(Part of UPI's Special Report on Sept. 11)
WASHINGTON (UPI) -- No sooner did Saddam Hussein's legions invade Kuwait Aug. 2, 1990, than Osama bin Laden, then a 33-year-old legendary Saudi war hero, asked for an urgent meeting with the Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Turki bin Faisal.
There was no need to ask the Americans to liberate Kuwait, bin Laden explained, because he would do the job with his al Qaida guerrillas, veterans of the war they had fought with Afghan mujahedin to liberate Afghanistan from Soviet occupation.
After a quarter of a century as head of the kingdom's intelligence branch, Turki resigned unexpectedly three weeks before Sept. 11 to "travel, read and enjoy life with no official duties."
Recalling his encounter with bin Laden, he said, "The whole idea of a few thousand former guerrillas in flat terrain, with no place to hide, pushing Saddam's armored divisions out of Kuwait struck me as laughable, and we turned him down."
That is when bin Laden became convinced the United States had entrapped Saddam into invading Kuwait as a pretext to occupy the Gulf. As he saw it, there also was collusion between the House of Saud and the United States to turn the oil riches of the Gulf into a U.S. protectorate.
When bin Laden saw hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops move into Saudi Arabia --- women soldiers and Jews were the final straw --- he resolved to punish the House of Saud.
He recorded his denunciations of the royal family's "betrayal" on cassettes that were shipped to mosques all over the kingdom. They were music to the Wahhabi clergy that shared his hatred of the heathen American "desecrators of Islam's holy cities" of Mecca and Medina, and his contempt for the royals' extravagant excesses. This was the same method used in the 1970s by Ayatollah Khomeini, then in exile in Iraq, to undermine the Shah's regime in Iran.
Bin Laden was warned by both Crown Prince Abdullah and the head of the bin Laden family, his brother Bakr, to cease and desist under penalty of imprisonment, He then left for Yemen, whence his father had come as a laborer before going on to found Saudi Arabia's largest construction company, and continued a steady stream of incendiary cassette sermons for Saudi mosques.
Bin Laden had launched al Qaida --- "The Base" in Arabic --- in 1988 as a response to Saudi and other Arab families anxious about their loved ones gone missing in Afghanistan. It organized proper documentation of all volunteers from some 50 Muslim countries, where they had fought and died, as well as all visitors, from donors to next of kin.
Now al Qaida soon would form the nucleus of bin Laden's transnational terrorist organization.
His assets were frozen in 1992, but not before he had transferred some $300 million out of Saudi Arabia, his share of his father's inheritance. From Yemen he moved to Sudan where he helped that country's fundamentalist regime train terrorists in three camps in northern Sudan to attack U.S. interests in the region. Bin Laden's official cover was the legitimate business he had set up, including a tannery, two large farms and a major road construction company. He also had several hundred "Afghan Arab" vets working for him.
On Feb. 26, 1993, the World Trade Center was bombed, followed in early October by the killing of 18 U.S. Marines in Mogadishu, Somalia. The suspicion was and still is that the Somali terrorists had been trained in Sudan.
Sudan then came under enormous international pressure for hosting bin Laden and his camp followers. The United States, Britain, France, Germany, and the principal Arab countries were all involved in the diplomatic campaign. The Saudis revoked bin Laden's citizenship on April 9, 1994.
In February 1995, Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing, was captured in Pakistan and extradited to the United States. He is financially linked to bin Laden and had stayed at a bin Laden-financed guesthouse while in Pakistan.
The next month, bin Laden told a French journalist, "I did not fight the Soviet communists in Afghanistan while forgetting the peril from the West. After forcing the Soviets to leave Afghanistan, I concluded we had to fight on all fronts against American oppression. This is an open war up to the end, until victory."
On Aug. 3, 1995, bin Laden issued an "Open Letter to King Fahd," in which he outlined major grievances against the Saudi monarchy's lack of commitment to Sunni Islam: its inability to conduct a viable defense policy without non-Muslim American imperialists, the squandering of public funds and oil revenue. He also called for a guerrilla campaign to drive U.S. forces out of the kingdom.
On Nov. 13 of that year five Americans are killed in the truck bombing of a U.S.-operated Saudi National Guard training Center in Riyadh. Bin Laden praised the attack but denied involvement.
