For all their anti-Americanism, even the most militant Islamists agreed that something had to be done about Saddam Hussein, a secular ruler who was seen as bent on destroying Islam. Immediately after Iraq invaded Kuwait in August, one of their leaders went to Riyadh to meet with Defense Minister Prince Sultan and to present him with an alternative way of going after Saddam without having to rely on the U.S. military. That militant leader was Osama bin Laden.
By this time a battle-hardened thirty-three-year-old, bin Laden told Sultan that the kingdom did not have to allow American infidels on Saudi soil to fight Saddam's troops. [1] Fresh from driving the Soviets out of Afghanistan, Osama was ready to take on another superpower. Armed with maps and a detailed ten-page plan, he asserted that his family's construction and engineering equipment could be used to quickly build fortifications. [2] Thanks in part to U.S. support for the Afghanistan campaign, bin Laden already had a global network of Islamic warriors ready to bolster Saudi forces. If the Islamic forces could defeat a true superpower like the Soviet Union, he argued, they could certainly take on Saddam Hussein. As Muslims, Iraqi soldiers could not possibly be deeply committed to someone as secular as Saddam and would not resist the jihad.
Stunned by bin Laden's proposal, Prince Sultan warned Osama that Saddam had four thousand tanks. "There are no caves in Kuwait," he said. "You cannot fight them from the mountains and caves. What will you do when he lobs the missiles at you with chemical and biological weapons?" [3]
"We [will] fight him with faith," bin Laden replied. He said he could lead the fight himself and promised to put together one hundred thousand former warriors from the Afghanistan War. [4] Still devoted to the House of Saud, bin Laden warned the royals that if they allowed U.S. soldiers near the holy mosques of Medina and Mecca, militant Islamists, not just in Saudi Arabia but throughout the entire Muslim world, would not overlook "Riyadh's transgressions of the sacred principles of Islam." [5] In its search for military security, he said, the royal family risked losing its religious legitimacy.
According to one report, for reasons that are unclear, bin Laden left his meeting with Prince Sultan thinking that the House of Saud agreed with him and was going to accept his offer. [6] But soon, he received the news that would transform his life: King Fahd was going to allow U.S. forces into the kingdom. [7]
To bin Laden, this development was "a backbreaking calamity." For decades, the secretive House of Saud had maintained its two different realities. In the West, it proudly paraded its alliance with the United States as evidence of its security and the Saudi entry into the modern world. But within Saudi Arabia, the House of Saud had downplayed any ties to the United States so as not to provoke militant Islamists. Now, however, the double marriage between the two mortal enemies was out in the open. When King Fahd asked the senior Islamic clerics who oversaw the Saudi judiciary to endorse the idea of allowing U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, at first they refused. [8] Allowing American soldiers on sacred Saudi soil was so abhorrent that it called into question the very legitimacy of the House of Saud as the custodian of Islam. Throughout all of Saudi Arabia, Islamists could talk of nothing else but the schism between the royal family and the ulema.
Meanwhile, on August 7, 1990, the United States began sending the most sophisticated and powerful fighting machine in the history of the world into the ancient desert kingdom of Saudi Arabia. First, there were paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne Division; then F-15 fighter jets and B-52 bombers. [9] The Saudi port town of Khafhi on the Persian Gulf near the Kuwait border was transformed overnight into a bustling garrison. Transport planes laden with soldiers and equipment arrived every ten minutes.
Tens of thousands of American soldiers -- blacks, Asians, Christians, Jews, even women made their way into a tribal, male- dominated Arab culture that had never seen anything of the like. Soon, the most awesome display of high-tech aerial firepower ever assembled straddled the entire Islamic world from east to west. There were aircraft carrier battle groups in the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea. Radar-dodging Stealth F-117 bombers moved into the area. F-111 bombers headed for Turkey and B-52s to the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, both within striking distance of Iraqi targets. There were F-15 Eagles armed with Sparrow and Sidewinder missiles; the F/A-18 Hornet with missiles, laser-guided bombs, and cluster bombs; the A-10 Thunderbolt and A-6 Intruder ground-attack planes, armed with Hellfire missiles; and the AH-64 Apache missile and cannon-bearing helicopter.
