Inside the Kingdom (23 page)

The East Wind missile system was, indeed, slow to load with liquid fuel and notoriously inaccurate, which is why it was a serious threat only when carrying nuclear warheads. Lucky to land within a mile of its target, the CSS-2 was scarcely worth firing with conventional warheads, and Israel showed its scorn by sending strike aircraft to “buzz” Saudi airfields. Flying low over the ground, the Israelis released empty fuel tanks (inscribed with Hebrew characters) to prove they could drop real bombs there anytime they chose.

King Fahd sent Ronald Reagan his personal assurance that the missiles did not carry nuclear warheads and that they would not be used for a first strike on Israel, adopting a considerably humbler tone than he was employing in public. But the State Department was not mollified. When Philip Habib, Reagan’s Middle East envoy, went to meet Fahd in April 1988 to discuss Israel, Palestine, and Lebanon, he was accompanied by Hume Horan, the recently arrived U.S. ambassador, who insisted on raising the missile question the moment that Habib had finished his business. Horan was a master Arabist, and he was just launching eloquently into his official protest when the king exploded in fury. The ambassador was back in Washington within a week.

The curious story was put about that Horan was sent home because King Fahd “did not like his Arabic,” and that was true in a way. Yet like everything to do with the East Wind affair, this was only part of the story. In the long-running U.S.-Saudi marriage of convenience, Riyadh’s acquiring of Chinese weaponry had to be rated a serious and deliberately pursued infidelity—though, once the ritual pots and pans had been flung, the dysfunctional marriage jogged along very much as before. The couple clearly met each other’s basic needs more than either of them cared to admit.

So far as is known, Saudi Arabia’s East Wind missiles remain in service, and on standby, to this day. The Saudi government continues to deny that the missiles’ warheads are nuclear.

CHAPTER 13

Vacationing Jihadi

K
haled Bahaziq and his wife first went to Peshawar, near the Afghan border, for a working holiday in the mid-1980s. “We wanted to work with the refugees for a week or so,” remembers Khaled. “We experienced the Russian invasion as something personal. It was an attack upon our brother Muslims, and we wanted to help. Our own government was making it so easy. They were giving big discounts on air tickets. You just needed a letter from one of the relief organizations. Quite a number of our friends were there.”

Among those friends was Osama Bin Laden, who had recently opened a guesthouse in Peshawar, Bayt Al-Ansar, the “House of the Helpers.” In Islamic history the
ansar
were the helpers who welcomed Mohammed to Yathrib and gave him shelter when he left Mecca. Osama welcomed Arab volunteers who had come to Pakistan to do relief work among the Afghanis. At this stage there were only a few Arabs who had actually come to fight.

“When Osama talked about jihad in those days,” remembers Bahaziq, “it was more about building than fighting. He was gentle and rather quiet, with this deep, slow voice that came up from his chest. You could not see him going to the battlefield. I thought he was very soft and unwarlike. At this stage he was just starting to bring in his company’s construction equipment, sending machines over the border to build roads for the mujahideen. It was good to see him again after Jeddah. We had long conversations about the jihad and the importance of implementing Islamic values. I found it very, very comforting to feel part of the jihad, and he felt the same.

“Don’t forget that in those days Osama was not a villain, and he was not in any way anti-Saudi. Quite the opposite. He was a hero of the community, using his wealth to help a noble cause that was supported by the Saudi government—and by the American government as well. The Muslims saw the fight as strengthening Islam. The West saw it as a battle to bring down Communism. In those days everyone was fixated on kicking out the Russians. I don’t remember anyone who looked ahead and saw a clash.

“Osama and I would pray together. We were friends and more than friends—our families both came up from Yemen in the early days. When we were kids we would go horseback riding together, doing jumps on a spare piece of land that we owned. Osama was always very athletic. He was the first person I remember—Muslim or non-Muslim—who insisted on eating and drinking things that were pure and natural. After our riding I would offer him fruit juice from the fridge at my house and he’d refuse. ‘This has got preservative,’ he’d say.”

In Peshawar Bin Laden had teamed up with Abdullah Azzam, the inspirational Palestinian
jihadi
from the Jeddah and Mecca university campuses. Azzam had set up his own Afghan relief network, the Maktab Al-Khadamat (Office of Services), to welcome Saudi volunteers and money. He would accommodate volunteers in the frontier town, then channel them off to the training camps in Afghanistan and the Khyber Pass, which opened just nine miles to the west.

“Azzam was another man of principle,” remembers Bahaziq. “He was very handsome, with his bushy, gray beard. I really loved the moments I had with him. He was always smiling—very calm, not stern. I’d met him when he came lecturing in America in the 1970s. Now he was putting his ideas into practice. He was helping jihad on the ground.”

Azzam’s Office of Services produced pamphlets and newspaper articles, drumming up international support for the Afghan war effort, and Khaled Bahaziq was one of those who responded. In the course of the 1980s he made no less than ten trips from Jeddah to Peshawar—like many Saudis, a vacationing jihadi.

“I’d buy my weapon when I got to the border. There was a huge weapons souk outside Peshawar—the guns were hanging there in rows, hundreds of them. You could buy any weapon you fancied, and go on your way. I would always get a Kalashnikov. It cost a thousand riyals [about three hundred dollars]. I would use it while I was there, then, when I left, I’d give it as a present to one of the Afghan brothers. Across the border there were lots of stalls selling hashish and opium flowers—very beautiful looking. But that was not for true jihadis, not in any way. I’d rent a car, or sometimes I’d buy one that I’d sell when I went home. If I was going up to the northeast where the roads were not paved, I would get a four-wheel drive, a Toyota or a jeep.”

