The Looming Tower:Chapter 7

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Return of the Hero
FAME CREATES ITS OWN AUTHORITY, even in Saudi Arabia, where humility is prized and prestige is carefully pruned among non-royals. It is a country that forbids the public display of portraits, except for the faces of the omnipresent ruling princes, who also name the streets and hospitals and universities after themselves, hoarding whatever glory is available. So when bin Laden returned to his hometown of Jeddah in the fall of 1989, he presented a dilemma that was unique in modern Saudi history. Only thirty-one years old, he commanded an international volunteer army of unknown dimensions. Because he actually believed the fable, promoted by the Saudi press, that his Arab legion had brought down the mighty superpower, he arrived with certain unprecedented expectations of his future. He was better known than all but a few princes and the upper tier of Wahhabi clergy—the Kingdom's first real celebrity. He was rich, although not by royal standards or even those of the great merchant families of the Hijaz. His share of the Saudi Binladin Group at the time amounted to 27 million Saudi riyals—a little more than $7 million. He also received a portion of the annual earnings from the company that ranged from half a million to a million riyals a year. He settled back into the family business, helping to build roads in Taif and Abha. He kept a house in Jeddah and another in Medina, the city he had always loved the most, where he could be close to the Prophet's Mosque. The young idealist returned to the Kingdom with a sense of divine mission. He had risked death and had been, he thought, miraculously spared. He had gone as an acolyte of an iconic Muslim warrior, and he returned as the undisputed leader of the Arab Afghans. He had a com- 145 T H E L O O M I N G T O W ER manding air of confidence, which was all the more seductive because of his instinctive humility In a time when Saudis were increasingly uncertain about their identity in the modern world, bin Laden appeared as an unsullied archetype. His piety and humble manner reminded Saudis of their historic image of themselves as shy and selfeffacing, but also fierce and austere. Some of his young admirers called him "the Othman of his age," a reference to one of the early caliphs, a wealthy man known for his righteousness. Inevitably, bin Laden's fame cast an unwelcome light on the behavior of the Saudi royal family, led by King Fahd, who was known for his boozing and carousing in the ports of the French Riviera, where he docked his 482-foot yacht, the $100 million Abdul Aziz. The ship featured two swimming pools, a ballroom, a gym, a theater, a portable garden, a hospital with an intensive-care unit and two operating rooms, and four American Stinger missiles. The king also liked to fly to London in his $150 million 747 jet, equipped with its own fountain. He lost millions in the casinos on these excursions. One night, upset with the curfew imposed by British gaming laws, he hired his own blackjack and roulette dealers so that he could gamble in his hotel suite all night long. Other Saudi princes enthusiastically followed his example, notably King Fahd's son Mohammed, who accepted more than $1 billion in bribes, according to British court documents, which he spent on "whores, pornography; fleets of more than 100 high-performance cars; palaces in Cannes and Geneva; and such luxuries as powerboats, chartered jets, ski-chalets, and jewelry." Oil prices collapsed in the mid-1980s, sending the Saudi economy into a deficit, but the royal family continued taking massive personal "loans" from the country's banks, which they rarely repaid. Every substantial business deal required "commissions"—kickbacks—to the royal mafia to lubricate the agreement. Individual princes confiscated land and muscled in on private businesses; this was in addition to the secret, but substantial, monthly allowance that each member of the family received. "Al Saud" became a byword for corruption, hypocrisy, and insatiable greed. The attack on the Grand Mosque ten years before, however, had awakened the royal family to the lively prospect of revolution. The lesson the family drew from that gory standoff was that it could protect itself against religious extremists only by empowering them. Consequently, the muttawa, government-subsidized religious vigilantes, 146 Return of the Hero became an overwhelming presence in the Kingdom, roaming through the shopping malls and restaurants, chasing men into the mosques at prayer time and ensuring that women were properly cloaked—even a strand of hair poking out from under a hijab could rate a flogging with the swagger sticks these men carried. In their quest to stamp out sinfulness and heresy, they even broke into private