To Americans, the imminent war had the makings of a patriotic but antiseptic spectacle that carried no more risk than a video game. In addition, the Saudi and American leadership had never been on better terms. When George and Barbara Bush visited American troops in Saudi Arabia during the Thanksgiving holiday in 1990, the New Yorker reported, Bush called Bandar, who was in the country at the time. The Bushes were staying in the royal palace, and when Bandar arrived at their quarters, the president told him how much his recently divorced daughter, Dorothy, appreciated the friendship of Bandar's family. Dorothy had been alone at the White House with her children when Princess Haifa, Bandar's wife, invited her and the rest of the family over for Thanksgiving. The gesture so deeply touched the president that he was moved to tears. [10] The first lady began to call him Bandar Bush.
But poignant as the friendship was between Bandar and Bush, within the Arab world at large there was little warmth toward the United States. True, James Baker had forged a coalition that had significant backing from the leadership of the Arab world. [11] But on the so-called Arab "street," the arrival of U.S. troops ripped open bitter wounds within the Islamic world that dated back to the Crusades. As hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops began flooding into Saudi Arabia in August, fundamentalists in Iran called for a boycott of the hajj so long as U.S. forces were in Saudi Arabia. [12] In November, a Saudi F-15 pilot defected to Sudan with his aircraft in protest of the U.S. military presence. [13] A sermon in the Grand Mosque in Mecca by a prominent academic asserted that a U.S. "occupation" of the region was part of a long-range plan. The message was stark: "If Iraq has occupied Kuwait, then America has occupied Saudi Arabia. The real enemy is not Iraq. It is the West." [14] Tape recordings of it circulated throughout the kingdom. For millions of Muslims, the U.S. presence was a humiliation of Islam that called forth visions of invading Christians and Jews.
A rising tide of anti-Americanism and animus against the House of Saud swept through the kingdom. Repeatedly using language that evoked images of the medieval holy war against Islam, bin Laden asserted that King Fahd had "sided with the Jews and Christians" and had committed an "unforgivable sin." [15] "The American government has made the greatest mistake in entering a peninsula that no religion from the non-Muslim states has entered for fourteen centuries," he said. He declared that the arrival of U.S. troops constituted a grave and unprecedented threat to Islam, a Crusader attack that marked "the ascendance of Christian Americans over us and the conquest of our lands." [16] For the first time since the annunciation of the Prophet Muhammad, bin Laden said, the three most sacred places of Islam - Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem -- were "under the open and covert control of non-Muslims." [17]
Still, bin Laden refrained from challenging the House of Saud directly, as many militant Islamists did, and directed his anger toward the United States. He called for a boycott of all American products. "When we buy American goods, we are accomplices in the murder of Palestinians," he said, asserting that American tax dollars ended up funding Israel, which then killed Palestinians. [18] But this was just the beginning. He and his acolytes were prepared to go much further.
***
Early in the evening of November 5, 1990, in New York City, it became clear exactly how far bin Laden and his associates were prepared to go. Three months had passed since bin Laden's meetings with Prince Sultan and a huge invading armada of American soldiers and materiel had landed in Arab lands, poised for attack. Rabbi Meir Kahane, the fiery founder of the militant Jewish Defense League, was appearing at a meeting at the New York Marriott Hotel on West Forty-Ninth Street in Manhattan. Kahane, who referred to Arabs as "dogs" and whose slogan was "Every Jew a .22," had been characterized by author Robert I. Friedman as a "Pied Piper of confused Jewish youth" who had "a knack for convincing youngsters that violence in the name of Greater Israel or Soviet Jewry is heroic in the tradition of the Bible." [19] Elected to the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, in 1984 by advocating the expulsion of all Arabs from Israel, Kahane had subsequently been barred from elective office in Israel after a new law banned parties that had racist platforms. As Kahane took questions from the audience, a man of Arab descent with an odd smile on his face suddenly approached and shot Kahane dead with a silver-plated .357 handgun. [20]
The man who pulled the trigger, El Sayed Nosair, was a thirty-four-year-old New York City air-conditioner repairman originally from Egypt. Nosair was just one of dozens of young Arabs who spent time at the Al-Kifah Refugee Center in Brooklyn, New York, [21] where the CIA had once recruited prospects to join the cause of the mujahideen in the Afghanistan War in the eighties. [i] It was there that Nosair had become mesmerized by Abdullah Azzam, the hypnotic Islamic orator, scholar, and colleague of bin Laden's who frequently left Peshawar to raise funds in the United States for the mujahideen. [22] [LC]
At Nosair's apartment, police discovered bomb-making materials and instruction manuals on special warfare. They also found a list of potential assassination targets, and maps and photos of many of New York's landmarks -- including the World Trade Center. [23] Some of the materials tied Nosair to the famous Blind Sheikh from Egypt, Omar Abdel Rahman, who preached jihad against America, and who, it was later revealed, had ordered Nosair to kill Kahane. [24] Nosair, it became clear, stood at the center of an Islamist cell intent on waging war against America.
