everywhere around him like he was on a secret mission.”
Khaled rose through the ranks and graduated to more elite and specialized training programs. By the beginning of 1998 there were some eight thousand non-Afghans stationed in and around the jihadi camps, according to one estimate by Saudi intelligence. It is not known how many of these were trained fighters directly loyal to Bin Laden, but there were enough for him to start putting his lofty dreams into practice—his bombast was no longer so empty. That February he called on Muslims around the world to support his “International Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders.” Signed by militant leaders from Bangladesh, Egypt, Kashmir, and Pakistan, the manifesto reflected the wide-ranging coalition of radicals that had gathered in Afghanistan since the triumph of the Taliban, and it extended Bin Laden’s previous declaration of war on America to civilians.
“We believe that the worst thieves in the world today, and the worst terrorists, are the Americans,” he told PBS’s Frontline. “Nothing could stop you, except perhaps retaliation in kind. We do not have to differentiate between military or civilian. As far as we are concerned, they are all targets.”
The manifesto made clear that Bin Laden’s basic quarrel still derived from the role that America was playing in his own country. The Gulf War had ended in 1991, but U.S. Air Force planes remained stationed in Saudi bases and the military cities, backed up by large and obvious contingents of U.S. personnel. It was difficult to deny the accusation that Osama lodged in his quaintly biblical language: “Since Allah made it flat, created its desert, and surrounded it with seas,” he declared, “the Arabian Peninsula has never been stormed by any forces like the Crusader armies spreading in it like locusts.” He had no need to add that these infidels had come to Arabia—“stealing its resources, dictating to its leaders, [and] humiliating its people”—at the invitation of the House of Saud.
“Finish this!”
Crown Prince Abdullah issued the order with his customary bluntness. Osama Bin Laden’s insulting and defiant February declaration of jihad had been bad enough, but a month or so afterward the Mabahith had picked up some Bin Laden followers transporting missiles that were intended for use inside the Kingdom. They had planned to attack the U.S. consulate in Jeddah.
“We had kept complaining to the Taliban,” remembers Turki Al-Faisal, “but here was solid evidence that Bin Laden was doing fieldwork at home, in Saudi Arabia itself. Enough was enough.”
The Al-Saud could no longer allow Bin Laden to roam free in Afghanistan, and in June 1998, Prince Turki flew off to Kandahar. As his plane banked over the airport, the intelligence boss could clearly make out Tar nak Farms, the huddle of mud-walled buildings, where, his agents reported, Osama had been living for some time—the new headquarters of his campaign to mount global jihad.
The Taliban leaders were waiting, grouped around Mullah Omar—a remarkable sight with their collection of missing eyes, arms, and legs. They were easily the world’s most physically disabled government.
“I can’t just give him to you to put on a plane,” was Omar’s response to Turki’s opening argument, which had been a reproachful reminder of the mullah’s original undertaking that he would prevent Bin Laden from operating or speaking against the Kingdom while he was in Afghanistan. Bin Laden had scarcely stopped talking and giving interviews since his arrival, and that was clearly in breach of what the Taliban had promised.
“We provided him shelter,” responded the Taliban leader, launching into a long lecture on the Pashtun code of hospitality and its strict rules against betraying guests.
The prince was prepared for some such tactic. To back up his own arguments, he had brought from Riyadh the learned Sheikh Abdullah Turki, a scholar of Islam-wide renown and one of the Saudi ulema, who now pointed out to the Taliban how a guest who repeatedly broke his word, as Bin Laden had done in giving so many aggressive and troublemaking interviews to the world’s press, forfeited his claim to his host’s protection. As a former Saudi minister of religious endowments, Sheikh Abdullah also provided a not-so-subtle reminder to the Afghans of the Saudi charities that were financing their revolution so generously—but whose spending ultimately depended on a certain give-and-take.
Mullah Omar seemed unmoved by either consideration. Offering a face-saving compromise, Prince Turki suggested the formation of a joint Saudi-Taliban commission that would negotiate an Islamic mechanism to hand over the jihadist, and he recalls leaving them with a final question: “Are you agreed in principle that you will give us Bin Laden?”
