Osama was an executive in the Bin Laden’s Medina office at the time this enormous undertaking took shape. He was still commuting from Saudi Arabia back and forth to the Afghan war. He had deepened his involvement after his brief visit to the fighting front in 1984, but he had not moved his family to Pakistan. He typically stayed in Pakistan for only three or four months at a time.
Fahd’s Medina project led to conflicts within the Bin Laden family that may have influenced Osama’s priorities, according to a former senior American government official who has discussed the episode with Bakr. The details are unclear, but according to this official, the Medina contract and its many pressures produced a “sort of realignment in the family,” which left Osama unhappy about his role. The essential issues were control and authority. “He just basically made a giant pest of himself and everybody wanted him gone,” according to the former official. By this account, Bakr and Salem stood on one side of the quarrel, and Osama and some of his more religious half-sisters tried to oppose them. “Salem told me, ‘This brother of mine in Afghanistan is going to be our family’s big problem,’” said a second business partner who worked very closely with the Bin Ladens during this period. Osama “didn’t bother Salem, he bothered all his family.” Whatever the nature and extent of this disagreement, it did not result in a full rupture between Osama and his half-brothers, however. Indeed, Salem’s risk taking on Osama’s behalf would soon increase. But the episode may have led both Osama and his half-brothers to see Pakistan, rather than Medina, as the best outlet for Osama’s energies.10
EARLY IN 1986, Abdullah Azzam wrote to Osama from Peshawar, urging him to move there. He told his protégé that administrative and financial problems had accumulated at the Services Office, the support service they had founded more than a year earlier for Arab volunteers in Afghanistan. Azzam urged Osama to help put the place in order. Here, at least, was an enterprise that wanted and appreciated Osama fully.
Later that year, Osama moved with his family to a pine-shaded house in the Hyatabad section of Peshawar. In the ensuing months, he would act like an ambitious young man who felt a need to prove himself. He threw himself more actively into the war, and for the first time, he independently sought publicity for his work, to extend his reputation in Saudi Arabia and the Muslim world. Was undeclared competition with Bakr and Salem, now themselves celebrated in Saudi media as the renovators of Medina, one strand in Osama’s web of motivations after he moved his family to Pakistan? Even if it was, one constant remained: to achieve his goals on the Afghan frontier, he needed the Bin Ladens.11
20. THE ARMS BAZAAR
AROUND THE TIME he moved with his family to Peshawar, Osama made a new request of Salem. This time it wasn’t money; he told his brother that he needed weapons, and he specifically asked for portable anti-aircraft missiles.1
Osama entered the international arms market because he had decided, for the first time, to create his own jihadist militia. He found the Arab volunteer movement in some disarray early in 1986. Azzam’s Services Office, which Osama had funded with about a half million U.S. dollars to this point, was fracturing over petty disputes and prideful slights. As more Arabs arrived, Azzam’s inclusive governing system of committees and consultative councils fell under strain. Bin Laden’s aide, Abu Haji Al-Iraqi, recalled “an increase of complaints” that led to a decision to “change the administrative staff.” Increasingly, leading figures in the group irritated one another and engaged in tedious debates about money and theology. Ayman Al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian doctor who had been tortured in Cairo prisons for his involvement in violent conspiracies, arrived in Peshawar with other radical Egyptian exiles. Zawahiri cultivated a relationship with Osama, motivated as Azzam had been earlier—the doctor was ambitious but poor, and he needed Osama’s financial patronage. He stirred bitter disputes in Peshawar salons over jihad strategy. He found Arab allies ripe with grievance. Azzam had promoted the Afghan war as a province of miracles and beautiful sacrifice; the volunteers summoned up this stairway to heaven found the reality of the war to be cold, brutal, disputatious, and poorly organized.
In April some Arab volunteers participated in a brutal four-week battle at Jawr, a fortified rear base located in high, sandy ridges near the Pakistan border, in an area controlled by a fierce Afghan commander named Jalaladin Haqqani. The fight went badly. Bin Laden decided that the Arabs needed to strengthen themselves in these border areas. He moved away from Peshawar’s debilitating office culture and began to build his own brigade of Arab jihadis up in the mountains along the Afghan-Pakistan border. His aim was to participate directly in the war; it was for this that he required his own portable missiles, to challenge Soviet helicopter-borne assault teams.2
“It is well known that there are two elements of fighting,” Osama said later. “There is the fighting itself and then there is the financial element, such as buying weapons. This is emphasized in many verses of the Koran, such as the following: ‘God has purchased the persons and possessions of the believers in return for the Garden.’”3
Salem turned to a German friend with an Afghan connection: Thomas Dietrich. They had first met in Cairo; Dietrich was an amateur pilot on vacation, and they fell into a friendship centered on flying. As a boy, Dietrich had lived in Kabul; his father was a West German foreign aid official. He became a fixture in Salem’s European entourage. In the mid-1980s, he was enrolled at a university in Stuttgart, but he found time to ski and fly with Salem and some of his brothers and sisters, particularly at resorts in the Alps.
At Offley Chase, his estate outside London, Salem summoned Dietrich to his room. “We need to help my brother,” Salem told him, as Dietrich recalled it.
“You’ve got many of them.”
Salem talked about Osama; Dietrich had heard some about him but not a lot. “He is now very religious,” Salem said. “He is now in Afghanistan, and the Russians are there. People are getting killed. And I know that you lived there—and you need to help him.” Osama had identified two priorities: missiles that could shoot down helicopters, and equipment that would allow Arab volunteers to manufacture ammunition for AK-47 assault rifles, by filling spent shells with new rounds.4
The war was intensifying. After a policy review in the spring of 1985, the United States decided secretly to escalate its support for the Afghan mujaheddin; for the first time, the U.S. identified victory over the occupying Soviet army as an objective. The CIA rapidly increased the quantity and quality of the weapons it sent in through Pakistan. The Soviets introduced more aggressive tactics as well, ordering elite helicopter-borne Special Forces units, called Spetsnaz, to Afghanistan; these assault troops flew raids against rebel supply lines and wreaked havoc along the Pakistan border. To thwart the Spetsnaz, the CIA agreed in 1986 to send heat-seeking U.S.-made Stinger missiles to the Afghans; the missiles were particularly lethal against helicopters. The initial shipments occurred during the first half of the year, just as Osama was moving with his family to Peshawar. An Afghan commander fired the first Stingers on the Afghan battlefield in September, at Jalalabad. The missiles destroyed several Soviet helicopters that day, and they quickly acquired an almost mythical reputation for potency among both the mujaheddin and the Soviets.5