The Finish: The Killing of Osama bin Laden

2. The Path of Jihad

Summer 2010

In hiding, his hair and beard had grown white. The Sheik, as he liked to be called, was just fifty-three years old, but the long white whiskers made him look like an old man. In a sense, he had been playing an elder his entire adult life, having been severe and serenely self-important since he was old enough to sprout a beard. Wealthy, well connected, and male in a culture that excessively prized those things, he had known deference and esteem from those closest to him all his life.

Despite the hammering his movement had taken in recent years, bin Laden kept an upbeat tone in his letters. His faith did not allow for doubt, or even questions. His perambulations around the Middle and Near East aside, bin Laden’s world was exceedingly narrow. If the man in the White House, Barack Obama, the man charged with defending the United States of America, was a surprising confluence of race and nationality, a man of international upbringing and broad liberal education, bin Laden was his opposite. The Sheik had walked a relatively narrow path in life. He had found the truth at a young age and ever since had labored to resist any challenge or contradiction. Even before he became the world’s most wanted fugitive, his daily habits and those he imposed on his family were calculated to reduce traffic with those outside his small circle of belief. The rituals he observed—the fasting, the avoidance of women other than his wives, the extra sessions of daily prayer—all of it was designed to stave off outside influence. It was designed to strengthen his devotion to the cause and his faith in ultimate victory.

He saw hopeful signs everywhere.

“Anyone who looks at the enemies in NATO, especially America, will know that they are in big trouble,” he wrote. “This year has been the worst for them in Afghanistan since they invaded it. The number of their dead has never been this high, according to their own reports. Their financial crisis continues. Britain has lowered its defense budget and America is reducing the budget at the Pentagon. Anyone who knows the world and who understands politics realizes that it is impossible for them to continue with the war. There is no difference between them and the Soviet Union before it withdrew from Afghanistan.”

At heart, the Sheik was a fantasist, and here was the nub of his fantasy. He had left home at age twenty-two to join a seemingly hopeless cause, a pan-Muslim jihad to drive the Soviet Union from Afghanistan. The mujahidin who took up this fight were little more than an untrained, poorly armed rabble going up against one of the richest, best-trained and -equipped, and most powerful military forces in the world. In later years bin Laden would be described as a murderous nihilist, someone who believed in nothing. He was murderous all right, but the opposite of a nihilist. He was a true believer. He had a complete vision of the world as he wanted it to be—indeed, as he was convinced it would be, as he was convinced God Almighty intended it to be. He believed in miracles and signs. He collected them throughout his life as proof of God’s favor. His determination to join the jihad in Afghanistan was an act of faith, and the defeat of the Soviets vindicated his commitment. It was the first great miracle on this path, the one that convinced him more than anything else that he was right.

As a boy, growing up one of fifty-four children of a Saudi billionaire construction magnate, bin Laden had gone mostly to Islamist schools, and in religion he found an antidote to the worldliness of his family. He was one of the few bin Laden children who received all of his education in Saudi Arabia. The schools he had attended as a boy included religious studies, but also taught mathematics, science, history, geography, and English. He learned as a boy to speak passable English. Growing up in the 1960s he was among the best educated of his Saudi generation. He had also worked for his father, first as a simple laborer. The bin Laden company was renowned for building roads and parts of the mosques in Mecca and Medina. Young Osama worked his way up to foreman of a labor gang, and finally headed up construction projects himself. One of his specialties was tunneling. This kind of work put him shoulder to shoulder with Muslim workers from all over the region and the world: Egyptians, Yemenis, Moroccans, and even Malaysians. So his ideas about the Muslim world expanded well beyond those of most sheltered young Saudis, who viewed their own Wahhabi brand of the faith as superior to all others. At the same time, bin Laden became exceedingly devout, shunning all contact with women other than his wives (the first of whom, Najwa, he had married at age seventeen). He renounced the affluent lifestyles of his vast family and discovered the work of Egyptian scholar Sayyid Qutb, a small, mean, sickly man with a Hitler mustache who had been hanged by authorities in Egypt in 1966. In death, Qutb’s angry words gained fiery eloquence for those who thought as he did.

