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Independent

Osama bin Laden: The godfather of terror?

by Robert Fisk

15 September 2001

The first time I met Osama bin Laden inside Afghanistan it was a hot, humid night in the summer of 1996. Huge insects flew through the night air, settling like burrs on his Saudi robes and on the clothes of his armed followers. They would land on my notebook until I swatted them, their blood smearing the pages. Bin Laden was always studiously polite: each time we met, he would offer the usual Arab courtesy of food for a stranger: a tray of cheese, olives, bread and jam. I had already met him in Sudan and would spend a night, almost a year later, in one of his mountain guerrilla camps, so cold that I awoke in the morning with ice in my hair.

I had been given a rough blanket and my shoes were left outside the tent. Whenever we met, he would interrupt our interviews to say his prayers, his armed followers - from Algeria, Egypt, the Gulf Arab states, Syria - kneeling beside him, hanging on his every word as he spoke to me as if he was a messiah.

On 20 March, 1997, I would meet him again. Although only 41 at the time, his ruggedly groomed beard had white hairs, and he had bags under his eyes; I sensed some infirmity, a stiffness of one leg that gave him the slightest of limps. I still have my notes, scribbled in the frozen semi-darkness as an oil lamp sputtered between us. "I am not against the American people," he said. "Only their government." I had heard this so often in the Middle East. I told him I thought the American people regarded their government as their representatives. Bin Laden listened to this in silence. "We are still at the beginning of our military action against the American forces," he said.

I remembered those words this week as I watched those airliners scything into the World Trade Centre towers. And I remembered, too, how in that last meeting he had seized on the Arabic-language newspapers I was carrying in my satchel (a schoolbag I use in rough countries) and scurried to a corner of the tent to read them for 20 minutes, ignoring both his fighters and myself. Although a Saudi, he did not even know that the Iranian foreign minister had just visited the Saudi capital of Riyadh. Didn't he even have a radio, I asked myself? Was this really the "godfather of world terror?" The US administration and Time magazine had both blessed him with this sobriquet. I rather thought he would have liked that. And the $5 million reward that the American administration offered for him. As a multi-millionaire himself, bin Laden would have been insulted at such a low price on the "wanted" poster.

The bin Ladens are a construction family, respected in their native Saudi Arabia although their roots lie on the Yemeni border, a family who honoured the young man who, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, took his followers and his road construction machinery to a volcanic landscape of tribal leaders to fight "the West". For the Russians - to a Saudi - were Westerners and their incursion into Islamic Afghanistan was a heretical, corrupting act. He paid from his own packet to fly thousands of young Arab Muslims to fight alongside him.

They came - from Algeria, from Egypt and the Arabian Gulf and from Syria - and many of them died as martyrs in the ferocious battles, torn to pieces by mines, shredded by the machine-gun fire of the Soviet Hind helicopter gunships that raided the villages of Panchir.

The first time we met, in Sudan, I persuaded bin Laden - much against his will - to talk about those days. And he recalled how, during an attack on a Russian firebase not far from Jalalabad, a mortar shell had fallen at his feet. He had waited for it to explode. And in those milliseconds of rationality, he had - so he said - felt a great sense of tranquillity, a sense of calm acceptance which he ascribed to God. The shell - and many an American may now wish the opposite had happened - failed to explode.

Even the Russians came to know of the esteem in which bin Laden was held among the Afghan resistance. In Moscow in 1993, I met a Soviet adviser who was supposed to arrange his liquidation. "A dangerous man,'' the Russian said of bin Laden. At the time, of course, the Americans loved him, provided him with weapons, never dreaming that within two decades they, too, would be dreaming of his murder. Bin Laden told me once that he never met an American agent during the anti-Russian war, never accepted a single bullet from the West.

But his bulldozers and earth-removers carved highways through the mountains for the Mujahedin to carry their British-made Blowpipe anti-aircraft missiles high enough to strike the Soviet Migs; years later, one of his armed followers would take me up the "bin Laden trail", a terrifying two-hour odyssey along fearful ravines in rain and sleet, the windscreen misting as we climbed the cold mountain. "When you believe in jihad [holy war], it is easy,'' the gunman informed me, fighting with the steering wheel as stones scuttered from the tyres, bouncing down the valleys into the clouds below. From time to time - this was in 1997 - lights winked at us from far away in the darkness. "Our brothers are letting us know they see us,'' the gunman said. It was two hours more before we reached bin Laden's old wartime camp, the jeep skidding backwards towards sheer cliffs, the headlights illuminating frozen waterfalls above. "Toyota is good for Jihad,'' bin Laden's man smiled. I could only agree. I never heard bin Laden make a joke.

