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KING FAISAL SENT HIS SONS to America to be educated. The youngest, Turki, was packed off to the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey in 1959, when he was fourteen years old. It was an upper-class prep school, but for Turki it was an experience in American egalitarianism. On the first day, another student introduced himself by slapping the prince on the butt and asking his name. When Turki responded, the student asked, “Like a Thanksgiving turkey?” No one really understood or cared who he was, and this novel experience allowed him to be somebody new. His classmates called him Turk or Feaslesticks.
He was dashingly handsome, with a high forehead, wavy black hair, and a deep cleft in his chin. He had his father’s hawkish features but not the ferocity that animated the old man’s eyes; his aspect was more interior and bemused. Although he was president of the French Club, he was a sportsman, not a scholar. He played varsity soccer and represented the New Jersey fencing team in the 1962 Junior Olympics. He was highly intelligent but unfocused in his studies. When he graduated he went to college a few miles away at Princeton, but flunked out after one semester. He transferred to Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., where in 1964, one of his classmates approached him and asked, “Did you hear the news? Your father has become king.”
From the safe distance of America, Turki followed the tumult in his country, including the financial rescue by Mohammed bin Laden—a timely gesture that allowed Faisal to reorganize and stabilize the Kingdom during a period of rising Arab socialism, when the royal family might well have been overthrown. The bond between the royal family and the bin Ladens was particularly strong with the children of King Faisal. They would never forget the favor that bin Laden had done for their father when he assumed the throne.
After Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six Day War, the entire Arab world sank into a state of despondency. Turki became so depressed that he began skipping classes, then had to make up the work in summer school. One of his classmates, a gregarious young man from Arkansas named Bill Clinton, spent four hours coaching him for an ethics test. It was August 19, Clinton’s twenty-first birthday. Turki got a B in the class, but he dropped out of Georgetown soon afterward without finishing his undergraduate degree. He continued taking courses at Princeton and Cambridge but was never really motivated to graduate.
Finally, in 1973, he returned to the Kingdom and went to ask his father what he should do next. The king understood him to be seeking a job. He raised his right eyebrow up to the sky and said, “Look, I didn’t give any of your brothers a job. Go look for your own job.” Of course, the king’s youngest son had little to concern himself with, since his place in life was already assured by his family’s immense wealth and his father’s firm grip on the affairs of the Kingdom. Turki’s maternal uncle, Sheikh Kamal Adham, offered him a post in the Foreign Liaison Bureau. “I had no interest in intelligence,” Turki said. “I didn’t even realize the job was in the intelligence field. I thought it had something to do with diplomacy.” Quiet-spoken and intellectual, he seemed more suited to a profession that relied on ceremonial dinners and cordial negotiations on the tennis court than one that called on the darker skills. He married Princess Nouf bint Fahd al-Saud, from a neighboring branch of the royal family, and settled into a life of wealth that only a handful on the planet could match. But the plates of history were shifting, and the blissful existence he enjoyed was drifting toward a cataclysm.
PRINCE TURKI RETURNED to his homeland at a fateful juncture. Many Saudis were unprepared for the abrupt transformation that their culture had endured since the first oil boom. In their own lifetimes, they remembered a country that was starkly fundamental in every aspect. Most Saudis in the 1950s lived as their ancestors had lived two thousand years before. Few actually thought of themselves as Saudi, since the concept of nationality meant little to them, and government occupied practically no place in their lives. They were tribesmen without boundaries. The enforced equality of poverty and meager expectations had created a society as horizontal as the desert floor. Tribal codes of behavior, coupled with the injunctions of the Quran, had governed individual thought and action. Many, perhaps the majority, had never seen an automobile or a foreigner. There was little education beyond the ritual memorization of the Quran, and scarce need for more. The essential experience of living on the Arabian Peninsula was that nothing changed. The eternal and the present were one and the same.
Suddenly into this desert rushed a flood of change: roads, cities, schools, expatriate workers, dollar bills, and an overriding new awareness of the world and one’s place in it. Their country—and their lives—became alien to them. Thrown into the global marketplace of ideas and values, many Saudis looking for something worthy in their own traditions found it in the unsparing beliefs that informed their understanding of Islam. Wahhabism provided a dam against the overwhelming, raging river of modernity. There was a widespread feeling, not only among extremists, that this torrent of progress was eroding the essential quality of Arabia, which was its sacredness.
