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YOUNG MEN FROM MANY COUNTRIES came to the dusty and obscure Soba Farm, ten kilometers south of Khartoum. Bin Laden would greet them, and then al-Qaeda trainees would begin their courses in terrorism. Their motivations varied, but they had in common a belief that Islam—pure and primitive, unmitigated by modernity and uncompromised by politics—would cure the wounds that socialism or Arab nationalism had failed to heal. They were angry but powerless in their own countries. They did not see themselves as terrorists but as revolutionaries who, like all such men throughout history, had been pushed into action by the simple human need for justice. Some had experienced brutal repression; some were simply drawn to bloody chaos. From the beginning of al-Qaeda, there were reformers and there were nihilists. The dynamic between them was irreconcilable and self-destructive, but events were moving so quickly that it was almost impossible to tell the philosophers from the sociopaths. They were glued together by the charismatic personality of Osama bin Laden, which contained both strands, idealism and nihilism, in a potent mix.
Given the diversity of the trainees and their causes, bin Laden’s main task was to direct them toward a common enemy. He had developed a fixed idea about America, which he explained to each new class of al-Qaeda recruits. America appeared so mighty, he told them, but it was actually weak and cowardly. Look at Vietnam, look at Lebanon. Whenever soldiers start coming home in body bags, Americans panic and retreat. Such a country needs only to be confronted with two or three sharp blows, then it will flee in panic, as it always has. For all its wealth and resources, America lacks conviction. It cannot stand against warriors of faith who do not fear death. The warships in the Gulf will retreat to the oceans, the bombers will disappear from the Arabian bases, the troops in the Horn of Africa will race back to their homeland.
The author of these sentiments had never been to America, but he liked to have people around him—such as Abu Rida al-Suri, Wa’el Julaidan, Ali Mohammed—who had lived there. They reinforced the bloated and degenerate America of his imagination. Bin Laden could scarcely wait to drive a spear into the heart of the last superpower. He saw his first opportunity in Somalia.
In the triumphant months following the defeat of Saddam Hussein, Somalia arose as the initial test of America’s new world order. The UN was overseeing the international effort to end the Somali famine, which had already taken 350,000 lives. As in the Gulf War, there was an international coalition crowded under the UN umbrella and backed by American power. This time, however, there was no large Iraqi army to face, no Republican Guard, no armored divisions, only disorganized mobs with machine guns and RPGs. But the threat they posed was convincingly demonstrated by an ambush that killed twenty-four Pakistani soldiers.
Bin Laden claimed that he sent 250 men to Somalia to fight against U.S. troops. According to Sudanese intelligence, the actual number of al-Qaeda fighters was only a handful. The al-Qaeda guerrillas provided training and tried to fit into the anarchic clan war that was raging within the tableau of starvation that the hostilities had caused. Little the al-Qaeda men did impressed their hosts; for instance, the Arabs built a car bomb to attack the UN, but the bomb failed. “The Somalis treated us in a bad way,” one of the Arabs complained. “We tried to convince them that we were messengers for people behind us, but they were not convinced. Due to the bad leadership situation there, we decided to withdraw.”
One night in Mogadishu a couple of al-Qaeda fighters saw two U.S. helicopters get shot down. The return fire struck the house next to where the men were hunkered down. Terrified that the Americans would capture them, they left Somalia the next day. The downing of those two American helicopters in October 1993, however, became the turning point in the war. Enraged Somali tribesmen triumphantly dragged the bodies of the dead crewmen through the streets of Mogadishu, a sight that prompted President Clinton to quickly withdraw all American soldiers from the country. Bin Laden’s analysis of the American character had been proven correct.
Even though his own men had run away, bin Laden attributed to al-Qaeda the downing of the helicopters in Somalia and the desecration of the bodies of U.S. servicemen. His influence magnified because of insurgent successes—as in Afghanistan and Somalia—that he really had little to do with. He simply appropriated such victories as his own. “Based on the reports we received from our brothers who participated in the jihad in Somalia,” bin Laden boasted on al-Jazeera, “we learned that they saw the weakness, frailty, and cowardice of U.S. troops. Only eighteen U.S. troops were killed. Nonetheless, they fled in the heart of darkness, frustrated after they had caused great commotion about the New World Order.”
