The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [97]
“Bin Laden,” wrote former British foreign secretary Robin Cook, “was a product of a monumental miscalculation of Western security agencies. Throughout the 80s he was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan.”
In a little-known interview, bin Laden himself appeared to offer a revelation. “I created my first camps,” he said in 1995, “where these volunteers underwent training, instructed by Pakistani and American officers [authors’ italics]. The arms were provided by the Americans and the money by the Saudis.”
Then, a year later, bin Laden reversed himself. “Personally,” he said in 1996, “neither I nor my brothers saw evidence of American help.”
Statements by Osama bin Laden—and for that matter those of intelligence officials—rarely contribute much to historical clarity.
THE USE THE GID SAW for bin Laden initially put him nowhere near the combat zone. “The Saudi government,” he would recall, had “officially asked me not to enter Afghanistan, due to how close my family is to the Saudi leadership. They ordered me to stay in Peshawar [Pakistan], because in the event the Russians arrested me that would be a proof of our support for the mujahideen.… I didn’t listen to them, and went into Afghanistan for the first time.”
Quite early in the 1980s, back in Jeddah, Najwa bin Laden heard her husband tell other family members that he had entered the Afghan war zone. He mentioned, too, that he had handled the controls of a helicopter. She began to probe a little but he merely said, “Najwa, stop thinking.” As a dutiful Saudi wife, she knew it was not her place to ask what her husband did outside the home.
Many Arabs who answered the call to jihad never saw actual fighting, but bin Laden saw to it that some of them did. He eventually set up a base at Jaji, ten miles inside Afghanistan and not far from a Soviet base, and called it Maasada, or the Lion’s Den. It was there that he and his Arabs had their baptism of fire.
One of Azzam’s sons recalled how, greenhorn that he was, bin Laden initially reacted to explosions by running away. Soon, however, he and his men gained a reputation for breathtaking bravery in terrifying circumstances—for a reason that Westerners can barely begin to understand. One observer saw a man in tears because he survived an attack. For jihadis, Azzam would say, had a “thirst for martyrdom.” The fact that he himself had not taken part in the fighting earlier, bin Laden said, “requires my own martyrdom in the name of God.”
“As Muslims,” he explained to the British journalist Robert Fisk, “we believe that when we die we go to heaven. Before a battle, God sends us seqina, tranquillity.” “I was so peaceful in my heart,” he said of one experience under bombing in Afghanistan, “that I fell asleep.”
In 1989, after the deaths of more than a million Afghans and some fifteen thousand Soviets, the Russians pulled out of Afghanistan. With the Afghan communist regime still in place, however, the conflict merely entered a new phase. Bin Laden and an Arab force, who took part in an attempt to take the eastern city of Jalalabad, suffered appalling casualties. Their contribution had been botched and ill-planned, but Saudi propaganda mills continued to profile bin Laden as a champion of Islam.
He “took charge of the closest front lines to the enemy,” trumpeted Jihad magazine, “started attacking with every hero that God gave him. Their number increased in view of their desire to take part in the deliverance of Jalalabad under the command of Osama bin Laden.” And: “the land of Jalalabad swallowed one lion after another. Osama had pain every time he said goodbye to one mujahid. And every time he would say goodbye a new rocket would come and take another.”
Bin Laden had for some time been having disagreements with his mentor, Azzam. That year, however, their differences became moot. Azzam and two of