THE CENTURY FOUNDATION

Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of

Osama bin Laden

PETER BERGEN,
Leonard Silk Fellow,
Author, Holy War, Inc.

The Century Foundation

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HOLY WAR, INC. December 6, 2001

BERGEN: I will talk generally perhaps about the future of Al Qaeda, the future of
Osama Bin Laden. In my view, Osama Bin Laden has decided to die in the final battle of
his holy war. He’s made a number of statements along this line that you Americans value
life as much as we value death. He’s also made it clear that he’s willing to die. I don’t
think that’s bravado. This is a man who fought against the Soviet Union on the front
lines in 1986. He held off 200 Russian forces, including Russian Special Forces. This is
at a place called Jaji, which is not far from Tora Bora, probably about 10 miles. It’s sort
of central to bin Laden’s mythology of himself and also one of the reasons his followers
admire him.

The battle took place in 1986, and it was widely reported around the Middle East, and it
was really a sort of the crystallization of the myth of Osama bin Laden. I spoke to
numerous people to confirm the details of the battle, including eyewitnesses and this
battle happened and bin Laden was, fought off this group for about a week. So, I think.
He’s also said a really interesting thing. He came under a Russian missile attack and he
said that he was so at peace with the notion of death that he actually fell asleep, despite
the fact that these Russian missiles were falling within about 30 yards of his position.

This is a very different person from Saddam Hussein who obviously folded his cards
when it was clear that surrender was a necessity for self-preservation. I think bin Laden
has decided to die. If you decide to die, you generally decide to die to the extent you can
on your own terms. It’s clear to me the recent statements bin Laden made about the fact
that his group has radioactive and chemical weapons, I think need to be taken extremely
seriously for the following reasons.

First of all, bin Laden’s statements have been the best guide to his actions. When he
declared war against the United States in 1996, I think a lot of people saw that as sort of
rhetorical flourish or perhaps bravado. He continued making threats. In 1997, I
produced the first television interview for CNN. Peter Arnette was the correspondent.
He told us, we’re going to attack American military targets. If American civilians get in
the way, that’s sort of their problem. A year later, he talked to ABC News and said we
make no distinction between American military and civilian targets.

Clearly, it has been a war if you look at the targets. Whether it was an American war
ship in Yemen or a U.S. embassy in Africa or American bases in Saudi Arabia. The
Pentagon in their mind, they saw the Trade Center as a sort of military target. Bin Laden
himself said it was a symbol of America’s sort of political and military might. They have
conducted a war against America. So, when bin Laden says a very curious statement, we
have radioactive and chemical weapons, and we will use them as a deterrent if America
uses nuclear and chemical weapons against us.
HOLY WAR, INC. December 6, 2001

Now, we well know. The likelihood of the United States using nuclear and chemical
weapons in an attack against bin Laden is essentially zero. So, why did he make this
rather odd statement a few weeks ago? I think he was prepping his followers for the idea
that he would deploy these weapons. They are clearly not atomic weapons in the sense of
Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Nation-states as you know spend years and hundreds of millions
of dollars trying to develop these weapons.

But Afghanistan is ideally suited for the acquisition of radioactive materials. I reported
in 1997 on Russian nuclear smuggling for a story we never eventually aired. It was the
story was sort of a hoax, but it was an interesting hoax. An Afghan approached us with
intermediary offering of what he claimed was bomb grade Uranium. He gave us the
serial numbers. We checked them out with the appropriate people. It was clearly a hoax.
On the other hand, whatever this Afghan was selling was clearly radioactive. He was
apparently developing health problems. Afghanistan is a place where a market for this
sort of material exists. Bin Laden has the money to acquire this kind of material. The
group was willing to spend 1.5 million dollars when their groups was based in Sudan to
buy bomb-grade Uranium, so that was quite a lot of money. It was never clear if the
shipment happened.

And then, bin Laden’s statements, including the recent one, they’re part of a pattern.
When India set off those nuclear explosions in May of 1998, bin Laden released a letter
rather quickly saying we need our own nuclear kind of weapon. So, I think that the
notion that he doesn’t have some kind of dirty nuclear bomb or perhaps several of these is
an exercise in wishful thinking because basically what he’s stated in the past has usually
come to pass.

