The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [125]
When Issam next saw bin Laden, he was surprised at how depressed he appeared. Zawahiri and al-Jihad had been expelled, removing the Egyptian core of bin Laden’s organization, and he was crippled by the loss. The relaxed and playful character Issam had known was gone. Rumors were racing through Khartoum that bin Laden was “the next Carlos.” The Sudanese government had allowed French intelligence to kidnap Carlos the Jackal while he was undergoing an operation on his right testicle. Now Sudanese intelligence cleverly put out a false story that the French had issued a similar indictment for bin Laden—intending, no doubt, to scare him out of the country.
Without the Egyptians, bin Laden was isolated and uncertain. There was no one he could trust. He knew that something might happen to him. He was already looking for another sanctuary, just in case.
“You shouldn’t leave Sudan,” Issam advised his friend. “If you go, who is going to manage your investments?” Bin Laden had no answer.
Issam pitied his predicament. He knew how merciless Sudanese politics could be, especially to a naïve foreigner with much to lose. “I loved that man by that time,” Issam said, “because of so many ideas I see in him. There was no hypocrisy in his character. No divergence between what he says and what he does. Unfortunately, his IQ was not that great.”
THE CATASTROPHE that the radical Islamist leaders of Sudan had created for themselves finally made itself starkly apparent. The government’s complicity in the terror plots against New York and the attempted assassination of Mubarak guaranteed international sanctions, which took effect in April 1996. By that time the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum had already moved its American staff, along with the CIA’s Khartoum Station, to Kenya. It was part of a general withdrawal of the diplomatic community. Sudan was being pushed into the freezer, and its leaders were struggling to find a way out.
On his final night in Sudan, the American ambassador, Timothy Carney, had dinner with the Sudanese vice president, Ali Othman Taha. They discussed what Sudan could do to improve its reputation. Sending Osama bin Laden back to Saudi Arabia was one of Carney’s suggestions. He had already spoken to a senior Saudi official who had assured him that bin Laden could still return to the Kingdom “if he apologizes.”
A month later, the Sudanese minister of state for defense, Major General Elfatih Erwa, met Carney and covert operatives of the CIA in a Rosslyn, Virginia, hotel room. Erwa communicated his government’s desire to get off the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terror. He wanted a written checklist of measures that would satisfy the U.S. government. The CIA responded with a memorandum, which among other things proposed that Sudan turn over the names of all the mujahideen that bin Laden had brought into that country, along with their passport numbers and dates of travel. In later meetings, the Americans pushed the Sudanese representative to expel bin Laden. Erwa told the agency that it was better for him to stay in Sudan, where the government could keep an eye on him; however, he said, if the United States wanted to bring charges against bin Laden, “We are ready to hand him to you.”
The Clinton administration still perceived bin Laden as a wealthy nuisance, not a mortal threat. His name had arisen as a financier of terror mainly because of his support of the blind sheikh. There was a consensus that he needed to be pushed out of his sanctuary in Sudan, because the country was overrun with Islamic terrorists, and they were far more dangerous with money than without. There was no real debate about the consequences of expelling him, however. Nor was there any point in forcing Sudan to hand him over to U.S. authorities, because there was no evidence so far that he had harmed American citizens. Administration officials briefly nurtured the fantasy that the Saudis would accept their wayward son and simply cut off his head. The president of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir, went to the Kingdom on hajj, and while he was