If the United States regarded him as the foremost "terrorist'' in the world - as I told him they did - then "if liberating my land is called terrorism, this is a great honour for me.'' There was no difference, he said, between the American and Israeli governments, between the American and Israeli armies. But Europe - especially France - was beginning to distance itself from the Americans. He did condemn French policy towards north Africa; although he did not mention Algeria, the name hovered over us for several minutes like a ghost.

Bin Laden gave me a Pakistani wall poster in Urdu which proclaimed the support of Pakistani scholars for his "holy war'' against the Americans; he even handed to me colour photographs of graffiti on the walls of Karachi that demanded the ousting of US troops from "the place of the two Holy shrines [Mecca and Medina]''. He had, he claimed, received some months ago an emissary from the Saudi royal family who said that his Saudi citizenship -- taken away after pressure from Washington - would be restored along with a new Saudi passport and 2 billion Saudi riyals (£339 million) for his family if he abandoned his jihad and went back to Saudi Arabia. He and his family, he said, had rejected the offer.

At the time, bin Laden had three wives, the elder of them the mother of his bright, 16-year-old Bon Omar, the youngest herself a teenager. Another son, Saad, was brought to meet me; they spoke some English and were clearly excited - in an innocent way - to be surrounded by so many armed men. All lived with him - along with other Mujahedin wives and children -- and stayed in a compound outside Jalalabad. Bin Laden even invited me to visit these hot, dank, miserable homes in the company of one of his Egyptian fighters. Of course, his wives - the youngest was later to return to her family in the Gulf - were not there. "These are ladies who are used to living in comfort,'' the Egyptian said. The encampment was protected by sheets of canvas and a few strands of barbed wire; a drainage ditch and three separate latrines had been dug in the earth, in one of which floated a dead frog. The Egyptian's teenage son, sitting beside us with a rifle in his lap, insisted that Egyptian Intelligence men had viewed the camp. "There are people in the towns who work for the Americans,'' he said. "We see these people and we have to be careful.''

Another of the Arabs in that camp was more forthcoming. There was, he said, "no other country left for Mr bin Laden'' outside of Afghanistan. "When he was in Sudan, the Saudis wanted to capture him with the help of the Yemenis. We know that the French government tried to persuade the Sudanese to hand him over to them because the Sudanese had given them a south American. The Americans were pressing the French to get hold of bin Laden in Sudan. An Arab group paid by the Saudis tried to kill him, but bin Laden's guards fired back and two were wounded.''

In all, bin Laden lost 500 of his men in the war against the Russians. Their graves lie near the Pakistani border at Torkum. After the Russian withdrawal, bin Laden left for Sudan, disgusted by the Afghans' internecine fighting. His closest followers went with him to build highways and invest in Sudanese industry.

Bin Laden is a tall, slim man and towers over his companions.

He has narrow, dark eyes which stared hard at me when he spoke of his hatred of Saudi corruption. Indeed, in my long conversation with bin Laden in 1996 - on that hot night of mosquitoes - the Saudi kingdom and its apparatchiks probably consumed more time than his views of America. He picked his teeth with a piece of miswak wood, a habit that accompanied all his conversations with me. History - or his version of it - was the basis of almost all his remarks. And the pivotal date was 1990, the year Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. "When the American troops entered Saudi Arabia, the land of the two Holy places, there was as strong protest from the ulema [religious authorities] and from students of the Sharia law all over the country against the interference of American troops.

"This big mistake by the Saudi regime of inviting the American troops revealed their deception. They had given their support to nations that were fighting against Muslims. They helped the Yemen communists against the southern Yemeni Muslims and are helping [Yasser] Arafat's regime fight Hamas. After it insulted and jailed the ulema ... the Saudi regime lost its legitimacy.''

Bin Laden paused to see if I had listened to his careful if frighteningly exclusive history lesson. "We as Muslims have a strong feeling that binds us together... We feel for our brothers in Palestine and Lebanon. The explosion at Khobar did not come as a direct result of American occupation but as a result of American behaviour against Muslims...

"When 60 Jews are killed inside Palestine [in suicide bombings in 1996], all the world gathers within seven days to criticise this action, while the deaths of 600,000 Iraqi children [under UN sanctions] did not receive the same reaction. Killing those Iraqi children is a crusade against Islam. We, as Muslims, do not like the Iraqi regime but we think that the Iraqi people and their children are our brothers and we care about their future."

