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9/11
COMMISSION REPORT
PREFACE“WE PRESENT THE NARRATIVE of
this report and the recommendations that flow from it to the President of the
United States, the United States Congress, and the American people for their
consideration. Ten Commissioners – five
Republicans and five Democrats chosen by elected leaders from our nation’s
capital at a time of great partisan division – have come together to present
this report without dissent.
…We learned about an enemy who is sophisticated, patient, disciplined, and lethal. The enemy rallies broad support in the Arab and Muslim world by demanding redress of political grievances, but its hostility toward us and our values is limitless. Its purpose is to rid the world of religious and political pluralism, the plebiscite, and equal rights for women. It makes no distinction between military and civilian targets. Collateral damage is not in its lexicon. …All of us have had to
pause, reflect, and sometimes change our minds as we studied these problems and
considered the views of others. We hope
our report will encourage our fellow citizens to study, reflect – and act.”
Thomas H. Kean CHAIR
Lee H. Hamilton VICE CHAIR
While “WOL” encourages everyone to read the full 9/11 Commission report, Chapter 2, (below)
clearly outlines the reasons why Islamic terrorists have targeted us for
extinction, why they rally “broad support in the Arab and Muslim world”, what
it would take to induce them to leave us alone, why we could never concede to
their demands and therefore, why our only permanent solution to the problem is
to change their way of thinking.
WINGS OF LUV FOUNDATION
THE 9/11 COMMISSION REPORTChapter 2
THE FOUNDATION OF
2.1
A DECLARATION OF WAR
In February 1998, the 40-year-old Saudi
exile Usama Bin Ladin and a fugitive Egyptian physician, Ayman al Zawahiri,
arranged from their Afghan headquarters for an Arabic newspaper in London to
publish what they termed a fatwa issued in the name of a "World Islamic
Front." A fatwa is normally an interpretation of Islamic law by a
respected Islamic authority, but neither Bin Ladin, Zawahiri, nor the three
others who signed this statement were scholars of Islamic law. Claiming that
America had declared war against God and his messenger, they called for the
murder of any American, anywhere on earth, as the "individual duty for
every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.”1
Three months later, when interviewed in
Afghanistan by ABC-TV, Bin Ladin enlarged on these themes. 2 He claimed it was
more important for Muslims to kill Americans than to kill other infidels. "It is far better for anyone to kill a single American soldier than to
squander his efforts on other activities," he said. Asked whether he
approved of terrorism and of attacks on civilians, he replied: "We believe
that the worst thieves in the world today and the worst terrorists are the
Americans. Nothing could stop you except perhaps retaliation in kind. We do not
have to differentiate between military or civilian. As far as we are concerned,
they are all targets."
Note: Islamic names often do not follow the Western practice of the consistent
use of surnames. Given the variety of names we mention, we chose to refer to
individuals by the last word in the names by which they are known: Nawaf al Hazmi
as Hazmi, for instance, omitting the article "al" that would be part
of their name in their own societies. We generally make an exception for the
more familiar English usage of "Bin" as part of a last name, as in
Bin Ladin. Further, there is no universally accepted way to transliterate
Arabic words and names into English. We have relied on a mix of common sense,
the sound of the name in Arabic, and common usage in source materials, the
press, or government documents. When we quote from a source document, we use
its transliteration, e.g.,"al Qida" instead of as Qaeda. Though novel for its open endorsement of
indiscriminate killing, Bin Ladin’s 1998 declaration was only the latest in the
long series of his public and private calls since 1992 that singled out the
United States for attack.
In August 1996, Bin Ladin had issued his own
self-styled fatwa calling on Muslims to drive American soldiers out of Saudi
Arabia. The long, disjointed document condemned the Saudi monarchy for allowing
the presence of an army of infidels in a land with the sites most sacred to
Islam, and celebrated recent suicide bombings of American military facilities
in the Kingdom. It praised the 1983 suicide bombing in Beirut that killed 241
U.S. Marines, the 1992 bombing in Aden, and especially the 1993 firefight in
Somalia after which the United States "left the area carrying
disappointment, humiliation, defeat and your dead with you." 3
Bin Ladin said in his ABC interview that he
and his followers had been preparing in Somalia for another long struggle, like
that against the Soviets in Afghanistan, but "the United States rushed out
of Somalia in shame and disgrace." Citing the Soviet army’s withdrawal
from Afghanistan as proof that a ragged army of dedicated Muslims could
overcome a superpower, he told the interviewer: “We are certain that we
shall—with the grace of Allah—prevail over the Americans.” He went on to warn
that "If the present injustice continues . . . , it will inevitably move
the battle to American soil."4
Plans to attack the United States were
developed with unwavering singlemindedness throughout the 1990s. Bin Ladin saw
himself as called "to follow in the footsteps of the Messenger and to
communicate his message to all nations,"5 and to serve as the rallying point and organizer of
a new kind of war to destroy America and bring the world to Islam.
2.2 BIN LADIN’S APPEAL IN THE ISLAMIC WORLD
It is the story of eccentric and violent
ideas sprouting in the fertile ground of political and social turmoil. It is
the story of an organization poised to seize its historical moment. How did Bin
Ladin—with his call for the indiscriminate killing of Americans—win thousands
of followers and some degree of approval from millions more? The history, culture, and body of beliefs
from which Bin Ladin has shaped and spread his message are largely unknown to
many Americans. Seizing on symbols of Islam’s past greatness, he promises to
restore pride to people who consider themselves the victims of successive
foreign masters. He uses cultural and religious allusions to the holy Qur’an
and some of its interpreters. He appeals to people disoriented by cyclonic
change as they confront modernity and globalization. His rhetoric selectively
draws from multiple sources—Islam, history, and the region’s political and
economic malaise. He also stresses grievances against the United States widely
shared in the Muslim world. He
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49
Usama Bin Ladin at a news conference in Afghanistan in 1998 ©Reuters 2004
inveighed against the presence of U.S.
troops in Saudi Arabia, the home of Islam’s holiest sites. He spoke of the
suffering of the Iraqi people as a result of sanctions imposed after the Gulf
War, and he protested U.S. support of Israel.
Islam (a word that literally means
"surrender to the will of God") arose in Arabia with what Muslims
believe are a series of revelations to the Prophet Mohammed from the one and
only God, the God of Abraham and of Jesus. These revelations, conveyed by the
angel Gabriel, are recorded in the Qur’an. Muslims believe that these
revelations, given to the greatest and last of a chain of prophets stretching
from Abraham through Jesus, complete God’s message to humanity. The Hadith,
which recount Mohammed’s sayings and deeds as recorded by his contemporaries,
are another fundamental source. A third key element is the Sharia, the code of
law derived from the Qur’an and the Hadith.