Qutb had railed against the rapid Westernization of traditional Arab societies. He championed divine revelation in a fallen modern world, penning biting critiques of both capitalist democracy and communism. A fervent Jew hater, he saw secret Zionist plots behind most of what he disliked, embracing every cockeyed forgery and myth in the canon of anti-Semitism. The Koran, he argued, was the one true path. All the wisdom mankind needed was in that book, which he spent a lifetime interpreting and explaining to suit his own vision. Muslims held the truth, the only truth, and had a duty to confront unbelievers, violently if necessary. Regimes and states that stood in the way of religious rule were jahiliyya—ignorant pre-Islamic societies—and as such were legitimate targets for violence. The forces of God must combat the forces of Satan, beginning with the secular regimes of modern Arab states. Qutb urged the faithful to carve out one country in which to base a pure society founded on shariah, Islamist law, a foothold for the faithful in a fallen world, and from that base radiate righteousness outward, by the sword if necessary. The new caliphate thus created would bend all of civilization to God’s will. At a time when well-to-do Arabs were becoming increasingly secular and Western, sending their children to Europe and the United States for advanced degrees and adopting lifestyles antithetical to Arab tradition, Qutb urged them to go in the opposite direction.

He had lived for a time in the United States—briefly in Colorado and in California—and seemingly everything he saw clarified his hatred not just for America, but also for the humanism that formed the intellectual undergirding of the Western world. A fastidious man who never married and seemed repelled by sex, Qutb denounced the licentiousness, materialism, and personal freedom of capitalist democracy. He saw clearly that for all its so-called respect for religion, Western society had become primarily secular, that faith, which for him was the dynamic principle of life, had been reduced in capitalist societies to something more akin to a commodity, as though there were different flavors of divine truth arrayed like items on a supermarket shelf for shoppers to pick through. What could it possibly matter to God what sort of truth a man preferred? There was only one truth, and man’s job was to accept it reverently and try to live in accordance with it. The very idea of tolerance, of respect for a variety of beliefs, was anathema. One either embraced the truth or was lost. As for Marxism, the Western world’s great rival notion, he saw it as simple idolatry, elevating human reason—“Rational Idealism”—above revelation. Lurking behind both Marxism and capitalism, he argued, was world Jewry.

“Islam is a system given by God and it aims to establish a fundamental principle of God’s sovereignty and people’s servitude to Him alone,” Qutb wrote. “As such, Islam has the right to remove all obstacles from its way and address people freely without any impediments such as a political system or social customs and traditions… it is the right of Islam to take the initiative. It is not the creed of a particular people or the system of a particular country. It is a system given by God for the entire world. As such, it has the right to take action to remove all obstacles that fetter man’s freedom of choice. It is a faith that does not force itself on any individual, it only attacks situations and regimes in order to free individuals from deviant influences that corrupt human nature and restrict man’s freedom.”

Young Osama bin Laden was not the first youth to be swept up by a pure, simple ideology that promised to create freedom of choice by abolishing everything that disagreed with it. The Koran stood like a rock in the shifting waters of human history. Progress for human beings meant one thing: living more closely to the teachings of the book.

“The Islamic concept of Divinity is utterly distinct from man’s… and therefore it does not need to develop or change,” Qutb wrote. “The One who established this concept can envision without limits of time or space. His knowledge is immune to the obstacles of ignorance and deficiency; and He chooses without being influenced by passion or emotion. Therefore, He has established for the entirety of humanity, in all places and at all times, a firm principle within the framework of which human life freely advances and develops.”

Accused of participating in a Muslim Brotherhood plot to assassinate Egyptian strongman Gamal Abdel Nasser, Qutb went to the gallows with his beliefs unshaken. “The Muslim Brotherhood is not a party of preachers and missionaries but rather of divine enforcers,” he wrote. “Its mission is to blot out, by force if necessary, oppression, moral anarchy, social disorder, and exploitation so as to finish the so-called divine role of self-styled gods and replace evil with good. ‘Fight them,’ the Koran says, ‘until there is no more oppression, and all submission is made to God alone.’”

Bin Laden became a “divine enforcer.” As a young man, he was not a scholar or much of a thinker, and he lacked Qutb’s eloquence. Those who knew him found him tongue-tied and unimpressive. But he was ambitious, and rich. His billionaire father was killed in a plane crash in 1967, leaving behind enough of a fortune to make all of his offspring at least multimillionaires. Bin Laden’s inheritance at age ten was estimated in the tens of millions. He had no interest in using his wealth to build a fine home or adopt a luxurious lifestyle, though, as many of his siblings did. His inclinations ran the opposite way. He had been educated in a private secular school, but by the time he attended King Abdulazzi University, where he studied economics and business management, he was already preaching simplicity and seemed primarily interested in religion and charitable work. He continued to pursue these interests until the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and launched him on the path toward his life’s work.

Huthaifa Azzam was just fourteen years old when he answered a bell on the gate outside his father’s house in Jordan. He found a very tall, very thin, swarthy and bearded young man wearing Arab robes and a simple white turban, not the typical red-and-white-checked headdress, or shemagh, worn by most Saudi men. The visitor asked, shyly, “Is this the house of Dr. Abdullah Azzam?”

