Afghanistan.13
Three former Iridium executives involved in the licensing effort, including Tuttle, said they could not recall how permission from Afghanistan was secured, when it was received, what form it took, or what Afghan authority granted it. As of July 1997, the Taliban, a radical Islamist militia, controlled the country’s government. At the same time, however, a competing faction manned the country’s embassy in Washington; it is possible the initial permission was obtained there. According to a Bin Laden attorney, Iridium never acquired a final Afghan license or a single Afghan customer.
The Taliban had already become notorious for their repression of women’s education and their bizarre Islamic rule making. That summer of 1997, they also faced criticism because of the radical statements, supporting violence, which emanated from a foreign guest the Taliban’s one-eyed leader, Mullah Omar, had decided to embrace: Osama Bin Laden. There is no evidence that Osama played any role in detailing the initial license for Afghanistan. The Bin Ladens’ attorney, Timothy J. Finn, later wrote that the family believed that the initial license was obtained by Iridium before the Bin Ladens came on the scene. “In any event, Hassan did not have any involvement with this and does not know how it came about,” Finn wrote. “Indeed, Hassan does not believe he had any significant involvement at any time with Afghanistan, which was not regarded as a significant market for this high-priced service. Needless to say he never contacted Osama about any aspect of this.”
It seems likely that Osama was at least aware of his family’s investment in Iridium. He could have offered them a testament supporting their investment gamble; he was learning himself about the powers of a global satellite telephone.
“MOTHERS SUFFER MOST,” Osama’s mother later remarked, but it was not because her son failed to phone home from political exile. “He used to call regularly” even from Afghanistan. “He would tell me about his and his family’s well-being—mother-son talk.”14
Osama’s fealty to his mother had become a greater technical challenge after his departure in May 1996 from Sudan, which had a shaky but functioning phone network, to Afghanistan, where communications were considerably more unreliable. He conceived his exile as an echo of the seventh-century journeys of the Prophet Mohamed; at the same time, he had become a model customer for a twenty-first-century company like Iridium.
He did not go to Afghanistan voluntarily. Sudan’s government sought a modicum of international legitimacy; the United States made clear it could not achieve this as long as Osama Bin Laden lived and operated openly in Khartoum. Osama’s former mentor, Hassan Al-Turabi, told him he had to go, and then compounded the betrayal, along with others in the Sudanese government, by failing to pay off debts owed to Osama and by taking his businesses at fire sale prices. Osama “sold them all,” recalled his bodyguard Nasir Al-Bahri, “for a very cheap price, because he had no other option.”15
Under financial pressure, less one wife and his eldest son, who had already returned to Saudi Arabia, Osama flew with his remaining family to Jalalabad, Afghanistan, on a chartered jet. He left behind a comfortable urban sheikh’s life of air-conditioned offices, horse farms, and business and jihad meetings. In the considerably more unplugged and violent landscape of eastern Afghanistan, he tried to make a virtue of necessity, often lecturing his children about the character-building benefits of an austere lifestyle, such as that endured by the Prophet and his companions. Yet it was plain, from the first weeks after his arrival in Afghanistan, that he did not relish his rough circumstances and that he was feeling a degree of psychological pressure. He fumed with renewed intensity at those who had forced him to endure a return to Afghanistan. Increasingly, in particular, he concentrated his anger on the government of the United States.
While in Khartoum, in his political essays, Osama had directed his incitement and sarcasm at Riyadh. The royal family’s failures and depredations were his dominant literary obsession, but he never formally declared war on the Saudi government. His expulsion from Sudan seems to have convinced him once and for all, however, that the Al-Saud were best understood as mere puppets of Washington. In any event, soon after he arrived in Afghanistan, Osama composed a rambling declaration of war against the United States, the first document he ever published that formally and openly endorsed a violent campaign against the West.
Its most striking passages were stanzas of poetry, particularly an autobiographical passage that suggested the anger and defiance building up within him. In these lines, Osama chose words and images associated with insanity or loss of control. He made near-explicit reference to those family members who had abandoned him, and to those he had defied in the name of Islam. He described his burning feelings about the “loss” of the Al-Quds mosque in Jerusalem, which he had never visited, so far as is known, but which he associated with his father in other public comments; perhaps this passage is best read as entirely political, but the possible complementary reading of an unconscious paternal reference is at least notable, particularly since the line is quickly followed by references to death, his mother, and her sanity. Overall, Osama’s self-portrait in verse suggested a man grappling with new extremities of personal experience—but while these feelings might be tormenting, he wrote, he retained a faith that they could ultimately be cleansed by righteous violence:
Some of Osama’s agitation may have been caused by the insecurity of his situation immediately upon arrival with his family near Jalalabad that summer of 1996. Eastern Afghanistan was then in violent flux, and Osama’s old Afghan contacts were in disarray as the Taliban swept to power. With a reputation for wealth and little political protection, he was fortunate during these initial weeks not to have become one more collateral victim of the ever- shifting Afghan civil war.
By the end of the year, however, his circumstances had improved dramatically. Bin Laden won an introduction to Mullah Omar and established cordial relations. Omar offered him hospitality in the poor but entirely peaceful southern Afghan city of Kandahar. Osama moved there with much of his large family—at least eleven sons by this point, three wives, and a brood of daughters whom none of his aides could or would try to count.
Even after his world calmed, he remained preoccupied by the United States. He collected and read an odd assortment of books about America, according to Al-Bahri, who later joined him as a bodyguard. These included accounts of former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger’s discussions about the seizure of Saudi oil fields during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war; a book by an American military commander about the use of rapid-deployment forces; and a book of undetermined origin that described a supposed plan by former U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt to control the world.17 Osama’s public comments during this period make clear that, like many Saudis, he subscribed to hoary anti-Semitic screeds such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an invented text about