Islam is divided into two main branches,
Sunni and Shia. Soon after the
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50
Prophet’s death, the question of choosing a
new leader, or caliph, for the Muslim community, or Ummah, arose. Initially,
his successors could be drawn from the Prophet’s contemporaries, but with time,
this was no longer possible. Those who became the Shia held that any leader of
the Ummah must be a direct descendant of the Prophet; those who became the
Sunni argued that lineal descent was not required if the candidate met other
standards of faith and knowledge. After bloody struggles, the Sunni became (and
remain) the majority sect. (The Shia are dominant in Iran.) The Caliphate—the
institutionalized leadership of the Ummah—thus was a Sunni institution that
continued until 1924, first under Arab and eventually under Ottoman Turkish
control. Many Muslims look back at the century after the revelations to the
Prophet Mohammed as a golden age. Its memory is strongest among the Arabs. What
happened then—the spread of Islam from the Arabian Peninsula throughout the
Middle East, North Africa, and even into Europe within less than a century
—seemed, and seems, miraculous.6 Nostalgia for Islam’s past glory remains a powerful
force. Islam is both a faith and a code of conduct
for all aspects of life. For many Muslims, a good government would be one
guided by the moral principles of their faith. This does not necessarily
translate into a desire for clerical rule and the abolition of a secular state.
It does mean that some Muslims tend to be uncomfortable with distinctions
between religion and state, though Muslim rulers throughout history have
readily separated the two.
To extremists, however, such divisions, as
well as the existence of parliaments and legislation, only prove these rulers
to be false Muslims usurping God’s authority over all aspects of life.
Periodically, the Islamic world has seen surges of what, for want of a better
term, is often labeled "fundamentalism."7 Denouncing
waywardness among the faithful, some clerics have appealed for a return to
observance of the literal teachings of the Qur’an and Hadith. One scholar from
the fourteenth century from whom Bin Ladin selectively quotes, Ibn Taimiyyah,
condemned both corrupt rulers and the clerics who failed to criticize them. He
urged Muslims to read the Qur’an and the Hadith for themselves, not to depend
solely on learned interpreters like himself but to hold one another to account
for the quality of their observance.8
The extreme Islamist version of history
blames the decline from Islam’s golden age on the rulers and people who turned
away from the true path of their religion, thereby leaving Islam vulnerable to
encroaching foreign powers eager to steal their land, wealth, and even their
souls.
Bin
Ladin’s Worldview
Despite his claims to universal leadership,
Bin Ladin offers an extreme view of Islamic history designed to appeal mainly
to Arabs and Sunnis. He draws on fundamentalists who blame the eventual
destruction of the Caliphate on leaders who abandoned the pure path of
religious devotion.9 He repeatedly calls on his followers to embrace
martyrdom since "the walls of oppression and
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51
humiliation cannot be demolished except in a
rain of bullets."10 For those yearning for a lost sense of order in an
older, more tranquil world, he offers his "Caliphate" as an imagined
alternative to today’s uncertainty. For others, he offers simplistic
conspiracies to explain their world. Bin Ladin also relies heavily on the
Egyptian writer Sayyid Qutb. A member of the Muslim Brotherhood11 executed in 1966
on charges of attempting to overthrow the government, Qutb mixed Islamic
scholarship with a very superficial acquaintance with Western history and
thought. Sent by the Egyptian government to study in the United States in the
late 1940s, Qutb returned with an enormous loathing of Western society and
history. He dismissed Western achievements as entirely material, arguing that
Western society possesses "nothing that will satisfy its own conscience
and justify its existence."12 Three basic themes emerge from Qutb’s writings.
First, he claimed that the world was beset with barbarism, licentiousness, and
unbelief (a condition he called jahiliyya, the religious term for the period of
ignorance prior to the revelations given to the Prophet Mohammed). Qutb argued
that humans can choose only between Islam and jahiliyya. Second, he warned that
more people, including Muslims, were attracted to jahiliyya and its material
comforts than to his view of Islam; jahiliyya could therefore triumph over
Islam. Third, no middle ground exists in what Qutb conceived as a struggle
between God and Satan. All Muslims—as he defined them—therefore must take up
arms in this fight. Any Muslim who rejects his ideas is just one more
nonbeliever worthy of destruction. 13
Bin Ladin shares Qutb’s stark view,
permitting him and his followers to rationalize even unprovoked mass murder as
righteous defense of an embattled faith. Many Americans have wondered,
"Why do ‘they’ hate us?" Some also ask, "What can we do to stop
these attacks?"
Bin Ladin and al Qaeda have given answers to
both these questions. To the first, they say that America had attacked Islam;
America is responsible for all conflicts involving Muslims. Thus Americans are
blamed when Israelis fight with Palestinians, when Russians fight with
Chechens, when Indians fight with Kashmiri Muslims, and when the Philippine government
fights ethnic Muslims in its southern islands. America is also held responsible
for the governments of Muslim countries, derided by al Qaeda as "your
agents.” Bin Ladin has stated flatly,” Our fight against these governments is
not separate from our fight against you." 14 These charges found a ready audience
among millions of Arabs and Muslims angry at the United States because of
issues ranging from Iraq to Palestine to America’s support for their countries’
repressive rulers.
Bin Ladin’s grievance with the United States
may have started in reaction to specific U.S. policies but it quickly became
far deeper. To the second question, what America could do, alQaeda’s answer was
that America should abandon the Middle East, convert to Islam, and end the
immorality and godlessness of its society and culture:” It is saddening to tell
you that you are the worst civilization witnessed by the history of
mankind." If the United States did not
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comply, it would be at war with the Islamic
nation, a nation that al Qaeda’s leaders said "desires death more than you
desire life." 15
History
and Political Context
Few fundamentalist movements in the Islamic
world gained lasting political power. In the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, fundamentalists helped articulate anticolonial grievances but played
little role in the overwhelmingly secular struggles for independence after
World War I. Western-educated lawyers, soldiers, and officials led most
independence movements, and clerical influence and traditional culture were
seen as obstacles to national progress.
After gaining independence from Western
powers following World War II, the Arab Middle East followed an arc from
initial pride and optimism to today’s mix of indifference, cynicism, and
despair. In several countries, a dynastic state already existed or was quickly
established under a paramount tribal family. Monarchies in countries such as
Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Jordan still survive today. Those in Egypt, Libya,
Iraq, and Yemen were eventually overthrown by secular nationalist
revolutionaries.
The secular regimes promised a glowing
future, often tied to sweeping ideologies (such as those promoted by Egyptian
President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Arab Socialism or the Ba’ath Party of Syria and
Iraq) that called for a single, secular Arab state. However, what emerged were
almost invariably autocratic regimes that were usually unwilling to tolerate
any opposition—even in countries, such as Egypt, that had a parliamentary
tradition. Over time, their policies —repression, rewards, emigration, and the
displacement of popular anger onto scapegoats (generally foreign)—were shaped
by the desire to cling to power.
The bankruptcy of secular, autocratic nationalism
was evident across the Muslim world by the late 1970s.At the same time, these
regimes had closed off nearly all paths for peaceful opposition, forcing their
critics to choose silence, exile, or violent opposition. Iran’s 1979 revolution
swept a Shia theocracy into power. Its success encouraged Sunni fundamentalists
elsewhere.
