393. Road To 9/11: Interviewing Bin Laden In The Caves of Tora Bora (Part 5)

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2:24Eastern Afghanistan, March 1997. A three-man TV crew is driven up freezing mountain roads. They have each been given a pair of glasses with blacked-out cardboard as blindfolds. They're searched, stripped of their cameras, and left to wait in a mud hut.

2:43Anita:It's now past midnight. The doors open and in walks a tall, softly spoken man with an AK-47 and a camouflage jacket. His name is Osama bin Laden. He is here to deliver his first televised declaration of war against the United States. And one of the three men in that hut, the producer who made the interview happen, joins us on this podcast today. This is the story of Osama bin Laden's declaration of war told by a man who had a front row seat to the action. Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnum. And me, William de Rimpel. And welcome to our guest, my old friend, Peter Bergen, one of the great security journalists of his generation.

3:30CNN's national security analyst and author of a wonderful book, The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden, which I just reread yesterday and which is just a spectacular summation of a long and complicated story. He's also the producer of the interview we just opened with, the first television interview Osama bin Laden ever gave to the Western press. He's also one of my eldest friends. So, Pete, welcome. Thank you, Willie.

3:56Anita:Before we get going and get you up that mountain, Peter, properly, I'd love you to set the scene for us because where we left bin Laden at the end of the episode he was landing at Jalalabad in May 1996 he was broke he was stateless he was disowned I mean many in the State Department thought he was washed up so Peter can you remind us why bin Laden ended up in Afghanistan and why he chose to make the name now is so familiar to us the Tora Bora Caves his base well thanks for having me on You know, Afghanistan for bin Laden was sort of the Medina of the 20th century. This is a man who believed that and modeled himself very explicitly on the prophet.

4:41So when the prophet was exiled from Mecca to Medina, you know, and began his war to kind of bring Islam to not only Saudi Arabia, but also the Middle East. Bin Laden, in his own mind, and this shows a certain amount of his hubris, in a sense. He tried to replicate, in many ways, the life of the Prophet Muhammad. And so his exile from Sudan to Afghanistan resonated in his own mind as reminiscent of what the Prophet had done. And of course, the Prophet was not only a religious figure. He fought 27 different wars and conflicts, so he was also a major military leader. Bin Laden comes to Afghanistan.

5:18He doesn't really know what to expect. He had spent a lot of time in Afghanistan. He arguably spent more time in Afghanistan than many other countries in his life. But the Taliban had just taken over, and he didn't really know what to expect. He lands in Jalalabad. He is greeted by a warlord called Yunus Kallus, who's not in the Taliban, but one of the Afghan warlords who fought the Soviets. And he gets a warm reception because bin Laden had really fought rather bravely against the Soviets during the 1980s war, despite some later kind of discussion that he was sort of a Gucci guerrilla who really didn't participate in the fighting.

5:53And then very soon thereafter, the Taliban take over Jalalabad. But they give him kind of a hero's welcome, and they really see him as a genuine war hero. He sets up Sholp and Jalalabad. In the end, it turns out to be a rather ideal place for him to launch his forthcoming Holy War. And why did he reach out to you, Peter? What's the process? I mean, obviously, this is an interview that most of the world's media would have been fighting and killing for, at least in retrospect. How did you guys – you were the person that actually fixed this up. I was living in New York in the early 90s. And so a group of guys who had trained in Afghanistan or supported the Afghan war effort drove a van into the World Trade Center building, blew it up, hoping to bring both towers down.

6:36They didn't succeed, but they killed six people. So I went to my bosses at CNN and said, look, there's something happening in Afghanistan. We need to try and dig into it. And I didn't really know who was behind it. But this group was an organization. Organizations had leaders. Initially, I thought it was an Afghan warlord called Gubadine Heknachar. who was held responsible for most of the nutty extremist stuff. He was throwing acid into schoolgirls' eyes and this sort of stuff. And we used to blame him for almost anything kind of very extreme at that time. So it was a very sensible attribution.

