Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
Afghans call him a hero. Americans call him a terrorist. But who is Osama bin Laden?
By DAVID ADAMS
© St. Petersburg Times, published September 23, 2001
The FBI's 10 Most Wanted poster lists his occupation as "unknown."
It says he is tall and slender, with brown hair and brown eyes. And that he walks with a cane.
The price on his head: $5-million.
The man in question is Osama bin Laden, Washington's "prime suspect" in the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
While his occupation might officially be a mystery, there can be little question about the terror business in which he is engaged.
But the story of how bin Laden, the estranged son of a Saudi Arabian construction magnate, turned his back on a life of privilege among his country's oil-rich elite is one that few claim to fully understand.
Officials acknowledge there are many gaps in their knowledge of bin Laden and his radical Islamic following. Even so, terrorism experts and professors of Middle Eastern and Islamic politics have pieced together his life over more than two decades.
The story they tell is a personal and tortured tale of a man deeply influenced by the society in which he grew up. It is a story that weaves its way through the twists and turns of a stunning series of historical events that have engulfed a part of the world little understood by many in the West.
Only by looking back over those years can one begin to comprehend how a former CIA ally during the 1980s Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union in Afghanistan became the alleged mastermind of what some call "the Ford Foundation of terror."
The scion of a wealthy and highly respected Saudi family, bin Laden was born in 1957 and raised in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, a steamy port on the Red Sea coast.
His father, Mohammad Awad bin Laden, was an illiterate immigrant from southern Yemen who arrived in Jeddah in 1925, seven years before the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was founded. Despite his lack of education, his engineering skills won the attention and eventual friendship of the young nation's first monarch, King Abdul Aziz bin Saud.
The relationship with King Abdul Aziz was a turning point for the bin Laden family, paving the way for the formation of a construction company in 1931. The family company, now known as the Saudi Binladin Group, is today one of the country's top construction firms, with 50,000 employees and diverse holdings from California to Kazakstan.
Early on, the family won official esteem by building a road from Jeddah to the royal summer resort of Taif. There followed lucrative contracts for the extension of the Holy Mosque complex in Mecca and Medina, Islam's holiest shrines, visited by millions of pilgrims every year.
The family company also built much of the infrastructure in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf region during the oil boom years of the 1970s, when the region invested billions on roads, airports and other projects, including military bases.
A devout Muslim, the elder bin Laden is fondly remembered for his contributions to humanitarian projects and the poor.
Some of that likely rubbed off on the young Osama. Like all children his age, he was a product of Saudi Arabia's strict religious education system based on the 18th century Islamic teachings of Mohammad Abdul Wahab. He may also have encountered the ways of the West.
Because of its location, the port city of Jeddah was more exposed to Western influence than other parts of the kingdom. As petrodollars flowed into Saudi Arabia, young men of bin Laden's age began to explore what the West had to offer.
Coming from their secluded and highly conservative background, where women wore veils and alcohol was forbidden, it was a cultural jolt.
Losing his father at the tender age of 11 could not have helped. The elder bin Laden was killed in a helicopter crash while inspecting a construction site, leaving the young Osama with an inheritance estimated at between $30-million and $80-million.
There are differing accounts of his teenage years. Some versions describe him as a pious young man who followed his fathers' strict Muslim devotion. But there are also stories of vacations spent in the nightclubs and bars of Beirut, the Lebanese capital, which at the time was one of the region's most Western and free-wheeling cities.
Either way, there is little evidence that he displayed much interest in politics.
All that would begin to change in the late 1970s.
He was 19 when he entered King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah, where he received a civil engineering degree in 1979 -- a year that was decisive in the religious radicalization of the young engineer.
On Feb. 1, 1979, an Islamic revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini overthrew the shah of Iran, one of the region's most opulent, autocratic and pro-Western regimes. The revolution was a source of inspiration to many Muslims, who saw in it the signs of weakness of secular states propped up by the West.
In March, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat signed a U.S.-brokered peace treaty with Israel, which many in the Arab world regarded as an act of betrayal. Two years later, Sadat would be assassinated by Islamic extremists.