BIN LADEN LURED various nationalist groups under his umbrella by offering weapons and training. He had instructors with years of combat experience. Zawahiri’s double agent, Ali Mohammed, taught a course on surveillance, using the techniques he had picked up from the U.S. Special Forces (bin Laden himself took Mohammed’s first course as a student). The weapons came from the storehouses of leftover mujahideen arms in Tora Bora, which bin Laden was able to smuggle into Sudan. Bin Laden also provided seed money for revolution. It must have been gratifying to see how much he could accomplish with so little.
In Algeria in 1992, a military coup prevented the election that an Islamist party, the Front Islamique du Salut (FIS) was expected to win. The following year, bin Laden sent Qari el-Said, an Algerian who was on the shura council of al-Qaeda, to meet with some of the rebel leaders who had taken refuge in the mountains. At that time, the Islamists were trying to pressure the unpopular military government to negotiate with them. The al-Qaeda emissary brought forty thousand dollars of bin Laden’s money. He warned the Islamist leaders that they were making jihad merely for politics, not for God, and that was a sin. There was no room for compromise with an impious government, he told them. Total war was the only solution. “This simple argument destroyed us,” recalled Abdullah Anas, who was part of the resistance. Those, like Anas, who favored dialogue with the government were pushed aside by other Arab Afghans in their midst who had been indoctrinated by takfir philosophy.
The young, poor, and largely urban guerrillas drawn to the Algerian revolt coalesced under the banner of the Groupe Islamique Armé (GIA). For the next five years they drenched the country in blood. The progression followed a predictable takfiri path. The Islamists began by killing non-Muslims, concentrating on priests and nuns, diplomats, intellectuals, feminists, doctors, and businessmen. According to the logic of GIA, democracy and Islam were incompatible; therefore, anyone who had a voting card was against Islam and deserved to be killed. The warrant was extended to include anyone who worked in establishments allied with the government, such as public schools. In two months of 1994 alone, thirty teachers and principals were killed and 538 schools were torched. The GIA terrorists were not only killing teachers and democrats, however. The inhabitants of entire villages were slain in midnight massacres. These atrocities were celebrated in GIA’s weekly newspaper, Al-Ansar, published in London, which featured headlines such as “Thank God, We Have Cut 200 Throats Today!” and “Our Brother Beheaded His Father for the Sake of Allah.” The religious madness culminated in a declaration that condemned the entire population of Algeria. A GIA communiqué stated the equation starkly: “There is no neutrality in the war we are waging. With the exception of those who are with us, all others are apostates and deserve to die.” This formulation was appealingly available to those who saw the conflict in apocalyptic terms.
Even bin Laden recoiled—if not from the violence itself, then from the international revulsion directed at the Islamist project. He sought to create a “better image of the jihad.” When some of the leaders of GIA came to Khartoum to beg for more funds, they had the temerity to criticize him for being “too flexible” with democrats, which made him appear “weak.” Bin Laden was furious and withdrew his support entirely. But his forty thousand dollars had already helped to create a catastrophe. More than a hundred thousand people would die in the Algerian civil war.
AT THE END OF 1993, a rumor raced through Khartoum that a Sudanese general had gotten his hands on some black market uranium. Bin Laden was already interested in acquiring more powerful weapons to match his enlarged vision of al-Qaeda as an international terrorist organization. He was working with the Sudanese government to develop chemical agents that could be used against the Christian rebels in the south and smuggling weapons from Afghanistan on Sudan Airways cargo planes. He bought an American military jet, a T-39, specifically to transport more Stingers. So, naturally, when word of the uranium reached him, he was excited. He sent Jamal al-Fadl to negotiate the price.
By his own account Fadl was the third person to pledge allegiance to al-Qaeda, giving him a special claim on bin Laden’s affections. He was a wiry and nimble athlete who played center on bin Laden’s soccer team. Fadl was always smiling, and he had an infectious horse laugh that caught people by surprise. Like many of al-Qaeda’s inner circle, he had come to jihad from America, having worked in the Services Bureau office on Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue. Because Fadl was Sudanese and knew the local real estate market, bin Laden had entrusted him with the money to buy the property for al-Qaeda’s farms and houses before the organization relocated to Khartoum.