7:06Yeah, he was the only prime minister in history probably to be shelling his own capital on a daily basis at the time. So we went to Afghanistan. We made a documentary. It's from trying to explain about this phenomenon of the Afghan Arabs and their potential for violence. violence and then in 96 the US State Department released a two-page white paper which was actually very useful and it was full of information about this guy Osama bin Laden who I'd never heard all the financier of Islamic extremism is the way they kind of framed it I then went back to my bosses of CNN who like you know they'd obviously never heard of Osama bin Laden and said I think this guy was responsible for the Trade Center attack in 93 that wasn't quite correct but it was close enough so we went there I went with Peter on that who was at the time the world's most famous foreign correspondent this was the guy who made his name in the gulf war describing scuds sort of and american missiles yeah peter was an old fashioned war correspondent i mean he ran to the sound of gunfire he loved it and also peter juvenile who had gone in 75 times in a british cameraman 75 times into afghanistan during the soviet war which was unbelievably dangerous later become the proprietor of the gandamak lodge our favorite watering hole in kabul every war has its hotel and the gandamak lodge was that hotel great place to ask your question really you know i reached out so many of the people that were supporting bin laden lived in london and they were basically saudi dissidents syrian dissidents and they you know they are they they knew bin laden into one degree or another and they were they had never dealt with the media or had very and they really didn't understand how the media worked and they were very concerned were agents of the cia they were very concerned will we give this guy a fair shake and and you know they just i spent weeks with them and we mostly talked about the Quran, Saudi history.

8:41And I was by then about 33. And I had developed patience, which was very, I spent a lot of time with these guys.

8:48Anita:Peter, what did bin Laden, what was he seeing when he walked into his new home, the Tora Bora mountains? What was there? How hospitable was it to human life? What was he walking into? For the son of a extraordinarily rich man, bin Laden really was like a survivalist. He loved taking 12-hour hikes in the mountains of Tora Bora. He lived like a medieval peasant in the Torreborra Mountains, much to the annoyance of some of his kids who knew that he had a lot of money. At the time, he was kind of broke. But the point is that he actually chose this life. He lived in this like ramshackle house, house is almost a kind of word, in Torreborra, which is where he loved sort of, he loved the mountain alpine air.

9:28He would take his sons on 12-hour hikes around the mountains, which they hated, but he loved. And, you know, But it was a place that he was very comfortable with because he had set this place up in the 1980s during the war against the Soviets. He knew these mountains like the back of his hand. And it's astonishingly beautiful, we should say. It's one of the most sort of extraordinary places to walk around. Yeah, you know, the mountains rise to 14 ,000 feet. Really, you've been there, I guess. And I think it's a fair amount of time there. And it's on the Afghan-Pakistan border. So it's an ideal place to sort of, you know, go back and forth between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

10:00So, you know, bin Laden arrives there. He also has a bigger house in Jalalabad, which is a sort of relatively small city near Tarabora. And this is where he kind of essentially resets his life. He spent five years in exile in Sudan. He's left with almost nothing, and he doesn't really know what to expect with the Taliban. We should perhaps explain that Jalalabad had been the winter capital of the Afghan kings, and it's notably warmer than Kabul. It's a place that's quite sort of, I mean, it's quite a civilized place by Afghan standards. It's not that remote. It has a subtropical climate. And when we went there, we checked into the Zero Star Spingar Hotel, which you may have stayed at, Willie.

10:44I've stayed there, actually. That's where we waited around to get the go-ahead to go on Indivi bin Laden.

10:50Anita:Right. Right. So while he's there, you know, sort of taking his reluctant sons on very long walks and eating, I believe, sort of a very, very basic diet of, you know, just bread, rice, you know, some fruit from time to time, living like a monk, as you say, you know, sort of this very religious and, you know, austere life. At what point does his path cross with Mullah Omar, who is also, you know, a big deal at this time? Mullah Omar was basically a village mullah. You know, he's well regarded by other of his colleagues because he was incorruptible, sort of led this very humble life. By 1994, he had styled himself the commander of the faithful, and he had taken over much of southern Afghanistan.

