Ghost Wars (15 page)

ABDURRAB RASUL SAYYAF became the Saudis’ most important client among the mujahedin rebels. A hulking former professor of Islamic law at Kabul University who maintained a long white-flecked beard, Sayyaf had lived for years in Cairo, where he acquired florid and impeccable Arabic. Crackdowns by the Afghan secret police, including a lengthy prison sentence, forced him into exile in Pakistan.

As Prince Turki’s GID began to penetrate the Afghan jihad in 1980, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, an alliance of Muslim governments, held a major summit in Saudi Arabia, in the resort town of Taif. The Saudis wanted the conference to condemn Soviet interference in Afghanistan. Yasser Arafat, then backing many leftist causes, planned to speak in Moscow’s defense. Afghan rebel leaders flew in from Peshawar to appeal for their cause. Ahmed Badeeb was assigned to select just one of the mujahedin leaders to make a speech, right after Arafat, attacking the Soviet invasion as an affront to Islam.

Several Afghan rebel leaders spoke passable Arabic, but Badeeb found that Sayyaf, then an assistant to another leader, was by far the most fluent and effective. “We chose him to give the speech,” Badeeb recalled later. Immediately, however, the Afghan leaders began to “fight among themselves. Unbelievable guys. . . . Everyone was claiming that he represents the Afghans and he should give the speech.” The scene became so unruly that Badeeb decided to lock all of them in a Taif prison until they agreed on a single speaker.

After six hours of jailhouse debate, the Afghans accepted Sayyaf. Badeeb then decided that his client needed a better stage name. As he recalled it, Sayyaf had been introduced to him as “Abdul Rasur Sayyaf.” The first two names, he said, translated to Saudis as “Slave of the Prophet,” suggesting that Sayyaf’s ancestors had been indentured servants. By adding “Abdur” to the name Badeeb altered its meaning to “Slave of the God of the Prophet,” suggesting religious devotion, not low social status. For years Badeeb was proud that Saudi intelligence had literally given Sayyaf his name.
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An emboldened Sayyaf returned to Peshawar and formed his own Afghan rebel party, drawing on Saudi cash. Sayyaf promoted Wahhabi doctrine among the rebels and provided GID with access to the war independent of ISI control.

Sayyaf also offered GID a means to compete for Afghan influence against Saudi Arabia’s wealthy Wahhabi clerics. Sheikh Abdul bin Baz, the head of the kingdom’s official religious establishment and a descendant of the Wahhabi sect’s founder, had his own mujahedin clients. Bin Baz managed charities that sent millions of dollars and hundreds of volunteer Arab fighters to help an austere Afghan religious leader, Jamil al-Rahman, who had set up a small Wahhabi-inspired “emirate” in an isolated valley of Afghanistan’s Kunar province. Badeeb saw Sayyaf as the GID-backed alternative to this and other rival Wahhabi groups.

The Saudi spy service’s murky mix of alliance and rivalry with the kingdom’s Islamic
ulama
(scholars of Islamic law) became a defining feature of the Afghan jihad as it swelled during the 1980s.

Middle-class, pious Saudis flush with oil wealth embraced the Afghan cause as American churchgoers might respond to an African famine or a Turkish earthquake. Charity is a compulsion of Islamic law. The money flowing from the kingdom arrived at the Afghan frontier in all shapes and sizes: gold jewelry dropped on offering plates by merchants’ wives in Jedda mosques; bags of cash delivered by businessmen to Riyadh charities as
zakat,
an annual Islamic tithe; fat checks written from semiofficial government accounts by minor Saudi princes; bountiful proceeds raised in annual telethons led by Prince Salman, the governor of Riyadh; and richest of all, the annual transfers from GID to the CIA’s Swiss bank accounts.

Prince Turki said years later that GID often controlled who among the Afghans was authorized to receive the semiofficial and unofficial charity funds, but it was never clear how effectively the spy service oversaw the
ulama-
run charities. There was relatively little supervision during the early and mid-1980s, a lack of control that Badeeb later regretted.
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Even more ambiguous than the money trail was the legion of Saudis flocking to join or support the Afghan jihad. It was rarely clear who was acting as a formal agent of the kingdom’s intelligence service and who was acting as an independent religious volunteer. To the Pakistani generals and American intelligence officers who came to know of him, no Saudi more embodied that mystery than Ahmed Badeeb’s former pupil from Jedda, Osama bin Laden.