Unimaginable wealth had fallen on these austere desert nomads—a gift from God because of their piety, they genuinely believed. Paradoxically, this gift was undermining every facet of their identity. Within twenty years of the first great oil boom in the 1950s, the average Saudi income was nearly equal to that of the United States and increasing at a rate that promised to make the Kingdom the largest economy in the world. Such tantalizing expectations masked the fact that class divisions were shearing apart a country that still fancied itself an extended tribal community. The spendthrift Saudi became a worldwide stereotype of greed, gluttony, corruption, hypocrisy, and—even more offensive to his dignity—a figure of fun. The sheer waste of fortunes at the gaming tables, the drinking, the whoring, the avarice of the Saudi women with their silver minks and their shopping bags on the Champs-Elysées, the casual buying of jewels that could capsize national economies, amused a world that was also shaken by the prospect of a future in which the Saudis owned practically everything. This anxiety was sharpened by the 1973 oil embargo, which caused prices to skyrocket and created genuine problems for a Saudi government that simply didn’t know how to spend all its money. The wholesale squandering of wealth, both public and private, only demonstrated the bottomless pocket that Saudi Arabia had become—at least, for the royal family.
They not only ruled the country, they essentially owned it. All unclaimed land belonged to the king; he alone decided who could acquire property. As the country expanded, the king’s uncles and aunts, brothers and sisters, nieces, nephews, and cousins grabbed the richest parcels. Still not sated, the princes forced themselves into business deals as “agents” or “consultants,” raking in billions in the form of kickbacks and bribes. This toll on commerce came despite the fact that Al Saud—the royal family—had already appropriated 30 or 40 percent of the country’s oil profits in the form of allowances for family members. Al Saud personified all the venal changes in the Saudi identity, and it was natural that their subjects would consider revolution.
Nonetheless, in a society with so few institutions, the royal family was a conspicuously progressive force. In 1960, against powerful resistance from the Wahhabi establishment, Crown Prince Faisal had introduced female education; two years later he formally abolished slavery. He prevailed upon President John F. Kennedy to send American forces to protect the Kingdom during the border war against Yemen. He brought television to the Kingdom, although one of his nephews was killed while leading a protest against the opening of the broadcast station in 1965. He was freer to act than his predecessor because his own piety was unquestioned, but he was wary of extremists who were constantly policing the thoughts and actions of mainstream Saudi society. From the point of view of some fervent believers, the most insidious accomplishment of Faisal’s reign was to co-opt the ulema—the clergy—by making them employees of the state. By promoting moderate voices over others, the government sought to temper the radicalism spawned by the tumultuous experience of modernization. Faisal was such a powerful king that he was able to force these changes on his society at a stunning pace.
His sons helped the king consolidate his power. Turki became the Kingdom’s spymaster, and his older brother, Prince Saud, was appointed the foreign minister. Between these two American-educated princes, Saudi Arabia began to assert itself in the world community. The Kingdom’s stupendous wealth would ease the disorientation of rapid change and the resentment of royal corruption; and the creation of a sophisticated, technologically savvy elite would open the shutters on this deeply suspicious, fervently religious society. But in 1975 King Faisal was murdered by his nephew (the brother of the man who protested the opening of the television station), and that promising future died with him.
IN THE EARLY MORNING of November 20, 1979, Turki received a summons from King Khaled, his father’s successor. Turki was in Tunis with Crown Prince Fahd, attending the Arab Summit. Turki was thirty-four years old, and he was about to face the biggest crisis in the brief history of Saudi Arabia.
That morning at dawn, the aged imam of the Grand Mosque of Mecca, Sheikh Mohammed al-Subayil, had been preparing to lead the prayers of fifty thousand Muslims gathered for the final day of hajj. As he approached the microphone, he was shoved aside, and a burst of gunfire echoed in the holy sanctuary. A ragged band of insurgents standing among the worshippers suddenly pulled rifles from under their robes. They chained the gates closed, trapping the pilgrims inside, and killed several policemen. “Your attention, O Muslims!” a rough-looking man with an untrimmed beard cried. “Allahu akhbar!”—God is great—“The Mahdi has appeared!”