homes and businesses; and they waged war on the proliferating satellite dishes, often shooting at them with government-issued weapons from government- issued Chevrolet Suburbans. Officially known as representatives of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, the muttawa would become the models for the Taliban in Afghanistan. PRINCE TURKI PRESENTED a striking contrast to the public image of the royal family. Courteous, charming, and soft-spoken, he was the kind of man many people knew and liked; but he was also guarded and private, and he kept the various parts of his life so carefully separated that no one knew him well. He enjoyed the royal prerogatives of power, but within the Kingdom he lived in an appealingly humble manner. He occupied a comparatively modest, one-story house in Riyadh with his wife, Princess Nouf, and their six children; and on weekends, he retreated to his desert ranch, where he raised ostriches. He wore the invariable Saudi garments: the ankle-length white gown, called a thobe, and a red-checked headscarf. The fundamentalists respected him because he was an Islamic scholar, but he was also an advocate of women's rights, so the progressives saw him as a possible champion. He ran an intelligence service in the Middle East, which is usually a watchword for torture and assassination, but he had quickly gained a reputation for valuing clean hands. His father was the martyred king; his beloved mother, Effat, was the only woman in Saudi history ever called queen. All that, plus his youth and his important career, meant that Turki would have to be considered when the grandsons of Abdul Aziz finally have the opportunity to contend for the crown. Outside the Kingdom, Turki lived a different life. He kept a house in London and an elaborate flat in Paris. He cruised the Mediterranean on his yacht, White Knight, one of several seagoing vessels he owned. In the drawing rooms of London and New York, he was known to favor the occasional banana daiquiri, but he was not a gambler or a 147 T H E L O O M I N G T O W ER lush. Because he fit comfortably into several different worlds, he had the quality of reflecting the virtues that others longed to see in him. The CIA worked closely with Turki and his service during the Afghan jihad, and he had impressed the agency with his insight, the range of his knowledge, and his easy familiarity with American customs. There was an assumption on the part of some members of the U.S. intelligence community that Turki was Our Man in Riyadh, but others found him deceitful and reluctant to share information. These reactions mirrored the thorny relationship the Americans and the Saudis found themselves entangled in. One Friday Turki went to a mosque in Riyadh where the imam had spoken out against certain female charitable organizations, including one that was overseen by five members of the Faisal family. Turki had listened to a tape recording of the sermon in which the imam had called the women running the charity whores. It was an astounding breach of the ancient bargain between Al Saud and the Wahhabi clergy. The following week Turki sat in the front row of the mosque, and when the imam rose to speak Turki furiously confronted him. 'This man has defamed my family!" Turki shouted into the microphone. "My sisters! My daughter-in-law! Either he proves it, or I'm going to sue." A witness to the event says that Turki actually threatened to kill the man on the spot. The daring slander and Prince Turki's furious response threw the country into turmoil. The governor of Riyadh, Prince Salman, placed the offending imam under arrest. He quickly offered his apology, which Turki accepted. But Turki realized that the balance of power between the two factions had begun to shift. Many of his family members were cowed by the religious posse that roamed the malls and streets with policemen at their command. The super-piety of the muttawa was bound to focus itself on the conspicuous depravity of some members of the royal family; now, however, they had even attacked the charitable works of popular and upstanding princesses who sought to advance women's causes. Clearly, the royal family could not abide such an insult, but the fact that such things were being said in public demonstrated that the muttawa were emboldened enough to preach revolution right under the noses of the ruling princes. Like the CIA, Turki's intelligence service was not supposed to operate inside the homeland; that was the province of Prince Naif, Turki's truculent uncle, who ran the Interior Ministry and who jealously 148 Return of the Hero guarded his territory. Turki decided that the situation inside the country was too dangerous to be ignored, even if it meant intruding into Naif's domain. He secretly began monitoring members of the muttawa. He learned that many