The spider in the web

AP

TO MILLIONS of people in the western world, he has come to be viewed as the personification of evil. On the streets of Cairo, in the mountains of northern Pakistan, and even in the air-conditioned luxury of his native Saudi Arabia, he has many admirers, both open and secret.

But for foes and supporters alike, there is much about Osama bin Laden, the man at the centre of a network of Islamist violence spanning 40 countries, that remains enigmatic and contradictory. He was born in the heart of Saudi Arabia's privileged elite, but is now its harshest critic. As a young man, he became a popular figure within that elite because of his prominent role in the American-backed effort to succour the rebels who were battling Soviet forces in Afghanistan. But for at least the past 11 years—since American troops arrived in his country to wrest control of Kuwait from the Iraqis, and then stayed on after that war was won—he has regarded the United States and its allies with unqualified hatred.

His own religious roots are in the Sunni branch of Islam, and some of his followers have a history of bitter conflict with followers of Shia Islam, whose biggest stronghold is Iran. But he has insisted that differences within the Islamic world should be set aside for the sake of the broader struggle against western and Jewish interests. American officials say there is clear evidence of tactical co-operation between his organisation, al-Qaeda, the government of Iran, and Iran's proxies in Lebanon, the Hizbullah group. From the early 1990s, members of his group and its Egyptian allies were being sent to Lebanon to receive training from Hizbullah: an unusual example of Sunni-Shia co-operation in the broader anti-western struggle.

Thousands of would-be Islamist fighters from at least a dozen countries have received training at camps which he set up, at first in Sudan and, since 1996, in Afghanistan. But by no means all the beneficiaries of this training are under his control. And, to judge from the evidence that has emerged from three big trials in America over the past decade, many of the people who implement his plans have little idea who their ultimate boss may be. In Chechnya, for example, there is evidence of support (in the form of explosives, logistics and advice) from Mr bin Laden for the ultra-militant factions. But this tactical support for certain Chechens, according to Mark Galeotti, a British Russia-watcher, does not mean they are under his control.

The money behind him

AP

His handiwork

Mr bin Laden was born in Riyadh in 1957, the 17th of the 52 children of Saudi Arabia's most successful building magnate. His father, Mohammed bin Oud bin Laden, came from southern Yemen in 1932, when the kingdom's new dynasty was installed, and rose from humble beginnings to become the favoured building contractor to the royal house.

The bin Laden group is still the kingdom's biggest construction business, with a turnover of tens of billions of dollars. Its latest projects include airport facilities in Kuala Lumpur, a runway in Cairo and a vast new mosque in Medina. Its recent investments have included a marble factory in Italy and a share in Iridium, a troubled satellite consortium.

How much of this fortune has flowed into Mr bin Laden's coffers? According to the State Department's list of terrorist organisations, he is “said to have inherited approximately $300m.” But others who know the Saudi royal house say this is a wild exaggeration. Since the early 1990s, he has been estranged from his family and from the Saudi government, which revoked his citizenship in 1994. The Saudi authorities have frozen his bank accounts and his share of the bin Laden fortune has been confiscated.

Some of the money lost then has, however, been replenished. Former officials of the CIA and the FBI say Mr bin Laden has been receiving secret donations from rich well-wishers in the Middle East and from Islamic charitable organisations. He may also take a cut from the Taliban's sales of opium. Units of his organisation are believed to raise money through financial and other sorts of crime. For example, Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian who plotted to bomb Los Angeles airport but later co-operated with American authorities, says he was given $12,000 of seed-money to set up his operation. When he asked for more cash, he was advised to finance himself by credit-card fraud.

In Sudan, where he established himself in 1991, Mr bin Laden launched several companies. One of these, the Al Shamal Islamic Bank, has a full website with a list of correspondent banking relationships, including institutions in New York, Geneva, Paris and London. He also set up agricultural and construction companies. But these operations, which in the past have built roads in Sudan, were designed primarily to secure the favour of the government rather than to yield high returns, says Vince Cannistraro, a former head of counter-terrorism at the CIA.

A former associate of Mr bin Laden's, Jamal al-Fadl, who fled to America after he was caught embezzling, described a complex operation with three committees, one military, one religious and one financial. Mr bin Laden and his supporters use business fronts and other means to move money secretly by wire and computer. Their financial sophistication is such that regulators and investment banks think it possible that they placed advantageous trades in the world's stock and derivative markets shortly before the attack on the World Trade Centre. The shares of three big insurers, France's AXA, Munich Re and Swiss Re, fell sharply in the days before. At the same time, volumes of put options (contracts that allow an investor to profit if shares fall below a specified level) on some airlines and other companies directly affected by the attack jumped beyond normal levels. An investigation is now under way.