The general wanted $1.5 million for the uranium plus a commission. He produced a cylinder, two and a half feet long and about six inches in diameter, and some documents showing that the canister had come from South Africa. Bin Laden was satisfied by this information and paid Fadl ten thousand dollars for his part of the exchange. As it turned out, the canister was filled with a substance called red mercury—also known as cinnabar—that physically resembles uranium oxide although chemically it is quite different. Red mercury has been used in nuclear scams for more than twenty-five years. Despite this expensive lesson, bin Laden continued his search for enriched uranium or Russian nuclear warheads that were said to be available in the ruins of the Soviet Union.
At this point, in the early nineties, bin Laden was still refining the concept of al-Qaeda. It was only one of his many enterprises, but it offered him a potentially extraordinary base of power. His actions, such as his foray into Somalia, were small and speculative; but with sufficiently powerful tools—nuclear or chemical weapons, for example—al-Qaeda could change the course of human events.
BY 1994 BIN LADEN’S LIFE had reached a pinnacle. His first two years in Sudan had been full of pleasure and good fortune. His wives and families were all together in his large villa; his business interests were expanding; al-Qaeda was gaining energy and momentum—but also raising alarms. Although Western intelligence agencies were still largely unaware of bin Laden, or simply failed to appreciate the scale of his enterprise, the Saudis and the Egyptians had taken notice of the activities in Sudan. Al-Qaeda proved difficult to penetrate, however. Loyalty, kinship, and fanaticism were formidable barriers against curious outsiders.
On Fridays, bin Laden normally went to pray in the Ansar al-Sunnah Mosque, across the Nile from Khartoum in the suburb of Omdurman. It was a Wahhabi mosque, frequented by Saudis. On February 4, a small group of takfiris, armed with Kalashnikovs and headed by a Libyan named Mohammed Abdullah al-Khilaifi, brazenly broke into two police stations, killing two policemen and seizing weapons and ammunition. Khilaifi and two companions then went to the mosque just as the evening prayers concluded. They fired indiscriminately into the crowd, killing sixteen people at once and wounding about twenty others. The killers hid out behind the airport. The next day, driving around Khartoum seeking other targets, they shot at policemen on the streets and at some of bin Laden’s employees in the Wadi El Aqiq office downtown. They were wild and undisciplined, but it seemed clear that they were gunning for bin Laden.
At five in the afternoon, when he normally opened his salon to visitors, bin Laden was having a dispute with his eldest son, Abdullah. Since childhood, Abdullah had suffered from asthma, and the experience in Peshawar and Khartoum had been difficult for him. He was sixteen years old, and he longed to be with his friends and his cousins in Jeddah, just across the slender ribbon of the Red Sea. Abdullah was, after all, a member of a very wealthy clan, and in Jeddah he could enjoy the family beach resort, the yachts, the parties, the cars, and all the luxuries that his father abhorred. He also worried that his father’s home tutorials had left him far behind his peers—in fact, the bin Laden children of his first wife could scarcely read. Osama believed that his family was already much too comfortable in Sudan. He wanted to make their lives more austere, not less.
As the father and son were talking in bin Laden’s house, his guests began arriving at his office across the street. “At that moment, I heard the sound of a shotgun coming from the direction of the guesthouse,” bin Laden recounted. “Then several shots were fired at the house.” He took his pistol out of the pocket of his gallabea and handed another weapon to Abdullah.
The killers had driven into the street between bin Laden’s two houses and immediately opened fire. Khilaifi and his two companions had expected bin Laden to be entertaining at his office. “They had targeted the spot where I used to sit,” bin Laden said. He and Abdullah, along with Sudanese security men who were patrolling the area, shot at the attackers. Three of bin Laden’s guests were hit and several of the guards. Khilaifi was wounded and both of his companions killed.
Bin Laden obliquely blamed “regimes in our Arabic region” for the assaults. When his old friend Jamal Khashoggi asked him what he meant by that, bin Laden pointed to Egyptian intelligence. The CIA believed that the Saudis were behind the attempt. Turki’s chief of intelligence, Saeed Badeeb, said, “We never tried to assassinate him. We only wanted to cool him down.”