But thanks to bungling from both the CIA and the FBI, a serious investigation was not in the cards. The Blind Sheikh had been tied to the 1981 assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, but later in the eighties the CIA saw him as a recruiting tool for the mujahideen and may have protected him so that his shady past did not set off alarms among U.S. authorities. [25] According to Peter Bergen's Holy War Inc., even though the Blind Sheikh was known to be a leader of Egypt's militant Islamic Group, he had been issued a visa in 1987 and again in 1990. [26]
On the night of the Kahane assassination, Edward Norris, a detective with the New York Police Department's Seventeenth Precinct, thought two Arab cabdriver friends of Nosair's might be involved. But after briefly detaining the two men, the police were ordered to release them. "They really were anxious at that time to get on to the press and say, 'We have a murder. We have a gunman. The case is solved. There's no reason to be afraid,'" said John Miller, coauthor, with Michael Stone and Chris Mitchell, of The Cell. [27] [ii]
FBI officials also insisted "that Mr. Nosair had acted alone and was not part of a larger conspiracy." [28] Worse, they didn't even bother to examine the contents of Nosair's filing cabinets thoroughly once they took them from the police. When they finally got around to translating the Arabic documents in the files more than two years later [29] -- after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center -- they found that the papers included a sermon urging Muslims to attack America and "blow up their edifices." There were videotapes of the electrifying speeches of Abdullah Azzam. [30] They even discovered a document that appears to be one of the very first bearing the name of bin Laden's new organization: Al Qaeda.
The relevance of that term would, of course, later become clear. But at the time, Kahane's murder appeared to have been an isolated event, an assassination of one extremist by another. America was poised to go to war with Saddam Hussein and was alive with patriotic fervor. When the Gulf War began on January 16, 1991, much of the country stood behind President Bush. Night after night, millions of people were spellbound by the high-tech spectacle on CNN, unaware that Osama bin Laden's jihad against America had begun. In Meir Kahane, Al Qaeda had already claimed its first casualty on American soil.
***
As bin Laden's popularity grew, the House of Saud became increasingly threatened by him. At first, Saudi officials warned that they would seize his property and take punitive measures against the Saudi Binladin Group. [31] Soon, relations between bin Laden and the royal family reached the point where he had to leave the country. In Apri1 1991, after the end of the Gulf War, he first traveled to Pakistan [32] and later to Sudan, a paradise for militant fundamentalists ruled by a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Sorbonne-educated Hassan al-Turabi. [33] Arriving with about $30 million from his inheritance, bin Laden launched a series of businesses to provide a cash flow for terrorist operations. There was the Islamic al-Shamal Bank, the al-Hijra construction company, a bakery, a tannery, a cattle-breeding firm, and several other companies. [34] He also built a coalition with the local jihadists.