What marks out Mr bin Laden from other godfathers of violence against western and Israeli targets is the extraordinary breadth of his connections. Bridging personal rivalries and ideological differences, he is prepared to make tactical alliances with almost any group that shares his aims: the “liberation” of his country and region from American troops, the replacement of pro-western regimes by militant Islamist ones, the defeat of Israel and the restoration of Muslim control over the holy places of Jerusalem.

He has sometimes been described as a Saudi agitator with an Egyptian base. Among the closest partners of his movement—forged in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, which was the home of the anti-Soviet resistance in Afghanistan—are the militant Islamist movements of Egypt. By early 1998, his core group of Afghan veterans had merged with Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a Cairo-based movement which includes the assassins of President Anwar Sadat in 1981. Since 1993 that group has avoided targets inside Egypt, but it bombed the Egyptian embassy in Pakistan and tried to bomb America's embassy in Albania. As a result of the merger, the “consultation council” over which Mr bin Laden presides includes the leaders of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad as well as his old comrades from Afghanistan.

Mr bin Laden has also co-operated closely with at least one wing of an even larger Egyptian movement, Gamaa Islamiya (the Islamic Group), whose spiritual guide, the blind cleric Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, has been in prison in the United States since 1995. This group, which killed 58 tourists in Luxor in 1997, declared a ceasefire in 1999, although this has since been renounced by the imprisoned sheikh.

In February 1998 Mr bin Laden summoned a prominent Egyptian fundamentalist, together with leaders of three other ultra-radical Islamist groups, to his base in Afghanistan. They agreed to form a new umbrella organisation, the World Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders. The leaders issued a statement asserting that America had, in effect, declared war against God by stationing forces on the holy soil of Saudi Arabia, besieging and bombing Iraq, and supporting Israeli oppression of the Palestinians. The statement concluded with a fatwa demanding that every Muslim comply with “God's order to kill the Americans and plunder their money.” This is the imperative that drives Mr bin Laden.

The making of a terrorist

Unlike many members of the Saudi elite, Mr bin Laden was never educated in the West, nor even at a western-run college in the Middle East. His only exposure to a cosmopolitan, western way of life was the two years he spent in the hedonistic atmosphere of Beirut after leaving school in 1973. While his brothers studied abroad, he took his degree in engineering in his home city of Jeddah; and he may perhaps have been influenced by the view of conservative clerics that Beirut's plunge into bloody civil war was a divine punishment for its decadent way of life.

Like tens of thousands of idealistic Muslims—and others—from all over the world, he seemed to find his vocation in the battle being waged by the mujahideen, a broad coalition of Islamic fighters divided into at least seven factions, against the Soviet forces that invaded Afghanistan in December 1979. He was uniquely well-placed to act as a conduit between the mujahideen and the kingdom because of his family's fortune and his personal contacts with the Saudi elite, including Prince Turki bin Faisal bin Abdelaziz, who was the Saudi intelligence chief for 24 years until his abrupt and unexplained dismissal a few weeks ago.

Shuttling between Peshawar, the Pakistani base for the mujahideen, and Saudi Arabia, Mr bin Laden raised huge sums of money and established a “services office” (maktab al-khidamat) which recruited fighters from all over the world—including the United States, where his men operated from an office in Brooklyn. According to American legal documents, the services office had metamorphosed—as early as 1989, the year the Russians left Afghanistan—into al-Qaeda, “the base”, which forms the core of Mr bin Laden's network of Islamist violence.

As a supplier of the Afghan rebels, Mr bin Laden was indefatigable. As well as procuring weapons and humanitarian aid, he obtained bulldozers and engineering equipment which were used to drive tunnels through the mountains of Afghanistan. Although most of his help was logistical and financial, he also saw some combat. In 1986 he was involved in the defence of a small village called Jadji, and in 1989 he was spotted by John Simpson, a British writer and broadcaster, among the forces besieging Jalalabad.

Support for the mujahideen was closely orchestrated between the governments and secret services of the United States, Britain, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. A privileged recipient of American and Saudi aid (distributed by the Pakistanis) was the militant Islamic leader Gulbuddin Hikmatyar, with whom Mr bin Laden, in turn, was closely associated. The privileged treatment of Mr Hikmatyar—regarded as power-hungry and fanatical by other rebel groups—was viewed with some bafflement in the expatriate community in Peshawar, and it led to backroom arguments between American officials and their British partners.

Was there any privileged relationship between Mr bin Laden and the Americans? British officials with knowledge of covert operations in support of the Afghan rebels believed there was such a relationship, although this has been vigorously denied by their American counterparts. In any case, soon after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, Mr bin Laden became disillusioned with his erstwhile friends in America, Britain and the Saudi elite. He was dismayed by American support for Dr Sayid Mohammed Najibullah, an Afghan leader whom he viewed as a Russian stooge; and he bitterly opposed the arrival of American troops in Saudi Arabia in August 1990.