This near murder offered Zawahiri a superb opportunity to expand his influence with bin Laden. Zawahiri called in his own man, Ali Mohammed, to investigate the assassins. Mohammed learned that Khilaifi was a Libyan who had trained in Lebanon and then traveled to Peshawar in 1988. There he joined the mujahideen and met bin Laden. But he had also come under the influence of the takfiris. Khilaifi was a sociopath who used this philosophy to justify the murder of anyone he labeled an infidel. It was no different, except in the less ambitious scale of the enterprise, from what Zawahiri and bin Laden were doing. Takfir was a weapon that could blow up in anyone’s face.
Zawahiri arranged for Ali Mohammed to train bin Laden’s bodyguards, and he made sure that they were largely Egyptians—drawing even tighter the noose of influence he was casting around the Saudi. As for bin Laden, he gloomily concluded that his Sudanese idyll had come to an end. The picnics on the Nile, the meditative strolls to the mosque, the Friday horse races—all that was part of the past. He traveled in convoys now, and he always carried the Kalikov AK-74 that he had been awarded on the field of combat.
LIFE AT HOME also changed for bin Laden. As stern as he was toward his children, he was surprisingly permissive toward his career-oriented wives. Umm Hamza, the professor of child psychology, and Umm Khaled, who taught Arabic grammar, kept their university jobs and commuted to Saudi Arabia during the Sudan years. Umm Hamza lived on the ground floor of the Khartoum house, where she offered lectures to women about the teachings of Islam.
For Umm Abdullah, however, life in Khartoum was not so rewarding. Two of her sons, Abdullah and Omar, hated the deprivation and the hazards that their father imposed on them. And there was the ongoing problem of caring for Abdul Rahman, the retarded son, whose emotional outbursts were all the more difficult to deal with in the cramped household.
The fourth wife, Umm Ali, asked for a divorce. Bin Laden had expected this. “We have not been on good terms since the beginning,” he confessed to Jamal Khalifa. When Osama and Jamal decided back in their university days to become polygamists, they had made a pledge that they would never abuse their moral code by being the one to ask for a divorce. Instead of marrying scores of women, like his father had done, bin Laden intended to fulfill the Quranic injunction to treat his four wives equally. But that meant he had to wait patiently for UmmAli to make the request herself and put years of unhappiness behind them.
Under Islamic law, children younger than seven stay with their mothers; after that, the daughters go to their fathers. Sons over seven years old may choose between their parents. Eight-year-old Ali, the oldest, decided to stay with his mother. Umm Ali took her three children and returned to her family in Mecca. The daughters stayed with her, even as they grew.
Bin Laden valued loyalty; indeed, nearly all those around him had formally pledged themselves to him. He lived as feudal lord, controlling the destinies of hundreds of people. Betrayal, until now, was practically unknown in his dominion. The sudden desertion by several members of his family was a crushing loss to a man who held himself out as an exemplar of Islamic family values. The spartan virtues that he had pressed upon his children had turned some of them against him. And yet he willingly let them go.
BIN LADEN also longed for home. The only times he got to see his mother or other members of his family were when the Saudi royal court sent them to Khartoum to command him to return. King Fahd was beside himself with this continuing display of disloyalty. Algeria and Yemen were furiously pressing the Saudis to put a stop to the man they saw as a source of the insurgencies in their countries. It was Egypt, however, that finally forced the Kingdom to choose between its prodigal son and continued good relations with a powerful ally. The Egyptians were fed up with the violence spilling out of Sudan and protested again and again that bin Laden was behind it. Finally, on March 5, 1994, Fahd personally decided to revoke bin Laden’s Saudi citizenship.
Saudi Arabia is an intimate nation, with large families and tribes complexly knitted together. To be expelled from the country was to be banished from these intricate relationships that are so much a part of every Saudi’s identity. Citizenship is a closely guarded property, rarely awarded to foreigners, and the fact that the bin Laden family, of Yemeni origin, were full members of Saudi society indicated the honored—but vulnerable—place they held. Immediately after the king canceled bin Laden’s citizenship, Bakr bin Laden, the eldest brother, publicly condemned Osama, turning the family’s back to him. Many of bin Laden’s countrymen date the moment of his total radicalization to the announcement of the king’s decision. An emissary traveled to Sudan to formally deliver the news and demand bin Laden’s passport. Bin Laden threw it at the man. “Take it, if having it dictates anything on my behalf!” he declared.
