Re: House of Bush, House of Saud, by Craig Unger
Posted: Wed Nov 27, 2013 4:17 am
CHAPTER SIX: Another Frankenstein
While the United States was aiding Iraq throughout the eighties, the CIA's campaign in Afghanistan was also well under way, becoming the biggest and most successful covert operation in the Agency's history. The entire program cost virtually no American casualties and a mere $3 billion for American taxpayers. Yet it dealt a devastating blow to the Soviet Union and was deemed a major factor in winning the Cold War for the United States.
The seeds of the campaign had been planted even before the Reagan-Bush administration took office, through a bold but clandestine strategy designed by the Carter administration. Better known for his innocence and naivete than for audacious foreign policy ploys, president Carter nevertheless had a few tricks up his sleeve. On July 3, 1979, on the advice of his brilliant and hawkish national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter signed the first directive to secretly aid Afghan rebels known as the mujahideen who were fighting the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. Soon, the CIA began to provide weapons and money to the mujahideen through Islamic fundamentalist warriors. This was a war by proxy. The aid was intended to bait the Soviets into committing more troops and weapons to defending their newly embattled allies. If everything went according to plan, ultimately the Soviets would become ensnared in a brutal, expensive, futile, and endless war that would lead to the disintegration of their entire empire.
On December 26, less than five months later, the USSR took the bait, and Soviet troops marched into Afghanistan to confront their emboldened foes. To Brzezinski, the architect of the plan, the Soviet invasion offered the United States an unrivaled geopolitical opportunity. As soon as the Soviets crossed the border, he wrote President Carter, "We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War." [1]
The policy was a delicious new rendering of the so-called Great Game, made famous in Rudyard Kipling's novel Kim, in which the British used indigenous Islamic forces to keep the Russians out of Afghanistan. But now the Americans were updating it for the Cold War. On the grand global chessboard, Brzezinski's strategy was a gambit worthy of Kasparov, and when the Reagan-Bush administration took office, they eagerly embraced it. Soon, aid to the Afghan rebels was a centerpiece of what the administration called the Reagan Doctrine. The intention of the policy was to make Soviet support for third world governments too costly to be sustainable.
A student of the American Revolutionary War, CIA director William Casey said the key to the American victory in 1776 was that they used "irregular partisan guerrilla warfare." [2] That was the methodology of the Afghan mujahideen, and Casey liked it that way. Early on, he was buoyed by reports that covert aid to the mujahideen was paying off. According to a declassified CIA intelligence assessment in late 1982, the Agency believed that the rugged terrain of Afghanistan and the resourcefulness of the mujahideen would prevent the Soviets from winning. The report concluded that even an extra fifty thousand Soviet troops would be unlikely to break the logjam. [3]
By this time, Prince Bandar had become King Fahd's trusted point man in Washington. When William Casey approached Bandar about Saudi Arabia's funding an escalation of anti-Soviet forces, the two men flew to Jeddah with Bandar serving as Casey's translator for the meeting with Fahd. [4] Casey met a receptive audience. This campaign was uniquely appealing to the Saudis. Not only would it enable them to cement their ties to the United States, it would also help the royal family deal with domestic unrest. And so, the House of Saud eagerly joined in, matching "America dollar for dollar supporting the mujahideen," as Prince Turki, longtime head of Saudi intelligence, puts it. [5]
In the U.S. Congress, the Afghan rebels were championed by Democratic congressman Charlie Wilson, the colorful six-foot- seven inch, skirt-chasing, cocaine-snorting Texan whose role in America's biggest covert operation was celebrated in George Crile's book Charlie Wilson's War. At dinner parties in Houston and in Washington, Wilson would bring together the likes of Henry Kissinger, White House chief of staff James Baker, and Prince Bandar along with a glittering assortment of senators, astronauts, diplomats, Texas oil barons, and military men in celebration of the mujahideen.
"Allah will not be pleased if the king abandons his freedom fighters," Wilson teased Bandar. [6] To which Bandar replied, "Allah will soon be smiling, Charlie. You will see." For his part, Wilson played an important role in seeing to it that Congress provided the $3 billion in covert aid for the mujahideen. [7]
The Saudis were a key part of the equation. Thousands of young warriors calling themselves Afghan Arabs streamed out of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Yemen, and all over the Middle East to aid the mujahideen. Neither the United States nor the Saudis seemed to mind that the crusading young Muslims could not have cared less about helping America win the Cold War. They were motivated by religious fervor and passion. This was a people's war, a noble crusade against an infidel superpower that had invaded Muslim lands, a fight to avenge the martyrdom of their Afghan brothers being crushed by Moscow. It was a time to demonstrate faith and courage. For many Muslims, the liberation of Afghanistan became a very personal jihad.
In sharp contrast to the Mecca Affair, the Afghanistan War was a mission that could be embraced by the gamut of Saudi society, from the wealthy merchant families and the House of Saud to the militant clerics and the fundamentalist masses. For the royal family, the war was not just part of the cornerstone of the burgeoning Saudi alliance with the United States, but served other purposes as well. Contributing to the war effort placated the militant clerics and helped accommodate the growing unrest and the more radical elements of society. In the wake of the Iranian revolution, there was a new determination on the part of Saudi Muslims to outdo their Iranian counterparts, to create a "new Islamic man." [8]
Instead of focusing their anger at the House of Saud or the United States, the militants could now zero in on the atheistic Soviets. A missionary zeal spread through every layer of society. "There was a sense that every penny you sent in made a difference," says Armond Habiby, an American lawyer who has practiced in Saudi Arabia for many years. "It was a very noble movement. The poor gave away prayer rugs, embroidered tablecloths. It established a monumental footprint that went across all levels of society." [9]
As the war got under way, with the United States, the Saudis, and the Pakistanis secretly supporting the Afghan rebels, the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) hoped that Prince Turki bin Faisal, then head of Saudi intelligence and a member of the House of Saud, would bring an actual member of the royal family to the front to demonstrate the commitment of the House of Saud to the jihad. [10] But no Saudi prince wanted to or needed to brave the Afghan mountains. Osama bin Laden, a protege of Prince Turki's, was the next best thing.
At twenty-two, Osama bin Laden could easily have become a wealthy Saudi businessman, like his father, Mohammed, or his older brother Salem. Thanks to his family's vast fortune and close ties to the royal family, he was perfectly positioned to join the Saudi elite. Instead, incensed by the Soviet invasion, he went straight to Afghanistan. [11] "I was enraged and I went there at once," he said. [12] He arrived before the end of 1979, just a few days after Soviet troops had crossed the border.
For bin Laden, the war was not only a historic turning point during which he would emerge as a leader, it was also a momentous time in Muslim history. He and his fellow Afghan Arabs were stirred by the plight of Muslims from a medieval society besieged by a twentieth-century superpower. [13] "One day in Afghanistan," Osama said, "counted for more than a thousand days praying in a mosque." [14]
Bin Laden's action carried extraordinary weight in large part because of his family's unique place in Saudi society. [i] Their ties to the royal family were so crucial that both sides made certain the relationships transcended generations. Many of the twenty-five bin Laden boys attended school with the sons of King Abdul Aziz and his successor, Faisal, at Victoria College in Alexandria, where they had classmates such as King Hussein of Jordan, the Khashoggi brothers (of whom Adnan [ii] was the preeminent Saudi arms dealer of the Iran-contra era), and Kamal Adham, the billionaire who ran Saudi intelligence before Prince Turki. [15] The boys earned reputations as discreet chaperones for the young royals.
In 1968, when Mohammed bin Laden was killed in a plane crash, King Faisal said his "right arm" had been broken [16] and rushed to the support of the bin Ladens, who, at the time, did not have anyone old enough to take the helm of the family business. Faisal appointed the highly regarded head of his own construction company to make sure the Saudi Binladin Group was in good hands until Salem, Osama's older half brother, was old enough to take over. [17] Later, when King Fahd took the throne in 1982, Salem became one of his two best friends. [18]
***
Closely tied as they were to both the royal family and the United States, at this point the bin Ladens had only indirect connections to the Bush family and its allies. James Bath, the American business representative of Salem bin Laden, knew both George W. Bush and George H. W. Bush. Khalid bin Mahfouz, who was close to both the bin Ladens and the royal family, had helped finance the Houston skyscraper for the Texas Commerce Bank, in which James Baker had a significant stake. He also had ties to Bath.
But these Bush-bin Laden "relationships" were indirect -- two degrees of separation, perhaps -- and at times have been overstated. Critics have asserted that money may have gone from Khalid bin Mahfouz and Salem bin Laden through James Bath into Arbusto Energy, the oil company started by George W. Bush, but no hard evidence has ever been found to back up that charge. [iii]
More to the point, now, in the Afghanistan War, Vice President Bush's interests and Osama bin Laden's converged. In using bin Laden's Arab Afghans as proxy warriors against the Soviets, Bush advocated a policy that was fully in line with American interests at that time. But he did not consider the long-term implications of supporting a network of Islamic fundamentalist rebels.
