The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden

Peter L. Bergen

• Editorial: Simon & Schuster
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781982170547
• Categoría: Politics & International Relations
• Categoría: Political Biographies

The world's leading expert on Osama bin Laden delivers for the first time the "riveting" ( The New York Times ) definitive biography of a man who set the course of American foreign policy for the 21st century and whose ideological heirs we continue to battle today. In The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden, Peter Bergan provides the first reevaluation of the man responsible for precipitating America's long war with al-Qaeda and its decedents, capturing bin Laden in all the dimensions of his life: as a family man, as a zealot, as a battlefield commander, as a terrorist leader, and as a fugitive. The book sheds light on his many contradictions: he was the son of a billionaire yet insisted his family live like paupers. He adored his wives and children, depending on his two wives, both of whom had PhDs, to make critical strategic decisions. Yet, he also brought ruin to his family. He was fanatically religious but willing to kill thousands of civilians in the name of Islam. He inspired deep loyalty, yet, in the end, his bodyguards turned against him. And while he inflicted the most lethal act of mass murder in United States history, he failed to achieve any of his strategic goals.In his final years, the lasting image we have of bin Laden is of an aging man with a graying beard watching old footage of himself, just as another dad flipping through the channels with his remote. In the end, bin Laden died in a squalid suburban compound, far from the front lines of his holy war. And yet, despite that unheroic denouement, his ideology lives on. Thanks to exclusive interviews with family members and associates, and documents unearthed only recently, Bergen's "comprehensive, authoritative, and compelling" (H.R. McMaster, author of Dereliction of Duty and Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World ) portrait of Osama bin Laden reveals for the first time who he really was and why he continues to inspire a new generation of jihadists.

PART I HOLY WARRIOR

ONE SPHINX WITHOUT A RIDDLE?

A sphinx without a riddle.

—Bismarck on Napoleon II

Around the time of the 9/11 attacks, relatively little was known about Osama bin Laden. In the rare television interviews that al-Qaeda’s leader had given before then he came across as largely inscrutable, with only an occasional thin, enigmatic smile playing across his lips. He had gone to considerable lengths to keep information about his private life hidden, which wasn’t surprising since he had grown up in Saudi Arabia, one of the most closed societies in the world. He also led an organization, al-Qaeda, whose very existence was a well-kept secret for a decade after its founding in the late 1980s. The bin Laden family, one of the richest in the Middle East, had also largely avoided scrutiny. Was the leader of al-Qaeda a sphinx without a riddle?

In recent years a great deal of information has surfaced to illuminate bin Laden and the inner workings of al-Qaeda. First there is the small library of documents found in bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound that were released in full only in late 2017, amounting to some 470,000 files. Secondly, many bin Laden associates have finally shown a willingness to talk. The result is that a decade after his death, it is now possible to appraise him in all the many dimensions of his life: as a family man; as a religious zealot; as a battlefield commander; as a terrorist leader; as a fugitive. He was born a young man of contradictions, and he kept adding to them: he adored his wives and children, yet brought ruin to many of them. He was a multimillionaire, but he insisted his family live like paupers. He projected a modest and humble persona that appealed to his followers, but he was also narcissistically obsessed about how his own image played out in the media, and he ignored any advice from the leaders of al-Qaeda that conflicted with his own dogmatic views. He was fanatically religious, yet he was also willing to kill thousands of civilians in the name of Islam, despite the fact that some verses of the Koran emphasize the protections afforded to innocents, even in times of war. He inspired deep loyalty, yet in the end, even his longtime bodyguards turned against him. And while he inflicted the most lethal act of mass murder in United States history, bin Laden failed to achieve any of his strategic goals.

Al-Qaeda’s leader is one of the few people of whom it can truly be said changed the course of history. Who could have predicted that in the two decades following the 9/11 attacks he masterminded, the United States would wage various kinds of military operations in seven Muslim countries—in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen—at the cost of more than $6 trillion and more than seven thousand American lives? In addition, tens of thousands of soldiers from countries allied to the United States died, as did hundreds of thousands of ordinary Afghans, Iraqis, Libyans, Pakistanis, Somalis, Syrians, and Yemenis who were also killed during the “war on terror.”

But just as it has taken many years to get a better understanding of the man who launched the 9/11 attacks, it has taken two decades to assess the successes and failures of both al-Qaeda and the United States in the long conflict that followed. This is not to suggest any moral equivalence between the two—but rather to explain where each side miscalculated the other’s intentions and actions.

Al-Qaeda did have some tactical successes. Before the 9/11 attacks it deftly exploited its safe haven in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan to train thousands of militants. On 9/11 al-Qaeda carried out the first significant foreign attack against the continental United States since the British burned the White House in 1814. Al-Qaeda used the opportunities presented by the Iraq War to recruit a new generation of militants, planting the seeds for ISIS. And al-Qaeda expanded its affiliated groups from Africa to Asia.

