The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [100]
Only years later, when the news was filled with stories and photographs of bin Laden, did Girardet and Simpson realize just who the menacing Arab had been.
THE MEN AROUND bin Laden had indeed long since deferred to him, as they had to his mentor, Azzam, before his death, as sheikh. Azzam had said jihad needed a “vanguard,” a leadership that would give the dreamed-of future Islamic society a “strong foundation.” The Arabic words he used for “strong foundation” were “al-qaeda al-sulbah.”
A few months later, in 1988, Azzam, bin Laden, and a handful of comrades had discussed plans for how to make progress once the Soviets finally left. Initially, they planned, they would maintain a militia of some three hundred men. Those who enlisted would make a pledge, “so that the word of God will be the highest and his religion victorious.” The camps in which they would train would be “al-qa’ida al’askariyya”—the Military Base.
Those who do not understand Arabic—these authors included—might interpret these utterances as the birth of the dragon that the Western media now calls “al Qaeda.” Not so, recent scholarship suggests. The word does mean “the foundation” or “the base”—and other things, for such is Arabic. More than one future bin Laden militant, though, would say he never heard the name “al Qaeda”—referring to an organization or fighting entity—before 9/11. Bin Laden himself would not refer to “members of al Qaeda” until shortly before 9/11.
“He rang me to explain,” Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi said of a call from bin Laden after the anti-Soviet conflict. “He said al Qaeda was an organization to record the names of the mujahideen and all their contact details: a database.… So wherever jihad needed fighting, in the Philippines or Central Asia or anywhere in the world, you could get in touch with the fighters quickly.”
All the same, a seed had been sown.
The ISI chief of the day, Hamid Gul, was asked in 1989 whether it had not been “playing with fire” to bring in Muslim radicals. “We are fighting a jihad,” Gul replied. “The communists have their international brigades, the West has NATO, why can’t the Muslims unite and form a common front?”
Gul was replaced as head of ISI by Benazir Bhutto, the moderate, Western-educated prime minister who had come to power in Pakistan the previous year. At a private meeting with President George H. W. Bush, she said, “I mentioned that in our common zeal to most effectively combat the Soviets in Afghanistan, our countries had made a strategic decision to empower the most fanatical elements of the mujahideen.… I sadly said to President Bush, ‘Mr. President, I’m afraid we have created a Frankenstein’s monster that could come back to haunt us in the future.’ ”
THE FUTURE CAST of 9/11’s characters was now waiting in the wings. Ayman al-Zawahiri, a doctor by training, led a clique of militant Egyptians in Afghanistan. Though his specialty was eye surgery, he had dealt with every sort of injury and ailment during the conflict—including bin Laden’s chronic low blood pressure. One day, he would become bin Laden’s principal cohort. Bin Laden and Mohammed Atef, who would become his strategist and senior commander, had fought side by side. All three of them knew Omar Abdel Rahman, the incendiary preacher later to be known in the West as the “Blind Sheikh.”
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who would one day claim to have been the principal planner of 9/11, was in his mid-twenties in 1989. Ramzi Yousef, who would lead a first attempt to destroy the World Trade Center, was still at college. Both of them were passionately hostile to the United States because of its support for Israel.
Mohamed Atta, who was to lead the 9/11 hijackers, was just twenty-one and studying architecture at Cairo University. His future fellow “pilots,” Hani Hanjour, Ziad Jarrah, and Marwan al-Shehhi, were seventeen, fourteen, and eleven.
As a little boy, Jarrah had lived near