Bitter and reproachful, bin Laden authorized his representatives to establish an office in London. (He considered seeking asylum in Britain himself, but upon hearing that possibility, the British home secretary immediately banned him.) The office, called the Advice and Reformation Committee, was run by Khaled al-Fawwaz, a Saudi, and two Egyptian members of al-Jihad. They sent faxes by the hundreds to prominent Saudis, who were stunned by bin Laden’s open denunciations of royal corruption and the family’s under-the-table deals with the Islamic clergy. These dispatches caused a sensation at a time when the fever for reform was already blazing. Bin Laden published an open letter to Sheikh bin Baz, chief of the Saudi ulema, denouncing his fatwas authorizing the royal family to keep the American forces in the holy land and to lock up dissident Islamic scholars.
“Bring this man to heel,” the Saudi king ordered Prince Turki. Assassination plots were considered, but the Saudis were not clever killers, nor did Turki have the stomach for such risky ventures. Instead, the Interior Ministry ordered bin Laden’s family to cut him off, and it seized his share of the company—about $7 million. As predictable as such moves were, bin Laden was taken by surprise. He depended on the monthly stipend the company paid him—in fact, it was his only real source of income.
His business career was a terrible failure. He had started his life in Sudan by spreading money around, loaning the government hard currency to purchase wheat, for instance, when an acute shortage caused breadlines to form; helping to build the Sudanese radio and television facilities; and occasionally picking up the tab for the nation’s oil imports when the government was short. In such an impoverished country, bin Laden’s modest fortune almost constituted a second economy. But he cared little about running his companies or overseeing his investments. Though he had an office with a fax machine and a computer, he rarely spent much time there, preferring to tinker with his agricultural projects during the day and entertain dignitaries and mujahideen in his evening salons.
He had sunk much of his money into enterprises he knew little about. His interests now included rock-crushing machines, insecticides, soap making, leather tanning—dozens of unrelated projects. He set up accounts in banks in Khartoum, London, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Dubai, each in the names of different al-Qaeda members, which made them difficult for intelligence agencies to trace, but also nearly impossible to manage. He drifted into projects without much thought. When one of his aides thought it would be a clever investment to import cheap bicycles from Azerbaijan to Sudan, where no one rides them, all that was needed was to have three al-Qaeda managers sign a form and bin Laden was in the bicycle business.
These extremely diverse enterprises were haphazardly grouped under various corporate entities. From the first, the men who oversaw bin Laden’s business interests realized that there was trouble ahead. In a 1992 meeting with bin Laden, Jamal al-Fadl and Abu Rida al-Suri asked him if it was really necessary for his companies to make money. “Business is very bad in Sudan,” they warned him. Inflation was over 150 percent, and the Sudanese currency was constantly losing value against the dollar, undermining the entire portfolio. “Our agenda is bigger than business,” bin Laden carelessly replied—a statement that ran a sword through any responsible management practices. When bin Laden’s Saudi allowance was suddenly cut off, he had to confront a river of deficits and no reliable stream of income. “There were five different companies, and nothing worked,” Abu Rida, his main business advisor, said. “All these companies lost. You cannot run a business on remote control.”
The crunch came at the end of 1994. Bin Laden told the members of al-Qaeda that he would have to reduce their salaries because he had “lost all my money.” When L’Houssaine Kherchtou, one of bin Laden’s pilots, mentioned that he needed to go to Kenya to renew his pilot’s license, which he had gained after three years of study on al-Qaeda’s payroll, bin Laden told him to “forget about it.” A few months later, Kherchtou’s pregnant wife needed a Caesarean section, and he asked the al-Qaeda paymaster for $500 for the operation. “There is no money,” the man told him. “We can’t give you anything.”
Suddenly Kherchtou felt expendable. The camaraderie that sustained the men of al-Qaeda rested on the financial security that bin Laden provided. They had always seen him as a billionaire, an endless font of wealth, and bin Laden had never sought to correct this impression. Now the contrast between that exaggerated image of bin Laden’s resources and the new destitute reality caused some of the men to begin looking out for themselves.
