Sayyid Qutb, the educator and writer whose book Milestones ignited the radical Islamist movement, is shown here displaying one of his books (probably Social Justice in Islam) to the president of Colorado State College of Education, Dr. William Ross.
Greeley, Colorado, from the air in the 1940s. “The small city of Greeley, in which I am staying, is so beautiful that one may easily imagine that he is in paradise,” Qutb wrote. But he also saw the darker side of America.
Qutb on trial, circa 1965. He was hanged in 1966. “Thank God,” he said when his death sentence was pronounced. “I performed jihad for fifteen years until I earned this martyrdom.”
Ayman al-Zawahiri grew up in Maadi, a middle-class suburb of Cairo. A solitary child, his classmates regarded him as a genius. He is shown in his childhood in a Cairo park.
Zawahiri as a schoolboy, right, and as a medical student at Cairo University, below
Opposite bottom: Ayman al-Zawahiri was defendant number 113 of the 302 who were charged with aiding or planning the October 1981 assassination of Anwar al-Sadat. He became spokesperson for the defendants because of his superior English. He is shown here delivering his lecture to the world press in December 1982. Many blame the torture of prisoners in the Egyptian prisons for the savagery of the Islamist movement. “They kicked us, they beat us, they whipped us with electric cables! They shocked us with electricity! And they used the wild dogs!”
The defendants on trial
Left: Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, “the blind sheikh,” was one of the defendants. He was the emir of the Islamic Group at the time.
Left: Mohammed bin Laden came to Saudi Arabia in 1931 as a penniless Yemeni laborer and rose to become the king’s favorite contractor and the man who built much of the infrastructure of the modern Kingdom. He gestures here to Prince Talal bin Abdul Aziz during a tour of the renovation of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, circa 1950.
Right: Mohammed bin Laden and King Faisal. During the construction of the road to Taif, King Faisal would often come to examine the progress and ask about cost overruns. When the road was completed, the Kingdom was finally united and Mohammed bin Laden became a national hero.
Left: The renovation of the Grand Mosque took twenty years. During the hajj it can accommodate a million worshippers at once.
Jamal Khalifa, bin Laden’s college friend and later his brother-in-law, moved into bin Laden’s house with his first wife. Their friendship broke apart over the issue of creating an all-Arab legion in Afghanistan, which was the predecessor of al-Qaeda.
Osama moved to this house in Jeddah with his mother after Mohammed bin Laden divorced her.
Osama bin Laden’s second house in Jeddah, a four-unit apartment building, which he acquired after he became a polygamist
Opposite, bottom: Juhayman al-Oteibi, the leader of the attack on the mosque in 1979, a turning point in the history of Saudi Arabia. The demands of the insurgents foreshadowed bin Laden’s agenda. When Oteibi begged for forgiveness after his capture, Prince Turki, head of Saudi intelligence, told him, “Ask forgiveness of God!”
Abdullah Azzam, who issued a fatwa in 1984 that called upon Muslims everywhere to “join the caravan” of the Afghan jihad. He and bin Laden set up the Services Bureau in Peshawar to facilitate the movement of Arabs into the war.
Bin Laden in a cave in Jalalabad in 1988, at about the time that he began al-Qaeda
Below: Azzam in the Panjshir Valley in 1988, where he traveled to meet with Ahmed Shah Massoud, the greatest of the Afghan commanders in the war against the Soviet invasion. Massoud sits next to Azzam with his arm around Azzam’s son Ibrahim. Shortly after this visit Azzam and two of his sons, including Ibrahim, were assassinated in a bombing that has never been solved.
General Hamid Gul, who ran the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence during the Afghan jihad. The United States and Saudi Arabia funneled hundreds of millions of dollars through the ISI, which was largely responsible for creating the Taliban when the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan.
Right: Prince Turki al-Faisal, head of Saudi intelligence, held the file on Afghanistan and worked with bin Laden. Later he negotiated with Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban leader, but came away empty-handed.
Prince Turki after the Soviet occupation, negotiating among the warring mujahideen. He is on the far left, next to Burhanuddin Rabbani, the head of Ahmed Shah Massoud’s political party. Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sherif sits on the right.