MOHAMMED BIN LADEN migrated to Jedda in 1931 from a harsh, impoverished valley in Yemen. He arrived just a few years after Abdul Aziz and his fierce Ikhwan took control of the Red Sea coastline. Talented, ambitious, frugal, and determined, bin Laden cobbled together a construction business one project at a time during the sparse years of the 1930s and 1940s. He built houses, roads, offices, and hotels, and he began to cultivate the Saudi royal clan. In the tradition of Saudi and Yemeni sheikhs, bin Laden took multiple young wives. He ultimately fathered about fifty children. By the time his seventeenth son, Osama, was born in 1957 to a young Syrian wife, Mohammed bin Laden had established himself in Jedda, Medina (where Osama lived as a boy), and Riyadh. First under King Saud and then especially under Crown Prince and King Faisal, bin Laden’s construction firm became the kingdom’s lead contractor for such ambitious and politically sensitive projects as a new highway from Jedda to Taif and the massive refurbishment of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.
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Prince Turki’s father and Osama bin Laden’s father were friends, business partners, and political allies. Mohammed bin Laden “was a worthy man,” as Prince Turki recalled. “He was truly a genuine hero in the eyes of many Saudis, including the royal family, because of what he did for the kingdom. But he was always the construction man. When there was a job to be done, bin Laden would do it.”
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King Faisal appointed Mohammed bin Laden as his minister of public works. The king’s patronage crowned the bin Laden family with open royal support and ensured that their construction fortune would grow into the billions of dollars as the Saudi treasury reaped the oil profits stoked by Faisal’s OPEC gambits.

As a child Osama rode his father’s bulldozers and wandered his teeming construction sites in the boomtowns of the Hejaz, as the region around the Red Sea is known. But he hardly knew his father. In 1967, just three years into Faisal’s reign, Mohammed bin Laden died in a plane crash. Faisal intervened to establish a trust to oversee the operations of the bin Laden construction firm. He wanted to guarantee its stability until the older bin Laden sons, led by Osama’s half-brother Salem, could grow up and take charge. In effect, because of the initiative of Prince Turki’s father, the bin Laden boys became for a time wards of the Saudi kingdom.

Salem and other bin Ladens paid their way into elite British boarding schools and American universities. On the wings of their wealth many of them moved comfortably and even adventurously between the kingdom and the West. Salem married an English aristocrat, played the guitar, piloted airplanes, and vacationed in Orlando. A photograph of the bin Laden children snapped on a cobbled Swedish street during the early 1970s shows a shaggy, mod clan in bell-bottoms. Perhaps because his mother was not one of Mohammed’s favored wives, or because of choices she made about schooling, or because of her boy’s own preferences, Osama never slipped into the jetstream that carried his half-brothers and half-sisters to Geneva and London and Aspen. Instead he enrolled in Jedda’s King Abdul Aziz University, a prestigious school by Saudi standards but one isolated from world affairs and populated by Islamist professors from Egypt and Jordan—some of them members of the Muslim Brotherhood or connected to its underground proselytizing networks.

Osama bin Laden was an impressionable college sophomore on a $1 million annual allowance during the first shocking upheavals of 1979. His teachers in Jedda included Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian who would become a spiritual founder of Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist rival to the secular-leftist Palestine Liberation Organization. Another of bin Laden’s teachers was Mohammed Qutb, the brother of Sayyed Qutb, an Egyptian Islamic radical executed in 1966 for advocating his secular government’s violent overthrow. In these classrooms bin Laden studied the imperatives and nuances of contemporary Islamic jihad.
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Exactly when bin Laden made his first visit to Pakistan to meet leaders of the Afghan mujahedin isn’t clear. In later interviews bin Laden suggested that he flew to Pakistan “within weeks” of the Soviet invasion. Others place his first trip later, shortly after he graduated from King Abdul Aziz University with a degree in economics and public administration, in 1981. Bin Laden had met Afghan mujahedin leaders at Mecca during the annual
hajj.
(The Afghan guerrillas with Saudi connections quickly learned they could raise enormous sums outside of ISI’s control by rattling their tin cups before wealthy pilgrims.) According to Badeeb, on bin Laden’s first trip to Pakistan he brought donations to the Lahore offices of Jamaat-e-Islami, Zia’s political shock force. Jamaat was the Pakistani offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood; its students had sacked the U.S. embassy in Islamabad in 1979. Bin Laden did not trust the official Pakistan intelligence service, Badeeb recalled, and preferred to funnel his initial charity through private religious and political networks.