of them were ex-convicts whose only job qualification was that they had memorized the Quran in order to reduce their sentences. But they had become so powerful, Turki believed, that they now threatened to overthrow the government. LIFE IN SAUDI ARABIA had always been marked by abstinence, submissiveness, and religious fervor, but the reign of the muttawa stifled social interaction and imposed a dangerous new orthodoxy. For centuries, the four main schools of Islamic jurisprudence—Hanafi, Maliki, Shafei, and Hanbali—were taught and studied in Mecca. The Wahhabis ostensibly held themselves above such doctrinal divisions, but in practice they ruled out other interpretations of the faith. The government forbade the Shia, who form a substantial minority in Saudi Arabia, from building new mosques or expanding existing ones. Only Wahhabis worshipped freely. Not content to cleanse its own country of the least degree of religious freedom, the Saudi government set out to evangelize the Islamic world, using the billions of riyals at its disposal through the religious tax—zakat—to construct hundreds of mosques and colleges and thousands of religious schools around the globe, staffed with Wahhabi imams and teachers. Eventually, Saudi Arabia, which constitutes only 1 percent of the world Muslim population, would support 90 percent of the expenses of the entire faith, overriding other traditions of Islam. Music disappeared in the Kingdom. Shortly after the 1979 attack on the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Umm Kalthoum and Fayrouz, the songbirds of the Arab world, were banished from the Kingdom's television stations, which were already dominated by bearded men debating fine points of religious law. There had been a few movie theaters in Saudi Arabia before the mosque attack, but they were quickly shut down. A magnificent concert hall was completed in Riyadh in 1989, but it never hosted a single performance. Censorship smothered art and literature, and intellectual life, which had scarcely had the chance to blossom in the young country, withered. Paranoia and fanaticism naturally occupy minds that are closed and fearful. 149 T H E L O O M I N G TOWER For the young, the future in this already joyless environment promised even less than the present. Only a few years earlier, Saudi Arabia had been on its way to becoming the wealthiest country, per capita, in the world, thanks to the bounty of its oil wealth. Now the declining price of oil crushed such expectations. The government, which had promised jobs to university graduates, withdrew its guarantees, creating the previously unknown phenomenon of unemployment. Despair and idleness are dangerous companions in any culture, and it was inevitable that the young would search for a hero who could voice their longing for change and provide a focus for their rage. Neither a cleric nor a prince, Osama bin Laden assumed this new role, even though there was no precedent for such an independent agent in the Kingdom. He offered a conventional, Muslim Brothers critique of the plight of the Arab world: The West, particularly the United States, was responsible for the humiliating failure of the Arabs to succeed. "They have attacked our brothers in Palestine as they have attacked Muslims and Arabs elsewhere/' he said one spring night in the bin Laden family mosque in Jeddah, just after evening prayers. "The blood of Muslims is shed. It has become too much.... We are only looked upon as sheep, and we are very humiliated." Bin Laden wore a white robe with a gauzy camel-colored cloak draped over his shoulders. He spoke in a sleepy monotone, sometimes wagging his long, bony index finger to make a point, but his manner was relaxed and his gestures were limp and wan. Already, the messianic stare into the middle distance that would characterize his later pronouncements was on display. Before him hundreds of men sat cross-legged on the carpet. Many of them had fought with him in Afghanistan, and they sought a new direction in their lives. Their old enemy, the Soviet Union, was falling to pieces, but America did not seem to offer such an obvious substitute. At first, it was difficult to grasp the basis of bin Laden's complaint. The United States had never been a colonial power, nor for that matter had Saudi Arabia ever been colonized. Of course, he was speaking for Muslims in general, for whom American support of Israel was a cause of anguish, but the United States had been a decisive ally in the Afghan jihad. The sense of humiliation he expressed had more to do with the stance of Muslims in the modern world. Their lives were sold at a discount, bin Laden was telling his hometown audience, which con- 1 5 0 Return of the Hero firmed their sense that other lives—Western, American lives—were fuller and more worthwhile. Bin Laden gave them a