was credible. The three-page account of Fouda’s work in the London
Unaccountably, 9/11 Commission staff failed to interview Fouda and mentioned his breakthrough interview only in an obscure footnote. It was included, however, in evidence presented during the military tribunal proceedings at Guantanamo. Two distinguished award-winning reporters,
During the reporter’s meeting with KSM and Binalshibh, a mysterious visitor had arrived, a man who could not be named. He was, Fouda was told, “a close companion of Sheikh Abu Abdullah, God protect him.”
“Abu Abdullah” was one of the several names associates used to refer to Osama bin Laden.
Had al Qaeda been a company in the West, Fouda concluded from what he learned that day, KSM would have been its CEO. The post of chairman belonged to bin Laden.
TWENTY-TWO
AFTER FIRST MEETING TOWARD THE END OF THE ANTI-SOVIET CONFLICT in Afghanistan, Bin Laden and KSM had for years followed separate trajectories. Until the mid-1990s, KSM plotted terror with his nephew Yousef, then traveled the world networking with fellow jihadis. Bin Laden stayed most of the time in Sudan, presenting an innocent face to the world.
To
Bin Laden the tycoon tended his business empire, but bin Laden the jihadi was never far away. To his guesthouse in Khartoum came all manner of men, rich and poor, powerful and humble, all focused on Muslim causes. In 1992, following the collapse of the former Yugoslavia and the beginning of strife between Christians and Muslims, Bosnia became the cause of the moment. The embattled Bosnian regime accepted massive financial support from Saudi Arabia and volunteer fighters, Arab veterans of the war in Afghanistan.
Though bin Laden rarely ventured out of Sudan, he did visit Bosnia. Renate Flottau, of the German magazine
Of the Arabs who rallied to the fight in Bosnia, three were to play key roles in the 9/11 operation. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was in the country twice during the same period. Two others, Saudi fighters, went on to be 9/11 hijackers.
Through bin Laden, massive injections of funds also went to the Muslim separatists in Chechnya. It won him loyalty—there would be dozens of Chechens, it would be reported, among the holdouts who fought on with bin Laden, after 9/11, at Tora Bora.
In Sudan in the early 1990s those who plotted terror found a welcome. There was Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian doctor turned fundamentalist zealot who had been a close associate in Afghanistan. From Khartoum, he directed bombings and assassinations in his homeland. One attempt came close to killing then-President Hosni Mubarak himself.
There was also a younger man, whose name was never to be as familiar to the public as Zawahiri’s. This was Abu Zubaydah, born in Saudi Arabia to a Palestinian father, still in his early twenties but already proving an effective manager of men and facilities. He was to be a key operative in the lead-up to 9/11.
At meetings in Khartoum, bin Laden sounded off regularly about the target he called the snake. “The snake is America, and we have to stop them. We have to cut their head off and stop what they are doing in the Horn of Africa.”
In late 1992, in the Yemeni city of Aden, bombs exploded outside two hotels housing U.S. troops on their way to join the United Nations relief mission in Somalia—then, as now, a war-torn country on the east coast of Africa. Though botched—no American soldiers were killed—the attack was later linked to bin Laden.
Bin Laden would later claim that his men, fighting alongside Somalis, a year later played a leading role in the disastrous U.S. raid on a Somali warlord’s headquarters. In that bloody fiasco, eighteen American soldiers were killed, seventy-eight wounded, and two Black Hawk helicopters shot down.
For a long time, there were no attacks in bin Laden’s homeland, Saudi Arabia. Then, in 1995, a truck bomb exploded outside a National Guard facility in the capital, Riyadh. Seven were killed and sixty injured, and five of the dead were American Army and civilian trainers.
The only link to bin Laden at the time was that the four men accused of the bombing—who were executed— said they had read his writings on jihad. Information developed later, however, indicated that he supplied money to purchase the explosives, that the munitions were stored in a bin Laden warehouse, then moved onward to Saudi Arabia aboard a bin Laden–owned ship.
The attack, bin Laden has said since, was a noble act that “paved the way for the raising of voices of opposition against the American occupation from within the ruling family.” He urged Saudis to “adopt every tactic to throw the Americans out of our territory.”
Seven months later, a huge bomb exploded outside an American housing complex near Dhahran, in eastern Saudi Arabia. Inside at the time was a large number of troops, many of them personnel serving with the 4404th Fighter Wing at the time patrolling the no-fly zone over Iraq. Nineteen Americans were killed, 372 wounded.
It was the largest terrorist bomb ever to be used against Americans, more powerful than the device used in the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, or a decade later in the destruction of the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City. Who was behind the attack long remained the subject of controversy. A body of evidence indicated that Iran was responsible, but many believe bin Laden was at least complicit.
He had reportedly been in Qatar before the attack, arranging—again—for the purchase and delivery of explosives. In an interview the following year, he said al Qaeda had indeed been involved, that the bombers had been “heroes.”
Even before the bombings in Saudi Arabia, bin Laden’s life as an exile in Sudan had turned sour. The Saudi royals, and his own family, had tried to persuade him to change course. “They called me several times from the Kingdom,” he recalled, “wanting me to return home, to talk about things. I refused.… They told me that the King would like me to act as intermediary between the different factions in Afghanistan. King Fahd himself called to try to win me over.… They sent my brother to try to convince me, but it didn’t work.”
The royals persuaded members of bin Laden’s family—including his mother, his father’s only surviving brother, and the half-brother who now headed the bin Laden company—to visit him in Sudan. “They beseeched him to stop his diatribes against Saudi and the Americans,” a family source told the BBC. “Come back and we’ll give you a responsible job in the company, one of the top five positions.” When that suggestion was rebuffed, the Saudis’ patience ran out.
That, at any rate, was the regime’s official position. In the spring of 1994, the royal family declared bin Laden’s citizenship revoked for “behavior that contradicts the Kingdom’s interests.” His family followed suit with a statement of “condemnation of all acts that Osama bin Laden may have committed.” His share of the family fortune, which had earlier been placed in a trust, was sold off and placed in a frozen account.
Though this sounded draconian, the full picture may have been otherwise. The formal cutoff caused bin Laden only a temporary cash flow problem. Far into the future, he would have huge sums of money at his disposal.
Later, asked whether he had really been disowned, bin Laden would put his hand on his heart. “Blood,” he said, “is thicker than water.” The DGSE, France’s intelligence service, which carefully monitored bin Laden over many years, took the view as late as 2000 that “Osama bin Laden has kept up contact with certain members of the family … even though it has officially said the contrary. One of his brothers would appear to be playing a role of