Specifically, as vice president in the mid-eighties, Bush supported aiding the mujahideen in Afghanistan through the Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK) or Services Offices, which sent money and fighters to the Afghan resistance in Peshawar. "Bush was in charge of the covert operations that supported the MAK," says John Loftus, a Justice Department official in the eighties. "They were essentially hiring a terrorist to fight terrorism." [19]
Cofounded by Osama bin Laden and Abdullah Azzam, the MAK was the precursor to bin Laden's global terrorist network, Al Qaeda. It sent money and fighters to the Afghan resistance in Peshawar, Pakistan, and set up recruitment centers in over fifty countries including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and even the United States to bring thousands of warriors to Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union. [20]The MAK was later linked to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York through an office in Brooklyn known as the Al-Kifah Refugee Center. It is not clear how much contact he had with bin Laden, but Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the "Blind Sheikh," who masterminded the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, also appeared in Peshawar on occasion. [21]
Throughout the eighties in Saudi Arabia, Prince Turki oversaw bin Laden's efforts aiding the mujahideen. Prince Bandar also met bin Laden, but many years later said he was not impressed. "At that time, I thought he couldn't lead eight ducks across the street," he said. [22]
And yet Osama now played a vital role for the House of Saud. Not merely a trophy to show how committed the royal family was to this noble cause, he helped the House of Saud celebrate the American commitment to the mujahideen's efforts. "Bin Laden used to come to us when America ... [was] helping our brother mujahideen in Afghanistan to get rid of the communist, secularist Soviet Union forces," recalled Prince Bandar. " ... Osama bin Laden came and said, 'Thank you. Thank you for bringing the Americans to help us to get rid of the secularist, atheist Soviets.'" [23]
Between 1980 and 1982, bin Laden went back and forth repeatedly between Saudi Arabia and the front, bringing donations from the Saudis. In Jeddah, his family enthusiastically endorsed his commitment to the cause. [24] Working closely with Turki [25] and with Prince Salman, the governor of Riyadh, [26] bin Laden played a key role in financing, recruiting, and training Arabian volunteers.
Finally, in 1982, Osama settled in Peshawar, the command headquarters of the jihad near the Khyber Pass, known as the Dodge City of the Afghan rebels, bringing with him engineers and heavy construction equipment from the Saudi Binladin Company to build roads and depots for the mujahideen. "In those years, there was no Al Qaeda," says Prince Turki. "Bin Laden gave money, equipment, and construction material from his family's company." [27]
Abdullah Azzam, the professor-cleric-mujahid who had taught at the university in Jeddah when Osama was there, had by this time become a spiritual leader of the mujahideen. "Azzam was the man who developed the idea of jihad in a complete way," said Mukahil ul Islam Zia, a professor at the Islamic Center at Peshawar University. "Azzam enshrines the need for armed struggle as part of daily life. ["28] Azzam helped many Arabs just off the plane take part in the jihad by starting the Jihad Training University. With Azzam as his mentor, bin Laden began recruiting warriors for the jihad. "Osama would have been nothing without Azzam," said one expert on the Taliban. "Before he came to Peshawar, Osama was a kind of playboy, a dilettante, not serious, not what we see today."
Some Western publications have characterized bin Laden as merely having used his family fortune to bankroll the mujahideen. Given his wealth, it was tempting for critics to dismiss him as a "Gucci terrorist." But according to a Pakistani who fought with him, he "was a hero to us because he was always on the front line, always moved ahead of everyone else. He not only gave of his money, he gave of himself." [29]
***
All of which served U.S. interests at the time in a way the CIA had only dreamed of. In 1985, a CIA assessment estimated that there had already been ninety-two thousand combined Soviet and Afghan casualties -- more than twice that of the rebels -- and that the Soviets were "no closer than they were in 1979 to achieving their goals." The report concluded that the Soviets were "unlikely" to quell the rebels' insurgency. [30]
To CIA chief William Casey, the success was inspiring. A longtime Cold Warrior who believed not in containment of the communists but what in the late forties and early fifties had been called rollback, Casey saw that he could push all the way across the Soviet border by escalating the war. Casey had told John N. McMahon, the CIA's deputy director of operations, how he felt about Afghanistan. "This is the kind of thing we should be doing -- only more. I want to see one place on this globe, one spot where we can checkmate them and roll them back. We've got to make the communists feel the heat. Otherwise, we'll never get them to the negotiating table." [31]
And so, the United States escalated. By 1987, well into the second term of the Reagan-Bush administration, the United States began to provide the rebels with nearly $700 million in military assistance a year. In addition, the CIA began supplying the mujahideen with intelligence, training, and equipment that allowed them to make scattered strikes against factories, military installations, and storage depots that were actually inside the Soviet Union. They gave the Islamic rebels satellite reconnaissance data, intercepted Soviet intelligence, and provided sniper rifles, timing devices for tons of C-4 explosives for urban sabotage, antitank missiles, and other sophisticated equipment. [32]
Most coveted of all were the Stinger missiles, portable, shoulder-fired antiaircraft guided missiles with infrared seekers for downing low-flying helicopters and planes, [33] missiles so sophisticated that, as one CIA officer put it, "a nearsighted, illiterate Afghan could bring down a few million dollars' worth of Soviet aircraft." [34] With a hit rate of 89 percent, the Stingers downed an average of one plane every day. Soon, the Afghan air force was depleted, and for the Soviets, the cost of the war soared. [35]
Meanwhile, bin Laden built a major arms storage depot, training facility, and medical center for the mujahideen at Khost in eastern Afghanistan. Peshawar became the center of a burgeoning pan Islamic movement. More than twenty-five thousand Islamic militants, from the Palestinians' Hamas, from Egypt's Al Gama'a al-Islamiya and Al Jihad, from Algeria's Islamic Salvation Front, from the Philippines' Moro Liberation Front, from countries all over the world, made the pilgrimage through Peshawar to the jihad. [36]
"You can sit at the Khyber Pass and see every color, every creed, every nationality, pass," a Western diplomat said. "These groups, in their wildest imagination, never would have met if there had been no jihad. For a Moro [iv] to get a Stinger missile! To make contacts with Islamists from North Africa! The United States created a Moscow Central in Peshawar for these groups, and the consequences for all of us are astronomical." [37]
A new network of charities grew into a formidable infrastructure to support the growing pan-Islamic movement. Money flowed into the Services Offices in Peshawar. A new leadership emerged that included Sheikh Azzam and his best friend, the rotund, blind Sheikh Omar from Egypt. CIA forces in Peshawar saw him as a valuable asset, letting pass his militant anti Western sentiments because he was such a powerful force in uniting the mujahideen. [38]
Bin Laden became a leader himself. His identity was truly forged in this period. "If you really want to understand Osama, you have to understand Afghanistan in the 1980s," said his younger brother Abdullah bin Laden, who last saw Osama at the funeral of their brother Salem in 1988. "His views do not come from his childhood or upbringing, but from prolonged exposure to war against a non Islamic force.
"Look to that period of history for your answers. In the West, people do not understand the incensing brutality of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. It had a severe effect on him. It seemed to change him completely. I believe it fomented his radical feelings and it scarred him. At least, this is how I try to understand my brother and come to terms with what he has done." [39]
Arab journalists who covered him then spoke of him in dark, romantic terms. "He is a man that seeks the afterlife and who truly feels that he has lived more than enough," said Abd-al-Bari Atwan, editor of Al-Quds al-Arabi. "You feel there is a sadness in him -- which he did not express -- that he was not martyred when he was fighting the Soviet army. ... You feel like he's saying: Why am I alive?" [40]
Years later, bin Laden rhapsodized about those days as a great romantic spiritual adventure. "Those were the prettiest days of our lives," he said. "What I lived in two years there, I could not have lived in a hundred years elsewhere." [41]
Bin Laden was not the only one who could savor the bittersweet qualities of the war against the Soviets. In May 1984, Vice President George H. W. Bush visited the region and peeked across the border into Afghanistan from the Khyber Pass in Pakistan. Armed with a $14-million check for humanitarian relief, Bush told the refugees, "Across the border, a brutal war is being waged against the people of Afghanistan. I know your resistance will continue until the Soviets realize they cannot be able to subjugate Afghanistan." [42]
We do not know exactly where bin Laden was at that moment, but during this period he was nearby in Afghanistan and had begun working with Azzam to build up the Services Offices. [43] Chances are, this is the closest that Osama bin Laden and George H. W. Bush ever got physically. They were in the same region at roughly the same time. And most important, they were fighting for the same cause.
***
By February 1987, a CIA assessment reported that the war was crippling the Soviet Union. "General Secretary Gorbachev has referred to the war as a 'bleeding wound,'" the report read. It had led to censure of the Soviets within the UN, impinged on Soviet relations with China and nonaligned third world nations, caused domestic social unrest, and diverted energies from pressing economic problems. [44] What the report did not say, but the Soviets felt, was that tens of thousands of Soviet youths were dying on killing fields in a foreign land, fighting for a cause they didn't believe in, detested by the local populace they allegedly fought for, bleeding the crippled economy of their own country dry.
For the Americans, the Afghanistan policy was so successful that as the 1988 presidential election neared, Bush saw it as proof of his bona fides as a Cold Warrior during his campaign against Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis. On October 18, 1988, Bush stopped at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, the site of Winston Churchill's 1946 historic speech warning that an "Iron Curtain" of communism was descending across the European continent. Bush seized the propitious occasion to comment on what Reagan had famously labeled "the evil empire."
It was Bush's most dramatic speech of the campaign, perhaps of his entire life, and it commemorated what was unquestionably the greatest accomplishment of the Reagan Bush era, the end of the Cold War. "The Iron Curtain still stretches from Stettin to Trieste," Bush said. "But it's a rusting curtain. Shafts of light from the Western side, from our side, the free and prosperous side, are piercing the gloom of failure and despair on the other side.
