THE MOST WANTED MAN IN THE WORLD
Terror's $250 million man lives a life fired by fury and faith

In many ways, Osama bin Laden's story is like that of many other Muslim extremists. There's the fanatical religiosity and the radical interpretation of Islam; the outrage over the dominance, particularly in the Arab world, of a secular, decadent U.S.; the indignation over U.S. support for Israel; the sense of grievance over the perceived humiliations of the Arab people at the hands of the West.

But bin Laden brings some particular elements to this equation. As a volunteer in the war that the Islamic rebels of Afghanistan fought against the Soviets in the 1980s, bin Laden had a front-row seat at an astonishing and empowering development: the defeat of a superpower by a gaggle of makeshift militias. Though the U.S., with billions of dollars in aid, helped the militias in their triumph, bin Laden soon turned on their benefactor. When U.S. troops arrived in his sacred Saudi homeland to fight Saddam Hussein in 1990, bin Laden considered their infidel presence a stain on the Prophet Muhammad's birthplace. He was inspired to take on a second superpower, and he was funded to do so: by a fortune inherited from his contractor father, by an empire of business enterprises, by the pride that comes from being a rich kid whose commands had always been obeyed by nannies, butlers and maids.

Though bin Laden grew up wealthy, he wasn't entirely within the charmed circle in Saudi Arabia. As the son of immigrants, he didn't have quite the right credentials. His mother came from Syria by some reports, Palestine by others. His father moved to Saudi Arabia from neighboring Yemen, a poor country looked down on by Saudis. The family's wealth came from the Saudi bin Laden Group, built by Osama's father Mohamed, who had four wives and 52 children. Mohamed had had the good luck of befriending the country's founder, Abdel Aziz al Saud. That relationship led to important government contracts such as refurbishing the shrines at Mecca and Medina, Islam's holiest places, projects that moved young Osama deeply. Today the company, with 35,000 employees worldwide, is worth $5 billion. Osama got his share at 13 when his father died, leaving him $80 million, a fortune the son subsequently expanded to an estimated $250 million.

At the King Abdel Aziz University in Jidda, bin Laden, according to associates, was greatly influenced by one of his teachers, Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian who was a major figure in the Muslim Brotherhood, a group that has played a large role in the resurgence of Islamic religiosity. Bin Laden, who like most Saudis is a member of the puritanical Wahhabi sect of Sunni Islam, had been pious from childhood, but his encounter with Azzam seemed to deepen his faith. What's more, through Azzam he became steeped not in the then popular ideology of pan-Arabism, which stresses the unity of all Arabs, but in a more ambitious pan-Islamicism, which reaches out to all the world's 1 billion Muslims.

And so bin Laden at age 22 was quick to sign up to help fellow Muslims in Afghanistan fight the godless invading Soviets in 1979. For hard-liners like bin Laden, a non-Muslim infringement on Islamic territory goes beyond the political sin of oppression; it is an offense to God that must be corrected at all costs.

At first, bin Laden mainly raised money, especially among rich Gulf Arabs, for the Afghan rebels, the mujahedin. He also brought in some of the family bulldozers and was once famously using one to dig a trench when a Soviet helicopter strafed him but missed. In the early 1980s, Abdullah Azzam founded the Maktab al Khidmat, which later morphed into an organization called al-Qaeda (the base). It provided logistical help and channeled foreign assistance to the mujahedin. Bin Laden joined his old teacher and became the group's chief financier and a major recruiter of the so-called Arab Afghans, the legions of young Arabs who left their homes in places like Egypt, Algeria and Saudi Arabia to join the mujahedin.

He was instrumental in building the training camps that prepared them to fight. Bin Laden saw combat too; how much is in dispute. During the same years, the CIA , intent on seeing a Soviet defeat in Afghanistan, was funneling arms and money to the mujahedin. Milton Bearden, who ran the covert program during its peak years—1986 to 1989—says the CIA had no direct dealings with bin Laden. But U.S. officials acknowledge that some of the aid probably ended up with bin Laden's group anyway.