“The Mahdi! The Mahdi!” the armed men cried.
It was New Year’s Day of the Islamic year 1400—the bloody inauguration of a turbulent new century. In some of the disputed oral traditions of Islam, the Mahdi (“the one who guides”) will appear shortly before the end of time. The concept of the Mahdi is a controversial one, especially in Wahhabi Islam, since this messiah is not mentioned in the Quran. Tradition says that the Mahdi will be a descendant of the Prophet and will carry his name (Mohammed bin Abdullah), and that he will appear during the hajj. Eventually, Jesus will return and ask his people to adhere to Islam. Together, Jesus and the Mahdi will fight the Antichrist and restore justice and peace to the earth.
The man claiming to be the Mahdi was Mohammed Abdullah al-Qahtani, but the real leader of the revolt was Juhayman al-Oteibi, a fundamentalist preacher and former corporal in the National Guard. The two men had been imprisoned together for sedition, and it was during that time, Oteibi claimed, that God had revealed to him in a dream that Qahtani was the Mahdi.
Qahtani was persuaded by Oteibi’s dream that he must be the chosen one. When the two men got out of prison, he married Oteibi’s sister. Soon they began attracting followers with their messianic message, especially young theology students from the Islamic University in Medina, a center of Muslim Brothers radicalism. Thanks to donations from wealthy adherents, Oteibi’s disciples were well armed and trained. Some, like Oteibi himself, were members of the Saudi National Guard, which is charged with protecting the royal family. Their goal was to seize power and institute theocratic rule, in expectation of the rapidly approaching apocalypse.
Jamal Khalifa, who was living in bin Laden’s house at the time, used to see Oteibi and his followers preaching in different mosques, often making blunders in their recitations of the Quran. Bin Laden would have seen them as well. People were stunned to hear them speaking openly against the government. They even tore riyals in half because the bills bore the picture of the king.
These were unheard-of actions in a country that was so strictly controlled; and yet there was an ingrained reluctance on the part of the government to confront religious extremists. At some point, members of the ulema cross-examined Oteibi and Qahtani to discover any signs of heresy, but they were let go. They were seen as rustic throwbacks to the Ikhwan fanatics, the shock troops of King Abdul Aziz; indeed, Oteibi was the grandchild of one of those men. No one imagined that they posed a real threat to the established order.
Just before the insurgents cut the telephone lines, an employee of the bin Laden organization, which was still renovating the Grand Mosque, called the company headquarters and reported what had happened; then a representative of the company notified King Khaled.
Turki returned from Tunis to Jeddah at nine o’clock that night and drove his own car to Mecca. The entire city had been evacuated, and the streets were spookily vacant. The giant stadium lights that usually illuminated the immense mosque were cut off, along with all power, so the building loomed mountainously in shadow. Turki went to a hotel where his uncle, Prince Sultan, who was the minister of defense, was waiting for him. As Turki entered the hotel, a shot rang out from one of the rebel snipers in the minarets, shattering the glass door in his hands.
Later that evening, Turki moved to the command post, a hundred meters from the mosque, where he would remain for the next two weeks. Most of the hostages had been let go, but an undetermined number of them were still locked in the sanctuary. No one knew how many insurgents there were, how many weapons they had, what kinds of preparations had been made. About a hundred security officers from the Interior Ministry had made an initial attempt to regain the mosque. They were immediately gunned down.
Forces from the Saudi Army and the National Guard soon joined the surviving security officers. Before the princes on the scene could order a military assault on the mosque, however, they first had to gain permission from the Saudi clerical establishment, and there was no certainty that they would receive that blessing. The Quran forbids violence of any kind within the Grand Mosque—not even a plant can be uprooted—so the prospect of a gun battle within the holy confines posed a dilemma for both the government and the ulema. The king would face revolt from his own men if he ordered them to open fire within the sanctuary. On the other hand, if the ulema refused to issue a fatwa endorsing the government’s right to reclaim the mosque, they could be seen as siding with the rebels. The historic compact between the royal family and the clergy would be broken, and who could guess the outcome?
