Excerpt of Osama by Jonathan Randal
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BUG IN THE ELEPHANT'S EAR
For days after September 11, 2001, I wondered if Osama bin Laden, along with
the rest of the world, had watched the real-time footage of those fully fueled
airliners, hijacked by suicidal pilots and their henchmen, as they rammed into
the Pentagon and the twin towers of Manhattan's World Trade Center. For reasons
I still do not completely fathom, everything else about 9/11, as the attacks
soon were called, was subordinated for me to that possibility. Perhaps it was
that in years past, high up in his Afghan redoubt carved into the Hindu Kush, he
had indulged a rich man's fascination with gadgetry, delighting in showing
visitors his computers, satellite telephones and dishes and other high-tech
paraphernalia. Did he now savor life imitating art, a pastiche of kitsch reruns
of Hollywood horror movies complete with plummeting bodies, billowing flames,
imploding buildings, brave firemen rushing back up the stairs to their deaths?
Did he appreciate the novelty of doomed airline passengers describing their
predicament on state-of-the-art cell phones while other passengers heroically
rushed their captors, determined to deflect their airliner-turned-missile from
yet another landmark target?
At the time I doubted ironclad answers would be forthcoming. I was indulging in
pure speculation, but speculation based on more than two frustrating years
trying to figure Osama out. On past form, I felt, he would approve and perhaps
claim he helped inspire, but still stop short of admitting he ordered, planned,
much less micromanaged this extraordinary act of violence, guaranteeing his name
a lasting footnote in the annals of terrorism. Such winking indirection had
become his modus operandi stretching back almost a decade. It allowed him to
insinuate a kind of global reach even when by any logical yardstick no
irrefutable proof linked him to some of the acts of terrorism laid at his door.
And, of course, in his mind at least, it distanced him from those he had
organized.
Then less than a fortnight before Christmas, a grainy, partly inaudible amateur
videotape was released by a hesitant Bush administration wary of its seeming
suspiciously good luck in obtaining the improbably self-incriminating
"mother of all smoking guns." For the administration, the cassette's
contents were literally almost too good to be true.
Entertaining some fifty to sixty dinner guests in Kandahar just days before the
rapid collapse of the Taliban regime in mid-November, an almost languid Osama
was shown providing chapter and verse for a hanging judge's fantasy. Right down
to the occasional chuckle and laugh, the chilling tale the lanky six-foot-four
Saudi told without remorse would make even a nineteenth-century melodrama
villain blanch in disbelief. And indeed disbelief was how much of the Muslim
world greeted the cassette, whether out of denial, because the contents seemed
too pat or because the doubters could not understand why Osama would have been
so arrogant, careless or plain stupid to have said what the cassette had him
saying.
(If anything, the outraged accusations of fraud were somewhat subdued, perhaps
reflecting the then still recent defeat of the Taliban regime and the initial
disruption of Osama's Al-Qaeda organization or at least of its frontline foot
soldiers. Equally off-putting to the worldwide Muslim audience he assiduously
courted was his single-minded interest in Saudi Arabia to the exclusion of
Kashmir, Palestine, Chechnya or other Islamic conflicts he normally championed.)
The Bush administration did not see fit to dispel the mystery of the
cassette's provenance in an effort to bolster the credibility of its bona
fides. For reasons elucidated neither at the time nor later, the U.S. government
did no more than hint it had been found in a private house in the eastern Afghan
city of Jalalabad, had been rushed to Washington in late November, had been
checked and double-checked and had provoked a sharp debate about the wisdom of
releasing its overly providential contents. The government's hesitation and
Muslim doubts were understandable because on the tape a coldly dispassionate
Osama uncharacteristically corroborates key bits of information and surmises
that the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency and
other investigators the world over had so painstakingly pieced together.
Excerpted from Osama by Jonathan Randal Copyright© 2004 by Jonathan
Randal. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All
rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted
without permission in writing from the publisher.
