| September 30, 2001
IN PROFILE
Bin Laden's Journey From
Rich Pious Lad to the
Mask of Evil
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN
His face is everywhere and
nowhere. He was born fabulously rich but is thought to live in desert caves.
He seems a soft-spoken ascetic yet he could be the instigator of mass
murder. He is an outcast from family, country and religion yet is beloved by
millions for his holy war against America.
The myths and realities of
Osama bin Laden swirl together like the smoke over the ruins of the World
Trade Center and its thousands of dead. Who is this man?
To the United States
government, the 44-year-old Saudi exile is the most wanted fugitive in
history, the founder and leader of a terrorist network known as Al Qaeda
(The Base), which has in a decade trained 5,000 or more militants in Sudan
and Afghanistan and posted them to perhaps 50 countries to await their turn
to strike. And strike they have, American officials assert, with bin Laden
plans, money or inspiration behind the bombings of the trade center in 1993
(6 dead), two American embassies in Africa in 1998 (224 dead) and the
destroyer Cole in Yemen in 2000 (17 dead), and the jetliners that collapsed
the trade center towers, damaged the Pentagon and crashed in Pennsylvania on
Sept. 11 (more than 6,500 feared dead).
To millions of Americans, who
have seen his face on television daily and on the magazine covers and front
pages of newspapers, Mr. bin Laden is the mask of evil; in many minds he is
already guilty of killing thousands, although he has not been found, let
alone tried, and no evidence directly linking him with murder has been made
public.
To millions in the Islamic
world who hate America for what they regard as its decadent culture and
imperial government, he is a hero who shunned the easy life to battle the
infidels for Allah, who has justified killings with arcane interpretations
of the Koran, and carried them out with encrypted e-mail, and plots stored
on CD-ROM's.
A Guest Under a War Cloud
To the Taliban, the extremist
Islamic clerics who have ruled Afghanistan and given him haven since 1996,
he is a a spiritual and political ally and a source of money, but one whose
presence has become a growing liability.
And to those closest to him,
there is yet another man — the family man who takes his 3 wives and 15
children from cave to cave, moving every night or two, with dozens of
bodyguards — one a bin Laden double — in a desert-roving caravan of land
cruisers armed with missiles.
Mr. bin Laden went from a
childhood of lofty privilege and education in Saudi Arabia to being
galvanized by the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980's.
Investigators say he went to Sudan for five years in the early 1990's to
build his network and multiply his fortune, then to Afghanistan, to wage
war.
Along the way, the young man
— one of 52 children of an immigrant Yemeni bricklayer who became Saudi
Arabia's richest building contractor — moved from boyish piety to youthful
carousing in the bars of Beirut, then back to Islamic fervor.
Inherited wealth and
religious zeal were his formative early pillars. Later there would be harsh
emotions: outrage at Soviet invaders in Afghanistan, indignation over
American support for Israel, anger at what he saw as Western imperialism,
and finally a hatred of an America that, as he saw it, had used its power to
oppress the people of Islam.
Investigators and
intelligence officials say that those beliefs were the basis for his
decisions to oppose the Russians, to make alliances with radicals from Egypt
and Pakistan, to rally young men from across the Islamic world to camps in
Afghanistan, and there to train them to use weapons, explosives, kidnapping,
counterintelligence and other tactics, even flirting with chemical,
biological and nuclear weapons.
Mr. bin Laden has denied
ordering the deaths of anyone, although he had applauded attacks that have
taken American lives as the work of dedicated soldiers of jihad.
Much of what is known about
Mr. bin Laden has come from documents captured in raids on suspected
terrorist operations, from Western agents who knew him in Pakistan in the
1980's when America aided the Afghan fight against the Soviets, and from
testimony by former bin Laden associates, some defectors from his cause,
others defendants on trial for terrorism in the United States, all of them
seeking leniency or new identities in witness protection programs.
It is an unfinished portrait.
As some trial testimony indicated, the image of Mr. bin Laden that has
loomed in the American psyche — of an enemy possessing a sophisticated
global reach and followers willing to die for the cause — was far from
complete. Indeed, the testimony showed a group torn by strife, greed and
banalities, and a leader who had cronies, quibbled over pay scales, lacked
political and organizational skills and may have profited from opium. And
much evidence suggested a loose organization of terrorists who may have no
idea who the leader is or where the plans come from.
Osama bin Laden (rhymes with
sadden) was born in 1957 in Saudi Arabia, the 17th of 24 sons in a family of
immigrants. His mother was Syrian or Palestinian, one of many wives of
Mohammed bin Oud bin Laden, who came from neighboring Yemen in 1932 and,
through friendship with the country's founder, King Abdel Aziz al-Saud, won
contracts to build the infrastructure of roads and refurbish the shrines at
Mecca and Medina, Islam's holiest places. The Saudi Binladen Group today has
35,000 employees worldwide and $5 billion in assets.
