The Saudi national, whose extremist organization has come under investigation following Tuesday’s aerial attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, is more of a manager than operational militant, overseeing a loosely linked chain of terrorists and supporters.
“He is a manager and an organizer,” said Dan Byman, a terrorism expert with the Rand Corp. outside of Washington. “He makes sure people are on track.”
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He has recruited and trained scores of terrorists, some of whom have remained loyal to his cause while others became disaffected and left. Trial testimony showed that Bin Laden often refused to pay his operatives.
Experts say that the level of organization required for Tuesday’s attack, and the precise coordination among hijackers and planes, are all strong suggestions that the plot sprung from within his terror group. For years, Bin Laden has vowed to drive the U.S. military out of the Mideast, and to halt what he calls the evil Western influence.
In the three years since Bin Laden operatives plotted and participated in the bombings of two American embassies in east Africa, the nature of the network of terrorists operating under Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda banner may have changed.
In recent months, Bin Laden has combined his command with members of the Egyptian group Islamic Jihad, who have been playing a larger role in Al Qaeda’s activities from Afghanistan, according to terrorism experts.
These experts say that Bin Laden’s group is becoming more diffuse and unpredictable, supporting distant sympathizers in places such as Yemen, Algeria and Sudan. “I think that somehow the American authorities have made a mistake by concentrating too much on his personality in trying to . . . draw a picture in which he’s standing on the head of a pyramid,” said Reuven Paz, an Israeli scholar and terrorism expert. “His organization is acting much more like a front for six, seven other groups that are acting on the same ideology, with the same object.”
Bin Laden hardly inspired the image of a guerrilla leader when he joined up with Arabs and Muslims drawn to Afghanistan in the early 1980s in the struggle to drive the Soviet Union from that country. He came from one of Saudi Arabia’s wealthiest families, its money earned in construction work done throughout the Middle East. He reportedly was the youngest of 24 brothers in the family.
His family fortune opened doors for him among the fighters, who were largely drawn from the Arab world. In no time, he became a close associate of Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian intellectual who created an organization that would recruit Muslim volunteers for the Afghan war.
Bin Laden reportedly separated with Azzam in a few years. Rather than focusing on the struggle in Afghanistan, Bin Laden reportedly saw the need to spread the jihad, or struggle, across the Arab world and other places where Muslims were threatened. In 1988, Bin Laden set up Al Qaeda, or “the base” in Arabic, as the instrument for launching a global war of terrorism.
After the Soviets left Afghanistan in 1989, the future for Al Qaeda was unclear. Azzam died in a mysterious car bombing, and there was no new front for the Afghan Arabs, as the thousands of volunteers who came to Afghanistan were called. Bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia and his family’s business.
But the seeds were set for the organization’s return. When the volunteers returned home to the Arab world, they brought with them a new religious fervor and military skills.
Since 1999, Bin Laden has lived in Afghanistan, considered by some as a hero, and protected by the government, which has refused to turn him over the U.S.
In the last few years, his followers have directed their fury toward one major target, the West, and toward decapitating “the snake,” as Bin Laden has referred to the U.S. In 1998, he issued a fatwa, or religious declaration, calling for the killing of Americans anywhere in the world.
“Very few groups could put this together,” said Byman, referring to Tuesday’s attacks. “But being able to preserve secrecy and with such a large number of people involved, those are skills of Bin Laden.”