The leader of the ulema was Abdul Aziz bin Baz, blind, seventy years old, an eminent religious scholar but a man who was suspicious of science and hostile to modernity. He claimed that the sun rotated around the earth and that the manned landing on the moon had never occurred. Now bin Baz found himself in an awkward and compromised position: Oteibi had been his student in Medina. Whatever bargain was struck during the meeting between the ulema and King Khaled, the government emerged with a fatwa authorizing the use of lethal force. With this decree, Prince Sultan ordered an artillery barrage followed by frontal assaults on three of the main gates. They never got close to breaching the rebel defenses.
Inside the mosque were four or five hundred insurgents, including some women and children. They included not only Saudis but also Yemenis, Kuwaitis, Egyptians, and even some American Black Muslims. In the weeks leading up to the hajj, they had stolen automatic weapons from the armory of the National Guard and smuggled them into the compound on biers on which the dead were commonly brought for ritual washing. The rebels had hidden their arms and supplies within the hundreds of tiny underground chambers beneath the courtyard that were used as hermitages for pilgrims on retreat. Now they were well fortified, and they had taken up commanding positions in the upper stories of the mosque. Snipers were picking off Saudi forces whenever they showed themselves.
In the field headquarters outside the mosque, a number of senior princes and the generals of rival services congregated, and their reckless orders, compounded by abundant contradictory advice from the military attachés from the United States and Pakistan, were causing confusion and needless fatalities. In the middle of the day, Sultan directed a suicidal helicopter assault in which troops were lowered on ropes into the vast courtyard in the center of the mosque. They were slaughtered. At that point, the king turned to the young Prince Turki, putting him in charge.
Turki worked out a strategy that would minimize casualties and damage to the holy shrine. The first priority was intelligence, and for that he called on the bin Ladens. The brothers had maps and electrical layouts and all the technical information about the mosque that would be critical for the assault that Turki was contemplating.
Salem bin Laden, the oldest of the brothers and the head of the clan, arrived on the hood of a car brandishing a machine gun. Salem was a wonderful character, so much the opposite of his pious, remote, and taciturn father. He was known throughout the Kingdom for his bravado and his nutty humor, traits that endeared him to the king, who loved him despite the practical jokes that Salem sometimes played on him. A daredevil pilot, Salem would buzz the ruler’s desert camp and carry on such antics in the sky that the king eventually banned him from flying.* Once, according to family legend, Salem had a hemorrhoid operation, and he had a videotape of the procedure sent to the king. In this stoic culture, few people—perhaps no one else—exercised such rough liberties.
Oteibi and his followers had control of the mosque’s public address system, and they were using this opportunity to broadcast their message to the world. Despite the government’s efforts to marginalize the insurgents as religious fanatics upset by the spread of video games and football, Oteibi’s brazen demands echoed through the streets of Mecca, electrifying the coffee houses and sheesha bars of the Kingdom.
Oteibi insisted on the adoption of Islamic, non-Western values and the rupture of diplomatic relations with Western countries, thus rolling back the changes that had opened the society to modernity. The Saudi Arabia these men wanted to create would be radically isolated. The royal family would be thrown out of power, and there would be a full accounting of the money that they had taken from the Saudi people. Not only the king but also the ulema who countenanced his rule would be denounced as sinful and unjust. Oil exports to the United States would be cut off, and all foreign civilian and military experts would be expelled from the Arabian Peninsula. These demands foreshadowed those that Osama bin Laden would make fifteen years later.
BY FRIDAY, the fourth day of the siege, Saudi forces had regained the upper stories of the Grand Mosque and two of the minarets. Battles flared in the covered corridors surrounding the Kaaba, and the stench of death clouded the air. The bodies of dead rebels had been mutilated—their faces shot off by female insurgents—to keep them from being identified. One of the bodies government troops recovered more or less intact was that of Mohammed Abdullah al-Qahtani, the purported Mahdi, whose jaw was blown away. But even the death of the Mahdi did not put an end to the rebellion.