Azzam was a prominent Palestinian Islamist and scholar whose fatwa, “Defense of the Muslim Lands: The First Obligation After Faith,” had caused a stir in the Arab world, summoning the faithful to Afghanistan to resist the infidel Soviets. Azzam had done more than preach. He had relocated to Pakistan to take part in the holy war himself. Based in Peshawar, close to the Afghan border, he had established what he called the “Services Office,” to recruit and train young Arab volunteers to join the fight. Magazines, photos, and videos prepared by the office spread news of the heroic religious resistance throughout the Arab world… and had found their way to young bin Laden. Azzam was taking a short holiday break with his family in Jordan when the young Saudi made the four-hour trip to ring his bell. This volunteer was different from most, of course, because of his fortune. Azzam must have been delighted. The two men spoke for hours that day, and by evening bin Laden was a recruit. He pledged himself to the cause. He was still enough of a loyal Saudi subject, however, that he delayed traveling back with Azzam in order to seek permission from King Fahd. He arrived in Peshawar several weeks later.

At that point, bin Laden’s money was more valuable to the cause than his leadership or even his life, and so during those first years with Azzam he stayed safely behind the lines, working at the Services Office and helping to attract other young fighters to the cause. This was not destined to last. Bin Laden was a romantic, and a zealot, and he had not made his jihad to live safely behind the lines. He grew apart from Azzam, increasingly falling in with Ayman al-Zawahiri, the radical Egyptian physician who had left his home country after serving three years in prison. Zawahiri worked at a Red Crescent hospital in Peshawar. Although only six years older than bin Laden, he was a man of wider experience and education, and had been deeply embittered by the torture he had undergone at the hands of Egyptian police. His angry radicalism stirred bin Laden to play a more active role in the holy war—to become a full-fledged mujahid himself.

Bin Laden’s growing extremism began to trouble his Palestinian mentor. Azzam, a college professor, balked at bin Laden’s refusal to send his children to school. The younger man wanted Arab recruits to form separate, religiously pure fighting units, while Azzam believed the Arabs would be better employed if mixed with the savvier, more experienced Afghan militia. He also resisted his protégé’s growing carelessness about human life. Bin Laden had embraced a broad definition of “infidel.” Until that point, the enemy had been understood to be Russian soldiers and Afghans who fought with them. They were at war, after all. Bin Laden had expanded the definition. It now applied to any Russian, even any non-Muslim. He was fighting a bigger war than the one being promoted by Azzam. The older man’s wife, Samira, remembers her husband arguing with bin Laden about the younger man’s plan to place a bomb on a bus full of Russians visiting Pakistan.

“You entered Pakistan on a visa,” Azzam reminded him. “The visa is a contract. You signed when you obtained the visa that you would not be a troublemaker nor break the laws. A Muslim should not break a contract.”

“Pakistan is a Muslim country,” bin Laden told him, by which he meant that non-Muslims had no business coming there.

It was one thing, Azzam argued, to kill Russians who invaded Afghanistan and held it by force, quite another to target innocent civilians on a holiday to a country that welcomed them.

“So what will happen if Russia loses a bus full of people?” bin Laden said dismissively. “It is not going to matter.”

He had moved beyond the conflict in Afghanistan. His faith empowered him. God had touched him. This gave him the right to decide, to kill.

Bin Laden also felt that jihad demanded that he actually fight as well, not just take part in recruiting, training, and paying others to do so. The older man argued with him for months, no doubt convinced that a multimillionaire Saudi was worth more to the cause alive than dead. But bin Laden had made up his mind. He was going to cross the border and join the battle. In 1987, he split with Azzam. He recruited his own band of about two dozen Arab fighters, creating the kind of fighting unit he preferred—a pure, all-Arab force of men who fought for religious reasons alone, not just for the principle of Afghan nationalism. Equipped with weapons and bulldozers, they drove ten miles or so into Afghanistan, joined up with some like-minded Afghan fighters, and set about building a mountain outpost near the village of Jaji. Bin Laden fortified a series of ridges and began building roads and other structures—he said a school and a hospital—that advertised their presence. It was in easternmost Afghanistan, in rugged country, and was not a strategically important spot, at least not in any conventional sense. Bin Laden called it al-Masada, the Lion’s Den. It was near a much larger Soviet garrison and its primary purpose was to provoke an attack. To a practical man like Azzam (who would be assassinated two years later) this probably appeared foolhardy, but bin Laden lived in a world of romantic fantasy, and in that realm, al-Masada made perfect sense. The battle was not just for Afghanistan, but for the whole world. It was the beginning of a new caliphate, the dawn of a new Muslim age. He was a holy warrior, and warriors did not win battles by writing checks and making videos and leading from the rear. In his view, the idea wasn’t to defeat the Soviets in battle, or even to survive, but to display such heroism and resolve that it would inflame the fighting spirit of the greater Muslim Nation.