history lesson. "America went to Vietnam, thousands of miles away, and began bombing them in planes. The Americans did not get out of Vietnam until after they suffered great losses. Over sixty thousand American soldiers were killed until there were demonstrations by the American people. The Americans won't stop their support of Jews in Palestine until we give them a lot of blows. They won't stop until we do jihad against them." There he stood, on the threshold of advocating violence against the United States, but he suddenly stopped himself. "What is required is to wage an economic war against America," he continued. "We have to boycott all American products.... They're taking the money we pay them for their products and giving it to the Jews to kill our brothers." The man who had made his name in combat against the Soviets now invoked Mahatma Gandhi, who brought down the British Empire "by boycotting its products and wearing non-Western clothes." He urged a public-relations campaign. "Any American we see, we should notify of our complaints," bin Laden meekly concluded. "We should write to American embassies." BIN LADEN WOULD LATER SAY that the United States had always been his enemy. He dated his hatred for America to 1982, "when America permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanon and the American Sixth Fleet helped them." He recalled the carnage: "blood and severed limbs, women and children sprawled everywhere. Houses destroyed along with their occupants and high rises demolished over their residents. . . . The situation was like a crocodile meeting a helpless child, powerless except for his screams." This scene provoked an intense desire to fight tyranny, he said, and a longing for revenge. "As I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon, it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressor in kind and that we should destroy towers in America in order that they taste some of what we tasted." His actions at the time belied this public stance. Privately, bin Laden approached members of the royal family during the Afghan jihad to express his gratitude for American participation in that war. Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, remembered bin Laden coming to him and saying, "Thank you. Thank 151 T H E L O O M I N G TOWER you for bringing the Americans to help us get rid of the secularist, atheist Soviets." Bin Laden had never shown himself to be an interesting or original political thinker—his analysis, until then, was standard Islamist boilerplate, uninformed by any deep experiences in the West. And yet, wrapped in the mystique that had been spun around him, bin Laden held a position in Saudi society that gave weight to his pronouncements. The very fact that his American critique was being uttered at all—in a country where speech was so curtailed—suggested to other Saudis that there must be royal consent behind the anti-American campaign that bin Laden had launched. Few countries in the world were so different from each other, and yet so dependent on one another, as America and Saudi Arabia. Americans built the Saudi petroleum industry; American construction companies, such as Bechtel, built much of the country's infrastructure; Howard Hughes's company, Trans World Airlines, built the Saudi passenger air service; the Ford Foundation modernized Saudi government; the U.S. Corps of Engineers built the country's television and broadcast facilities and oversaw the development of its defense industry. Meantime, Saudi Arabia sent its top students to American universities— more than thirty thousand per year during the 1970s and 1980s. In return, more than 200,000 Americans have lived and worked in the Kingdom since the discovery of oil. Saudi Arabia needed American investment, management, technology, and education to guide it into the modern world. America, for its part, became increasingly reliant on Saudi oil to sustain its economic and military supremacy. In 1970 the United States was the tenth greatest importer of Saudi oil; a decade later, it was number one. 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. 