Having defeated the Soviet Union, the Afghan Arabs saw themselves as triumphant warriors who were now immersed in one international struggle after another. The disintegration of Yugoslavia that year led to the killing of thousands of Bosnian Muslims. Ironically, one of the seminal moments in bin Laden's campaign against the United States would come in reaction against what was probably the most altruistic foreign venture by the administration of George H. W. Bush. In December 1992, U.S. troops landed in Somalia to work with the United Nations humanitarian mission to provide relief in the famine- ravaged country. No U.S. foreign venture was more devoid of ulterior motives. But as bin Laden saw it, "famine relief" was merely a pretext for an American attempt to control not just Somalia, but Sudan, Yemen, and Eritrea -- the entire Horn of Africa. [35]
In a rare interview, however, bin Laden denied that he had any plans for a global jihad. "The rubbish of the media and the embassies," he said. "I am a construction engineer and an agriculturalist. If I had training camps here in Sudan, I couldn't possibly do this job." [36] But in fact bin Laden had already decided that Al Qaeda should take on U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Somalia. [37]
One by one the attacks began. On December 29, 1992, a bomb exploded in a hotel in Aden, Yemen, where U.S. troops had been staying before going on to Somalia. The U.S. soldiers had left already, and two tourists were killed. [38]
In February 1993, in Jersey City, New Jersey, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef began assembling a host of restricted chemicals such as lead nitrate, phenol, and methylamine with magnesium, aluminum, ferric oxide, and nitric acid into a fifteen-hundred-pound bomb. [39] On February 26, Yousef, who was said to have been a houseguest of Osama bin Laden's in Pakistan, [40] and Ismail Najim, an associate who had flown up from Texas to take part in the operation, drove a rented white Ford Econoline van to the World Trade Center and parked it in the B-2 level of the underground garage. [41]
At 12:17 p.m., the device exploded. It killed six people and injured more than a thousand others, but failed to accomplish its intended mission of knocking down both of the Twin Towers. The terrorist cell behind the bombing included Kahane's assassin El Sayed Nosair [iii] and his accomplices, Mohammed Salameh and Mahmoud Abouhalima -- the two men who had briefly been detained by police but then released after the Kahane murder. [42] Also involved was the Blind Sheikh, Omar Abdel Rahman. [43] The Al-Kifah Refugee Center in Brooklyn was not just a hub for the conspirators, it was now the New York outpost of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda's operation. [44]
THE WORLD TRADE CENTER 1993: THE FBI SET IT UP AND LET IT HAPPEN
The bomb detonated in the underground parking garage at the World Trade Center on February 26, 1993 killed six people, resulted in injuries to a thousand more, and threw lower Manhattan into chaos. At the center of the terror cell was a bombmaker who had been in the Egyptian army. He was also a paid informer and provocateur for the FBl. Other participants in the terror operation had entered the country with the connivance of the CIA, despite the fact that normally they would not have been allowed in. The FBI was aware of every phase of the plot, but refused to exploit numerous opportunities to stop it. The first WTC bomb of 1993 went off with the full complicity of the FBl, which tried repeatedly to pass off the blame to the Sudanese mission to the United Nations. The Kean-Hamilton Commission has nothing to say about this.
A detailed narrative of these events has appeared under the title The Cell. It is a coverup, written by participants in the operation. This book ignores the central and most dramatic event of the entire affair, which was the publication of the tapes secretly made by FBl provocateur Emad Salem of his own conversations with his FBI controllers -- tapes which he wisely surmised he might need later as an insurance policy. Salem appears to have been passed from British intelligence to the FBI.
Even without the Salem tapes, The Cell presents a story of criminal incompetence within the FBI. The story starts with the November 1990 assassination in New York City of Rabbi Meir Kahane, an Israeli terrorist leader who had founded the Jewsih Defense League several decades earlier. The accused assassin of Kahane was El Sayyid Nosair, an Egyptian fanatic. But Nosair was not just a drifting fanatic: when the police searched his apartment, "there were training manuals from the Army Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg. There were copies of teletypes that had been routed to the Secretary of the Army and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. How had Nosair come up with those? Clearly, he had a source in a sensitive position in the US military." (Cell 45) Much more likely, his terrorist controller occupied a sensitive position in the US military, as any fool can see.
Nosair's Arabic-language files were said to contain the detailed plan of a series of future terrorist acts, including the 1993 WTC bombing. But the FBI was not interested in having these documents translated; it simply put them into storage and ignored them until it was too late. This vital evidence, according to our authors, "entered a black hole."
