Articles

The Financing of 9/11:

Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate & the CIA

The financial trail prior to and post 9/11

A short investigatory text with a complete referenced list of sources reproduced in full

The reference system:

Superscript references e.g. 5 are used in this document.

The number refers the reader to a page number where the relevant paragraph is highlighted for clarity.

General

This document contains additional material which is supplied for the reader to delve more deeply into the subject matter.

All the information herein is already in the public domain but has not always been collated in a useful manner. Hence the existence of this document.

This report does not pertain to be a fully comprehensive exposure of the story concerned but rather a collation of current publicly available information.

The author hopes the Federal Bureau of Investigation is given the mandate and influence to complete its enquiries.

Until that time no other option exists but to personally examine all the available evidence for ourselves.

 

The ISID Connections to 9/11 Finance

This document is the result of an investigation into the financiers of 9/11 and their connections.

The age old adage applies: Follow the money.

Following the money trail proved to be a fairly straight-forward task as all the evidence necessary to form a picture is already in the public domain. Albeit scattered across many published articles.

This account is the result of days spent at the British Library Archives in London pouring over microfilm. It also became necessary to survey the appropriate electronic database which allows access to the Lexus-Nexus™ archives.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has been following the money trail of the 9/11 hijackers for some time and found several important leads.

After working with Indian authorities the FBI has been able to ascertain the sources; or at least the conduits for the money used to facilitate the 9/11 attacks.

It is not presently known why the FBI has been unable or unwilling to bring about criminal proceedings as a result of these findings. Unfortunately many of the key players in the case are now either dead or maintaining a reclusive lifestyle.

In summer 2001 the ringleader of the hijackers Mohammed Atta (right), received a wired money transfer of $100,000 64. The FBI traced this payment after 9/11 to a man in Pakistan called Saeed Sheikh121, remember his name, he becomes rather important.

The plot thickens at this juncture; our man Saeed Sheikh (picture above left) was actually a secret agent for a Pakistani organization called the ISID55. The FBI report that orders for this money transfer came all the way from the chief of the ISID64.

The next part of our story begins in Washington DC on September 4th 2001, just a week before the most horrific attack on the US mainland in our history.

On the 4/09/01 a senior Pakistani official, General Mahmoud Ahmed arrived in Washington DC for several meetings with top US officials; including the head of the CIA George Tenet13.

Shockingly; the same General Mahmoud Ahmed (picture above) was the head of Pakistan’s ISID (Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate).12

The General was still in Washington on 9/11 itself having meetings at the Pentagon with senior US officials26.

 

Although numerous mainstream newspapers reported these facts they did so in isolation. Only one paper (The Guardian Sept 10th 2005)126 actually reported all the facts and the connections between the persons involved.

Why the lack of press exposure? This is probably partly because the only journalist who got really close to the story in Pakistan ended up being killed, most sources state at the hands of the ISID64. He was an American reporter who most of us should remember, his name was Daniel

Pearl and he had flown to Pakistan to investigate the ISID and its funding of Al Qaeda78.

(Above right: Daniel Pearl before being murdered; probably on the orders of Pakistan’s ISID)

In 2002 a man was sentenced to death in Pakistan for Daniels murder, his name (what a co-incidence) was a certain Saeed Sheikh87.

 

So to collate all that into one paragraph:

The FBI know an ISID agent financed the 9/11 hijackers and that he was ordered to wire the money by the head of the ISID General Ahmed. The same General Ahmed was visiting the head of the CIA George Tenet (Below left) on the week of 9/11 in Washington DC.

No attempt has been made to even interview General Ahmed by the US authorities127 and the only journalist to fly to Pakistan to look into it ended up dead at the hands of the ISID. There are one or two reports probing the possibility that Pearl may have been feeding information to the CIA97.
If this is the case the CIA either had not briefed Pearl properly or Pearl had ignored security advice. His getting into a strange car in Pakistan’s underworld seems a very odd course of action83.

It appears to me Pearl was either extraordinarily naïve or incredibly brave. 

A report from a Taxi driver confirms the identity of Saeed Sheikh as being in the car with Pearl the last time he was seen alive66. Does this make him the murderer?

Pearls family don’t think so123, strangely enough Saeed was condemned to be executed for his murder in 2002. Many acknowledge his undoubted involvement as a probable kidnapper, however there is little to place him as the actual killer88.

I believe that Saeed was condemned to ensure he would not be extradited and awkward questions asked.

The ISID has been funded and used by the American CIA for decades to do their dirty work9. It was the very same ISID that trained the Afghan fighters in 1986 to kill Soviets with state of the art CIA supplied military hardware5.

The CIA and ISID are very, very close associates and have been for decades.

 

All intelligence agencies have ‘media contacts’, to whom are released ‘red-herrings’ and misinformation in order to lead the public (and other people) astray. However in this case the fate of Daniel Pearl who was investigating these stories certainly gives them a very high level of credence.

The above information is studiously ignored by the 9/11 Commission who make two seemingly unbelievable statements on the matter of who financed 9/11.

Below a selection of quotes from articles I hold to support my statements.

When the General’s involvement was made public we would like to think he would be immediately arrested and extradited to the USA. However the head of Pakistan President Musharraf was simply pressurised by the US to ensure General Ahmed retired quietly and kept out of sight64.

(Left: Pakistani President Musharraf with General Ahmed)

As far as we know the man who paid for three thousand innocent men and women to be murdered is happily living under close watch in Pakistan64.

Neither the General nor Saeed have ever been sought by the US for questioning related to their roles in funding the 9/11 operation.127

There are also very recent reports of the ISID funding and training groups in Pakistan who intended to commit terrorism in the UK132 + 133. Given the public post 9/11 US alignment with Pakistan this is very disturbing.

See the ‘author’s conclusions’ on page 134 for further discussion.

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was a brave decision. Hamid Gul, former head of intelligence, warned that
the army might rebel and Musharraf -who threw out a corrupt civilian government two years ago but has been promising elections -feared the same. An editor who met Musharraf last week noted that he "knows he has perhaps signed his own death warrant".

On the streets of Karachi, demonstrations erupted. At one intersection, a
hawker was selling fake beards for those who had spontaneously decided to
conform to the Taliban creed.

Back in Washington, Bush sent a signal to worried Muslims. Between the
military planning and services for the dead, he visited an Islamic centre. He
took off his shoes before entering the mosque and was at pains to distinguish
between ordinary Muslims and fanatical terrorists. However, some of his less diplomatic remarks played more awkwardly worldwide.

"There's an old poster out west that says, 'Wanted, dead or alive'," he told
America. It was an honest reaction, although not entirely off the cuff. He had
tried the phrase on his friend, Vincente Fox, president of Mexico, who had
approved. Sophisticates did not. They also shuddered when he spoke of a
"crusade" against terrorism. Was he about to ignite a conflagration that would
harm millions of innocent people?