Jamal al-Fadl, who was one of bin Laden’s most popular and trusted men, had been chafing at the differential pay scale, which favored the Saudis and the Egyptians. When bin Laden refused to give him a raise, the Sudanese secretary reached into the till. He used the money to buy several plots of land and a car. In the narrow circles of Khartoum, such a burst of affluence was quickly noticed. When confronted, Fadl admitted to taking $110,000. “I don’t care about the money, I care about you. You are one of the best people in al-Qaeda,” bin Laden told him. “If you need money, you should come to us.” Bin Laden pointed to other members of the organization who had been given a new car or a house when they asked for help. “You didn’t do that,” said bin Laden. “You just stole the money.”
Fadl begged bin Laden to forgive him, but bin Laden said that would not happen “until you bring all the money back.”
Fadl considered the offer, then disappeared. He would become al-Qaeda’s first traitor. He offered to sell his story to various intelligence agencies in the Middle East, including the Israelis. He eventually found a buyer when he walked into the American Embassy in Eritrea in June 1996. In return for nearly $1 million, he became a government witness. While in protective custody, he won the New Jersey Lottery.
AFRICA WAS BLEEDING in the mid-1990s. Major wars and civil conflicts in Liberia, Angola, Sierra Leone, Congo, Nigeria, Rwanda, Burundi, and Zimbabwe took millions of lives. For bin Laden, the strife represented an opportunity to spread al-Qaeda’s influence. He sent Ali Mohammed to Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, to conduct surveillance on American, British, French, and Israeli targets. They were chosen because of their involvement with Operation Restore Hope in Somalia, which was still going on at the time.
Ali Mohammed walked around Nairobi posing as a tourist. Among the possible targets he considered were the French Cultural Center and the British-owned Norfolk Hotel, one of the great artifacts of the colonial period. The Israeli Embassy was too heavily fortified, and the El Al office in a local strip mall was surrounded by security.
The American Embassy stood out as a rich, vulnerable target. There was no setback from the road, making it easy for a car bomb to get close enough to do great damage. Mohammed carried two cameras, one around his neck, like a tourist, and another, a tiny Olympus, that he cupped in his hand. For four or five days he passed by the building, snapping pictures at different times of the day, noticing the traffic patterns and the rotation of the security guards. He spotted the closed-circuit television cameras and determined their range. He developed the photos himself and then buried them in a stack of other pictures so they would appear inconspicuous. He drew up a plan of attack, which he placed on an Apple PowerBook 140; then he returned to Khartoum to make a presentation to bin Laden.
“Bin Laden looked at the picture of the American Embassy and pointed to where a truck could go as a suicide bomber,” Mohammed eventually testified. But when the international community withdrew from Somalia and that miserable country collapsed back into a hopelessness from which it has yet to recover, al-Qaeda lost its pallid excuse for attacking the embassy in Nairobi. The plan was not forgotten, however; it was only filed away.
IN 1995 BIN LADEN began to have second thoughts about his life. He was struggling to keep his businesses afloat and his organization from flying apart. He could no longer afford to be a dilettante, but he was unwilling to cut loose his unprofitable projects and was paralyzed by the unfamiliar predicament of being broke. He was also pining for the familiar. “I am tired,” he told one of his followers. “I miss living in Medina. Only God knows how nostalgic I am.”
Al-Qaeda so far had come to nothing. It was another of his tantalizing enthusiasms that had no leadership and no clear direction. Al-Qaeda’s treasurer, Medani al-Tayeb, who had married Osama’s niece, had been urging bin Laden to reconcile with the king as a way of rectifying the organization’s dire finances. The Saudi government sent several delegations to see him in Khartoum. According to bin Laden, the government offered to return his passport and his money provided that “I say through the media that the king is a good Muslim.” He also claimed that the Saudis offered two billion riyals ($533 million) to his family if he abandoned jihad. He was torn between his righteous stance against the king and his sudden need for funds to keep al-Qaeda alive. When he rejected the offer, Tayeb defected, causing panic among the members when he turned up back in Saudi Arabia. Some accounted for his shocking desertion by saying that he was under a magical spell.
Bin Laden wanted to go home as well, but his loathing for King Fahd was so great he could never call him a “good Muslim.” During this time he had a dream of being in Medina, where he heard the sound of a great celebration. He looked over a mud wall and saw that Prince Abdullah was arriving. “It means that Abdullah will become king,” he told Abu Rida. “That will be a relief to the people and will make them happy. If Abdullah becomes king, then I will go back.”