-- 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Griffin Tarpley
Seven months later, in October 1993, came the episode that inspired the movie Black Hawk Down. Relying on Yemenite "Afghan Arabs" who had fought with him against the Soviets, and financing the operation with businesses he owned in Yemen, bin Laden backed the ambush that killed eighteen U.S. Army Rangers who were trying to capture two aides to a Somali warlord. By early 1994, bin Laden had set up at least three Al Qaeda training camps in northern Sudan with Islamic rebel trainees from six countries. In June 1995, bin Laden tried, unsuccessfully, to assassinate Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. [45]
Now that bin Laden's jihad was under way, even his own family finally took action against him. In February 1994, Bakr bin Laden, who had succeeded Salem as head of the extended bin Laden family, sought to dissociate himself, his family, and the Saudi Binladin Group from his terrorist half brother. He sent a faxed message to the Saudi press that expressed the family's "regret, denunciation, and condemnation of all acts that Osama bin Laden may have committed, which we do not condone and which we reject." [46] Two months later, the Saudi government moved to revoke bin Laden's citizenship and freeze his Saudi assets because of his militancy. His passport was seized. In 1994, there was even a botched attempt by the Saudis to assassinate bin Laden. [47]
In many ways, the Saudis appeared to be taking aggressive action against bin Laden and the growing terrorist threat. But mere bureaucratic measures against bin Laden carried little weight against a demographic time bomb that was inexorably ticking away. In the early seventies when it was first awash in petrodollars, the Saudis had imported millions of foreign workers to do low-level jobs that most Saudis thought beneath them. By the mid-nineties, however, immigrants filled nearly 70 percent of all jobs in Saudi Arabia, [48] and unemployment in the kingdom had risen to 25 percent. [49] At the same time, the soaring birthrate meant that a growing population of Saudi youths was joining the labor market with few technical skills or employment options. To strengthen its frayed relationship to the ulema, the House of Saud funded the madrassas, schools with a strong Islamic fundamentalist ideology scattered throughout Muslim countries in the Middle East. The schools taught a new generation that Allah turned Jews and Christians into apes and pigs, that Judgment Day will not come "until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them." As a result, many Saudi graduates had training that was more appropriate for joining Al Qaeda than for entering the professional world. [50]
At the same time, per capita income in Saudi Arabia had dropped to just one-third of what it had been during the oil boom of the seventies. [51] Even that understated the problem. Since many princes had scores of wives and even more children, the House of Saud itself was growing at a fantastic rate. Now thousands of princes expected huge monthly stipends. Given the grotesque disparity between the wealth of the royal family and the unemployed masses, it was not surprising that increasingly thousands of Saudis saw bin Laden as a powerful voice articulating the anger against the House of Saud and the United States.
***
The rise of militant Islam was just one factor in shaping a new era in U.S.-Saudi relations. In 1992, Bill Clinton won the presidency from George H. W. Bush. Bandar took Bush's defeat as a personal loss. The night before the election, at two in the morning, he wrote a letter to Bush expressing his feelings. "You are my friend for life, one of my family. Tomorrow you win either way. If you win, you deserve it, and if you lose you are in good company," he wrote, referring to Winston Churchill's having lost reelection after winning the war. [52]
When the results came in, Bandar was so despondent he told King Fahd that he wanted to resign. "It was like I lost one of my family, dead," he said. [53] But he stayed on and took solace in adding onto his thirty-eight-room home in McLean, Virginia, [54] with one extravagant addition after another to the house. An ardent fan of professional football, Bandar also followed the fortunes of the Dallas Cowboys, who were having an excellent season, and whose owner, Jerry Jones, had hosted Bandar at Cowboys' games. [55] [iv]
Now that the House of Bush had been remanded to the private sector, the Saudis did not forget its members. Prince Bandar was quite candid about how the game was played. "If the reputation then builds that the Saudis take care of friends when they leave office," he said, "you'd be surprised how much better friends you have who are just coming into office." [56]
The Saudis were also taking the long view. They reasoned that sooner or later, the Republicans would be back in office and one of the promising sons of George H. W. Bush or his allies might be elevated to power. In the meantime, there was money to be made. As it happened, the Carlyle Group, a new private equity firm in Washington, D.C., was becoming a home away from home for some of the leading figures of the Reagan-Bush era. It was just the kind of place where the Saudis would be able to give them their due.