Using maps of the compound provided by Salem, Turki oversaw a series of reconnaissance probes by Special Security Forces, who slipped in and out among the hundred doors, retrieving bodies of fallen soldiers. But Turki wanted to see for himself. He exchanged his ministerial robes for the khaki uniform of an ordinary soldier; then he and a handful of men, including his brother, Prince Saud, and Salem bin Laden, entered the holy mosque.
The mosque’s lengthy arcades and grand plaza were eerily vacant. Turki and his companions discovered that the main body of rebels had taken refuge in the warren of underground prayer rooms carved into the lava that underlay the great courtyard. The subterranean hive that the rebels now occupied was easily defended. The government had no idea how long the insurgents could hold out on the dates and water they had cached in the storerooms; nor was there any possibility of an assault upon this labyrinth, which offered infinite opportunities for ambush. Thousands of soldiers and an unknown number of hostages would die. For half an hour, the two sons of Faisal and the eldest son of Mohammed bin Laden crept about, sketching the sight lines of the rebels’ positions and their probable lines of defense. The Kingdom itself weighed in the balance of their actions, for if they failed to secure the holy ground, they would lose the trust of the Saudi people. Nothing in the world was more sacred to them and to Muslims everywhere than this mosque. Now it was a surreal battlefield. The early bombardment had done appalling damage. Turki noticed that even the pigeons had fled; from the earliest accounts by pilgrims, pigeons were constantly circumnavigating the holy mosque in the same counterclockwise manner. It seemed to him that the devotion of nature had been interrupted by this bloody human quarrel.
One of the ideas the government entertained was to flood the underground chambers, then electrocute everyone inside with high-voltage cables. Such a plan, however, did not distinguish the hostages from their captors, and besides, Turki realized, “you would need the entire Red Sea to fill it.” Another notion was to put explosive-laden saddles on dogs and detonate them by remote control.
With such hopeless alternatives in front of him, Turki could have called upon the American Central Intelligence Agency, which was training Saudi Army Special Forces in the nearby city of Taif. But he had found that when immediate action was needed, the French were less complicated than the Americans. He consulted the legendary spy Count Claude Alexandre de Marenches, who was then head of the French secret service. A huge, commanding presence, de Marenches recommended gas. Turki agreed, but insisted that it be nonlethal. The idea was to render the insurgents unconscious. A team of three French commandos from the Groupe d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale (GIGN) arrived in Mecca. Because of the prohibition against non-Muslims entering the holy city, they converted to Islam in a brief, formal ceremony. The commandos pumped gas into the underground chambers, but perhaps because the rooms were so bafflingly interconnected, the gas failed and the resistance continued.
With casualties climbing, Saudi forces drilled holes into the courtyard and dropped grenades into the rooms below, indiscriminately killing many hostages but driving the remaining rebels into more open areas where they could be picked off by sharpshooters. More than two weeks after the assault began, the surviving rebels finally surrendered.
Oteibi was among them, looking like a wild man with his matted hair and beard, which jutted defiantly toward the television cameras that recorded the emergence of the rebels stumbling out of the underground chambers. His defiance had faded once the tragedy concluded. Turki went to see him in the hospital, where his wounds were being attended. Oteibi jumped off the bed, grabbed the prince’s hand, and kissed it. “Please ask King Khaled to forgive me!” he cried. “I promise not to do it again!”
Turki was too startled to answer at first. “Forgiveness?” he finally said. “Ask forgiveness of God.”
The government divided Oteibi and sixty-two of his disciples among eight different cities where, on January 9, 1980, they were beheaded. It was the largest execution in Saudi Arabian history.
The Saudi government admitted that 127 of its men had been killed in the uprising and 461 injured. About a dozen worshippers were killed, along with 117 rebels. Unofficial accounts, however, put the number of dead at more than 4,000. In any case, the Kingdom was traumatized. The holiest place in the world had been defiled—by Muslims. The authority of the royal family had been openly challenged. After this, nothing could remain the same. Saudi Arabia had come to a place where it would have to change, but in which direction? Toward openness, liberality, tolerance, modernity, and Western ideas of democratic progress, or toward greater authoritarianism and religious repression?
