The Network - Jason Elliot [100]
‘No. From anybody.’ Lie.
Another long silence.
‘I knew sooner or later somebody would come,’ she says.
She rolls over, looks into my face without speaking and runs her finger across my eyebrows, my nose, my lips.
‘I didn’t want this to happen,’ she says.
I omit no detail of what she tells me, writing for reasons of security at a glass table from which the imprint of my pen can’t be lifted, and with a single sheet of paper at a time. She begins with the story of her husband, one of bin Laden’s many half-brothers, and describes her marriage in Khartoum six years before and her early meetings with his family members at parties and gatherings. She names the dozen other bin Laden brothers she has met, and describes their prosperous lifestyles, their homes in California and London, their love of business, racehorses, boats and cars. These are not the profiles I’m really expecting. Bin Laden himself, she says, is one of the few brothers who lacked the family’s love of wealth, perhaps because he’s the only child of his father’s tenth wife and lost his father when he was a teenager. Much of this, she says, she knows from her husband, who worked on the periphery of bin Laden’s circle, helping to raise money for his projects in Sudan. Her husband is a good man, she says, but fell under the spell of the extremists who formed bin Laden’s closest associates. I’m guessing that this is one of the reasons for their separation but I don’t ask.
Bin Laden has been in Sudan for several years when she meets him, not long after what is said to have been an attempt on his life by the Sudanese authorities, acting on instructions from powerful Saudis who are hoping to silence bin Laden’s criticisms of the Kingdom. It’s in Sudan, says Jameela, that he acquires a penchant for black women, and has a string of Sudanese girlfriends. Can’t really blame him for that, I’m thinking. His other great fondnesses are for earth-moving machinery and hunting with falcons. He also has an incongruous love of growing sunflowers.
The bin Laden I know from the cables and reports I’ve read over the previous year bears no resemblance to the man Jameela describes. The impression of a bloodthirsty mastermind simply doesn’t tally with the diffident, almost shy man she knows from family meetings and parties. He’s known to his admirers as a quiet philanthropist, sponsoring construction projects in Sudan and encouraging wealthy Saudi friends to invest in farming and real estate there. But those who knew him better, says Jameela, observed a man going through changes.
The unworldly teenager she’s described is marked by a single overwhelming experience: his involvement with Afghanistan. It’s there, after living and fighting among Afghan mujaheddin during the Soviet occupation, that his life is given a different direction. He becomes passionate about supporting the Afghans in their struggle against their invaders, and puts his personal fortune to work sponsoring camps, hospitals and a support network for Afghan fighters and their relatives. Like so many others, he simply falls in love with the place.
The simplicity and austerity of life in Afghanistan leaves a deep mark on him. When he returns to Saudi, he sees his own country through different eyes: a place run by corrupt and worldly men who care little for the true face of Islam. It is this true face that he has encountered in Afghanistan. He works against the Saudi regime, and when American troops arrive on Saudi soil for the Gulf War he calls for the overthrow of the royal family. He wins friends in low places and is forced to leave his homeland.
He’s hounded from country to country, and settles in Khartoum. A puritanical hardness has entered him. He bans music in his household and puts his teenage sons through hard physical tests. Two years after his arrival in Sudan the Saudis strip him of his citizenship and freeze his assets. Around him circulates a loyal entourage of ‘Arab Afghans’ from the days of the jihad in Afghanistan, and their agenda becomes increasingly political. A few of them take an interest