_______________
[i] Despite the testimony of several eyewitnesses who said he pulled the trigger, Nosair was acquitted of shooting Kahane in a verdict that Judge Alvin Schlesinger said was "devoid of logic and common sense." The judge sentenced Nosair to seven and one-third to twenty-two years in jail for shooting two men and trying to hijack a taxi after the murder.
[ii] In the late nineties, Miller went to Afghanistan and became one of the few American journalists to interview bin Laden. He opened his conversation with the master terrorist by telling the translator, "For a guy who comes from a family known for building roads, he could sure use a better driveway up this mountain."
[iii] Astonishingly, Nosair had been acquitted of Kahane's murder in a state trial. Only later was he convicted of the crime in a 1995 federal terrorism case.
[iv] Bandar's relationship with the Dallas Cowboys football team and their head coach was one of the most bizarre but revealing episodes in the Americanization of this sentinel of Wahhabi Islam. Having been trained as a jet fighter pilot in Texas in 1970, Bandar grew to love American football and immediately became a devoted fan of "America's Team," as the Dallas Cowboys were known. After the Cowboys won the Super Bowl in 1993, to cement his close friendship with team owner Jerry Jones, Bandar gave Jones a platinum-and-sterling-silver Dallas Cowboys football helmet in a display box, inscribed, "You said you would do it, and you did it." It was signed, "Bandar."
An independent oilman from Arkansas, Jones no doubt was aware of Bandar's role in the royal House of Saud. Certainly, he also saw that Bandar was close friends with President George H. W. Bush. To the dismay of Cowboys coach Jimmy Johnson, Jones treated Bandar accordingly. At a time when Johnson had led the Cowboys from a 1-15 record to the Super Bowl championship, Jones became so attached to Bandar that he gave the prince the rare privilege of being allowed on the team's sidelines during the game, even though he had as many as thirty bodyguards. Johnson was irate. When Bandar was allowed into the team's locker room as well after the game, that only made matters worse between Jones and his coach.
In December 1992, after the Cowboys fumbled the ball in a game against the Chicago Bears, Coach Johnson looked up to see Bandar and his entourage nearby on the sidelines. Enraged by the distraction, Johnson marched up to the owner's box and erupted at Jones for allowing the Saudi prince to intrude on his turf. A year later, a similar event happened. After beating the Washington Redskins, Johnson closed the locker room and kept both Jones and Prince Bandar waiting outside. When they finally gained entrance, Johnson left as fast as possible. A month later, the Cowboys won their second consecutive Super Bowl with Johnson as coach. But by then the relationship between Johnson and Jones was frayed so badly that Johnson was forced out and resigned -- even though he had won two consecutive championships. Jerry Jones repeatedly denied that his friendship with Bandar had been a factor, but it was widely reported as a major irritant between the two men. In any case, for the Dallas Cowboys, the Jimmy Johnson era was over.
NOTES:
1. Douglas Jehl, "Holy War Lured Saudis as Rulers Looked Away," New York Times, December 27, 2001, p. A 1.
2. Yossef Bodansky, Bin Laden, p. 29.
3. Jehl, "Holy War Lured Saudis as Rulers Looked Away," p. A 1.
4. Ibid.
5. Bodansky, Bin Laden, p. 29.
6. Anonymous, Through Our Enemies' Eyes, p. 114.
7. Bodansky, Bin Laden, p. 29; and Arnaud de Borchgrave, "Osama's Saudi Moles," Washington Times, August 1, 2003, p. A 19.
8. Bodansky, Bin Laden, p. 30.
9. Robert Mackay, "U.S. Sending Aircraft, Troops to Saudi Arabia," UPI, August 7, 1990.
10. Elsa Walsh, "The Prince: How the Saudi Ambassador Became Washington's Indispensable Operator," New Yorker, March 24, 2003, p. 48.
11. Arab supporters of the U.S. military action in the Gulf War included Syria, Egypt, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Qatar.
12. Tehran TV, November 18, 1990, Gulf/2000 archives.
13. New York Times, November 20, 1990, p. 12.
14. Judith Caesar, "Rumblings Under the Throne," Nation, December 17, 1990, p.762.
15. Anonymous, Through Our Enemies' Eyes, p. 115.
16. Ibid., p. 114.
17. Bodansky, Bin Laden, p. 250.
18. Ibid., p. 30.
19. Michael Specter and Laurie Goodstein, "Thousands of U.S. Jews Mourn Militant Kahane," Washington Post, November 7, 1990, p. 18.
