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COVER STORY:EXCLUSIVE BOOK
EXCERPTS
 Inside
The Secret World Of Osama bin Laden
The morning
in America on September 11 brought out two defining images of the century:
the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York vanishing in flames,
and the grainy picture of a bearded, turbaned man somewhere in the remoteness
of Afghanistan. The terror and its mind, Osama bin Laden.
 Since
then, the Saudi billionaire-turned-jehadi has become the most engaging
media story: the man who declared war on the most powerful nation on earth.
Peter L. Bergen's Holy War, Inc: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin
Laden (Weidenfeld & Nicolson; distributed in India by Books Today;
292 pp; Rs 595) is a sprawling thriller on the world's most wanted fugitive
and his empire of terror, stretching from Afghanistan to Pakistan to Sudan
to Egypt to the Philippines to Chechnya to Britain to, well, America.
Bergen, currently the terrorism analyst for CNN, has reported on Afghanistan
and Pakistan for 15 years and travelled widely in the Islamic world. It
took him six years to put bin Laden between the covers. To get a better
access into the mind and methods of the terrorist-in-chief, Bergen spoke
to bin Laden's friends and associates, top Taliban members and CIA officials,
and travelled to countries connected by bin Laden's network. He met bin
Laden himself for a CNN profile in 1997 in the hate emperor's hideout
somewhere in Afghanistan, a dramatic encounter with which the book opens.
Excerpts:
How to Find the World's Most
Wanted Man
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ARMS AND THE MAN: The Kalashnikov
rifle is never far from bin Laden's sight. His followers say he
took it from a Russian he killed.
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As Bergen begins
his book, " When you go looking for Osama bin Laden, you don't find
him: he finds you." And his phone rang in March 1997.The three-member
CNN team-Bergen, Peter Arnett, photographer Peter Jouvenal-and their Osama
contact man called Ali began their journey in Britain. First stop Islamabad,
then Peshawar, from there to Jalalabad, Afghanistan, by road.
After several days of waiting in the Jalalabad
hotel, we were visited by a bin Laden emissary. The man, who introduced
himself as bin Laden's 'media adviser', was young and wore shoulder-length
hair, a headdress, and sunglasses that concealed much of his face. He
was not unfriendly, but businesslike, asking if he could take a look at
our camera and sound equipment. Following a perfunctory survey of our
gear he announced: 'You can't bring any of this for the interview.' To
have gotten so far, and to have spent this much time and money, only to
learn that the interview would be sabotaged-this was rather bad news.
Things looked up again when the media adviser
said that we could shoot the interview on his hand-held digital camera.
I knew that our professional gear would do a better job, but there was
clearly little point in arguing. Bin Laden feared that strangers with
electronic equipment might be concealing some type of tracking device
that would give away his location. (Ali had mentioned the example of Terry
Waite, an Anglican church envoy negotiating for the release of Western
hostages in Beirut in the 1980s, who was himself taken captive because
he was suspected of carrying such a device.)
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"The
hearts of Muslims are filled with hatred towards the US ... The president
has a heart that knows no words. A heart that kills children ... "
Osama bin Laden, while speaking to Bergen
in 1997 |
Bin Laden's men left nothing to chance: we were
not even to bring our watches. The media adviser's parting words: 'Bring
only the clothes you are wearing.' He told us we would be picked up the
next day.
The following afternoon a beaten-up blue Volkswagen
van drew up at our hotel. Ali motioned hurriedly for us to get in and
then drew curtains over the windows of the van. As the sun dipped, we
drove west on the road to Kabul. Inside the van were three well-armed
men.
The trip passed mostly in heavy silence.
After driving through a long tunnel, Ali finally
broke the silence, saying almost apologetically: 'This is the point in
the journey when guests are told if they are hiding a tracking device,
tell us now and it will not be a problem.' We took it that any potential
'problem' would likely result in a swift execution. I glanced nervously
at my two colleagues. Could I be absolutely sure neither of them had such
a device? I assured him we were clean.
It was now nightfall and under an almost full
moon we turned onto a little track heading into mountainous terrain. After
a few minutes we arrived at a small plateau and were told to get out.
Each of us was given a pair of glasses with little cardboard inserts stuffed
in the lenses, making it impossible to see. We were then transferred into
another vehicle, in which we were later allowed to take off our glasses.
We found ourselves inside a jeep with heavily tinted windows. The path
wound upward, becoming steeper. In places, the road seemed to be just
the rock bed of a mountain stream; elsewhere, improvements had been made
to the track. My colleagues and I exchanged almost no words during this
surreal trip. None of us had any idea how it would end.
