Only rarely does an intelligence agency reveal facts inimical to its own interests. Most often, intelligence sources share only information that it is useful to share—in other words, self-serving. Such information is not necessarily truthful.
The natural impulse of the general public in the West may be to give credence to accounts provided by “our” intelligence—publicly and officially or through “sources.” Such trust, though, may be misplaced. Like any story told by humans, an account given by an intelligence agency—domestic or foreign—may be only partially true. It may even be an outright lie.
WHAT IS CLEAR is that Saudi Arabia’s intelligence service, the GID, reached out for bin Laden early in the Afghan confrontation with the Soviets—through his former school science teacher, Ahmed Badeeb. Badeeb had kept an eye on his pupil during his days on the school’s religious committee, had liked him, thought him “decent … polite,” and—now that bin Laden was in his early twenties—saw a role for him.
Badeeb had gone up in the world. He was no longer a science teacher but chief of staff to GID’s director, Prince Turki al-Faisal. Turki was in the second year of what was to be a long career as chief of the agency. He was American-educated, a man who could relate easily to his U.S. counterparts. The GID and the CIA liaised closely with each other from the moment he became director—on his terms, not Washington’s.
For the United States, the coming struggle with the Soviets was a pivotal confrontation in the Cold War. For the Saudi government in 1980, it was much more than that. Afghanistan was a fellow Muslim nation overwhelmed by catastrophe. Uncounted numbers of its citizens were swarming into Pakistan as refugees. To bring aid to the Afghans, and being seen to do it, was to aid the cause of Islam.
That aside, it was feared that the Soviet thrust heralded an eventual threat to Saudi Arabia itself. Prince Turki was soon shuttling between Riyadh and Pakistan, networking with Pakistan’s Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence—ISI—triggering a relief effort that was to last far into the future.
On another tack, and in great secrecy, the GID and the CIA worked together to support the Afghan rebels’ fight against the Soviets. Thanks to huge sums of money funneled through a Swiss bank account, modern weaponry began to make the rebels a more viable fighting force.
“When the invasion of Afghanistan started,” bin Laden once said, “I was enraged and went there at once. I arrived within days, before the end of 1979.” At GID headquarters, Prince Turki and his aide Badeeb noted bin Laden’s potential. Youthful though he was, as a member of the bin Laden conglomerate he had clout. He had, above all, religious drive and commitment.
“To confront those Russian infidels,” bin Laden said, “the Saudis chose me as their representative in Afghanistan. When they decided to participate actively in the Islamic resistance they turned to the bin Laden family … which had close links to the royal family. And my family designated me. I installed myself in Pakistan, in the frontier region bordering on Afghanistan. There I received the volunteers who arrived from Saudi Arabia and all the Arab and Muslim countries.”
Prince Turki has admitted having met bin Laden a couple of times in that early period, while avoiding going into detail. His former chief of staff Badeeb has been more forthright. Bin Laden, he has said, “had a strong relation with the Saudi intelligence and with our embassy in Pakistan.… He was our man.… We were happy with him.… He had a good relationship with the ambassador, and with all Saudi ambassadors who served there. At times, the embassy would ask bin Laden for some things and he would respond positively.… The Pakistanis, too, saw in him one who was helping them do what they wanted done there.”
According to one of the most well-informed sources on the conflict, the journalist Ahmed Rashid, Pakistan’s ISI had wanted Turki “to provide a royal prince to lead the Saudi contingent.” In bin Laden, with his family’s links to the Saudi royals, they got the next best thing.
What was required of him in the early 1980s was not to fight but to travel to-and-fro, spread money around, cultivate Afghan contacts, make sure that cash got to the right people. Then his activities became entwined with those of Abdullah Azzam, the jihadist whose lectures he had attended at university. The duty of jihad “will not end with victory in Afghanistan,” Azzam was heard to declare. “Jihad will remain an individual obligation until all other lands that were Muslim are returned to us.”
With Saudi support, Azzam moved full-time to Pakistan, and so eventually did bin Laden—at his mentor’s request. By 1986 they were running the office that processed Arab donations and handled recruits rallying to the cause. Funded with money from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, and his own wealth, bin Laden ensured that arrivals were housed, cared for if they were sick or wounded, and fed Islamic propaganda.
Newcomers stayed initially at a building called Beit al-Ansar, which translates as Place of the Supporters. That was a reference to an episode in the story of the Prophet Mohammed, but it resonates today in another way. Twelve years later, some of the future 9/11 hijackers would give their apartment that name. Azzam, for his part, toured the United States regularly, raising funds and starting what eventually became a nationwide support system.
At some point, according to a source quoted by Barnett Rubin, now a senior State Department adviser on Pakistan and Afghanistan, the CIA “enlisted” Azzam. Did the Agency have any involvement with bin Laden himself?
The CIA had significantly ratcheted up its support for the anti-Soviet forces by the mid-1980s. U.S. funding, $470 million in 1986, continued to soar, and the agency saw to it that more and better weapons reached the Afghans. Under a supposedly strict, immutable arrangement, however—necessary to the United States to ensure deniability, to Pakistan to retain control—all this assistance was handled by the ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence service. Officials of the day have played down the notion that there was American contact with bin Laden, or anyone else in the field.
Reputable authors have reported how the CIA on occasion circumvented the rules. While the bulk of the mujahideen were trained by Pakistani officers, some of the officers were trained in the States. U.S. and British Special Forces veterans entered Afghanistan and operated alongside the fighters. American cash went to at least one Afghan commander who collaborated with bin Laden.
Other voices claim there was an early link between the CIA and bin Laden himself. Michael Springmann, who in 1986 and 1987 headed the Non-Immigrant Visa Section at the U.S. consulate in Jeddah, said that the CIA forced him against his will to issue visas to people who would otherwise have been ineligible. “What I was protesting was, in reality, an effort to bring recruits, rounded up by [the Agency and] Osama bin Laden, to the U.S. for terrorists training by the CIA. They would then be returned to Afghanistan to fight against the Soviets.”
Simon Reeve, a British author, cited a “former CIA official” as saying that “U.S. emissaries met directly with bin Laden.” According to this source it was bin Laden, acting on advice from Saudi intelligence, who suggested that the mujahideen be supplied with the Stinger missiles that proved devastatingly effective against Soviet airpower.
“Bin Laden,” wrote former British foreign secretary Robin Cook, “was a product of a monumental miscalculation of Western security agencies. Throughout the 80s he was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan.”
In a little-known interview, bin Laden himself appeared to offer a revelation. “I created my first camps,” he said in 1995, “where these volunteers underwent training, instructed by Pakistani and
Then, a year later, bin Laden reversed himself. “Personally,” he said in 1996, “neither I nor my brothers saw evidence of American help.”
Statements by Osama bin Laden—and for that matter those of intelligence officials—rarely contribute much to historical clarity.
THE USE THE GID SAW for bin Laden initially put him nowhere near the combat zone. “The Saudi government,” he would recall, had “officially asked me not to enter Afghanistan, due to how close my family is to the Saudi leadership. They ordered me to stay in Peshawar [Pakistan], because in the event the Russians arrested me that would be a proof of our support for the mujahideen.… I didn’t listen to them, and went into Afghanistan for the first time.”
Quite early in the 1980s, back in Jeddah, Najwa bin Laden heard her husband tell other family members that he had entered the Afghan war zone. He mentioned, too, that he had handled the controls of a helicopter. She