Prince Turki is quite adamant that Mullah Omar’s answer was a firm “Yes”—and that no money or aid changed hands. Observers have suggested that the arrival of several hundred new 4x4 pickup trucks in Kandahar later that summer was a Saudi down payment on the deal, but Prince Turki denies this.
“The trucks,” agrees Ahmed Rashid, “could have come from any of the talibs’ Gulf sponsors.”
At the end of July the Taliban used their new trucks, enhanced with machine guns, to finally capture the northern town of Mazar-e Sharif. This historic center of Shia worship, the “Noble Shrine,” had resisted Taliban attacks the previous summer and was now punished with a series of ghastly reprisals. Ahmed Rashid later estimated that six thousand to eight thousand Shia men, women, and children were slaughtered in a rampage of murder and rape that included slitting people’s throats and bleeding them to death, halal-style, and packing hundreds of victims into shipping containers without water, to be baked alive in the desert sun.
The massacre of Mazar-e Sharif was the Taliban’s most gruesome atrocity yet. But it was overshadowed in the world’s headlines by news from Africa. On August 7, 1998, the eighth anniversary of the arrival of American troops in Saudi Arabia in 1990, two teams of Al-Qaeda suicide bombers launched onslaughts against America’s embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Two hundred twenty-four people died and more than forty-five hundred were injured in attacks that were coordinated to within eight minutes of each other. The double campaign had been organized on the ground by Ahmed Abdullah, Khaled Al-Hubayshi’s blond-haired Egyptian explosives instructor, whose final act was to press the detonator he had wired into the dashboard of the truck that he drove into the U.S. embassy parking lot in Dar es Salaam.
It was the first of Al-Qaeda’s international spectaculars, and a chilling demonstration of the organization’s ability to orchestrate histrionic attacks at a distance of thousands of miles. Osama Bin Laden’s string of threats from Afghan tents and caves no longer seemed so windy or rhetorical.
The atrocity demanded a response from the American government, which had been virtually paralyzed that summer by the revelations of the affair between the president, Bill Clinton, and Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern. When Crown Prince Abdullah went to Washington in 1998 for his first visit as the de facto Saudi ruler, he was dismayed that two-thirds of his meeting with the president was consumed by talk of the scandal. Abdullah could not understand how the leader of what was now the world’s only superpower could be in such straits over an extramarital affair.
“You are the rock,” he said with concern as the two men parted. “The mountain is not swayed by the breeze.”
Many Saudis saw significance in the fact that Ms. Lewinsky was Jewish. The intern’s relationship with the president had involved Clinton unzipping his trousers to receive oral sexual favors from Ms. Lewinsky, and this impressed many as neatly symbolizing Jewish influence on the American centers of power.
On August 20, 1998, Operation Infinite Reach launched thirteen Tomahawk missiles against a suspected chemical weapons factory in Sudan, which turned out to be an innocent pharmaceutical plant, while seventy-five cruise missiles were fired from U.S. warships in the Indian Ocean in the direction of the recently built terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. The error of intelligence concerning the factory, coupled with the total failure of the missiles to reach a single member of the terrorist leadership that was their target, showed how ill-prepared and ill-equipped the United States was for the challenges of the new age of terrorism. It also gave Bin Laden the international stature he had sought for so long.
“By the grace of God, I am alive!” he exulted in a crackling wireless transmission.
As he gave thanks to God for his escape, however, Osama read out the name of one Saudi who was not so fortunate—Saleh Mutabaqani, a young man from a prominent Jeddah family who had been training fighters in one of the camps. Saleh was the solitary Saudi casualty, and Bin Laden proclaimed the young man a martyr.
“I remember meeting Saleh after he first came back from the war against the Soviets,” recalls his cousin Mustapha. “He was a very cool guy, very peaceful. He seemed very soft—and also holy. I told him the bad jokes that I liked to say in those days, and he just did not react. It was like he was from another world. Later we heard that he was the head of a group, that he could make bombs, that he could strip and fix a machine gun in the dark—that he could do things you would never have guessed. Lots of people talk about fighting for God. Saleh really did it. The government took away his passport around that time, but somehow he went back.
“It was a shock to all of us when Bin Laden announced Saleh’s name as a martyr on CNN. The press came asking questions. But the family said it must have been some mistake of spelling—they said they didn’t know who he was.”