"The truth is being sought as never before," he added. "And the peoples of Eastern Europe, the peoples of the Soviet Union itself, are demanding more freedom, demanding their place in the sun."
Seventy years after the Russian Revolution, Bush said, Marxism is finally "losing its luster." At last, in the age of Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost (openness) and perestroika (transformation), the Cold War was thawing and there was a sense of a new flexibility. One key reason for such historic changes, Bush said, was that "the price of aggression was too high, because we supported the mujahideen in Afghanistan." [45]
***
By the time George Bush moved into the White House in early 1989, having easily beaten Dukakis, the Soviet troops were already withdrawing from Afghanistan. At CIA headquarters, William Webster -- who had succeeded Bill Casey as director -- and his euphoric "Afghan Team" toasted the success of the multibillion-dollar covert operation to support the Muslim Afghan rebels. The Cold War was over. The Afghan campaign had been the coup de grace. [46]
As the Soviets withdrew, however, the many unintended consequences of the war became increasingly apparent. The arms pipeline set up by the CIA had unwittingly become a drug pipeline as well. As first reported by the Herald, an English-language magazine in Pakistan, the main conduit through which weapons reached the Afghan rebels was now one of the principal routes for the transport of heroin to Karachi for shipment to Europe and the United States.
"It is really very simple," the Herald reported in January 1987. "If you control the poppy fields, Karachi, and the road which links the two, you will be so rich that you will control Pakistan." The article added that the drugs came down by truck from Peshawar with "sacks [containing] packets of heroin. ... This has been going on now for about three and a half years." [47] [v]
An even bigger issue, however, was that the United States was still pouring billions of dollars in funding and sophisticated weaponry to build a vast pan-Islamist army. "During the war, if there was any thought of postwar complications from this stuff, it wasn't much expressed," says Frank Anderson, chief of the CIA's Afghan Task Force from 1987 to 1989. "Everyone was busy getting the Soviets kicked out of Afghanistan. The Muslim world was excited by this stuff, and at the time we knew nothing of these activities being related to terrorism." [48] "We set up the very system [of Islamist terrorism] we are now trying to dismantle," says a senior investigator who participated in the Senate probe into BCCI. "People forget that we invented this shit, that Bill Casey was getting the Saudi fundamentalists to assemble all these kooks and go out and kill the Russians. No one asked what would happen when it was over." [49]
Throughout the eighties most of the American media, with a few rare exceptions, such as Edward Girardet of the Christian Science Monitor, simply ignored the war in Afghanistan. And yet, as Steve Galster, project director of the National Security Archive's Afghanistan archives, has observed, "This was the longest war in Soviet history, the largest CIA paramilitary operation since Vietnam, and with one million dead Afghans, the bloodiest regional conflict in the world at the time." [50]
Even America's most heralded investigative reporters missed the story. In Veil, his 1987 account of the CIA's secret wars of that era, Bob Woodward devotes several pages to the Afghanistan operation, but he does not mention the mujahideen, Wahhabism, BCCI, or in any way suggest that billions of American dollars were going to arm and finance a global network of militant Islamic fundamentalists.
On rare occasions, starting as early as 1983, these concerns did make their way up the policy ladder in Washington. That year, the CIA suspected the mujahideen had gotten so many weapons that they were selling the extras to third parties, so they sent CIA deputy director of operations John McMahon out to investigate. When he got to Peshawar, McMahon brought together eight different mujahideen from eight different tribes who ran the supply operation and confronted them.
"Finally, I brought up our main concern," said McMahon. "We'd given them enough land mines to mine the whole goddamn country. So I just laid it out. I said, 'We have a feeling that all the weapons we're giving you aren't showing up on the battlefield. What's going on? Are you cashing them in?'"
A tribal chief named Khalis gave McMahon an unexpectedly candid response: "Yes, we are. We do sell some of your weapons. We are doing it for the day when your country decides to abandon us, just as you abandoned Vietnam and everyone else you deal with." [51]
For all that, Washington actually responded by sending more and more sophisticated weapons. By 1986, the Reagan administration was supplying hundreds of the sought-after Stinger missiles to the mujahideen. The two premises behind the decision were, one, that the transactions would remain secret and, two, that the Islamic rebels would not use them for terrorist activities. Soon enough, however, Reagan's decision was widely reported in the news, and one Republican aide on Capitol Hill pointed out the risks of arming the mujahideen.
"Some of these guys are a lot closer politically, religiously, and philosophically to [Iran's Ayatollah Ruholla] Khomeini than they are to us," the aide said. "There is concern that one of these guys could show up in Rome aiming a Stinger at a jumbo jet." [52]
Nor was that the only sign that the groundwork was being laid for a national security catastrophe. "In Saudi Arabia I was repeatedly ordered by high-level State Department officials to issue visas to unqualified applicants," Michael Springman, the head of the American visa bureau in Jeddah from 1987 to 1989, told the BBC. "People who had no ties either to Saudi Arabia or to their own country. I complained there. I complained here in Washington to Main State, to the inspector general, and to Diplomatic Security, and I was ignored.
"What I was doing was giving visas to terrorists -- recruited by the CIA and Osama bin Laden to come back to the United States for training to be used in the war in Afghanistan against the then Soviets." [53]
This was blowback. "Afghanistan provided a place where these guys could hang out in a subculture for people who wanted to be warriors," says the CIA's Frank Anderson. "It built up the craft of giving money to people like this that undoubtedly continued past when it should have." [54]
By the late eighties, the CIA finally approached the Saudis about whether the Muslims' enthusiasm for the battle was getting out of control. "The Saudis said, 'We can't modulate this,'" recalls Anderson. "They said, 'We can either turn [the flow of money] on-or off."'
By February 1989, the last Soviet soldier had left Afghanistan, but the pro-Soviet government continued to hold power in Kabul. On February 12, President Bush approved continuing U.S. military aid to the rebels resisting the Soviet-imposed government in Afghanistan. [55] With the prospect that the puppet government would soon fall, the United States was exuberant. At last, America had learned how to achieve its foreign policy goals without incurring massive casualties or costs. It was an extraordinary bipartisan achievement. Even a decade later one of the principal architects of the policy, Zbigniew Brzezinski, evinced few regrets. "What is most important to the history of the world?" he asked the French weekly the Nouvel Observateur. "The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?" [56]
Brzezinski and the Reagan-Bush administration were right about the extraordinary value of supporting the mujahideen. But they had resolved the past by endangering the future. They vastly underestimated the price America would pay in the long run. Thanks to the United States, Osama bin Laden had learned an important lesson: mujahideen warriors fighting for Islam could bring a superpower to its knees.
Not long after he took office in 1989, President Bush was warned about exactly this possibility by someone in a position to know. Displeased that the president continued to support extremist radical Muslims, Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto let him know about the dangers. Arming the mujahideen might initially have been the right thing, she told Bush. But, she explained, "The extremists so emboldened by the United States during the eighties are now exporting their terrorism to other parts of the world to the extent that they use heroin trafficking to pay for their exploits."
It had gone too far, she said. By aligning the United States with the most extremist mujahideen groups, she told him, "You are creating a veritable Frankenstein." [57]
***
By this time, Bhutto's "Frankenstein" had set up a vast infrastructure capable of financing a global operation for years to follow. It was becoming known as Al Qaeda -- the Base. Osama bin Laden was now seen as a heroic figure in the Afghanistan War. Money poured into his operations from the mosques, the House of Saud itself, Saudi intelligence, the Saudi Red Crescent, the World Muslim League, various princes, and the kingdom's merchant elite. [58]
Perhaps the greatest insight into the origins of Al Qaeda came after a March 19, 2003, raid by Bosnian authorities on the Sarajevo offices of the Benevolence International Foundation, a multimillion-dollar Islamic charity, yielded a computer with a file marked "Tareekh Osama," Arabic for "Osama's History." [59] The contents included the key founding documents of Al Qaeda -- including photographs and scanned letters, some in Osama bin Laden's own handwriting. One 1988 document tells how Al Qaeda evolved from the Afghan resistance and how "we took very huge gains from the country's people in Saudi Arabia ... gathering donations in very large amounts." [60]
One document asserted, "The only solution is the continuation of the armed jihad." [61] Notes discussed training with Kalashnikov rifles and showed how the group began to take the battle that had begun in Afghanistan on to Chechnya, Bosnia, Sudan, and Eritrea. An extraordinary network of global terrorism was taking shape.
Probably the most noteworthy item discovered had a verse from the Koran "And spend for God's cause" -- followed by a list of twenty wealthy Saudi donors known as the Golden Chain. After each name, the translator had written a second name in parentheses, which, according to U.S. News and World Report, suggested who was the recipient of money from that particular donor. [62] One of the names, Usama -- Osama bin Laden -- appeared seven times.