1 5 2 Return of the Hero 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 153 T H E L O O M I N G T O W ER 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 assassinate socialist leaders. These murderous forays had an effect. With the brittle union in danger of breaking apart into civil war once again, the new president of the Republic of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh, traveled to Saudi Arabia to plead with King Fahd to keep bin Laden under control. The king firmly instructed bin Laden to stay out of Yemen's affairs. Bin Laden denied that he was involved, but soon he was back in Yemen, making more speeches and campaigning against the communists. The frustrated and irate Yemeni president returned to Saudi Arabia to press his case once again before King Fahd, who was unused to being disobeyed by his subjects, much less openly lied to. He turned to the family enforcer. The minister of the interior, Prince Naif, an imperious figure often compared to J. Edgar Hoover, summoned bin Laden to his office. The ministry occupies a strangely unsettling building—an inverted pyramid— that looms on the perimeter of downtown Riyadh. Tubular black elevator columns rise inside the vast and disorienting marble atrium, which seems specially designed to diminish anyone who stands there. Bin Laden had reported to Naif in this building many times during the Afghan jihad, scrupulously keeping the government informed of his activities. He had always received respectful treatment in the past, due to his family, his status, and the loyalty to the royal family that he had displayed over the years. This time was different. Naif spoke to him harshly and demanded his passport. The prince didn't want to hear any more about bin Laden's personal foreign policy. It was a cold splash of reality, but bin Laden felt double-crossed. "I was working for the sake of the Saudi government!" he complained to his friends. As THE RICHEST COUNTRY in the region, surrounded by envious neighbors, Saudi Arabia was also the most anxious. When King Faisal 154 Return of the Hero commissioned the country's first census in 1969, he was so shocked by how small the population actually was that he immediately doubled the figure. Since then, the statistics in the Kingdom have been distorted by this fundamental lie. By 1990 Saudi Arabia claimed a population of more than 14 million, nearly equal to that of Iraq, although Prince Turki privately estimated the Kingdom's population to be a little over 5 million. Always fearful of being overrun and plundered, the Saudi government spent billions of dollars on weapons, buying the most sophisticated equipment on the market from the United States, Britain, France, and China and further enriching members of the royal family with lucrative kickbacks. In the 1980s the Kingdom built a $50 billion air-defense system; the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers moved its foreign headquarters from Germany to Saudi Arabia in order to construct bases, schools, and headquarters complexes for the Saudi army, air force, navy, and National Guard. After the U.S. Congress passed laws prohibiting American companies from participating in bribery and kickbacks with foreign agents, the Saudi government concluded the largest arms deal in history with Great Britain. By the end of the decade, the Kingdom should have been well equipped to defend itself against the immediate threats in its neighborhood. It had the weapons; all it lacked was training and troops—an actual army, in other words. In 1990 bin Laden warned of the danger that the murderous tyrant in Iraq, Saddam Hussein, posed to Saudi Arabia. He was treated as a Cassandra. "I said many times in my speeches at the mosques, warning that Saddam will enter the Gulf," bin Laden lamented. "No one believed me." Much of the Arab world was elated by Saddam's anti- Western rhetoric and his threats to "burn half of Israel" with chemical weapons. He was especially popular in Saudi Arabia, which maintained cordial relations with its northern neighbor. Nonetheless, bin Laden continued his lonely campaign against Saddam and his secular Baath Party. Once again the king was annoyed by bin Laden, a dangerous position for any Saudi subject to find himself in. The Kingdom had signed a non-aggression pact with Iraq, and Saddam had personally assured Fahd that he had no intention of invading Kuwait, even as he was moving Republican Guard divisions to the border. The Saudi government warned bin Laden once again to mind his own business, then followed up on the threat by sending the National Guard to raid bin 155 T H E L O O M I N G TOWER Laden's farm and arrest several of his workers. Bin Laden protested this outrage to Crown Prince Abdullah, the commander of the National Guard, who denied knowing about the incident. On July 31 King Fahd personally chaired a meeting between representatives of Iraq and Kuwait to arbitrate the disputes between the two countries, which concerned the ownership of the invaluable oil fields on the border. Saddam also contended that Kuwait's high rate of production was driving down the price of petroleum and ruining the Iraqi economy, already bankrupted by a disastrous war with Iran that Saddam had provoked in 1980, which ended eight years later after a million casualties. Despite the king's mediation, talks between Iraq and Kuwait quickly fell apart. Two days later, the formidable Iraqi army rolled over the tiny nation, and suddenly all that stood between Saddam Hussein and the Saudi oil fields was