In the 1980s, awash in sudden oil wealth,
Saudi Arabia competed with Shia Iran to promote its Sunni fundamentalist
interpretation of Islam, Wahhabism. The Saudi government, always conscious of
its duties as the custodian of Islam’s holiest places, joined with wealthy
Arabs from the Kingdom and other states bordering the Persian Gulf in donating
money to build mosques and religious schools that could preach and teach their
interpretation of Islamic doctrine.
In this competition for legitimacy, secular
regimes had no alternative to offer. Instead, in a number of cases their rulers
sought to buy off local Islamist movements by ceding control of many social and
educational issues. Emboldened rather than satisfied, the Islamists continued
to push for power—a trend especially clear in Egypt. Confronted with a violent
Islamist movement that killed President Anwar Sadat in 1981, the Egyptian
government combined
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53
harsh repression of Islamic militants with
harassment of moderate Islamic scholars and authors, driving many into exile.
In Pakistan, a military regime sought to justify its seizure of power by a
pious public stance and an embrace of unprecedented Islamist influence on
education and society.
These experiments in political Islam
faltered during the 1990s: the Iranian revolution lost momentum, prestige, and
public support, and Pakistan’s rulers found that most of its population had
little enthusiasm for fundamentalist Islam. Islamist revival movements gained
followers across the Muslim world, but failed to secure political power except
in Iran and Sudan. In Algeria, where in 1991
Islamists seemed almost certain to win power
through the ballot box, the military preempted their victory, triggering a
brutal civil war that continues today. Opponents of today’s rulers have few, if
any, ways to participate in the existing political system. They are thus a ready
audience for calls to Muslims to purify their society, reject unwelcome
modernization, and adhere strictly to the Sharia.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, an
unprecedented flood of wealth led the then largely unmodernized oil states to
attempt to shortcut decades of development. They funded huge infrastructure
projects, vastly expanded education, and created subsidized social welfare
programs. These programs established a widespread feeling of entitlement
without a corresponding sense of social obligations. By the late 1980s,
diminishing oil revenues, the economic drain from many unprofitable development
projects, and population growth made these entitlement programs unsustainable.
The resulting cutbacks created enormous resentment among recipients who had
come to see government largesse as their right. This resentment was further
stoked by public understanding of how much oil income had gone straight into
the pockets of the rulers, their friends, and their helpers.
Unlike the oil states (or Afghanistan, where
real economic development has barely begun), the other Arab nations and
Pakistan once had seemed headed toward balanced modernization. The established
commercial, financial, and industrial sectors in these states, supported by an
entrepreneurial spirit and widespread understanding of free enterprise, augured
well. But unprofitable heavy industry, state monopolies, and opaque
bureaucracies slowly stifled growth. More importantly, these state-centered
regimes placed their highest priority on preserving the elite’s grip on
national wealth. Unwilling to foster dynamic economies that could create jobs
attractive to educated young men, the countries became economically stagnant
and reliant on the safety valve of worker emigration either to the Arab oil
states or to the West. Furthermore, the repression and isolation of women in
many Muslim countries have not only seriously limited individual opportunity
but also crippled overall economic productivity. 16
By the 1990s, high birthrates and declining
rates of infant mortality had
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54
produced a common problem throughout the
Muslim world: a large, steadily increasing population of young men without any
reasonable expectation of suitable or steady employment—a sure prescription for
social turbulence. Many of these young men, such as the enormous number trained
only in religious schools, lacked the skills needed by their societies. Far
more acquired valuable skills but lived in stagnant economies that could not
generate satisfying jobs.
Millions, pursuing secular as well as
religious studies, were products of educational systems that generally devoted
little if any attention to the rest of the world’s thought, history, and
culture. The secular education reflected a strong cultural preference for
technical fields over the humanities and social sciences. Many of these young
men, even if able to study abroad, lacked the perspective and skills needed to
understand a different culture.
Frustrated in their search for a decent
living, unable to benefit from an education often obtained at the cost of great
family sacrifice, and blocked from starting families of their own, some of
these young men were easy targets for radicalization.
Bin
Ladin’s Historical Opportunity
Most Muslims prefer a peaceful and inclusive
vision of their faith, not the violent sectarianism of Bin Ladin. Among Arabs,
Bin Ladin’s followers are commonly nicknamed takfiri, or "those who define
other Muslims as unbelievers," because of their readiness to demonize and
murder those with whom they disagree. Beyond the theology lies the simple human
fact that most Muslims, like most other human beings, are repelled by mass
murder and barbarism whatever their justification.
"All Americans must recognize that the
face of terror is not the true face of Islam," President Bush observed.
"Islam is a faith that brings comfort to a billion people around the
world. It’s a faith that has made brothers and sisters of every race. It’s a
faith based upon love, not hate." 17 Yet as political, social, and
economic problems created flammable societies, Bin Ladin used Islam’s most
extreme, fundamentalist traditions as his match. All these elements—including
religion—combined in an explosive compound.
Other extremists had, and have, followings
of their own. But in appealing to societies full of discontent, Bin Ladin
remained credible as other leaders and symbols faded. He could stand as a
symbol of resistance—above all, resistance to the West and to America. He could
present himself and his allies as victorious warriors in the one great
successful experience for Islamic militancy in the 1980s: the Afghan jihad
against the Soviet occupation.
By 1998, Bin Ladin had a distinctive appeal,
as he focused on attacking America. He argued that other extremists, who aimed
at local rulers or Israel, did not go far enough. They had not taken on what he
called "the head of the snake." 18
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Finally, Bin Ladin had another advantage: a substantial, worldwide organization. By the time he issued his February 1998 declaration of war, Bin Ladin had nurtured that organization for nearly ten years. He could attract, train, and use recruits for ever more ambitious attacks, rallying new adherents with each demonstration that his was the movement of the future.
2.3 THE RISE OF BIN LADIN AND AL QAEDA(1988–1992)
A decade of conflict in Afghanistan, from
1979 to 1989, gave Islamist extremists a rallying point and training field. A
Communist government in Afghanistan gained power in 1978 but was unable to
establish enduring control. At the end of 1979, the Soviet government sent in
military units to ensure that the country would remain securely under Moscow’s
influence. The response was an Afghan national resistance movement that
defeated Soviet forces. 19
Young Muslims from around the world flocked
to Afghanistan to join as volunteers in what was seen as a "holy
war"—jihad—against an invader. The largest numbers came from the Middle
East. Some were Saudis, and among them was Usama Bin Ladin.
Twenty-three when he arrived in Afghanistan
in 1980, Bin Ladin was the seventeenth of 57 children of a Saudi construction
magnate. Six feet five and thin, Bin Ladin appeared to be ungainly but was in
fact quite athletic, skilled as a horseman, runner, climber, and soccer player.