The donors of the Golden Chain were not just wealthy Saudis -- they were the creme de la creme of the great Saudi industrial and merchant elite. Among them, they owned sixteen of the hundred biggest Saudi companies, [63] which had more than $85 billion in assets in 2003. [64] There were three billionaire bankers, a former government minister, and leading Saudi merchants and industrialists, including, not surprisingly, the bin Laden brothers who ran the Saudi Binladin Group. Banking moguls Khalid bin Mahfouz and Saleh Kamel were on the list, as were the Al-Rajhi banking family. [65] Bin Mahfouz, who contributed $250,000, was one of the seven donors on the list who had Osama bin Laden's name next to his. [66]
By this time, bin Mahfouz had taken over the National Commercial Bank from his father and effectively become the banker for the House of Saud, and the most powerful banker in Saudi Arabia. As a result, over the next decade, his name was on many, many wire transfers to Muslim charities that sent funds to Al Qaeda. "He was the banker for the royal family," says Robert Baer, a former CIA case officer in the Middle East, and the author of Sleeping with the Devil. "If someone in the royal family ordered money to be transferred, he would have no choice. That's the way the relationship works." [67]
In addition, by then bin Mahfouz had also become the biggest investor in BCCI. [68] Not only did BCCI finance arms deals in both the Afghanistan War and the Iran-Iraq War, it also continued to pursue U.S. political contacts, just as it had lured Bert Lance and Clark Clifford a decade earlier. In 1987, one company in particular that interested BCCI investors was a troubled Texas oil company called Harken Energy. Loaded with debt, having drilled dry hole after dry hole, beset by accounting irregularities, barely subsisting during a period in which the price of oil was plummeting, Harken seemed like a particularly unlikely investment for the Saudis -- especially in light of Saudi Arabia's vast oil riches. Nevertheless, Harken had one asset that BCCI truly knew how to appreciate: one of its investors and directors was a forty-one-year-old businessman named George W. Bush.
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[i] Mohammed bin Laden was so close to the royal family that in the sixties, he played a vital role in persuading King Saud to abdicate in favor of his brother Faisal.
[ii] Adnan Khashoggi was also the uncle of Dodi Fayed, who died in a Paris automobile crash with Princess Diana in 1997.
[iii] Bath had fronted for Saudi billionaires Salem bin Laden and Khalid bin Mahfouz on other deals, but in this case he says, "One hundred percent of those funds were mine. It was a purely personal investment." Bin Laden and bin Mahfouz, he insists, had nothing to do with either the elder George Bush or his son. "They never met Bush," Bath says. "Ever. And there was no reason to. At that point Bush was a young guy just out of Yale, a struggling young entrepreneur trying to get a drilling fund."
[iv] The reference is to the Islamic separatist movement in the Philippines.
[v] At the time he visited the war-ravaged region in May 1984, Vice President Bush was also serving as the head of the National Narcotics Border Interdiction System, a national network designed to stop the flow of drugs into the United States. A vigorous critic of drug use, Bush later vowed to tell drug dealers, "Your day is over. You're history."
The CIA later insisted it had no knowledge of the heroin running. But according to the Financial Times, the CIA not only had knowledge, it actually started a special cell that "promoted the cultivation of opium and the extraction of heroin in Pakistani territory as well as in the Afghan territory under Mujahadeen control for being smuggled into the Soviet-controlled areas in order to make the Soviet troops heroin addicts."
NOTES:
1. Zbigniew Brzezinski, "For the Record: American Tragedy," New African, November 1, 2001, p. 6. Originally published by Le Nouvel Observateur in January 1998.
2. Bob Woodward, Veil, pp. 136-37.
3. Gordon Negus, "Afghan Resistance," November 5, 1982, National Security Archives, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB57/us3.pdf.
4. George Crile, Charlie Wilson's War, p. 238.
5. Interview with Prince Turki.
6. Crile, Charlie Wilson's War, pp. 239-40.
7. Steve Galster, "Afghanistan: The Making of US Policy, 1973-1990," October 9, 2001, National Security Archives, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB57/essay.html .
8. Edward Girardet: "Arab Extremists Exploit Afghan Jihad," Christian Science Monitor, February 23, 1989, p. 1.
9. Interview with Armond Habiby.
10. Ahmed Rashid, Taliban, p. 131.
11. Roland Jacquard, In the Name of Osama bin Laden, p. 21.
12. "Usama bin Laden: Islamic Extremist Financier," CIA memo, National Security Archives, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB55/ciaubl.pdf .
13. Yossef Bodansky, Bin Laden, p. 10.
14. Jacquard, In the Name of Osama bin Laden, p. 11.
15. "Hunting bin Laden," PBS Frontline, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline ... amily.html .
16. Anonymous, Through Our Enemies' Eyes, p. 80.
17. Michael Field, The Merchants, p. 106.
18. Anonymous, Through Our Enemies' Eyes, p. 80.
19. Interview with John Loftus.
20. Federation of American Scientists, 216.239.39.100/search?q=cache:sXXKfWXrGUJ:www.library.cornell.edu/colldev/mideast/qaida.htm+MAK+and+Afghanistan&hl=en&ie=UTF-8.
21. Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror, p.103.
22. Interview with Prince Bandar, "Looking for Answers," PBS Frontline, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows terrorism/interviews/bandar.html .
23. Ibid.
24. Rashid, Taliban, p. 132.
25. Jane Mayer, "The House of Bin Laden," New Yorker, November 12, 2001, http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?011112fa_FACT3.
26. Mary Anne Weaver, "Blowback," Atlantic Monthly, May 1996, http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/96may/blowback.htm .
27. Interview with Prince Turki.
28. Robert Marquand, with Jane Lampman, Scott Peterson, Ilene R. Prusher, and Warren Richey, as well as Sarah Gauch and Dan Murphy, "The Tenets of Terror, Part II," Christian Science Monitor, October 18, 2001.
29. Anonymous, Through Our Enemies' Eyes, p. 90.
30. "The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan: Five Years After," a CIA Intelligence assessment produced jointly by the Office of Near Eastern and South Asian Analysis and the Office of Soviet Analysis, released as sanitized, 1999 CIA Historical review program, National Security Archives, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB57/us5.pdf .
31. Joseph Persico, Casey, p. 225.
32. Steve Coll, "Anatomy of a Victory: CIA's Covert Afghan War," Washington Post, July 19, 1992.
33. Federation of American Scientists, Military Analysis Network, "FIM-92A Stinger Weapons System: RMP & Basic," http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/land/stinger.htm .
34. Persico, Casey, p. 312.
35. Marin Strmecki, "Among the Afghans," Washington Quarterly, vol. 11, no. 3 (summer 1988), p. 227.
36. Weaver, "Blowback."
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid.
39. Charlotte Edwardes, "My Brother Osama," Sunday Telegraph (London), December 16, 2001.
40. Anonymous, Through Our Enemies' Eyes, p. 91.
41. Ibid.
42. William Claiborne, "Bush at the Khyber Pass," Washington Post, May 18,
1984, p. A23.
43. Anonymous, Through Our Enemies' Eyes, p. 99.
44. "The Costs of Soviet Involvement in Afghanistan," Directorate of Intelligence, prepared by the Office of Soviet Analysis, February 1987, National Security Archives, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB57/us8.pdf .
45. Gerald Boyd, "Bush Asserts 'Iron Curtain' Remains, but It's Rusting," New York Times, October 19, 1988, p. B6.
46. Galster, "Afghanistan: The Making of US Policy."
47. Lawrence Lifschultz, "Bush, Drugs, and Pakistan: Inside the Kingdom of Heroin," Nation, November 14, 1988, p. 477; and B. Raman, "Heroin, Taliban and Pakistan," Financial Times Asia Africa Intelligence Wire, August 10, 2001.
48. Interview with Frank Anderson.
49. Interview with former Senate investigator.
50. Galster, "Afghanistan: The Making of U.S. Policy."
51. Persico, Casey, p. 313.
52. Patrick Tyler, "Possible Diversion of Stinger Missile to Terrorists Causes Concern," Washington Post, April 8, 1986, p. A12.
53. Michael Springman, interview on British Broadcasting Corporation as reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, November 7, 2001, http://www.smh.com.au/news/0111/07/world/world100.html .
54. Interview with Frank Anderson.
55. "Bush OKs Military Aid for Rebels," Associated Press, February 12, 1989.
56. "Zbigniew Brzezinski: How Jimmy Carter and I Started the Mujahideen," interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Nouvel Observateur Jan. 15-21, 1998, p. 76; translated from the French by Bill Blum.
57. Meet the Press, NBC News Transcripts, October 14, 2001.
58. Weaver, "Blowback"; and Rashid, Taliban, p. 132.
59. David E. Kaplan, with Aamir Latif, Ilana Ozernoy, Laurie Lande, and Monica M. Ekman, "Playing Offense," U.S. News and World Report, June 2, 2003, p. 18.
60. Tony Barthelme, "King of Torts," Post and Courier (Charleston, S.C.), June 22, 2003.
61. Tony Barthleme, "Seized Bosnian Documents Link Saudis to Terror Funding, Lawyers Say," Post and Courier (Charleston, S.C.), March 19, 2003, p. 17.
62. Kaplan et al., "Playing Offense," p. 18.
63. Golden Chain List Analysis, http://www.investi.virtualave.net/Golde ... alyses.htm .
64. Barthleme, "Seized Bosnian Documents Link Saudis to Terror Funding, Lawyers Say," p. 17.
65. Glen Simpson, "List of Early al Qaeda Donors Points to Saudi Elite, Charities," Wall Street Journal, March 18, 2003.
66. Glenn Simpson, Wall Street Journal, online corrections and amplifications, updated March 18, 2003, 10:48 p.m., http://www.online.wsj.com/article/O,,SB ... 00.html#CX .
