The Bin Ladens

urgently in order to enable Sayyaf to conquer Kabul.”¹⁹

In 1984 Osama entered Afghanistan for the first time, essentially as a tourist. He may have visited Sada. He witnessed some fighting around Jaji, near the new Arab camp. It was the first time in his life that he had heard the concussive thump of shells or felt the blood-quickening pulse of exposure to war. The experience seemed to thrill him but also infuse him with guilt over the length of time it had taken him to put himself at physical risk in the cause he had espoused with such conspicuous pride. “I feel so guilty for listening to my friends and those that I love not to come here, and stay home for reasons of safety,” he told a Syrian journalist. “I feel that this delay of four years requires my own martyrdom in the name of God.”²⁰

It was a refrain he would repeat for many years, while managing, nonetheless, to persistently avoid what he claimed to welcome. Certainly Azzam wished to keep him in one piece. Osama’s fundraising prowess had reached new heights.

Azzam moved to Peshawar in October 1984 to establish the Makhtab Al-Khadamat, or “Services Office,” to support Afghan fighters and serve Arab volunteers who traveled to the war. His vision for the office blended Islamic charity and marketing. His projects included Al-Jihad magazine, whose first issue, published in December, concentrated mainly on fundraising. The start-up money came from Osama, who provided initial cash infusions at an annual rate of between $200,000 and $300,000. For the first time, too, the Bin Laden family also provided engineering and construction personnel to support the war effort—an Arab volunteer who arrived in Peshawar in 1984 recalled meeting a construction engineer assigned from the Bin Laden organization. During the Hajj pilgrimage of the Islamic year 1405, which took place in June 1985, Azzam lodged for days at a Bin Laden home in Mecca. “The entire Bin Laden family were hosting people. And they had food and busses to take people,” recalled Abdullah Anas, Azzam’s future son-in-law. A document about Osama’s work from that same year describes contributions provided by the Bin Laden family foundation.²¹

Osama associated himself with Azzam’s radical voice, yet he remained an entirely orthodox Saudi figure, a minor emissary of its establishment. His volunteerism remained inseparable from his family’s identity and its business strategy.

IT WAS AZZAM who first introduced Osama to the concept of transnational jihad. “When the Sheikh started out,” Bin Laden said years later, “the atmosphere among the Islamists and sheikhs was limited, location-specific and regional, each dealing with their own particular locale, but he inspired the Islamic movement and motivated Muslims to the broader jihad. At that point we were both in the same boat.” As an exiled Palestinian, Azzam spoke passionately about his homeland but encouraged his followers to regard the conflict with Israel as part of a larger war waged by unbelievers against Muslims—a millenarian conflict, leading inevitably to Judgment Day, as forecasted in the Koran. Azzam’s speeches and books dwelled on the suffering of Muslim innocents. He deified Afghan and Palestinian civilians as victims of aggression and cried for revenge. The women and children dying in Afghanistan under Soviet guns and in Lebanon after the Israeli invasion of 1982 were united by their identity as Muslims. These incursions into Muslim lands gave rise to fard ayn, a compulsory duty upon all Muslims to repel them. Azzam’s ideas traced to the writings of the thirteenth-century jihadi theorist Ibn Taymiyya, which Bin Laden himself would later quote: “As for repelling the enemy aggressor who corrupts religion and the world, there is no greater duty after faith than uncompromising struggle against him.” Azzam argued that Afghanistan was the most pressing theater for such jihad, and that it would strengthen the ummah, or “community of believers,” for a later war to liberate Palestine. Here the ideological and opportunistic sides of Azzam merged in argument; as a practical matter, in Afghanistan, he could raise money and influence events, whereas in Palestine, at least for the time being, he was a powerless and not particularly influential exile.²²