There are several hallmarks of the groups. One of them is patience. It took them five
years to plan the embassy bombing attacks in Africa. It took them two years to plan the
attacks on the Cole. The other one is to do it very unexpected things. The attacks on the
U.S. embassies in Africa came shortly after bin Laden said that there was going to be
good news in coming weeks. He had a press conference in Pakistan. As a result of that
press conference, the State department issued a warning saying that they were increasing
security at American facilities in the Middle East and Asia, but significantly omitted
Africa. That was where the bombs went off. A U.S. war ship was bombed as you know
in Yemen last year.

It was well known to the State Department and the Pentagon that Yemen was a place
where groups like Egypt’s jihad group, which is effectively part of Al Qaeda, had long
had a face in Yemen, despite those obvious concerns about Yemen’s terrorist, harboring
certain terrorists groups.
HOLY WAR, INC. December 6, 2001

The calculation was made that we won’t need, we want to bring Yemen into the Pax
Americana. Yemen hadn’t sided with Iraq in the Gulf War. That was a calculation based
on the notion that it would be very unlikely that a terrorist would ever attack an American
war ship. Of course, they managed to pull that off. It was an unprecedented attack.
Obviously, no one could have predicted the events of September 11th. Both unexpected
and also something we don’t know the full story but clearly something that took a long
time to plan.

The reason I say all this is, I think again, it would be wishful thinking that bin Laden does
not have some other plan, which had been in the works before September 11th.
If we look at the pattern of the activities of this group, there was a serious plan to attack a
U.S. embassy in Yemen in June. Also, the U.S. embassy in New Delhi in June. The
United States State department issued a very strongly worded advisory on July 18th of
this year saying there were imminent possible attacks against American targets in Saudi
Arabia. So, this group is a group that does a lot of things that don’t really pan out for one
reason or another. But, if you throw enough darts at the dartboard, I think, in their view,
some of them are going to hit.

So, with that, I’m neither a pessimist or an alarmist by nature, but I do think that there
may be a final big iteration of this story unfortunately. We’re coming to the 27th day of
Ramadan, dying on that day is a special mark of Allah’s favor. This group has planned
attacks on that day before. They, in a dress rehearsal for an attack on the U.S.S. Cole,
they tried to attack the U.S.S. Sullivan in Aden on what would be the 27th day of
Ramadan which was January 3rd, 2000. That was part of a whole package of attacks,
which was going to include attacks on tourist sites in Jordan, an attack on Los Angeles
International Airport in the middle of the Christmas tourist season, which would have
been absolutely devastating. All those plans failed, either because of good police work or
the incompetence of the populace. But I think it is possible that they may have an attack
for that day or it may be the day that bin Laden chooses to go out in what we will hope is
not a cloud of radioactive glory but just regular glory as it were.

And so with that I throw it open to any questions.

QUESTION:
Peter, are you saying that you think the radioactive material is in one of these
bunker things in Afghanistan or…?

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HOLY WAR, INC. December 6, 2001

BERGEN: It’s hard to tell. He’s said “we have radioactive, nuclear and chemical
weapons,” and clearly also, we know that they’ve experimented in an amateur way with
chemical weapons. They were gassing dogs with cyanide and injecting dogs with
cyanide. These things may be crude, but I think they, you’ve got to presume that they
exist in some manner. Where they are is a separate question that I have no special
knowledge of.

Follow up question: What is the probability of that?

BERGEN: Well, I think the probability is very high. Certainly in Afghanistan perhaps,
that would be the logical place. That is where the materials are floating around. That is
where his group is. That’s where the documents were found.

QUESTION: Peter, expound a bit on what would be your expectation, assuming

Osama bin Laden is dead, sometime in the near future. What happens to Al Qaeda?
And the second part of that is: There’s been a lot of press these days that this is not
the only network out there. There are a number of others. Are there a number of
others? Are they on the size and scale of this one?