Suddenly a man leaped out of the darkness, pointing
an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) at our vehicle. He shouted at us to
halt and exchanged some quick words with the driver before letting us
pass on. This happened again a few minutes later. Finally, a group of
about half a dozen men appeared and signaled us to get out of the vehicle.
They were armed with Russian PK sub-machine guns and RPGs.
'Don't be afraid,' said their leader, a burly
Saudi, who politely asked us to get out of the car. 'We are going to search
you now,' he said in barely accented English. They patted us down in a
professional manner and ran a beeping instrument with a red flashing light
over us. I assumed it was a scan for any tracking device we might have
secreted.
We drove into a small rock-strewn valley at
about five thousand feet. March in the Afghan mountains is cold and I
was glad I had brought a down jacket for the trip. We were led to a rough
mud hut lined with blankets; here we were to meet bin Laden. Nearby were
other huts, grouped around a stream. The settlement was probably used
from time to time by Kuchis, nomads who roam Afghanistan's mountains and
deserts with their flocks. We could hear the low rumble of a generator
that bin Laden's men had set up for us so that we could run the lights
and camera.
Inside the hut, a flickering kerosene lamp illuminated
the faces of bin Laden's followers. Some were Arabs; others had darker,
African complexions. They served us a dinner of heaping platters of rice,
nan bread, and some unidentifiable meat. Was it goat? Chicken? Hard to
tell in the dim light. I have generally made it a rule of the road never
to eat anything I am not too sure of, ever since an eventful encounter
with some curried brains in Peshawar. But by now I was ravenous, so I
tucked in with gusto.
I calculated that it was some time before midnight
when bin Laden appeared with his entourage-a translator and several bodyguards.
He is a tall man, well over six feet, his face dominated by an aquiline
nose. Dressed in a turban, white robes, and a green camouflage jacket,
he walked with a cane and seemed tired, less like a swaggering revolutionary
than a Muslim ascetic. Those around him treated him with the utmost deference,
referring to him with the honorific 'sheikh', a homage he seemed to take
as his due. We were told we had about an hour with him before he would
have to go. As he sat down, he propped up next to him the Kalashnikov
rifle that is never far from his side. His followers said he had taken
it from a Russian he had killed.
Jouvenal fiddled with the lights and camera
and then said the welcome words 'We have speed,' which is cameramanese
for 'We're ready.'
Peter Arnett and I had worked up a long list
of questions, many more than could be answered in the hour allotted to
us. We had been asked to submit them in advance, and bin Laden's people
had excised any questions about his personal life, his family, or his
finances. We were not going to find out, Babara Walters-style, what kind
of tree bin Laden thought he was. But he was going to answer our questions
about his political views and why he advocated violence against Americans.
Without raising his voice, bin Laden began to
rail in Arabic against the injustices visited upon Muslims by the United
States and his native Saudi Arabia: 'Our main problem is the US government
... By being loyal to the US regime, the Saudi regime has committed an
act against Islam,' he said. Bin Laden made no secret of the fact that
he was interested in fomenting a revolution in Saudi Arabia, and that
his new regime would rule in accordance with the seventh-century precepts
of the Prophet Muhammad. 'We are confident ... that Muslims will be victorious
in the Arabian peninsula and that God's religion, praise and glory be
to Him, will prevail in the peninsula. It is a great ... hope that the
relevation unto Muhammad will be used for ruling.'
Bin Laden coughed softly throughout the interview
and nursed a cup of tea. No doubt he was suffering from a cold brought
on by the draughty Afghan mountains. He continued on in his soft-spoken
but focused manner, an ambiguous, thin smile sometimes playing on his
lips: 'We declared jihad against the US government because the US government
... has committed acts that are extremely unjust, hideous, and criminal
whether directly or through its support of the Israeli occupation of (Palestine).
And we believe the US is directly responsible for those who were killed
in Palestine, Lebanon, and Iraq. This US government abandoned humanitarian
feelings by these hideous crimes. It transgressed all bounds and behaved
in a way not witnessed before by any power or any imperialist power in
the world. Due to its subordination to the Jews, the arrogance and haughtiness
of the US regime has reached to the extent that they occupied (Arabia).
For this and other acts of aggression and injustice, we have declared
jihad against the US, because in our religion it is our duty to make jihad
so that God's word is the one exalted to the heights and so that we drive
the Americans away from all Muslim countries.'
But a line kept resonating in my mind, the final
words in our broadcast. When asked about his future plans bin Laden had
replied:
'You'll see them and hear about them in the
media, God willing.
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