11:34And he was a one-eyed cleric. He fought against the Soviets. He was extremely provincial. They saw Kabul as sort of Sodom and Gomorrah, a place of sin, you know, the longtime capital of Afghanistan. So, Muammar and bin Laden, they sort of reach out to each other. Muammar is governed by ideas around Pashtun hospitality, which is extremely important for Pashtun. He's the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan. He also regards bin Laden as a war hero, and he gives him protection. Now, that is not to say that the Taliban love bin Laden universally. In fact, a lot of them don't. They know he's complicating their quest for international recognition by his threatening statements against the United States.

12:18Quite a lot of them want bin Laden to leave Afghanistan at a certain point. But Mullah Omar is, you know, he's the commander of the faithful. It's a theocracy. And it's basically if he wants bin Laden to stay, bin Laden's going to stay. And this declaration of jihad that is made in front of your cameras, give us the immediate background on that. The background was, yeah, I reached out to these guys in London, spent a lot of time with them. bin Laden had delivered a declaration of war to in Arabic, but no one had paid any attention to it. And in bin Laden's mind, he had a duty to warn if he was going to kind of attack civilians.

12:51And so he wanted to talk, he, his contact in London told me, you know, we were talking to CNN, BBC, 60 Minutes, CBS. And in the end, they chose CNN, you know, we went there, we spent a lot of time in Pakistan, we had two of bin Laden's associates with us, we checked into the zero star spinger hotel in jalalabad we waited and waited at one point that his media advisor came he said don't bring any of your equipment with us and we know we had a fifty thousand dollar camera and we had professional equipment but this was not up for negotiation and you know it's interesting that they would use a bomb and a camera to later kill akman shah masoud the leader of the taliban resistance but so they told us don't bring anything with you including your watches just bring your clothes so one evening group of heavenly our men arrive in a van.

13:40We get in, they drive towards Kabul, then they drive up into the Tora Bora mountains, change of vehicles, blindfolds, searched very carefully, multiple levels of security. A lot of this sort of may have been for our, you know, kind of a little bit of security theater. But the point is, is that by the time we get to this mud hut in the middle of the night, I estimated it was midnight. I didn't really know much about bin Laden compared to anybody listening to this i didn't even know exactly know what he would look like were they're not pictures from the beginning that were so familiar with that face though don't forget he was a very fundamentalist saudi wahabi who do not take pictures and at that time there was maybe one robert fiske had maybe taken a picture of him in 1993 in sudan but it was like very limited um and so he walks in and he's six foot four i estimated he is very rail thin he carried himself like a cleric he wasn't a table-thumping revolutionary i knew enough about him to say that his you know his views on the united states were you know and israel and most arab regimes was very intense but when he was talking it was like he was reading the phone book he was uh very kind of monotone he spoke in arabic and he had a very good translator with him who like took to be some kind of saudi cleric um he delivered um you know this declaration of war against the united States.

14:58He was reading or he was just talking? He was talking. He was talking. And he spoke in Arabic. He speaks English. You know, he grew up, look, he comes from one of the most elite families. He went to a school where he had an English teacher, Brian Fifield-Shaylor, who was an recent Oxford graduate who taught him English. He spent a little time in Oxford when he was 17, two and a half months on a kind of like exchange program type of thing. So, he speaks English. But he didn't speak English to the degree that he wanted to do an interview. He wanted to be very clear what he was going to say. So some of the things he said in the interview, I frankly didn't understand, because we didn't.

15:33So he mentioned Aiden. Well, it turned out I many years later that the his man had bombed a hotel in Aiden that was housing American soldiers who were on the way to Somalia to support Operation Restore Hope, which was feeding starving Somalis in 1993. So the interview sort of came along and he spent an hour with us and he was there very kind of, you know, He wasn't going to hang out. I mean, we had a cup of tea, took some pictures, and then he left. And at the end of the interview, I think it was maybe like three in the morning or something. And again, I'm estimating. I thought, this is all very interesting, but how do you operationalize this from a mud hut at 6 ,000 feet in Afghanistan, which the Taliban had basically put back into the Middle Ages?

