The Bin Ladens

inculcated by Abdullah Azzam, was further inflamed when Salem informed him that his attempt to buy Stingers had been rebuffed at the Pentagon. In any event, by comparison, Osama was fiercely protective of the Saudi royal family during this same period. A Palestinian journalist who worked at Al-Jihad magazine recalled Osama lashing out when colleagues suggested during 1986 that King Fahd was not a legitimate Muslim because Queen Elizabeth had presented him a medal that resembled a Christian cross: “For God’s sake, don’t discuss this subject—concentrate on your mission,” Osama said, as the journalist recalled it. “I don’t permit anyone to discuss this issue here.” He was at war with the enemies of Saudi Arabia, not with its throne.¹²

BEGINNING IN THE SUMMER of 1986, Osama spent more of his time around Jaji, in the Afghan province of Khost, near a protrusion of Pakistani territory called Parrot’s Beak. This was an area of increasing strategic importance in the broader Afghan war. A number of important Afghan rebel fighting units with strong Islamist credentials—those led by Haqqani, Sayyaf, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and Younus Khalis—operated in this vicinity. They tried to pressure Kabul and its outskirts. Sayyaf, in particular, ran a training facility near Jaji. It was the theatrical site he had used to host Arab donors, but increasingly his camp was situated in a hot battle zone.

Pakistani intelligence officers who directed supplies and tried to manage war strategy on the front lines decided to fortify the border area around Jaji, to preserve their supply lines and protect Afghan fighters from the Soviet raids. Osama joined in this effort. He built infrastructure that served the Islamist Afghan commanders, and for himself, he constructed a new camp near Sayyaf ’s Jaji facility, which he called the Lion’s Den. The number of volunteers who initially joined him there in the autumn of 1986 was tiny—as few as a dozen, many still in their teens. Abdullah Azzam was uneasy about Osama’s solo venture. He was still financially dependent upon his protege. Among other things, he feared that Soviet troops might kidnap Bin Laden and fly him off to Kabul as a propaganda prize. Azzam sent Arabs from his own nearby camp to join and protect Bin Laden; by the end of the year, the militia at the Lion’s Den had grown to about fifty.¹³

Osama built this initially unimposing brigade—barely a platoon, actually—with active support from his family. In addition to helping him buy weapons, the Bin Ladens shipped construction equipment during 1986 to support Osama’s projects on the border. Bin Laden company engineers had volunteered in Peshawar earlier, and some construction equipment probably arrived during that earlier period as well. A large batch reached Pakistan between October and December of 1986.¹⁴ Afterward, Osama expanded construction activity around Jaji and built roads north toward the mountain redoubt of Tora Bora, which Pakistani intelligence officers had identified as an area where caves and storage depots could be fortified and defended. None of this support from the Bin Ladens—apart from the missiles and ammunition—would have seemed exceptional; it differed little in character from the defense construction work they had done for the Saudi government for years on the Yemen frontier, among other places. Osama later described the scope of his imports:

In spite of the Soviet power, we used to move with confidence and God conferred favors on us so that we transported heavy equipment from Saudi Arabia estimated at hundreds of tons altogether that included bulldozers, loaders, dump trucks, and equipment for digging trenches. When we saw the brutality of the Russians bombing mujaheddin positions, we dug a good number of huge tunnels and built in them some storage places and in some others we built a hospital. We also dug some roads.¹⁵

Ahmed Badeeb recalled that Osama was “very professional” as he built these underground fortifications. Indeed, Bin Laden was literally operating at times as a construction professional, under contract with Pakistani and probably also Saudi intelligence. He chose a group of young Saudi volunteers from Medina, the city where he had so recently served as a Bin Laden executive, to work with him. The Bin Laden office in Cairo, in cooperation with the Saudi Ministry of Interior, obtained visas for young Egyptian Islamists who wanted to volunteer in Afghanistan. By one account, Bin Laden companies also contracted to build hospitals and other facilities for Islamic charities in Peshawar. These Peshawar building projects generated several hundred jobs for Arab workers from Egypt and elsewhere, by this account; the workers poured concrete nine to five and some toured the jihad on weekends.¹⁶