He had attended Abdul Aziz University in Saudi Arabia. By some accounts, he had
been interested there in religious studies, inspired by tape recordings of
fiery sermons by Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian and a disciple of Qutb. Bin
Ladin was conspicuous among the volunteers not because he showed evidence of
religious learning but because he had access to some of his family’s huge
fortune. Though he took part in at least one actual battle, he became known
chiefly as a person who generously helped fund the anti-Soviet jihad. 20
Bin Ladin understood better than most of the
volunteers the extent to which the continuation and eventual success of the
jihad in Afghanistan depended on an increasingly complex, almost worldwide
organization. This organization included a financial support network that came
to be known as the "Golden Chain," put together mainly by financiers
in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf states. Donations flowed through charities
or other nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Bin Ladin and the "Afghan
Arabs" drew largely on funds raised by this network, whose agents roamed
world markets to buy arms and supplies for the mujahideen, or "holy
warriors." 21
Mosques, schools, and boardinghouses served
as recruiting stations in many parts of the world, including the United States.
Some were set up by Islamic extremists or their financial backers. Bin Ladin
had an important part in this
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56 activity. He and the cleric Azzam had joined
in creating a "Bureau of Services" (Mektab al Khidmat, or MAK), which
channeled recruits into Afghanistan. 22
The international environment for Bin
Ladin’s efforts was ideal. Saudi Arabia and the United States supplied billions
of dollars worth of secret assistance to rebel groups in Afghanistan fighting
the Soviet occupation. This assistance was funneled through Pakistan: the Pakistani
military intelligence service (Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, or
ISID), helped train the rebels and distribute the arms. But Bin Ladin and his
comrades had their own sources of support and training, and they received
little or no assistance from the United States. 23
April 1988 brought victory for the Afghan
jihad. Moscow declared it would pull its military forces out of Afghanistan
within the next nine months. As the Soviets began their withdrawal, the jihad’s
leaders debated what to do next.
Bin Ladin and Azzam agreed that the
organization successfully created for Afghanistan should not be allowed to
dissolve. They established what they called a base or foundation (al Qaeda) as
a potential general headquarters for future jihad. 24 Though Azzam had
been considered number one in the MAK, by August 1988 Bin Ladin was clearly the
leader (emir) of al Qaeda. This organization’s structure included as its
operating arms an intelligence component, a military committee, a financial
committee, a political committee, and a committee in charge of media affairs
and propaganda. It also had an Advisory Council (Shura) made up of Bin Ladin’s
inner circle.25
Bin Ladin’s assumption of the helm of al
Qaeda was evidence of his growing self-confidence and ambition. He soon made
clear his desire for unchallenged control and for preparing the mujahideen to
fight anywhere in the world. Azzam, by contrast, favored continuing to fight in
Afghanistan until it had a true Islamist government. And, as a Palestinian, he
saw Israel as the top priority for the next stage. 26
Whether the dispute was about power,
personal differences, or strategy, it ended on November 24, 1989, when a
remotely controlled car bomb killed Azzam and both of his sons. The killers
were assumed to be rival Egyptians. The outcome left Bin Ladin indisputably in
charge of what remained of the MAK and al Qaeda. 27
Through writers like Qutb, and the presence
of Egyptian Islamist teachers in the Saudi educational system, Islamists
already had a strong intellectual influence on Bin Ladin and his al Qaeda
colleagues. By the late 1980s, the Egyptian Islamist movement—badly battered in
the government crackdown following President Sadat’s assassination—was centered
in two major organizations: the Islamic Group and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. A
spiritual guide for both, but especially the Islamic Group, was the so-called
Blind Sheikh, Omar Abdel Rahman. His preaching had inspired the assassination
of Sadat. After being in and out of Egyptian prisons during the 1980s, Abdel
Rahman found Page
57 refuge in the United States. From his
headquarters in Jersey City, he distributed messages calling for the murder of
unbelievers. 28
The most important Egyptian in Bin Ladin’s
circle was a surgeon, Ayman al-Zawahairi, who led a strong faction of the
Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Many of his followers became important members in the
new organization, and his own close ties with Bin Ladin led many to think of
him as the deputy head of al Qaeda. He would in fact become Bin Ladin’s deputy
some years later, when they merged their organizations. 29
By the fall of 1989, Bin Ladin had
sufficient stature among Islamic extremists that a Sudanese political leader,
Hassan al Turabi, urged him to transplant his whole organization to Sudan.
Turabi headed the National Islamic Front in a coalition that had recently
seized power in Khartoum. 30 Bin Ladin agreed to help Turabi in an ongoing war
against African Christian separatists in southern Sudan and also to do some
road building. Turabi in return would let Bin Ladin use Sudan as a base for
worldwide business operations and for preparations for jihad. 31 While agents of
Bin Ladin began to buy property in Sudan in 1990, 32 Bin Ladin himself
moved from Afghanistan back to Saudi Arabia.
In August 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait. Bin
Ladin, whose efforts in Afghanistan had earned him celebrity and respect,
proposed to the Saudi monarchy that he summon mujahideen for a jihad to retake
Kuwait. He was rebuffed, and the Saudis joined the U.S.-led coalition. After
the Saudis agreed to allow U.S. armed forces to be based in the Kingdom, Bin
Ladin and a number of Islamic clerics began to publicly denounce the
arrangement. The Saudi government exiled the clerics and undertook to silence
Bin Ladin by, among other things, taking away his passport. With help from a
dissident member of the royal family, he managed to get out of the country
under the pretext of attending an Islamic gathering in Pakistan in April 1991. 33 By 1994, the
Saudi government would freeze his financial assets and revoke his citizenship. 34 He no longer had
a country he could call his own.
Bin Ladin moved to Sudan in 1991 and set up
a large and complex set of intertwined business and terrorist enterprises. In
time, the former would encompass numerous companies and a global network of
bank accounts and nongovernmental institutions. Fulfilling his bargain with
Turabi, Bin Ladin used his construction company to build a new highway from
Khartoum to Port Sudan on the Red Sea coast. Meanwhile, al Qaeda finance
officers and top operatives used their positions in Bin Ladin’s businesses to
acquire weapons, explosives, and technical equipment for terrorist purposes.
One founding member, Abu Hajer al Iraqi, used his position as head of a Bin
Ladin investment company to carry out procurement trips from western Europe to
the Far East. Two others, Wadi al Hage and Mubarak Douri, who had become
acquainted in Tuc-
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58
son, Arizona, in the late 1980s, went as far
afield as China, Malaysia, the Philippines, and the former Soviet states of
Ukraine and Belarus.35
Bin Ladin’s impressive array of offices
covertly provided financial and other support for terrorist activities. The
network included a major business enterprise in Cyprus; a "services"
branch in Zagreb; an office of the Benevolence International Foundation in
Sarajevo, which supported the Bosnian Muslims in their conflict with Serbia and
Croatia; and an NGO in Baku, Azerbaijan, that was employed as well by Egyptian
Islamic Jihad both as a source and conduit for finances and as a support center
for the Muslim rebels in Chechnya. He also made use of the already-established
Third World Relief Agency (TWRA) headquartered in Vienna, whose branch office
locations included Zagreb and Budapest. (Bin Ladin later set up an NGO in
Nairobi as a cover for operatives there.) 36
Bin Ladin now had a vision of himself as head
of an international jihad confederation. In Sudan, he established an
"Islamic Army Shura" that was to serve as the coordinating body for
the consortium of terrorist groups with which he was forging alliances. It was
composed of his own al Qaeda Shura together with leaders or representatives of
terrorist organizations that were still independent. In building this Islamic
army, he enlisted groups from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Oman,
Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, Morocco, Somalia, and Eritrea. Al Qaeda also
established cooperative but less formal relationships with other extremist
groups from these same countries; from the African states of Chad, Mali, Niger,
Nigeria, and Uganda; and from the Southeast Asian states of Burma, Thailand,
Malaysia, and Indonesia. Bin Ladin maintained connections in the Bosnian
conflict as well. 37 The groundwork for a true global terrorist network
was being laid.
