The royals persuaded members of bin Laden’s family—including his mother, his father’s only surviving brother, and the half-brother who now headed the bin Laden company—to visit him in Sudan. “They beseeched him to stop his diatribes against Saudi and the Americans,” a family source told the BBC. “Come back and we’ll give you a responsible job in the company, one of the top five positions.” When that suggestion was rebuffed, the Saudis’ patience ran out.
That, at any rate, was the regime’s official position. In the spring of 1994, the royal family declared bin Laden’s citizenship revoked for “behavior that contradicts the Kingdom’s interests.” His family followed suit with a statement of “condemnation of all acts that Osama bin Laden may have committed.” His share of the family fortune, which had earlier been placed in a trust, was sold off and placed in a frozen account.
Though this sounded draconian, the full picture may have been otherwise. The formal cutoff caused bin Laden only a temporary cash flow problem. Far into the future, he would have huge sums of money at his disposal.
Later, asked whether he had really been disowned, bin Laden would put his hand on his heart. “Blood,” he said, “is thicker than water.” The DGSE, France’s intelligence service, which carefully monitored bin Laden over many years, took the view as late as 2000 that “Osama bin Laden has kept up contact with certain members of the family … even though it has officially said the contrary. One of his brothers would appear to be playing a role of intermediary in his professional contacts and the progress of his business.”
It would be reported as late as 2006 that bin Laden’s half-brother Yeslam had pledged to pay the cost of Osama’s legal defense should he be captured. In the years before 9/11, female relatives were used to keep the money coming, perhaps because women in Saudi Arabia are treated as though they are invisible. “Some female members of bin Laden’s own family have been sending cash from Saudi Arabia to his ‘front’ accounts in the Gulf,” Vincent Cannistraro, former CIA chief of operations and analysis, told a congressional committee after 9/11.
Major funding also came from others. Soon after his funding had officially been cut off, according to the DGSE report, $4.5 million went to bin Laden from “Islamic Non-Governmental Organizations” in the Gulf. Five years later, it was discovered that “at least $3,000,000” believed to be for bin Laden had been funneled through Saudi Arabia’s National Commercial Bank. Those behind the payments, the CIA’s Cannistraro testified, had been “wealthy Saudis.” When the Commercial Bank connection was cut, they switched to “siphoning off funds from their worldwide enterprises in creative and imaginative ways.”
The former head of the DGSE’s Security Intelligence department, Alain Chouet, who had regular access to secret intelligence, has said that considerable evidence “points to a number of private donors in the Arabian Peninsula, as well as to a number of banks and charities with money pumped in from Saudi or Gulf funds.… What was expensive wasn’t the terrorist operations themselves but all that’s required for recruiting terrorists: financing the mosques, the clubs, the imams, the religious schools, the training camps, the maintenance of ‘martyrs’ ’ families.”
Funding for bin Laden’s operational needs—weapons, camps, living expenses, operatives’ travel—never dried up. As a 9/11 Commission report on terrorist financing noted, al Qaeda’s budget in the years before 9/11 amounted to $30 million a year. It was money raised almost entirely from donations, especially from “wealthy Saudi nationals.”
The DGSE’s Alain Chouet dismissed the revocation of bin Laden’s Saudi citizenship as merely a “subterfuge aimed at the gullible—designed to cover a continuing clandestine relationship.” For years to come at least—according to Chouet—the Saudi government covertly manipulated bin Laden to act in its strategic interests, as he once had in the Afghan war against the Soviets.
There is information, to be reported later in these pages, that the “wealthy Saudi nationals” who continued to fund bin Laden included members of the ruling royal family.
• • •
BY EARLY 1996, when U.S. ambassador to Sudan Timothy Carney sat down for talks with Sudanese foreign minister Ali Taha, the bin Laden problem was on the agenda. Washington, which had recently condemned Sudan for its “sponsorship of terror,” claimed that bin Laden was directing and funding a number of terrorist organizations around the world.