Bahaziq had a job as a university lecturer in Jeddah, as well as a share in a medical supplies business with his brother-in-law. His brother was a full-time mujahid, one of the small group of “Arab Afghans” who were fighting their own battle against the Russians.

“When I went to the front, it was a very good feeling. I had a sensation of calmness and peace. Jihad was doing God’s work, and I felt very close to God. I always felt—and my brother used to say this—that we were defenders. We were not there to kill, but to defend. There was great fellowship, we were all brothers, with a lot of joking. I used to make this life-size human dummy: it had a headdress that made it look like an Afghan, so I would stick it up over the trench and the Russians would fire at it. We laughed and teased each other—we felt very easy with the bullets flying around. If one of them caught us, we knew it would take us to heaven. I remember one expedition in the mountains where we had no jeeps. We had our weapons on donkeys, and it got dark and cold. One of the young guys decided to give his donkey a name—Nadia. ‘Please, Nadia,’ he said, ‘come into the cave with me, just for warmness. I’m not married, and I want the feeling that I have a woman to keep me warm.’ ”

Bahaziq brought his wife to vacation with him on several occasions, taking her into the firing zone.

“So my wife, you could say, is also a terrorist. One day I was teaching her how to throw hand grenades. I had one in my hand with the pin out, holding it tight so it would not explode. ‘Am I your king?’ I asked her. ‘Am I your master on the earth? If I release this, what happens after three seconds will be horrible—worse than death.’ ‘Please, Khaled,’ she said, pleading with me, ‘please, yes indeed, you are my master.’ So I threw the grenade far away and it exploded. ‘Right,’ she said, taking a grenade for herself and pulling out the pin. ‘Now let
me
tell you who
you
are.’ ”

Coming and going, often during his Ramadan holidays, and sometimes bringing his children, whom he would leave in one of the Peshawar guesthouses, the vacationing jihadi had no illusions as to who were the serious warriors in the battle against the Russians.

“The Afghans were like their goats, scaling the mountains so nimbly. Somehow they always got themselves up above the Russians, firing down on them in their tanks. They had such toughness. They did not show pain. I remember one had had his finger cut off, and I was dressing that wounded hand with a bandage. Meanwhile, he had his walkie-talkie in the other hand and was giving out orders. Another time I was with an Arab and an Afghan when both of them got shot. At once the Arab started rolling on the ground screaming. The Afghan just looked at him.”

For several years Osama Bin Laden was an armchair warrior, traveling to Peshawar to bring money and supplies, helping the mujahideen with his road-making work, but not actually joining the Afghans on the field of battle. Later he confessed his shame that he had not been braver—“I asked forgiveness from God Almighty,” he wrote in one account that he prepared for Abdullah Azzam, “feeling that I had sinned.”

But in 1986 he started work building a military base, a camp to house several dozen Arab fighters, near the Afghan village of Jaji, about ten miles from the Pakistani border. It was a turning point in his career—it brought him into contact with real fighting. The following summer Soviet jets made a series of attacks on the camp, diving down on Jaji, their engines screaming. The lanky young Saudi, now thirty years old, dived for cover as the shells rained down.

“The mountains were shaking from the bombardment,” as he later described it. “The missiles that landed outside the camp were making a huge noise that covered the sound of the mujahideen cannon as if they did not exist. Bear in mind that if you heard those sounds alone, you might say there could not be anything louder! As to the missiles that landed inside the camp, thanks to God, they did not explode. They landed as iron lumps. I felt closer to God than ever.”

By Bin Laden’s melodramatic account, the mujahideen cannon managed to bring down four Soviet planes.

“I saw with my own eyes the remains of [one of] the pilots—three fingers, a part of a nerve, the skin of one cheek, an ear, the neck, and the skin of the back. Some Afghan brothers came and took a photograph of him as if he were a slaughtered sheep! We cheered.”

Osama described the battles of Jaji to the young journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who had come out to write about the Arab Afghans for
Al-Majallah
magazine.

“He was very proud,” remembers Khashoggi. “He showed me how he’d figured out that he could defend the whole valley from a certain vantage point. The Afghans, he said, did not think tactically like that.”

Like Khaled Bahaziq, Bin Laden was full of admiration for the bravery of the Afghan fighters. Unlike the Arabs—and Bin Laden himself—they had not dived for the trenches. They had stood their ground, firing up at the infidels, serene in their faith, accepting life or death as it was dealt to them.

“Reliance upon God is the main source of our strength,” Bin Laden told Khashoggi. “These trenches and tunnels are merely the military facilities God asked us to make. We depend completely on God in all matters.”

Osama was coming to feel that his life—and death—was totally in God’s hands.

“I became more convinced of the fact,” he later wrote, “that no one could be injured except by God’s will.”

When a Russian mortar shell fell at his feet shortly after this, he waited fatalistically for it to explode and kill him.

“I felt
sakina
[serenity],” he later told the British journalist Robert Fisk—
sakina
being the Islamic concept that removes you mentally from the material aspects of the world. Linked with God in another existence, you feel elevated, exhilarated—quite indifferent to whether you live or die. It is the nirvana to which suicide bombers aspire.