The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [120]
“WE WERE WHISKED to a chartered Learjet,” his son Omar has recalled. “My father and his party were treated as dignitaries, with no need for the formalities of passports and customs. Besides my father and me, there were only eight other male passengers. Brother Sayf Adel, my father’s security chief, and Mohammed Atef, my father’s best friend and top commander, were traveling with us.”
The plane passed through Saudi airspace without difficulty, refueled in Iran, and landed at the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad, near the border with Pakistan. Other members of bin Laden’s family and entourage followed months later, again aboard a chartered jet.
“Our plane had two configurations: with fifty-six passengers and with seventy-nine,” the captain recalled. “They wanted eighty-four. They asked how many extra seats we wanted. They installed the seats overnight.… We flew women, children, clothes, rickshaws, old bikes, mattresses, blankets.”
After a brief stay in Jalalabad courtesy of a local warlord, bin Laden set up base for a while in the mountains at Tora Bora. Family members thought it a desolate place, but he called it “our new home,” was excited to be back at a place he had known while fighting the Soviets.
A major concern, for some time, was how the Taliban—then gaining the upper hand in the civil war—would view his presence. Then their leader, Mullah Omar, sent word that he was welcome. It was by no means religious and ideological compatibility alone that was to ensure bin Laden a lasting welcome. Through him, the 9/11 Commission would calculate, between $10 and $20 million a year was to flow to the Taliban.
Visibly relaxed once he knew he had sanctuary, bin Laden began talking with his son Omar about his “mission in life.” “I was put on this earth by God for a specific reason,” he said. “My only reason for living is to fight the jihad and to make sure there is justice for the Muslims.” He ranted on about America and Israel, and it was evident that there was no limit to what he imagined he could achieve.
“First,” he said with the supreme self-confidence that only boundless faith or delusion can bring, “we obliterate America. By that I don’t mean militarily. We can destroy America from within by making it economically weak, until its markets collapse.… That’s what we did with Russia. When that happens, they will have no interest in supplying Israel with arms.… We only have to be patient.… This is God’s plan.”
The man who voiced this astounding ambition now lived in a makeshift wooden cabin. There bin Laden spent much of his time, reading deeply into his hundreds of books, most of them religious tomes, never far from his prayer beads, his copy of the Qur’an, and a radio that picked up the BBC’s broadcasts from London. At his side, always, was his Kalashnikov assault rifle.
Bin Laden was interested in the techniques of mass communication, the distribution of propaganda by tape cassette and fax machine. He would shortly acquire a state-of-the-art satellite telephone. When the technology became available, his operatives would use the Internet as an everyday tool. Omar noticed that his father now spent much time recording his thoughts on a dictating machine.
The fruit of his latest thinking came in August 1996, with a fax transmission to the office of al-Quds al-Arabi—or The Arab Jerusalem—an Arabic-language newspaper published in London. It was a twelve-thousand-word message from the mountain, in bin Laden’s words from “the summit of the Hindu Kush,” one that at the time got little coverage in the West. Across the Middle East, where hundreds of thousands of copies were distributed in cassette form, it had a major impact.
Lengthy, couched in archaic language, replete with religious references, this was bin Laden’s “Declaration of Jihad against the Americans