Washington wanted Sudan to expel the troublesome exile. But to where? To the United States? What to do with him were he to be flown there? “We couldn’t indict him then,” President Clinton said after 9/11, “because he hadn’t killed anyone in America.” To Saudi Arabia? “We asked Saudi Arabia to take him,” Clinton recalled. “The Saudis didn’t want him back.… They were afraid it was too much of a hot potato.”
Wherever bin Laden was to go, the Clinton White House believed it would be worthwhile just to get him out of Sudan. “My calculation was, ‘It’s going to take him a while to reconstitute,’ ” then–National Security Council counterterrorism director Steven Simon has said, “and that screws him up and buys time.”
Following that line of thinking turned out to be a disastrous mis-judgment. Not to have acted decisively against bin Laden in 1996, President Clinton would say—in private—after 9/11, was “probably the biggest mistake of my presidency.” In Sudan, as former CIA station chief Milton Bearden has said, “perhaps we could have controlled or monitored him more closely, to see what he was doing.”
The United States did not do that. It sat idly by when, in May that year, bin Laden returned to the remote, tragically chaotic country that he knew well and where Washington had virtually no leverage—Afghanistan. Allowing that to happen, the CIA’s Bearden sardonically remarked, was “probably the best move since the Germans put Lenin in a boxcar and sent him to St. Petersburg in 1917.”
“WE WERE WHISKED to a chartered Learjet,” his son Omar has recalled. “My father and his party were treated as dignitaries, with no need for the formalities of passports and customs. Besides my father and me, there were only eight other male passengers. Brother Sayf Adel, my father’s security chief, and Mohammed Atef, my father’s best friend and top commander, were traveling with us.”
The plane passed through Saudi airspace without difficulty, refueled in Iran, and landed at the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad, near the border with Pakistan. Other members of bin Laden’s family and entourage followed months later, again aboard a chartered jet.
“Our plane had two configurations: with fifty-six passengers and with seventy-nine,” the captain recalled. “They wanted eighty-four. They asked how many extra seats we wanted. They installed the seats overnight.… We flew women, children, clothes, rickshaws, old bikes, mattresses, blankets.”
After a brief stay in Jalalabad courtesy of a local warlord, bin Laden set up base for a while in the mountains at Tora Bora. Family members thought it a desolate place, but he called it “our new home,” was excited to be back at a place he had known while fighting the Soviets.
A major concern, for some time, was how the Taliban—then gaining the upper hand in the civil war—would view his presence. Then their leader, Mullah Omar, sent word that he was welcome. It was by no means religious and ideological compatibility alone that was to ensure bin Laden a lasting welcome. Through him, the 9/11 Commission would calculate, between $10 and $20 million a year was to flow to the Taliban.
Visibly relaxed once he knew he had sanctuary, bin Laden began talking with his son Omar about his “mission in life.” “I was put on this earth by God for a specific reason,” he said. “My only reason for living is to fight the jihad and to make sure there is justice for the Muslims.” He ranted on about America and Israel, and it was evident that there was no limit to what he imagined he could achieve.
“First,” he said with the supreme self-confidence that only boundless faith or delusion can bring, “we obliterate America. By that I don’t mean militarily. We can destroy America from within by making it eco
nomically weak, until its markets collapse.… That’s what we did with Russia. When that happens, they will have no interest in supplying Israel with arms.… We only have to be patient.… This is God’s plan.”
The man who voiced this astounding ambition now lived in a makeshift wooden cabin. There bin Laden spent much of his time, reading deeply into his hundreds of books, most of them religious tomes, never far from his prayer beads, his copy of the Qur’an, and a radio that picked up the BBC’s broadcasts from London. At his side, always, was his Kalashnikov assault rifle.
Bin Laden was interested in the techniques of mass communication, the distribution of propaganda by tape cassette and fax machine. He would shortly acquire a state-of-the-art satellite telephone. When the technology became available, his operatives would use the Internet as an everyday tool. Omar noticed that his father now spent much time recording his thoughts on a dictating machine.
