The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [87]
By that time, Saudi Arabia had replaced Iran as America’s main ally in the Persian Gulf. The Kingdom depended on U.S. arms and defense agreements for its protection. Thus the apparent complicity on the part of the royal family in bin Laden’s escalating verbal attack on America seemed a suicidal paradox. But so long as bin Laden remained focused on an external enemy, he diverted popular attention from the princely looting of the oil wealth and the spiral of religious fanaticism. Events would soon give bin Laden the excuse he sought to make America into the enemy he needed.
IN 1989 BIN LADEN approached Prince Turki with a bold plan. He would use his Arab irregulars to overthrow the Marxist government of South Yemen. Bin Laden was enraged by the communist rule in his ancestral home, and he saw an opportunity to exploit his partnership with the Saudi government to purge the Arabian Peninsula of any secular influences. It would be bin Laden’s first opportunity to put al-Qaeda into action.
Saudi Arabia had always had an uneasy relationship with its smaller, poorer, and more populous southern neighbors, the Yemens. The quarreling twins posed a strategic problem as well. Reaching across the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, with its thumb on the throat of the Red Sea, South Yemen was the only Marxist entity in the Arab world. North Yemen was a pro-Western military regime, but it was constantly engaged in boundary disputes with the Kingdom.
Turki listened to bin Laden’s offer and declined. “It’s a bad idea,” he told him. The Saudis had a long history of meddling in the affairs of both Yemens, so Turki’s demurral wasn’t a matter of propriety. Bin Laden spoke of “my mujahideen” and of liberating South Yemen from the kafrs. The grandeur of bin Laden’s manner put Turki off.
Shortly after the meeting between bin Laden and the Saudi intelligence chief, North and South Yemen came to an unexpected agreement to merge their countries into an entity that would be called the Republic of Yemen. Oil had been discovered in the ill-defined border region between the two impoverished countries, and now there was an incentive to resolve their arguments through politics rather than arms.
Bin Laden, however, was not reconciled to peace. He became convinced that the Americans had a secret agreement with the socialists to create a military base in Yemen, and therefore he set out to wreck this alliance by financing a guerrilla war. Soon Yemeni veterans of the Afghan jihad began showing up at his apartment house in Jeddah and leaving with suitcases full of cash to supply the rebellion.
Ahmed Badeeb, bin Laden’s old teacher, went to pay a call on him, no doubt at Turki’s direction. Bin Laden was managing investments in Jeddah at the time. As they spoke, Badeeb took the measure of anger in his former student’s voice and realized something was going to happen. Bin Laden simply could not tolerate the fact that there were any communists in the coalition government at all. He insisted on imposing his own ill-defined notions of Islamic government in place of the peaceful and practical political solution that the Yemens had agreed upon. In bin Laden’s mind, the entire peninsula was sacred and had to be cleansed of foreign elements. The fact that his father was born in the Hadramout, in the southern part of the country, fortified his fervent desire to liberate his kinsmen from any vestige of communist rule. He made a number of trips to the new republic, speaking in mosques to incite the opposition. His al-Qaeda brigade worked with tribal leaders in the north to carry out raids in the cities of the south and to