Osama was 11 or 12 when his
father died in a plane crash near San Antonio in 1968. It is unclear how
much he inherited — reports vary from $20 million or $80 million to as
high as $300 million — but he was wealthy beyond dreams as a boy. He grew
tall and lean — eventually reaching 6 feet 5 inches — and towered over
classmates and friends.
Like most Saudis, the bin
Laden family belonged to the puritanical Wahhabi sect of Sunni Muslims. By
most accounts, Osama was a pious boy, attending Islamic classes and private
school, although he was never an incisive Islamic scholar. As a teenager, he
is said to have flown often to Beirut, where he partied in casinos and
nightclubs, chased women and got into occasional brawls.
At 18, he enrolled in King
Abdel Aziz University in Jidda and studied civil engineering with the idea
of joining his family business. He also listened to taped lectures of an
influential teacher, Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian major figure in the
Muslim Brotherhood, which is dedicated to resurgent Islamic faith, and the
experience deepened Mr. bin Laden's religious commitment.
In 1979, the year he
graduated, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and the 22-year-old Mr. bin
Laden took his first step into the realm of holy war. Like thousands of
young Arabs, he joined in spirit with the Afghan resistance, in outrage at
the invasion as a violation of Islamic territory. It was, to Mr. bin Laden
and others, an offense against God.
Mr. bin Laden did not take up
a rifle. Instead, he raised money and supplies for Afghan fighters, known as
mujahedeen. He raised huge sums from oil-rich Arabs in Persian Gulf states,
contributed millions from his own fortune and even brought in heavy
equipment from his family's company to help build camps, tunnels, military
depots and roads for the Afghan forces.
"He's not very
sophisticated politically or organizationally," said a former bin Laden
associate whose nom de guerre was Abdullah Anas. "But he's an activist
with great imagination. He ate very little. He slept very little. He'd give
you his clothes. He'd give you his money."
A Man the West Could Use
In 1984, Mr. bin Laden moved
to Peshawar, Pakistan, where he was known to some of the American and French
agents who were intriguing to manipulate the Afghan cause to their
countries' advantage. He also joined Abdullah Azzam, whose taped lectures
had influenced him at the university, in forming Makhtab al Khadimat, a
group that recruited and trained Muslim volunteers from Egypt, Algeria and
other countries to fight in the Afghan war.
The Central Intelligence
Agency was funneling arms and money to the mujahedeen, and some of the aid
may have gone to the Makhtab al Khadimat. It was to play a major role in
raising the concept of global holy war to a reality over the next decade,
eventually becoming the organization known as Al Qaeda.
Mr. Azzam wanted the
organization to support the Afghan cause exclusively, but Mr. bin Laden
sympathized with many Muslims who saw Western perils in their homelands and
embraced the idea of wider jihad, or holy war.
Among those courting him were
a group of radicals belonging to the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which helped to
assassinate President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt in 1981. The group advocated
the overthrow of governments by terrorism and violence, and one of its key
figures, Ayman al-Zawahiri, became Mr. bin Laden's chief associate.
Business and Bioweapons
In 1986, according to
intelligence officials, Mr. bin Laden began to chart an independent course,
setting up his own training camp for 50 Persian Gulf Arabs who lived in
separate tents. He called the camp Al Masadah, The Lion's Den. A year later,
the Afghan-support organization divided and in 1988 Mr. bin Laden and the
Egyptians formed Al Qaeda.
By 1989, Afghanistan had
become a deadly quagmire for Moscow, which was forced to withdraw.
Intoxicated by their triumph in Afghanistan, Mr. bin Laden and other
volunteers returned to their homelands, eager to apply the principles of
jihad wherever they seemed needed. The Koran sets strict limits on holy war,
but the Afghan veterans were guided by their own radical interpretations.
Back in Saudi Arabia, Mr. bin
Laden was indignant with corruption in the government and became enraged
when King Fahd let American forces, with their rock music and Christian and
Jewish troops, wage the Persian Gulf war from Saudi soil in early 1991.
After the conflict he moved back to Afghanistan, but did not stay long. He
told associates that Saudi Arabia had hired Pakistani operatives to kill
him.
Still, Mr. bin Laden moved in
1991 to Sudan, where a militant Islamic government had taken power. Over the
next five years, he may have multiplied his fortune and built a group that
combined business with holy war under the umbrella of Al Qaeda.
Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl, who
described himself as Mr. bin Laden's paymaster, told a federal court in
Manhattan last February that Al Qaeda was comparable to a modern
corporation, with a finance committee, investments, and a network of
profitable ventures.
American agents first came
upon the global ambitions of Mr. bin Laden in 1993 while investigating the
World Trade Center bombing, though evidence of his direct involvement is not
conclusive.
In 1994, Saudi Arabia revoked
his citizenship and his family disowned him. Islamic leaders in other
countries, offended that he used Islam to justify murder, disavowed him.
By then, American officials
regarded Mr. bin Laden as a stateless sponsor of terrorism. Washington
pressed Sudan to expel him, and in 1996 succeeded. He went back to
Afghanistan. Before long, the Taliban was letting him use the country as
what Mr. Anas called a "jihad camp for the world.".
Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company
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