How did an estranged member of a wealthy Saudi family, with long connections to the royal Sauds, come to lead an Islamic terrorist group that rattles the safety and complacency of the world's only superpower? Randal, a foreign correspondent with 40 years of experience covering the Middle East for a variety of news organizations, offers a detailed and compelling look at the man who has galvanized fears of global terrorism. Based on interviews with sources from diplomats to informants to radicals, Randal assembles a compelling portrait of an intelligent, sophisticated man molded by the tensions and treacheries between efforts to reconcile Islam, Middle Eastern politics, and Western social and political influences. Born the seventeenth of 24 sons of a wealthy construction magnate, Osama bin Laden early manifested an interest in purifying Islamic nations of Western influences. Caught up in the Afghan effort to drive out the Soviets, bin Laden used his wealth and considerable leadership skills to assemble troops and, before the age of 30, turned himself into "something of a religious pop star in a land hungering for inspirational role models." Randal explores the dynamics within bin Laden's family, his personality, and Saudi Arabia and surrounding nations that drove him to join campaigns in Afghanistan, Algeria, and Sudan. Randal also explores bin Laden's elusiveness, his network of resources, and the failure of U.S. intelligence to understand radicalizing influences in the Middle East. This is a fascinating, informative look at the man considered the foremost terrorist threat to the U.S. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Acclaim for Osama

“The volume does a nimble and often highly compelling job of leading the reader through the labyrinth of information and speculation about Al Qaeda and the broader jihadi movement, showing how Islamic terrorism has evolved and proliferated over the last two and a half decades . . . [Randal] provides a succint account of how the 1980s anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan brought together Islamic radicals from around the world, inflamed their self-righteousness and anger, and gave them faith in their ability to bring a superpower to its knees.”--Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

“[A] meticulous account of the emergence and spread of the terror virus [and a] map of world that produced him and his fellow Islamists.” --Ben Macintyre, New York Times Book Review

“An account that is simultaneously detailed and fast paced . . . witty, opinionated, and highly urbane . . . Of all the flutter of bin Laden and Al Qaeda books, Randal has produced the most readable and informative.” --Richard A. Clarke, Boston Sunday Globe

“Randal is at his best when intuiting the nuances of terrorism and the particular Middle Eastern culture from whence it springs.” --Robert Kaplan, Washington Post Book World


“A detailed and compelling look at the man who has galvanized fears of global terrorism
. . . fascinating, informative.” —Booklist

“An outstanding achievement . . . a thorough and penetrating look”-- Publisher's Weekly (starred)

“A masterful work of reporting.” --Kirkus Reviews (starred)

How is it possible for one middle-aged Saudi millionaire to threaten the world’s only superpower? This is the question at the center of Jonathan Randal’s riveting, timely account of Osama bin Laden’s role in the rise of terrorism in the Middle East. Randal–a journalist whose experience of the Middle East spans the past forty years–makes clear how Osama’s life epitomizes the fatal collision between twenty-first-century Islam and the West, and he describes the course of Osama’s estrangement from both the West and the Saudi petro-monarchy of which his family is a part. He examines Osama’s terrorist activities before September 11, 2001, and shows us how, after the attack on the World Trade Center, Osama presented the West with something new in the annals of contemporary terrorism: an independently wealthy entrepreneur with a seemingly worldwide following ready to do his bidding. Randal explores the possibility that Osama offered the Saudis his Al-Qaeda forces to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait in 1991; he traces the current sources of Osama’s money; and he tells us why the Iraq war has played into the hands of the terrorists.

With his long-maintained sources in the Middle East and his intimate understanding of the region, Randal gives us a clearer explanation than any we have had of the whys and wherefores of the world’s most prominent and feared terrorist.

Jonathan Randal is a former correspondent for the Washington Post.

In the 1980s, in the course of my own reporting, I ran into Jonathan Randal occasionally in places like Sudan and Pakistan. The now-retired foreign correspondent for The Washington Post represented a breed of journalist now gradually going extinct: the seasoned, multilingual man or woman of the world who lives overseas and has an intimate, inside-baseball knowledge of dozens upon dozens of countries and their politics, with the added advantage of being able to write about it all at reasonable length, rather than having to reduce it to television sound bites.

