The Story (20 page)

Fourteen months into the investigation of the TWA crash, the FBI announced it had found no evidence of terrorism. But our inquiry led Jeff and me to spot an important shift in the pattern of terrorist attacks. In August 1996, a month after the disaster, we wrote a front-page story asserting that counterterrorism officials were now as worried about terrorist groups
and their wealthy financiers, especially from Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf, as about Iran and Libya. The emergence of “sophisticated, privately financed networks of terrorists” posed new, even more daunting challenges for the United States, we wrote. Wealthy Muslim businessmen in the Gulf, for instance, had helped finance Ramzi Yousef, enabling him to carry out the first World Trade Center attack in February 1993, as well as another plot called Bojinka to blow up a dozen American airliners on Pacific routes. Only later would investigators link Yousef to his uncle: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the “principal architect of 9/11,” as the 9/11 Commission called him.

Jeff and I learned that American intelligence agencies were focused on one terrorist financier in particular, Bin Laden. The State Department called Bin Laden “one of the most significant financial sponsors of Islamic extremist activities in the world.” In the summer of 1996, when Jeff and I wrote about the government's shift of focus from rogue states to wealthy groups and individuals, our article was the first major exposé of Bin Laden's role in jihadi violence.

A few reporters took note. Peter Bergen of CNN, who had been covering militant Islam since the 1993 World Trade Center attack, followed up on our article in Afghanistan. The first, and one of only a handful of reporters, to interview Bin Laden for an American news outlet, Peter often credited our assessment as groundbreaking in his own superb reporting.
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Jeff and I had tried unsuccessfully to get Bin Laden to comment. In his earlier interviews with reporters, he had denied any involvement in terrorism. We quoted his spokesman in London, Khaled al-Fawwaz, as describing the terrorism charge as “rubbish.”

In 1992 I had tried to interview Bin Laden for my book on the resurgence of militant Islam. When I was covering a meeting of Arab extremists hosted by the militant Islamist regime in Khartoum, my interpreter and I drove out to his compound on the outskirts of the capital to try to meet him. But guards with Kalashnikov assault rifles turned us away. I left my business card with some of his aides, one of whom was an associate of Khaled al-Fawwaz. I offered to return to Khartoum to see Bin Laden whenever he liked.

I thought little about my offer until 1996, when Jeff and I were trying to get Bin Laden to comment on our story about him. Fawwaz had promised to relay the request to him in Afghanistan, but we never heard back. Two years later, in the spring of 1998, Fawwaz called me. Was I still interested in interviewing Bin Laden?

Normally, I would have jumped at the invitation. But I hesitated. Richard Clarke, Clinton's chief counterterrorism adviser, and other officials I trusted had warned me that Bin Laden was becoming more aggressive by the day and his militant networks ever more violent. Bin Laden was no longer a mere financier of terror but a key operator. His goal was to unite disparate militant groups under the single banner of the group he had founded and funded: Al Qaeda, “the base.” He had issued a fatwa calling on all Muslims to kill Americans wherever and whenever they could.

The
Times
did not like reporters poaching on others' beats. I had written terrorism stories, but one of our correspondents closer to the region could have interviewed Bin Laden and would have resented my doing so.

What's more, I was more apprehensive. Perhaps it was the trip's logistics. I was to fly to Islamabad, Pakistan, and then on to Peshawar, near the Afghanistan border. Someone from Bin Laden's group whom Fawwaz would not identify would meet me at an as yet undesignated hotel and drive me across the border to Bin Laden's location at an undisclosed place in the Afghan mountains. I was to tell no one outside the newspaper about the purpose of my visit and take no electronic items with me except a cell phone.

This unnerved me. While Bin Laden had probably not read my book, numerous articles about it and me were on the internet. They would know that I identified myself as Jewish and considered Islamic militants dangerous. I was uneasy enough about the offer not to pursue it with Steve Engelberg or others in the paper's chain of command. I feared that Bin Laden might decide that killing this particular messenger would send a more powerful message than anything I could write.