“God willing, we want the Lion’s Den to be the first thing that the enemy faces,” bin Laden told a Syrian journalist. “Its place as the first camp visible to the enemy means that they will focus their bombardments on us in an extreme manner.”

And the Soviets obliged, dropping napalm and so many tons of conventional explosives that the outpost and the area around it were denuded of trees and vegetation. Then they attacked directly, encircling the outpost. The siege lasted for twenty-two days, with a heavy toll on both sides. Some of bin Laden’s men were more skilled fighters than he was. Abu Hafs (Mohammed Atef, an Egyptian policeman who would be killed in 2001) and Abu Ubaidah (Ali Amin al-Rashidi, also a former Egyptian policeman, killed in 1996) led punishing counterattacks. The Soviets eventually gave up and retreated, handing the Arab fighters an inspirational victory. It had unfolded for bin Laden miraculously, a clear sign from heaven.

He would later tell the Syrian journalist, “At seven on the twenty-seventh morning of Ramadan 1407 [April of 1987], most of the people were sleeping in the camp because it was Ramadan. Then I saw things that, by God, I have never seen before. A Soviet airplane, a MIG, I believe, passed by in front of us, when a group of our Afghan mujahidin brothers grouped together [and attacked]. The plane then broke into pieces and fell right in front of our eyes. This battle is what gave me the strong will to continue with this war.”

By all accounts bin Laden fought bravely, exposing himself to danger and the extremes of deprivation and cold like everyone else in the camp. He was injured during the fighting and, at one point, he later told an interviewer, he lay unconscious and bleeding in a trench, surrounded by his dead comrades. He was ultimately rescued, but only after losing a lot of blood, an incident that he would later say had given him chronically low blood pressure. Bin Laden’s willingness to place himself at risk greatly enlarged his reputation. It mattered little in the end that the battle had been meaningless in practical terms. The Battle of Jaji was proclaimed a great victory, and bin Laden, having conceived it, was its hero. Reporters trekked out to al-Masada to meet this Saudi multimillionaire who fought with suicidal conviction. One of them, Ahmad Zaidan, a Pakistani newspaper reporter working for a group of Arab newspapers, found an extraordinarily pious young man in complete command, who had supplanted the role once played by the far more famous Azzam, and who was surrounded by devoted followers. Bin Laden had transformed himself from a rich-kid backer on the sidelines into a frontline mujahidin leader.

It brought him more than new recruits. It affirmed his sense of destiny. By then he had become the Sheik. He was thirty years old, tall and thin, with long full features and a long dark beard that further elongated his face. He preferred traditional Arab robes and cultivated a lofty, saintly mien, affecting abject humility. He was theatrically holy. From time to time he would receive audiences of reporters, and after each question he would sit silently for a few moments, mouthing prayers, as if waiting for the Almighty to formulate the response for him, and only then would he speak, in a voice so soft that everyone had to lean close to hear him. He fasted once or twice a week and rejected the simple comforts and conveniences of modern life that he could easily afford. He shunned electricity, doing without air-conditioning and refrigeration in even the warmest climates, as when he and his family lived in the Sudan. All the better to harden himself and his family for the privation of war, for life as a fugitive. Followers were now drawn to his renown, to his sincerity, to his daring and his conviction, but also to his money. His fortune was still key. For those who had experienced the heady days of jihad in Afghanistan and preferred to make a career of it, bin Laden could provide the means, and possessed the reckless vision. For most Arabs the caliphate was ancient history, but to the Sheik it was destiny. God had chosen him. Surviving the bitter Russian siege at Jaji reinforced those beliefs. Qutb had called for a pure Muslim state, a base from which to spread the cause. Afghanistan seemed to be the place. It had been called Khorasan when it was converted to Islam in the seventh century and had stood as one of the great pillars of the caliphate for centuries. Defeating the Soviets there would have deep resonance among believers. It was, perhaps, the right place. And in bin Laden’s mind, it had started at al-Masada, where the pure of heart, outnumbered and outgunned, had righteously defied Soviet MIGs and bombs and weeks of determined assault.