Osama is Randal's third book, and even if it contains relatively little new about Osama bin Laden himself, there are enough interesting asides drawn from a lifetime of reporting in the Middle East to make it a worthwhile venture. "If there is an answer to such an enduring phenomenon as terrorism," Randal writes, "I suspect it lies in needlework, that time-consuming, patient, dull, professional accumulation of detail." In that spirit, he posits that the tactical goal of the United States should be not to stamp out terrorism in its entirety but to confine it to the peripheries of the Third World. For if suicide bombers fail to launch new spectacular assaults on the United States and other major Western countries, "the attraction of jihad may wane."

Randal is at his best when intuiting the nuances of terrorism and the particular Middle Eastern culture from whence it springs, and at his worst when characterizing the United States, which he has visited but not lived in for decades, and which he occasionally reduces to clichés of the very kind he abjures about the Middle East.

He understands how suicidal terrorists desperately need to memorialize themselves as a revenge for their own failures in life, how such failed men often have a need to reinvent themselves, how they are "prone to quarrels, splintering, and new groupings" and how they live drifters' lives in low-end suburbs of the West, divorced from their own cultures. Whether they fall into a productive immigrant existence or an al Qaeda cell is as much a matter of happenstance as it is of personal character, he suggests.

Randal also describes well the panoramic milieu of violence from which, for instance, the Algerian cohorts of al Qaeda have sprung: the beheadings, the kidnappings, the utter anarchy that was rife across the Algeria of the 1990s. Algeria was a country that, as he notes, "Most pale-skinned Westerners had long since deserted." It is a wonder that more immigrants, after coming from such a place and then being thrown into the alienating flotsam and jetsam of immigrant life in the West, do not join al Qaeda. Terrorism, alas, is a vile germ of modernity.

The author also takes us to Sudan, whose capital, Khartoum, became a "rest-and-recreation center for extremist Muslims" in the 1990s, much as Beirut had been the decade before. The impresario of the infamous rise of Khartoum was one Hasan al-Turabi, a well-manicured, Park Avenue ayatollah of sorts, even if he was a Sunni. I interviewed Turabi once in 1984, and Randal describes him perfectly: an "in-your-face" politician full of "intellectual arrogance," who proved too clever by half. Turabi hosted bin Laden and then later sought a rapprochement with the United States by turning over information about him after the terrorist became too hot to handle. The author faults the Clinton administration for not sufficiently following up on such leads.

In addition to geographic scope, Randal explores the many sub-issues that are often more important than the so-called big issues in the Middle East. Like other authors, he notes that Palestine had never been much of an obsession to bin Laden. What bin Laden really cared about -- and what the Saudi establishment did, too -- was the fate of South Yemen, a Marxist satellite that bin Laden wanted to lay low but which the Al-Saud family wanted to preserve because of their fear of North and South Yemeni unification. In fact, it was bin Laden's meddling in his homeland of South Yemen that first brought him to the attention of the Saudi intelligence establishment in the 1980s. Unification happened anyway in 1990, and now Yemen, the volatile and dynamic demographic core of the Arabian peninsula, is where the political future of the region may likely be written.

The problem with Randal's book is that while there are enough useful insights to make it a worthwhile read, its lack of understanding or empathy for the realities in which any American administration -- Republican or Democratic -- is forced to deal reduces the text in many places to the same old, tired criticisms of American policy that, while perhaps justified, insufficiently advance the reader's knowledge or understanding. The author inveighs against the hypocrisy of American support for authoritarian regimes, even as the United States calls for more democracy in the Arab world. The remark shows insufficient understanding of how great powers, even when they seek to advance universalist goals, must also deal with the world as it is. Moreover, if some of those repressive regimes were to collapse, even more turmoil and consequent human suffering might ensue.

Randal frowns upon the dispatch of U.S. troops to places like Yemen and the Philippines, perhaps not realizing that the number of American Marines and Army Special Forces sent to those places has been exceedingly small and used in humanitarian exercises or for the training of local militaries in new democracies that are under siege. His careful and painstakingly sympathetic reportage of places like Algeria too often gives way to easy, broad-brush judgments when he turns to the United States.