In November, the Saudi kingdom was shaken by a short-lived mini-revolt of 1,500 armed Islamic radicals who seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca.
In December, the Islamic world received an even bigger shock when Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan to protect a Moscow-backed, communist government under threat from Islamic rebels backed by Pakistan.
Years later, looking back on the invasion of Afghanistan, bin Laden told an interviewer from the Arabic-language Al-Quds newspaper, "I was enraged, and went there at once."
Much has been made of bin Laden's time in Afghanistan. But in the early years it's not clear how deep his motivation was.
He was only one of many Arabs who joined the cause.
"A lot of younger guns from rich families in the gulf went to Afghanistan to fight the good fight," said Dominic Simpson, a Middle East expert at the London office of Kroll Associates, a leading international security firm.
Simpson and others liken the Arab role in the Afghan war to the foreign volunteers who fought against fascism during Spain's civil war in the mid 1930s.
"It was ideological and also quite chic," he said.
In fact, bin Laden spent the first years of the war in comfort, traveling throughout Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf and raising millions of dollars for the holy war, or jihad.
Some of the funding came directly from the Saudi government, some from Muslim charities and some from the kingdom's financial and business elite, including his late father's construction empire.
Eventually, bin Laden moved permanently to the region, taking up residence in Peshawar, a Pakistani border town near the Khyber Pass that served as the key staging area for the Afghan resistance.
By that time the CIA and Pakistani intelligence services were also fully involved. Over the years the CIA funnelled as estimated $3-billion to various Afghan resistance groups. In the interests of the Cold War, Washington chose to overlook the fact that most of the groups were Islamic radicals of one sort or another who shared virulently anti-American beliefs.
Bin Laden quickly set about financing the recruitment and training of new volunteers. Within a few years he had offices and recruitment centers in 50 countries, including one in New York.
He was also busy bringing in plane loads of bulldozers and other heavy equipment, which were used to construct defensive tunnels and storage depots and cut roads through the deep mountain gorges of Afghanistan. According to some sources, bin Laden sometimes drove the bulldozers himself, exposing himself to strafing from Soviet helicopter gunships.
Others who were active in the resistance say bin Laden's role has been exaggerated. While he no doubt played an important part in recruiting what became known as the "Afghan Arab" volunteers, many doubt the battlefield heroics.
Milt Bearden, the CIA station chief in Pakistan from 1986 to 1989, has said he never met bin Laden during the war years. While he heard accounts of his deeds, Bearden never considered him an important player.
"There were a lot of bin Ladens who came to do jihad," he told one reporter. "These guys were bringing in up to 20- to 25-million dollars a month from other Saudis and Gulf Arabs to underwrite the war. And that is a lot of money."
But experts and scholars agree that what happened in Afghanistan left a permanent impression on bin Laden.
It was in Afghanistan that he came under the spell of a Palestinian-born Islamic teacher named Abdalah Azzam, who became both his mentor and his organizational right hand. From 1984 to 1988 the two men traveled frequently to Afghanistan, where Azzam delivered fiery sermons to the resistance fighters.
"Azzam's message was straightforward, and the essence of his message can be found in bin Laden's current call for a global jihad," writes Yossef Bodansky, director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and author of the 1999 book, Bin Laden. The Man Who Declared War on America.
But it was the way the war ended that seems to have most profoundly affected bin Laden.
After the Soviet pullout in early 1989, Bodansky says, the Pakistani government was bent on undermining the Afghan Arabs to help its own Islamic allies, the Taliban. To this end, the Pakistani intelligence that ran much of the resistance effort with CIA financial support had directed the Afghan resistance to attack heavily fortified enemy positions.
The attack decimated the Afghan resistance.
In November of that year, bin Laden suffered another blow. Azzam was silenced by a powerful car bomb in a narrow street in Peshawar.
Bin Laden left Afghanistan with a troubled mind.
He was following a well-trodden sociological path of many Islamic leaders and thinkers, according to Beverley Milton-Edwards, a professor of Islamic politics at Queen's University, Belfast, Northern Ireland, who has spent the last 10 years researching radical Islamic groups.
