Accompanying bin Laden were fifty or sixty of his most fanatical followers – mostly Saudis but also Yemenis and Sudanese. In key positions he had two former Egyptian policemen: his military commander Abu Ubaidah, whose brother had been involved in the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, and his deputy Abu Hafs.
After some initial humiliations the first major engagement of these ‘Arab Afghans’ came in April 1987 when they were bombed by the Russians in what became known as the Battle of Jaji. Accounts vary of whether the bombing went on for one week or three, but Osama and his men stood their ground, even against the feared Spetsnaz, or special forces, and later claimed to have shot down one of their Hind helicopter gunships.
The stories of Jaji became legendary, and led to many young Arabs wanting to join bin Laden. The once shy young man became more assertive, producing his first promotional videos. These showed him on the back of a white horse, a deliberate reference to the Prophet on his white-winged horse Burak, as well as speaking on a walkie-talkie and firing off Kalashnikovs. The tall, lanky millionaire who had given up his privileged life to fight with the Afghans became a Saudi hero. ‘He’d give you the clothes off his back,’ said Anas.
Bin Laden’s first wife Najwa was horrified when her husband came back from Afghanistan to their home in Jeddah with ‘red raised scars all over his body’ and boasting he had learned to fly a helicopter. She was his cousin from Syria and they had married in 1974, when she was just fourteen and he seventeen, and she might reasonably have expected an easy life after marrying into one of the richest families in the Middle East.
Instead she found a fanatic who refused toys to his children, or to let his family have air conditioning to relieve the sweltering desert heat. Yet initially she was proud. ‘Everyone was astonished that a wealthy bin Laden son actually risked death or injury on the front lines,’ she later wrote. ‘I heard silly talk that many people wanted to inhale the very air Osama breathed.’ She was less impressed when he took their eldest son Abdullah to Jaji to experience jihad at the age of just nine.
Bin Laden became known as ‘the Sheikh’, and his growing reputation led to inevitable rivalry with his former mentor Azzam, though he continued to finance MK. Then one day, visiting some of his wounded fighters in the Kuwaiti Red Crescent hospital in Peshawar, bin Laden met an Egyptian eye doctor called Ayman al Zawahiri.
Bin Laden had long been anti-American, his wife Najwa complaining that his children were not allowed to have Western products such as Coca-Cola or television. But his focus had always been on expelling infidels from Afghanistan, and he had never talked of opposing the Saudi monarchy or other Arab regimes.
That changed after he met Zawahiri. At thirty-five, Zawahiri was seven years older than bin Laden and much more of an intellectual, and he gradually took Azzam’s place as his mentor. The two men made an unlikely pair, one tall and lean, the other portly and bespectacled, but they found much in common. The Egyptian had grown close to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, but was otherwise condescending about the Afghans, who he did not think knew the first thing about Islam. To him they were simply tools. He agreed with bin Laden about the need to create an all-Arab force, and had gathered around him a small cadre of well-educated doctors and engineers from Egypt, many of whom had already been imprisoned and tortured for their beliefs. By then several of bin Laden’s key men were Egyptian radicals.
In May 1988 the Soviets began pulling out troops from Afghanistan in a phased withdrawal that would take nine months, and the two men began looking to the future and what they could do next. In August 1988 they officially formed an organisation called al Qaeda, which meant ‘the Base’, the hub for what was to be the first terrorism multinational, and whose members would pledge the bayat, an oath of allegiance to bin Laden.
After the defeat of the Soviet Union in 1989, and the failure of the mujaheddin to take over Afghanistan, bin Laden left Peshawar disillusioned, and eventually set up operations in Sudan. In 1996 the government there expelled him under American pressure, and he flew back to Afghanistan. He made Tora Bora his base, moving in with his three wives and twelve of his seventeen children, and joined by many al Qaeda fighters.
His son Omar hated it there, and later described surviving on eggs, rice and potatoes, with no electricity or running water – hardly the life of a Saudi millionaire. Bin Laden got to know the mountains well, taking hikes with his sons, and learning centuries-old trails used by smugglers and traders into Pakistan.
In the following years, his men stockpiled weapons and fortified an area about six miles square between the Wazir and Agam valleys. Some of their caves were reported to be concealed 350 feet inside the granite peaks. It was, in other words, an obvious hide-out and escape route.
Gary Berntsen, a tall man with cold blue eyes, had been in the last CIA team to go into Afghanistan before 9/11 – a trip to the Northern Alliance in 2000, though they were quickly pulled out and he ended up in Latin America. After the attack he was sent back in late October 2001, his team replacing that of the other Gary, Gary Schroen, in northern Afghanistan. By mid-November the capital had fallen, and he was running CIA operations from a Kabul guesthouse when the first reports came in that bin Laden was in Tora Bora. He went straight to Major General Dell Dailey, the US special forces commander at Bagram, and asked for an SF team to go down there together with some of his agents. When I met Berntsen afterwards, he told me Dailey had said, ‘We’re not going to – it’s too disorganised, too dangerous, too this, too that.’9
Berntsen decided that if the special forces wouldn’t go, he would mount his own operation. ‘Bin Laden killed 3,000 Americans in my city New York, and I wanted him dead. Simple as that,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t going to ask for permission, because I knew I wouldn’t get it. I knew if I didn’t do anything bin Laden would escape the country with his entire force, so I just improvised.’
He sent a small team of eight men to Jalalabad, where they began coordinating with local commanders. In late November four of them with ten Afghan guides set off into the mountains, scaling 10,000-foot peaks. Their equipment was packed onto mules (one of which was blown up when an RPG round on its back detonated). They knew they faced an enemy who outnumbered them by perhaps hundreds to one. ‘I sent four guys into those mountains alone to look for a thousand people,’ said Berntsen. ‘It was a very, very large risk. If they’d been found they would have been tortured and killed, and I would probably have been fired.’
After two days they spotted bin Laden’s camp, complete with trucks, command posts and machine-gun nests. They estimated there were between six and seven hundred people there. ‘We got them,’ they radioed Berntsen, who punched the air in delight. ‘One word kept pounding in my head: revenge. Let’s do this right and finish them off in the mountains.’
The agents mounted their laser marking devices on tripods and began lighting up targets using lasers invisible to the naked eye. To be doubly sure, one of them punched coordinates into a device that looked like a gigantic palm pilot. For the next fifty-six hours they directed strike after strike by B1 and B2 bombers and F14 Tomcats onto the al Qaeda encampment. The battle of Tora Bora had begun. But there was a fatal flaw. They might have the world’s most overwhelming air power and sophisticated communications system on their side, but at the end of the day they were just four Americans against perhaps a thousand men.
As the bombardment went on, bin Laden and his men fled further into the mountains. A twelve-man special forces team was sent in, as well as some crack SAS operatives. The plan was to pin the al Qaeda fighters against the mountains, using Afghan forces to trap them in a ‘kill-box’ between three promontories. Three rival local commanders who between them controlled most of Jalalabad were hired – Hazrat Ali, Haji Zahir and Haji Zaman Ghamsharik – and a day rate of $100–150 per soldier agreed. ‘I raised an army with a couple of million dollars,’ says Berntsen. But he doubted that they were really committed.
Hazrat Ali – or ‘General Ali’, as he called himself – had fought the Soviets as a teenager in the 1980s, and later joined the Taliban for a time. Haji Zahir was the nephew of Abdul Haq, who had been executed by the Taliban the previous month. Haji Zaman was a wealthy drug smuggler who had also fought the Soviets,