Bin Ladin also provided equipment and
training assistance to the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in the Philippines and
also to a newly forming Philippine group that called itself the Abu Sayyaf
Brigade, after one of the major Afghan jihadist commanders. 38 Al Qaeda helped
Jemaah Islamiya (JI), a nascent organization headed by Indonesian Islamists
with cells scattered across Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the
Philippines. It also aided a Pakistani group engaged in insurrectionist attacks
in Kashmir. In mid-1991, Bin Ladin dispatched a band of supporters to the
northern Afghanistan border to assist the Tajikistan Islamists in the ethnic
conflicts that had been boiling there even before the Central Asian departments
of the Soviet Union became independent states.39
This pattern of expansion through building
alliances extended to the United States. A Muslim organization called al Khifa
had numerous branch offices, the largest of which was in the Farouq mosque in
Brooklyn. In the mid-1980s, it had been set up as one of the first outposts of
Azzam and Bin Ladin’s MAK. 40 Other cities with branches of al Khifa included
Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Tucson. 41 Al Khifa recruited American Muslims
to
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fight in Afghanistan; some of them would
participate in terrorist actions in the United States in the early 1990s and in
al Qaeda operations elsewhere, including the 1998 attacks on U.S. embassies in
East Africa.
2.4 BUILDING AN ORGANIZATION,
DECLARING WAR
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After U.S. troops deployed to Somalia in
late 1992, al Qaeda leaders formulated a fatwa demanding their eviction. In
December, bombs exploded at two hotels in Aden where U.S. troops routinely
stopped en route to Somalia, killing two, but no Americans. The perpetrators
are reported to have belonged to a
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group from southern Yemen headed by a Yemeni
member of Bin Ladin’s Islamic Army Shura; some in the group had trained at an
al Qaeda camp in Sudan. 44 Al Qaeda leaders set up a Nairobi cell and used it
to send weapons and trainers to the Somali warlords battling U.S. forces, an
operation directly supervised by al Qaeda’s military leader. 45 Scores of
trainers flowed to Somalia over the ensuing months, including most of the
senior members and weapons training experts of al Qaeda’s military committee.
These trainers were later heard boasting that their assistance led to the
October 1993 shootdown of two U.S. Black Hawk helicopters by members of a
Somali militia group and to the subsequent withdrawal of U.S. forces in early
1994. 46
In November 1995, a car bomb exploded
outside a Saudi-U.S. joint facility in Riyadh for training the Saudi National
Guard. Five Americans and two officials from India were killed. The Saudi
government arrested four perpetrators, who admitted being inspired by Bin
Ladin. They were promptly executed. Though nothing proves that Bin Ladin
ordered this attack, U.S. intelligence subsequently learned that al Qaeda
leaders had decided a year earlier to attack a U.S. target in Saudi Arabia, and
had shipped explosives to the peninsula for this purpose. Some of Bin Ladin’s
associates later took credit. 47
In June 1996, an enormous truck bomb
detonated in the Khobar Towers residential complex in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia,
that housed U.S. Air Force personnel. Nineteen Americans were killed, and 372
were wounded. The operation was carried out principally, perhaps exclusively,
by Saudi Hezbollah, an organization that had received support from the
government of Iran. While the evidence of Iranian involvement is strong, there
are also signs that al Qaeda played some role, as yet unknown. 48
In this period, other prominent attacks in which
Bin Ladin’s involvement is at best cloudy are the 1993 bombing of the World
Trade Center, a plot that same year to destroy landmarks in New York, and the
1995 Manila air plot to blow up a dozen U.S. airliners over the Pacific.
Details on these plots appear in chapter 3.
Another scheme revealed that Bin Ladin
sought the capability to kill on a mass scale. His business aides received word
that a Sudanese military officer who had been a member of the previous
government cabinet was offering to sell weapons-grade uranium. After a number
of contacts were made through intermediaries, the officer set the price at $1.5
million, which did not deter Bin Ladin. Al Qaeda representatives asked to
inspect the uranium and were shown a cylinder about 3 feet long, and one
thought he could pronounce it genuine. Al Qaeda apparently purchased the
cylinder, then discovered it to be bogus. 49 But while the effort failed, it shows
what Bin Ladin and his associates hoped to do. One of the al Qaeda
representatives explained his mission: "it’s easy to kill more people with
uranium." 50
Bin Ladin seemed willing to include in the
confederation terrorists from
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almost every corner of the Muslim world. His
vision mirrored that of Sudan’s Islamist leader, Turabi, who convened a series
of meetings under the label Popular Arab and Islamic Conference around the time
of Bin Ladin’s arrival in that country. Delegations of violent Islamist
extremists came from all the groups represented in Bin Ladin’s Islamic Army
Shura. Representatives also came from organizations such as the Palestine
Liberation Organization, Hamas, and Hezbollah. 51
Turabi sought to persuade Shiites and Sunnis to put aside their divisions and join against the common enemy. In late 1991 or 1992, discussions in Sudan between al Qaeda and Iranian operatives led to an informal agreement to cooperate in providing support—even if only training—for actions carried out primarily against Israel and the United States. Not long afterward, senior al Qaeda operatives and trainers traveled to Iran to receive training in explosives. In the fall of 1993, another such delegation went to the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon for further training in explosives as well as in intelligence and security. Bin Ladin reportedly showed particular interest in learning how to use truck bombs such as the one that had killed 241 U.S. Marines in Lebanon in 1983.The relationship between al Qaeda and Iran demonstrated that Sunni-Shia divisions did not necessarily pose an insurmountable barrier to cooperation in terrorist operations. As will be described in chapter 7, al Qaeda contacts with Iran continued in ensuing years. 52
Bin Ladin was also willing to explore
possibilities for cooperation with Iraq, even though Iraq’s dictator, Saddam
Hussein, had never had an Islamist agenda—save for his opportunistic pose as a
defender of the faithful against "Crusaders" during the Gulf War of
1991. Moreover, Bin Ladin had in fact been sponsoring anti-Saddam Islamists in
Iraqi Kurdistan, and sought to attract them into his Islamic army. 53
To protect his own ties with Iraq, Turabi reportedly brokered an agreement that Bin Ladin would stop supporting activities against Saddam. Bin Ladin apparently honored this pledge, at least for a time, although he continued to aid a group of Islamist extremists operating in part of Iraq (Kurdistan) outside of Baghdad’s control. In the late 1990s, these extremist groups suffered major defeats by Kurdish forces. In 2001, with Bin Ladin’s help they re-formed into an organization called Ansar al Islam. There are indications that by then the Iraqi regime tolerated and may even have helped Ansar al Islam against the common Kurdish enemy. 54
With the Sudanese regime acting as intermediary,
Bin Ladin himself met with a senior Iraqi intelligence officer in Khartoum in
late 1994 or early 1995. Bin Ladin is said to have asked for space to establish
training camps, as well as assistance in procuring weapons, but there is no
evidence that Iraq responded to this request.55 As described below, the ensuing years
saw additional efforts to establish connections.