16:14There was no phone system. The only way you could communicate was through Theraya satellite phones, which were the very early satellite phones. A little over a year later, the U.S. embassy attacks in Africa happened. And then it was very clear that these guys could kill, you know, they didn't care about killing large numbers of civilians.

16:30Anita:Did you ever get that feeling from the man himself? I mean, you know, sometimes people look back and they embellish an experience. And I know you're not that kind of person. But when he walked in, did you feel that you were in the presence of somebody who was capable of such violence? No, no. I mean, they'd invited us, so I wasn't scared. I was like, you're both journalists and writers and you work in this. So, like, when you're in that situation, it's like, what you're actually thinking is, am I getting what we need? You work for this. Exactly. And they'd invited us. It was four years before they beheaded Danny Pearl.

17:05Anita:Well, I was thinking of that. I was thinking of exactly that. But, you know, you are excited. But you also have a spidey sense of, you know, I hate, I like, I fear. I mean, was there an emotional response you had to him walking in at all? I found him very hard to read, Anita. I found him hard to read. He wasn't like, there was no, A, there was like very, it wasn't like there was a lot of small talk. There was just like, we did the interview, we did it. I mean, the people around him hung on his every word. There were maybe a dozen guys who were weapons sort of outside the vision of the camera. And they filmed the camera, they filmed the interview on their camera, again, because of this concern about security.

17:42And, you know, I thought, wow, this guy's serious. He seems serious. The people around him are serious. But it's one thing to be serious, another thing to have capability. So lots of people may have the intent to attack the United States. Do they have the capability? And some people have the capability, but do they really have the intent? So at that time, we didn't know a bunch of things that I now know. We didn't know that his men may have trained some of the fighters in the Black Hawk Down incident in Somalia, in which 18 American servicemen had died. At the time, it seemed like a bunch of threats.

18:11In fact, they invited me back in 1998, and I didn't go because I felt, okay, there's not much more to say it's going to be the same set of threats and uh you know john miller of abc news then went in in 98 and did another interview with bin laden where he sort of said much of the same things do you regret that now i mean this is one of the great interviews of the 20th century that you turned down well no but i don't regret it because we i mean basically he said that he you know our interview in 97 was the first televised interview and a year later john Miller did this interview and Bin Laden said some of the same things, gave a little bit more access, they were a little more comfortable to the media at the time.

18:51But fundamentally, it was the same set of threats. And Bin Laden knew by then in May of 98, the embassy attacks in Africa were just a few months away.

19:01Anita:And there is a real, I think, fascinating insight in your book, which is that He knows what he's doing when he's talking to the media. This is all part of a strategy and a plan. This isn't some vanity thing. There is a plan here. Well, I mean, look, CNN is going to be half of many listeners to recall this. CNN was sort of the X or Twitter of the age. I mean, that was the most sophisticated way of communication at the time. It made its name in the Gulf War and it was right in the lead at this point. I mean, now the Bin Laden of Gryffind would just put a note, you know, would tweet about it. He went from somebody who had very little experience with the media and also, from a religious point of view, rejected photographs, video, etc., etc.

19:46When he grew up, there were no pictures in his house. There was no photographs. He wasn't photographed because of his religious beliefs. But anyway, that changed. Peter, I've got a question. um i'd heard from friends who were covering uh the afghan conflict at this point that uh these arab afghans as as as we first knew them were actually very scary that uh people would be going in with the taliban and uh with the mujahideen before them and were always well treated because of this pashtun ethic of of hospitality and and you know you might be marched 40 miles over the mountains on a crust of bread but they looked after you and and they didn't threaten you the first way ever heard of the arab afghans was that they were not at all welcoming to westerners and regarded them as a threat and occasionally used to take potshots at them uh did you find uh bin laden's people uh suspicious and hostile i suppose they weren't hostile but i mean really that is absolutely true they they they just generally did not like westerners or particularly americans but you know in this context they'd invited us to do an interview they weren't friendly they weren't unfriendly they just we did our thing and then we went back the interview aired um and uh in may of 97 it got virtually no attention because by that point you know bin laden hadn't really seemingly done anything how funny this crucial interview was ignored at the time low low point on the news below monica lewinsky or something so this goes