There were certainly calls within Bush's inner circle for retribution on a
broad front. Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defence, and Lewis Libby, chief of staff to the vice-president, Dick Cheney, urged attacks on suspected
terrorist bases in Iraq and Lebanon, as well as Afghanistan.

Hard-line conservatives circulated a letter calling on Bush to "make a
determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power". The mood elsewhere was also grimly determined. Benjamin Netanyahu, the former Israeli prime minister, barely paused when a television interviewer suggested that "taking out" Bin Laden hiding in Afghanistan would be as difficult as as finding a needle in a haystack.

"No, it's not difficult at all," growled Netanyahu. "You take out the haystack."

Behind the aggressive rhetoric, however, American diplomacy had gone into
overdrive. Colin Powell, the secretary of state, was building a coalition of
allies across many divides. Bush, Powell and their teams had been burning up the telephone lines to Europe, Russia, Asia and, in particular, the Middle East,
calling Ariel Sharon, the ultra-hawkish prime minister of Israel, and Yasser
Arafat, the Palestinian leader. If Sharon and Arafat could not agree peace while America did battle against terrorism, the Middle East could explode into war.

Powell piled on the pressure until Sharon finally saw the light. He sent
Omri, his son, to dinner with Arafat. The Palestinian leader cut pieces of
kunafeh, a traditional honey and cheese dessert. "You look hungry. Eat it all
up," Arafat told Omri. "Eat, and tell your father we can reach an agreement."
The dinner lasted two hours. The next day Arafat and Sharon announced a
ceasefire. There were doubts that it would hold but it was a remarkable
achievement.

IN suburban America and the back streets of Britain, passions were running
high. At the Surplus Store on Venice Boulevard in Los Angeles, middle America
was busy buying gas masks. "We've sold hundreds in the past few days," said John Edell, the owner.

An Indian immigrant was shot dead at a petrol station in Arizona. The man
held for questioning allegedly shouted: "I stand for America all the way." The
victim was not even Islamic; he was a Sikh. Congressman John Cooksey said anyone "wearing a diaper on his head" at airports ought to be pulled over for extra questioning. He later apologized, although he added that America would never win the war "if we have to stop every five minutes to make sure we are being politically correct".

Several Asian passengers checking in at American airports experienced scenes
that contrasted sadly with the comradely "We are the people" flight from Denver to Washington. In San Antonio, Texas, Ashraf Khan, 32, a mobile phone salesman and permanent resident of the United States who was trying to get to his brother's wedding in Pakistan, was ordered off a Delta Airlines flight. The plane's captain, Khan said, told him that the flight crew did not "feel
safe flying with you".

"There was no apology, nothing," said Khan, who missed the wedding. "Because of my name, the colour of my skin, the pilot thought I was a bad person." In Orlando, Florida, two businessmen from Pakistan were ordered off a US Airways flight bound for Baltimore. In Minneapolis, three Middle Eastern looking men were denied permission to board a Northwest Airlines flight to their home in Salt Lake City. Ticket agents expressed concern, according to a police report, because they appeared nervous.

Police questioned them about their nationalities and itineraries and then
escorted them to the departures area, but an airline official told them: "The
crew and the passengers refuse to go with you guys, so you're not going."
One of them, Kareem Alasady, 36, a taxi driver who went to America in 1994
and became a citizen in 1999, said afterwards: "All the people were looking at
us like we were guilty."

In Britain a fire bomb was thrown at the central mosque in Burton-upon-Trent; Muslims in Bradford were advised not to walk to mosques alone. Ten pigs' heads were strewn around the car park of the Islamic Centre for the South West in Exeter; at the central Manchester mosque notes pushed through
the door read: "Kill Muslim scum" and "Muslims follow Satan". Abhorrent though the incidents were, few acts of physical violence were reported to the police in Britain. The only people calling for blood were fundamentalists. Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed, a Syrian who arrived in Britain in the 1980s after being expelled from Saudi Arabia, denounced Pakistan for helping America. Its leader, he said, should be killed.

Suddenly a fresh reminder of the savagery of the hijackers cut through all
the arguments: details emerged of how an airline stewardess on one of the
hijacked planes had witnessed the terrorists' actions.

Madeline Sweeney had managed to make a call from American Airlines flight
11, reporting that it was being hijacked. Two crew members had been stabbed, she told a ground controller. "A hijacker also cut the throat of a business class passenger and he appears to be dead," she said. Business class America never expected such bloodiness.

Sweeney saw four Middle Eastern men and tried to give their seat numbers.
The pilot was apparently trying to alert air controllers by surreptitiously
clicking his radio button. Sweeney was asked their position: "I see water and
buildings." It was the Hudson River and New York; the plane was heading for the twin towers.

"Oh my God. Oh my God." They were her last words. The awfulness of what followed her call is best understood in the makeshift office of Dale Downey, the head of DMort , the disaster and mortuary operations unit in New York. He has the task of gathering the remains of people slaughtered
in the World Trade Center. On his office wall he keeps a tally of the dead.

The gruesome ritual starts with the rescue workers at ground zero, as the
wrecked site is called. When they find a body or a body part, they place it on a
hospital trolley or in a white plastic bucket to be taken to a nearby tent.
There, other hands sort the pieces into body bags: a torso gets its own bag;
other lumps are loaded in together. These jumbled remains of people travel via
refrigerated truck to the makeshift morgues where teams of pathologists examine
them. One severed hand was identified by the mobile phone it still clutched. A
priest is nearby to comfort those overwhelmed by what they see.

Every 12 hours Downey's list of remains is updated. One day last week
"Bodies (full)" were rising beyond 180; "Body parts (identified)" numbered a few score; "Body parts (unidentified)" were piling up to more than 1,600. Several thousand more people were still missing.

As the rescue work went on, America's forces were already on the move to
seek retribution. To the chirpy refrain of the timeless Broadway song, New York, New York, the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt pulled away from a pier in Norfolk, Virginia, on Thursday with thousands of sailors, immaculate in
dress-white uniforms, lined up on its decks. It was an awesome display of
military firepower and an unmistakable signal to the world that Bush is about to get serious in his war on terrorism.

Yet the sight of a US carrier -nicknamed "the Big Stick" -steaming off with
a battle convoy of two cruisers, a destroyer, a frigate, two attack submarines
and other support vessels did little to calm concerns. There are fears that
America's superpower military assets are likely to prove less than conclusive in
what may quickly turn into a long, dirty and clandestine war against largely
invisible targets scattered across thousands of miles of hostile mountain
terrain.

