Inside the Kingdom (14 page)

But at this stage of life his own path to piety was that of the Salafi. The evidence was in the lengthening of his beard. As Osama and his friends studied the Koran, they started to shorten the length of their trousers and thobes, and to wear wrinkled shirts that had not been ironed—they had found no evidence that the Prophet or his wives had ever used irons.

“Osama would fast on Mondays and Thursdays,” remembers Khaled Batarfi. “He was consciously following the Prophet’s example. But he wasn’t overbearing in his religion, and he certainly wasn’t violent—not at that time in any way. He’d invite us to his home sometimes to record Islamic chants—just chants, of course: music for him was already strictly
haram
[forbidden].”

Osama’s half brothers and half sisters were, on the whole, a more worldly crew. With the boom of the 1970s the original Bin Laden construction company had diversified, like many a Saudi family business, moving into equipment supply, water storage and desalination, motor vehicle distribution (Audi, Porsche, and Volkswagen), import-export trading, telecommunications, and also franchise ventures in food and catering: the Holy Mosque contractors were also the Saudi distributors of Snapple. But while Osama benefited, like all his siblings, from the considerable family wealth, he had been brought up separately by his mother. His parents divorced soon after his birth. The boy had no full blood brothers or sisters in the family, and he seemed to cultivate his separateness.

This isolation may explain his receptiveness to the approaches of a member of the Muslim Brotherhood while he was at school. A Syrian phys ed teacher recruited Osama and four other young pupils for after-hours soccer training, which soon developed into candlelit sessions of Islamic story-telling.

“The Syrian was mesmerizing,” recalls one of Osama’s fellow students. “He was a born storyteller. But his stories got darker and darker. Osama seemed to like them, but it was too much for me—it caused me to leave the group. The teacher told us a story about a boy of our age who had come to God, but who had found his father standing in his way. This father was not a true believer—he would pull the prayer rug out from beneath his son, for example, when the boy tried to pray. As the teacher told us this tale, he built up the suspense: how this ‘brave and righteous’ boy determined that he would
fight
for the right to pray; how he got hold of his father’s gun; how he found the bullets; how he learned how to load the gun, how he made a plan. The story must have gone on for a full twenty minutes, with the candlelight flickering in the darkened room, and all of us sitting round with our mouths open. Then the climax came—the boy shot his father dead.

“It was a deeply shocking story, because we are taught in Islam to love and respect our father in every situation, even if he is a nonbeliever. But the Syrian turned that teaching on its head.
‘Wallahi!’
he exclaimed, ‘the Lord be praised—with that shot, Islam was finally liberated in that home!’ ”

CHAPTER 7

Jihad in Afghanistan

A
hmed Badeeb was a genial and roly-poly science teacher at Jeddah’s select Al-Thagr (the Harbor or Haven) school on Mecca Road; one of his pupils was Osama Bin Laden. But Ahmed, who held a master’s degree in secondary education from Indiana State University, moved on from teaching to join Saudi Arabia’s CIA, the General Intelligence Department (GID), or Istikhbarat, and one morning in the spring of 1980, he was called in by his boss, Prince Turki Al-Faisal. A high-ranking Pakistani general was arriving the next day to meet the king and the crown prince, explained Turki, and he wanted Ahmed to make all the arrangements.

Ahmed did not attend the meeting with the crown prince, but he did join his boss afterward for dinner with the visiting general, Akhtar Abdur Rahman, who turned out to be head of Pakistan’s powerful military intelligence organization, the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence). The conversation was all about Pakistan’s beleaguered northwestern neighbor, Afghanistan, invaded a few months earlier by the Soviets. Muslim freedom fighters, the mujahideen, local Afghan warriors, were mounting fierce resistance, and Pakistan was supporting them.

Three days later Ahmed received further instructions.

“You have a task to accomplish,” said Prince Turki, handing him an envelope. “His Royal Highness [the crown prince] has agreed to help our Afghan brothers. We are going to buy them their first shipment of weapons, and you must take the money for them to Pakistan—in cash.”

“In cash?” queried Ahmed.

“In cash,” repeated the prince, handing him the crown prince’s letter, where Ahmed read the words “No trace.”

“At the beginning,” explains Prince Turki today, “it was most important that the Russians should not be able to link the mujahideen to any national entity, neither to ourselves nor to Pakistan. We needed deniability. The plan was to use the money to buy Kalashnikovs and RPGs [rocket-propelled grenade launchers] for the Afghans, along with other old Russian weapons that the freedom fighters could have picked up from anywhere.”

Ahmed Badeeb went to the bank and quoted an account number. He declines to say how many fresh $100 bills he requested, but he confirms that the sum was in the millions, and that he was able to lift and carry the money in one large carryall. Experienced couriers report that $2 million is the most that a reasonably fit individual can hang from one arm without staggering too obviously under the weight of the bills (nearly forty-one pounds).