Fawwaz didn't tell me at the time that he had also extended a similar invitation to a colleague: John Miller, no relation, who was then at ABC. John later became the FBI's spokesman and New York City's deputy police
commissioner for counterterrorism. When I watched his superb interview with Bin Laden on TV in May 1998, I was delighted for him, and also envious. If I had been braver, or better positioned within the paper, I thought at the time, the
Times
and I could have shared the scoop.

In the fall of 2000, two years after I had turned down the chance to interview Bin Laden, I was en route to Afghanistan to interview Ahmed Shah Massoud, the charismatic military leader of the Northern Alliance, the major Afghan opposition to Bin Laden's Taliban hosts.

I was deeply involved by then in a series about Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, and the growing jihadi terrorist threat. I felt it was important to understand why young Muslim men had traveled to this forlorn land to fight for the self-declared Islamist state. Since 1996, when the Taliban had seized the Afghan capital, Kabul, the so-called “students” of Islam had turned their country into a nightmare.
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Yet their rule was admired by thousands of foreign-born Muslims who had come to Afghanistan to fight for them. I wanted to understand why.

I had second thoughts about my decision soon after the helicopter lifted off an airstrip near Dushanbe, Tajikistan's capital. The Northern Alliance's Soviet chopper was even older than the one I had taken to Voz Island a year earlier. The Afghan opposition had only four of these vintage vehicles left. The fifth had crashed a few weeks earlier, killing all on board. As I glanced out the mud-splashed window, I saw nothing below us but jagged mountain peaks.

I was relieved when we touched down north of Kabul at a makeshift Massoud camp. But the mortars I could hear seemed awfully close. After offering me tea, an anxious aide told me we had to leave immediately. The Taliban were attacking. Three nerve-racking hours later, our convoy of jeeps and ancient cars arrived in the Panjshir Valley at one of Massoud's many headquarters. Although it was the end of summer, the house was freezing. There was no heat or power. Later that night, I interviewed the commander by candlelight.

An ethnic Tajik with expressive brown eyes, a well-clipped mustache,
and a white-tipped beard, Massoud was very different from the Arab leaders I had covered. He had no interest in small talk, flattery, or inquiries about one's health, staples of Arab conversation. He spoke fractured French, not English—the result of a few years' education in a French lycée. And he quickly acknowledged his mistakes. He accepted partial blame for the terrible civil war among Afghanistan's many Islamic sects and ethnic groups after the Soviets were driven out in 1989.

Despite financial aid and weapons from Iran and Russia, he said, his alliance was losing ground to the Taliban. They had often tried to kill him, he told me. (On the eve of 9/11, they would succeed.) The soldiers Massoud had fought earlier that day—the so-called Fifty-fifth Brigade—had been assembled by Bin Laden himself, and included some seven hundred Arabs and other militant Muslims. His forces had captured some brigade members whom he called seasoned fighters. I asked to interview them, but he refused. His security had not yet interrogated them. But he agreed to let me interview some of the 120 foreign Muslim fighters whom he was holding among his 1,200 Taliban prisoners. These young foreign fighters—Pakistanis, Yemenis, Britons, and Chinese Uighurs, among others—were in a remote prison that was accessible only by helicopter.

An eternity later, as the helicopter rounded a set of craggy cliffs, with the prison and our landing spot in sight, its rotor sputtered. The chopper tipped sideways as we began to plunge. One of Massoud's aides pulled a Koran out of his flak jacket; another rapidly fingered his worry beads. A few seconds later, the chopper righted itself but came down hard about a half mile from our intended landing spot. Even the pilot, who must have been accustomed to such emergencies, looked relieved.

Over the next two days, I came face-to-face with several of the young men Bin Laden had inspired. Muhammad Khaled Mihraban, a Pakistani from Lahore, was only twenty-six, but he claimed to have killed at least one hundred people. He had an “Islamic ideal” to fulfill, he told me. Afghanistan under the Taliban was the pure land he had been seeking. If ordered to so do, he would travel to New York to kill women and children for Islam. He would not hesitate.

