Holy warrior with US in his sights

The Sunday London Times

1998, August 16

Edition 5ln SUN 16 AUG 1998, Page News 10

Holy warrior with US in his sights

Focus;Bomb;Profile;Osama Bin Laden

MARIE COLVIN

OVERSEAS NEWS 

America's top suspect for the African bombings is a millionaire with a mission to attack America from his cave hideout, writes Marie Colvin Mountain cedars hide the mouth of the cave. Inside, in rooms hollowed into the rock face, computer screens glow, fax machines whirr, messages are sent via satellite telephone. This is where Osama Bin Laden, the Saudi multimillionaire fundamentalist, conducts his holy war against the United States.

The cave, at the end of a narrow dirt road through a mountain range above the city of Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan, is a nerve centre of state-of-the-art communications linking him to a network of Islamic fundamentalists that stretches across the Middle East, Asia, Europe, the United States and Africa.

Western intelligence believes that he e-mailed instructions from here to his supporters on the timing of a 1995 car bombing in Riyadh that killed five

Americans.

The State Department considers Bin Laden to be the prime suspect in the twin bombings of the American embassies in Nairobi and Dares Salaam nine days ago that killed 256 people, including 12 Americans, and wounded almost 5,000.

Israel takes its suspicions a large step further. It believes he is using his contacts and great wealth to get his hands on what the West most fears: an "Islamic" nuclear bomb.

Laden is known to have three bases in Afghanistan, including two "showpiece" tent encampments in Kandahar and Logar to which western journalists are taken. The "bat cave" is his real headquarters. It has been hollowed back into the rock face so that it extends to three rooms. In Bin Laden's bed room - where he sleeps with a Kalashnikov rifle which he claims to have captured from a slain Soviet general - three uncomfortable beds with wool blankets and thin mattresses are pushed up against the raw shelving that holds a library of richly bound Islamic texts.

A second, smaller room contains his arsenal of Kalashnikovs, mortars and ammunition. The largest room has a desk and two laptop computers connected to the world by a satellite telephone.

Bin Laden, who inherited a fortune of $200m-$400m, is in touch not just with fellow fundamentalists but with western financiers as well. He directs an extensive stock portfolio and makes investments through front companies in construction and other legitimate businesses.

Bin Laden may preach a virulent anti-western line but his jihad seems to rely heavily on western technology.

His life appears to be spartan. He and his fighters eat meals of gritty bread, cheese and tea. A recent visitor found Bin Laden and his entourage sharing a dinner of four fried eggs between 12 people.

A generator supplies electricity, but Bin Laden always keeps a torch at hand in case of blackouts. The cave is warmed by a jerry-built system of hot water pipes.

Anti-aircraft guns are stationed on the slopes above the cave, which is guarded by a force of loyal fighters from around the Islamic world - Saudis, Kuwaitis, Yemenis, Afghanis - most of them veterans of the successful guerrilla war that drove the Russians out of Afghanistan.

About a kilometre down the dirt road to Jalalabad is a checkpoint manned by fighters of the Taliban, the Islamic movement that controls most of Afghanistan. Bin Laden has never had a greater need for his ring of defence. American agents are hunting for him; so is Israeli intelligence.

The Americans are not yet pointing a formal finger of accusation. But Bin Laden combines a virulent hatred of the United States with vast wealth and a network of acolytes trained in terror.

Earlier this year, Bin Laden issued a fatwa calling on Muslims around the world to fight to expel the Americans from the holy land of Saudi Arabia, and eventually from the Islamic world. American intelligence believes he is implicated in at least three similar operations against American targets: the 1993 blast at the World Trade Center in New York; the 1995 Riyadh car bombing; and the 1996 truck bomb that killed 19 American soldiers in the Khobar barracks.

He makes little effort to hide his actions. "You should go through my track record," Bin Laden said by satellite telephone last week to a contact in Pakistan, who asked to remain anonymous. "I always kill Americans because they kill us. Look at al-Khobar, al-Riyadh and Mogadishu (where, in 1993 a mob of Somalis killed 18 American soldiers; Bin Laden is believed to have helped to arm them). When we attack Americans, we don't harm other people."