“What sort of job do you do, sir?” asked the teller curiously as he checked the account balance.

“I’m a businessman,” replied Ahmed.

Two days later he went back to receive the notes, each million packed in its own custom-made wooden box. Ahmed took the money out of the boxes, wrapped the bundles in metal foil from his kitchen, and enveloped the whole package in a black plastic garbage bag, which he carried as far as Karachi.

“That bag’s too big to carry on the plane,” he was told at the domestic check-in for Islamabad.

“Not at all,” he insisted, cavalierly jiggling the bag up and down, trying to give the impression that it was filled with party balloons.

When the bag went through the X-ray machine, the kitchen foil bounced back a plain image, and when the security guard asked to open the bag, Ahmed told him there was sensitive film beneath the black plastic. Producing his diplomatic passport, he decided that the time had come to ring General Akhtar.

“Your people are giving me a hard time with the documents,” he said.

“You have arrived so quickly!” said the general in surprise—scarcely a week had passed since the dinner.

Badeeb’s destination was the home of Pakistan’s president, Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq.

“It was a very humble, very simple place,” Ahmed remembers. “A small villa with only three or four rooms. The president was just getting ready for the
maghreb
[sunset] prayer, and we prayed it together.”

Badeeb had met Zia-ul-Haq the previous year when he carried a message from Saudi Arabia requesting that Pakistan should not hang the deposed prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, sentenced to death on corruption charges. That request was not granted, but his current mission met with more success. The Saudi sat with the president late into the night discussing the problems of Afghanistan and Pakistan, while Zia’s small son zoomed around the room on a little bicycle.

“I have brought the amount you requested of His Majesty,” said Badeeb.

“Give my thanks to His Highness,” replied Zia. “Please tell him I will come for
umrah
[small pilgrimage] very soon.”

Meanwhile, in an adjoining room, five generals of the ISI had opened Badeeb’s bag and were toiling away, counting every one of the crisp $100 bills.

Osama Bin Laden could not wait to get to Afghanistan. Within two weeks of the Soviet invasion the twenty-two-year-old was visiting Peshawar, the atmospheric town on the Pakistani side of the border where the bearded mujahideen loped down the streets with their Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders. Returning to Jeddah inspired, Osama lobbied wealthy friends and relatives to raise what one associate described as a “huge” sum of money to support the mujahideen.

There were not many devout young Muslims who could afford to drop their studies to fly to Pakistan on an impulse, and some historians have doubted whether Bin Laden traveled to Peshawar at such an early date. But there is no evidence to contradict his story. Osama certainly had the funds to take him just about anywhere in the world, and if his personal wealth was exceptional, his impulse was not. The plight of the invaded Afghans woke an immediate and powerful response in a society where outrage was habitually rationed. Here was an injustice where protest could be permitted—encouraged even—by the Saudi government, which had had no diplomatic relations with the atheistic Soviets since 1938.
⁸
Better that anger should be directed into jihad abroad than into Iran-style revolution at home.

With the government’s blessing, the Friday pulpits took up the cause. Newspapers reported Communist atrocities against innocent Muslims—while their columnists ignored the “red lines” that restrained their aggression on other issues. Charities were created. Collection boxes appeared in supermarkets and mosques, and Saudi schoolchildren were encouraged to raise money for the poor Afghans.

“People became very generous with their money,” remembers a government minister of the time. “It was an inspiring and romantic idea that people wanted to help—those few brave men in the mountains resisting the mighty Soviet Union.”

Religion was the catalyst. Early in the 1980s Rafiq Hariri, then CEO of the construction company Saudi Oger, astonished the
Washington Post
reporter David Ottaway by smuggling him into the Muslim-only area of Medina, where he proudly showed off the massive Koran printing plant he had been commissioned to build for the government. It was by far the world’s largest. Hundreds of machines stood ready to churn out tens of millions of Korans in multiple languages with commentaries approved by Bin Baz and the Saudi ulema. It was part of the Kingdom’s worldwide missionary effort to combat the Shia teachings of Khomeini’s Iran, and particularly in Afghanistan, where it would ensure that young Afghans were fortified against Marxism with “the true Islam.” Korans and textbooks would be distributed free to the madrasas (schools) inside Afghanistan and along the Pakistani border.

Less than six months after the Soviet invasion, the Saudi foreign minister, Saud Al-Faisal, the elder brother of Turki, announced that fund-raising among ordinary Saudi citizens had accumulated no less than 81.3 million Saudi riyals ($22.1 million). In May 1980, Saud handed a check for that amount to the secretary general of the Islamic Conference in Islamabad. The money was destined for Afghan refugee relief. But by that date his brother Turki’s General Intelligence Department had already secretly disbursed a great deal more than that—on weapons.