The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [191]
Massoud was an eager partner. He was himself a dedicated Islamist whose wife wore a burka and whose troops had committed more than one massacre. Like his competitors, he probably supported his militia on the opium trade. But he spoke a rudimentary French, which he learned in high school in Kabul, and he was well known for his love of Persian poetry, which made him seem like a civilized alternative to the Taliban. In February, Taliban goons had gone through the Kabul museum with sledgehammers, pulverizing the artistic heritage of the country; then in March, they used tanks and anti-aircraft weapons in Bamiyan Province to destroy two colossal images of the Buddha that had loomed above the ancient Silk Road for fifteen hundred years. To the degree that the Taliban were sinking in the world’s estimation, Massoud was rising.
In a reflection of his increased international stature, Massoud addressed the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, in April 2001. He spoke about the danger that al-Qaeda posed to the world. He also told American officials that his own intelligence had learned of al-Qaeda’s intention to perform a terrorist act against the United States that would be vastly greater than the bombings of the American embassies in East Africa.
In July, Zawahiri composed a letter in poorly written French purporting to be from the Islamic Observation Centre in London. He requested permission for two journalists to interview Massoud. That letter was followed up by a personal recommendation from Abdul Rasul Sayyaf. Permission was granted.
Massoud was not alone in his warnings to America. In addition to the gleeful chatter that the NSA was picking up about a major attack (“spectacular,” “another Hiroshima”) that was in the works, intelligence agencies from Arab countries, with better human sources, issued dire advisories. Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak warned the United States that terrorists were planning to attack President Bush in Rome, “using an airplane stuffed with explosives,” while he was on his way to the G-8 summit in Genoa that July. The Italian authorities put up anti-aircraft emplacements to prevent the attack. The Taliban foreign minister, Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, confided to the American consul general in Peshawar and the United Nations in Kabul that al-Qaeda was planning a devastating strike on the United States. He feared that American retaliation would destroy his country. Around the same time, Jordanian intelligence overheard the name of the rumored operation, which it passed along to Washington: The Big Wedding. In the culture of suicide bombers, the day of a martyr’s death is his wedding day, when he greets the maidens of Paradise.
BIN LADEN DECIDED to take another bride himself, a fifteen-year-old Yemeni girl named Amal al-Sada. One of bin Laden’s bodyguards traveled to the mountain town of Ibb to pay a bride price of five thousand dollars. According to Abu Jandal, the wedding was a splendid celebration. “Songs and merriment were mixed with the firing of shots into the air.”
Although the marriage seems to have been a political arrangement between bin Laden and an important Yemeni tribe, meant to boost al-Qaeda recruitment in Yemen, bin Laden’s other wives were upset, and even his mother chastised him. Two of bin Laden’s sons, Mohammed and Othman, angrily confronted Abu Jandal. “Why do you bring our father a girl of our age?” they demanded. Abu Jandal complained that he had not even known that the money he took to Yemen was to purchase a bride. He had thought it was for a martyrdom operation.
Najwa, bin Laden’s first wife, left at about this time. After eleven children and twenty-seven years of marriage, she decided to return to Syria, taking her daughters and her retarded son, Abdul Rahman, with her. The man she had married was not a mujahid or an international terrorist; he was a rich Saudi teenager. The life she might have