More than 85% of Americans approved of Bush's "dead or alive" stance. In
Britain, 70% said America and its allies should be ready to take action against
countries "giving aid and comfort" to the terrorists. But there were currents of
grave doubt. Fewer than half of Britons surveyed supported military action if it
led to the deaths of many civilians or British troops. More than three-quarters
feared that an attack would ignite a wider conflict between the West and the
Islamic world.

There were geopolitical dangers, too. Pakistan, already unstable, had
nuclear weapons that could fall into fundamentalist hands. If America used Saudi Arabian bases, it might spark a violent backlash by radical opponents to the Saudi ruling family. The Pentagon was counting on using the Combined Air
Operations Center at the Prince Sultan Air Base, 70 miles southeast of Riyadh,
completed only six weeks ago. But the Saudi government was resisting the plan. An outright refusal threatened to undermine the broad coalition the
Americans were working to build.

FLYING through the anxiety and turmoil, Tony Blair was reading the Koran. He
had taken it on holiday and was looking at it again while engaged in an
extraordinary burst of shuttle diplomacy. "He is trying to understand the real message of Islam, which is patently not that being peddled by those who attacked America," one official close to him confided.

Blair flew to see Gerhard Schroder, the German chancellor, and Jacques
Chirac, the French president. With his wife Cherie and closest advisers Alastair
Campbell, Jonathan Powell and Anji Hunter, he headed for Washington.

Also on board his chartered BA plane were four "defence planners and
intelligence experts" drawn from MI5, MI6 and the defence ministry, as well as
Sir David Manning, the prime minister's special adviser on intelligence. From the plane Blair called Mohammad Khatami, the Iranian president. Patched through interpreters in London and Tehran, the two leaders spoke for 15 minutes.
It was the first official contact between the two countries for more than 20
years.

Afterwards Blair emerged looking tired, shoulders hunched. No pleasantries,
no toothsome smile. "It is a huge responsibility," he told journalists, "which
is why we must deliberate carefully. This form of terrorism has no boundaries,
it knows no limits."

Although he understood the risks of inflaming the Islamic world he saw, too,
the dangers of doing nothing. He asked, rhetorically, what would happen if
suicide terrorists achieved their goal of acquiring biological, chemical or
nuclear weapons. It was the compelling reason why the West had to act. His
conversation with Khatami had been "remarkable", one he "could not have imagined having two weeks ago". Now Iran had closed its border with Afghanistan and was offering support to the West.

In Washington, Bush was refining his aims, preparing a speech for Congress.
Disturbing evidence was surfacing that some of the hijackers had used false
identities. Some of those accused of being suicide hijackers appeared to be
alive and well. The trail to Bin Laden remained tenuous.

Bush and Blair dined at the White House on scallops and veal, with a blue
cheese salad. Then they marched out together to the Roosevelt hall at the front of house, shoulder to shoulder. Blair was, said Bush, "my friend and a friend of America". In return, Blair invoked the spirit of the Blitz when one nation and one people above all had stood by Britain and "that nation was America and that people was the American people. We stand side by side with you now".

The leaders disappeared upstairs to the president's private apartment. There
Bush produced the speech he was preparing. Blair read, advised and approved. Bush had been working hard on the speech with Michael Gerson, his youthful chief speech writer. A devout Christian, Gerson once coined the phrase "compassionate conservatism"; now from his office in the west wing he gave voice to the grand sweep of the president's vision of a war against terrorism.

When the president addresses Congress, the vice-president normally sits on a
dais just behind. But on Thursday, as Bush rose to speak, Cheney was absent,
secluded elsewhere. America still feared attack: if another suicide jet wiped
out Congress, the country would not be leaderless.

Bush stepped forward. America listened. Well before the end, people across
the country were weeping and whooping at the power of his rhetoric. Gerson had helped to transform a tentative president into the reassuring leader that
Americans craved. His message to the Taliban was blunt: "Deliver to the United States authorities all of the leaders of Al-Qaeda who live in your land. Release all foreign nationals, including American citizens, you have unjustly imprisoned. Close immediately and permanently every terrorist training camp."

But as he warned his country to prepare for a long and arduous war, Bush
asked Americans to remain calm in the face of danger. "Live your lives," he
said, "and hug your children."

ON the other side of the world, as the bombers and warships of the West
gathered, Afghans packed their few belongings and took to the dirt tracks and
broken roads. Margalara, 27, was one who made her way to the border with
Pakistan. Taliban guards tried to stop her before they took her money and let
her pass. "We hate the Taliban," she said. "We hope this time the Taliban will
be finished."

Others were hoping to escort relatives to safety before returning to fight.
Many more were just hoping to survive.

The Taliban, once welcomed as liberators, are now despised for their
administrative incompetence and theocratic authoritarianism. Thousands of
Afghans have given everything they had to be smuggled to the West.

"Our culture has been destroyed, our customs destroyed," said one refugee
who has spent the past three weeks on a ship hoping to reach Australia. "If you were in opposition to the Taliban, they would imprison or kill you."
Food is desperately short, drought is withering the fields. The infrastructure has fallen apart. The once vibrant city of Kabul is a rag-bag of rubble and scavenging dogs.

"There is no fighting, no thieves," said one aid worker in Kabul. "But there
is also no work and no money." Gesturing at women and children begging, another said simply: "These people don't have any home, food and income."
More than 1m have already sought refuge in Pakistan; more than 1m in Iran.
Yet last week western aid agencies, on whom a further 3m villagers relied for
food, were advised to leave by the Taliban.

"It was already set to be the world's worst humanitarian crisis, a looming
catastrophe," said Stephanie Bunker of the United Nations humanitarian
operations. Now Afghanistan is heading into the unknown.

THE REPORTING TEAM
London: David Leppard, Adam Nathan, Nicholas Hellen, Robert Winnett, John
Elliot, Margarette Driscoll, Will Iredale.

With Tony Blair: Eben Black. Islamabad: Michael Sheridan
Washington: Tony Allen-Mills. New York: Eliza Griswold. Brussels: Nicholas
Rufford. Tel Aviv: Uzi Mahnaimi. Los Angeles: Chris Goodwin

LOAD-DATE: September 24, 2001

 

Copyright 2001 The Telegraph Group Limited
SUNDAY TELEGRAPH(LONDON)
September 23, 2001, Sunday
SECTION: Pg. 14
LENGTH: 1010 words
HEADLINE: Pakistan's 'godfathers of the Taliban' hold the key to hunt for bin
Laden The CIA now depends on a foreign agency for information on Afghanistan, explains Julian West in Islamabad
BYLINE: By Julian West

BODY:

THE KEY to the success or failure of America's hunt for Osama bin Laden lies
largely in the hands of Pakistan's powerful and feared intelligence service, an
organization referred to by many Pakistanis as "the invisible government".
At first glance, the headquarters of Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence
Agency (ISI), set behind high stone walls on Khayban e Suhawardy Avenue in
Islamabad, might be mistaken for yet another drab military building. Most
Pakistanis do not even know what is behind its nondescript gates.

