The CEO of Terror Inc.
Osama bin Laden's corporation is unique. Its only product is mayhem
On a windswept hilltop in the city of Kandahar, Afghanistan, a nervous Saudi son wed the daughter of a former Egyptian cop. Like a medieval prince, Mohammed bin Laden very likely took his bride not for love but out of expedience. The bride's father, Mohammed Atef, is a member of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a band of extremists best known for its 1981 assassination of Anwar Sadat. The groom's father is now the world's most wanted man: Osama bin Laden, leader of the al Qaeda terror network.
The simple wedding this year was more than the union of two families. It heralded the fusion of two of the world's top terror organizations. The merger has transformed al Qaeda, fostering new discipline among a loose association of terrorist organizations from more than 60 countries. This potent new "holding company"--as Secretary of State Colin Powell put it--even goes by a new name. But the group is so shadowy that American intelligence sources cannot agree on what to call it: Some say al Qaeda Jihad (or Base of the Holy War) while others believe it is now al Qaeda Jadid (which means the New Base).
Whatever the name, the violent network bin Laden nourished is a slippery target for U.S. intelligence, which has been trying to understand how the group matured from a dangerous but erratic gang into a terror juggernaut. With its attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, al Qaeda proved it can orchestrate spectacularly destructive attacks, plan and finance several campaigns at once, and carry out missions with near-military precision.
But there is another side to the organization: Captured al Qaeda operatives describe a cash-strapped organization riven by internal strife, whose operations were often bungled by blunders or incompetence. Still, the world of Islamic terror has come far since the days of al Qaeda associate Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, the Pakistani engineer who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993. One of his men, after all, was arrested because he tried to claim his deposit on the rented van used in the attack.
"Infidels." Yousef's near miss signaled a new age of terror. The bombers did not belong to a formal group but shared a fundamentalist ideology that called for the creation of strict religious states. They demanded that the West leave Islamic homelands. And they were willing to strike anywhere on the globe. That first attack in New York killed six and injured over 1,000. Other plots were foiled: Yousef tried to assassinate Pope John Paul II and Bill Clinton and to blast 11 U.S. airliners out of the sky on a single day in 1995.
Yousef's campaign shook U.S. officials, who soon discovered a network of Islamic militants around the globe. "It was much worse than we ever imagined," recalls Bob Blitzer, who headed the FBI's first unit on Islamic terrorism in 1994. "And the more we investigated, the more bin Laden's name popped up."
Bin Laden harnessed the rage that Yousef tapped--and made it more lethal. The 17th son of a Saudi construction magnate, he ventured into Afghanistan in the early 1980s to fight the Soviets. He helped fund and train a kind of Islamic foreign legion, and he learned the ways of guerrilla war. Later, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, bin Laden offered his militias to the Saudi defense; the king invited U.S. forces instead. Enraged at the presence of "infidels" in Islam's holiest land, bin Laden turned his wrath on America. With his military experience, a personal fortune, and a roster of battle-hardened militant Islamists, bin Laden forged an extraordinary network of terrorists, allying himself with groups from Algeria to the Philippines. That network became al Qaeda.
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