"Now the people of Saudi Arabia understand the speeches of the ulema (Islamic clergy) and they know our country has become an American colony," he said. "(Now) they know their real enemy is America."
By May 1996, the Sudan caved and asked where the United States wanted bin Laden deported. The United States said it didn't care where he went -- missing a unique opportunity to kidnap him -- and bin Laden elected to move to Afghanistan, settling in the Jalalabad region in eastern part of the country. The Taliban was completing its conquest of the country after five years of civil war following the Soviet withdrawal.
On June 25, 1996, shortly after bin Laden had returned to Afghanistan, the Khobar Towers terrorist bombing, planned before bin Laden left Sudan, took place in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killing 19 U.S. service personnel and wounding scores.
On Aug. 23, 1996, bin Laden issued his "Declaration of War Against the Americans Who Occupy the Land of the two Holy Mosques." This is when he first bracketed America and Israel "killing the weaker men, women and children in the Muslim world."
"We have seen this in the recent Qana massacre in Lebanon, and the death of more than 600,000 Iraqi children because of food and medicine shortages that resulted from boycotts and sanctions ... also the withholding of arms from the Muslims of Bosnia, leaving them prey to the Christian Serbs who massacred and raped in a manner not seen in contemporary history. Nor should we forget the dropping of H-bombs on cities with the premeditated purpose of killing entire populations of children and women and the elderly as was done in Hiroshima and Nagasaki," bin Laden wrote.
In March 1997, bin Laden told CNN that victory over the Soviets in Afghanistan also destroyed "the myth of the superpower, not only in my mind but also in the minds of all Muslims. Slumber and fatigue vanished as did the terror of the U.S. superpower as America kept referring to itself in the media."
In February 1998, bin Laden held a news conference in which he called for attacks against all Americans, both civilian and military. He also announced the creation of the "International Islamic Front for Jihad Against the Jews and the Crusaders," in association with extremist groups in Egypt, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
"The fatwa to kill the Americans and their allies -- civilians and military -- is an individual duty for every Muslim, who can do it in any country in which it is possible, in order to liberate the Al Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque in Mecca from their grip," he said.
In May 1998, bin Laden gave an interview to ABC's John Miller in a remote mountaintop camp, which went over much the same ground.
Two months later, al Qaida truck-bombed the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224, including 12 Americans, and wounding 4,500. Bin Laden denied al Qaida was responsible but said two of the suspects were "men we respect and hold in the highest esteem." Those who did it, he explained, were simply obeying the fatwa issued by the "International Islamic Front for Jihad" against Jews and Americans.
The Clinton administration retaliated with cruise missile attacks against terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and at a pharmaceutical plant north of Khartoum. The United States said the plant was tied to the production of chemical weapons for bin Laden but later this intelligence was judged to be faulty.
When asked by Time magazine, on Dec. 23, 1998, whether he was trying to acquire chemical and nuclear weapons, bin Laden said acquiring weapons for the defense of Muslims is "a religious duty. If I have indeed acquired these weapons, then I thank God for enabling me to do so. And if I seek to acquire these weapons, I am carrying out my duty. It would be a sin for Muslims not to try to possess these weapons that would prevent the infidels from inflicting harm on Muslims."
On Jan. 16, 1999, the U.S. Attorney's office filed its most complete indictment to date of bin Laden and 11 other members of his terrorist organization. The al Qaida terror network was in the dock as a worldwide conspiracy to murder Americans. The indictment also accused al Qaida of concealing the activities of the co-conspirators by, among other things, establishing front companies, providing false ID and travel documents, engaging in encrypted correspondence, and providing false information to a number of countries.
On May 29, 2001, four months before Sept. 11, four followers of bin Laden were found guilty of charges that stemmed from the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, including murder, conspiracy and perjury, after a nine-week trial during which prosecutors called 90 witnesses, including al Qaida informants.
Osama bin Laden was born in Riyadh in 1957, the 17th of 52 -- some say 54 -- children sired by the late Muhammad, Saudi Arabia's wealthiest construction magnate, worth between $10 billion and $15 billion, and the most prominent non-royal family. Osama is the only brother with a Saudi mother. The others share Syrian, Lebanese, Jordanian, Egyptian and Yemeni mothers. The head of the Egyptian group, for example, also is the manager of the bin Laden Group in Egypt, which employs some 40,000 people.