In 1993, 18 U.S. soldiers, part of a contingent sent on a humanitarian mission to famine-struck Somalia, were murdered by street fighters in Mogadishu. The main lesson for bin Laden was the horrified American reaction to the deaths. Within six months, the U.S. had withdrawn from Somalia. In interviews, bin Laden has said that his forces expected the Americans to be tough like the Soviets but instead found that they were "paper tigers" who "after a few blows ran in defeat."

Bin Laden began to think big. U.S. officials suspect he may have had a financial role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center by a group of Egyptian radicals. This may have been bin Laden's first strike back at the entity he believed to be the source of so much of his own and his people's trouble. That same year, U.S. officials now believe, bin Laden began shopping for a nuclear weapon, hoping to buy one on the Russian black market. When that failed, they say, he started experimenting with chemical warfare, perhaps even testing a device. Then, in 1995, a truck bombing of a military base in Riyadh killed five Americans and two Indians. Linking bin Laden to the attack, the U.S.—along with the Saudis—pressured the Sudanese to expel him. To his dismay, they did.

With his supporters, his three wives (he is rumored to have since added a fourth) and some 10 children, bin Laden moved again to Afghanistan. There he returned full time to jihad. This time, instead of importing holy warriors, he began to export them. He turned al-Qaeda into what some have called "a Ford Foundation" for Islamic terror organizations, building ties of varying strength to groups in at least a few dozen places. He brought their adherents to his camps in Afghanistan for training, then sent them back to Egypt, Algeria, the Palestinian territories, Kashmir, the Philippines, Eritrea, Libya and Jordan. U.S. intelligence officials believe that bin Laden's camps have trained tens of thousands of fighters. Sometimes bin Laden sent his trainers out to, for instance, Tajikistan, Bosnia, Chechnya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen, according to the State Department. As a result, U.S. officials believe bin Laden's group controls or influences about 3,000 to 5,000 guerrilla fighters or terrorists in a very loose organization around the world.

Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian who was arrested entering the U.S. from Canada in December 1999 with a carful of explosives, has told interrogators that his al-Qaeda curriculum included lessons in sabotage, urban warfare and explosives. He was trained to attack power grids, airports, railroads, hotels and military installations. Visitors to al-Qaeda camps say that students receive instruction not only in using intricate maps of U.S. cities and targeted venues but also in employing scale models of potential sites for strikes. A 180-page al-Qaeda manual offers advice to "sleepers" (agents sent overseas to await missions) on how to be inconspicuous: shave your beard, wear cologne, move to newly developed neighborhoods where residents don't know one another.

As he built his syndicate, bin Laden also became more open about what he was up to. In 1996 he issued a "Declaration of Jihad." His stated goals were to overthrow the Saudi regime and drive out U.S. forces. He expanded the target with another declaration in early 1998 stating that Muslims should kill Americans, civilians included, wherever they could find them. Later that year, his operatives used car bombs against the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224, mostly Africans. Those blasts provoked a U.S. cruise-missile attack on an al-Qaeda base in Afghanistan that missed bin Laden and only burnished his image as an authentic hero to many Muslims.

Bin Laden has spoken out against Israel, which he, like many Muslims, regards as an alien and aggressive presence on land belonging to Islam. Lately, he has lauded the Palestinian uprising against Israel's continued occupation of Palestinian territories. But his main fixation remains the U.S. Officially, he is committed to preparing for a worldwide Islamic state, but for now he focuses on eradicating infidels from Islamic lands.

What would he say about the civilian men and women, the moms and dads, the children who died in New York City on September 11? He might say, as he said to ABC News in 1998, "In today's wars, there are no morals. We believe the worst thieves in the world today and the worst terrorists are the Americans. We do not have to differentiate between military or civilian. As far as we are concerned, they are all targets."

Questions

1. How did the 1993 murder of 18 American soldiers in Mogadishu lead bin Laden to "think big"?

2. Identify the key points of bin Laden's philosophy.