The fruit of his latest thinking came in August 1996, with a fax transmission to the office of al-Quds al-Arabi—or The Arab Jerusalem—an Arabic-language newspaper published in London. It was a twelve-thousand-word message from the mountain, in bin Laden’s words from “the summit of the Hindu Kush,” one that at the time got little coverage in the West. Across the Middle East, where hundreds of thousands of copies were distributed in cassette form, it had a major impact.
Lengthy, couched in archaic language, replete with religious references, this was bin Laden’s “Declaration of Jihad against the Americans occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places.”
“Praise be to Allah, we seek his help and ask for his pardon,” the declaration began, then launched into a catalogue of the iniquities imposed on Muslims by “the Zionist-Crusaders alliance.” The greatest of the aggressions, bin Laden wrote, was the presence of the “American invaders” in Saudi Arabia, followed by U.S. exploitation of Arab oil and the “annexing” of Arab land by Israel.
“After Faith,” he went on, “there is no more important duty than pushing the American enemy out of the holy land.” Addressing U.S. Defense Secretary William Perry in person, he warned that his recruits to the cause made formidable enemies. “These youths love death as you love life. They inherit dignity, pride, courage, generosity, truthfulness and sacrifice. They are most effective and steadfast in war.… They have no intent but to enter Paradise by killing you.”
Around the time he issued this proclamation of punishment to come, bin Laden sat down to confer with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
WHETHER THE TWO men had seen each other in the recent past remains unclear. According to KSM, he had hoped to meet with bin Laden in Sudan, but settled for seeing his military aide Atef instead. One intelligence lead suggests that he and bin Laden had traveled somewhere together—perhaps on one of the trips they both made to Bosnia. It seems certain, though, that they got together at Tora Bora in mid-1996.
At the meeting, which Atef also attended, KSM came up with a raft of ideas for terrorist attacks, most of them involving airliners. Atef, too, had recently been discussing the idea of attacking aircraft. Terrorist attacks on planes had usually followed a pattern—hijack a plane, have it land in a compliant nation-state, then make demands (often for the release of captured comrades). By the mid-1990s, however, bin Laden operatives had little prospect of finding a “friendly” place to land. For the men meeting at Tora Bora, the focus was simply on destroying planes.
Atef apparently favored finding ways to blow up airliners in mid-air, as in the 1988 downing of Pan Am 103 over Scotland. He and bin Laden listened, however, as KSM proposed a very different concept—using hijacked planes as weapons.
There are two versions of what he suggested. According to KSM himself, the notion he proposed was ambitious in the extreme. Ten planes would be hijacked, on the same day, to be crashed into target buildings on both coasts of the United States. He himself, as commander, would force a landing at an airport, kill all male passengers, then deliver a speech assailing American support for Israel and “repressive” regimes around the world. This, as the 9/11 Commission put it, would have been “theater, a spectacle of destruction with KSM as the self-cast star—the super-terrorist.”
According to another detainee, KSM’s proposal was more modest, a suggestion that the World Trade Center should be targeted again—this time not with a bomb but by small planes packed with explosives. This, the detainee said, prompted bin Laden to suggest a grander vision. “Why do you use an ax,” he supposedly mused, “when you can use a bulldozer?”
KSM thought it was important to target civilian landmarks. Were only military or government buildings hit, he surmised, ordinary Americans “would not focus on the atrocities that America is committing by supporting Israel against the Palestinian people.” The purpose of a further strike on the World Trade Center was to “wake people up.”
KSM’s proposal may have been premature. He got the impression that bin Laden’s priority concern remained the situation in Saudi Arabia. He told KSM he was “not convinced” of the practicality of the planes operation. For now, the discussion went no further.
Nevertheless, a further strike on the World Trade Center apparently remained on the drawing board. Months after the meeting at Tora Bora, a bin Laden operative in Europe traveled to America and shot videotape of various prominent buildings—including the Twin Towers. The footage, seized after 9/11, included shot after shot of the towers, taken from multiple angles.
