The Great War for Civilisation by Robert Fisk Read Free Book Online

generals who dominated the “modern” Middle East. The Hizballah delegates from Lebanon took me aside one night to reveal the fragility of the regime. “We were invited to dinner on a boat on the Nile with Turabi,” one of them told me. “We cruised up and down the river for a while and I noticed the government guards on both banks watching us. Then suddenly there was a burst of gunfire from a wedding party. We could hear the music of the wedding. But Turabi was so frightened that he hurled himself from the table onto the floor and stayed there for several minutes. This is not a stable place.” Nor was the façade of free speech going to lift the blanket of isolation which the United States and its allies had thrown over Sudan, or protect its more notorious guests.
    Two months after I met bin Laden, gunmen burst into his Khartoum home and tried to assassinate him. The Sudanese government suspected the potential killers were paid by the CIA. Clearly, this was no place for a latterday Mahdi. Saudi Arabia stripped him of his citizenship later the same year. The Saudis and then the Americans demanded bin Laden’s extradition. Sudan meekly handed its other well-known fugitive, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez—“Carlos the Jackal,” who had seized eleven oil ministers at the OPEC conference in Vienna in 1975 and organised an assault on the French embassy in The Hague—to the French. But “Carlos” was a revolutionary gone to seed, a plump alcoholic now rotten enough to be betrayed. Bin Laden was in a different category. His followers were blamed for bomb explosions in Riyadh in November of 1995 and then at a U.S. barracks at al-Khobar the following year which in all killed twenty-four Americans and two Indians. In early 1996, he was permitted to leave for the country of his choice—and that was bound to be the one refuge in which he had discovered so much about his own faith.
    AND SO IT WAS THAT ONE HOT EVENING in late June 1996, the telephone on my desk in Beirut rang with one of the more extraordinary messages I was to receive as a foreign correspondent. “Mr. Robert, a friend you met in Sudan wants to see you,” said a voice in English but with an Arabic accent. I thought at first he meant Kashoggi, though I had first met Jamal in 1990, long before going to Khartoum. “No, no, Mr. Robert, I mean the man you interviewed. Do you understand?” Yes, I understood. And where could I meet this man? “The place where he is now,” came the reply. I knew that bin Laden was rumoured to have returned to Afghanistan but there was no confirmation of this. So how do I reach him? I asked. “Go to Jalalabad—you will be contacted.” I took the man’s number. He was in London.
    So was the only Afghan embassy that would give me a visa. I was not in a hurry. It seemed to me that if the bin Ladens of this world wished to be interviewed,
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should not allow itself to be summoned to their presence. It was a journalistic risk. There were a thousand reporters who wanted to interview Osama bin Laden. But I thought he would hold more respect for a journalist who did not rush cravenly to him within hours of his request. I also had a more pressing concern. Although the secret services of the Middle East and Pakistan had acted for the CIA in helping the Afghan mujahedin against the Russians, many of them were now at war with bin Laden’s organisation, which they blamed for Islamist insurgencies in their own countries. Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia and Saudi Arabia all now suspected bin Laden’s hand in their respective insurrections. What if the invitation was a trick, a set-up in which I would unwittingly lead the Egyptian police—or the infinitely corrupt Pakistani ISI, the ubiquitously named Inter-Services Intelligence organisation—to bin Laden? Even worse from my point of view, what if this was an attempt to lure a reporter who knew bin Laden to