Osama was no longer a tourist to the war, however; he was now shaping the battlefield in a strategically important region at a time of military escalation. His ragtag unit of volunteers might be of little importance, but his construction work was significant, at least in the evaluation of American and Pakistani intelligence officers who monitored the overall war effort. Recalled Milton Bearden, the CIA station chief in Pakistan at the time, speaking of Osama: “He put a lot of money in a lot of the right places in Afghanistan.” With his cash and bulldozers, he won allegiance from Arab fighters who saw him as “more practical” than the preachy Azzam.¹⁷

“HISTORY RECOUNTS THAT AMERICA supported everyone who waged jihad and fought against Russia,” Osama once noted in passing. It is the only time he is known to have spoken positively about the American role in the anti-Soviet Afghan war. The great majority of his other comments have emphasized American hypocrisy during the conflict and his own staunch independence from the CIA. Even in radical Islamist circles, the canard occasionally circulated that Bin Laden had been a CIA client or paid agent during the 1980s. An Al-Jazeera interviewer once put the question to him directly, and Osama offered a lengthy, defensive reply, one that combined theological and realpolitik justifications for the proximity between his own activities and those of the CIA:

It’s an attempt to distort by the Americans, and praise be to God that He has thwarted their conspiracy…As for their claim that they supported the jihad and the struggle against the Soviets, well, this support came from Arab countries, especially from the Gulf…The Americans are lying when they claim they helped us at any point, and we challenge them to present a single shred of evidence to prove it. In fact, they were a burden on us…We were doing our duty, which is supporting Islam in Afghanistan, even if this did coincide with American interests. When the Muslims were fighting the Byzantines, during the fierce war between the Byzantines and the Persians, no one in their right mind could say that the Muslims were fighting as agents of the Persians against the Byzantines. There was merely a common interest…Unintended confluence of interests does not mean there is any kind of link or tacit agreement.¹⁸

There is no evidence from any source—no document, no interview—to suggest that Osama ever met an American intelligence officer. The only American of any kind whom he is known to have greeted personally—apart, perhaps, from Bin Laden family members and other Arab acquaintances who carried American passports—is George Harrington, the ultralight salesman and accidental adventurer from San Antonio who accompanied Salem to Peshawar in early 1985. Nonetheless, whether he was aware of it or not, Osama’s logistics and construction work along the Pakistan border, starting in 1986, intersected with CIA programs and funding. The agency’s logistics and construction units, working through Pakistani intelligence, provided cement and other materials for the caves and storage facilities that Afghan commanders such as Haqqani and Hekmatyar built along the border during this period. Osama’s construction with Bin Laden family equipment certainly complemented these projects, and he may well have participated in them. Moreover, after 1986, Haqqani became what intelligence officers refer to as a “unilateral” asset of the CIA, meaning that he received tens of thousands of dollars in cash directly from CIA officers working undercover in Pakistan, without any mediation by Pakistani intelligence, which normally handled and relayed the great majority of CIA funds to the Afghans. Haqqani had multiple sources of cash but the CIA payments were sizable. Haqqani, in turn, helped and protected Osama and the Arab volunteers as they built their nascent militia. (Osama later referred to Haqqani as a “hero mujahid sheikh” and “one of the foremost leaders of the jihad against the Soviets.”) Haqqani traveled frequently to Peshawar to meet with a Pakistani and, separately, with an American intelligence officer, and to pick up supplies. Osama would have had no reason to know about Haqqani’s opportunistic work with the CIA, but he and his Arab volunteers benefited from it. They stood apart from the CIA’s cash-laden tradecraft—but just barely.¹⁹

Osama’s contacts with the Saudi government, by comparison, were open and routine. Badeeb maintained offices for the Saudi intelligence service at the Saudi embassy in Islamabad and sleeping quarters in Saudi-funded charities in Peshawar. These charities, in turn, funneled contributions to the Services Office. Azzam’s Al-Jihad magazine praised the support of seven charities in its December 1986 issue;