I heard similar words from other prisoners. Obeida Rahman, twenty-one,
a Yemeni from Sana, one of ten children, had been sent to Afghanistan by teachers at his madrassa, the religious school. They had paid for living and training expenses in Afghanistan and, against his family's wishes, encouraged him to fight. Abdul Jalil, twenty-one, from Kashgar in Xinjiang Province, China, said that despite his capture, he yearned to create an Islamic state “all over the world, God willing.” When released, he would return to China to expand the jihad.

The young men being held here were a sample of what the CIA estimated were between fifty thousand and seventy-seven thousand militants from fifty-five countries who had been trained in recent years at a network of camps that the Taliban hosted. Arab officials had estimated that as many as five thousand recruits had passed through camps that were operated by Bin Laden. Two terrorism experts I trusted—Mike Sheehan, the former US Army Ranger who had worked for President Clinton as the coordinator of the State Department's counterterrorism office, and Richard Clarke—said that participants in nearly every plot against the United States and its allies in the past decade had learned the arts of war and explosives in such camps. Bin Laden used the most closely guarded of them for advanced training on suicide bombs and mass attacks. The 1998 US Embassy bombings in Africa had been rehearsed on a model built to scale at a Bin Laden–run camp. Another, Abu Khabab, was being used to experiment on chemicals, poisons, and toxins.

I was planning to fly to Faizabad in the northeastern tip of Afghanistan, where three of the world's most forbidding mountain ranges converge. There I would wait in a guest house for a private relief group's weekly supply flight to Dushanbe in a more reliable, fixed-wing Cessna. The chopper that was to fly me to Faizabad was the most dilapidated yet. Its cracked windshield was covered in masking tape. Its fuel tank was leaking; the rusty cabin smelled like a gas station. A pipe carrying fuel to the rotor was wrapped in burlap. The pilot, who was smoking under the helicopter when I arrived, seemed disoriented. It was insane for me to board. But I had no choice. This junkyard dog of a chopper was my only way out of Afghanistan.

Mine was a telling panic. I had surely come closer to being killed in my reporting career. But I had obviously changed since those near misses. I was no longer the daring young foreign correspondent who had ventured into Khartoum's Kobar prison yard in 1985 amid several hundred impassioned Muslim believers to cover the hanging of an intellectual “heretic.” By the end of 2000, I had a lot to live for: Jason, good friends, and the life I loved in New York.

Given my growing aversion to senseless risk, it was doubly ironic that four months later I would be pleading with Steve Engelberg to let me return to Afghanistan—this time as a guest of the Taliban.

Laili Helms was a soccer mom and mother of two who lived in New Jersey. An Afghan-American who had married the nephew of former CIA director Richard Helms, she was the Taliban's improbable unofficial spokesman in America.
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I was fascinated by Laili. A granddaughter of two former Afghan ministers in the late monarchy, she never seemed to tire of putting the best possible face on a regime whose human rights abuses were exasperating Washington. It was also clear to me that she loved Afghanistan and thought that the Taliban were the country's best hope of reestablishing security after a brutal civil war that had ruined what the Soviets hadn't destroyed.

In November 2000 she helped me interview the Taliban foreign minister, Wakil Ahmad Mutawakil, who had adamantly denied that his regime was hosting terrorist training camps. (Intelligence sources had already shown me satellite shots of such facilities.) He had also denounced American pressure to expel Bin Laden as “insulting and useless.” Bin Laden had helped expel the Soviets. He was their guest. Finally, while some non-Afghan “volunteers” from the 1980s war against the Soviets remained in Afghanistan because they were not permitted to return to their countries, they were not being “trained” in “jihadi” training camps. There was none in Afghanistan, he insisted. Nothing was “hidden” in Afghanistan. I should come see for myself.

How could we refuse such an offer? I begged Steve. Thanks to my interviews with the opposition's Taliban prisoners in northern Afghanistan and information that I had from Western intelligence officials, we knew the names and locations of at least a dozen Bin Laden camps. The trip would provide the natural conclusion of our series on Al Qaeda and militant Islamic terrorism, I said. After a year of research, travel, and nonstop interviews, most of the articles for our series on the growing militant Islamist threat were almost finished, and a portrait of Al Qaeda and Bin Laden's terror network had emerged. All we needed was on-the-ground information about his camps. This was our best shot at getting it, I argued.