There were also serious American policy failures. They include letting bin Laden escape at the battle of Tora Bora in December 2001, which allowed him to lead his organization for another decade, and the conflation of al-Qaeda with Saddam Hussein, which helped make the case for the Iraq War, a war that ultimately produced the very thing it was supposed to prevent—an alliance between al-Qaeda and Iraqi Baathists.

But bin Laden and al-Qaeda also had many failures of tactics and strategy. For one thing, the United States eventually came up with an increasingly effective tactical playbook against al-Qaeda and other jihadist militant groups—a playbook that largely, if imperfectly, worked, relying on armed drones, a much-expanded intelligence community, and Special Operations Forces raids. It’s a playbook that presidents as different as George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump all embraced to varying degrees and that kept the United States largely safe from jihadist terrorism since 9/11.

During the two decades after the 9/11 attacks, al-Qaeda and its affiliates failed to successfully carry out a large-scale lethal terrorist attack in the United States.^I Al-Qaeda’s failure to strike the United States after 9/11 was neither inevitable nor predictable, especially in the first years after the attacks, when bin Laden and the organization he led continued to plot against Western targets.

The key question about bin Laden is: Why did he build an organization dedicated to the mass murders of civilians? It’s a question I have been probing since I met bin Laden in 1997 as the producer of his first television interview. There was no single event that turned bin Laden from the shy scion of one of the richest families in the Middle East into the architect of the 9/11 attacks. Rather, bin Laden went through a gradual process of radicalization that first began during his teenage years when he became a religious zealot.

The invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviets in 1979, when bin Laden was twenty-two, turned him into a leading financier of Muslim volunteers from around the globe who were drawn to the Afghan holy war. Eight years later bin Laden led his followers into battle against the Russians. From that battle emerged al-Qaeda, a group dedicated to spreading jihad, holy war, around the world. The introduction of hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops into the holy land of Saudi Arabia in 1990 turned bin Laden’s latent anti-Americanism into a passionate hatred of the United States. He started conceiving of the Americans as his main enemy while he was living in exile in Sudan during the first half of the 1990s. His expulsion from Sudan to Afghanistan in 1996 angered him further against the United States, and in the late 1990s the planning for the 9/11 attacks began in earnest.

There was nothing inevitable about bin Laden’s transformation over the course of decades from a quiet, humble, religious young man into the leader of a global terrorist network who was intent on killing thousands of civilians. This book is an attempt to explain how that transformation happened.

I. The only lethal terrorist attack in the United States in the two decades after 9/11 that had any direct connection to al-Qaeda was when its branch in Yemen coordinated with a Saudi air force officer who killed three U.S. sailors at Pensacola Naval Air Station in Florida on December 6, 2019. It wasn’t clear whether this attack was directed by al-Qaeda from Yemen, or whether the Saudi officer came up with his own plan and he simply kept al-Qaeda apprised of it as it matured.

TWO ZEALOT

The impression sometimes prevails that the true believer, particularly the religious individual, is a humble person. The truth is that the surrendering and humbling of the self, breeds pride and arrogance. The true believer is apt to see himself as one of the chosen, the salt of the earth, the light of the world, a prince disguised in meekness, who is destined to inherit this earth and the kingdom of heaven too. He who is not of his faith is evil; he who will not listen will perish.

—Eric Hoffer, The True Believer

The bin Ladens originally hail from Hadhramaut in Yemen, a region of rocky deserts and boulder-strewn valleys known as wadis bounded to the north by Saudi Arabia’s Empty Quarter and the Arabian Sea to the south. Hadhramaut means “death is present,” an evocatively apt name for a harsh, arid place whose inhabitants have long eked out only the most basic of livings.

One of the larger valleys is Wadi Doan, where the road is not much more than a rocky path shaded by palm trees. The bin Laden ancestral village of al-Rubat lies at the end of Wadi Doan nestling in the shade of honey-colored cliffs that tower above the valley floor by a couple thousand feet. In the village there is a Bin Laden Street, a crumbling, mud-brick bin Laden mansion, and a number of impoverished, distant cousins of the bin Ladens.

Black-robed women flit like wraiths down the alleys of the towns of the wadi, and in the fields women harvest crops while completely swathed in black, shielded from the unremitting sun by distinctive conical hats made of straw. The segregation of the sexes is so rigorously enforced that the women have developed a separate dialect, and the dictates of purdah have shaped the mazelike layout of the tall, mud-brick buildings that are characteristic of Hadhramaut. Small wonder, then, that bin Laden felt so much kinship with Yemen, as he told his wives and children in one of their last family discussions at his compound in Abbottabad.