"They all have somehow had contact with or an experience with the West whereby the antipathy becomes internalized and religiousified into their own motif and an extreme radical demeanor," she said.
"For bin Laden, it was Afghanistan."
Back in Jeddah, bin Laden rejoined the family business. But he was a changed man.
Those who know the bin Ladens say the family had already begun to worry about Osama as early as the mid 1980s.
"Osama was already a known element," said Wayne Fagan, a San Antonio, Texas, lawyer who worked closely with bin Laden's older brother, Salem bin Laden, from 1983 to 1987. "There was this black sheep who was distant from the family even in those days."
That distance was understandable. While the Saudi royal family supported the Afghan war effort, it has long been sensitive to its own vulnerability at home to Islamic extremism.
"The whole bin Laden family empire was tied to the Saudi government. So if they had someone with extremist views in their family, in pure business terms it was a problem," Fagan said.
An avid pilot, Salem bin Laden died in an ultralight accident near San Antonio in 1988 at age 42. It was a terrible blow to the family, according to Fagan. As the oldest brother, he had assumed the leadership of the business empire after his father's death.
"I have always wondered what would have happened with Osama if he (Salem) had lived," said Fagan. "He (Salem) was very much the man in charge. He ruled with an iron fist. When he died, that power become more diffuse."
By most accounts, Osama bin Laden had not yet turned his Islamic views against the Saudi royal family. Instead, his wrath was directed at foreign powers, especially the United States.
He had returned home something of a hero and was much in demand on the Saudi speaking circuit at mosques and private homes. Cassettes of his fiery speeches were sold across the country.
And once again, sudden events changed his life.
On Aug. 2, 1990, Saddam Hussein's troops invaded Kuwait, posing a dramatic threat to the entire oil-producing Persian Gulf region.
Bin Laden immediately offered to help the Saudi government, offering to reinforce the kingdom's National Guard with his Afghan veterans. Above all, bin Laden warned against inviting "infidel" American troops onto Muslim holy soil.
The Saudi royal family was in no position to risk a face-off with Iraq's far more powerful army, however. Within weeks, U.S. and other allied troops -- 500,000 in all -- were swarming across the Saudi desert.
Bin Laden's speeches now turned sharply anti-American. He equated the U.S. presence in Saudi Arabia with the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
"When we buy American goods, we are accomplices in the murder of Palestinians," he said in one speech. "American companies make millions in the Arab world with which they pay taxes to their government. The United States uses that money to send $3-billion a year to Israel, which it uses to kill Palestinians."
Saudi officials tried to silence bin Laden. He refused. "They then threatened his extended family . . . in order to silence him," writes Bodansky. "Saudi officials threatened to sever the family's unique ties with the royal court and push the entire family business into bankruptcy."
The Iraqi military was quickly routed by the allies. But fearing renewed hostility from Iraq, the Saudi government allowed a large contingent of U.S. troops to remain on its soil.
Ironically, when the Saudis later agreed to build a new air base to house the more than 4,000 American troops, the $150-million construction contract went to the bin Laden family business.
By then Osama was long gone. In 1991 he moved to Sudan, where another radical Islamic government was in power. During five years of exile there, he put his fortune, estimated at as much as $300-million, to work. With the cooperation of the Sudanese government he set up a number of financial and trading companies, dealing chiefly in agricultural exports. The profits went to the cause.
By now bin Laden's Islamic world view had begun to take a sharp turn away from the mainstream and into the fringes of subversive extremism.
Islamic experts point out that Islamic fundamentalism is deeply divided into more moderate and extremist camps.
"While others in the Islamist camp seek to modernize Islam and make it relevant and bring it back as a central tenet of people's lives -- a flexible guide for modern living -- Osama does not," said Milton-Edwards.
"His vision of Islam is fixed and centered on rigid tenets and defense of the faith which includes war against those who are its enemies."
