Anthony Summers - The Eleventh Day

A story in the Pakistan Observer , published on December 25, quoted a Taliban official as saying the fugitive had died “a natural and quiet death” of “serious complications in the lungs.” He had supposedly been buried with military honors, according to his faith, in an unmarked grave. The story was clearly inaccurate—and perhaps a diversionary tactic, given that he in fact survived. A story that bin Laden made his escape after suffering a wound to the shoulder seems entirely possible.

Reports that became available in 2011, meanwhile, offer two versions of his escape. One holds that he headed north, to a remote part of Afghanistan, and remained there for months. The other suggests that, just as the CIA’s man at Tora Bora had feared he would, he escaped over the snow-covered passes to Pakistan with the assistance of a Pakistani militant commander.

While the force guarding the border was commanded by a Pakistan army general, most of the troops involved were drawn from tribes in the region who answered to tribal chiefs, most of whom bin Laden had cultivated and who to one degree or another approved his cause.

Good evidence that he had survived came gradually: a handwritten letter, scanned and posted on islamonline.net in August 2002; weeks later, another letter; an audiotape, followed by two others in 2003—one of them, triumphal in tone, describing how “the forces of faith” had beaten back “the evil forces of materialism” at Tora Bora; in October 2003 a videotape urging on the fighters resisting the American occupation of Iraq, encouraging the people of Palestine to continue their struggle; in 2004 three further audiotapes and—on October 29, days before the U.S. presidential election—a videotape addressed to the American people.

Bin Laden wished to tell Americans, he said, how “to avoid another Manhattan.” September 11 had been a response to the United States’ “great injustices”—especially in Iraq and Israel. He invoked God’s blessing on “the nineteen” [there had been nineteen hijackers on 9/11], and openly admitted his personal involvement. “We agreed with the general commander Mohamed Atta, may God bless his soul, to carry out all operations within twenty minutes, before Bush and his administration could be aware of them.”

Until he saw that videotape, the former Delta Force commander at Tora Bora had not been sure what to think. Some had believed the previous bin Laden tapes authentic. Some had suspected they were fakes. Fury had preferred to think them fakes, until he saw the fall 2004 appearance.

“I knew immediately that the tape was the real thing. His posture, the voice, his thin body, and the aged beard that seemed frosted of snow were unmistakeable. Unfortunately, the man was still alive.”

Not long before, far off in Afghanistan, a local militiaman named Faqir Shah had accompanied reporter Tim McGirk back to Tora Bora. “This was where Osama lived,” Shah said as they walked the shattered battlefield. “We fought al Qaeda here for two weeks in the snow.… See that hole? An American soldier tossed a piece of concrete in there from the World Trade Center, because he thought al Qaeda was all finished.…

“I didn’t think so.”

PART IV

PLOTTERS

SEVENTEEN

TWO DECADES EARLIER, WHEN THE TWIN TOWERS OF THE WORLD Trade Center had been a relatively new phenomenon—years before the earliest official concern that they would make a prime target for terrorists—an improbably tall young Saudi, still in his early twenties, had flown into the United States with his pregnant wife and two infant children. His visit, in 1979, passed without notice, for he was neither famous nor infamous.

Osama bin Laden’s activity in America appeared entirely peaceful. The fact that he came at all was not firmly established until 2009, when his wife Najwa—nine babies later and separated from her husband by force of circumstance—published a memoir. She recalled having thought that Americans in general were “gentle and nice … easy to deal with.… My husband and I did not hate America, yet we did not love it.”

An incident on the final day of their stay, as the family sat in an airport departure lounge, showed Najwa how little some Americans knew of other cultures. “I saw an American man gawking at me … jaw dropped open in surprise, curious eyes growing as large as bugs popping from his skull.… I knew without asking that his unwelcome attention had been snagged by my black Saudi costume … face veil, head scarf, and abaya .… That man gave us a good laugh.”

Bin Laden had been busy during the trip, but Najwa was the good Arab wife. “Since my husband’s business was not my business, I did not ask questions.” She asked no questions when bin Laden took off for Los Angeles for a week to talk with unknown men. Nor did she press for details when he said he was meeting—elsewhere—with “a man by the name of Abdullah Azzam.”

By mentioning Azzam, bin Laden had provided a first pointer to the direction his life was going to take. Azzam lectured and led prayers in the mosque at King Abdul Aziz University in the Saudi city of Jeddah, where bin Laden was a third-year student of economics and management. Often described as a “cleric” or “scholar,” Azzam was more than that. A Palestinian, whose village had been overrun by the Israelis in the Six Day War, he was on his way to becoming the “Emir of Jihad.”

“Jihad” is a religious duty for Muslims. It can be interpreted in several ways—its basic sense is “struggle,” or “striving”—but what Azzam meant by it was very clear. He preached the need for jihad to liberate Muslim lands from foreign occupation. “Humanity,” he was to say, “is being ruled by Jews and Christians. The Americans, the British, and others. And behind them, the fingers of world Jewry.”

In the late 1970s Azzam, an imposing figure and a fine speaker, was raging especially about Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat’s peacemaking visit to Israeli-occupied Jerusalem, a visit that millions in the Middle East saw not as statesmanship but betrayal.

With Azzam at Abdul Aziz University was Mohammed Qutb, brother of a writer and thinker who in death, following his execution in Egypt, became the guiding light of Islamic extremism. Sayid Qutb had been the leading voice of the Muslim Brotherhood, deplored the corruption of secular regimes in the Middle East, and advocated using violence to remove them. He excoriated Western society as he had seen it in the United States and poured verbal vitriol on the Jews and Zionism. Osama bin Laden read Sayid Qutb, and attended his brother’s lectures.

Azzam and Qutb were free to spread their message at will in the Saudi Arabia of the 1970s, and what they said about Israel accorded perfectly with Saudi doctrine. For all his anti-Zionist speechifying, moreover, the United States welcomed Azzam. From 1979, the year the young bin Laden met with him in the States, he was perceived as an ally in a common cause, the struggle to expel Soviet forces from Afghanistan. For both Saudi intelligence—the GID—and the CIA, Azzam was useful, a man to manipulate.

An irony, then, that—after 9/11—Azzam’s name would be joined to that of Osama bin Laden. The dedication to a so-called Encyclopedia of Jihad , a sort of how-to manual for terrorists in eleven volumes, would read: “To our much loved brother Abu Abdullah Osama bin Laden, who shared in the jihad of Sheikh Abdullah Azzam … Who has committed himself every day to jihad.”

Azzam, bin Laden himself would say, was “a man worth a nation.” For he, with bin Laden and a few comrades, was to found a movement that would shake the Western world and change history: al Qaeda.

In 1979, when the preacher from Palestine and the Saudi economics student got together in Indiana, the seeds were being sown. For the student, then and for the rest of his life, the driving force was always religion.