67. Interview with Robert Baer.
68. Interview with Cherif Sedky, attorney for Khalid bin Mahfouz.
While the United States was aiding Iraq throughout the eighties, the CIA's campaign in Afghanistan was also well under way, becoming the biggest and most successful covert operation in the Agency's history. The entire program cost virtually no American casualties and a mere $3 billion for American taxpayers. Yet it dealt a devastating blow to the Soviet Union and was deemed a major factor in winning the Cold War for the United States.
The seeds of the campaign had been planted even before the Reagan-Bush administration took office, through a bold but clandestine strategy designed by the Carter administration. Better known for his innocence and naivete than for audacious foreign policy ploys, president Carter nevertheless had a few tricks up his sleeve. On July 3, 1979, on the advice of his brilliant and hawkish national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter signed the first directive to secretly aid Afghan rebels known as the mujahideen who were fighting the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. Soon, the CIA began to provide weapons and money to the mujahideen through Islamic fundamentalist warriors. This was a war by proxy. The aid was intended to bait the Soviets into committing more troops and weapons to defending their newly embattled allies. If everything went according to plan, ultimately the Soviets would become ensnared in a brutal, expensive, futile, and endless war that would lead to the disintegration of their entire empire.
On December 26, less than five months later, the USSR took the bait, and Soviet troops marched into Afghanistan to confront their emboldened foes. To Brzezinski, the architect of the plan, the Soviet invasion offered the United States an unrivaled geopolitical opportunity. As soon as the Soviets crossed the border, he wrote President Carter, "We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War." [1]
The policy was a delicious new rendering of the so-called Great Game, made famous in Rudyard Kipling's novel Kim, in which the British used indigenous Islamic forces to keep the Russians out of Afghanistan. But now the Americans were updating it for the Cold War. On the grand global chessboard, Brzezinski's strategy was a gambit worthy of Kasparov, and when the Reagan-Bush administration took office, they eagerly embraced it. Soon, aid to the Afghan rebels was a centerpiece of what the administration called the Reagan Doctrine. The intention of the policy was to make Soviet support for third world governments too costly to be sustainable.
A student of the American Revolutionary War, CIA director William Casey said the key to the American victory in 1776 was that they used "irregular partisan guerrilla warfare." [2] That was the methodology of the Afghan mujahideen, and Casey liked it that way. Early on, he was buoyed by reports that covert aid to the mujahideen was paying off. According to a declassified CIA intelligence assessment in late 1982, the Agency believed that the rugged terrain of Afghanistan and the resourcefulness of the mujahideen would prevent the Soviets from winning. The report concluded that even an extra fifty thousand Soviet troops would be unlikely to break the logjam. [3]
By this time, Prince Bandar had become King Fahd's trusted point man in Washington. When William Casey approached Bandar about Saudi Arabia's funding an escalation of anti-Soviet forces, the two men flew to Jeddah with Bandar serving as Casey's translator for the meeting with Fahd. [4] Casey met a receptive audience. This campaign was uniquely appealing to the Saudis. Not only would it enable them to cement their ties to the United States, it would also help the royal family deal with domestic unrest. And so, the House of Saud eagerly joined in, matching "America dollar for dollar supporting the mujahideen," as Prince Turki, longtime head of Saudi intelligence, puts it. [5]
In the U.S. Congress, the Afghan rebels were championed by Democratic congressman Charlie Wilson, the colorful six-foot- seven inch, skirt-chasing, cocaine-snorting Texan whose role in America's biggest covert operation was celebrated in George Crile's book Charlie Wilson's War. At dinner parties in Houston and in Washington, Wilson would bring together the likes of Henry Kissinger, White House chief of staff James Baker, and Prince Bandar along with a glittering assortment of senators, astronauts, diplomats, Texas oil barons, and military men in celebration of the mujahideen.
"Allah will not be pleased if the king abandons his freedom fighters," Wilson teased Bandar. [6] To which Bandar replied, "Allah will soon be smiling, Charlie. You will see." For his part, Wilson played an important role in seeing to it that Congress provided the $3 billion in covert aid for the mujahideen. [7]
The Saudis were a key part of the equation. Thousands of young warriors calling themselves Afghan Arabs streamed out of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Yemen, and all over the Middle East to aid the mujahideen. Neither the United States nor the Saudis seemed to mind that the crusading young Muslims could not have cared less about helping America win the Cold War. They were motivated by religious fervor and passion. This was a people's war, a noble crusade against an infidel superpower that had invaded Muslim lands, a fight to avenge the martyrdom of their Afghan brothers being crushed by Moscow. It was a time to demonstrate faith and courage. For many Muslims, the liberation of Afghanistan became a very personal jihad.
In sharp contrast to the Mecca Affair, the Afghanistan War was a mission that could be embraced by the gamut of Saudi society, from the wealthy merchant families and the House of Saud to the militant clerics and the fundamentalist masses. For the royal family, the war was not just part of the cornerstone of the burgeoning Saudi alliance with the United States, but served other purposes as well. Contributing to the war effort placated the militant clerics and helped accommodate the growing unrest and the more radical elements of society. In the wake of the Iranian revolution, there was a new determination on the part of Saudi Muslims to outdo their Iranian counterparts, to create a "new Islamic man." [8]
Instead of focusing their anger at the House of Saud or the United States, the militants could now zero in on the atheistic Soviets. A missionary zeal spread through every layer of society. "There was a sense that every penny you sent in made a difference," says Armond Habiby, an American lawyer who has practiced in Saudi Arabia for many years. "It was a very noble movement. The poor gave away prayer rugs, embroidered tablecloths. It established a monumental footprint that went across all levels of society." [9]
As the war got under way, with the United States, the Saudis, and the Pakistanis secretly supporting the Afghan rebels, the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) hoped that Prince Turki bin Faisal, then head of Saudi intelligence and a member of the House of Saud, would bring an actual member of the royal family to the front to demonstrate the commitment of the House of Saud to the jihad. [10] But no Saudi prince wanted to or needed to brave the Afghan mountains. Osama bin Laden, a protege of Prince Turki's, was the next best thing.
At twenty-two, Osama bin Laden could easily have become a wealthy Saudi businessman, like his father, Mohammed, or his older brother Salem. Thanks to his family's vast fortune and close ties to the royal family, he was perfectly positioned to join the Saudi elite. Instead, incensed by the Soviet invasion, he went straight to Afghanistan. [11] "I was enraged and I went there at once," he said. [12] He arrived before the end of 1979, just a few days after Soviet troops had crossed the border.
For bin Laden, the war was not only a historic turning point during which he would emerge as a leader, it was also a momentous time in Muslim history. He and his fellow Afghan Arabs were stirred by the plight of Muslims from a medieval society besieged by a twentieth-century superpower. [13] "One day in Afghanistan," Osama said, "counted for more than a thousand days praying in a mosque." [14]
Bin Laden's action carried extraordinary weight in large part because of his family's unique place in Saudi society. [i] Their ties to the royal family were so crucial that both sides made certain the relationships transcended generations. Many of the twenty-five bin Laden boys attended school with the sons of King Abdul Aziz and his successor, Faisal, at Victoria College in Alexandria, where they had classmates such as King Hussein of Jordan, the Khashoggi brothers (of whom Adnan [ii] was the preeminent Saudi arms dealer of the Iran-contra era), and Kamal Adham, the billionaire who ran Saudi intelligence before Prince Turki. [15] The boys earned reputations as discreet chaperones for the young royals.
In 1968, when Mohammed bin Laden was killed in a plane crash, King Faisal said his "right arm" had been broken [16] and rushed to the support of the bin Ladens, who, at the time, did not have anyone old enough to take the helm of the family business. Faisal appointed the highly regarded head of his own construction company to make sure the Saudi Binladin Group was in good hands until Salem, Osama's older half brother, was old enough to take over. [17] Later, when King Fahd took the throne in 1982, Salem became one of his two best friends. [18]
***
Closely tied as they were to both the royal family and the United States, at this point the bin Ladens had only indirect connections to the Bush family and its allies. James Bath, the American business representative of Salem bin Laden, knew both George W. Bush and George H. W. Bush. Khalid bin Mahfouz, who was close to both the bin Ladens and the royal family, had helped finance the Houston skyscraper for the Texas Commerce Bank, in which James Baker had a significant stake. He also had ties to Bath.
But these Bush-bin Laden "relationships" were indirect -- two degrees of separation, perhaps -- and at times have been overstated. Critics have asserted that money may have gone from Khalid bin Mahfouz and Salem bin Laden through James Bath into Arbusto Energy, the oil company started by George W. Bush, but no hard evidence has ever been found to back up that charge. [iii]
More to the point, now, in the Afghanistan War, Vice President Bush's interests and Osama bin Laden's converged. In using bin Laden's Arab Afghans as proxy warriors against the Soviets, Bush advocated a policy that was fully in line with American interests at that time. But he did not consider the long-term implications of supporting a network of Islamic fundamentalist rebels.