a few miles of sand and the superbly equipped but cowed and undermanned Saudi military. One battalion of the Saudi National Guard—fewer than a thousand men— guarded the oil fields. The royal family was so shocked that it forced the governmentcontrolled media to wait a week before announcing the invasion. Moreover, after years of paying billions of dollars to cultivate the friendship of neighboring countries, the royal family was stunned to discover how isolated it was in the Arab world. The Palestinians, Sudanese, Algerians, Libyans, Tunisians, Yemenis, and even the Jordanians openly supported Saddam Hussein. With the Iraqi army poised on the Saudi border, bin Laden wrote a letter to the king beseeching him not to call upon the Americans for protection; he followed this with a frenzied round of lobbying the senior princes. The royal family itself was divided about the best course of action, with Crown Prince Abdullah strongly opposing American assistance and Prince Naif seeing no obvious alternative. The Americans had already made a decision, however. If, after snacking on Kuwait, Saddam gobbled up the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, he would then control the bulk of the world's available oil supply. That was an intolerable threat to the security of the United States, not just the Kingdom. U.S. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney flew to Jeddah with a team of advisors, including General Norman Schwarzkopf, to persuade the king to accept American troops to defend Saudi Arabia. Schwarzkopf showed satellite images of three armored Iraqi divisions inside Kuwait, followed by ground troops— 156 Return of the Hero far more manpower, he contended, than the number needed to occupy such a small country. The Saudis had intelligence that several Iraqi reconnaissance teams had already crossed the Saudi border. Crown Prince Abdullah advised against letting the Americans enter the country for fear they would never depart. In the name of the president of the United States, Cheney pledged that the troops would leave as soon as the threat was over, or whenever the king said they should go. That promise decided the matter. "Come with all you can bring/7 the king implored. "Come as fast as you can." In early September, weeks after American forces began arriving, bin Laden spoke to Prince Sultan, the minister of defense, in the company of several Afghan mujahideen commanders and Saudi veterans of that conflict. It was a bizarre and grandiose replication of General Schwarzkopf's briefing. Bin Laden brought his own maps of the region and presented a detailed plan of attack, with diagrams and charts, indicating trenches and sand traps along the border to be constructed with the Saudi Binladin Group's extensive inventory of earthmoving equipment. Added to this, he would create a mujahideen army made up of his colleagues from the Afghan jihad and unemployed Saudi youth. "I am ready to prepare one hundred thousand fighters with good combat capability within three months/' bin Laden promised Prince Sultan. "You don't need Americans. You don't need any other non-Muslim troops. We will be enough." "There are no caves in Kuwait," the prince observed. "What will you do when he lobs missiles at you with chemical and biological weapons?" "We will fight him with faith," bin Laden responded. Bin Laden also made his presentation to Prince Turki. He was one of the few princes who had agreed with bin Laden's assessment of Saddam as a threat to the Kingdom; in fact, over the years, Turki had made several proposals to the CIA about removing Saddam through covert means, but each time he was spurned. When the invasion of Kuwait occurred, Turki had been in Washington, D.C., on vacation. He was in a theater watching Die Hard 2 when he was summoned to the White House. He spent the rest of the night at the Central Intelligence Agency, helping to coordinate the campaign to repel the Iraqis from Kuwait. In his opinion, if Saddam were allowed to stay in Kuwait, he would enter the Kingdom at the slightest provocation. 157 T H E L O O M I N G TOWER So when bin Laden approached him with his plan, Turki was taken aback by the naïveté of the young Afghan veteran. There were only fifty-eight thousand men in the entire Saudi army. Iraq, on the other hand, had a standing army of nearly a million men—the fourth-largest army in the world—not counting its reserves and paramilitary forces. Saddam's armored corps counted 5,700 tanks, and his Republican Guards included the most fearsome and well-trained divisions in the Middle East. That did not impress bin Laden. "We pushed the Soviets out of Afghanistan," he said. The prince laughed in disbelief. For the first time, he was alarmed by the "radical changes" he saw in bin Laden's personality. He had gone from being "a calm, peaceful and