The World Trade Center as seen from New Jersey, where the followers of Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman plotted to bring it down
Ramzi Yousef was the mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing. It was his dark imagination that gave shape to al-Qaeda’s ambitious agenda.
Hasan al-Turabi, the loquacious and provocative ideologue who organized the Islamist coup in Sudan and courted bin Laden to invest in the country. “Bin Laden hated Turabi,” a friend confided. “He thought he was a Machiavelli.” Bin Laden came to Sudan a wealthy man; he left with little more than his wardrobe.
While bin Laden was in Sudan, the king of Saudi Arabia revoked bin Laden’s citizenship and sent an emissary to collect his passport. Bin Laden threw it at the man. “Take it, if having it dictates anything on my behalf!”
In the mornings, bin Laden walked to the mosque, followed by acolytes, and would linger to study with holy men, often breakfasting with them before going to his office.
Osama bin Laden returned to Afghanistan in 1996. He habitually carried the Kalikov AK-74 that had been awarded to him in the jihad against the Soviets.
Opposite, top: Zawahiri and bin Laden holding a press conference in Afghanistan in May 1998. In Afghanistan, the destinies of bin Laden and Zawahiri became irrevocably intertwined, and eventually their terrorist organizations, al-Qaeda and al-Jihad, merged into one.
Taliban fighters headed to the front to fight against the Northern Alliance in 2001. The Taliban arose out of the chaos of mujahideen rule in 1994 and swiftly moved to consolidate their control of Afghanistan. At first, bin Laden and his followers had no idea who they were—there were rumors that they were communists.
The Dar-ul-Aman Palace, Kabul. The palace was caught between the lines during the civil war that followed the Soviet withdrawal. After twenty-five years of continuous warfare, much of Afghanistan was left in ruins.
Above: The ruins of the American Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, which was bombed on August 7, 1998—al-Qaeda’s first documented terrorist strike. The attack killed 213 people and injured thousands. More than 150 people were blinded by flying glass.
Right: The American Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, was bombed nine minutes later, killing 11 and wounding 85.
Left: The Clinton administration responded by destroying several al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan and the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, pictured here. A night watchman was killed in the plant, which later proved to have nothing to do with producing chemical or biological weapons.
The USS Cole after a suicide attack by two al-Qaeda operatives in a fishing skiff in October 2000. The attack nearly sank one of the most invulnerable ships in the U.S. Navy. Seventeen sailors died. “The destroyer represented the capital of the West,” said bin Laden, “and the small boat represented Mohammed.”
Michael Scheuer, who created Alec Station, the CIA’s virtual Osama bin Laden station. He and the FBI’s John O’Neill were bitter rivals.
Richard Clarke, the counterterrorism czar in the White House, proposed that O’Neill succeed him in his job—an offer that may have led to his downfall.
Valerie James saw John O’Neill in a bar in Chicago in 1991 and bought him a drink because “he had the most compelling eyes.” O’Neill was married at the time, a fact he failed to reveal to the many women he courted.
While he was dating Valerie in Chicago, O’Neill asked for an “exclusive relationship” with Mary Lynn Stevens in Washington, D.C.
In Washington, O’Neill also became involved with Anna DiBattista. “That guy is never going to marry you,” her priest warned her.
John O’Neill said good-bye to Daniel Coleman and his FBI teammates at a farewell coffee on the occasion of his retirement from the bureau on August 22, 2001. The next day he started work at the World Trade Center.
Above: After gaining the names of the hijackers from al-Qaeda suspects in Yemen, Ali Soufan (left, with Special Agent George Crouch) traveled to Afghanistan. Here he stands in the ruins of what was bin Laden’s hideout in Kabul.
O’Neill’s funeral was the catastrophe of coincidence that he had always dreaded. Here his mother, Dorothy, and his wife, Christine, leave St. Nicholas of Tolentine Church in Atlantic City. They were among a thousand mourners.
The ruins of the World Trade Center burned for a hundred days. John O’Neill’s body was found ten days after the 9/11 attack.