“That’s not true.”
“Somebody very reliable told us that you are.”
“I’m not,” Fadl replied. “Have them bring evidence. It’s a lie!”
Fadl was taken to a meeting with more al-Qaeda officials. Again Tayyib confronted him, and again Fadl denied it.
“Look, Jamal, a guy named Fazhil who you do business with—you know him, right?” Fadl nodded. “He told someone, who told us, that you take a commission.”
Confronted with more evidence, Fadl relented. “Okay,” he said, shaking his head, “I’m sorry, I did take a commission.” He had been charging local businesses a commission in exchange for selling them al-Qaeda’s goods, netting himself around $110,000.
“I must say that we cannot believe you did this. You were one of the first people to join al-Qaeda. How could you steal from us?”
Fadl’s face went red and he stared at the floor to avoid the look of condemnation in Tayyib’s eyes. “Please forgive me,” he said. “I will try my best to get the money back.”
“What should we tell bin Laden? He knows you swore
“The truth is that we are working hard, but the Egyptians are earning more money than the rest of us,” Fadl replied. His reply was a reflection of the constant tension in al-Qaeda between Egyptians, who dominated leadership positions and who were therefore paid more than other operatives, and members from elsewhere. Many of the Egyptians came with more experience, which is why they were higher up in the group. There was general resentment over the perceived inequity.
“That’s no excuse to steal.”
Fadl returned to Tayyib with about a quarter of the money he owed. The rest he had already spent, buying land for his sister and for himself. He had also bought a car. When he confessed to Tayyib that he could not come up with the remainder of the money, Tayyib told him that he needed to speak to bin Laden.
The al-Qaeda leader had been briefed on the matter. “I don’t care about the money,” bin Laden told him. “I care about you. You were with us from the start in Afghanistan. We give you a salary, we give you everything. When you travel we give you extra money. We pay your medical bills. So why do you need to steal?”
“For the reasons we have spoken about before, Abu Abdallah—because the Egyptians get more money than the rest of us, and they joined al-Qaeda later. It’s not fair.”
“That’s still no reason to steal,” bin Laden replied. “If you need the money you can always come to us. You can say, ‘I want a house’ or ‘I want a car’—and we’d give it to you. But you didn’t do that. You just stole the money.”
“I’m sorry, and I’ve given back what I have left, but I don’t have any more. I ask for your forgiveness and hope that you can grant it, and that you can accept my apology. I did my best, and I wish to remain a member of al-Qaeda.”
“There’s no forgiveness until you bring all of the money back,” bin Laden replied. The two men had arrived at a stalemate: Fadl continued to maintain that the salary scale was biased, and bin Laden argued that if he forgave Fadl, other members of the organization would think that it was all right to steal as long as they sought forgiveness.
Finding himself in a bind, Fadl walked into an American embassy in one of the countries in the Horn of Africa. He waited in a line for visa applications, and when he got to the front of the line, he was was greeted by a female clerk. “I don’t want a visa,” Fadl said, “but I have some information for you about people who want to do something against your government.”
The woman hesitated, unsure what to do. A brief conversation ensued, and she explained to Fadl that she would bring the issue to a colleague. She disappeared to another part of the embassy. Twenty minutes later she returned and asked Fadl to come into an inner office to resume the conversation.
“I was in Afghanistan,” Fadl began, “and I work with a group that is trying to make war against your country. They are trying very hard to do this. Maybe war inside the United States or maybe against the U.S. Army outside. They also are planning to bomb an embassy.”
The clerk asked Fadl how he had come by this information. “I worked with them for more than nine years,” Fadl said, “and now I’ve left the group. If you help me, I’ll tell you everything you need.” She asked Fadl where he was living, and he explained that he was living in a hotel and gave her the address.
“Don’t leave the hotel,” the clerk instructed him. “Stay out of sight.” She left the room to obtain cash for Fadl. “Here’s some money to keep you going,” she told him.
Fadl returned to the embassy a few days later and met with the same clerk. She had more questions and was trying, he sensed, to verify that he was a credible source. He answered all of her questions, and she asked him to return later that week, which he did, meeting more officials. Eventually Fadl met with Dan Coleman and two assistant U.S. attorneys from the Southern District of New York, Patrick Fitzgerald and Kenneth Karas.
Originally he didn’t tell them why he had left al-Qaeda, but he gave them enough information for them to determine that he could be believed. He returned to the embassy repeatedly for further questioning. About two weeks into the process, his interlocutors told him that they knew he had committed some offense in Sudan, and that if Fadl could not tell them what it was, they couldn’t trust him. Assuming that they must have somehow found out about the money he had been skimming off the top of his deals with local businesses, he sheepishly confessed, and with that he opened up: telling his questioners, in great detail, about an organization called al-Qaeda, its structure, its leaders, its members, and its operations.
Being back in Afghanistan reconnected bin Laden to the “golden chain” of money from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and elsewhere that had once funded the mujahideen and that now was funding the Taliban in the same way. Funding rippled out to al-Qaeda through Taliban channels, but bin Laden reactivated his own connection to the network. In this way he was able, beginning in 1996, to begin adding to his Afghani bases, buying construction equipment to help him build caves and facilities; he also continued to build his operations around the world. The cash that poured in from sympathetic Saudis, in particular, enabled him to make deeper inroads into countries such as Albania and Yemen, as well as into London.
Bin Laden’s oath of loyalty to Mullah Omar, which by 1997 had become public knowledge, gave al-Qaeda freedom of movement, allowing the group to use the Afghani national airline to transport money, weapons, and operatives, and relieving them of any worries about crossing controlled borders. Bin Laden in turn provided money to the Taliban, and among the gifts he lavished on Mullah Omar was a house for him and his family.
Bin Laden promised the Taliban that he would keep a low profile, but soon he was attracting attention, notably following his March 1997 interview with Peter Arnett on CNN. Shortly after, Mullah Omar had bin Laden moved to Kandahar, where he himself was headquartered, so that he could keep a closer watch on him.
The CNN interview was bin Laden’s first television appearance, and questions were submitted in advance. When asked about criticisms he had made of the Saudi royal family, he accused them of being “but a branch or an agent of the U.S.,” and he spoke about his jihad against America. The Saudis were furious—especially so because they were funding the Taliban—and Prince Turki bin Faisal al-Saud, director general of al-Mukhabarat al-Aamah, the Saudi Arabian intelligence agency, received a promise from Mullah Omar on behalf of the Taliban that bin Laden would be expelled.
On February 23, 1998, al-Qaeda issued its second fatwa declaring war against the United States:
The Arabian Peninsula has never—since God made it flat, created its desert, and encircled it with seas— been stormed by any forces like the crusader armies spreading in it like locusts, eating its riches and wiping out its plantations.… For over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples.… The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [the Grand Mosque] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim. This is in accordance with the words of Almighty God: “and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together,” and “fight them until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in God.”
“Enough about al-Qaeda,” Jamal al-Fadl said to me one day after we had spent the morning talking about bin