In the early 1930s the formidable English explorer and writer Freya Stark visited al-Rubat around the time that Osama’s father, Mohammed bin Laden, was living there and found “poverty and little commerce.” Slavery was still commonplace, and when Stark visited a harem of some dozen women, it was the first time that they had ever met a European woman. Stark observed that most of the men of Hadhramaut had left their native villages to find work in Egypt, or had taken the long sea voyage to Malaysia; staying away for up to twenty years.

Seeking his fortune, which certainly wasn’t going to happen in desperately poor al-Rubat, Mohammed bin Laden immigrated to what would soon become the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, embarking for the seaport city of Jeddah around 1930 together with his brother, Abdullah.

Mohammed had good timing because he arrived in Saudi Arabia as a great gusher of oil wealth was first being tapped that in the decades to come would shower a deluge of petrodollars on the desert kingdom, from which Mohammed would greatly prosper. Mohammed started working as a porter for pilgrims in Jeddah, the port city that had long served as the gateway to the holy city of Mecca, some forty miles away. Later in life Mohammed proudly displayed his porter’s bag in one of his palaces. Mohammed, a skilled bricklayer, founded a construction company in 1931. A year later King Abdel Aziz inaugurated the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the following year geologists from Standard Oil of California arrived to begin to prospect for oil fields.

Mohammed bin Laden adeptly ingratiated himself with the source of all the richest contracts in the kingdom, dropping by frequently at King Abdel Aziz’s regular majlis, a public meeting where supplicants could lobby the monarch. The king was partially confined to a wheelchair, so Mohammed built him an ingenious ramp on the outside of one of his palaces in Jeddah so that the aging monarch could easily move between the floors of the palace using his car. One thing led to another, and when a British company pulled out of its contract in the early 1950s to build a major road from Jeddah to the holy city of Medina, Mohammed stepped in to save the day and built the highway.

Mohammed, who had only one eye and retained the manners of a laborer with few airs and graces, was now a rich man who had a number of current and former wives. Aged around fifty, Mohammed was visiting the Mediterranean port city of Latakia, Syria, in 1956 when he encountered a beautiful girl in her mid-teens, Allia Ghanem. Allia was from the nearby, desperately poor village of Jabaryoun. The surrounding region of orange groves and olive trees is well known as a home to the Alawites, who are an offshoot of mainstream Shiism. Many Alawite religious practices are secret and they celebrate both Christian and Islamic holidays. As a result, Alawites are considered heretics by orthodox Sunni Muslims such as the bin Ladens. The Ghanems were Alawite, but Mohammed didn’t seem to mind. A year after they met in 1957 Allia bore the bin Laden patriarch their first and only child, Osama, who also happened to be Mohammed’s eighteenth son. The union between Allia and Mohammed bin Laden was brief; when Osama was two his parents divorced. Allia then married Mohammed al-Attas from a prominent family originally from Hadhramaut who was working as a midlevel manager at the bin Laden construction company. Attas brought Osama up like he was his own son, and he and Allia would also have three sons and a daughter together.

Bin Laden was exceptionally close to his mother. Allia told Osama when he was ten that she was going to take him to visit her family in Syria.

When Osama’s biological father, Mohammed, got wind of the trip, he told Osama that if he stayed with him in Saudi Arabia he would buy him a parrot in a cage and a watch.

Osama replied that he wanted to be with his mother.

Mohammed bin Laden told his son that he couldn’t be bribed with “earthly things,” which was a testament to Osama’s true Muslim nature. It was one of the only times that Osama ever had a substantive discussion with his biological father.

Osama often proudly told the story of how Mohammed bin Laden would routinely visit the three holiest Islamic sites during the course of one day, offering his morning prayers in Medina, his afternoon prayers in Mecca, and then his evening prayers in Jerusalem, because he had his own plane. The bin Laden family fortune was deeply intertwined with these holy sites, as Mohammed bin Laden was the sole contractor for their extensive renovations, which brought him not only great riches, but also the considerable prestige of rebuilding the holy places. Bin Laden won the contract to extensively renovate the area in and around the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, expanding the area of the mosque by more than half. He was paid around $19 million during the early 1950s for the renovations. He also built a new airport to service Medina.

Next, Mohammed embarked on a project that was even more ambitious: massively expanding Islam’s holiest site, the Ka’ba sanctuary in Mecca, which previously held some fifty thousand pilgrims, so that it could accommodate up to 400,000. The Saudi royal family estimated that this renovation cost $130 million. Mohammed bin Laden was also granted the contract to renovate the third-holiest ...