Anthony Summers - The Eleventh Day

Looking back, Simpson vividly remembered how the Arab who wanted him dead had looked at that moment. He remembered especially the eyes: with that “crazy, handsome glitter—the Desert Sheikh meets Hannibal Lecter.”

Only years later, when the news was filled with stories and photographs of bin Laden, did Girardet and Simpson realize just who the menacing Arab had been.

THE MEN AROUND bin Laden had indeed long since deferred to him, as they had to his mentor, Azzam, before his death, as sheikh. Azzam had said jihad needed a “vanguard,” a leadership that would give the dreamed-of future Islamic society a “strong foundation.” The Arabic words he used for “strong foundation” were “al-qaeda al-sulbah.”

A few months later, in 1988, Azzam, bin Laden, and a handful of comrades had discussed plans for how to make progress once the Soviets finally left. Initially, they planned, they would maintain a militia of some three hundred men. Those who enlisted would make a pledge, “so that the word of God will be the highest and his religion victorious.” The camps in which they would train would be “al-qa’ida al’askariyya” —the Military Base.

Those who do not understand Arabic—these authors included—might interpret these utterances as the birth of the dragon that the Western media now calls “al Qaeda.” Not so, recent scholarship suggests. The word does mean “the foundation” or “the base”—and other things, for such is Arabic. More than one future bin Laden militant, though, would say he never heard the name “al Qaeda”—referring to an organization or fighting entity—before 9/11. Bin Laden himself would not refer to “members of al Qaeda” until shortly before 9/11.

“He rang me to explain,” Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi said of a call from bin Laden after the anti-Soviet conflict. “He said al Qaeda was an organization to record the names of the mujahideen and all their contact details: a database.… So wherever jihad needed fighting, in the Philippines or Central Asia or anywhere in the world, you could get in touch with the fighters quickly.”

All the same, a seed had been sown.

The ISI chief of the day, Hamid Gul, was asked in 1989 whether it had not been “playing with fire” to bring in Muslim radicals. “We are fighting a jihad,” Gul replied. “The communists have their international brigades, the West has NATO, why can’t the Muslims unite and form a common front?”

Gul was replaced as head of ISI by Benazir Bhutto, the moderate, Western-educated prime minister who had come to power in Pakistan the previous year. At a private meeting with President George H. W. Bush, she said, “I mentioned that in our common zeal to most effectively combat the Soviets in Afghanistan, our countries had made a strategic decision to empower the most fanatical elements of the mujahideen.… I sadly said to President Bush, ‘Mr. President, I’m afraid we have created a Frankenstein’s monster that could come back to haunt us in the future.’ ”

THE FUTURE CAST of 9/11’s characters was now waiting in the wings. Ayman al-Zawahiri, a doctor by training, led a clique of militant Egyptians in Afghanistan. Though his specialty was eye surgery, he had dealt with every sort of injury and ailment during the conflict—including bin Laden’s chronic low blood pressure. One day, he would become bin Laden’s principal cohort. Bin Laden and Mohammed Atef, who would become his strategist and senior commander, had fought side by side. All three of them knew Omar Abdel Rahman, the incendiary preacher later to be known in the West as the “Blind Sheikh.”

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who would one day claim to have been the principal planner of 9/11, was in his mid-twenties in 1989. Ramzi Yousef, who would lead a first attempt to destroy the World Trade Center, was still at college. Both of them were passionately hostile to the United States because of its support for Israel.

Mohamed Atta, who was to lead the 9/11 hijackers, was just twenty-one and studying architecture at Cairo University. His future fellow “pilots,” Hani Hanjour, Ziad Jarrah, and Marwan al-Shehhi, were seventeen, fourteen, and eleven.

As a little boy, Jarrah had lived near the refugee camp where hundreds of Palestinian refugees had been slaughtered—by Christian militiamen with the knowledge of Israeli commanders—during Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

The plight of the Palestinians, the rise and rise of Israel, and America’s consistent support of Israel preoccupied bin Laden from very early on. His mother has recalled him, as a teenager, being “concerned, sad, and frustrated about the situation in Palestine in particular.” It was essential, bin Laden said even then, “to reclaim Palestine.”

By the mid-1980s, bin Laden was already speaking out publicly about boycotting American products. He would not drink Coca-Cola, Pepsi, or 7-Up, or allow his children to drink such beverages. “The Americans take our money,” he recalled saying, “and give it to the Jews so that they can kill our children with it in Palestine.” “Our” children, because Palestinians were fellow Arabs, part of the wider Arab community. He was to raise the Palestine issue and excoriate American support for Israel time and again—until as recently as 2009.

The 1982 Israeli assault on Lebanon, bin Laden said after 9/11, made a lasting impression on him. “America allowed the Israelis to invade Lebanon,” he declared. “They started bombing, killing and wounding many.… I still remember those distressing scenes: blood, torn limbs, women and children massacred.… It was like a crocodile devouring a child, who could do nothing but scream.… The whole world heard and saw what happened, but did nothing.”

It was then, bin Laden asserted, that something like 9/11 first occurred to him. He watched, presumably on television, as Israel bombarded the high-rise apartment blocks that housed many Palestinians in Beirut. “The idea came to me,” he asserted, “when things went just too far with the American-Israeli alliance’s oppression and atrocities against our people in Palestine and Lebanon.… As I looked at those destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me to punish the oppressor in kind by destroying towers in America, so that it would get a taste of its own medicine.”

“The events of Manhattan,” he would say on an audiotaped message broadcast after 9/11, “were retaliation against the American-Israeli alliance’s aggression against our people in Palestine and Lebanon.”

PERHAPS SO. While he was still the hero home from the war, though, a further grievance against the United States arose on his home territory—one that, for bin Laden and many other Saudis—loomed at least as large as Palestine.

NINETEEN

IN AUGUST 1990, OSAMA BIN LADEN STOCKED UP ON FOOD SUPPLIES, candles, gas masks, and portable communications equipment. In the event of the need for a quick getaway, he had a more powerful engine fitted to the boat he kept at the family marina. At home, he got his sons to help him cover the windows with adhesive tape. The tape, he explained, was in case of bombing, to protect the family from broken glass.

Bombing was a possibility. Saddam Hussein’s army had overrun neighboring Kuwait and appeared poised to push on into Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden despised the Iraqi president, whom he considered an unbeliever. Saddam, he predicted, “will attack Saudi Arabia for possession of the oilfields in the eastern province.”

Oil was what mattered, the one thing that really mattered, to all the nations involved. It was the only reason, certainly, that Saudi Arabia had ever mattered to the Americans. “The defense of Saudi Arabia,” President Franklin Roosevelt had said back in 1943, “is vital to the defense of the United States.” Half a century on and within twenty-four hours of the Iraqi invasion, the first President Bush now made a promise. “If you ask for help from the United States,” he told Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar, “we will go all the way with you.”