In the early days of the siege, Osama bin Laden and his brother Mahrous were arrested. They were driving home from Al-Barood, the family farm off the road from Jeddah to Mecca. Authorities spotted the dust trail of their car coming out of the desert and thought they were fleeing rebels. At the time of their arrest, the brothers professed to be unaware that the siege had taken place. They stayed in custody for a day or two, but their social prominence protected them. Osama remained secluded in his house for a week. He had been opposed to Oteibi and the extreme Salafists who surrounded him. Five years later, however, he would tell a fellow mujahideen in Peshawar that Oteibi and his followers were true Muslims who were innocent of any crime.
IN THE MONTH between the surrender of the rebels and their mass execution, there was a new shock to the Islamic world: on Christmas Eve 1979 Soviet troops entered Afghanistan. “I was enraged and went there at once,” bin Laden later claimed. “I arrived within days, before the end of 1979.” According to Jamal Khalifa, bin Laden had never even heard of the country of Afghanistan until that point and did not actually go there until 1984, which is when he first became noticed in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Bin Laden explained that the trips he made before then were “a big secret, so that my family wouldn’t find out.” He became a courier, he said, delivering charitable donations from wealthy Saudis. “I used to hand over the money and head straight back, so I wasn’t really familiar with what was going on.”
The most influential figure in bin Laden’s involvement with the Afghan cause was a charismatic Palestinian scholar and mystic named Abdullah Azzam. Born in Jenin in 1941, Azzam fled to Jordan after Israel captured the West Bank in 1967. He went to al-Azhar University in Cairo, where he gained a doctorate in Islamic jurisprudence in 1973, two years behind his friend Omar Abdul Rahman, the blind sheikh. He then joined the faculty of the University of Jordan, but his Palestinian activism got him dismissed in 1980. Soon he found a job leading prayers in the school mosque at King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah.
For aroused young Muslims such as Osama bin Laden, Sheikh Abdullah Azzam* embodied in a modern fashion the warrior priest—a figure that was as well established in Islamic tradition as the samurai in Japan. Azzam combined piety and learning with a serene and bloody intransigence. His slogan was “Jihad and the rifle alone; no negotiations, no conferences, no dialogues.” Around his neck he wore the black-and-white Palestinian kaffiyeh, or scarf—a reminder of his reputation as a freedom fighter. By the time he arrived in Jeddah, he was already well known for his courage and oratory. Tall and sturdy, with an impressive black beard distinctively forked by two bright streaks of white and dark eyes that radiated conviction, he mesmerized audiences with his vision of an Islam that would dominate the world through the force of arms.
Despite his growing body of followers, Azzam was restless in Jeddah and eager to participate in the nascent Afghan resistance. “Jihad for him was like water for a fish,” his wife, Umm Mohammed, said. He soon found a position for teaching the Quran and Arabic language at the International Islamic University in Islamabad, Pakistan, and moved there as soon as he could, in November 1981.
Soon he was spending each weekend in Peshawar, which had become the headquarters of the Afghan resistance against the Soviet occupation. He visited the refugee camps and saw appalling suffering. He met with the leaders of the mujahideen—the “holy warriors”—who made Peshawar their base. “I reached Afghanistan, and I could not believe my eyes,” Azzam would later recall in his countless videos and speeches around the world. “I felt as if I had been reborn.” In his renderings, the war was primeval, metaphysical, fought in a landscape of miracles. The Afghans, in his tableau, represented humanity in a pristine state—a righteous, pious, pre-industrial people—struggling against the brutal, soulless, mechanized force of modernity. In this war, the believers were aided by the invisible hands of angels. Azzam spoke of Russian helicopters being snared by ropes, and he claimed that flocks of birds functioned as an early-warning radar system by taking wing when Soviet jets were still over the horizon. Repeatedly in his stories mujahideen discover bullet holes in their clothes when they themselves are not injured, and the bodies of those who are martyred do not putrefy but remain pure and sweet-smelling.
