The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [126]
The Americans continued pushing the Sudanese government. “Ask him to leave the country,” they told General Erwa. “Just don’t let him go to Somalia.”
“He will go to Afghanistan,” Erwa warned.
“Let him,” the Americans responded.
HASAN AL-TURABI and bin Laden argued heatedly late into the night over a period of three consecutive days. Bin Laden said that after all he had invested in the country, the government had no right to throw him out. He had committed no crimes against Sudan, and there was no other place in the world that was ready to receive him. Turabi replied that bin Laden had only two choices: to leave or to remain and keep his mouth shut. Bin Laden said he couldn’t remain silent as long as young Islamists were unjustly imprisoned in Saudi Arabia. Finally, he agreed to leave.
But where in the world could he go? He no longer had a Saudi passport, which gave him entry anywhere in the world; now he was traveling as a rather notorious Sudanese businessman and alleged sponsor of terror. Some members of al-Jihad offered to arrange for him to have plastic surgery and then smuggle him into Egypt, but Zawahiri, who reportedly was lying low in Bulgaria, advised against it. He had always maintained that Egypt was too transparent and lacked the natural retreats—caves, mountains—where a revolution could nurture itself. Somalia was a possibility, but the hostility of the local population toward the Arabs made the country too untrustworthy.
As the Sudanese had warned, Afghanistan was the most obvious destination—perhaps the only one. Turabi did bin Laden the favor of calling the Sudanese ambassador to Afghanistan to ease bin Laden’s return. Then the rulers of Sudan sat down to divvy up bin Laden’s investments.
The government still owed him for the $20 million, 450-mile highway from Khartoum to Port Sudan. Bin Laden had agreed to accept the tannery, which the government valued at $5 million, as partial payment, but now he had to suffer the indignity of selling it back to the government at a fraction of its worth. He liquidated his other businesses as quickly as possible, hoping to regain some portion of his fortune, but he was forced to virtually give away nearly everything he owned. The government confiscated his heavy equipment—the Caterpillars, steamrollers, and cranes that were the key assets of his construction company, worth approximately $12 million by themselves. The spreading acres that he had cultivated with so much anticipation and pleasure were snatched away for next to nothing. He sold his horses to Issam for a few hundred dollars. The net loss, he ruefully admitted, was more than $160 million.* Turabi’s Islamist party, bin Laden concluded, was “a mixture of religion and organized crime.”
The imminent departure of its leader threw al-Qaeda into a panic. Some members were invited to join bin Laden in Afghanistan in the future; others were told the organization could no longer support them. Each of them got a check for $2,400 and a plane ticket home.
Having shorn bin Laden of most of his net worth, the Sudanese government thoughtfully chartered him an antique Soviet Tupolev jet. Saif al-Adl, later to become al-Qaeda’s military chief, sat in the copilot’s seat holding a map so he could direct the Russian pilot, who didn’t speak Arabic and whom they didn’t trust. Two