His statement seems to have been intended as a half-hearted denial of any role in the east African blasts. But western intelligence thinks otherwise. It is persuaded that he had a hand, at least, in the planning of the two attacks.

OSAMA BIN LADEN was one of 20 children of Mohamed Bin Laden, a self-made man who initially built walls for King Abdel Aziz, the founder of the Saud dynasty, and went on - with the king's patronage - to construction projects in the pilgrim cities of Mecca and Medina and built about 80% of Saudi Arabia's roads as the country's oil wealth grew.

By the time Osama was born in 1957, his father was one of the wealthiest commoners in Saudi Arabia. When the old man crashed his private plane and was killed in the late 1970s, an elder son, Bakr, took over the company and Osama became a wealthy young man.

Although the family was religious, Osama was not remembered as particularly zealous until - studying economics and business administration at university - he met members of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Egyptian group that advocated creating an Islamic society and rejecting western influence. Within days of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, the 22-year-old Osama left for Afghanistan to join the fight against the Russians. He took with him a team of construction workers and equipment and spent most of the war building roads for the mujaheddin and constructing caves for ammunition dumps. The war was seen as a holy mission against the communists and his conservative relatives supported the cause.

According to an intelligence source, Bin Laden also had contact with the CIA, which was training, financing and attempting to direct the volunteers from all over the Islamic world to join the jihad against the Russian invaders. When the 10-year war ended, these veterans went home fired by a dangerous fusion of victory, virulent Islamic zeal, the best training in the world and an incipient hatred that turned against their American paymasters.

They brought their expertise to some of the most violent anti-western groups in the Middle East. The CIA calls it "blowback". Bin Laden has maintained close ties to the "Afghanis" throughout the Middle East.

Bin Laden moved to Sudan, where he helped the Islamic regime build a strategic road. His family disowned him and the Saudi government cancelled his passport. In 1996 Sudan came under pressure from the Americans to deport him and he returned to Afghanistan, taking with him a coterie of loyal fighters and continued control over his fortune.

"He is not hiding his money in socks in a cave somewhere," said an intelligence analyst. "His money is working." He earns millions of pounds

annually from his 53% stake in Sudan's export of a natural gum used in western food products. But investments are hard to trace because he works through front companies and rarely communicates directly.

Western intelligence believes Bin Laden is using the investments to fund a terrorist network that is unlike any seen before. He personifies the new face of what Harvey Kushner, a terrorism expert from Long Island University who was consulted by Washington on the embassy bombings, calls "transnational" terrorism, in which agents of numerous nationalities operate in shifting alliances all over the world. They are far harder to track because, unlike the terrorists of the 1970s or 1980s, they have no fixed organisation or state sponsor.

A group planning an operation may use him as a sort of broker, asking for finance and for help in the logistics, or he may mastermind his own op eration. "These guys have no hierarchical structure, so you can't infiltrate them," Kushner said. "You could compare investigating these new millennium terrorist groups to trying to take a picture of a constellation of stars. Only in the case of these groups, by the time you develop the picture the constellation changes."

AS THE search-and-rescue teams wound down in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam last week, the focus shifted to the investigation. Burnt-out cars and shreds of metal were gathered and meticulously laid out in a car park 80 yards from the Nairobi embassy, where teams of FBI agents pored over the debris.

Experts said they believed it most likely that Semtex had been used. Sheila Horan, the FBI agent in charge of the Nairobi investigation, refused to comment yesterday on the type of explosive that had been used. "We have returned potential evidence to FBI headquarters and that is going to give us a better indication, but under no circumstances would I make a statement that it was

Semtex or any other explosive," she said.

America has bitter memories of attacks against its citizens around the world. It knows that finding and punishing the perpetrators is an extraordinarily difficult, sometimes impossible task.

If Bin Laden and his network were behind the bombings of the two embassies, they show that he has at his disposal teams of highly skilled, technically proficient and ruthless killers.