In the middle of September 1998, Prince Turki Al-Faisal was once again circling in a plane over Kandahar airport. Three months earlier he had brought a religious sheikh to reinforce his mission. This time he brought along more earthly “muscle”—General Naseem Rama, the head of Pakistani intelligence. If Mullah Omar got awkward, he would have to face down his principal boss and official paymaster.
“We’ve been waiting for you,” said the prince as he picked up his tea in the same Kandahar guesthouse he had visited in June. “You gave us your word that you were going to deliver Osama Bin Laden to us.”
Unfailingly gentle in his speech, Prince Turki Al-Faisal can also direct his gaze with an intensity that is intimidating. He has the hawklike features and piercing eyes of his father, King Faisal—and he evidently disconcerted Mullah Omar, for the Taliban leader gave him no answer. Instead he stood up abruptly and left the room.
It was a long twenty minutes before he returned, and as the intelligence chief waited, sipping tea with his fellow spymaster, he wondered who the Taliban leader was talking to behind the door—the cohorts, he later concluded, of Omar’s shura (advisory council).
“There must have been a translator’s mistake,” said the one-eyed mullah unapologetically as he reentered the room. “I never told you we would hand over Bin Laden.”
Now it was Prince Turki’s turn to be disconcerted.
“But, Mullah Omar,” he expostulated, “you did not say this only one time!”
Only six weeks previously, he pointed out, in the month of July, Omar’s principal adviser, Mullah Wakil Ahmed Mutawwakil, had traveled to Saudi Arabia for the express purpose of working out the Islamic formalities of Bin Laden’s return with the Saudi government and to negotiate the terms of the handover.
It was just two weeks after that, however, on August 7, 1998, that Bin Laden had launched his lethal attacks on America’s East African embassies, and that had clearly changed the situation. By several accounts, Mullah Omar had been furious with his guest for taking such drastic action without even extending the courtesy of informing him. But the Taliban chief was trapped by the enthusiasm with which the community of radical Muslims around the world, and particularly in Kandahar, had greeted the twin attacks. How could the leader of Afghanistan’s Islamic revolution now disavow the man who had become the most admired jihadi on earth?
“Why are you doing this?” he blustered angrily at Prince Turki. “Why are you persecuting and harassing this courageous, valiant Muslim?”
As he played for time, the Taliban leader was effectively admitting his lack of maneuvering space over the surrender of Bin Laden—and that America’s attacks on Afghan targets had cornered him still further. At least twenty Afghans had been killed by the Tomahawk missiles. Omar could not now do a deal with their murderers. Nor could he meekly present Turki, America’s surrogate, with the jihadi hero that America had tried, and failed, to assassinate.
Turki wondered if the Taliban leader was on drugs as Omar sweated and his voice grew ever shriller.
“He looked ill,” remembers the prince. “It was clearly the strain of the moment. He was being called to account—and in front of his patron in the Pakistani ISI. I have thought about that moment a lot, and I am sure it was the American action that had pushed him to go back on his word.”
Bin Laden, exclaimed Omar, was “a man of honor, a man of distinction.” There had always been an element of awe in the simple mullah’s attitude toward the wealthy, world-traveled Saudi warrior—gratitude, almost, that this Islamic champion should have chosen Afghanistan for his base. “Taqwa,” the code name that the Taliban would later assign to Bin Laden, means fear or reverence for God.
“Instead of seeking to persecute him,” proposed the Afghan leader, “you should put your hand in ours and his, and fight against the infidels!” America, he insisted, was the great enemy of the Muslims.
This was getting into dangerous territory, and, sure enough, the mullah stumbled over the boundary. The hospitality that Saudi Arabia gave to U.S. forces, he declared, meant that the Kingdom was, in effect, “an occupied country.” Bin Laden himself could not have put it more offensively—and as he heard it, Prince Turki felt sure that Bin Laden himself must have fed this sort of thinking directly to Omar.
“I am not going to take any more of this,” the prince announced furiously, rising to his feet and making for the door. “But you must remember, Mullah Omar, what you are doing now is going to bring a lot of harm to the Afghan people.”
Within days the Saudi chargé d’affaires was withdrawn from Kabul—it was the end of official Saudi relations with the Taliban. But it was also the end of the last and best practical chance to protect the world from the destructive anger and ambition of Osama Bin Laden.