Then the impossible happened. Just as they had backed away from al-Masada, in 1989 Russian armies retreated in frustration from Afghanistan. Within three years, the Soviet empire itself collapsed, closely followed by the regime it had left behind in Kabul. Bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia with an outsized reputation as author of this titanic accomplishment, and he gained even more disciples. He and the men who had fought with him at Jaji saw themselves as the fulcrum of this triumph and named themselves “the Base,” or al Qaeda. They were the soul of what bin Laden saw as the emerging caliphate, a true Muslim Nation.

It was, of course, absurd. If anything, the source of the mujahidin’s triumph had been the billions of dollars of U.S. aid and arms that Michael Vickers had helped steer to Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion. But bin Laden was less interested in the truth than in appearances, and in the latter, he and his followers excelled. Their style spoke volumes. Their long beards and hair and prayer caps and robes made them seem like men from an ancient, holier time. They adopted bin Laden’s asceticism. They embraced struggle and death, bragging that their desire for martyrdom trumped their attachment to life itself. They pitted themselves against power. They were natural men, real men. Their very shabbiness advertised their authenticity. They were pious. They believed that happiness and justice were not things civilization was evolving toward, but things that had been lost.

The fall of the Soviet Union had many causes, of course, and the drawn-out humiliation in Afghanistan was certainly among them, but for the devout there was only one cause: the hand of God had once more moved clearly in human history, just as it had in the legends of old. No serious scholar would credit bin Laden with a critical role in the effort, much less a role in the collapse of the Soviet state, but in the Sheik’s mind that was how it had gone. It made for a great story, the powerless but pure of heart overcoming impossible odds. The Sheik loved stories like these. He was a poet himself, a fantastical one, given to cosmic sweep and romantic cliché. He celebrated violence and death in the struggle to defend the faith, with centuries-old imagery of swords and steeds, soaring mountains, and fearless warriors.

He hunches forth,

Staining the blades of lances red.

May God not let my eye stray

From the most eminent humans,

Should they fall.

As the stallion bears my witness

That I hold them back,

My stabbing is like the cinders of fire

That explode into flame.

He used his poems to explain, excite, and recruit in parts of the world where traditions were still tribal and oral, but the poems were also an expression of how he saw himself, how he believed the world to be. As a younger man he had composed and recited his poems at weddings and other occasions. He was stitching his own life and his modern struggle into images of a glorious past. The Sheik often enclosed verses in his letters, and instructed that they be read on important occasions—published or broadcast. The Afghanistan victory brought the ages of heroes and mighty deeds to life in modern times. In his poetry, he was arguing that we, too, live in an age of miracles.

After the collapse of the Soviet state, even the wildest reach of his ambition seemed possible. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, the Sheik, then living in his home country, wrote a series of letters to King Fahd demanding that American forces not be allowed to enter Saudi Arabia and offering to put together a force of mujahidin to expel the Iraqi forces himself. His pleas were ignored. Huthaifa Azzam, who had remained friends with bin Laden for years after the Afghan conflict, remembers this as the only time he ever saw the studiously mild-mannered Sheik ever lose his temper. Bin Laden’s outrage and sense of betrayal were complete. He was considered dangerous enough in his home country that he was placed under house arrest.

After the kingdom’s refusal to adopt his plan for a renewed holy war, instead opting for the more practical option of inviting the United States and other apostate countries to assemble military forces to confront Saddam, bin Laden’s brothers used their influence to get his passport back, and he left Saudi Arabia permanently, first traveling to Pakistan, then to Afghanistan, then the Sudan, and then back to Afghanistan.

The younger Azzam was attending a conference in the Sudan in 1995 when he dropped in to see bin Laden. During his visit, he recalls, he met Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who had brought his notorious nephew, Ramzi Yousef, a Sunni extremist who was at that time a fugitive sought by the United States for the first attack on the World Trade Center, two years earlier. Azzam described Yousef as a scrawny man whose bearded face had been scarred in a bomb-making accident. Both he and his uncle would later be characterized in The 9/11 Commission Report as “rootless but experienced operatives.” Yousef would be captured in Pakistan later that year. According to Azzam, the Sheik listened as Yousef outlined a plan to attack targets in the United States again, including the World Trade Center towers, this time by hijacking commercial airliners and flying them into buildings. He wanted al Qaeda to help with recruiting martyrs and raise money for them to travel to the United States for flight training. As Azzam recalls it, the Sheik said, “We have nothing to do with the United States, why should we attack them?”

