Blowback

“No. You see, during the Afghan war, there was a Soviet KGB agent obsessed with bin Laden. He studied everything he could about him and the burgeoning al-Qaeda organization. Right before the collapse of the Soviet Union, he defected to Great Britain. As these people do, he tried to make himself look as valuable as possible to his new host country. Contained within the intelligence he brought with him were his views and hypotheses about bin Laden and al-Qaeda. At the time, a good portion of that intelligence was seen as pretty fantastic. I mean, bin Laden had been nothing more than a really nasty thorn in the side of the Soviets. The West was on bin Laden’s side back then. We wanted them to cream the Red Army and we helped train and equip them to do so. In hindsight, we probably trained them too well.

“Fast forward seven years, and you have the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, followed by the USS Cole bombing in Yemen two years later. Then of course there’s September eleventh, and all of a sudden, al-Qaeda cells are popping up all over Britain. Now, the Brits were looking for anything and everything they could get their hands on about bin Laden and al-Qaeda. So, what would you imagine floats back up to the surface?”

“All of the files from the KGB defector,” replied Jillian.

“Exactly. This is in part where it starts really coming together. The ex-KGB person, we’ll call him Yuri, hasn’t given up his passion for bin Laden just because he’s the newest citizen of merry old England. On the contrary, he really sees a growing threat in al-Qaeda and predicted long before anyone else that bin Laden was going to go global in a very big, very bad way.

“Yuri took classes at Oxford about all things Islamic and wrote lengthy letters to his case officer at MI6 about why England needed to take the bin Laden threat seriously. Of course, at that time, nobody saw any need to listen to Yuri, and so his letters were buried along with the rest of his intel. Then Yuri made a big mistake.”

“Which was?”

“He had unapproved contact with someone active in the espionage community. That’s one thing a host country absolutely will not tolerate. They put a roof over your head, and in exchange you give them your old team’s playbook and you hang up your spikes. You do not put your spikes back on unless your hosts tell you to.”

“So who was he talking to?” asked Jillian.

“The man was a floater. He worked for several different governments, none of whom the British were too fond of. Yuri claimed the man was just an old friend whom he was talking to for a book he wanted to write about bin Laden, but the powers that be at MI6 didn’t give a damn. He broke the rules, and he got the boot for it. It was Sweden who finally took him in,” said Harvath.

“Interesting,” replied Jillian, “but what does that have to do with the idea that someone is pulling al-Qaeda’s strings?”

“Yuri believed that al-Qaeda was a front.”

Jillian looked at him. “A front? A front for what?”

“What do you know about the beginnings of al-Qaeda?” he asked.

“Not much. I know that bin Laden fought in Afghanistan against the Soviets and that when he returned home to Saudi Arabia he was extremely unhappy with the Saudi Royal Family. Somehow al-Qaeda came from all of that.”

“Their roots go a lot deeper and cover a piece of terrorism history most people are unfamiliar with. You see, when the Soviet Union invaded predominantly Muslim Afghanistan in 1979, bin Laden was one of the thousands of devout Muslims who heeded the call to help repel the invasion. As the son of one of the wealthiest men in Saudi Arabia, bin Laden brought with him quite a sizable bank account, and it’s here that we get to the part that a lot of people don’t know about.

“Along with a man by the name of Sheik Abdullah Azzam, bin Laden founded the Maktab al-Khidamat, or Offices of Services, in1984. It served as a recruiting and command center for the international Muslim brigade that fought throughout Afghanistan.

“It’s rumored that the MAK trained, equipped, and financed anywhere between ten thousand and fifty thousand mujahideen, or holy warriors, from more than fifty countries. The MAK had offices around the globe, including Europe and even in the United States. Bin Laden’s fame grew like wildfire throughout the Islamic world, and soon all sorts of interesting people were coming to see him. One of these visitors, according to Yuri, began to mold bin Laden’s vision of what he could do on a worldwide basis.”

“You’re saying he was manipulated?” asked Alcott.