King Abdul Aziz, the founder of the kingdom, was so impressed with the royal palace the elder bin Laden had built he gave him the contract for the renovation of Mecca. Bin Laden later obtained exclusive rights to all religious construction -- Saudi Arabia's road to fabulous wealth.
Among the 12 sons of his four official wives, Osama is the only one who was entirely educated at home, completing his Koranic studies and graduating from King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah in 1979 with a degree in civil engineering. A year later, he moved to the Pakistani tribal areas to provide logistical and humanitarian aid to the mujahedin fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
Osama persuaded many wealthy Saudi families to contribute to the anti-Communist cause. He also funded the passage of Arab and other Muslim volunteers from some two dozen countries to join the ranks of the guerrillas.
By 1984, according to his CIA biography, bin Laden was running a front organization known as Maktab al-Khidamar -- MAK -- that funneled money, arms and fighters from the entire Muslim world into the Afghan war. MAK was the creation of ISI, Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Agency, which coordinated about $1 billion a year from both the CIA and Prince Turki's Saudi intelligence agency. MAK became al Qaida in 1988.
The CIA found Afghan Arabs easier to read than the mujahedin. Treachery and double-dealing became the norm with native Afghans. For the CIA, bin Laden and his Afghan Arabs from Pakistan, Palestinian refugee camps all over the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia were easier to deal with.
Today, Osama bin Laden -- dead or alive -- has assumed the role of a Muslim Che Guevara, the legendary, Argentine-born black beret hero of Fidel Castro's revolution who was captured and executed in Bolivia in 1967. Black chalk poster sketches of Guevara still hang in college dorms the world over. Similar posters of bin Laden are found all over the tribal regions of Pakistan that form a porous border of 1,300 miles with Afghanistan.
One of Pakistan's most prominent tribal leaders who also is a national political figure swears his loyal followers -- "my 600,000 pairs of eyes and ears" -- know "fact certain" that bin Laden and some 50 followers crossed into Pakistan from the Tora Bora mountain region last Dec. 9.
Ajmal Khattak, the head of the Khattak tribe, also says bin Laden and his entourage were hiding in Peshawar, a sprawling slum city of 3.5 million, until mid-August when they moved to Karachi, a port city of 12 million on the Arabian Sea.
Both Peshawar and Karachi contain hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of bin Laden sympathizers. Several thousand Taliban officials and al Qaida operatives presently are scattered in Pakistan's four provinces. Osama has been the favorite first name for Pakistani baby boys since Sept. 11.
Pakistani security forces could not go through either city to capture bin Laden without triggering a blood bath, which would jeopardize President Pervez Musharraf's plan for national elections Oct. 10.
Pakistan's ISI presumably knows bin Laden's whereabouts. ISI also is the organization that nurtured the Taliban regime in Afghanistan between 1992, when it began its quest for power, and 1996 when Taliban took over Kabul. The organization employs a number of bin Laden admirers. One of its former director generals, Hamid Gul, does not conceal his admiration for bin Laden.
One Pakistani editor, speaking not for attribution, said, "Assuming OBL is alive, and the authorities captured him, they would have to turn him over to the Americans. And if that happened, Washington, otherwise occupied in Afghanistan and Iraq, would lose interest in Pakistan and forget about all its post-Sept. 11 commitments."
Al Qaida still is a worldwide terror network. It lost its training camps in Afghanistan but the organization essentially is intact. It has operatives throughout the Middle East, Europe, North and South America. Gul says he knows some of them.
"They wear business suits," he explained last year, "they belong to the best clubs. Some are computer engineers, even computer scientists and they stay away from mosques and Islamic centers."
There is little doubt in western and Arab intelligence communities another Sept. 11 is being planned, most probably with chemical or biological weapons of mass destruction. Nor is there much doubt cyber terrorism will be part of the next terror scenario. The successor generation of terrorists knows a hand on a mouse can be far more lethal than a finger on a trigger.
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(This analysis is part of UPI's Special Report on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks).