This may have been for Azzam’s benefit, since bin Laden had been preaching a duty to attack America for years. Ever since he had broken with Azzam’s father, the Sheik had steered a far more radical course. Huthaifa Azzam was not the radical bin Laden had become, and would have been seen as suspect, perhaps even as a spy. It might explain why bin Laden would have made a show of rejecting Yousef’s idea in this meeting. Already al Qaeda had been implicated in attacks and plots on Americans, including sending military advisers to Somalia in 1993 to help tribal militiamen target American helicopters, and a car bomb explosion in Saudi Arabia that killed five American and two Indian soldiers. If the account is true, the meeting Azzam described is significant because it would be the first known mention of what became the 9/11 plot to bin Laden. The idea for the attacks is customarily attributed to Khalid Sheik Mohammed, but Yousef’s fixation on the towers is well documented. He later confessed that he had hopes that the 1993 bombing would collapse the towers and kill 250,000 people. Whatever bin Laden said at this session, al Qaeda would endorse the plan soon enough.

Bin Laden left the Sudan when terrorists linked to al Qaeda and the Egyptian group Islamic Jihad were linked to an attempted assassination of the Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Pressure mounted on the Sudanese government after that, and the Sheik was expelled. He had other reasons to go. There had been one known attempt on his life there, and Saudi authorities had cut off payments to the al Qaeda leader from his family inheritance. With funding for his ambitious projects in the Sudan dried up, he left for Afghanistan in May 1996.

Three months later, back in the dusty, rugged homeland of the first great miracle, the Sheik held a press conference to declare war on “the head of the snake.” He cited a list of grievances against America and demanded that its forces be withdrawn from “the land of the two Holy Places”—Saudi Arabia. It was time for the next great struggle, he preached, which would topple the world’s other superpower, the United States. That would mean the end of Israel, America’s client state, and the dawn of a new Islamist age. There was nothing stealthy about his plan, just as there had been no disguising his intentions when he built al-Masada near the Soviet garrison at Jaji. The whole idea was to confront the enemy openly, to make a show of inspired defiance. Indeed, making the show was more important than succeeding. Audacity was the point.

In 1998, he told ABC News correspondent John Miller, to whom he gave an interview in order to directly reach American audiences: “I’m declaring war on the United States. I am going to attack your country.”

Few Americans took the threat seriously. Some crackpot Arab in the middle of nowhere had declared war on the United States. The country had more important things on its mind… like sex. Former White House intern Monica Lewinsky said it had transpired between her and President Clinton, and he was still denying it. Hillary Clinton was conjuring up “a vast right-wing conspiracy.” House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who was then secretly carrying on his own extramarital affair with a staffer twenty-three years his junior, was leading the charge to impeach the president. Basketball star Michael Jordan clinched the Chicago Bulls’ sixth NBA title with a fade-away jumper in the final seconds of his last game with the team. Bin Laden was of interest to those whose job it was to protect the United States from foreign threats but, as we have seen, even in those circles he did not merit urgent concern.

But the Sheik had big plans, and the means to carry them out. The bombings of American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998 and the attack on the USS Cole two years later, got America’s attention, but al Qaeda was still considered by most in the intelligence and military communities to be a nuisance—a deadly and growing nuisance, perhaps, but a nuisance. Bin Laden’s own life grew more difficult, as the Clinton administration devoted more effort to finding and killing him. Two of bin Laden’s wives left him during this period, choosing to abandon the path of jihad. But the Sheik persevered through the next decade, training recruits, plotting, and laying the groundwork for the next miracle.

The fall of the World Trade Center towers was his vindication. What greater proof of God’s purpose could the world wish to see? Bin Laden placed great stock in signs. He had long sought to deliver a decapitating strike, hitting the American centers of finance, government, and military. It had seemed an impossible goal. One had to be crazy, or inspired, to think he could pull it off.

The collapse of the World Trade Center had been the second great miracle in his life. The fall of the iconic towers in Manhattan, symbols of the wealth and power of the world’s remaining infidel superpower, seemed to presage the imminent collapse of America, too. It was further proof that the path he followed was divinely inspired.

In his wildest hopes he had not imagined that the planes might bring down the towers completely. God’s hand had surely been in it. The physical force of the colliding planes, the exploding fuel, and the resulting infernos were themselves, he believed, inadequate to explain it. On a video found by American soldiers in Kandahar weeks after the attacks, bin Laden is seen conversing happily with a group of sympathetic Saudi visitors, alternately praising God and celebrating the remarkable outcome, painting the attacks in magical terms. It was a practice familiar in religious communities. You decorated the truth with dreams and portents, weaving magic into the facts, coloring them with divine favor.