gentle man" whose only goal was to help Muslims, to being "a person who believed that he would be able to amass and command an army to liberate Kuwait. It revealed his arrogance and his haughtiness." SPURNED BY THE GOVERNMENT, bin Laden turned to the clergy for support. His case against American assistance rested on the Prophet's remark, as he lay dying, "Let there be no two religions in Arabia." The meaning of this remark has been disputed ever since it was uttered. Prince Turki argued that the Prophet meant only that no other religion should dominate the peninsula. Even during the Prophet's lifetime, he pointed out, Jews and Christians were traveling through Arabia. It was not until 641 C.E., the twentieth year of the Muslim calendar, that Caliph Omar began removing the indigenous Christians and Jews from some parts of Arabia. They were resettled in Iraq, Syria, and Palestine. Since then, the holy cities of Mecca and Medina have been off-limits for non-Muslims. To bin Laden and many other Islamists, that wasn't enough. They believed that the Prophet's deathbed injunction is clear: All non-Muslims should be expelled from the entire peninsula. Nonetheless, recognizing the danger that the foreign troops posed to their legitimacy, the Saudi government pressured the clergy to issue a fatwa endorsing the invitation of non-Muslim armies into the Kingdom on the excuse that they were defending Islam. This would give the government the religious cover it needed. Bin Laden furiously confronted the senior clerics. "This is inadmissible," he told them. "My son Osama, we cannot discuss this issue because we are 158 Return of the Hero afraid," one of the sheikhs replied, pointing to his neck and indicating that his head would be cut off if he talked about the matter. Within weeks, half a million American GIs streamed into the Kingdom, creating what many Saudis feared would be a permanent occupation. Although the Americans—and other coalition forces—were stationed mainly outside the cities in order to stay out of view, Saudis were mortified by the need to turn to Christians and Jews to defend the holy land of Islam. That many of these foreign soldiers were women only added to their embarrassment. The weakness of the Saudi state and its abject dependence on the West for protection were paraded before the world, thanks to the 1,500 foreign journalists who descended on the Kingdom to report on the buildup to the war. For such a private and intensely religious people, with a press that had been entirely under government control, the scrutiny was disorienting— at times both shameful and exhilarating. There was a combustible atmosphere of fear, outrage, humiliation, and xenophobia, but instead of rallying behind their imperiled government, many Saudis saw this as a one-time-only opportunity to change it. At this awkward moment in Saudi Arabia's history, with the world peering through the windows, Saudi progressives were sufficiently emboldened to press their modest agenda. In November, forty-seven women decided it was time to challenge the Kingdom's informal ban on female driving. As it turned out, there was no actual law forbidding it. The women met in front of the Safeway in Riyadh and ordered their drivers out of their cars, then took a defiant fifteen-minute spin through the capital city. A policeman stopped them, but he had no legal reason to hold them. Prince Naif instantly banned the practice, however, and Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Baz, the chief cleric, helpfully added a fatwa, calling female driving a source of depravity. The women lost their passports, and several of them, who had been professors in the women's college of King Saud University, were fired after their own female students protested that they did not want to be taught by "infidels." In December, reformers circulated a petition requesting an end to discrimination based on tribal affiliation, the establishment of a traditional council of advisors to the king (called a shura), more press freedom, the introduction of certain basic laws of governance, and some kind of oversight on the proliferation of religious fatwas. A few months later, the religious establishment fired back with its 159 T H E L O O M I N G TOWER own vehement "Letter of Demands." It was an open bid for Islamic control of the Kingdom, containing a barely disguised attack on the predominance of the royal family. The four hundred religious scholars, judges, and professors who signed the letter called for strict conformity with the Sharia throughout society, including a ban on the payment of interest, the creation of an Islamic army through universal military training, and "purifying" the media in order to better serve Islam. The royal family was more shocked by this letter than by Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. Many