The 1982 Israeli campaign in Lebanon lit up the Arab world; it was a televised war filled with infuriating news and images. Osama watched at a time when he was absorbed by Azzam’s lectures about jihad and mesmerized by his mentor’s stature as an unyielding Islamic activist and an exiled Palestinian. In later years it would become common to describe Osama’s overheated rhetoric about Palestinians as little more than media-savvy lip service from a Saudi who pandered to his Arab following. That interpretation overlooks Osama’s self-conscious pride about his father’s work in Jerusalem, however, as well as his close relationship with Azzam. It also ignores his recollections, which may be suspect in their emphases but are not likely invented. “The events that made a direct impression on me were during and after 1982, when America allowed the Israelis to invade Lebanon,” scene of his boyhood schooling, Osama wrote years later:

I still remember those distressing scenes: blood, torn limbs, women and children massacred. All over the place, houses were being destroyed and tower blocks were collapsing, crushing their residents…In those critical moments, many ideas raged inside me, ideas difficult to describe, but they unleashed a powerful urge to reject injustice and a strong determination to punish the oppressors. 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 have a taste of its own medicine…On that day I became sure that the oppression and intentional murder of innocent women and children is a deliberate American policy.²³

This reminiscence—ideas that “raged inside” and were “difficult to describe”—suggest some of the tension and confusion in Osama’s expanding intellectual and political life. Inspired by Azzam, he began in Peshawar to synthesize the banal tasks of organizing and fundraising—forming bureaucratic committees, reviewing publishing plans, creating rules and systems to provide financial subsidies to young Saudi volunteers—with a more mystical and poetical rhetoric of martyrdom. Partly this reflected Azzam’s millenarian beliefs, but partly it was a marketing strategy crafted by a money-conscious proselytizer and the former business student who funded him. Their conduct suggests that Osama and Azzam were less interested in becoming martyrs than in creating a movement based on the emotional power of other people’s martyrdom. Azzam used testimonials and memorials to sanctify the sacrifices of the first young, poorly trained volunteers who passed through his guesthouses in Peshawar and died in Afghanistan. “Lucky him who is rewarded with martyrdom,” Azzam wrote. “Allah rewards him with seventy-two virgins and he can choose seventy of his relatives to join him in heaven.” Of the first four committees Osama organized at the Services Office, one promoted media operations and a second promoted education.²⁴ His instincts were hardly surprising; he had spent much of his early working life in Bin Laden offices filled with glossy brochures and staffed by specialists in advertising and marketing. In his work for the royal family and the religious authorities in Medina and Mecca, Osama had learned that a project was a success only if its sponsors saw it as a success, and to ensure that they did, publishing and advertising had to play a role. He brought some of this modern business ethos to his earliest projects in Peshawar.

It was only about three months after Osama established the Services Office with Azzam that Salem, while on his hunting trip with Saudi royalty in Pakistan, flew into Peshawar with his video camera and his unbelieving entourage, consisting of a Swedish mechanic and an American specialist in ultralight aircraft.²⁵ Osama seemed to instinctively understand where his own passion for jihad overlapped with Salem’s potential interest in the Afghan war—Osama chose to put orphans, not volunteer fighters, on display for his brother’s camera. This was mainstream charity marketing on which they could collaborate without any hint of conflict: “God instructs you to treat orphans fairly,” holds a Koranic verse. “He is well aware of whatever good you do.”²⁶

Even now, as he began to think of himself as a war fighter and perhaps, eventually, a martyr in the name of jihad, Osama interacted respectfully with his cigarette-smoking, patently irreligious elder brother. The sawa, or religious awakening, in Saudi Arabia might tug at family unity, but Osama also stretched himself to forgive secular-minded siblings, recalled his friend Jamal Khashoggi. What Osama feared more than individual sinfulness was “a mass movement of secularization, mixed schools, top-down changes.” Also, recalled Khashoggi, “the Brotherhood emphasized the role of love and care and compassion in reaching out to non- observant Muslims. He had no problem with that, with non-observant Muslims. His method was to be compassionate and patient.” Osama regarded his family’s contributions to his work as nothing more or less than their duty: “Financial jihad,” he would later write, “likewise, is an obligation…particularly for those who have the resources, rather than those who don’t.”²⁷

Salem visited Peshawar a second time during this period, according to Bengt Johansson, who accompanied him. They met Osama in a suburban villa, “an Arab office, with some sofas around.” They talked together for an