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Not until 1998 did al Qaeda undertake a
major terrorist operation of its own, in large part because Bin Ladin lost his
base in Sudan. Ever since the Islamist regime came to power in Khartoum, the
United States and other Western governments had pressed it to stop providing a haven
for terrorist organizations. Other governments in the region, such as those of
Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and even Libya, which were targets of some of these
groups, added their own pressure. At the same time, the Sudanese regime began
to change. Though Turabi had been its inspirational leader, General Omar al
Bashir, president since 1989, had never been entirely under his thumb. Thus as
outside pressures mounted, Bashir’s supporters began to displace those of
Turabi.
The attempted assassination in Ethiopia of
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in June 1995 appears to have been a tipping
point. The would-be killers, who came from the Egyptian Islamic Group, had been
sheltered in Sudan and helped by Bin Ladin. 56 When the Sudanese refused to hand
over three individuals identified as involved in the assassination plot, the UN
Security Council passed a resolution criticizing their inaction and eventually
sanctioned Khartoum in April 1996. 57
A clear signal to Bin Ladin that his days in
Sudan were numbered came when the government advised him that it intended to
yield to Libya’s demands to stop giving sanctuary to its enemies. Bin Ladin had
to tell the Libyans who had been part of his Islamic army that he could no
longer protect them and that they had to leave the country. Outraged, several
Libyan members of al Qaeda and the Islamic Army Shura renounced all connections
with him. 58
Bin Ladin also began to have serious money
problems. International pressure on Sudan, together with strains in the world
economy, hurt Sudan’s currency. Some of Bin Ladin’s companies ran short of
funds. As Sudanese authorities became less obliging, normal costs of doing
business increased. Saudi pressures on the Bin Ladin family also probably took
some toll. In any case, Bin Ladin found it necessary both to cut back his
spending and to control his outlays more closely. He appointed a new financial
manager, whom his followers saw as miserly. 59
Money problems proved costly to Bin Ladin in
other ways. Jamal Ahmed al Fadl, a Sudanese-born Arab, had spent time in the
United States and had been recruited for the Afghan war through the Farouq
mosque in Brooklyn. He had joined al Qaeda and taken the oath of fealty to Bin
Ladin, serving as one of his business agents. Then Bin Ladin discovered that
Fadl had skimmed about $110,000, and he asked for restitution. Fadl resented
receiving a salary of only $500 a month while some of the Egyptians in al Qaeda
were given $1,200 a month. He defected and became a star informant for the
United States. Also testifying about al Qaeda in a U.S. court was L’Houssaine
Kherchtou, who told of breaking with
Bin Ladin because of Bin Ladin’s professed inability to provide him with money
when his wife needed a caesarian section. 60
In February 1996, Sudanese officials began
approaching officials from the
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United States and other governments, asking
what actions of theirs might ease foreign pressure. In secret meetings with
Saudi officials, Sudan offered to expel Bin Ladin to Saudi Arabia and asked the
Saudis to pardon him. U.S. officials became aware of these secret discussions,
certainly by March. Saudi officials apparently wanted Bin Ladin expelled from
Sudan. They had already revoked his citizenship, however, and would not
tolerate his presence in their country. And Bin Ladin may have no longer felt
safe in Sudan, where he had already escaped at least one assassination attempt
that he believed to have been the work of the Egyptian or Saudi regimes, or
both. In any case, on May 19, 1996, Bin Ladin left Sudan—significantly
weakened, despite his ambitions and organizational skills. He returned to
Afghanistan. 61
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2.5 AL QAEDA’S RENEWAL IN
AFGHANISTAN
(1996–1998)
Bin Ladin flew on a leased aircraft from
Khartoum to Jalalabad, with a refueling stopover in the United Arab Emirates. 62 He was
accompanied by family members and bodyguards, as well as by al Qaeda members
who had been close associates since his organization’s 1988 founding in Afghanistan.
Dozens of additional militants arrived on later flights. 63
Though Bin Ladin’s destination was
Afghanistan, Pakistan was the nation that held the key to his ability to use
Afghanistan as a base from which to revive his ambitious enterprise for war against
the United States.
For the first quarter century of its
existence as a nation, Pakistan’s identity had derived from Islam, but its
politics had been decidedly secular. The army was—and remains—the country’s
strongest and most respected institution, and the army had been and continues
to be preoccupied with its rivalry with India, especially over the disputed
territory of Kashmir.
From the 1970s onward, religion had become
an increasingly powerful force in Pakistani politics. After a coup in 1977, military
leaders turned to Islamist groups for support, and fundamentalists became more
prominent. South Asia had an indigenous form of Islamic fundamentalism, which
had developed in the nineteenth century at a school in the Indian village of
Deoband. 64 The influence of the Wahhabi school of Islam had
also grown, nurtured by Saudi funded institutions. Moreover, the fighting in
Afghanistan made Pakistan home to an enormous—and generally
unwelcome—population of Afghan refugees; and since the badly strained Pakistani
education system could not accommodate the refugees, the government
increasingly let privately funded religious schools serve as a cost-free
alternative. Over time, these schools produced large numbers of half-educated
young men with no marketable skills but with deeply held Islamic views. 65
Pakistan’s rulers found these multitudes of
ardent young Afghans a source
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64
of potential trouble at home but potentially
useful abroad. Those who joined the Talaban movement, espousing a ruthless
version of Islamic law, perhaps could bring order in chaotic Afghanistan and
make it a cooperative ally. They thus might give Pakistan greater security on
one of the several borders where Pakistani military officers hoped for what
they called "strategic depth." 66
It is unlikely that Bin Ladin could have
returned to Afghanistan had Pakistan disapproved. The Pakistani military
intelligence service probably had advance knowledge of his coming, and its
officers may have facilitated his travel. During his entire time in Sudan, he
had maintained guesthouses and training camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan. These
were part of a larger network used by diverse organizations for recruiting and
training fighters for Islamic insurgencies in such places as Tajikistan,
Kashmir, and Chechnya. Pakistani intelligence officers reportedly introduced
Bin Ladin to Taliban leaders in Kandahar, their main base of power, to aid his
reassertion of control over camps near
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65
Khowst, out of an apparent hope that he
would now expand the camps and make them available for training Kashmiri
militants. 67
Yet Bin Ladin was in his weakest position
since his early days in the war against the Soviet Union. The Sudanese
government had canceled the registration of the main business enterprises he
had set up there and then put some of them up for public sale. According to a
senior al Qaeda detainee, the government of Sudan seized everything Bin Ladin
had possessed there.68
He also lost the head of his military
committee, Abu Ubaidah al Banshiri, one of the most capable and popular leaders
of al Qaeda. While most of the group’s key figures had accompanied Bin Ladin to
Afghanistan, Banshiri had remained in Kenya to oversee the training and weapons
shipments of the cell set up some four years earlier. He died in a ferryboat
accident on Lake Victoria just a few days after Bin Ladin arrived in Jalalabad,