Randal the seasoned man-of-the-world is more insightful than Randal the expatriate. Nevertheless, American policymakers would do well to excuse the latter in order to glean perceptions from the former.

Reviewed by Robert D. Kaplan
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

BUG IN THE ELEPHANT'S EAR

For days after September 11, 2001, I wondered if Osama bin Laden, along with the rest of the world, had watched the real-time footage of those fully fueled airliners, hijacked by suicidal pilots and their henchmen, as they rammed into the Pentagon and the twin towers of Manhattan's World Trade Center. For reasons I still do not completely fathom, everything else about 9/11, as the attacks soon were called, was subordinated for me to that possibility. Perhaps it was that in years past, high up in his Afghan redoubt carved into the Hindu Kush, he had indulged a rich man's fascination with gadgetry, delighting in showing visitors his computers, satellite telephones and dishes and other high-tech paraphernalia. Did he now savor life imitating art, a pastiche of kitsch reruns of Hollywood horror movies complete with plummeting bodies, billowing flames, imploding buildings, brave firemen rushing back up the stairs to their deaths? Did he appreciate the novelty of doomed airline passengers describing their predicament on state-of-the-art cell phones while other passengers heroically rushed their captors, determined to deflect their airliner-turned-missile from yet another landmark target?

At the time I doubted ironclad answers would be forthcoming. I was indulging in pure speculation, but speculation based on more than two frustrating years trying to figure Osama out. On past form, I felt, he would approve and perhaps claim he helped inspire, but still stop short of admitting he ordered, planned, much less micromanaged this extraordinary act of violence, guaranteeing his name a lasting footnote in the annals of terrorism. Such winking indirection had become his modus operandi stretching back almost a decade. It allowed him to insinuate a kind of global reach even when by any logical yardstick no irrefutable proof linked him to some of the acts of terrorism laid at his door. And, of course, in his mind at least, it distanced him from those he had organized.

Then less than a fortnight before Christmas, a grainy, partly inaudible amateur videotape was released by a hesitant Bush administration wary of its seeming suspiciously good luck in obtaining the improbably self-incriminating "mother of all smoking guns." For the administration, the cassette's contents were literally almost too good to be true.

Entertaining some fifty to sixty dinner guests in Kandahar just days before the rapid collapse of the Taliban regime in mid-November, an almost languid Osama was shown providing chapter and verse for a hanging judge's fantasy. Right down to the occasional chuckle and laugh, the chilling tale the lanky six-foot-four Saudi told without remorse would make even a nineteenth-century melodrama villain blanch in disbelief. And indeed disbelief was how much of the Muslim world greeted the cassette, whether out of denial, because the contents seemed too pat or because the doubters could not understand why Osama would have been so arrogant, careless or plain stupid to have said what the cassette had him saying.

(If anything, the outraged accusations of fraud were somewhat subdued, perhaps reflecting the then still recent defeat of the Taliban regime and the initial disruption of Osama's Al-Qaeda organization or at least of its frontline foot soldiers. Equally off-putting to the worldwide Muslim audience he assiduously courted was his single-minded interest in Saudi Arabia to the exclusion of Kashmir, Palestine, Chechnya or other Islamic conflicts he normally championed.)

The Bush administration did not see fit to dispel the mystery of the cassette’s provenance in an effort to bolster the credibility of its bona fides. For reasons elucidated neither at the time nor later, the U.S. government did no more than hint it had been found in a private house in the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad, had been rushed to Washington in late November, had been checked and double-checked and had provoked a sharp debate about the wisdom of releasing its overly providential contents. The government's hesitation and Muslim doubts were understandable because on the tape a coldly dispassionate Osama uncharacteristically corroborates key bits of information and surmises that the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency and other investigators the world over had so painstakingly pieced together.

He accurately listed the nationalities and sometimes the names of the nineteen-man suicide squad, all but four his Saudi compatriots. Osama confirmed the existence of four hijacking teams, rejoiced in the tradecraft that deliberately kept each in the dark about the others’ existence. He explained their division between the four witting pilots and the Saudi "muscle" who, he chuckled, learned the exact nature of their suicide mission only "just before boarding" the four airliners to cow their passengers into submission with box cutters once the plane was in the air. [1] Osama said he knew five days in advance that the operations would take place on September 11 and had a radio tuned in ready to hear the first plane hit the Trade Center’s north tower.

