The CEO of terror: Bin Laden the financier of a broad network
Miami Herald
BY JUAN O. TAMAYO
jtamayo@herald.com
Osama bin Laden was a 24-year-old scion of a super-rich Saudi Arabian family when the Saudi CIA recruited him in 1979 to fight Soviet invaders in Afghanistan, with weapons provided by the American Central Intelligence Agency.
Today, bin Laden is the world's most wanted terrorist, the CEO of ``Islamic Terror Inc.,'' a loose-knit network of groups with tentacles in Asia, Europe, Africa and the United States -- even South Florida -- dedicated to attacking U.S. targets and moderate Arab governments.
Though he may not directly control the groups, he is widely believed to be the driving force and chief financier of a dozen murderous assaults in the past decade, including Tuesday's devastating attacks. ,P> ``Think of these groups as grapes from the same bunch,'' said an Egyptian counter-terrorism expert. ``They are separate, distinct groups yet all their vital links flow back to one common root: Osama bin Laden.''
Some terrorism experts believe that the U.S. government has demonized bin Laden to the point of turning one in many thousand Islamic radicals into the devil himself, blaming him for any and all terror attacks.
``This isn't the politically correct thing to say while they're digging bodies out of the World Trade Center, but he is just a figurehead for a broad and diverse movement,'' said a U.S. terror expert who asked for anonymity.
But anyway one cuts it, bin Laden has been linked to a wave of attacks since 1993 designed to reestablish a Caliphate, an Islamic concept that harks back to the time when Muslims ruled from India to Spain.
According to the CIA's declassified biography of bin Laden, he was born in 1955 in the port city of Jeddah, the youngest son of an ethnic Yemenite businessman who built the Bin Laden Construction Group into a $5 billion firm based on his friendship and contracts with the Saudi government.
Ironically, the firm built the main base for U.S. Air Force units stationed in Saudi Arabia since the Gulf War, the Prince Sultan Air Force Base in the desert, 50 miles southeast of the Saudi capital of Riyadh.
Bin Laden studied economy and religion at the King Abdul Aziz University but, according to friends quoted in published profiles, he was always critical of his country's ruling Al Saud family, widely accused of corruption and un-Islamic behavior such as drinking alcohol.
IN SAUDI CIA
What the CIA biography does not mention are published reports that he was recruited in 1979 by Saudi CIA chief Prince Turk Bin Faisal into the Islamic Legion, a group of volunteers from around the Arab world organized by bin Faisal to fight the Soviet troops that invaded Afghanistan that year.
That's how bin Laden came to know thousands of Islamic radicals, and in the mid-1980s founded the Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK), or Services Office, to help channel volunteers from some 50 countries to Afghanistan.
While bin Laden is now praised by admirers as a valiant combat commander, CIA agents who worked with the Afghan rebels at the time have said he was more of a rear-echelon organizer and religious leader.
Although he is often photographed holding an AK-47 assault rifle, a 1999 video clip of bin Laden at a firing range showed him awkwardly aiming and firing his rifle. But sometime in the mid-1980's bin Laden began preaching a broader sort of war -- not just military struggle against the Soviets, but an anything-goes war on moderate Arab governments, Israel and its main backer, America.
MORE POLITICAL
Although he bases his call for a Jihad on the Muslim holy book, the Koran, his followers tend to be more politically than religiously radical.
Two of the suspects in Tuesday's attacks drank vodka at a South Florida bar shortly before they embarked on their suicide missions. Muslims prohibit the consumption of alcohol.
``In today's wars, there are no morals,'' he said in a 1998 interview with ABC-TV reporter John Miller in one of his Afghan hideouts.
``The terrorism we practice is of the commendable kind, for it is directed at the tyrants and the aggressors and the enemies of Allah. . . who commit acts of treason against their own country and their own faith,'' he declared.
He broke with MAK co-founder Abdallah Azzam, a Palestinian killed in 1989, in the mid-1980s and in 1988 created al Qaeda, Arabic for the military base, reflecting his vision of a network of far-flung groups tenuously linked to a central coordinating body.
``Senior leaders in the organization are also senior leaders in other Islamic terrorist organizations,'' said the CIA biography, made public after the 1998 bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
Bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia after the Soviet troops left Afghanistan in 1989, but was expelled in 1991 for plotting against the Riyadh government and moved to Sudan, where his family firm has several branches.
BLASTED SAUDIS
That same year, the Saudi government allowed hundreds of thousands of U.S., British, French and other troops into the Arab peninsula to fight Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.
Bin Laden thundered against the Al Saud family, calling its members ``whores'' and charging that it had violated Muslim precepts by allowing infidel troops near the cities of Mecca and Medina, Islam's two holiest sites.
``They rip us of our wealth, resources and oil. . . . They kill, murder our brothers. They compromise our honor and our dignity, and dare we utter a single word of protest, we are called terrorists,'' he told ABC.
The real terrorists, he said, are the Israelis and their U.S. backers, who rule over Palestinians and want to weaken Islam everywhere so they can impose Western values on Islamic nations.
