The fighting began in April of 1987. Osama’s volunteers clashed for a week with Soviet forces; this initial engagement was followed by a longer battle the next month. Bin Laden’s positions came under sustained aerial bombardment; the Soviets may have used incendiary weapons similar to napalm. Spetsnaz troops raided Bin Laden’s fortified encampments; the Arab volunteers, although lightly trained and little experienced, fought back fiercely in close engagements. Precisely what happened during these battles would become obscured over the years by retrospective accounts from self-mythologizing jihadis; their versions are sometimes contradictory. The earliest known published description, in Azzam’s Al-Jihad magazine, does not emphasize Osama’s role in the battles, but concentrates instead on the heroics of one of his Egyptian military aides; Osama was not even mentioned. He soon painted himself into the picture, however, by giving effusive interviews about his experiences to sympathetic Arab journalists. There is no doubt about the basic facts. The Jaji battles of 1987 were intense, with significant casualties on both sides, but they did nothing to alter the course of the larger war. Osama was present, and he performed honorably under heavy pressure. The battles seem to have left him with two main reactions: they endowed his belief that he had been called to war in God’s name with fresh and deep emotion, and they struck him as an outstanding marketing opportunity.9
“It was obvious in the way that he was telling stories, that he was trying to create a drive to bring in more, to use the media for attracting more Arabs, recruiting more Arabs to come to Afghanistan,” recalled Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist who was one of the first to interview Osama after the Jaji campaign. “I liked his enthusiasm.” Osama’s speaking style in this period was “like a university professor…like if he is at the head of the table of the political committee of this party or that party.” Yet his memories of the peril he felt at Jaji were florid, infused with a sense of fatalism and surrender to God’s will.10
“We sometimes spent the whole day in the trenches or in the caves until our ears could no longer bear the sound of the explosions around us,” Osama told Khashoggi:
War planes continually shrieked by us and their crazy song of death echoed endlessly. We spent the days praying to God Almighty. Despite the massive Russian onslaughts, one of us had to come out from our shelter regularly to see the enemy’s movements…Each time, we were able, by the grace of God, to inflict a crushing defeat on the Russians…It was God alone who protected us from the Russians…Reliance upon God is the main source of our strength and these trenches and tunnels are merely the military facilities God asked us to make. We depend completely on God in all matters.11
Around this time, Osama permitted an Egyptian filmmaker, Essam Deraz, to follow him and document the movement he was building. Deraz helped to crystallize the themes that would later shape Osama’s legend—a rich man who lived like the poor, a socially advantaged man who was prepared to sacrifice everything for his religion, a fighter who would not waver in the face of death. “I saw him with my own eyes on the battlefield,” Deraz said later. “He was in the middle of the fighting. Being a rich man, no matter what he was like, people of course looked at him as a financier, just a man with money. After the battle of Jaji, he was looked upon as a military man who deserved to be the leader.”12
This, at least, was the view that filmmaker and the other early Bin Laden publicists promoted; combined with Osama’s quiet charisma, and his ability—common in the Saudi court circles from which he had emerged—to avoid giving offense even to his adversaries, it would prove to be enough.
He was emerging now from the shadow of his mentor, Abdullah Azzam. They quarreled over Osama’s plans to group Arabs together in their own separate military encampments; Azzam believed firmly that they should insert themselves into mixed militias, alongside the Afghans, where they could share the war’s burdens and proselytize to Afghan fighters whose own religious scholars had been killed off by the communists. “Bin Laden sought to pamper Arab fighters,” Azzam’s wife later complained. “Even their food was different from that of the Afghan mujaheddin. Bin Laden used to bring them special foodstuff in containers from Saudi Arabia.”13
These tensions complicated Osama’s position, but he was careful; he and Azzam remained cordial. By late 1987, their global fundraising and recruitment network included offices in Brooklyn and Tucson in the United States, as well as in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere. As this worldwide retail network spread, it was not in Osama’s interest to precipitate a debilitating split.
Osama’s own access to money remained unrivaled. His contributors included Salem’s friend Khalid Bin Mahfouz. Sometime before May 1988, Bin Mahfouz “was approached for a contribution to the Afghan resistance by Salem Bin Laden,” according to a statement by his attorneys. “Consistent with many other prominent Saudi Arabians, and in accordance with U.S. government foreign policy at that time, Sheikh Khalid Bin Mahfouz recalls making a donation of approximately $270,000. This donation was to assist the U.S.-sponsored resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and was never intended nor, to the best of Sheikh Khalid Bin Mahfouz’s knowledge, [was it] ever used to fund any extension of that resistance movement in other countries.” Bin Mahfouz did not donate the money “with the intention” that it be used to purchase arms, his attorneys said. Osama’s fundraising in Saudi Arabia “emphasized the need for humanitarian support (that is, food, shelter, medical supplies) for the Afghan resistance and the Afghan populations under their control that were subject to Soviet attacks…The financial needs of the Afghan resistance were, in fact, greater for these purposes than for weapons, which were being freely supplied by the U.S. Government.”14
Osama spread his money and his favor around, some to Azzam, some to the rival Egyptian faction in Peshawar. By this signature method of accommodative Bedouin leadership, he gradually bound a loose coalition of multinational Arab volunteers to his undeclared leadership. As Azzam’s son-in-law put it: “I think Osama started to believe in himself.”15
22. THE PROPOSAL
SALEM, TOO, dreamed of an idyll. His vision did not revolve around war or martyrdom, however; it involved the women in his life. By 1985, as he approached forty, Salem had approximately five regular girlfriends—one American, one German, one French, one Danish, and one English. He used his money and pilots to weave them in and out of his itineraries. They swirled around Salem and one another like airplanes in an intricate air traffic control pattern; they brushed against one another now and then, but rarely collided. Occasionally he installed girlfriends on two different floors of the same hotel, each unaware of the other’s presence. One or two believed they were his only love; the others knew better.
Salem developed a bold plan to resolve this state of affairs. It began as a friendly bet between Salem and King Fahd, Bengt Johansson recalled. Salem told Fahd that he could persuade four young European and American women—“normal family girls”—to marry him simultaneously, as permitted by Islamic law. Fahd said he was crazy, that he could never pull it off. Perhaps the king believed this; perhaps he also understood, as Johansson put it, that if you told Salem he could not do something, “then he was for sure doing it.”1