It is this organization, staffed by about 100 officers who run an internal
and external intelligence network of many thousand agents and freelance spies, that America will have to lean on heavily to track and find bin Laden in the barren mountains of Afghanistan.

Pakistan's many-tentacled ISI - equivalent to Britain's MI5 and MI6 combined
- has long possessed the world's finest and most accurate human intelligence
within Afghanistan. It also functions as the predominant power-broker in
Pakistan and Afghanistan.

American officials are publicly enthusiastic about the offer of co-operation
from Pakistan's intelligence agencies. "This is a crucial development that will
change everything," one said. "Pakistan has better links to the Taliban, and
knows more about them, than anyone else in the world. Its agents walk the
streets and talk the talk."

Lt Gen Mahmood Ahmed, the head of ISI, was co-incidentally in Washington as the terrorist attack in New York took place, having arranged to visit senior
administration officials several weeks earlier. After talks with CIA chiefs, he
met Richard Armitage, the Deputy Secretary of State.

"There was an extremely candid exchange from our side, one that left little
room for misunderstanding," an administration official said. "It is safe to say
the rules have changed." Porter Goss and Bob Graham, who respectively chair the House and Senate intelligence committees, met government officials in Islamabad in August to promote better ties with Pakistani intelligence.

American officials are aware of the great care that must be taken in
evaluating information from the ISI, an organization that has spent much of the past 10 years supporting and encouraging the Taliban. "These guys are the only people we can use," said one administration ally, "but that doesn't mean we can rely on them."

Employing a vast spy network of Pakistanis who speak Pashto and Farsi, the
local languages, the ISI has also recruited many hundreds of Afghans, luring
them with money and promises of sanctuary for their families in Pakistan.
"It's easy to recruit Pakistanis, a hotel doorman here earns only $4 a
month," said a Western intelligence officer in Islamabad. "They also use Afghans who are afraid for their families. They tell them 'work for us, we'll look after your family here and you can come and see them'."

Described as "the Taliban's godfathers and parents", the ISI is credited with
fostering and nurturing the Taliban movement in the mid 1990s. It is also
believed to have had access to bin Laden himself in the past. It was an ISI
delegation, led by its deputy chief, Gen Faiz Gilani, that flew to Kandahar and
Kabul early last week in a failed attempt to pressurize Mullah Omar, the
Taliban's secretive, one-eyed leader, to give up bin Laden.

ISI military "consultants" are to be found on the Taliban's frontlines alongside several thousand Arabs loyal to bin Laden. The agency has covertly
armed and funded the movement for many years. "The ISI has its fingers in every pie," said a Western diplomat. "That's why America had to get their co-operation. America has no worthwhile agents on the ground in Afghanistan. If anyone can catch bin Laden it's the ISI."

Gen Hamid Gul, the head of ISI from 1987-1989, remains bitter at the way that he was treated by America which, he claims, had him sacked from his position because of his ideological commitment to the fundamentalist cause. Gen Gul turned the organization into a state within a state with its own Islamic agenda. Although it failed in trying to install a fundamentalist government in
Afghanistan during his leadership, his influence over the organization remained
crucial when in 1994 it became responsible for turning the Taliban into a force
capable of taking over Kabul.

"The Americans thought they could use the fundamentalists to fight the
Russians and drop them," said Gen Gul. "This is what they do, they build
something up and then destroy it. They did the same with ISI. When George Bush senior felt we were becoming too independent and ideologically-motivated he said 'clip the wings of ISI' and had me sacked. Now they want the same institution to share information with them."

The Pakistani intelligence organization has long been viewed by most of its
countrymen as a sinister and shadowy force. Conceived in the 1950s by Gen Ayub Khan as a means of keeping watch on politicians, its power grew after he took over the country in 1958, effectively becoming the army's political wing. In the 1970s, the Prime Minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, began using the agency against his political enemies and it became known as a "dirty tricks" brigade. It ran smear campaigns against politicians, prominent figures and journalists. Visitors to Pakistan can expect to be tailed by mysterious men, or find their telephone conversations and e-mails are tapped.

The ISI only became seriously active in Afghanistan during the Soviet-Afghan
war when it helped the CIA to arm, train and fund the mujahideen. During the
power vacuum created by the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 when Afghanistan was torn apart by warring mujahideen groups, the ISI grasped the chance to wield power in the region by fostering a previously unknown Kandahari student movement, the Taliban. "If you want to do anything in the region, you have to have the ISI on your side," said a former CIA official. "These guys speak the languages, wear the clothes and walk the streets.
"No one knows Afghanistan like the ISI."
[PS]News: [ES]
LOAD-DATE: September 23, 2001

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Guardian (London)
October 17, 2001
SECTION: Guardian Home Pages, Pg. 1
LENGTH: 863 words
HEADLINE: 3.30am news: New offer on Bin Laden: Minister makes secret trip to
offer trial in third country
BYLINE: Rory McCarthy in Islamabad

BODY:

A senior minister from the Taliban regime in Afghanistan has offered a
last-minute deal to hand over Osama bin Laden during a secret visit to
Islamabad, senior sources in Pakistan told the Guardian last night.
For the first time, the Taliban offered to hand over Bin Laden for trial in
a country other than the US without asking to see evidence first, in return for
a halt to the western bombing of his country, a source close to Pakistan's
military leadership said.

But US officials, who are leading the campaign against Afghanistan for
harboring Bin Laden, suspected mastermind of last month's attacks on New York and Washington, appear to have dismissed the proposal. Instead they are hoping to engineer a split within the Taliban leadership. It is unclear whether the Taliban would have the ability to seize Bin Laden,
who has his own fighting force.

The offer was brought by Mullah Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, the Taliban foreign
minister and a man often regarded as a relatively moderate figure. He met officials from the CIA and Pakistan's ISI intelligence directorate in Islamabad on Monday. US officials pressed the minister for a sweeping change in
the Kabul regime. "They are trying to persuade him to get the moderate elements together," another source said. Mr Muttawakil's visit coincided with the arrival yesterday in Islamabad of the US secretary of state, Colin Powell.

After several hours of talks with Pakistan's military ruler, General Pervez
Musharraf, Mr Powell admitted that Taliban moderates would play a role in talks on a future Afghan government. "We would have to listen to them or at least take them into account," he said. Mr Powell also met envoys sent by Zahir Shah, the former Afghan king who lives in exile in Rome, and a representative of the opposition Northern Alliance, sources said.

The Taliban foreign minister asked for face-to-face talks with the US
secretary of state but no direct meeting was held. Mr Muttawakil returned to
Kabul last night and the Taliban have publicly denied he was ever in Islamabad. His visit came as the re gime's forces in Afghanistan came under renewed pressure from the bombing campaign and opposition advances.