leaving Bin Ladin with a need to replace him not only in the Shura but also as
supervisor of the cells and prospective operations in East Africa. 69 He had to make
other adjustments as well, for some al Qaeda members viewed Bin Ladin’s return
to Afghanistan as occasion to go off in their own directions. Some maintained
collaborative relationships with al Qaeda, but many disengaged entirely. 70
For a time, it may not have been clear to
Bin Ladin that the Taliban would be his best bet as an ally. When he arrived in
Afghanistan, they controlled much of the country, but key centers, including
Kabul, were still held by rival warlords. Bin Ladin went initially to
Jalalabad, probably because it was in an area controlled by a provincial
council of Islamic leaders who were not major contenders for national power. He
found lodgings with Younis Khalis, the head of one of the main mujahideen
factions. Bin Ladin apparently kept his options open, maintaining contacts with
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who, though an Islamic extremist, was also one of the
Taliban's most militant opponents. But after September 1996, when first
Jalalabad and then Kabul fell to the Taliban, Bin Ladin cemented his ties with them. 71
That process did not always go smoothly. Bin
Ladin, no longer constrained by the Sudanese, clearly thought that he had new
freedom to publish his appeals for jihad. At about the time when the Taliban
were making their final drive toward Jalalabad and Kabul, Bin Ladin issued his
August 1996 fatwa, saying that "We . . . have been prevented from
addressing the Muslims," but expressing relief that "by the grace of
Allah, a safe base here is now available in the high Hindu Kush mountains in
Khurasan. "But the Taliban, like the Sudanese, would eventually hear
warnings, including from the Saudi monarchy. 72
Though Bin Ladin had promised Taliban
leaders that he would be circumspect, he broke this promise almost immediately,
giving an inflammatory interview to CNN in March 1997. The Taliban leader
Mullah Omar promptly "invited" Bin Ladin to move to Kandahar,
ostensibly in the interests of Bin Ladin’s own security but more likely to
situate him where he might be easier to control. 73
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66
There is also evidence that around this time
Bin Ladin sent out a number of feelers to the Iraqi regime, offering some
cooperation. None are reported to have received a significant response.
According to one report, Saddam Hussein’s efforts at this time to rebuild
relations with the Saudis and other Middle Eastern regimes led him to stay
clear of Bin Ladin.74
In mid-1998, the situation reversed; it was
Iraq that reportedly took the initiative. In March 1998, after Bin Ladin’s
public fatwa against the United States, two al Qaeda members reportedly went to
Iraq to meet with Iraqi intelligence. In July, an Iraqi delegation traveled to
Afghanistan to meet first with the Taliban and then with Bin Ladin. Sources
reported that one, or perhaps both, of these meetings was apparently arranged
through Bin Ladin’s Egyptian deputy, Zawahairi, who had ties of his own to the
Iraqis. In 1998, Iraq was under intensifying U.S. pressure, which culminated in
a series of large air attacks in December. 75
Similar meetings between Iraqi officials and
Bin Ladin or his aides may have occurred in 1999 during a period of some
reported strains with the Taliban. According to the reporting, Iraqi officials
offered Bin Ladin a safe haven in Iraq. Bin Ladin declined, apparently judging
that his circumstances in Afghanistan remained more favorable than the Iraqi
alternative. The reports describe friendly contacts and indicate some common
themes in both sides’ hatred of the United States. But to date we have seen no
evidence that these or the earlier contacts ever developed into a collaborative
operational relationship. Nor have we seen evidence indicating that Iraq
cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the
United States. 76
Bin Ladin eventually enjoyed a strong
financial position in Afghanistan, thanks to Saudi and other financiers
associated with the Golden Chain. Through his relationship with Mullah Omar—and
the monetary and other benefits that it brought the Taliban—Bin Ladin was able
to circumvent restrictions; Mullah Omar would stand by him even when other
Taliban leaders raised objections. Bin Ladin appeared to have in Afghanistan a
freedom of movement that he had lacked in Sudan. Al Qaeda members could travel
freely within the country, enter and exit it without visas or any immigration
procedures, purchase and import vehicles and weapons, and enjoy the use of
official Afghan Ministry of Defense license plates. Al Qaeda also used the
Afghan state-owned Ariana Airlines to courier money into the country. 77
The Taliban seemed to open the doors to all
who wanted to come to Afghanistan to train in the camps. The alliance with the
Taliban provided al Qaeda a sanctuary in which to train and indoctrinate fighters
and terrorists, import weapons, forge ties with other jihad groups and leaders,
and plot and staff terrorist schemes. While Bin Ladin maintained his own al
Qaeda guesthouses and camps for vetting and training recruits, he also provided
support to and bene-
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67
fited from the broad infrastructure of such
facilities in Afghanistan made available to the global network of Islamist
movements. U.S. intelligence estimates put the total number of fighters who
underwent instruction in Bin Ladin–supported camps in Afghanistan from 1996
through 9/11 at 10,000 to 20,000. 78 In addition to training fighters and
special operators, this larger network of guesthouses and camps provided a
mechanism by which al Qaeda could screen and vet candidates for induction into
its own organization. Thousands flowed through the camps, but no more than a
few hundred seem to have become al Qaeda members. From the time of its
founding, al Qaeda had employed training and indoctrination to identify
"worthy" candidates. 79
Al Qaeda continued meanwhile to collaborate
closely with the many Middle Eastern groups—in Egypt, Algeria, Yemen, Lebanon,
Morocco, Tunisia, Somalia, and elsewhere—with which it had been linked when Bin
Ladin was in Sudan. It also reinforced its London base and its other offices
around Europe, the Balkans, and the Caucasus. Bin Ladin bolstered his links to
extremists in South and Southeast Asia, including the Malaysian-Indonesian JI
and several Pakistani groups engaged in the Kashmir conflict. 80
The February 1998 fatwa thus seems to have
been a kind of public launch of a renewed and stronger al Qaeda, after a year
and a half of work. Having rebuilt his fund-raising network, Bin Ladin had
again become the rich man of the jihad movement. He had maintained or restored
many of his links with terrorists elsewhere in the world. And he had
strengthened the internal ties in his own organization.
The inner core of al Qaeda continued to be a
hierarchical top-down group with defined positions, tasks, and salaries. Most
but not all in this core swore fealty (or bayat) to Bin Ladin. Other operatives
were committed to Bin Ladin or to his goals and would take assignments for him,
but they did not swear bayat and maintained, or tried to maintain, some
autonomy. A looser circle of adherents might give money to al Qaeda or train in
its camps but remained essentially independent. Nevertheless, they constituted
a potential resource for al Qaeda. 81
Now effectively merged with Zawahairi’s
Egyptian Islamic Jihad, 82 al Qaeda promised to become the general headquarters
for international terrorism,without the need for the Islamic Army Shura. Bin
Ladin was prepared to pick up where he had left off in Sudan. He was ready to
strike at "the head of the snake." Al Qaeda’s role in organizing
terrorist operations had also changed. Before the move to Afghanistan, it had
concentrated on providing funds, training, and weapons for actions carried out
by members of allied groups. The attacks on the U.S. embassies in East Africa
in the summer of 1998 would take a different form—planned, directed, and
executed by al Qaeda, under the direct supervision of Bin Ladin and his chief
aides.