BERGEN: I think two things. First of all, Max Weber said charismatic movements sort
of wither with their charismatic leaders and I think bin Laden is such a leader. His
charisma may be lost on myself and parts of the audience, but we have somebody who
has clearly created this transnational coalition. I think that Afghanistan is a sort of a
generous case. Here is a sort of failed nation-state with a government with a government
that is broadly sympathetic. There is a very limited number of places in the world where
even a remotely analogous situation pertains.

In Somalia, you could perhaps imagine that a place with no government at all, where bin
Laden’s men have functioned in the past, there might be one or two camps there. In
Yemen, there are definitely Al Qaeda people but the Yemen government is very
enthusiastically cooperating with the United States government. By the way, as you
might remember, John O’Neil was the leader of investigation of the U.S.S. Cole and the
embassy bombing attacks. The FBI guy who retired two weeks before he ran the Trade
Center security, he died in the attack, but apparently, the Yemen government spent a long
time talking to him. That was a very significant moment for them.

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HOLY WAR, INC. December 6, 2001

So, they’re cooperating quite a lot. I think that generally if you eliminate bin Laden and
the entire top leadership, the terrorist training camps in Afghanistan, this phenomenon
will die with it. The only question is how many people have cycled through the camps
and where are they right now and do they just revert to their liberal causes, ‘cause with
bin Laden’s genius in a way, it basically brings together Philippinos and Chechnyans and
Arabs of various descriptions and even Americans to basically direct their war against
first of all the United States and the out of state regimes around the Middle East and
Muslim world.

So, I do think. I think that with the elimination of bin Laden and the camps, I think to the
analogy in my book that we’re looking really at the assassins. The assassins’ function in
Iran and Syria for some period of time but their impact on history is basically zero. They
never were able to take a single city. Bin Laden’s political project has collapsed around
him in ruins. If he was interested in provoking civilizations then the whole thing was a
big dive.

One of the things that was fascinating to me is that we didn’t see any demonstration in
Karachi and Cairo in cities of 15 million people. It just didn’t happen and bin Laden’s
project has, I think will die with him.

QUESTION: On that question, how much of that is al-Zawahir versus bin Laden in
what you just described in terms of bringing in all these [unintelligible] and
Chechnyans?

BERGEN: In my one stab at a psychological explanation for what bin Laden’s activities,
for why he’s done this. Bin Laden’s father died when he was 10 which is a major
psychological event for anybody and bin Laden has said that his father said that one of
his sons was going to continue was going to fight against the enemies of Islam. His
father was a very devout man who basically his family renovated not only Mecca and
Medina but also the Al-Asqa mosque that was destroyed by fire in 1969.

So, this is a very religiously devout man, the father, who dies in 1967. His son is age 10.
As far as bin Laden feels he’s continuing some sort of legacy of his father and it was very
interesting to me that the people who have influenced him most profoundly in life, first
was Abdullah Azzam who was his teacher of Islamic studies in Saudi Arabia, who really
created this international jihadist network by recruiting people from around the world to
go fight against the Soviet Union.
HOLY WAR, INC. December 6, 2001

And the second man is al-Zawahiri, who had been basically a professional terrorist
revolutionary his entire adult life. Here is a man, a very qualified surgeon whose
grandfather was [a leader] of Al Azhar mosque, the Oxford of Islamic learning. His
father was also a physician. He comes from an aristocratic Egyptian family. He speaks
good English and set up a terrorist group in 1973. This is a man who has been described
by multiple people when I did the reporting as the brains or the mind of the operation.
But in a sense, you know, I think the United States government well understands that it’s
not just bin Laden, it’s this whole top tier of leadership and it’s possible that al-Zawahiri
by some reports may even be dead as we speak. Maybe, it’s a little too flip. What
actually happened was a bit like the AOL Time Warner merger. There was a brief
moment when bin Laden had the public profile and money to sort of take over this
organization, but it was really an Egyptian organization with a Saudi figurehead, because
the entire top leadership were all Egyptians. They followed Egyptian models, ideologies,
attacks on state targets. They followed the jihad basically philosophy.