And in the early hours of this morning, Australia announced it would begin
deploying military forces over the next two weeks to join the US-led coalition
against terrorism. The latest onslaught, which included more than 100 western aeroplanes and five cruise missiles, continued yesterday. Lieutenant-General Gregory Newbold, director of operations for the US joint chiefs of staff said that more than 2,000 bombs and missiles had been used so far in the 10-day campaign. Troops from the Northern Alliance were said yesterday to be closing in on the key northern town of Mazar-i-Sharif. Lt-Gen Newbold said they had reached the edge of the airport and were "extremely close" to reaching the town itself. The Taliban forces were "in danger of being cut off right now".

 

 

 

 

Later he was to boast that, using his private helicopter, he could pray in the
three holiest locations of Islam -Mecca, Medina and the al-Aqsa mosque in
Jerusalem - in a single day. Visiting the former two sites must have been
especially satisfying, for it was the contract to restore and expand the
facilities serving pilgrims and worshippers there that established the
reputation of his company, confirmed its status as the in-house builders of the
Saudi ruling clan and made him stupendously wealthy.

Though at one stage he was rich enough to bail out the royal family when they fell on hard times, the tatty bag he had carried when he left the Yemen remained on display in the palatial family home. He was killed when his helicopter crashed in 1968.

Mohamed bin Laden had, in the words of the French engineer, 'changed wives
like you or I change cars'. He had three Saudi wives, Wahhabis like their
husband, who were more or less permanent. The fourth, however, was changed on a
regular basis.

The magnate would send his private pilot all over the Middle East to pick up
yet another bride. 'Some were as young as 15 and were completely covered from head to toe,' the pilot's widow recently recalled. 'But they were all
exceptionally beautiful.'

Bin Laden's mother, Hamida, was not a Saudi or a Wahhabi, but a stunningly
beautiful, cosmopolitan, educated 22-year-old daughter of a Syrian trader. She
shunned the traditional Saudi veil in favour of Chanel trouser suits and this,
coupled with the fact that she was foreign, diminished her status within the
family. She was Mohammed bin Laden's tenth or eleventh spouse, and was known as the 'the slave wife'.

Mohamed bin Laden gave even his former wives a home at his palaces in Jedda and Hijaz. Hamida was still married to the millionaire when he died and so, amid a huge family and the solid gold statues, the ancient tapestries and the Venetian chandeliers, this is where Osama bin Laden, Mohamed's seventh son, 'the son of the slave', grew up.

Born in 1957 - the year 1377 of the Islamic calendar - he was 11 when his
father died. He never saw much of him. A flavour of the bin Laden household
comes from a document provided to the American ABC TV network in 1998 by 'an anonymous source close to bin Laden'. It offers unprecedented insights into Osama's childhood. 'The father had very dominating personality.

He insisted to keep all his children in one premises,' it reads. 'He had a tough discipline and observed all the children with strict religious and social code At the same time, the father was entertaining with trips to the sea and desert,' the document goes on. 'He dealt with his children as big men and demanded them to show confidence at young age.'

Brian Fyfield-Shayler, 69, gave the then 13-year-old bin Laden and 30 other
privileged classmates attending al-Thagh school, an elite Western-style Saudi
school in Jedda, four one-hour English lessons a week during 1968 and 1969. He described bin Laden as a 'shy, retiring and courteous' boy who was unfailingly polite.

'He was very courteous - more so than any of the others in his class.
Physically, he was outstanding because he was taller, more handsome and fairer than most of the other boys. He also stood out as he was singularly gracious and polite, and had a great deal of inner confidence,' said Fyfield-Shayler. Bin Laden was 'very neat, precise and conscientious' in his work. 'He wasn't pushy at all. Many students wanted to show you how clever they were. But if he knew the answer to something he wouldn't parade the fact. He would only reveal it if you asked him.'

In bin Laden's early teens there was little sign of the fanatic he would
become. In 1971 the family went on holiday en masse to the small Swedish copper mining town of Falun. A smiling Osama - or 'Sammy' as he sometimes called himself - was pictured, wearing a lime-green top and blue flares, leaning on a Cadillac.

Osama, then 14, and his older brother Salem had first visited Falun a year
before, driving from Copenhagen in a Rolls-Royce flown in from Saudi Arabia.
Oddly, they stayed at the cheap Astoria hotel, where the owner, Christina
Akerblad, recalled them spending the days out 'on business' and the evenings
eating dinner in their rooms. 'I remember them as two beautiful boys - the girls
in Falun were very fond of them,' she said. 'Osama played with my two (young)
sons.'

Akerblad remembered the wealth she found on display when cleaning the boys' rooms. 'At the weekends we saw they used the extra bed in their rooms to lay out their clothes. They had lots of white silk shirts packaged in cellophane. I think they had a new one for every day I never saw the dirty ones. They also had a big bag for their jewellery. They had emeralds and rubies and diamond rings and tie pins.'

Nor was there any sign of incipient fervour in a bucolic summer at an Oxford
language school in the same year. Bin Laden and his brothers befriended a group of Spanish girls and went punting on the Thames.

Last month one woman showed a Spanish newspaper a photos of herself and
girlfriends - one in hotpants - with three bin Laden boys. Bin Laden, wearing
flares, a short-sleeved shirt and a bracelet, looks like any other awkward
teenager. His two older brothers look more assured. The young Saudi even once stayed on London's Park Lane. He had forgotten the name of the hotel his Saudi parents had checked into, he told a reporter several years ago, but he recalled 'the trees of the park and the red buses'.

Quite how much of a personal fortune bin Laden had inherited is uncertain.
It may well be a lot less than the huge sums (up to Dollars 250 million) often
cited. The young bin Laden was never interested in money for its own sake. In
fact, the very things that had made the father huge riches had begun to trouble the son. The early Seventies were a time of huge cultural change in the Middle East.

Oil revenue, the wars with Israel and, above all, increasing contact with
the West forced a profound re-examining of old certainties. For most of Mohamed bin Laden's numerous progeny, the answer lay in greater Westernization and the elder members of the family set off for Victoria College in Alexandria in Egypt, Harvard, London or Miami. But not bin Laden. Like tens of thousands of other young men in the region at the time, Osama had become increasingly drawn to the cool, clear, uncluttered certainties of extremist Islamist ideology.

1974-84: THE DEVOUT SCHOLAR
TURNS HOLY WARRIOR

AFTER FINISHING high school in Jedda in 1974, bin Laden decided against
joining his siblings overseas for further education. Salim, the head of the
clan, had been educated at Millfield, a Somerset boarding school. Another,
Yeslam, went to university in Sweden and California. Osama entered the
management and economics faculty at King Abdul Aziz University.