"Be patient," he then told his "overjoyed" guests: more was to come, as it indeed did over the next hour or so. He recounted that in the planning stage his engineering training had helped him calculate the number of likely deaths from the explosive impact of a nearly fully fueled airliner on the twin towers' metal structures. He acknowledged his surprise that they collapsed completely. "All that we had hoped for," he allowed, was the destruction of "three or four floors" where the aircraft hit and those above the impact.

And, as it turned out, indeed I had been--almost--right about his watching the crashes on television. His spokesman, Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, had turned on a television set in an adjoining room and seen the first run of the constantly repeated footage of the planes hitting the twin towers before excitedly summoning Osama. "I tried to tell him about what I saw," the spokesman recounted, "but he made a gesture with his hands, meaning: 'I know, I know.'"


The specialist literature long ago concluded that modern terrorism’s objective was to inflict maximum casualties with maximum publicity. In those terms Osama had succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. For days on end television screens the world over repeatedly showed the scenes of horror that consumed nearly 3,000 lives (and initially were feared to have killed more than twice as many). Yet his very success left a string of tantalizing questions unanswered. Logically, he must have realized that the United States would react--and massively. Yet perhaps his gift for meticulous reckoning finally had gone awry or his increasingly audacious acts of violence emboldened him to the point that he felt invulnerable. He had preached that the Americans were paper tigers so long and hard that he could be excused for relishing the disarray that overtook the U.S. government and kept a humiliated President George W. Bush out of Washington for nine embarrassing hours after the fourth and final airliner crashed in Pennsylvania.

Had such cocksure reasoning now convinced him the United States dared not mount a major punitive expedition in Afghanistan, where he had come to believe his own distorted propaganda claims that his Arab volunteers all but single-handedly defeated the Soviet Red Army in the 1980s? Osama was not alone in suggesting the dangers of a new foreign intervention in Afghanistan. Russian veterans warned the United States of the horrors they had experienced there. Those tales of Afghan savagery and resentment of foreigners, reinforced by nineteenth-century massacres of British troops at Afghan hands, had played no small role in dissuading President Bill Clinton and his successor from mounting a major military operation to punish the increasingly cheeky Taliban regime and its Al-Qaeda guests. (In fact, high-tech American weaponry, combined with wads of cash and local Afghan allies, initially routed the foot soldiers of Osama's Al-Qaeda organization and its Taliban protectors with surprising ease and speed in what more properly should be called a campaign rather than a war. If there was going to be an Afghan quagmire, more likely than not it would take the form of trying to maintain a modicum of law and order on the cheap rather than investing in the "nation-building" that was so doctrinally repugnant to the administration.)

If Osama had planned his own endgame, was he resigned to his fate and even anxious to embrace the martyrdom he had so helped popularize? He may have reckoned that he and Al-Qaeda could not reasonably hope to match, much less outdo, 9/11. With his health then rumored to be undermined by an implacable kidney affliction and an often-incurable heart condition called Marfan's syndrome that threatens early death, had he decided to bow out at the top of his form, at age forty-four, rather than risk an uncertain future that might tarnish his legend? Such was the subject of endless speculation and the stuff of a myth that he and his followers were intent on creating.

But in the practical world what mattered immediately was that Osama, deliberately or by miscalculation, had acted like a Muslim Samson. He had brought the temple down on his Taliban hosts and jeopardized the peerless Afghan sanctuary that had allowed his Al-Qaeda to grow without serious challenge and to extend its operations virtually worldwide. The tantalizing mystery of his fate masked that reality. Inconclusive mountain battles and collusion with like-minded Islamic radicals in Pakistan helped maintain the illusion of intact Al-Qaeda discipline and strength. Well into 2002, Al-Qaeda and Taliban operatives found refuge in the wild and wooly tribal areas along the Afghan border in Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province, which had scarcely changed since Kipling's day. Yet the Pakistanis caught hundreds of his operatives, many of them mere...