21:15Anita:unnoticed. In February 1998, bin Laden merges operations with another name that's going to resonate a lot with people, Ayman al-Zawahiri, this doctor from Cairo. And at this point, do people take notice? Because they sign this joint statement of intent, the World Islamic Front for Jihad against the Jews and Crusaders. And in it is a radical fatwa, which declares that killing Americans and whoever helps Americans is actually a duty. It's a blessing on the Muslim who does it. It's a fatwa. It's a religious edict. I mean, we should remind people, you know, they'll associate that word with Salman Rushdie, but it is a religious cause for the faithful to carry out this rule.

21:58Anita:So, do people sit up when this is signed, when the word fatwa and this edict goes out? Yeah, I got some coverage. You know, there are a very limited number of people in the US government looking at this question, they were in the New York field office, or the FBI, and then also the CIA bin Laden unit, he was still like not particularly well known. It's only with the embassy bombing attacks in August of 98 that you really suddenly he's, you know, there's a ton of media about him. But you know, this does get to an interesting question, Anita, which is this this fatwa is based in part on the blind shake, who is a graduate of al-Azhar University in Cairo, which is the Vatican of Sunni thought.

22:41And bin Laden is not a religious scholar at all, was Ayman al-Zawahiri, he was a surgeon. Important point, these are both characters who for all that they're wrapping themselves in the cloak of Islam, neither of them are trained Islamic scholars in any way. No, they have no formal religious training. Bin Laden had remembered every verse of the Quran, which is a pretty impressive feat of memory since those 6 ,000 verses. But that said, they couldn't issue a fatwa because a fatwa is a religious legal ruling. It's a law-based religion. And so Sheikh Rachman was in an American jail at the time for a role in his terrorist conspiracies in New York City in the mid-'90s.

23:21And he says in this fatwa, you can essentially kill Americans and Jews on land, on sea, pretty much anywhere. And that, I think, is kind of the crucial religious authorization that bin Laden thinks he needs for this holy war. And they have their first and only press conference in May of 98. Two of Sheikh Rahman's sons are there, and they hand out this fatwa from their father. It's a press conference with about a dozen Pakistani reporters. And it's the only time al-Qaeda gave a press conference. And I think, again, it's like their belief that they have a duty to warn, their belief that they need a religious imprimatur that is really, as it were, kosher, halal, from a leading cleric.

24:02And that's why they hold this press conference. And then a few months later, the embassies blow up. By the way, to blow up two American embassies within nine minutes, it's hard to blow up one American embassy. To blow up two within nine minutes, this shows something very, very different. And now this is the thing that wakes up the agencies, isn't it? This is the moment that they suddenly put people onto this. More than 200 people get killed. Kenya and Tanzania both have substantial Muslim populations. And so it also indicated that Bin Laden didn't care. They timed the bomb so it was Friday when a lot of people would be in the mosque if they were observant.

24:37but you know bin laden didn't care how many civilians he killed and from that point forward because most in previous terrorist attacks there have been an effort to have what the famous terrorism scholar brian michael jenkins said you want a lot of people watching and not a lot of people dying that's what he said in 75 bin laden and al-qaeda wanted a lot of people dying and a lot of people watching uh which was kind of a new development so it's now you know if we have part for some listeners perhaps to recall the terrorists actually tried to calibrate the violence So it didn't turn people off, didn't turn off fence sitters, didn't turn off potential supporters.

25:11So you wouldn't just have – the IRA would call in warnings, right, if they were going to blow up a pub. So this was a very different kind of terrorist group.