of the demands of the religious dissidents echoed those of the leaders of the 1979 attack on the Grand Mosque. They became the basis of bin Laden's political agenda for the Kingdom. The American mission quickly grew from protecting Saudi Arabia to repelling the Iraqis from Kuwait. The war began on January 16, 1991. By then, most Saudis were resigned to the presence of the Americans and the troops of thirty-four other countries that formed the coalition against Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of Kuwaiti citizens had taken refuge in the Kingdom, and they told affecting stories about the looting of their country; the kidnapping, torture, and murder of civilians; and the rape of Kuwaiti women by the Iraqi troops. When Iraqi Scud missiles began raining down, however fecklessly, on Riyadh, even the Islamists held their tongues. But to many Saudis, the presence of the foreign "crusaders," as bin Laden characterized the coalition troops, in the sanctuary of Islam posed a greater calamity than the one that Saddam was already inflicting on Kuwait. "Tonight in Iraq, Saddam walks amidst ruin," President George H. W. Bush was able to boast on March 6. "His war machine is crushed. His ability to threaten mass destruction is itself destroyed." Although Saddam remained in power, that seemed to be a footnote to the awesome display of American military force and the international coalition that rallied behind U.S. leadership. The president was exultant. With the fall of the Soviet Union followed by this lightning victory, American hegemony was undisputed. "We can see a new world coming into view," Bush told Congress, "in which there is the very real prospect of a new world order.... A world where the United Nations, freed from cold war stalemate, is poised to fulfill the historic vision of its founders. A world in which freedom and respect for human rights find a home among all nations." These words, uttered so hopefully, found a bitter audience in 160 Return of the Hero Osama bin Laden. He also wanted to create a new world order, one that was ruled by Muslims, not dictated by America and enforced by the UN. The scale of his ambition was beginning to reveal itself. In his fantasy he would enter history as the savior of Islam. BIN LADEN WAGED a high-level campaign to retrieve his passport. He argued that he needed to return to Pakistan in order to help mediate the civil war among the mujahideen, which the Saudi government was keenly interested in resolving. "There's a role I can play/7 bin Laden pleaded. Many prominent princes and sheikhs interceded on his behalf. Eventually, Prince Naif backed down and returned bin Laden's travel documents, but only after making the nettlesome warrior sign a pledge that he would not interfere with the politics of Saudi Arabia or any Arab country. In March 1992, bin Laden arrived in Peshawar. In the three years since his departure, the communist government in Afghanistan had managed to hang on to power, but it was on the verge of being overrun. Rival mujahideen forces, led by Ahmed Shah Massoud and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, were already engaged in a bloody struggle to determine who was going to seize power. The great powers that had chosen to use Afghanistan as a venue for the existential battle between communism and capitalism were notably absent in the chaotic aftermath of the war. Prince Turki hoped to establish a provisional government in Afghanistan that would unite the warring commanders and stabilize the country. He led the negotiations in Peshawar, along with Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif. Worried about the influence of Iran on Afghanistan's western border, Turki was inclined to support the more intransigent and fundamentalist Sunni elements, led by Hekmatyar. Bin Laden, on the other hand, attempted to play the role of the honest broker. He arranged a telephone conference call between Massoud and Hekmatyar, in which he begged Hekmatyar to come to the bargaining table. Hekmatyar was unyielding—knowing, no doubt, that he had Turki's blessing. But, in the middle of the night, Massoud's forces slipped into the city. The next morning, the surprised Hekmatyar furiously lobbed rockets into Kabul and began the siege of the capital. The Afghan civil war had begun. By opposing Turki in the negotiations, bin Laden believed that he 161 T H E L O O M I N G TOWER had crossed a line. He told some of his companions that Saudi Arabia had recruited Pakistani intelligence to kill him. The old alliances formed by the jihad were falling apart. He and Prince Turki were now deadly antagonists. Before he left Afghanistan, bin Laden put on a disguise and checked into a clinic in Karachi for some unknown ailment. His doctor, Zawahiri, was in Yemen, but they would soon be reunited. 1 6