There are some reports, again unconfirmed, that he married his first wife, a Syrian related to his mother, when he was 17. Salim, the elder brother who had run the bin Laden corporation after their father's death, hoped Osama would take up a useful role in the family business and ensured that a key element of his university course was civil engineering. Bin Laden himself preferred the Islamic Studies component of the course. Later, he was to combine the two in a radically effective way.

At university he heard tapes recorded by the fiery Palestinian-born
Jordanian academic Abdallah Azzam, and these had a powerful impact. Azzam's recorded sermons - much like Osama's videotapes today - brilliantly caught the mood of many disaffected young Muslims.

Jedda itself - and King Abdul Aziz university - was a centre for Islamic
dissidents from all over the Muslim world. In its mosques and medressas (Islamic schools) they preached a severe message: only an absolute return to the values of conservative Islam could protect the Muslim world from the dangers and decadence of the West. One bin Laden brother, Abdelaziz, remembers Osama 'reading and praying all the time' during this period. Osama certainly became deeply involved in religious activities at university, including theological debates and Koranic study. He also made useful contacts, striking up a crucial friendship with Prince Turki ibn Faisal, a young royal and the future chief of Saudi intelligence services.

But events were to overtake him. In February 1979 Ayatollah Khomeini
returned to Iran, overthrew the Shah and established an Islamic Republic. A
shudder of excitement and fear ran through Muslims everywhere. In November - and bin Laden was later to refer to this as a crucial, formative event - Islamic
radicals seized the grand mosque at Mecca and held it against Saudi government forces. Bin Laden, young, impressionable, increasingly devout but still unsure of himself and his vocation, was stunned. Eventually, after much bloodshed, the rebels were defeated. 'He was inspired by them,' a close friend told The Observer last month. 'He told me these men were true Muslims and had followed a true path.'

Sooner than anyone expected, bin Laden got his chance to follow them. In the
last days of the year Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan.

IT IS JUST 30 miles from the Afghan border to the febrile Pakistani city of
Peshawar. The road winds down through the Khyber Pass, through the badlands ruled by the violent and unruly Pashtun tribes, past the relics of battles fought by men from a score of armies - Greek, Arab, Mongol, Sikh and British - and then disappears into the choking mayhem of the city's bazaars.

In the spring of 1980, with yet another army's tanks parked up against the
frontier, Peshawar was seething with soldiers, spies, gun-runners, drug dealers, Afghan refugees, exiles, journalists and, of course, the thousands of
sympathisers who had flocked from all over the Muslim world to fight the Soviet
forces.

One of them, distinctive in his carefully tailored shalwar kameez and
English handmade leather boots, was Osama bin Laden. 'I was enraged and went there at once,' he has told interviewers. He was 23 and had found the cause he had been looking for.

Bin Laden's time fighting the Russians was critical. It was during this
period that he changed from a contemplative, scholarly young man to a respected, battle- hardened leader of men. And though he had yet to fully develop his extremist ideas, the war in Afghanistan gave him crucial confidence and status. 'He came to the jihad a well-meaning boy and left a man who knew about violence and its uses and effects,' said one former associate interviewed by The Observer in Algeria last year.

According to Gulf intelligence sources, bin Laden's first trip to Peshawar
lasted little more than a month. He returned to Saudi Arabia and started
lobbying his brothers, relatives and old school friends to support the fight
against the Soviet Union. When he went back to Pakistan with the huge sum of money he had collected, he took with him several Pakistanis and Afghans who had been working in the bin Laden company. They set about organising an office to support the Mujahideen and the Arab volunteers.

Within weeks of his first arrival in Pakistan, Osama had been introduced to
Abdullah Azzam, the charismatic preacher whose taped sermons had made such an impression at university. The pair got on well. The energy, administrative talent and contacts of the young Saudi complemented the profound Islamicknowledge and commitment of the older man. Azzam, then 38, was a founder of the Hamas guerrilla group on the occupied West Bank and Gaza and thus had theexperience to run a major organization. For the next two years, bin Laden commuted between the Gulf and Pakistan. All the time his relationship with Azzam grew stronger.

At first, bin Laden kept a low profile. Journalists in Pakistan at the beginning of the Eighties remember hearing stories about the 'Saudi sheikh' who would visit wounded fighters in the university town's clinics, dispensing cashew
nuts and chocolates. The man would note their names and addresses and soon a generous cheque would arrive at their family home. Such generosity - perhaps learnt from his father with his wad of notes for the poor - is something that almost all who have fought for or alongside bin Laden mention.

Some - such as one former al-Qaeda member interviewed by The Observer in
Algeria - speak of Dollars 1,500 donations for marriages, others talk of cash
doled out for shoes or watches or needy relatives. His followers say that such
gifts bind them to their emir as effectively as the bayat or oath that many of
them swear.

Sometimes his time was as valuable as his money. One former Afghan
Mujahideen remembered how he had befriended bin Laden because he wanted to learn Arabic. The young Saudi spent many hours tutoring him, in the language of the Koran. Despite his tough reputation, he was still the quiet and softly spoken young man his teachers had remembered.

BY 1984, bin Laden and Azzam had rented a house in the Peshawar suburb of
University Town and established a logistics base for the thousands of Arab
fighters arriving in the city. It was called Beit-al-Ansar (the House of the
Faithful).

'Bin Laden would receive the Arab volunteers, vet them and then send them on to the various Afghan factions,' said one former associate. The venture was
condoned by the CIA, the powerful Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI, and
the Saudi agency, the Istakhbarat, soon to be headed by his old friend Prince
Turki. None, though, gave bin Laden any American aid.

Beit-al-Ansar was on Syed Jalaluddin Afghani Road, a quiet backstreet full
of bougainvillea and large houses built for the local elite. By the mid-Eighties
the area had become a centre for the Afghan resistance. All the leaders of the
various groups had offices there. There were two newspapers - one published by Abdullah Azzam and bin Laden. There was even a 'neutral' office, in a building rented by bin Laden, where Mujahideen groups could thrash out their differences.

Conditions were spartan - almost deliberately so. The volunteers, and bin
Laden too, used to sleep a dozen to a room on thin pallets laid out on the hard floor of their offices. According to former associates, bin Laden used to sit up late into the night discussing Islam and Middle Eastern history. The young Saudi was yet to develop his radical ideology. Instead his views were a mixture of half-remembered history and heavily skewed, and often ill-informed, analyses of current affairs. Bin Laden was particularly angry about what he called the betrayal of the Arabs by the British after the First World War. He also criticized the Saudi royal family, saying they had exploited the Wahhabi to gain power.