From the beginning of the Afghan jihad, Saudi intelligence used religious charities to support its own unilateral operations. This mainly involved funneling money and equipment to favored Afghan commanders outside ISI or CIA control. Badeeb established safehouses for himself and other Saudi spies through Saudi charities operating in Peshawar. Badeeb also stayed frequently at the Saudi embassy in Islamabad. “The humanitarian aid—that was completely separate from the Americans,” Badeeb recalled. “And we insist[ed] that the Americans will not get to that, get involved—especially in the beginning,” in part because some of the Islamist mujahedin objected to direct contacts with Western infidels.
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With Zia’s encouragement, Saudi charities built along the Afghan frontier hundreds of
madrassas,
or Islamic schools, where they taught young Afghan refugees to memorize the Koran. Ahmed Badeeb made personal contributions to establish his own refugee school along the frontier. He did insist that his school’s curriculum emphasize crafts and practical trade skills, not Koran memorization. “I thought, ‘Why does everybody have to be a religious student?’ ”
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In spy lexicon, each of the major intelligence agencies working the Afghan jihad—GID, ISI, and the CIA—began to “compartment” their work, even as all three collaborated with one another through formal liaisons. Working together they purchased and shipped to the Afghan rebels tens of thousands of tons of weapons and ammunition. Separately they spied on one another and pursued independent political agendas. Howard Hart, the CIA station chief in Islamabad until 1984, regarded it as “the worst kept secret in town” that the Saudis were privately running guns and cash to Sayyaf.

The Saudis insisted that there be no interaction in Pakistan between the CIA and the GID. All such contact was to take place in Riyadh or Langley. GID tried to keep secret the subsidies it paid to the ISI outside of the arms-buying program. For their part, CIA officers tried to shield their own direct contacts with Afghan commanders such as Abdul Haq.
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Bin Laden moved within Saudi intelligence’s compartmented operations, outside of CIA eyesight. CIA archives contain no record of any direct contact between a CIA officer and bin Laden during the 1980s. CIA officers delivering sworn testimony before Congress in 2002 asserted there were no such contacts, and so did multiple CIA officers and U.S. officials in interviews. The CIA became aware of bin Laden’s work with Afghan rebels in Pakistan and Afghanistan later in the 1980s but did not meet with him even then, according to these record searches and interviews. If the CIA did have contact with bin Laden during the 1980s and subsequently covered it up, it has so far done an excellent job.
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Prince Turki and other Saudi intelligence officials said years later that bin Laden was never a professional Saudi intelligence agent. Still, while the exact character and timeline of his dealings with GID remains uncertain, it seems clear that bin Laden did have a substantial relationship with Saudi intelligence. Some CIA officers later concluded that bin Laden operated as a semiofficial liaison between GID, the international Islamist religious networks such as Jamaat, and the leading Saudi-backed Afghan commanders, such as Sayyaf. Ahmed Badeeb describes an active, operational partnership between GID and Osama bin Laden, a relationship more direct than Prince Turki or any other Saudi official has yet acknowledged. By Badeeb’s account, bin Laden was responsive to specific direction from both the Saudi and Pakistani intelligence agencies during the early and mid-1980s. Bin Laden may not have been paid a regular stipend or salary; he was a wealthy man. But Badeeb’s account suggests that bin Laden may have arranged formal road-building and other construction deals with GID during this period—contracts from which bin Laden would have earned profits. Badeeb’s account is incomplete and in places ambiguous; he is known to have given only two interviews on the subject, and he does not address every aspect of his history with bin Laden in depth. But his description of the relationship, on its face, is one of intimacy and professional alliance. “I loved Osama and considered him a good citizen of Saudi Arabia,” Badeeb said.

The Badeeb family and the bin Ladens hailed from the same regions of Saudi Arabia and Yemen, Badeeb said.When Ahmed Badeeb first met Osama at school in Jedda, before Badeeb became Turki’s chief of staff, bin Laden had “joined the religious committee at the school, as opposed to any of the other many other committees,” Badeeb recalled. “He was not an extremist at all, and I liked him because he was a decent and polite person. In school and academically he was in the middle.”
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