In the footage, bin Laden knelt on a large pillow, wearing his military-style camouflage jacket, his head wrapped in a white turban, speaking so softly that his words were barely audible. When he spoke, the others in the room would fall silent. Bin Laden seemed stiff, perhaps because he knew he was being videotaped, and he elevated his long slender left hand and two fingers like Christ or a saint in an old icon. In older photographs, before he became so notorious, he appears more relaxed and human, even graceful, his long, thin features animated with a frequent smile. Now he was important. He assumed the pose of the important. He said he had received notice about the precise day of the attacks the week before, so he had been ready for the news. In Jalalabad it had been early evening. He described how he and his fellow mujahidin had gathered around a radio to listen to the BBC’s Arabic-language radio broadcast.

“We calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy who would be killed based on the position of the tower,” he explained. “We calculated that the floors that would be hit would [be at most] three or four floors. I was the most optimistic of them all due to my experience in this field [construction]. I was thinking that the fire from the gas in the plane would melt the iron structure of the building and collapse the area where the plane hit and all the floors above it only. This was all that we had hoped for.”

When the others began celebrating after the first plane hit, bin Laden said he told them, “Be patient.” There was more news to come. The difference between the first and second plane hitting the towers was twenty minutes, and the difference between the first plane and the plane that hit the Pentagon was one hour.

As much as the first miracle, this one seemed to mark a profound milestone in his struggle. But he was cautious at first about claiming credit.

He sought out Hamid Mir, a well-known Pakistani journalist who had met and interviewed him years earlier. As Mir explained it, he was in his Islamabad office when the 9/11 attacks occurred. Within hours a messenger came to him with a written statement from the Sheik. Mir recognized the messenger. He had seen him when he had first met with bin Laden years earlier in Kandahar. The statement read, “I praise all those who conducted that operation. But I am not directly involved.”

Mir told the messenger: “You contacted me immediately after the attacks and you reached my office within a few hours and that means that you were not in Afghanistan at that time. That means that bin Laden gave you this statement before the attacks. And that means that you people were aware of the attacks.”

The messenger pleaded ignorance.

“The Sheik just gave me this letter. He said, ‘You will contact Mr. Mir at six o’clock and you will reach his office at seven o’clock and then you will come back.’ So that was my job and I have done my job, okay? Bye.”

The messenger left.

Mir’s own reporting reputation in Pakistan is controversial. He has often angered the government there, and he has been accused of being sympathetic to extremists, but his reports have been recognized worldwide as credible and often extraordinary. His many run-ins with Pakistani officialdom had burnished his reputation for independence among Western reporters, so in the days immediately after the attacks he was interviewed by many who were searching for some insight into al Qaeda. After he appeared on Larry King’s interview program on CNN, Mir was again contacted by one of bin Laden’s messengers, who said the Sheik wanted to talk to him. So Mir traveled to Jalalabad in November of 2001 in search of the scoop of a lifetime. Bin Laden was now the most wanted fugitive in the world.

He said that when he arrived in Jalalabad he waited a full day before being contacted by a group of low-level al Qaeda figures, who said they knew nothing of bin Laden’s summons.

“We are not aware of why you are here or who wanted you here,” one said. “We are not aware, just wait.”

More hours passed. Eventually, Mir was contacted and instructed to travel to Kabul. He spent several days in the Afghan capital, being shuttled first to one safe house, then another. It was now weeks into the American invasion, and just days before the Taliban fell. The capital was braced for tumultuous change. He could hear bombs falling on the city day and night, explosions that shook the earth. The Islamist kingdom under construction was coming apart all around him. Mir feared he would never get out alive. If an American bomb didn’t kill him, these al Qaeda fighters would. On the morning of November 8, six days before the Taliban fled the city, he was escorted into the presence of bin Laden and al-Zawahiri. Both men said they had come to Kabul to attend funeral services for a comrade.

Bin Laden seemed serenely untroubled by the unfolding disaster around him, and in high spirits. Sitting with the two most wanted men in the world, surrounded by other members of their group, Mir began nervously. He asked, “Are you responsible for 9/11?”

Bin Laden reached over with one long finger and shut off Mir’s tape recorder.

He asked, “Can you ask this question to George W. Bush: Are you responsible for the killing of many Muslims in Palestine and Iraq?”

“No, I cannot ask him this question because I’ll not get any chance to interview him,” said Mir.

“Okay, but if you do get a chance and if you ask this question, will he answer?”

“No,” said Mir.

“Then why are you asking this question of me?”

“Because he is a politician and you are a fighter,” said Mir, thinking fast, and then, falling back on any journalist’s most trusted tactic, he resorted to flattery. “You said that you are a mujahid, so there must be a difference between a politician and a mujahid. Mujahid always speak the truth. You have to answer my question.”

“Off the record, yes,” said bin Laden. Then he turned the recorder back on. “I cannot answer your question because my answer will create problems for the Taliban.”

Clearly the Taliban had problems enough. Bombs were exploding outside so close that the journalist was shaken. His fright amused bin Laden.