At other times bin Laden would lead religious debates among the volunteers.
Many centered on Sura Yasin - the key passage known as 'the heart' or 'the
source' of the Koran, when Muhammad the prophet reveals the message and the task that God has entrusted him with. 'He used to talk a lot about the warriors of Islamic history such as Salauddin (Saladin),' said one associate. 'It was as if he was preparing himself.'

 

1984-90: THE BATTLE-HARDENED
FANATIC TASTES POWER

JUST OVER THE border from Peshawar into Afghanistan is the small village of
Jaji. In 1986 the Soviet garrison there was under heavy attack from the
resistance. One morning a senior commander was sheltering from a bombardment by Russian mortars in a bunker when a tall Arab dived through the door as explosions shook the earth. It was bin Laden. His 'ground war' had started.

In the mid-Eighties - partly due to a massive increase in American funding
for the resistance - the war in Afghanistan intensified. Thousands of young
Muslims were filling the university town dormitories. Though their motives were
varied - some came for adventure, camaraderie or to escape from the law - most came for one reason only. 'I went to fight for my faith,' one Egyptian former mujahid told The Observer in London last year.

Through the summer of 1986 bin Laden was in the centre of the fighting
around Jaji. Once, with a force of about 50 Arabs, he fought off a sustained
assault by Soviet helicopters and infantry. 'He was right in the thick of it,'
Mia Mohamed Aga, a senior Afghan commander at the time and now with the Taliban, said last week. 'I watched him with his Kalashnikov in his hand under fire from mortars and the multiple-barrelled rocket launchers.'

Over the next three years, bin Laden fought hard, often exposing himself to
extreme physical danger. One leader of the hard-line Hezb-i-Islami group said he remembered bin Laden holding a position under heavy bombardment after being surrounded by Soviet soldiers. At least a dozen other senior veterans, many of whom are now opposed to bin Laden, corroborate the accounts of his combat role. They all mention his lack of concern for his own safety. The devout boy was turning into the holy warrior.

Bin Laden's fanaticism was shared by his men. 'I took three Afghans and
three Arabs and told them to hold a position (during the battle for the eastern
city of Jalalabad in 1989). They fought all day, then when I went to relieve
them in the evening the Arabs were crying because they wanted to be martyred. I told them that if they wanted to stay and fight they could. The next day they were killed. Osama said later that he had told them that the trench was their gate to heaven.'

Bin Laden shared more than their fanaticism. 'You never knew he was so rich
or the commander of everyone. We used to all sit down together and eat like
friends,' another veteran said.

On some occasions he took it on himself to broker truces between Afghan
factions. His self-assumed responsibility for supplying the Mujahideen
continued. CIA sources estimated he was bringing in at least Dollars 50m a year for the jihad. One veteran said that during the fighting for Jalalabad, he had seen the Saudi by a roadside, caked in mud, organising food, boots and clothes for the Mujahideen.

However, there were tensions with those who did not share his hard-line
Islamism. Said Mohamed, another Afghan veteran, said bin Laden had refused to deal with him during one battle because he was clean shaven. Bin Laden was learning the power of the media too. Reports of his exploits, by Arab
journalists based in Peshawar, were published throughout the Middle East. They brought him a flood of recruits as well as a respect and a status that he had never had before. The 'son of the slave' was now a sheikh himself.

In 1979 the Soviet forces pulled out of Afghanistan and left a puppet
government in Kabul. The Mujahideen were now battling other Afghans. - and each other. There was little to keep the thousands of battle-hardened fighters of the Arab 'international brigade' in Afghanistan. Many left to continue their jihad in their home countries. Bin Laden, hating the internecine squabbles, was one.

'He was very frustrated by it all. He is a very honest, very clean man, and
when he saw the Arabs were arguing among themselves he was sickened by it,' said Jammal Nazimuddin, a former fighter. 'He used to tell them that they had defeated the Soviet empire alone because they were united and Allah had blessed them. If they were not united, he said, they could not do Allah's will.'
Bin Laden, aged 33, went home.

1990-96: SAUDI DISILLUSION
AND EXILE IN SUDAN

PRINCE ABDULLAH , the effective regent of Saudi Arabia, placed a soft, plump
hand on his young compatriot's shoulder, smiled and spoke of friendship and
loyalty. His words were smooth and conciliatory, but there was no doubting the harsh threat that lay beneath them.

'The family of Mohamed bin Laden have always been faithful subjects of our
kingdom and have helped us greatly in our times of need,' he told the gathering. 'We are sure that nothing will be allowed to mar our good relations in the
future.'

It was the autumn of 1990 and Abdullah was addressing Afghan veterans in a
beautifully furnished lounge in his palace in Riyadh. Although the men nodded
respectfully at the prince's words, the man to whom they were directed could
barely conceal his anger. 'He was seething,' one of the Afghan commanders said. 'You could see it in his eyes.'

A few months earlier, on 2 August, Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait. Osama bin Laden, then living in his home town of Jedda, had immediately sent a message to the Saudi royal family offering to form an army of 30,000 Afghan veterans to defeat the Iraqi dictator. The men who had defeated the Russians could easily take on Saddam, he said, and he was clearly the man to lead them.

Bin Laden was in for a rude - and profoundly upsetting - shock. The last
thing the House of al-Saud wanted was an army of zealous Islamists fighting its war. Bin Laden was received by senior royals, but his offer was firmly rejected. Worse was to come. Instead of the Islamic army he envisaged protecting the cradle of Islam, the defence of Saudi Arabia - and thus of the holy sites of Mecca and Medina - was entrusted to the Americans. Bin Laden, seething with humiliation and rage, could do nothing but watch as 300,000 US troops arrived in his country and set about building bases, drinking Coke and alcohol and sunbathing. Bin Laden saw their presence as an infidel invasion.

It even appeared to defy directly the dying words of the Prophet Muhammad: 'Let there be no two religions in Arabia.' The 33-year-old started lobbying religious scholars and Muslim activists throughout the Gulf. Playing on his celebrity status, he lectured and preached throughout Saudi Arabia, circulating thousands of audio tapes through mosques. He started recruiting his army and sent an estimated 4,000 men to Afghanistan for training. The regime grew uneasy, raided his home and put him under house arrest.

Bin Laden's family, worried that his activities might jeopardise their close relations with the ruling clan, tried to bring him back into the fold but were forced eventually to effectively disown him. The pressure mounted.

In late 1990 an escape route appeared. Bin Laden received an offer of refuge
from Hassan al-Turabi, the charismatic Islamist scholar in effect running Sudan.
Turabi believed that the total defeat of Iraq and the discrediting of 'secular'
Arab regimes would lead to an opportunity to set up a 'pure' Islamic government across the Muslim world. It was a seductive message. And the Saudi regime were thankful for an opportunity to get rid of him. They pushed bin Laden further in the hope that he would leave.