Although investigators have focused on Bin Laden as the most likely suspect, however, they will not make the mistake of assuming his responsibility without concrete evidence.

CIA investigators are to travel to Pakistan question a man who is alleged to have confessed to planning the two outrages. The man, identified as Mohammed Sadique, 32, was arrested after trying to enter Afghanistan from Pakistan.

The spread of Islamic fundamentalism and the hatred of America for its support of Israel and "corrupting" influence on the Islamic world means the list of those who would like to mount such an attack is daunting. Although Iran under Mohammad Khatami, its new and more pragmatic president, has shown signs of moderating its fierce antagonism to the "Great Satan", intelligence analysts do not rule out the possibility that a faction of radicals within the Tehran regime that opposes Khatami's rapprochement to the West could have been involved in the operation.

The radicals would know full well that any evidence of Iranian involvement in the explosions in east Africa would put paid to the hesitant warming of relations which they loathe.

In February, Bin Laden met Yehia Safawi, a senior member of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, at which the two are believed to have agreed to train Muslim extremists and possibly co-ordinate efforts, despite the antipathy between the Taliban and Iran.

A threat by the Islamic jihad in Egypt to attack American targets - issued because the United States was behind the arrest and deportation to Egypt of three Islamic jihad members who had gone to Albania to join the Kosovars fighting Serbian forces - has been judged unlikely because it came only a week before the attacks. Such operations take months of planning. Investigators remain suspicious, however, as the Egyptian Islamic jihad, which was responsible for the assassination of Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian president, is known to have close ties to Bin Laden.

Now Bin Laden is suspected of paying Pounds 2m to an intermediary in the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan as part of a two-year quest for his own tactical nuclear weapon. According to Israeli military intelligence, he turned to Kazakhstan because it has a substantial Muslim population. The Israeli sources said Bin Laden was looking for a tactical nuclear weapon, or "suitcase bombs", the weapon every intelligence agency dreads falling into the hands of a terrorist.

So worried were the Israelis that they sent one of their cabinet members to Kazakhstan to try to head off Bin Laden's efforts. Western intelligence experts said they were not surprised by the attempt, but did not believe Bin Laden would be successful. "It's true to form," said David Long, an American counterintelligence expert formerly with the State Department. "People like Bin Laden, who are fanatical and have a lot of money, can be fanciful. It would be virtually impossible for him to succeed in overcoming the difficulty in putting together a nuclear weapon and making it work."

For several months American intelligence officials have been monitoring Bin Laden's movements inside Afghanistan from the Pakistani frontier town of Peshawar. There was also debate last week about whether an American commando team could seize or kill the fugitive financier should he be accused of a role in the east African bombings.

However, an intelligence official ruled out such an operation. Plucking a well guarded terrorist from such a hostile, remote country as Afghanistan was no simple mission, even with the co-operation of Pakistan, said the source. "It would be very hard even for the best trained unit. You can't go roaming around in Afghanistan without being noticed." Bari Atwan, the editor of Al-Qods, a London-based Arabic newspaper, is one of the few outsiders to visit the "bat cave". Bin Laden was entirely at home there, Atwan said, and he outlined for Atwan a set of goals that can be interpreted as a chilling harbinger of the east African bombings. "We saw the Riyadh and al-Khobar bombings as a sufficient signal for people of intelligence among American decision-makers to avoid the real battle between the nation of Islam and the American forces, but it seems they didn't understand the signal," Bin Laden said. "Military people are not unaware that preparations for major operations take a certain amount of time, unlike minor operations. If we wanted small actions, the matter would have been easily carried out. But the nature of the battle calls for operations of a specific type that will make an impact on the enemy, and this, of course, calls for excellent preparation."

Atwan said Bin Laden was committed to his aim of driving the Americans out of Saudi Arabia and ultimately the Middle East. The world's most wanted man became almost tearful when he spoke of the presence of "infidels" on the land of Mecca and Medina. "He said his dream is to die a martyr," Atwan said. "And I believed him."