road through all the revolutions in Sudan,’ a bearded sheikh announced. ‘We waited until we had given up on everybody – and then Osama bin Laden came along.’ I noticed how bin Laden, head still bowed, peered up at the old man, acknowledging his age but unhappy that he should be sitting at ease in front of him, a young man relaxing before his elders. He was even more unhappy at the sight of a Westerner standing a few feet away from him, and from time to time he would turn his head to look at me, not with malevolence but with grave suspicion.
Kashoggi put his arms around him. Bin Laden kissed him on both cheeks, one Muslim to another, both acknowledging the common danger they had endured together in Afghanistan. Jamal Kashoggi must have brought the foreigner for a reason. That is what bin Laden was thinking. For as Kashoggi spoke, bin Laden looked over his shoulder at me, occasionally nodding. ‘Robert, I want to introduce you to Sheikh Osama,’ Kashoggi half-shouted through children’s songs. Bin Laden was a tall man and he realised that this was an advantage when he shook hands with the English reporter. Salaam aleikum. His hands were firm, not strong, but, yes, he looked like a mountain man. The eyes searched your face. He was lean and had long fingers and a smile which – while it could never be described as kind – did not suggest villainy. He said we might talk, at the back of the tent where we could avoid the shouting of the children.
Looking back now, knowing what we know, understanding the monstrous beast-figure he would become in the collective imagination of the world, I search for some clue, the tiniest piece of evidence, that this man could inspire an act that would change the world for ever – or, more to the point, allow an American president to persuade his people that the world was changed for ever. Certainly his formal denial of ‘terrorism’ gave no hint. The Egyptian press was claiming that bin Laden had brought hundreds of his Arab fighters with him to Sudan, while the Western embassy circuit in Khartoum was suggesting that some of the Arab ‘Afghans’ whom this Saudi entrepreneur had flown to Sudan were now busy training for further jihad wars in Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt. Bin Laden was well aware of this. ‘The rubbish of the media and embassies,’ he called it. ‘I am a construction engineer and an agriculturalist. If I had training camps here in Sudan, I couldn’t possibly do this job.’
The ‘job’ was certainly ambitious: not just the Almatig connection but a brand-new highway stretching all the way from Khartoum to Port Sudan, a distance of 1,200 kilometres on the old road, now shortened to 800 kilometres by the new bin Laden route that would turn the distance from the capital into a mere day’s journey. In a country that was despised by Saudi Arabia for its support of Saddam Hussein after his 1990 invasion of Kuwait almost as much as it was by the United States, bin Laden had turned the equipment of war to the construction of a pariah state. I did wonder why he could not have done the same to the blighted landscape of Afghanistan, but he refused at first to talk about his war, sitting at the back of the tent and cleaning his teeth with a piece of mishwak wood. But talk he eventually did about a war that he helped to win for the Afghans whom the Americans and the Saudis – and the Pakistanis – all supported against the Russians. He wanted to talk. He thought he was going to be interrogated about ‘terrorism’ and realised that he was being asked about Afghanistan and – despite all the reserve and suspicion he felt towards a foreigner – that he wished to explain how his experience there had shaped his life.
‘What I lived through in two years there,’ he said, ‘I could not have lived in a hundred years elsewhere. When the invasion of Afghanistan started, I was enraged and went there at once – I arrived within days, before the end of 1979, and I went on going back for nine years. I felt outraged that an injustice had been committed against the people of Afghanistan. It made me realise that people who take power in the world use their power under different names to subvert others and to force their opinions on them. Yes, I fought there, but my fellow Muslims did much more than I. Many of them died and I am still alive.’ The Russian invasion is often dated to January 1980, but the first Soviet special forces troops entered Kabul before Christmas of 1979 when they – or their Afghan satellites – killed the incumbent communist President Hafizullah Amin and established Babrak Karmal as their puppet in Kabul. Osama bin Laden had moved fast.
