The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [89]
“I knew immediately that the tape was the real thing. His posture, the voice, his thin body, and the aged beard that seemed frosted of snow were unmistakeable. Unfortunately, the man was still alive.”
Not long before, far off in Afghanistan, a local militiaman named Faqir Shah had accompanied reporter Tim McGirk back to Tora Bora. “This was where Osama lived,” Shah said as they walked the shattered battlefield. “We fought al Qaeda here for two weeks in the snow.… See that hole? An American soldier tossed a piece of concrete in there from the World Trade Center, because he thought al Qaeda was all finished.…
“I didn’t think so.”
PART IV
PLOTTERS
SEVENTEEN
TWO DECADES EARLIER, WHEN THE TWIN TOWERS OF THE WORLD Trade Center had been a relatively new phenomenon—years before the earliest official concern that they would make a prime target for terrorists—an improbably tall young Saudi, still in his early twenties, had flown into the United States with his pregnant wife and two infant children. His visit, in 1979, passed without notice, for he was neither famous nor infamous.
Osama bin Laden’s activity in America appeared entirely peaceful. The fact that he came at all was not firmly established until 2009, when his wife Najwa—nine babies later and separated from her husband by force of circumstance—published a memoir. She recalled having thought that Americans in general were “gentle and nice … easy to deal with.… My husband and I did not hate America, yet we did not love it.”
An incident on the final day of their stay, as the family sat in an airport departure lounge, showed Najwa how little some Americans knew of other cultures. “I saw an American man gawking at me … jaw dropped open in surprise, curious eyes growing as large as bugs popping from his skull.… I knew without asking that his unwelcome attention had been snagged by my black Saudi costume … face veil, head scarf, and abaya.… That man gave us a good laugh.”
Bin Laden had been busy during the trip, but Najwa was the good Arab wife. “Since my husband’s business was not my business, I did not ask questions.” She asked no questions when bin Laden took off for Los Angeles for a week to talk with unknown men. Nor did she press for details when he said he was meeting—elsewhere—with “a man by the name of Abdullah Azzam.”
By mentioning Azzam, bin Laden had provided a first pointer to the direction his life was going to take. Azzam lectured and led prayers in the mosque at King Abdul Aziz University in the Saudi city of Jeddah, where bin Laden was a third-year student of economics and management. Often described as a “cleric” or “scholar,” Azzam was more than that. A Palestinian, whose village had been overrun by the Israelis in the Six Day War, he was on his way to becoming the “Emir of Jihad.”
“Jihad” is a religious duty for Muslims. It can be interpreted in several ways—its basic sense is “struggle,” or “striving”—but what Azzam meant by it was very clear. He preached the need for jihad to liberate Muslim lands from foreign occupation. “Humanity,” he was to say, “is being ruled by Jews and Christians. The Americans, the British, and others. And behind them, the fingers of world Jewry.”
In the late 1970s Azzam, an imposing figure and a fine speaker, was raging especially about Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat’s peacemaking visit to Israeli-occupied Jerusalem, a visit that millions in the Middle East saw not as statesmanship but betrayal.
With Azzam at Abdul Aziz University was Mohammed Qutb, brother of a writer and thinker who in death, following his execution in Egypt, became the guiding light of Islamic extremism. Sayid Qutb had been the leading voice of the Muslim Brotherhood, deplored the corruption of secular regimes in the Middle East, and advocated using violence to remove them. He excoriated Western society as he had seen it in the United States and