But it was America that captured bin Laden's final attention. "I believe that sooner or later the Americans will leave Saudi Arabia, and that the war declared by America against the Saudi people means war against Muslims everywhere. Resistance against America will spread in many, many places in Muslim countries. Our trusted leaders, the ulema, have given us a fatwa that we must drive out the Americans. The solution to this crisis is the withdrawal of American troops... their military presence is an insult to the Saudi people.''

I've been thinking a lot about that last statement this week. American forces are still in Saudi Arabia. And about his earlier remark in July, 1996 - after a truck bomb had killed 19 Americans - that this incident marked "the beginning of the war between Muslims and the United States". Of the later bombing and the killing of 24 US servicemen, he was to tell me that it was "a great act in which I missed the honour of participating". He spoke then in a chilling, lower voice of his hatred of the American "occupiers".

Intelligent - and eloquent in Arabic - bin Laden undoubtedly is. But his understanding of foreign affairs is decidedly eccentric. At one point, he even suggested to me that individual US states might secede from the Union because of Washington's support for Israel. But the historical perspective was deeply disturbing. "We believe that God used our holy war in Afghanistan to destroy the Russian army and the Soviet Union,'' he said. "We did this from the top of this very mountain on which you are sitting - and now we ask God to use us one more time to do the same to America, to make it a shadow of itself. We also believe that our battle against America is much simpler than the war against the Soviet Union because some of our Mujahedin who fought here in Afghanistan also participated in operations against the Americans in Somalia [during the doomed UN mission] - and they were surprised at the collapse of American morale. This convinced us that the Americans are a paper tiger.

He was also to tell me that "swift and light forces working in complete secrecy" would be needed to oust America from Saudi Arabia. In the following two years, bin Laden was to form his al-Qaeda movement and declare war on the American people - not just the government and army of the United States. There would follow the near-sinking of the USS Cole in Aden harbour - by suicide bombers - and the Cruise missile attacks on the old CIA base that bin Laden uses in southern Afghanistan. He walks now with a stick - a development of the foot problem I noticed four years ago - and speaks more slowly.

But could he really command an army of suicide bombers from the desolation of the Afghan mountains? He did admit to me once that he knew two of the three men executed - beheaded - in Saudi Arabia for bombing the second American military base. He wanted a "real" Islamic sharia law government in Arabia - there would, I suspected, be even more head-chopping in a bin Laden regime - and he wanted an end to those dictators installed by the Americans, those men who supported US policies while repressing their own people.

And it occurred to me that this was, for many millions of Arabs in the Middle East, a very powerful message. You didn't need instructions from bin Laden to form your own small group of followers, to decide on your own individual actions. Bin Laden wouldn't have to plan bombings or the overthrow of regimes. You had only to listen to the thousands of cassette tapes of his voice circulated clandestinely around the Middle East. Which is why I wonder - always supposing bin Laden is connected to the crime against humanity committed in the United States this week - if it would even be necessary to command a para-military organisation for such acts to happen. Arabs are angry enough with the injustices that they blame on America without needing orders from Afghanistan. Inspiration might be just enough.

And I wondered, after those images from New York last week, whether bin Laden was not as astonished as myself to see them. Always supposing he watched television. Or listened to the radio. Or read a newspaper.

Life Story

Born: Osama bin Muhammad bin Awad bin Laden in 1955.

Family: seventh son of a Saudi businessman who made a fortune out of Saudi Arabia's oil-fuelled construction boom (died in a helicopter crash when Osama was 13); mother was a Syrian beauty and his father's official wife; 51 siblings.

Married: first to his Syrian cousin in 1972 (believed to have three wives); two sons.

Education: degree in civil-engineering at Abdul-Aziz University in Jeddah 1979.

Military career: from 1979 fought and raised funds for Mujahedin in the Afghan conflict against the Russians with his Al Qaeda group (backed with American dollars and had the blessing of the governments of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan); from 1984 channelled Arab volunteers to the Afghan guerrillas in Pakistani border town.

Fortune: estimated to have about $300m in personal financial assets.

Charges: 1993 bombing of World Trade Centre which killed six people and injured more than 1,000; 1995 and 1996 bombings of Saudi cities of Riyadh and Khobar which killed 24; 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania which killed 224 people and wounded 4,000; 2000 suicide bombing of USS Cole in Yemen which killed 17; 2001 destruction of the World Trade Centre and attack on Pentagon.

Bounty: $5m.

Aliases: The Prince, The Emir, Abu Abdallah, Mujahid Shaykh, Hajj, the Director.

He says: "It does not worry us what the Americans think. What worries us is
pleasing Allah."