Specifically, as vice president in the mid-eighties, Bush supported aiding the mujahideen in Afghanistan through the Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK) or Services Offices, which sent money and fighters to the Afghan resistance in Peshawar. "Bush was in charge of the covert operations that supported the MAK," says John Loftus, a Justice Department official in the eighties. "They were essentially hiring a terrorist to fight terrorism." [19]
Cofounded by Osama bin Laden and Abdullah Azzam, the MAK was the precursor to bin Laden's global terrorist network, Al Qaeda. It sent money and fighters to the Afghan resistance in Peshawar, Pakistan, and set up recruitment centers in over fifty countries including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and even the United States to bring thousands of warriors to Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union. [20]The MAK was later linked to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York through an office in Brooklyn known as the Al-Kifah Refugee Center. It is not clear how much contact he had with bin Laden, but Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the "Blind Sheikh," who masterminded the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, also appeared in Peshawar on occasion. [21]
Throughout the eighties in Saudi Arabia, Prince Turki oversaw bin Laden's efforts aiding the mujahideen. Prince Bandar also met bin Laden, but many years later said he was not impressed. "At that time, I thought he couldn't lead eight ducks across the street," he said. [22]
And yet Osama now played a vital role for the House of Saud. Not merely a trophy to show how committed the royal family was to this noble cause, he helped the House of Saud celebrate the American commitment to the mujahideen's efforts. "Bin Laden used to come to us when America ... [was] helping our brother mujahideen in Afghanistan to get rid of the communist, secularist Soviet Union forces," recalled Prince Bandar. " ... Osama bin Laden came and said, 'Thank you. Thank you for bringing the Americans to help us to get rid of the secularist, atheist Soviets.'" [23]
Between 1980 and 1982, bin Laden went back and forth repeatedly between Saudi Arabia and the front, bringing donations from the Saudis. In Jeddah, his family enthusiastically endorsed his commitment to the cause. [24] Working closely with Turki [25] and with Prince Salman, the governor of Riyadh, [26] bin Laden played a key role in financing, recruiting, and training Arabian volunteers.
Finally, in 1982, Osama settled in Peshawar, the command headquarters of the jihad near the Khyber Pass, known as the Dodge City of the Afghan rebels, bringing with him engineers and heavy construction equipment from the Saudi Binladin Company to build roads and depots for the mujahideen. "In those years, there was no Al Qaeda," says Prince Turki. "Bin Laden gave money, equipment, and construction material from his family's company." [27]
Abdullah Azzam, the professor-cleric-mujahid who had taught at the university in Jeddah when Osama was there, had by this time become a spiritual leader of the mujahideen. "Azzam was the man who developed the idea of jihad in a complete way," said Mukahil ul Islam Zia, a professor at the Islamic Center at Peshawar University. "Azzam enshrines the need for armed struggle as part of daily life. ["28] Azzam helped many Arabs just off the plane take part in the jihad by starting the Jihad Training University. With Azzam as his mentor, bin Laden began recruiting warriors for the jihad. "Osama would have been nothing without Azzam," said one expert on the Taliban. "Before he came to Peshawar, Osama was a kind of playboy, a dilettante, not serious, not what we see today."
Some Western publications have characterized bin Laden as merely having used his family fortune to bankroll the mujahideen. Given his wealth, it was tempting for critics to dismiss him as a "Gucci terrorist." But according to a Pakistani who fought with him, he "was a hero to us because he was always on the front line, always moved ahead of everyone else. He not only gave of his money, he gave of himself." [29]
***
All of which served U.S. interests at the time in a way the CIA had only dreamed of. In 1985, a CIA assessment estimated that there had already been ninety-two thousand combined Soviet and Afghan casualties -- more than twice that of the rebels -- and that the Soviets were "no closer than they were in 1979 to achieving their goals." The report concluded that the Soviets were "unlikely" to quell the rebels' insurgency. [30]
To CIA chief William Casey, the success was inspiring. A longtime Cold Warrior who believed not in containment of the communists but what in the late forties and early fifties had been called rollback, Casey saw that he could push all the way across the Soviet border by escalating the war. Casey had told John N. McMahon, the CIA's deputy director of operations, how he felt about Afghanistan. "This is the kind of thing we should be doing -- only more. I want to see one place on this globe, one spot where we can checkmate them and roll them back. We've got to make the communists feel the heat. Otherwise, we'll never get them to the negotiating table." [31]
And so, the United States escalated. By 1987, well into the second term of the Reagan-Bush administration, the United States began to provide the rebels with nearly $700 million in military assistance a year. In addition, the CIA began supplying the mujahideen with intelligence, training, and equipment that allowed them to make scattered strikes against factories, military installations, and storage depots that were actually inside the Soviet Union. They gave the Islamic rebels satellite reconnaissance data, intercepted Soviet intelligence, and provided sniper rifles, timing devices for tons of C-4 explosives for urban sabotage, antitank missiles, and other sophisticated equipment. [32]
Most coveted of all were the Stinger missiles, portable, shoulder-fired antiaircraft guided missiles with infrared seekers for downing low-flying helicopters and planes, [33] missiles so sophisticated that, as one CIA officer put it, "a nearsighted, illiterate Afghan could bring down a few million dollars' worth of Soviet aircraft." [34] With a hit rate of 89 percent, the Stingers downed an average of one plane every day. Soon, the Afghan air force was depleted, and for the Soviets, the cost of the war soared. [35]
Meanwhile, bin Laden built a major arms storage depot, training facility, and medical center for the mujahideen at Khost in eastern Afghanistan. Peshawar became the center of a burgeoning pan Islamic movement. More than twenty-five thousand Islamic militants, from the Palestinians' Hamas, from Egypt's Al Gama'a al-Islamiya and Al Jihad, from Algeria's Islamic Salvation Front, from the Philippines' Moro Liberation Front, from countries all over the world, made the pilgrimage through Peshawar to the jihad. [36]
"You can sit at the Khyber Pass and see every color, every creed, every nationality, pass," a Western diplomat said. "These groups, in their wildest imagination, never would have met if there had been no jihad. For a Moro [iv] to get a Stinger missile! To make contacts with Islamists from North Africa! The United States created a Moscow Central in Peshawar for these groups, and the consequences for all of us are astronomical." [37]
A new network of charities grew into a formidable infrastructure to support the growing pan-Islamic movement. Money flowed into the Services Offices in Peshawar. A new leadership emerged that included Sheikh Azzam and his best friend, the rotund, blind Sheikh Omar from Egypt. CIA forces in Peshawar saw him as a valuable asset, letting pass his militant anti Western sentiments because he was such a powerful force in uniting the mujahideen. [38]
Bin Laden became a leader himself. His identity was truly forged in this period. "If you really want to understand Osama, you have to understand Afghanistan in the 1980s," said his younger brother Abdullah bin Laden, who last saw Osama at the funeral of their brother Salem in 1988. "His views do not come from his childhood or upbringing, but from prolonged exposure to war against a non Islamic force.
"Look to that period of history for your answers. In the West, people do not understand the incensing brutality of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. It had a severe effect on him. It seemed to change him completely. I believe it fomented his radical feelings and it scarred him. At least, this is how I try to understand my brother and come to terms with what he has done." [39]
Arab journalists who covered him then spoke of him in dark, romantic terms. "He is a man that seeks the afterlife and who truly feels that he has lived more than enough," said Abd-al-Bari Atwan, editor of Al-Quds al-Arabi. "You feel there is a sadness in him -- which he did not express -- that he was not martyred when he was fighting the Soviet army. ... You feel like he's saying: Why am I alive?" [40]
Years later, bin Laden rhapsodized about those days as a great romantic spiritual adventure. "Those were the prettiest days of our lives," he said. "What I lived in two years there, I could not have lived in a hundred years elsewhere." [41]
Bin Laden was not the only one who could savor the bittersweet qualities of the war against the Soviets. In May 1984, Vice President George H. W. Bush visited the region and peeked across the border into Afghanistan from the Khyber Pass in Pakistan. Armed with a $14-million check for humanitarian relief, Bush told the refugees, "Across the border, a brutal war is being waged against the people of Afghanistan. I know your resistance will continue until the Soviets realize they cannot be able to subjugate Afghanistan." [42]
We do not know exactly where bin Laden was at that moment, but during this period he was nearby in Afghanistan and had begun working with Azzam to build up the Services Offices. [43] Chances are, this is the closest that Osama bin Laden and George H. W. Bush ever got physically. They were in the same region at roughly the same time. And most important, they were fighting for the same cause.
***
By February 1987, a CIA assessment reported that the war was crippling the Soviet Union. "General Secretary Gorbachev has referred to the war as a 'bleeding wound,'" the report read. It had led to censure of the Soviets within the UN, impinged on Soviet relations with China and nonaligned third world nations, caused domestic social unrest, and diverted energies from pressing economic problems. [44] What the report did not say, but the Soviets felt, was that tens of thousands of Soviet youths were dying on killing fields in a foreign land, fighting for a cause they didn't believe in, detested by the local populace they allegedly fought for, bleeding the crippled economy of their own country dry.
For the Americans, the Afghanistan policy was so successful that as the 1988 presidential election neared, Bush saw it as proof of his bona fides as a Cold Warrior during his campaign against Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis. On October 18, 1988, Bush stopped at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, the site of Winston Churchill's 1946 historic speech warning that an "Iron Curtain" of communism was descending across the European continent. Bush seized the propitious occasion to comment on what Reagan had famously labeled "the evil empire."
It was Bush's most dramatic speech of the campaign, perhaps of his entire life, and it commemorated what was unquestionably the greatest accomplishment of the Reagan Bush era, the end of the Cold War. "The Iron Curtain still stretches from Stettin to Trieste," Bush said. "But it's a rusting curtain. Shafts of light from the Western side, from our side, the free and prosperous side, are piercing the gloom of failure and despair on the other side.
