In the same way that Americans regarded Afghanistan as a Cold War battleground on which to fight the forces of communism, Azzam saw in Afghanistan, with its simple brave men fighting a mighty mechanised army, a way of motivating a billion Muslims across the world and the first step to recapturing past glory and all former Muslim lands.
Galvanised by Azzam’s words, Anas travelled to Peshawar and joined some mujaheddin, with whom he walked for forty days across war-torn Afghanistan. It was so hard that he lost most of his toenails, but he said afterwards: ‘I felt I was reborn when I first got there … Even though I was sick for ten days, I was so happy to be walking along with my Kalashnikov and with my brothers.’
He decided to stay in Peshawar. He married Azzam’s daughter and helped him establish the Makhtab-al-Khidamat (MK), or the Services Bureau. Bin Laden had also decided to stay, and provided much of their funding as his father owned the biggest construction company in Saudi Arabia, estimated to be worth $5 billion, and gave him a yearly stipend of at least $7 million.
Right from the start the three men realised the importance of propaganda, and from those headquarters they produced a magazine called al-Jihad. Initially a few black-and-white pages crudely stapled together, it grew into a full-colour glossy with a circulation of 70,000 throughout Muslim communities across the world. Many were distributed in the United States, where the MK established a string of offices with a headquarters in Brooklyn.
In Washington at that time a Texan Congressman, Charlie Wilson, was pounding the corridors of the Capitol extolling the bravery of Afghan ‘illiterate shepherds and tribesmen fighting with stones’ in order to persuade his colleagues to commit more funds. ‘I had everyone in Congress convinced that the mujahideen were a cause only slightly below Christianity,’ he said.5
In the same way, in Muslim communities around the world, including in America, Azzam used his magazine and speeches to create the image of an almost mythical holy warrior. Those who heard him speak say he spellbound audiences with tales of flocks of birds that flew over Afghan villages to warn of approaching Soviet helicopters; of mujaheddin almost single-handedly defeating columns of Soviet tanks; and miracles such as fighters being hit by bullets yet magically not being wounded.
Such stories, combined with the idea of recapturing a glorious past, created a powerful message to frustrated young Arabs. To further motivate them they were told that if they died in jihad they would not only be rewarded with seventy-two virgins in the afterlife, but would also enable seventy family members to go to heaven. Azzam went on recruiting tours, exhorting young Arabs to ‘join the caravan’. Agents rounded up people, picking up recruiting bonuses for doing so. The bin Laden construction company acted as a pipeline, with Osama setting up a halfway house in Jeddah and providing a stipend to the families of fighters of $300 a month. Some were just tourists going off to jihad for a week, helped by generous discounts offered by Saudi Airlines. Others became committed jihadists.
Reception committees were set up at Pakistan’s main airports. One of the greeters was Dr Umar Farooq, who at the time was a medical student at King Edward College, Lahore, and whose family was regarded as a kind of Islamist aristocracy in Pakistan. His father had set up the country’s first madrassa, and his elder brother had built the first hospital for Afghan refugees in Quetta and married the daughter of the leader of Jamaat-e-Islami, Pakistan’s largest religious party.
‘Azzam was very impressive,’ he said. ‘Whoever met him became a mujahid. I would receive the Arabs at the airport. To start with they were good people, Egyptians, Yemenis, Saudis, Kuwaitis, Sudanese, Moroccans … I gave them maps with arrows pointing to show Soviet forces heading toward the Warm Water and we would send them to Peshawar and Quetta to our reception centres from where they would be sent to all the [mujaheddin] parties.’6
Not all came to fight. The Services Bureau provided schooling, clinics and refugee care as well as running an active propaganda division. But most came for jihad, and Azzam thought these Arab fighters should be scattered throughout Afghan groups to motivate them and teach them about Islam. The majority were sent to join Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, one of the seven Afghan mujaheddin leaders, who like Azzam was a graduate of al-Azhar and a Wahhabi. Sayyaf was very close to the Saudis, in particular the intelligence chief Prince Turki al Faisal. Not only did the Saudis provide the mujaheddin with $500 million every year, that went to a Swiss bank account controlled by the US and distributed to ISI, but Prince Turki’s chief of staff Adeeb (who had once been bin Laden’s biology teacher) visited Peshawar twice a month with cash for the leaders.
After a while Dr Farooq noticed a change. ‘Initially the Arabs went to different groups but then they started to be diverted all one way to promote the Saudi kind of Islam, Wahhabism, and all went to near Jalalabad. Different sorts of people started coming, criminal people who grew these long beards.’
Many were fugitives, some of whom had been involved in radical Islamic movements at home. Countries such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia were only too happy to get rid of such people. In Peshawar they would adopt a new identity – often being known by where they came from, such as ‘al Libbi’ – the Libyan.
Milt Bearden, who was CIA station chief in Pakistan at the time, later admitted that many were criminals. ‘Egypt and many other Islamic nations found Afghanistan a convenient dumping ground for home-grown troublemakers. Egypt quietly emptied its prisons of its political activists and psychotics and sent them off to the war in Afghanistan with fondest hopes that they might never return.’
Both ISI and the Americans thought it was a good idea to broaden the cause, and turned a blind eye to the backgrounds of these additional fighters. ‘All we cared about then was defeating the Soviets,’ admitted Richard Armitage, then the Under-Secretary of Defense. ‘We weren’t thinking about Osama bin Laden. Who cared what happened in Afghanistan? We had a much greater objective. Our Afghan policy was amoral in my view,’ he added. ‘Not immoral but amoral. We had one objective, and we didn’t care what happened after that.’7
General Hamid Gul, who headed ISI from 1987 to 1989, estimated that around 3–4,000 Arabs came to join the fight. ‘The Pakistan government never objected to them coming,’ he said. ‘Princes used to come and go inside [Afghanistan] from all over the Middle East for jihad, and this was just an extension.’
Though General Gul would send his officers to talk to bin Laden, he says he never met him when he was living in Peshawar. ‘I only met him in Sudan in ’93 and ’94 when I was invited by him. Before that I used to hear about Osama from CIA officers – they used to admire him, romanticise him, they seemed enamoured of him.’
From 1985 bin Laden started spending less time fundraising at home in Saudi Arabia and more time inside Afghanistan. When he did go home to Medina, he spent his time studying military maps. ‘I hated the Russians because they took my father away from me,’ his fourth son Omar later wrote.8 One day the five-year-old Omar tried to get his father’s attention by dancing round the maps. Bin Laden was so enraged that he summoned his older sons and caned them all for allowing Omar to disturb his work.
Inside Afghanistan, bin Laden worked closely with Jalaluddin Haqqani, a powerful commander based near the south-eastern city of Khost who had become something of a folk hero. But increasingly he became convinced that what was needed was his own Arab force, rather than dispersing the Arabs among the Afghans as Azzam advocated. In 1986 a mujaheddin leader called Yunus Khalis, who was also close to Haqqani, agreed to let bin Laden set up his own camp in an area under his control. Bin Laden chose Jaji in the Tora Bora mountains, and named it al Masada, ‘the Lion’s Den’, after his own name, which meant lion.
To the Afghans it seemed an odd choice. The camp was on a pine-clad mountain and very near a Soviet base – ‘almost as if they wanted to