The pledge of God and his covenant is upon me, to listen and obey the superiors, who are doing this work, in energy, early-rising, difficulty, and easiness, and for his superiority upon us, so that the word of God will be the highest, and His religion victorious.15
This ambiguity present at Al Qaeda’s birth—the sense that it was an organization but that its borders dissolved into a wider movement—would persist for years because it was fundamental to Osama’s own outlook. In his mind, Al Qaeda was merely an incidental means to incite and organize the ummah, the community of Islamic believers. Across the years, Osama would struggle at times to remain true to this aspiration, as bureaucracy, factionalism, and petty ambition gnawed at his ideals. Yet he never abandoned his original model. “The situation is not as the West portrays it,” Osama would tell an interviewer many years later, “that there exists an ‘organization’ with a specific name, such as ‘Al Qaeda’ and so on. That particular name is very old, and came about quite independently of me. Brother Abu Ubaida Al-Banjshiri created a military base to train the young men to fight against the Soviet empire…So this place was called ‘The Base,’ as in a training base, and the name grew from this. We aren’t separated from the ummah. We are the children of an ummah, and an inseparable part of it.”16
He drew upon a rich heritage of Saudi and Brotherhood-influenced ideology, but he synthesized these ideas with his lessons drawn from his family. In the years ahead, Osama would make three indispensable contributions to Al Qaeda, all derived from his experiences as a Bin Laden: his emphasis on diversity and inclusion, his confidence about money and administration, and his attraction to the technologies of global integration. Indeed, arguably, these family-derived strengths of Osama’s would become more important to Al Qaeda’s potency than its underlying Islamic ideology, which was commonplace among militant groups.
Ambition, energy, natural talent, and a gift for managing people had made Mohamed Bin Laden wealthy. Reinterpreted by Salem, these characteristics had girded a secular life of singular creativity and financial success. Reinterpreted through a prism of Islamic radicalism by Osama, they would soon prove just as transforming.
IN APRIL 1989, Ghalib Bin Laden flew to the United States with one of the family’s Pakistani pilots to arrange for final delivery of the Hawker Siddeley private jet that Salem had purchased prior to his death. It was a sleek, spacious two-engine executive jet that could carry a dozen or more passengers. Ghalib had the piloting skills to evaluate the plane’s readiness, and as Bakr’s full brother, he had his trust. He had matured into a smart, sharp-minded administrator who did not suffer fools and who could act decisively, in the judgment of one business partner who worked with him extensively. He had two sons; his wife increasingly kept the veil.17
On April 22, Ghalib flew to San Diego, where one of his youngest half-brothers, Abdullah, was enrolled in university. He flew on to Honolulu, then Guam, and reached Hong Kong on the 24th. Gerald Auerbach, the family pilot, had joined the flight, as had a second Pakistani pilot and the mechanic Bengt Johansson. They flew to Kuala Lumpur, and then to Bombay. On the evening of April 27, 1989, they continued on to Peshawar. They checked into a hotel in the city, and Ghalib Bin Laden and one of the Pakistani pilots traveled by road to the Afghan frontier.18
According to two people who were on the trip but who did not travel out from the Peshawar hotel, Ghalib carried about fifty thousand dollars in cash. One of these people, Auerbach, recalled that the money was destined for Osama because he was in need of “some cash.” The second passenger, Johansson, said that he was told by the Pakistani pilot who went out from the hotel that they sought to distribute the money as a Ramadan gift to poor people living in a refugee camp. By Johansson’s account, this act of charity turned dangerous. “They were almost killed there” and “had to jump over some fences” because a crowd of refugees, seeing Ghalib’s bag of money, decided to rush him, rather than wait for an orderly distribution of charity. A family attorney said that Ghalib recalled that “the cash which he [Ghalib] took with him from Peshawar was distributed to the poor in refugee camps” and was not provided to Osama; the attorney emphasized that Ghalib had never provided financial or other support for Osama’s terrorism.19
At the time of this visit, Osama was suffering through the most trying episode of his Afghan adventure. In March, at the direction of Pakistani intelligence, a large force of Afghan rebels had opened an assault on the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad, about a four-hour drive away from Peshawar, over the Khyber Pass. The city was defended by a rump force of Afghan communist soldiers who feared they would be executed if they yielded their positions, and, therefore, fought fiercely, supported by clandestine Soviet officers who manned Scud missile batteries. Osama joined the siege campaign, leading a company-sized force of Arab volunteers who had been trained over the winter at the inaugural Al Qaeda camps. He ensured once more that his followers were adequately equipped—among other things, he acquired night-vision equipment. On the Jalalabad battlefield, however, he and his militia failed disastrously. The guerrilla and ambush tactics they had honed in the mountains proved futile during assaults on fortified fixed positions. The terrain favored the defenders. About one hundred young Arab men had died under Osama’s leadership by the time the campaign was called off in June.20
So many casualties in such a transparently failed effort only exacerbated the factionalism and dispute that surrounded Osama. In July an Afghan faction led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who was favored by Osama, massacred the leaders of a rival faction led by Ahmed Shah Massoud, who was favored by Azzam. These two powerful Afghan militias embarked on open civil war. Behind the lines, Peshawar “became a horrible place,” recalled Jamal Khashoggi. “Arabs who don’t like each other. Takfiris. Tensions…Splinters, fanatic groups.”21
On November 24, 1989, Abdullah Azzam died in a car bomb attack. The crime went unsolved. Egyptian rivals of Azzam, Hekmatyar, Bin Laden, or some combination seem the most likely suspects. Osama later denied any involvement. “At that point, we were both in the same boat, and you are all aware of the numerous conspiracies there were to murder us all,” he said. He recalled telling Azzam to stay out of Peshawar. Ultimately, he said, he concluded that Israel “in collusion with some of its Arab agents” had carried out the attack. His declaration of innocence is difficult to evaluate but probably correct. He had no particular need to kill Azzam, and there is no convincing evidence that he had yet participated in any assassination plots.22
A few weeks before Azzam’s death, Osama moved home with his family. In quick succession, he had lost the two most important mentors in his life. His sponsor in Saudi intelligence, Ahmed Badeeb, his former high school teacher, urged him to leave Pakistan. Badeeb was trying to “thin out” the number of agents and allies he supported in Peshawar, now that the Soviets had withdrawn. He offered Osama business advice. Financial developments within the Bin Laden family may also have speeded his departure. Bakr was about to oversee a major corporate reorganization and inheritance distribution to all the Bin Ladens of Osama’s generation; it would behoove Osama to be present in Saudi Arabia as this occurred. It was, in a broader sense, a time to find his bearings.23