The struggle of Islam, as Qutb had framed it, and as Azzam deeply believed, was against jahiliyya—the world of unbelief that had existed before Islam, which was still corrupting and undermining the faithful with the lures of materialism, secularism, and sexual equality. Here in this primitive land, so stunted by poverty and illiteracy and patriarchal tribal codes, the heroic and seemingly doomed Afghan jihad against the Soviet colossus had the elements of an epochal moment in history. In the skillful hands of Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, the legend of the Afghan holy warriors would be packaged and sold all over the world.
Azzam returned to Jeddah frequently, staying in bin Laden’s guest flat on his trips to the Kingdom. He held recruiting sessions in bin Laden’s apartment, where he magnetized young Saudis with his portraits of the suffering of the refugees and the courage of the Afghan mujahideen. “You haveto do this!” he told them. “It is your duty! You have to leave everything and go!”
Bin Laden revered Azzam, who provided a model for the man he would become. For his part, Azzam was enchanted by his well-connected young host with his monastic habits. “He lives in his house the life of the poor,” Azzam marveled. “I never did see a single table or chair. Any Jordanian or Egyptian laborer’s house was better than the house of Osama. At the same time, if you asked him for a million riyals for the Mujahideen, he would write you out a check on the spot.” Still, Azzam was a little discomfited when, in the sweltering Saudi heat, bin Laden left the air conditioner off. “If you have it, why don’t you use it?” he asked petulantly. Bin Laden reluctantly accommodated his guest’s request.
Soon Jeddah became a transit station for young men who were answering Sheikh Abdullah’s call to “join the caravan” of the Afghan jihad. Paid agents rounded up prospects, pocketing half of the money—typically, several hundred dollars—that the recruits received when they signed up. Young Muslim pilgrims were particular targets. To get them to the front, agents promised them jobs with aid organizations that never materialized. Fugitives from Algeria and Egypt slipped into the country and were provided with false papers by Saudi intelligence. The Saudi Binladin Group, which maintained an office in Cairo for hiring skilled laborers to work on the two holy mosques, became known as a pipeline for radicals who wanted to fight in Afghanistan. It is probable that Zawahiri connected to the Egyptians coming through Jeddah, and that would have brought him into bin Laden’s realm.
Bin Laden opened a halfway house for the recruits and even put them up in his own apartment. In the summers, he ran special military camps for high school and college students. Despite his youth, he rapidly emerged as a talented fund-raiser. Wealthy individuals, including members of the royal family, eagerly contributed. The Saudi government encouraged these efforts by offering steep discounts on the national airline for flights to Pakistan, the dropping-off point for jihad. Crown Prince Abdullah personally donated dozens of trucks for the cause. It was a thrilling national effort, although it established charitable habits and associations that would later become ruinous. The people who rallied to the Afghan jihad felt that Islam itself was threatened by the advance of communism. Afghanistan meant little to most of them, but the faith of the Afghan people meant a great deal. They were drawing a line against the retreat of their religion, which was God’s last word and the only hope of human salvation.
Jamal Khalifa was completely persuaded by Azzam’s arguments. Later, he spoke to his friend Osama and declared that he had decided to go to Afghanistan. As a sign of his approval, bin Laden proposed that Jamal marry his favorite sister, Sheikha. She was divorced and several years older than Osama, who was taking care of her and her three children. Because Jamal wasn’t allowed to see her at first, his friend extravagantly praised her pleasant nature, her humor, and her piety.
“What are you talking about?” Khalifa said. “Suppose I go to die?”
But he agreed to meet her as soon as it could be properly arranged. When he did, he decided that Sheikha was “the best I ever met in my whole life.” He put off the marriage for a year, however, in case he was martyred in Afghanistan.
Bin Laden also wanted to go openly to Afghanistan, but he could not get permission from the authorities. “The Saudi government asked me officially not to enter Afghanistan due to how close my family is to the Saudi leadership,” bin Laden later said. “They ordered me to stay in Peshawar, because if the Russians arrested me that would be proof of our support against the Soviet Union. I didn’t obey their order. They thought my entry into Afghanistan was damning to them. I didn’t listen.”
He would have to defy another authority as well, which was even more difficult for him. His mother forbade him to go. He begged for her permission, saying that he would be going there only to take care of the families of the mujahideen. He said he would call every day. Finally he promised, “I won’t even get near Afghanistan.”