"The truth is being sought as never before," he added. "And the peoples of Eastern Europe, the peoples of the Soviet Union itself, are demanding more freedom, demanding their place in the sun."
Seventy years after the Russian Revolution, Bush said, Marxism is finally "losing its luster." At last, in the age of Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost (openness) and perestroika (transformation), the Cold War was thawing and there was a sense of a new flexibility. One key reason for such historic changes, Bush said, was that "the price of aggression was too high, because we supported the mujahideen in Afghanistan." [45]
***
By the time George Bush moved into the White House in early 1989, having easily beaten Dukakis, the Soviet troops were already withdrawing from Afghanistan. At CIA headquarters, William Webster -- who had succeeded Bill Casey as director -- and his euphoric "Afghan Team" toasted the success of the multibillion-dollar covert operation to support the Muslim Afghan rebels. The Cold War was over. The Afghan campaign had been the coup de grace. [46]
As the Soviets withdrew, however, the many unintended consequences of the war became increasingly apparent. The arms pipeline set up by the CIA had unwittingly become a drug pipeline as well. As first reported by the Herald, an English-language magazine in Pakistan, the main conduit through which weapons reached the Afghan rebels was now one of the principal routes for the transport of heroin to Karachi for shipment to Europe and the United States.
"It is really very simple," the Herald reported in January 1987. "If you control the poppy fields, Karachi, and the road which links the two, you will be so rich that you will control Pakistan." The article added that the drugs came down by truck from Peshawar with "sacks [containing] packets of heroin. ... This has been going on now for about three and a half years." [47] [v]
An even bigger issue, however, was that the United States was still pouring billions of dollars in funding and sophisticated weaponry to build a vast pan-Islamist army. "During the war, if there was any thought of postwar complications from this stuff, it wasn't much expressed," says Frank Anderson, chief of the CIA's Afghan Task Force from 1987 to 1989. "Everyone was busy getting the Soviets kicked out of Afghanistan. The Muslim world was excited by this stuff, and at the time we knew nothing of these activities being related to terrorism." [48] "We set up the very system [of Islamist terrorism] we are now trying to dismantle," says a senior investigator who participated in the Senate probe into BCCI. "People forget that we invented this shit, that Bill Casey was getting the Saudi fundamentalists to assemble all these kooks and go out and kill the Russians. No one asked what would happen when it was over." [49]
Throughout the eighties most of the American media, with a few rare exceptions, such as Edward Girardet of the Christian Science Monitor, simply ignored the war in Afghanistan. And yet, as Steve Galster, project director of the National Security Archive's Afghanistan archives, has observed, "This was the longest war in Soviet history, the largest CIA paramilitary operation since Vietnam, and with one million dead Afghans, the bloodiest regional conflict in the world at the time." [50]
Even America's most heralded investigative reporters missed the story. In Veil, his 1987 account of the CIA's secret wars of that era, Bob Woodward devotes several pages to the Afghanistan operation, but he does not mention the mujahideen, Wahhabism, BCCI, or in any way suggest that billions of American dollars were going to arm and finance a global network of militant Islamic fundamentalists.
On rare occasions, starting as early as 1983, these concerns did make their way up the policy ladder in Washington. That year, the CIA suspected the mujahideen had gotten so many weapons that they were selling the extras to third parties, so they sent CIA deputy director of operations John McMahon out to investigate. When he got to Peshawar, McMahon brought together eight different mujahideen from eight different tribes who ran the supply operation and confronted them.
"Finally, I brought up our main concern," said McMahon. "We'd given them enough land mines to mine the whole goddamn country. So I just laid it out. I said, 'We have a feeling that all the weapons we're giving you aren't showing up on the battlefield. What's going on? Are you cashing them in?'"
A tribal chief named Khalis gave McMahon an unexpectedly candid response: "Yes, we are. We do sell some of your weapons. We are doing it for the day when your country decides to abandon us, just as you abandoned Vietnam and everyone else you deal with." [51]
For all that, Washington actually responded by sending more and more sophisticated weapons. By 1986, the Reagan administration was supplying hundreds of the sought-after Stinger missiles to the mujahideen. The two premises behind the decision were, one, that the transactions would remain secret and, two, that the Islamic rebels would not use them for terrorist activities. Soon enough, however, Reagan's decision was widely reported in the news, and one Republican aide on Capitol Hill pointed out the risks of arming the mujahideen.
"Some of these guys are a lot closer politically, religiously, and philosophically to [Iran's Ayatollah Ruholla] Khomeini than they are to us," the aide said. "There is concern that one of these guys could show up in Rome aiming a Stinger at a jumbo jet." [52]
Nor was that the only sign that the groundwork was being laid for a national security catastrophe. "In Saudi Arabia I was repeatedly ordered by high-level State Department officials to issue visas to unqualified applicants," Michael Springman, the head of the American visa bureau in Jeddah from 1987 to 1989, told the BBC. "People who had no ties either to Saudi Arabia or to their own country. I complained there. I complained here in Washington to Main State, to the inspector general, and to Diplomatic Security, and I was ignored.
"What I was doing was giving visas to terrorists -- recruited by the CIA and Osama bin Laden to come back to the United States for training to be used in the war in Afghanistan against the then Soviets." [53]
This was blowback. "Afghanistan provided a place where these guys could hang out in a subculture for people who wanted to be warriors," says the CIA's Frank Anderson. "It built up the craft of giving money to people like this that undoubtedly continued past when it should have." [54]
By the late eighties, the CIA finally approached the Saudis about whether the Muslims' enthusiasm for the battle was getting out of control. "The Saudis said, 'We can't modulate this,'" recalls Anderson. "They said, 'We can either turn [the flow of money] on-or off."'
By February 1989, the last Soviet soldier had left Afghanistan, but the pro-Soviet government continued to hold power in Kabul. On February 12, President Bush approved continuing U.S. military aid to the rebels resisting the Soviet-imposed government in Afghanistan. [55] With the prospect that the puppet government would soon fall, the United States was exuberant. At last, America had learned how to achieve its foreign policy goals without incurring massive casualties or costs. It was an extraordinary bipartisan achievement. Even a decade later one of the principal architects of the policy, Zbigniew Brzezinski, evinced few regrets. "What is most important to the history of the world?" he asked the French weekly the Nouvel Observateur. "The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?" [56]
Brzezinski and the Reagan-Bush administration were right about the extraordinary value of supporting the mujahideen. But they had resolved the past by endangering the future. They vastly underestimated the price America would pay in the long run. Thanks to the United States, Osama bin Laden had learned an important lesson: mujahideen warriors fighting for Islam could bring a superpower to its knees.
Not long after he took office in 1989, President Bush was warned about exactly this possibility by someone in a position to know. Displeased that the president continued to support extremist radical Muslims, Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto let him know about the dangers. Arming the mujahideen might initially have been the right thing, she told Bush. But, she explained, "The extremists so emboldened by the United States during the eighties are now exporting their terrorism to other parts of the world to the extent that they use heroin trafficking to pay for their exploits."
It had gone too far, she said. By aligning the United States with the most extremist mujahideen groups, she told him, "You are creating a veritable Frankenstein." [57]
***
By this time, Bhutto's "Frankenstein" had set up a vast infrastructure capable of financing a global operation for years to follow. It was becoming known as Al Qaeda -- the Base. Osama bin Laden was now seen as a heroic figure in the Afghanistan War. Money poured into his operations from the mosques, the House of Saud itself, Saudi intelligence, the Saudi Red Crescent, the World Muslim League, various princes, and the kingdom's merchant elite. [58]
Perhaps the greatest insight into the origins of Al Qaeda came after a March 19, 2003, raid by Bosnian authorities on the Sarajevo offices of the Benevolence International Foundation, a multimillion-dollar Islamic charity, yielded a computer with a file marked "Tareekh Osama," Arabic for "Osama's History." [59] The contents included the key founding documents of Al Qaeda -- including photographs and scanned letters, some in Osama bin Laden's own handwriting. One 1988 document tells how Al Qaeda evolved from the Afghan resistance and how "we took very huge gains from the country's people in Saudi Arabia ... gathering donations in very large amounts." [60]
One document asserted, "The only solution is the continuation of the armed jihad." [61] Notes discussed training with Kalashnikov rifles and showed how the group began to take the battle that had begun in Afghanistan on to Chechnya, Bosnia, Sudan, and Eritrea. An extraordinary network of global terrorism was taking shape.
Probably the most noteworthy item discovered had a verse from the Koran "And spend for God's cause" -- followed by a list of twenty wealthy Saudi donors known as the Golden Chain. After each name, the translator had written a second name in parentheses, which, according to U.S. News and World Report, suggested who was the recipient of money from that particular donor. [62] One of the names, Usama -- Osama bin Laden -- appeared seven times.