There were five tapes, with pictures not only of the Trade Center but of the Statue of Liberty, the Brooklyn Bridge, San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, Chicago’s Sears Tower, and Disneyland.
At his meeting with bin Laden, KSM had suggested sending operatives “to study in the U.S. flight institutes.” Whether or not bin Laden ordered it, it seems that someone in the terrorist milieu was already making such preparations. The FBI had received information that “individuals with terrorist connections had requested and received training in the technical aspects of aviation.”
One such individual was a young Saudi who, after a trip to Arizona to learn English, returned home seeming a “different person.” He grew a full beard, shunned established friends, and spent most of his spare time reading books on religion and aviation. Then, in 1996, he returned to the Grand Canyon State—to learn to fly. The twenty-four-year-old seemed unsure of himself in the cockpit, even frightened, but he was to return again and again to flight school, even after he got his commercial pilot’s license. The Saudi was Hani Hanjour, who in 2001 would fly a hijacked Boeing 757 into the Pentagon.
Mohamed Atta, who was to lead the 9/11 operation, turned twenty-seven the year of the Tora Bora meeting. In Germany, where he was now studying, he struck people—even those familiar with Muslim practices—as religiously obsessed.
IN AFGHANISTAN in 1996 bin Laden had asked the British reporter Robert Fisk to come to see him for a second time—less than three years after their first meeting in Sudan. The Saudi was nearing forty now and visibly aging. His beard was longer and starting to turn gray, the lines around his eyes deeper.
It was night when bin Laden met with the reporter. He talked on and on of how Saudi Arabia had become “an American colony,” of how the “evils” of the Middle East were rooted in the policies of the United States. “Resistance against America will spread in many, many places in Muslim countries,” he said. “We must drive out the Americans.”
In the flickering light of a paraffin lamp, when his interviewee agreed to be photographed, Fisk saw in bin Laden’s face the trace of a smile and what looked like vanity. He thought the man “possessed of that quality which leads men to war: total self-conviction. In the years to come I would see others manifest this dangerous characteristic … but never the fatal self-resolve of Osama bin Laden.”
PART V
PERPETRATORS
TWENTY-THREE
SEVEN THOUSAND MILES AND TWO CONTINENTS AWAY, VERY FEW people had yet sensed the real danger in the man.
According to the then-head of the CIA’
s Counterterrorist Center, Winston Wiley, in a recently released 9/11 Commission interview, President Clinton’s administration actually reduced the focus on counterterrorism. Former Clinton officials, and the President himself, have insisted otherwise. One can only report claim and counterclaim, and cite the record.
Two months into the Clinton presidency, in 1993, bin Laden had been characterized in a CIA document as merely an “independent actor who sometimes works with other individuals or governments … to promote militant Islamic causes throughout the region.” What the Agency told the White House ranged from dismissing bin Laden as “a flake” or—closer to reality—as a “terrorist financier,” and the “Ford Foundation” of Sunni Muslim extremism.
In 1995, when the evidence had yet to link bin Laden firmly to any specific attack, a formal Clinton order—aimed at cutting off funding from named terrorist organizations—did not mention him.
In 1995 and 1996, however, the President made nine speeches mentioning terrorism or calling for tough action. He also issued a Presidential Decision Directive—PDD-39—designed to combat terrorism that targeted the United States. It included, for the first time, a provision for what was to become known as rendition, the forcible removal to the United States of captured terrorist suspects. Policy on the subject was henceforth to be coordinated from the White House.
Anthony Lake, Clinton’s first national security adviser, and Richard Clarke—who eventually became national coordinator for counterterrorism—had been badgering the CIA for fuller information on bin Laden. One CIA official recalled having thought that Lake was positively “foaming at the mouth” about him. “It just seemed unlikely to us,” Clarke recalled, “that this man who had his hand in so many seemingly unconnected organizations was just a donor, a philanthropist of terror.”