But Abdullah was still crown prince. Bin Laden wrote a cagey and conciliatory note to him, trying to sound him out. He learned that the Saudi government was agreeable to his return if he pledged to give up jihad, otherwise, he would be jailed or put under house arrest.
His family heard about his yearning to come home, and they turned to a longtime friend of his, the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who had covered bin Laden’s exploits in Afghanistan. Khashoggi’s job was to get Osama to grant an interview in which he renounced violence. That would be a very public signal to the government that he accepted its terms.
Bin Laden cheerfully received his friend. Khashoggi had visited him several times before in Khartoum. Previously, when Osama was beginning his press campaign against the Saudi government, Khashoggi found him surrounded by young Saudi dissidents, who fetched newspaper clippings for him whenever he wanted to make a point. This time there were no articles. Bin Laden was subdued and introspective, and he kept his automatic weapon beside him. They had dinner on the terrace beside his house, next to the garden. There were a couple of Saudis, a Sudanese, and Abu Hajer, the Iraqi. They ate around nine, when the temperature became just bearable. Sudanese servants spread plastic on the ground and laid out a platter of rice and lamb, Saudi style.
Khashoggi explained his mission, and in clear, unambiguous language, bin Laden condemned the use of violence inside the Kingdom. Khashoggi pulled out his tape recorder. “Why don’t you say that on the record?” he asked.
“Let’s do that tomorrow night,” said bin Laden.
The next day, bin Laden took Khashoggi to visit his genetics laboratory, where he spent hours discoursing on the Muslims’ duty to aquire technology to improve their lives. For example, the Dutch have a monopoly on the best banana pods. Why can’t Muslims devote themselves to horticulture with the same level of sophistication? Here, in this laboratory, bin Laden was trying to develop high-quality seeds appropriate for Sudan. He also discussed another major highway he was about to construct. He seemed to be utterly engaged in his projects—buoyant, content, peaceful, but homesick.
Then at dinner, bin Laden unexpectedly began boasting about al-Qaeda. He said he was convinced that the Americans could be easily driven out of the Arabian Peninsula. He gave the example of Yemen. “We hit them in Aden and they left,” he said proudly. “We hit them in Somalia, and they left again.”
“Osama, this is very dangerous,” Jamal replied. “It is as if you are declaring war. You will give the right to the Americans to hunt for you.”
Bin Laden just smiled.
Again, Khashoggi pulled out his tape recorder. Again, his friend declined to speak on the record.
The following night, Khashoggi came to dinner for the last time. They sat once more on the floor of the terrace. It was exactly the same simple meal he had enjoyed the previous nights—rice and lamb. Bin Laden sometimes ate with a spoon, but he preferred to use the fingers of his right hand, because it was Sunna—the way the Prophet did it. He rhapsodized about how much he missed Medina and how he would like to go back and settle there. Khashoggi responded that all he had to do was state on the record what he’d already said privately—that he renounced the use of violence.
Just then someone approached bin Laden and whispered in his ear. Osama stood up and went into the garden. In the shadows, Khashoggi could see two or three men quietly speaking in Egyptian accents. Five minutes later, bin Laden returned, and Khashoggi posed the question again.
“What will I get for that?” bin Laden asked.
Khashoggi was caught by surprise. Osama had never acted like a politician before, negotiating for a personal advantage. “I don’t know,” Khashoggi admitted. “I’m not representing the government. Just say something, break the ice! Maybe there will be a positive reaction. Don’t forget you said a few nasty things about the Kingdom.”
Bin Laden smiled. “Yes, but a move like that has to be calculated.” He aired a couple of possible sweeteners: a full pardon for him, a timetable for the complete withdrawal of the American forces from the peninsula.
Khashoggi had the feeling that his friend was losing his hold on reality. Bin Laden began to speak fondly about Sudan, saying what great investment opportunities there were. He asked Khashoggi about a couple of mutual friends, and suggested that they should come investigate the agricultural prospects. He would be happy to show them around.
“Osama, any Saudi person would be afraid to be seen with you in public,” said Jamal. “Why can’t you see that?”
Bin Laden just gave him the same old smile that Khashoggi had always seen. He didn’t seem to realize what he had done or become in the eyes of his compatriots.
Exasperated, Khashoggi told bin Laden that he was going to leave the next day. If Osama wanted to do the interview, he should call him at the Hilton.
Bin Laden never called.