The donors of the Golden Chain were not just wealthy Saudis -- they were the creme de la creme of the great Saudi industrial and merchant elite. Among them, they owned sixteen of the hundred biggest Saudi companies, [63] which had more than $85 billion in assets in 2003. [64] There were three billionaire bankers, a former government minister, and leading Saudi merchants and industrialists, including, not surprisingly, the bin Laden brothers who ran the Saudi Binladin Group. Banking moguls Khalid bin Mahfouz and Saleh Kamel were on the list, as were the Al-Rajhi banking family. [65] Bin Mahfouz, who contributed $250,000, was one of the seven donors on the list who had Osama bin Laden's name next to his. [66]
By this time, bin Mahfouz had taken over the National Commercial Bank from his father and effectively become the banker for the House of Saud, and the most powerful banker in Saudi Arabia. As a result, over the next decade, his name was on many, many wire transfers to Muslim charities that sent funds to Al Qaeda. "He was the banker for the royal family," says Robert Baer, a former CIA case officer in the Middle East, and the author of Sleeping with the Devil. "If someone in the royal family ordered money to be transferred, he would have no choice. That's the way the relationship works." [67]
In addition, by then bin Mahfouz had also become the biggest investor in BCCI. [68] Not only did BCCI finance arms deals in both the Afghanistan War and the Iran-Iraq War, it also continued to pursue U.S. political contacts, just as it had lured Bert Lance and Clark Clifford a decade earlier. In 1987, one company in particular that interested BCCI investors was a troubled Texas oil company called Harken Energy. Loaded with debt, having drilled dry hole after dry hole, beset by accounting irregularities, barely subsisting during a period in which the price of oil was plummeting, Harken seemed like a particularly unlikely investment for the Saudis -- especially in light of Saudi Arabia's vast oil riches. Nevertheless, Harken had one asset that BCCI truly knew how to appreciate: one of its investors and directors was a forty-one-year-old businessman named George W. Bush.
_______________
[i] Mohammed bin Laden was so close to the royal family that in the sixties, he played a vital role in persuading King Saud to abdicate in favor of his brother Faisal.
[ii] Adnan Khashoggi was also the uncle of Dodi Fayed, who died in a Paris automobile crash with Princess Diana in 1997.
[iii] Bath had fronted for Saudi billionaires Salem bin Laden and Khalid bin Mahfouz on other deals, but in this case he says, "One hundred percent of those funds were mine. It was a purely personal investment." Bin Laden and bin Mahfouz, he insists, had nothing to do with either the elder George Bush or his son. "They never met Bush," Bath says. "Ever. And there was no reason to. At that point Bush was a young guy just out of Yale, a struggling young entrepreneur trying to get a drilling fund."
[iv] The reference is to the Islamic separatist movement in the Philippines.
[v] At the time he visited the war-ravaged region in May 1984, Vice President Bush was also serving as the head of the National Narcotics Border Interdiction System, a national network designed to stop the flow of drugs into the United States. A vigorous critic of drug use, Bush later vowed to tell drug dealers, "Your day is over. You're history."
The CIA later insisted it had no knowledge of the heroin running. But according to the Financial Times, the CIA not only had knowledge, it actually started a special cell that "promoted the cultivation of opium and the extraction of heroin in Pakistani territory as well as in the Afghan territory under Mujahadeen control for being smuggled into the Soviet-controlled areas in order to make the Soviet troops heroin addicts."
NOTES:
1. Zbigniew Brzezinski, "For the Record: American Tragedy," New African, November 1, 2001, p. 6. Originally published by Le Nouvel Observateur in January 1998.
2. Bob Woodward, Veil, pp. 136-37.
3. Gordon Negus, "Afghan Resistance," November 5, 1982, National Security Archives, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB57/us3.pdf.
4. George Crile, Charlie Wilson's War, p. 238.
5. Interview with Prince Turki.
6. Crile, Charlie Wilson's War, pp. 239-40.
7. Steve Galster, "Afghanistan: The Making of US Policy, 1973-1990," October 9, 2001, National Security Archives, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB57/essay.html .
8. Edward Girardet: "Arab Extremists Exploit Afghan Jihad," Christian Science Monitor, February 23, 1989, p. 1.
9. Interview with Armond Habiby.
10. Ahmed Rashid, Taliban, p. 131.
11. Roland Jacquard, In the Name of Osama bin Laden, p. 21.
12. "Usama bin Laden: Islamic Extremist Financier," CIA memo, National Security Archives, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB55/ciaubl.pdf .
13. Yossef Bodansky, Bin Laden, p. 10.
14. Jacquard, In the Name of Osama bin Laden, p. 11.
15. "Hunting bin Laden," PBS Frontline, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline ... amily.html .
16. Anonymous, Through Our Enemies' Eyes, p. 80.
17. Michael Field, The Merchants, p. 106.
18. Anonymous, Through Our Enemies' Eyes, p. 80.
19. Interview with John Loftus.
20. Federation of American Scientists, 216.239.39.100/search?q=cache:sXXKfWXrGUJ:www.library.cornell.edu/colldev/mideast/qaida.htm+MAK+and+Afghanistan&hl=en&ie=UTF-8.
21. Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror, p.103.
22. Interview with Prince Bandar, "Looking for Answers," PBS Frontline, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows terrorism/interviews/bandar.html .
23. Ibid.
24. Rashid, Taliban, p. 132.
25. Jane Mayer, "The House of Bin Laden," New Yorker, November 12, 2001, http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?011112fa_FACT3.
26. Mary Anne Weaver, "Blowback," Atlantic Monthly, May 1996, http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/96may/blowback.htm .
27. Interview with Prince Turki.
28. Robert Marquand, with Jane Lampman, Scott Peterson, Ilene R. Prusher, and Warren Richey, as well as Sarah Gauch and Dan Murphy, "The Tenets of Terror, Part II," Christian Science Monitor, October 18, 2001.
29. Anonymous, Through Our Enemies' Eyes, p. 90.
30. "The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan: Five Years After," a CIA Intelligence assessment produced jointly by the Office of Near Eastern and South Asian Analysis and the Office of Soviet Analysis, released as sanitized, 1999 CIA Historical review program, National Security Archives, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB57/us5.pdf .
31. Joseph Persico, Casey, p. 225.
32. Steve Coll, "Anatomy of a Victory: CIA's Covert Afghan War," Washington Post, July 19, 1992.
33. Federation of American Scientists, Military Analysis Network, "FIM-92A Stinger Weapons System: RMP & Basic," http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/land/stinger.htm .
34. Persico, Casey, p. 312.
35. Marin Strmecki, "Among the Afghans," Washington Quarterly, vol. 11, no. 3 (summer 1988), p. 227.
36. Weaver, "Blowback."
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid.
39. Charlotte Edwardes, "My Brother Osama," Sunday Telegraph (London), December 16, 2001.
40. Anonymous, Through Our Enemies' Eyes, p. 91.
41. Ibid.
42. William Claiborne, "Bush at the Khyber Pass," Washington Post, May 18,
1984, p. A23.
43. Anonymous, Through Our Enemies' Eyes, p. 99.
44. "The Costs of Soviet Involvement in Afghanistan," Directorate of Intelligence, prepared by the Office of Soviet Analysis, February 1987, National Security Archives, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB57/us8.pdf .
45. Gerald Boyd, "Bush Asserts 'Iron Curtain' Remains, but It's Rusting," New York Times, October 19, 1988, p. B6.
46. Galster, "Afghanistan: The Making of US Policy."
47. Lawrence Lifschultz, "Bush, Drugs, and Pakistan: Inside the Kingdom of Heroin," Nation, November 14, 1988, p. 477; and B. Raman, "Heroin, Taliban and Pakistan," Financial Times Asia Africa Intelligence Wire, August 10, 2001.
48. Interview with Frank Anderson.
49. Interview with former Senate investigator.
50. Galster, "Afghanistan: The Making of U.S. Policy."
51. Persico, Casey, p. 313.
52. Patrick Tyler, "Possible Diversion of Stinger Missile to Terrorists Causes Concern," Washington Post, April 8, 1986, p. A12.
53. Michael Springman, interview on British Broadcasting Corporation as reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, November 7, 2001, http://www.smh.com.au/news/0111/07/world/world100.html .
54. Interview with Frank Anderson.
55. "Bush OKs Military Aid for Rebels," Associated Press, February 12, 1989.
56. "Zbigniew Brzezinski: How Jimmy Carter and I Started the Mujahideen," interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Nouvel Observateur Jan. 15-21, 1998, p. 76; translated from the French by Bill Blum.
57. Meet the Press, NBC News Transcripts, October 14, 2001.
58. Weaver, "Blowback"; and Rashid, Taliban, p. 132.
59. David E. Kaplan, with Aamir Latif, Ilana Ozernoy, Laurie Lande, and Monica M. Ekman, "Playing Offense," U.S. News and World Report, June 2, 2003, p. 18.
60. Tony Barthelme, "King of Torts," Post and Courier (Charleston, S.C.), June 22, 2003.
61. Tony Barthleme, "Seized Bosnian Documents Link Saudis to Terror Funding, Lawyers Say," Post and Courier (Charleston, S.C.), March 19, 2003, p. 17.
62. Kaplan et al., "Playing Offense," p. 18.
63. Golden Chain List Analysis, http://www.investi.virtualave.net/Golde ... alyses.htm .
64. Barthleme, "Seized Bosnian Documents Link Saudis to Terror Funding, Lawyers Say," p. 17.
65. Glen Simpson, "List of Early al Qaeda Donors Points to Saudi Elite, Charities," Wall Street Journal, March 18, 2003.
66. Glenn Simpson, Wall Street Journal, online corrections and amplifications, updated March 18, 2003, 10:48 p.m., http://www.online.wsj.com/article/O,,SB ... 00.html#CX .
67. Interview with Robert Baer.
68. Interview with Cherif Sedky, attorney for Khalid bin Mahfouz.