“Oh, Mr. Mir, maybe today you will be killed with me at this place,” he said, lightly mocking him. “You are here to interview me and maybe you will not be able to report that interview back to your newspaper. What will happen with you?”

Bin Laden and the others laughed. They spoke for hours. Mir worked through a list of questions he had prepared. They discussed the various attempts that had been made on bin Laden’s life, and after shutting off Mir’s recorder again the Sheik spoke at length about his disdain for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi, neither of whom had joined the struggle against the Soviet Union years before. Mir asked him about widespread reports that he suffered a kidney disease and needed dialysis treatments. Again, the Sheik laughed. He promised to address the question in more detail when they had finished the interview. So when Mir finished asking his questions, breakfast was brought in for them—olives, cheese, bread and butter, beef. Bin Laden began eating vigorously.

“A kidney patient cannot eat a lot,” he told Mir. “You see this is beef? I am eating beef. You see this is cheese? I am eating cheese.”

Mir looked to al-Zawahiri, who agreed. “Yes, I am a doctor, I can confirm, kidney patients cannot eat a lot.”

“I can ride my horse seventy kilometers without any stop,” said bin Laden.

He kept Mir far longer than the reporter had expected, or desired. The Pakistani, having asked his questions, was eager to leave and get out of the city. He knew that bin Laden might well be a target for the Americans. After this exchange about the Sheik’s health, Mir asked, “Can I leave now?”

“No,” said his host. “You spend some more time with us and have some tea and you can ask some other questions, off the record questions.”

Bin Laden told Mir that the day after the attacks in America, his youngest wife had given birth to a daughter, whom he named Safiyah.

“Why Safiyah?” Mir asked.

Bin Laden explained that Safiyah had been an aunt of the Prophet and an early convert to Islam. She had given up all her possessions to join the faith, and had taken part in battles and slain unbelievers in defense of the faith.

“Are you now planning to involve the females of your family in your fight against the Americans?” Mir asked, mindful of the Sheik’s strictly traditional views on the role of women. Bin Laden laughed.

“Maybe Safiyah will follow the footsteps of her father,” he said, and resisted when Mir seemed to be taking the comment too seriously.

“Just forget, forget,” he said.

“No, no, it’s very important for me.”

“Okay, rest assured Safiyah will not become a mujahid, don’t worry,” bin Laden said, and laughed again. And at last he said, “Okay, now you can go back.”

Despite the relentless American attacks and the imminent defeat of the Taliban, the Sheik was filled with confidence from the impact of 9/11. All was unfolding as he foretold.

He did not see any of his attacks as wanton terror, as his horrified enemies did. They were retribution. They were not simply just, but divinely inspired. They were his duty.

“We kill civilian infidels in exchange for those of our children they kill,” he told an interviewer from Al Jazeera five months after the 9/11 attacks, citing an estimate he often used, that a “million children” had died in Iraq owing to UN–imposed sanctions on that country, a number most serious analysts considered absurdly inflated. Asked about the children killed who had been attending a school inside the World Trade Center, he reasoned: “[Retribution] is permissible in law and intellectually. The men that God helped [on September 11] did not intend to kill babies, they intended to destroy the strongest military power in the world, to attack the Pentagon that houses more than 64,000 employees, a military center that houses military intelligence. The twin towers are an economic power and not a children’s school.”

It is worth noting here, and for most it goes without saying, that Osama bin Laden’s ideas were neither new nor compelling outside his relatively small circle of followers. They belonged to an ugly cul-de-sac of history, an era where witches and heretics were burned in town squares. They were adolescent ideas, in that they remained willfully ignorant of all that had come before. There are many who choose to believe that certain ancient texts are literally the word of one God or the other, but not many who would go so far as to regard as a sacred duty the slaughter of those who disagree with them, or to kill in order to advance their aims. This was a philosophy that would never appeal to more than a few dedicated fanatics. But one of the peculiarities of the modern world is that, because of telecommunications, small groups of like-minded people, even if widely scattered, can form a community of belief. They can feed off of each other, and can come to wield influence far beyond their actual numbers or appeal. Bin Laden’s was the first to use these tools to build his network into a deadly force. The idea of turning fully fueled commercial airliners into guided bombs effectively gave al Qaeda the destructive power of a small air force or small arsenal of missiles. The suicide attackers who pulled it off had been recruited and trained internationally, financed by global money transfers, and steered by telephone and e-mail. The attacks themselves were designed to create a horrible spectacle for the entire world, television providing the audience, complete with replays and analyses for those who came late. It was a backward-looking movement with forward-looking tactics.