20. Sam Donaldson, ABC Nightline, November 5, 1990.
21. Evan Thomas et al., "The Road to September 11," Newsweek, October 1, 2001, p. 38.
22. John Miller, Michael Stone, and Chris Mitchell, The Cell, p. 49.
23. Michael Daly, "Terror Clues in '90 Killing," Daily News (New York), May 29, 2002, p. 5; and Simon Reeve, "Blind Sheikh Behind New Terror Wave," Scotland on Sunday, November 23, 1997, p. 17.
24. Arieh O'Sullivan, "Osama bin Laden's Links to the Palestinians Widening," Jerusalem Post, September 13, 2001, p. 6; and John Miller, interviewed by Terry Gross, Fresh Air, National Public Radio, August 21, 2002.
25. Thomas et al., "The Road to September 11," p. 38.
26. Peter Bergen, Holy War, Inc., p. 67.
27. Miller, Fresh Air; and John Miller, "The Esquire Timeline," Esquire, October 2003, p. 80.
28. James C. McKinley, "Suspect in Kahane Slaying Kept List of Prominent Jews," New York Times, December 1, 1990, p. 29.
29. Daly, "Terror Clues in '90 Killing," p. 5.
30. Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror, p. 235.
31. Bodansky, Bin Laden, p. 30.
32. Anonymous, Through Our Enemies' Eyes, p. 118.
33. Benjamin and Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror, p. 109.
34. Ibid., p. 111.
35. Bodansky, Bin Laden, p. 70.
36. Robert Fisk, "Anti-Soviet Warrior Puts His Army on the Road to Peace," Independent (London), December 6, 1993, p. 10.
37. "Osama bin Laden, a Chronology of His Life," PBS Frontline, http://www.pbs.org/ wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/binladen/etc/cron.html.
38. There was another terrorist attack on American soil as a result of U.S. policy toward the Muslims, though it was never tied to bin Laden or Al Qaeda. On January 25, 1993, just five days after Bill Clinton was sworn in as president, a man with an AK-47 got out of his car near CIA headquarters in McLean, Virginia, and fired ten times at vehicles lined up to get into the agency. The gunman, a Pakistani named Mir Aimal Kansi, killed two agency employees and wounded three others. Kansi was executed in 2002 for the murders.
39. Miller, Stone, and Mitchell, The Cell, pp. 91-92.
40. Ibid., p. 123.
41. Ibid., p.94.
42. Miller, Fresh Air.
43. Miller, Stone, and Mitchell, The Cell, p. 123.
44. Colum Lynch and Vernon Loeb, "Bin Laden's Network: Terror Conspiracy or Loose Alliance?" Washington Post, August 1, 1999, p. A 1.
45. "Osama bin Laden," PBS Frontline.
46. February 19, 1994, Associated Press.
47. Charles Richards, "Times Have Changed for Terrorists Today," Ottawa Citizen, August 16, 1994, p. A 2.
48. "Unemployment Will Cause Unrest in Gulf," Reuters, February 5, 1995.
49. "Gulf Citizen, No Qualifications, Seeks Well-Paid Job," Economist, April 12, 1997, p. 41.
50. Lisa Beyer et al., "After 9/11: The Saudis: Friend or Foe," Time, September 15, 2003, p. 38; and interview with Richard Clarke.
51. Howard Schneider, "Rote Schooling in Saudi Arabia Leaves Students Ill-Suited to Work," Washington Post, June 12, 1999, p. A 13.
52. Walsh, "The Prince," p. 48.
53. Ibid.
54. Patricia Dane Rogers, "A Princely View: A Bird's-Eye Tour of the Saudi Ambassador's Residence," Washington Post, September 8, 1994, p. T 12.
55. David Whitford, "Entrepreneur of the Year," Inc., December 1993, p. 102.
56. Robert G. Kaiser and David Ottaway, "Oil for Security Fueled Close Ties; But Major Differences Led to Tensions," Washington Post, February 11, 2002, p. A 1.