It was in Sudan that bin Laden's ideas began to jell. The organizational skills -- and contacts -- he had acquired in Afghanistan soon became the backbone of his new, radical Islamic terrorist network, known as al-Qaida, Arabic for "the base."
According to a CIA report released in 1996, it was in Sudan that bin Laden established and financed his first terrorist training camps in the north of the country, paying to transport hundreds of fighters from Pakistan.
The network's objectives soon became evident.
In 1992, a bomb went off at a hotel in Yemen where U.S. soldiers had been staying. The troops had left, but two Austrian tourists were killed.
Then in 1993, a powerful bomb went off in the basement of the World Trade Center, killing six people and injuring hundreds more.
Under pressure from the United States and some Arab nations, the Saudi government officially stripped bin Laden of his Saudi nationality in 1994. That same year his family formally disowned him in a public statement.
But by now bin Laden was operating beyond any constraints. Over the years al-Qaida became an ideological focal point and financial sponsor for a host of radical groups in the region -- a role some have called "the Ford Foundation of terror."
U.S. officials think al-Qaida has given financial backing to anti-government groups in Egypt, Algeria, Yemen, Somalia, Saudi Arabia and the Philippines. Bin Laden has supported Islamic fighters not only in Afghanistan but also in Chechnya, Kosovo, Kashmir, Bosnia and Tajikistan.
Again, the United States and other nations brought pressure to bear. In May 1996, bin Laden was forced to leave Sudan, disappearing deeper into the world of radical Islam.
He returned to Afghanistan, where the Taliban were on the verge of seizing power after a protracted struggle between rival groups.
Bin Laden wasted no time teaming up with his former Afghan jihad comrade, Mullah Mohammed Omar, the leader of the Taliban. Their relationship was cemented soon after when bin Laden married one of Omar's daughters.
It was only after the synchronized bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998 that evidence began clearly pointing to bin Laden.
The bombs killed 224 people, including 12 Americans, and injured more than 4,000 others. Within a week, FBI agents working with Kenyan police arrested two suspected Nairobi bombers, both connected to bin Laden.
Shortly after the embassy attacks, President Bill Clinton ordered the first official strike against bin Laden. Cruise missiles hit bin Laden's training camps in Afghanistan. Several people were killed, but not bin Laden.
In November 1998 the Justice Department handed down a 238-count indictment against bin Laden and members of his group.
The indictment charged that, as the leader of a terrorist conspiracy for nearly 10 years, bin Laden had attempted to obtain the components of nuclear and chemical weapons. It alleged bin Laden had a logistical and training role in the 1993 killing of 18 American servicemen in Somalia. (In a CNN interview, bin Laden had himself boasted that his followers played a role in those deaths.)
The six-month embassy bombings trial, which ended in May with the conviction of four Islamic radicals by a U.S. federal court, revealed the fullest picture to date of bin Laden's organization, motives and planning.
The evidence pointed to a less hands-on role played by bin Laden. Instead, his followers promote his image, through T-shirts, CDs and Islamic cable television, as a revolutionary icon -- a more ruthless 21st century version of Che Guevara, providing inspiration to murder in the name of his radical Islamic movement.
In recent months police have arrested scores of his alleged disciples around the world. While there appears to be little evidence they took orders directly from bin Laden, some may have received training at his camps. Instead, they are linked to various radical Islamic groups in Algeria and Egypt funded in part by bin Laden's al-Qaida.
Investigations have uncovered alleged plots to bomb the French city of Strasbourg, where the European Parliament sits; U.S. embassies in Italy, India and Bangladesh, and American cities.
Bin Laden's precise role in those operations is -- just as his FBI poster states -- "unknown."
Bringing him to justice, or bringing justice to him, as President Bush declared Thursday night, will not be easy.
According to Bodansky, bin Laden is probably hiding in one of the Afghan tunnels he built two decades ago, happily awaiting his fate.
"He considers himself dead already," Bodansky said on CNN last week. "And he will ensure that he is martyred rather than captured alive."
- Researcher John Martin contributed to this report, which includes information from Jane's Intelligence Review, the Journal of Counterterrorism & Security International and the New Yorker.