Emboldened by the prestige he had acquired as a powerful friend of the mujahideen, he became increasingly vocal in his criticism of the Saudi leadership—and an embarrassment to his friends and family. He was expelled from Saudi Arabia in 1991 and took refuge in Sudan, where he remained until that country, under international pressure, asked him to leave and return to Afghanistan, his old stamping-ground.

Foot-soldiers' evidence

The richest sources of publicly available information about Mr bin Laden, his network and methods have been a series of highly publicised trials in the United States over the past decade. Earlier this year, four people were convicted by a New York court for their roles in the August 1998 bombing of the American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, a double atrocity that cost 224 lives and apparently took five years to plan.

The court was told that one defendant, Wadih el Hage, had been linked with Mr bin Laden during the Afghan war in the early 1980s; a decade later, he was ordered by the Saudi godfather to bring Stinger anti-aircraft missiles (left over from American supplies to the mujahideen) from Pakistan to Sudan by air. Another defendant, a Tanzanian called Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, had played a role in the Dar es Salaam bombing but apparently had little knowledge of who was ultimately orchestrating it. As Peter Bergen, the author of a forthcoming book on the bin Laden network, puts it, “This confirms a pattern of foot-soldiers who know very little about the wider plan, and masterminds who are spirited out of the country immediately after, or even before, the attack takes place.”

AP

Ramzi Yousef, convicted

The other court case which provided much information about Islamic terror was that of Ramzi Yousef, who, with half a dozen accomplices, was convicted of bombing the World Trade Centre in February 1993. His intention was to topple one tower against the other and release cyanide gas at the same time. In the event, a bomb went off but killed “only” six people.

While his junior assistants were quickly apprehended, Mr Yousef himself fled the country to Pakistan. Later he moved to the Philippines, where he teamed up with a militant Muslim movement with links to Mr bin Laden. In the Philippines he conspired to kill President Bill Clinton and Pope John Paul; then, in January 1995, he plotted to blow up 11 American aircraft in a single day. The plot was thwarted only because of a fire in his Manila apartment; he was arrested a month later in Pakistan.

While it seems clear that Mr Yousef had received support from Mr bin Laden's network before the February 1993 bombing, and that he co-operated with close associates and allies of Mr bin Laden over the next two years, his precise relationship with the Saudi boss remains unclear. One American Middle East scholar, Laurie Mylroie, has argued that there are strong grounds for believing that Mr Yousef was an agent of Iraq. She blames poor co-operation between America's Justice Department and intelligence agencies for the authorities' failure to follow up the evidence.

Whether or not Mr Yousef has an Iraqi connection, his story is a striking example of the grey area in which Mr bin Laden operates. Mr Yousef has a record of support for Sunni Muslim groups which bitterly oppose the Shia branch of Islam; Mr bin Laden, by contrast, believes that all Muslims should work together against their enemies. Yet this did not seem to prevent Mr Yousef from co-operating with the bin Laden network.

Other tantalising details of the bin Laden apparatus—and the military training it offers in Afghanistan—emerged during a separate hearing in New York on the conspiracy by a group of Algerians to set off a suitcase bomb at Los Angeles airport at the turn of the millennium. Ahmed Ressam, a conspirator who gave evidence for the prosecution, disclosed that he had received six months of training at a camp in Afghanistan in 1998, along with volunteers from many other places including Algeria, Jordan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, France and Chechnya.

The witness said he had been trained in how to blow up the infrastructure of a country—“airports, railroads, large corporations” as well as how to wage urban warfare by blocking roads, storming buildings and assassinating individuals. One of the men convicted in the embassy-bombings trial, Mohamed al-Owhali, had been trained in the same camp, while two other defendants had received instruction at a different training-ground in Afghanistan.

How to get him

Officials in America and Europe believe that stifling Mr bin Laden's financial network would help to stop more attacks. But that will be difficult. Although it is possible to pinpoint and freeze accounts held in America and Europe, seizing assets held in the Middle East under names not directly related to Mr bin Laden's organisation is far harder. When Mr bin Laden realised that intelligence agencies were pursuing his financial arrangements, he started to rely more heavily on cash, which leaves no trace. His global network may use an internal credit system similar to those employed by the Mafia and Triad gangs, says Magnus Ranstorp, a terrorism expert at the University of St Andrews. Like cash, it leaves no audit trail. “We will never be able to cut off his funds entirely,” says Mr Cannistraro; “only restrict them.”

The biggest nightmare is that Mr bin Laden and his associates will acquire, or have already acquired, biological, chemical or even nuclear weapons. American legal documents allege that his supporters have been looking for nuclear materials since the early 1990s. Another risk, says bin Laden-watcher Yonah Alexander, is that of devastating cyber-warfare. And even if the man himself is somehow neutralised, plenty of militant Muslims will be ready to struggle on in his name—with or without direct orders from their hero.