The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [103]
Not satisfied with seeing senior ministers, however, bin Laden requested an audience with the king himself. The request went nowhere, not least because bin Laden had said that he “didn’t care about King Fahd, only about Allah.” He was sent on his way with a royal “Don’t call us. We’ll call you.”
Bin Laden personally got away with this. The hundred or so war veterans he had brought into the country, however, and some of his personal staff were arrested. They were released only after bin Laden had made a string of calls to various princes. Unrepentant, he then began speaking out in public, arranging the distribution of flyers and audiotapes that claimed Saudi Arabia was becoming “a colony of America.”
The United States, meanwhile, leading a coalition of troops from thirty-two nations—including Saudi Arabia and several Muslim countries—duly recaptured Kuwait. Iraq was routed, at huge cost in men and matériel, in the brilliant operation remembered as Desert Storm. Even had bin Laden been able to resign himself to a temporary American presence, however, there was now a further affront. After the war, contrary to what he and like-minded objectors had hoped, some five thousand American troops and several bases remained. The American military did not leave Saudi Arabia.
IT WAS, FATEFULLY, bin Laden who departed. The precise reason that he left, and under what conditions, is lost in the fog of conflicting information supplied by Saudi and CIA sources. The shapes in that fog may tell us something.
To at least some in the Saudi government, bin Laden had become a political pest at a difficult time. In the groundswell of protest over the U.S. presence, his very public dissent was galling. So was his attempt to use his veterans for a new jihad, against the communist regime that controlled part of neighboring Yemen. Bin Laden’s passport was reportedly seized, his movements within Saudi Arabia restricted.
Then suddenly, in April 1991, he was cleared to travel. “One day,” his son Omar recalled, “my father disappeared without telling us anything.” He had gone to Pakistan—supposedly to attend an Islamic conference, or look after a business matter. “We didn’t say, ‘Get out!’ ” Prince Bandar has said. “He left because he thought it was getting to the point where what he was saying and doing was not going to be accepted.”
The truth was probably not so simple. The whole purpose of confiscating bin Laden’s passport, after all, had been to prevent him going abroad to make trouble. Why return it? One Saudi intelligence source said bin Laden was told he should leave because “the U.S. government was planning to kill him … so the royal family would do him a favor and get him out of the kingdom for his own protection.” This makes no sense. Bin Laden had as yet perpetrated no crimes against the United States. As yet, Washington had no motive to want him dead.
Accounts vary as to the circumstances of bin Laden’s departure. Former senior CIA officer Michael Scheuer has written that he managed to leave by “using the intervention of his brothers to convince the Saudi officials to let him travel on condition he would return.…” Author Lawrence Wright, for his part, wrote that many “prominent princes and sheikhs” interceded on his behalf. Interior minister Naif authorized the departure, but only after bin Laden signed “a pledge that he would not interfere with the politics of Saudi Arabia or any Arab country.”
Out of the Kingdom, bin Laden would be free to pursue jihad. That, in the context of fighting for Islam, would be very much in line with Saudi foreign policy. If this scenario is accurate, the long-term implications are grave.
Just who did launch bin Laden