The Most Wanted Man In The World

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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 also funneling money and arms 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 1989, the exhausted Soviets finally quit Afghanistan. With his mentor Azzam dead at the hands of an assassin and his job seemingly done, bin Laden went home to Jidda. The war had stiffened him. He became increasingly indignant over the corruption of the Saudi regime and what he considered its insufficient piety. His outrage boiled over in 1990. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and threatened Saudi Arabia, bin Laden informed the royal family that he and his Arab Afghans were prepared to defend the kingdom. The offer was spurned. Instead, the Saudis invited in U.S. troops for the first time ever. Like many other Muslims, bin Laden was offended by the Army's presence, with its Christian and Jewish soldiers, its rock music, its women who drove and wore pants. Saudi Arabia has a singular place among Islamic countries as the cradle of Islam and as home to Mecca and Medina, which are barred to non-Muslims.

When bin Laden began to write treatises against the Saudi regime, King Fahd had him confined to Jidda. So bin Laden fled the country, winding up in Sudan. That country was by then under the control of radical Muslims headed by Hassan al-Turabi, a cleric bin Laden had met in Afghanistan who had impressed him with the need to overthrow the secular regimes in the Arab world and install purely Islamic governments. Bin Laden would go on to marry al-Turabi's niece. Eventually the Saudis, troubled by bin Laden's growing extremism, revoked his citizenship. His family renounced him as well. After relatives visited him in Sudan to exhort him to stop agitating against Fahd's regime, he told a reporter, he apologized to them because he knew they'd been forced to do it.

In Sudan, bin Laden established a variety of businesses, building a major road, producing sunflower seeds, exporting goatskins. But he was seething. He was also gathering around him many of the old Arab Afghans who, like him, returning home after the war, faced suspicion from, if not detention by, their governments.

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. Bin Laden later claimed that some of the Arab Afghans were involved. The main thing to bin Laden, however, 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.