Robert Fisk - The Great War for Civilisation - The Conquest of the Middle East

We washed our hands in the stream and walked over the stiff grass towards a dark gash in the cliff face above us. As my eyes became accustomed to the light, I could make out a vast rectangle in the side of the mountain, a 6-metres-high air-raid shelter cut into the living rock by bin Laden’s men during the Russian war. ‘It was for a hospital,’ the Egyptian said. ‘We brought our mujahedin wounded here and they were safe from any Russian plane. No one could bomb us. We were safe.’ I walked into this man-made cave, the Algerian holding a torch, until I could hear my own crunching footsteps echoing softly from the depths of the tunnel. When we emerged, the moon was almost dazzling, the valley bathed in its white light, another little paradise of trees and water and mountain peaks.

The tent I was taken to was military issue, a khaki tarpaulin roped to iron stakes, a flap as an entrance, a set of stained mattresses on the floor. There was tea in a large steel pot and I sat with the Egyptian and Algerian and with three other men who had entered the tent with Kalashnikovs. We waited for perhaps half an hour, the Algerian slowly acknowledging under my questioning that he was a member of the ‘Islamic resistance’ to the Algerian military regime. I spoke of my own visits to Algeria, the ability of the Islamists to fight on in the mountains and the bled – the countryside – against the government troops, much as the Algerian FLN had done against the French army in the 1954–62 war of independence. The Algerian liked this comparison – I had intended that he should – and I made no mention of my suspicion that he belonged to the Islamic Armed Group, the GIA, which was blamed by the government for the massacres of throat-cutting and dismemberment that had stained the last four years of Algeria’s history.

There was a sudden scratching of voices outside the tent, thin and urgent like the soundtrack of an old movie. Then the flap snapped up and bin Laden walked in, dressed in a turban and green robes. I stood up, half bent under the canvas, and we shook hands, both of us forced by the tarpaulin that touched our heads to greet each other like Ottoman pashas, bowed and looking up into the other’s face. Again, he looked tired, and I had noticed a slight limp when he walked into the tent. His beard was greyer, his face thinner than I remembered it. Yet he was all smiles, almost jovial, placing the rifle which he had carried into the tent on the mattress to his left, insisting on more tea for his guest. For several seconds he looked at the ground. Then he looked at me with an even bigger smile, beneficent and, I thought at once, very disturbing.

‘Mr Robert,’ he began, and he looked around at the other men in combat jackets and soft brown hats who had crowded into the tent. ‘Mr Robert, one of our brothers had a dream. He dreamed that you came to us one day on a horse, that you had a beard and that you were a spiritual person. You wore a robe like us. This means you are a true Muslim.’

This was terrifying. It was one of the most fearful moments of my life. I understood bin Laden’s meaning a split second before each of his words. Dream. Horse. Beard. Spiritual. Robe. Muslim. The other men in the tent were all nodding and looking at me, some smiling, others silently staring at the Englishman who had appeared in the dream of the ‘brother’. I was appalled. It was both a trap and an invitation, and the most dangerous moment to be among the most dangerous men in the world. I could not reject the ‘dream’ lest I suggest bin Laden was lying. Yet I could not accept its meaning without myself lying, without suggesting that what was clearly intended of me – that I should accept this ‘dream’ as a prophecy and a divine instruction – might be fulfilled. For this man – and these men – to trust me, a foreigner, to come to them without prejudice – for them to regard me as honest – that was one thing. But to imagine that I would join them in their struggle, that I would become one with them, was beyond any possibility. The coven was waiting for a reply.

Was I imagining this? Could this not be just an elaborate, rhetorical way of expressing traditional respect towards a visitor? Was this not merely the attempt of a Muslim – many Westerners in the Middle East have experienced this – to gain an adherent to the faith? Was bin Laden really trying – let us be frank – to recruit me? I feared he was. And I immediately understood what this might mean. A Westerner, a white man from England, a journalist on a respectable newspaper – not a British convert to Islam of Arab or Asian origin – would be a catch indeed. He would go unsuspected, he could become a government official, join an army, even – as I would contemplate just over four years later – learn to fly an airliner. I had to get out of this, quickly, and I was trying to find an intellectual escape tunnel, working so hard in digging it that my brain was on fire.

‘Sheikh Osama,’ I began, even before I had decided on my next words. ‘Sheikh Osama, I am not a Muslim.’ There was silence in the tent. ‘I am a journalist.’ No one could dispute that. ‘And the job of a journalist is to tell the truth.’ No one would want to dispute that. ‘And that is what I intend to do in my life – to tell the truth.’ Bin Laden was watching me like a hawk. And he understood. I was declining the offer. In front of his men, it was now bin Laden’s turn to withdraw, to cover his retreat gracefully. ‘If you tell the truth, that means you are a good Muslim,’ he said. The men in the tent in their combat jackets and beards all nodded at this sagacity. Bin Laden smiled. I was saved. As the old cliché goes, I ‘breathed again’. No deal.

Perhaps it was out of the need to curtail this episode, to cover his embarrassment at this little failure, that bin Laden suddenly and melodramatically noticed the school satchel lying beside my camera and the Lebanese newspapers partially visible inside. He seized upon them. He must read them at once. And in front of us all, he clambered across the tent with the papers in his hand to where the paraffin lamp was hissing in the corner. And there, for half an hour, ignoring almost all of us, he read his way through the Arabic press, sometimes summoning the Egyptian to read an article, at others showing a paper to one of the other gunmen in the tent. Was this really, I began to wonder, the centre of ‘world terror’? Listening to the spokesman at the US State Department, reading the editorials in the New York Times or the Washington Post , I might have been forgiven for believing that bin Laden ran his ‘terror network’ from a state-of-the-art bunker of computers and digitalised battle plans, flicking a switch to instruct his followers to assault another Western target. But this man seemed divorced from the outside world. Did he not have a radio? A television? Why, he didn’t even know – he told me so himself after reading the papers – that the foreign minister of Iran, Ali Akbar Velayati, had visited Saudi Arabia, his own country, for the first time in more than three years.

When he returned to his place in the corner of the tent, bin Laden was businesslike. He warned the Americans of a renewed onslaught against their forces in Saudi Arabia. ‘We are still at the beginning of military action against them,’ he said. ‘But we have removed the psychological obstacle against fighting the Americans … This is the first time in fourteen centuries that the two holy shrines are occupied by non-Islamic forces …’ He insisted that the Americans were in the Gulf for oil and embarked on a modern history of the region to prove this.

‘Brezhnev wanted to reach the Hormuz Strait across Afghanistan for this reason, but by the grace of Allah and the jihad he was not only defeated in Afghanistan but was finished here. We carried our weapons on our shoulders here for ten years, and we and the sons of the Islamic world are prepared to carry weapons for the rest of our lives. But despite this, oil is not the direct impetus for the Americans occupying the region – they obtained oil at attractive prices before their invasion. There are other reasons, primarily the American-Zionist alliance, which is filled with fear at the power of Islam and of the land of Mecca and Medina. It fears that an Islamic renaissance will drown Israel. We are convinced that we shall kill the Jews in Palestine. We are convinced that with Allah’s help, we shall triumph against the American forces. It’s only a matter of numbers and time. For them to claim that they are protecting Arabia from Iraq is untrue – the whole issue of Saddam is a trick.’