Cover Story

The Tapes

The scene, much as the Pentagon would prefer it otherwise, has to be imagined. It is New Year's Eve. Outside the compound's high mud walls, the barren hillsides, the dusty terraced fields and the smaller compounds of homes in the village are sunk in a profound silence. A dog barks and snarls. There are no roads here and no vehicles and the puddles in the dirt track that leads up to the valley are frozen solid. Through a gap in the hills the distant lights of Gardez, the eastern Afghan city, are just visible.

FANATIC FOLLOWING: Despite virtual obscurity till 1997, bin Laden mustered unprecedented support. People in Pakistan rallied to condemn the US retaliatory attack in Afghanistan after September 11.

Inside the compound, buildings line three walls. Against the fourth are stables full of livestock. The tallest single construction is the guesthouse with its three large rooms, each with a wooden stove at the centre. There are carpets hanging over windows that obscure the orange glow of the fire and shield the gleam of the lanterns which light the evening meal for the men. In the third room, leaning against a wall and wrapped in a blanket over a camouflaged jacket, is a tall, lean Arab with burning eyes. In the frigid dawn he will rise for prayers and give thanks. Osama bin Laden: a man for our time, a man of our time, a man made by our time.

"By our time", because his development, his creation, his formation was a result of a combination of major historic themes of the past three decades: westernisation, resurgent fundamentalist religion, the Cold War, its end and the New World Order that replaced it. "Of our time", because his ability to wreak the most devastating single terrorist attack in history relied on and was rooted in the nature of the contemporary world: modern communications, modern media, modern modes of thought, protest and action. And "for our time", because as a symbol, bin Laden, the protean mythopoeic figure about whom we know simultaneously everything and nothing, personifies more than anyone else the crazy, helter-skelter, supercharged, superficial world we now live in.

HUNTING GROUND: A marked man after the daring strikes on the twin towers of the World Trade Center, bin Laden is not an easy target as the American war machine is realising

He does not exist at the moment. But he is everywhere. That is his greatest achievement. For that he has to be the Newsmaker of the Year.

The bare facts about bin Laden are now known. He was born in 1957 in Jeddah, the cosmopolitan port city of Saudi Arabia where he lived, on and off, for the first 25 years of his life. His father was a self-made construction magnate who had been born and raised in Yemen but had left his humble home in Hadaramawt province to successfully seek his fortune in the new kingdom of the al-Saud family. Osama was one of 50 children, probably the 17th son, and the child of Hamida, the fourth wife of a strongwilled, illiterate, disciplinarian husband. She was the daughter of a Syrian merchant and her taste for Chanel clashed with the Wahhabite conservatism of the other wives and of bin Laden's father. As a result she was despised as "the slave wife". Bin Laden was "the son of the slave".

Unlike his brothers he went to the Abdul Aziz University in Saudi Arabia. He did not, as is often rumoured, go whoring and drinking in Beirut. At university, where he studied civil engineering, he became profoundly interested in the radical strain of Islam that was providing solace to millions of young Muslims who felt alienated by the seemingly all-powerful westernisation which was so deeply affecting their cultures and societies. It was a time of huge ferment in the Middle East as newly released oil revenues, war and then peace with Israel, the miniskirt and Hollywood all shook the centuries-old society. But though aspirations rose, the power structures that kept people in their place remained unchanged. For bin Laden, like so many others, radical thinkers like Sayyid Qutb and Abdullah Azzam were particularly strong influences. Both men strongly rejected the western culture and the "apostate" regimes that collaborated in its spread. The cool, clear logic of radical Islam was a powerful draw and the reaction to westernisation took on its own dynamics.

In 1979, the strands started to weave together. In November, radicals ("true Muslims", as bin Laden later called them) took over the Grand Mosque in Mecca and were only expelled after a vicious battle. In Iran, an Islamic revolution deposed the Shah. And Soviet tanks rolled through Kabul.

The key to it all was the Cold War. Bin Laden suddenly found himself auditioning for a walk-on role in the great dramatic work that was the Eighties. He got the part and spent 10 years battling the infidel Russians. At first from an office in the Pakistani frontier city of Peshawar; then, Kalashnikov in hand, from the bunkers and trenches of eastern Afghanistan. And, alongside him, were tens of thousands of extras. Maybe 30,000, according to intelligence estimates. Armed, motivated, hardened fighters who, once the Soviets were defeated, spread out across the world, an Islamist diaspora, searching for a new jehad. They all knew bin Laden and bin Laden knew them. Westernisation, the Islamic reaction, the crucible of the Cold War combat.

When the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989, bin Laden, like a clay figure prodded and poked into recognisable shape, was thoroughly baked. He was now hard-if brittle. A man made by the time in which he lives.

The first war of the post-Cold War era, the age of George Bush senior's New World Era, provided an epiphany. Bin Laden's offer of an army of Afghan veterans to defeat the designs of Saddam Hussein and protect his homeland Saudi Arabia was rejected. The Yanks marched in instead and the Stars and Stripes fluttered over the harsh, bright desert sand of the land of Islam. Bin Laden saw his new cause and his life was focused once again. When in 1996, after five years of exile in Sudan, he returned to Afghanistan the formation was complete. He was ready. The man made "by his time" was about to become "of his time".

For what makes bin Laden? The quintessential defining element of the late 20th century: communications. Bin Laden signed his first communication to the world, a call to arms for the new jehad, after arriving in Afghanistan "from the Hindu Kush". In fact, he was at Tora Bora, the mountain cave complex made famous by the Al Qaida men who fought not quite to the death in recent weeks. But the point he made was clear. I may be in the most inaccessible part of the world, he was saying, you may not be able to see me, but I am still here. I am still a force. Why was he a force despite being stuck half- way up a benighted scrub-strewn craggy hill in eastern Afghanistan-a country almost without roads, let alone telephones? Modern communications. The Afghan diaspora could be drawn back together. Abdel Bari Atwan, a London-based Arab journalist, visited bin Laden at Tora Bora soon after he moved, with three wives and a dozen children, into the cave complex in the frigid winter of 1996. Atwan reported seeing banks of computers.

These were connected, we know now, to satellite phones so that e-mails could be sent. Last week, a British court agreed to extradite Khaled al-Fawwaz, a Saudi dissident, to America to stand trial for a terrorist conspiracy. Al-Fawwaz's biggest alleged offence was the purchase of a satellite phone that ended up being used by the Al Qaida. It was used during the bombing of the Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam embassies in 1998.