The money was bin Ladens, but I always thought the money was a red herring. Apart
from anything else, bin Laden inherited the 35 million, which is still a lot of money. I
think the money is perhaps. (COMMENT: Not enough to be a Senator… [laughter])
BERGEN: Certainly not in New Jersey. [laughter] I think that the money was important,
more perhaps because his followers, it made an interesting back story for the media
perhaps but also for his followers because they understood he was leaving a leisure life of
huge comfort.

By the way there is not a single record as far as I can tell of a single Saudi prince of
which there are 5,000 or 7,000 ever going to Afghanistan to fight, so bin Laden by
comparison was seen as a very heroic figure. But, at the end of the day, you can’t
persuade people to fly passenger jets into large buildings because of money. It has to be
about belief. And while 500,000 dollars seems to be a fair amount of money, on the other
hand, given the chaos it caused, it is relatively small amount, and I think the money, it’s
always overemphasized.

Afghanistan, the average Afghan doctor earns 6 dollars a month. A little bit of money
goes a long way, so I think that going after money will be useful as an investigative tool,
but I don’t think it’s a way of really cracking down on these organizations. It’s not about,
these people are volunteers, they’re not mercenaries, so as a way of getting rid of the
organization, I don’t see it being very significant.

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HOLY WAR, INC. December 6, 2001

QUESTION: I was just wondering if you thought the money was also coming from
Egypt.

BERGEN: I think it’s mostly the Gulf and the Saudis. I don’t think it’s coming from
Egypt.

QUESTION: Bin Laden is presumably connected to Hussein [unintelligible]…?

Do they have anything in common beyond a hatred of the United States?

BERGEN: After the interview was over with bin Laden in 1997, Peter Arnette who
interviewed Saddam Hussein asked bin Laden when they started talking about Saddam
Hussein and bin Laden said a very interesting thing. First of all, he’s a bad Muslim and
secondly he invaded Kuwait for his own self-aggrandizement, so there had been one
meeting with bin Laden and a senior Iraqi intelligence figure and also one of the Trade
Center bombers met with an Iraqi intelligence agent.

But I think everybody has meetings with people you don’t necessarily do business with. I
think there is really no scintilla of evidence, I mean Colin Powell himself said in the
Sunday Times profile to Bill Keller that Iraq wasn’t involved. I think it fails a lot of
common sense tests. I think for a lot of people it would be comforting that it was a dais
ex machina beyond bin Laden, but there isn’t. He represents a privatization of terrorism.
He didn’t need the help of states.

QUESTION: Back on the nuclear question, if he intended to use these weapons,

why would he put it in that way, calling it a deterrent and saying if the U.S. uses
these weapons against us, we’ll use it against them. Rather than just making an
outright threat, particularly if it was a signal to his…?

BERGEN: I mean it’s a puzzling statement because it’s obvious the United States won’t
use those kinds of weapons. So, I think he’s prepping his followers for the notion they
might be employed. That’s the way I took it.

QUESTION: What if it’s just an empty threat and he doesn’t have the stuff and it
was just a way saying because he’s knows that they’re not going to use it on them?

BERGEN: Well, I think there have been a very small number of empty threats that bin
Laden has made. Unfortunately he’s fulfilled a lot of them.
HOLY WAR, INC. December 6, 2001

COMMENT: This is idle, but my thought when you mentioned this endgame was that if
a nuclear weapon did go off in a way radioactive material … more than half the world
would believe it was the United States, that he would finish him off and in a sense for a
good many people would legitimize the use of such weapons against the United States.

BERGEN: Well, in fact, that may be another explanation for this. I think that one other
thing about his decision to die. Ayman al-Zawahiri just finished his biography and it’s
supposed to be published in Egypt and it again makes these kinds of statements about my
last will and testament. Perhaps they are prepping their audience for what they foresee.
They know what the endgame is, we don’t. All we can do is speculate. It’s a lunar
month. Depending on where you are in the world, it is around December 13th. I think it
might be December 13th or thereabout.

Thank you very much.