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As early as December 1993, a team of al
Qaeda operatives had begun casing targets in Nairobi for future attacks. It was
led by Ali Mohamed, a former Egyptian army officer who had moved to the United
States in the mid-1980s, enlisted in the U.S.Army, and became an instructor at
Fort Bragg. He had provided guidance and training to extremists at the Farouq
mosque in Brooklyn, including some who were subsequently convicted in the
February 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. The casing team also included a
computer expert whose write-ups were reviewed by al Qaeda leaders. 83
The team set up a makeshift laboratory for
developing their surveillance photographs in an apartment in Nairobi where the
various al Qaeda operatives and leaders based in or traveling to the Kenya cell
sometimes met. Banshiri, al Qaeda’s military committee chief, continued to be
the operational commander of the cell; but because he was constantly on the
move, Bin Ladin had dispatched another operative, Khaled al Fawwaz, to serve as
the on-site manager. The technical surveillance and communications equipment
employed for these casing missions included state-of-the-art video cameras
obtained from China and from dealers in Germany. The casing team also reconnoitered
targets in Djibouti. 84
As early as January 1994, Bin Ladin received
the surveillance reports, complete with diagrams prepared by the team’s
computer specialist. He, his top military committee members—Banshiri and his
deputy, Abu Hafs al Masri (also known as Mohammed Atef)—and a number of other
al Qaeda leaders reviewed the reports. Agreeing that the U.S. embassy in
Nairobi was an easy target because a car bomb could be parked close by, they
began to form a plan. Al Qaeda had begun developing the tactical expertise for
such attacks months earlier, when some of its operatives—top military committee
members and several operatives who were involved with the Kenya cell among
them—were sent to Hezbollah training camps in Lebanon. 85
The cell in Kenya experienced a series of
disruptions that may in part account for the relatively long delay before the
attack was actually carried out. The difficulties Bin Ladin began to encounter
in Sudan in 1995, his move to Afghanistan in 1996, and the months spent establishing
ties with the Taliban may also have played a role, as did Banshiri’s accidental
drowning.
In August 1997, the Kenya cell panicked. The
London Daily Telegraph reported that Madani al Tayyib, formerly head of al
Qaeda’s finance committee, had turned himself over to the Saudi government. The
article said (incorrectly) that the Saudis were sharing Tayyib’s information
with the U.S. and British authorities. 86 At almost the same time, cell members
learned that U.S. and Kenyan agents had searched the Kenya residence of Wadi al
Hage, who had become the new on-site manager in Nairobi, and that Hage’s
telephone was being tapped. Hage was a U.S. citizen who had worked with Bin
Ladin in Afgha-
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nistan in the 1980s, and in 1992 he went to
Sudan to become one of al Qaeda’s major financial operatives. When Hage
returned to the United States to appear before a grand jury investigating Bin
Ladin, the job of cell manager was taken over by Harun Fazul, a Kenyan citizen
who had been in Bin Ladin’s advance team to Sudan back in 1990. Harun faxed a
report on the "security situation" to several sites, warning that
"the crew members in East Africa is [sic] in grave danger" in part
because "America knows . . . that the followers of [Bin Ladin]. . .
carried out the operations to hit Americans in Somalia." The report
provided instructions for avoiding further exposure. 87
On February 23, 1998, Bin Ladin issued his public fatwa. The language had been in negotiation for some time, as part of the merger under way between Bin Ladin’s organization and Zawahairi's Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Less than a month after the publication of the fatwa, the teams that were to carry out the embassy attacks were being pulled together in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. The timing and content of their instructions indicate that the decision to launch the attacks had been made by the time the fatwa was issued. 88
The next four months were spent setting up
the teams in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. Members of the cells rented residences,
and purchased bomb-making materials and transport vehicles. At least one
additional explosives expert was brought in to assist in putting the weapons
together. In Nairobi, a hotel room was rented to put up some of the operatives.
The suicide trucks were purchased shortly before the attack date. 89
While this was taking place, Bin Ladin
continued to push his public message. On May 7, the deputy head of al Qaeda’s
military committee, Mohammed Atef, faxed to Bin Ladin’s London office a new
fatwa issued by a group of sheikhs located in Afghanistan. A week later, it
appeared in Al Quds al Arabi, the same Arabic-language newspaper in London that
had first published Bin Ladin’s February fatwa, and it conveyed the same
message—the duty of Muslims to carry out holy war against the enemies of Islam
and to expel the Americans from the Gulf region. Two weeks after that, Bin
Ladin gave a videotaped interview to ABC News with the same slogans, adding
that "we do not differentiate between those dressed in military uniforms
and civilians; they are all targets in this fatwa." 90
By August 1, members of the cells not
directly involved in the attacks had mostly departed from East Africa. The
remaining operatives prepared and assembled the bombs, and acquired the
delivery vehicles. On August 4, they made one last casing run at the embassy in
Nairobi. By the evening of August 6, all but the delivery teams and one or two
persons assigned to remove the evidence trail had left East Africa. Back in
Afghanistan, Bin Ladin and the al Qaeda leadership had left Kandahar for the
countryside, expecting U.S. retaliation. Declarations taking credit for the
attacks had already been faxed to the joint al Qaeda–Egyptian Islamic Jihad
office in Baku, with instructions to stand by
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for orders to "instantly" transmit
them to Al Quds al Arabi. One proclaimed "the formation of the Islamic
Army for the Liberation of the Holy Places," and two others—one for each
embassy—announced that the attack had been carried out by a "company"
of a "battalion" of this "Islamic Army." 91
On the morning of August 7, the bomb-laden
trucks drove into the embassies roughly five minutes apart—about 10:35 A.M. in
Nairobi and 10:39 A.M. in Dar es Salaam. Shortly afterward, a phone call was
placed from Baku to London. The previously prepared messages were then faxed to
London. 92
The attack on the U.S. embassy in Nairobi
destroyed the embassy and killed 12 Americans and 201 others, almost all
Kenyans. About 5,000 people were injured. The attack on the U.S. embassy in Dar
es Salaam killed 11 more people, none of them Americans. Interviewed later
about the deaths of the Africans, Bin Ladin answered that "when it becomes
apparent that it would be impossible to repel these Americans without
assaulting them, even if this involved the killing of Muslims, this is
permissible under Islam. "Asked if he had indeed masterminded these
bombings, Bin Ladin said that the World Islamic Front for jihad against
"Jews and Crusaders" had issued a "crystal clear" fatwa. If
the instigation for jihad against the Jews and the Americans to liberate the
holy places "is considered a crime, “he said, “let history be a witness that
I am a criminal."93
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