With his Iraqi engineer Mohamed Saad, who was now building the highway to Port Sudan, bin Laden blasted massive tunnels into the Zazai mountains of Pakhtia province for guerrilla hospitals and arms dumps, then cut a mujahedin dirt trail across Afghanistan to within 25 kilometres of Kabul, a remarkable feat of engineering that the Russians could never destroy. But what lessons had bin Laden drawn from the war against the Russians? He was wounded five times and 500 of his Arab fighters were killed in combat with the Soviets – their graves lie just inside the Afghan border at Torkham – and even bin Laden was not immortal, was he?
‘I was never afraid of death,’ he replied. ‘As Muslims, we believe that when we die, we go to heaven.’ He was no longer irritating his teeth with the piece of mishwak wood but talking slowly and continuously, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees. ‘Before a battle, God sends us seqina – tranquillity. Once I was only thirty metres from the Russians and they were trying to capture me. I was under bombardment but I was so peaceful in my heart that I fell asleep. This experience of seqina has been written about in our earliest books. I saw a 120-millimetre mortar shell land in front of me, but it did not blow up. Four more bombs were dropped from a Russian plane on our headquarters but they did not explode. We beat the Soviet Union. The Russians fled … My time in Afghanistan was the most important experience of my life.’
But what of the Arab mujahedin whom he took to Afghanistan – members of a guerrilla army who were also encouraged and armed by the United States to fight the Russians, and who were forgotten by their mentors when the war was over? Bin Laden seemed ready for the question. ‘Personally neither I nor my brothers saw evidence of American help,’ he said. ‘When my mujahedin were victorious and the Russians were driven out, differences started so I returned to road construction in Taif and Abha. I brought back the equipment I had used to build tunnels and roads for the mujahedin in Afghanistan. Yes, I helped some of my comrades come here after the war.’ How many? Osama bin Laden shook his head. ‘I don’t want to say. But they are here with me now, they are working right here, building this road to Port Sudan.’
A month earlier, I had been on assignment in the Bosnian war and I told bin Laden that Bosnian Muslim fighters in the town of Travnik had mentioned his name to me. This awoke his interest. Each time I saw bin Laden, he was fascinated to hear not what his enemies thought of him but of what Muslim ulema and militants said of him. ‘I feel the same about Bosnia,’ he said. ‘But the situation there does not provide the same opportunities as Afghanistan. A small number of mujahedin have gone to fight in Bosnia-Hercegovina but the Croats won’t allow the mujahedin in through Croatia as the Pakistanis did with Afghanistan.’ But wasn’t it a bit of an anticlimax to be fighting for Islam and God in Afghanistan and end up road-building in Sudan? Bin Laden was now more studied in his use of words. ‘They like this work and so do I. This is a great project which we are achieving for the people here; it helps the Muslims and improves their lives.’
This was the moment when I noticed that other men, Sudanese who were very definitely not among bin Laden’s former comrades, had gathered to listen to our conversation. Bin Laden, of course, had been aware of their presence long before me. What did he think about the war in Algeria, I asked? But a man in a green suit calling himself Mohamed Moussa – he claimed to be Nigerian although he was a Sudanese government security agent – tapped me on the arm. ‘You have asked more than enough questions,’ he announced. So how about a picture? Bin Laden hesitated – something he rarely did – and I sensed that prudence was fighting with vanity. In the end, he stood on the new road in his gold-fringed robe and smiled wanly at my camera for two pictures, then raised his left hand like a president telling the press when their time was up. At which point Osama bin Laden went off to inspect his highway.
But what was the nature of the latest ‘Islamic Republic’ to capture bin Laden’s imagination? He maintained a home in Khartoum – he would keep a small apartment in the Saudi city of Jeddah until the Saudis themselves deprived him of his citizenship – and lived in Sudan with his four wives, one of them only a teenager. His bin Laden company – not to be confused with the larger construction business run by his cousins – was paid in Sudanese currency