Bin Laden cracked. He fled Saudi Arabia for Khartoum, the Sudanese capital.
He was never to return to his homeland. BIN LADEN set up a home in a rich suburb of Khartoum with his four wives, his children and a core of close retainers. Then he flew in several hundred Arab veterans from Afghanistan to provide the basis of a broader organization.

Life in Sudan was odd. There were football matches and bathing trips to the
Blue Nile, and long junior common room-type arguments over whether Shia and Sunni Muslims should unite to fight the common enemy, and points of Islamic doctrine. Bin Laden even opened a personal bank account in his own name. And most of the time of 'the sheikh' was spent making money, rather than spreading global jihad.

'The biggest myth concerns his wealth,' Ghazi Algosaibi, Saudi Arabia's veteran ambassador to London, said recently. 'I have read reports that he has
Dollars 300 to Dollars 400 million stashed away. This is simply not true. When
he left Saudi Arabia he did not take anything like that amount of money, and the Saudi authorities have taken great care to make sure he does not receive any money from the kingdom.'

In the group's offices in Khartoum, bin Laden, as befitted the boss, had the
largest office. The group was run like any other organization. There was a board of directors, a series of sub-committees and too many meetings. Employees nursed grievances over wages, healthcare, and alleged favoritism. Perks included travel (using the passports of Arab volunteers killed in Afghanistan), free tea and groceries.

The organization ran a trading company called Laden International, a foreign
exchange dealership, a civil engineering company and a firm running farms
growing peanuts and corn. In payment for building a 700-mile road from the
capital to Port Sudan, the government gave Bin Laden the monopoly on sesame seed export. Sudan is one of the world's three largest sesame producers, so it was extremely lucrative.

Other ventures were less successful. A plan to import bicycles from
Azerbaijan was a total flop. Other hare-brained schemes were hatched,
half-implemented and then went nowhere.

But there was still enough cash to keep al-Qaeda's core business ticking
along. The chief executive never lost sight of his main purpose. More than
Dollars 100,000 in cash went to Islamists in Jordan, funds were sent to Baku to set up an operation smuggling Islamic fighters into Chechnya, another Dollars 100,000 went to an Eritrean Islamist group. At one point bin Laden bought a plane for Dollars 250,000 and hired a pilot. The plane soon crashed.

He also set up several military training camps, and hundreds of Algerians,
Palestinians, Egyptians and Saudis received instruction in bomb-making and
terrorist tactics. Many of them had fought in Afghanistan and now, like bin
Laden, were at a loose end. There was talk of assassinating President Mubarak of Egypt, though nobody was sure how to go about it, and there was some haphazard surveillance of possible targets for a bombing in East Africa, including the Nairobi embassy of the US.

There also appears to have been an unsuccessful attempt to buy components
for nuclear weapons in Eastern Europe and a bid to smuggle hundreds of Kalash nikovs on camels across the desert to Egypt. A shipload of guns was sent to Yemen and operatives dispatched to help tribesmen fight US troops in Somalia. The CIA claim that bin Laden was behind the attacks on their troops in Mogadishu in 1993.

However, there is little evidence that al-Qaeda were heavily involved. 'During bin Laden's stay in Sudan anti-American incidents happened in many places but none were conducted by his group in the usual sense of an order passed down a chain of command,' one intelligence source said. 'They were done by people who had trained in Afghanistan and had enough anti-American drive. Bin Laden may have sanctioned them but that was all.'

It was a pattern that was to be often seen in the years to come. A car bomb
in Riyadh in 1995 was blamed on him, with the Saudis producing video
'confessions' from four Afghans for the attack. The Khobar Towers bombing a year later was also blamed on bin Laden, though Iranian agents are now the prime suspects.

In 1994, when the Saudis publicly withdrew his citizenship, bin Laden's
response was to exploit the power of the media. It is believed he set up a
London office called the Advice and Reform Committee (ARC). Its job was
allegedly propaganda, issued vitriolic criticism against the Saudi regime. It
was run by Khalid al-Fawwaz, now fighting extradition to the United States from the UK.

By January 1996, Khartoum was increasingly uneasy about its guest. Turabi
contacted the Sudanese ambassador to Afghanistan, Atiya Badawi, who was based in Peshawar. Badawi, who had learnt the Pashtun language while fighting the Russians, had excellent contacts with his former comrades among the Mujahideen and, with Afghanistan split into hundreds of warring bandit fiefdoms, it was easy to persuade three of the most senior commanders in the Jalalabad area that a wealthy Saudi under their protection might give them an edge over their rivals. The three men - all of whom are now dead - flew to Sudan to ask bin Laden to return to the land of the jihad.

 

1996-98: BUILDING AN ARMY OF TERROR

IT WAS A cool autumn evening in Kabul. Outside a high-walled house in the
northern suburb of Wazir Akbar Khan were a dozen Japanese pickup trucks. The guards and drivers lounged against them. Though the area had escaped the worst of the fighting in the seven years since the Russians had withdrawn, shrapnel scars still pitted the walls and sandbags were stacked around every home.

It was October 1996 and Osama bin Laden was in Kabul to meet the Taliban. It was his first visit to the city and his first encounter with the hard-line Islamic
militia army who had captured it a month earlier. In May a specially chartered
cargo plane carrying the 39-year- old, three of his four wives, half a dozen
children and a hundred of his Arab fighters had landed at Jalalabad airport. But
the three Mujahideen commanders who had invited him back from Sudan had since been ousted and bin Laden, politic as ever, knew he needed to ingratiate himself with the new regime.

A month earlier he had sent a Libyan associate to Taliban leader Mullah Omar
in Kandahar. Omar ordered Mullah Mohamed Rabbani, the deputy leader and mayor of Kabul, to meet bin Laden and see if he was as much of a friend as his
subordinate had claimed. Their meeting was wary but friendly. Bin Laden spoke first. Ignoring their doctrinal differences, he praised the militia's aims and achievements and pledged his unconditional moral and financial support. Rabbani, pleased and flattered, offered the protection of the regime. 'Everybody left smiling,' a witness said.

The meeting signified more than an alliance between the world's most wanted
terrorist and the world's most reviled regime. It was the start of the final -
and most critical - phase of bin Laden's development. Having secured the
Taliban's protection, he was free to start building the most efficient terrorist
organization the world had ever seen.

The jihad against the Russians had given bin Laden much-needed confidence,
contacts throughout the Islamic world and a taste for fame, respect and
adulation. His authority and profile had been boosted further by his stance
against Saudi Arabia and exile. And in Sudan he had been able to start the
serious work of building al-Qaeda - a global umbrella group of Muslim extremists dedicated to overturning 'unIslamic' governments throughout the Middle East and further afield. But in terms of military capacity and strategic thinking bin Laden's group was st