Bin Laden soon began forging tight links with radical Islamic groups, especially Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood and Al Jihad but also the Lebanese-based Hezbollah and other groups in Algeria, Pakistan, Indonesia and several predominantly Muslim nations in the former Soviet region of Central Asia.
And the attacks began:
1993 -- Veterans of the Afghanistan resistance set off a truck bomb in the basement of the World Trade Center, hoping to topple one 110-story tower onto the other. Six people die.
1994 -- A bomb goes off in a Philippines Airline jetliner, killing one person.,P> 1995 -- A car bomb destroys a Saudi National Guard barracks in Royadh, killing six.
1995 -- Bin Laden and Sudan are accused of complicity in an attempt to assassinate Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak during a trip to neighboring Ethiopia. Sudan expelled bin Laden in May 1996, under intense pressure from Western governments as a result of the plot against Mubarak. Bin Laden returned to Afghanistan, now under the protection of the ruling Taliban.
`ORDINARY MAN'
``He is a good Muslim. Osama is just an ordinary man and he could not have organized'' the New York and Washington attacks, the Taliban's religious leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, said in a nationally broadcast speech Friday.
Bin Laden's move to Afghanistan only emboldened him, allowing him to set up terrorist training camps in rugged hills near the southern city of Jalalabad and host visiting delegations from other terror groups.
And in August of 1996 he issued a public ``Declaration of War'' against America. ``If someone can kill an American soldier, it is better than wasting time on other matters,'' he said the next year.
He sent fighters into Bosnia, Chechnya, Tajikistan, Somalia, Yemen and Kosovo -- virtually any place where Muslims were fighting, according to the CIA biography.
And the attacks continued.
1996 -- A suicide truck bomb at a U.S. military barracks in the Saudi city of Dahran kills 19 American soldiers. In early 1998, bin Laden proclaimed a new group, the International Islamic Front for Jihad against the Jews and Crusaders, his terminology for Israel and Western nations that sent troops to fight in the Middle East.
And the attacks grew even more deadly.
1998 -- Suicide bombers blow up the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224, including a dozen Americans.
2000 -- A small boat packed with explosives pulls up next to the USS Cole warship in the Yemeni port of Aden and blows up, killing 17 sailors.
2001 -- Suicide hijackers slam three jetliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. A fourth crashes in Pennsylvania. Some 5,000 people are reported dead or missing.
`NO SHAME'
``America has no shame,'' he told ABC. ``We believe that the worst thieves in the world today and the worst terrorists are the Americans. Nothing could stop you, except perhaps retaliation in kind.''
Asked if he feared the Clinton Administration's decision in 1998 to put a $5 million price on his head following the embassy bombings, bin Laden shrugged it off.
``We as Muslims believe that our years on this earth are finite and predetermined,'' he said. ''If the whole world gets together to kill us before it is our time to go, they will not succeed.''
By JACK DOUGLAS JR.
Star-Telegram Staff Writer
NEW YORK - A former Muslim religious leader in Arlington will not agree to talk to the FBI about Tuesday morning's attacks at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, his lawyer said Friday.
The FBI has said it wants to question Moataz al-Hallak, who until last year was head of a mosque operated by the Islamic Association of Arlington, about what he may know about the attacks, in which a commercial airliner was also downed in Pennsylvania early Tuesday.
Al-Hallak's attorney in New York, Stanley Cohen, said his client isn't hiding from authorities but isn't talking to them because he knows nothing that would be useful. Cohen said the FBI only wants to bully al-Hallak because of his Islamic race and religion.
"He's not a fugitive," Cohen said. "But he's not talking to the FBI."
If a subpoena is issued, Cohen said he will advise al-Hallak to talk to a grand jury, an assistant U.S. attorney or some other "reasonable" government investigative agency. He said the FBI, however, has not given a reason for why it wants to talk to his client and that it appears to be on a "fishing expedition."
Cohen added: "They want to sit him down and say, 'What do you know about the world?' It's racist. It's destructive ... and that's why he won't be talking to the FBI."
Al-Hallak was the imam, or spiritual leader, of the Arlington mosque until January 2000, when his contract expired. He moved from Arlington about 11 months ago and is now in the Washington area, where he works at an Islamic school and lives a "quiet, wholesome, religious life," Cohen said.
While at the mosque in Texas, al-Hallak became a friend and spiritual adviser to Wadih el Hage, an Arlington resident who, the FBI said, was a top lieutenant to fugitive terrorist leader Osama bin Laden, the man many believe is behind Tuesday's attacks.
The FBI described al-Hallak as an associate of el Hage during its investigation of two U.S. embassy bombings in Africa, and al-Hallak testified three times before a grand jury, Cohen said.
The FBI's public statement that it wants to talk to al-Hallak about Tuesday's terrorist attacks is a potential "death sentence" for his client because of the unbridled anger felt by Americans and their desire to retaliate, Cohen said.
Attorney General John Ashcroft said Friday that federal authorities want to talk to "more than 100" people about the attacks and that the FBI had devoted 4,000 agents to the investigation.
Staff writer Patrick McGee in Arlington contributed to this report.
Jack Douglas Jr., (817) 390-7700 jld@star-telegram.com