Dan Snow's History Hit - The Making of Osama bin Laden

Episode Date: August 17, 2026

A deep dive into the rise and fall of Osama bin Laden, from his affluent childhood in Saudi Arabia to his assassination during the biggest manhunt in modern history. For this, Dan is joined by Jason Burke, author of 'The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s’, to make sense of the forces that inspired the world's most infamous Jihadist, the beginnings and growth of Qaeda, and 9/11 and its aftermath.Produced by James Hickmann and Mariana Des Forges, and edited by Dougal Patmore.We need your help! Let us know what you want from Dan Snow's History Hit by filling in our anonymous survey here: https://forms.gle/PvgayWLkWGjYT4St6Dan Snow's History Hit is now available on YouTube! Check it out at: https://www.youtube.com/@DSHHPodcastSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit history hit.com slash subscribe. Just after 10.30 p.m. on the 1st of May 2011, two specially modified Black Hawk helicopters lifted off from a US base in Jarlabad, Afghanistan, carrying 23 Navy seals, an interpreter and a dog named Cairo. Their destination lay 150 miles away across the Pakistani border. It was a fortified compound in the garrison town of Abbottabad. The mission was code-named Neptune's spear

and had a single objective kill or capture the world's most wanted man Osama bin Laden For nearly a decade He had seemed like almost a mythical presence The architect of the deadliest terrorist attack in modern history A ghost who'd vanished into the mountains The target of one of the most expensive and relentless manhunts

Ever undertaken Presidents had come and gone Wars had been fought Thousands had died yet he remained elusive. The CIA had been patiently tracking one of Bin Laden's most trusted couriers until finally the trail led them to a strange house

surrounded by towering walls topped with barbed wire. There were no telephone lines, no internet connection. The residents burned their rubbish instead of leaving it for collection. And each day a tall, unidentified figure would pace alone in the courtyard, never venturing beyond the compound's walls.

Analysts nicknamed him some the pacer. They believed it could be Bin Laden himself, but there was only one way to find out for sure. Just seconds after arriving in the area, disaster nearly struck the seal team. One of the helicopters lost lift in the warm night air, and hard landed inside the compound. Years of painstaking preparation could have been lost in an instant, but instead the seals adapted, regrouped and pressed on. They breached doors. They fought their way through the buildings floor by floor, climbed the narrow staircase, the third floor.

Less than 40 minutes after crossing into Pakistan, they confronted and shot with multiple rounds, the man who had eluded the largest manhunt in modern history. But to understand how that extraordinary night came to pass, you have to go back much further. To a privileged young man, born into one of Saudi Arabia's wealthiest families, to the battlefields of Afghanistan during the dying years of the Cold War, and to a series of decisions that transformed a little-known Islamist activist into a figure that would define 21st century international terrorism. This is the story of Osama bin Laden, his rise, his motivation, the creation of al-Qaeda

and his legacy that continues to shape our world today. Joining me is the journalist and author Jason Burke, a man who's work I've admired for so long. It's great privilege to have on the podcast. His work has challenged many of the prevailing assumptions about bin Laden, and the movement he helped to build. He's also the author of The Revolutionists, the story of the extremists who hijacked the 1970s, which is a fascinating study into the evolution of extremism

as we are familiar with it today. Together, we'll explore the man behind the mythology, separate fact from fiction, and examine how one individual came to redirect the course of modern history. Let's get into it. Jason, thanks so much, man. So great for you have you back on the podcast.

Pleasure to be here. Always good. I guess we need to, you know, we need to visit a bit to history podcast. We've got to go into history of Osama bin Laden, really. I mean, tell me about his dad, his mom and dad, their story is so fascinating. What did the family look like in the years up to including his birth? Well, his dad is a pretty extraordinary figure in his own right. He was a bricklayer from a particularly harsh and remote part of Yemen,

who came to Saudi Arabia for work in, I think probably the 30s around then. And really worked his way up, not just up the sort of construction site hierarchy, but established companies, worked incredibly hard, was clearly very good at what he did, and built these companies into a major construction conglomerate and made a huge amount of money. And one of the reasons he made such a lot of money was because he got close to the new rulers of Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia founded in 1932 by the Al-Saur dynasty, a really a bunch of minor warlords to start with and created this incredible kingdom. And his timing was brilliant and completely fortuitous, obviously,

because in 38, I think, certainly in mid-30s, they discover oil. So there's this huge boom. He, by this stage, started building these links with the royal family. They need construction. Everybody needs construction. He gets lots of contracts. The Bin Laden company becomes this huge and wealthy conglomerate. Azama, who we're interested in, is born in 1957.

And he is the son of a very young, very beautiful woman from Syria, who his father meets and marries one of many, many wives. He had a kind of rotating system of, he had four wives as prescribed in Islam. Rarely practiced, but that's the prescription. and he basically kind of swapped out the third and fourth slots as and when he felt like it. And she was the fourth wife at the time and was divorced after three years. And Azama was then raised by an employee, actually, of his father, the big company, in no spectacular luxury of semi-detached house on the outskirts of Jeddah. And that's quite important for a variety of reasons.

I mean, he grew up with a lot of step-siblings, but they barely, rarely saw his father, who wasn't that interested in kind of standard dad roles. And his mother had this very subordinate status within the family or the broader bin Laden family. And he got on fine with his stepdad and so forth. But I think that was an important circumstance in his childhood. I'm having too cute, Jason, to kind of wonder whether you've got, sounds to me like you've got Yemen, you've got Syria, you've got Saudi, you have written a lot.

The lot of ink has been spent on the kind of subject of nation states and identity in the Middle East. These are very young countries. Do you think that this is something that's important that he sees himself as perhaps something, you know, kind of slightly more pan-Arab? The Yemeni link, certainly. The Yemeni link very much so. I mean, he's very much about kind of authenticity and the real Muslims and, you know, the real Arabs in a way too, although that's less foregrounded in his writing and his thinking. And for him, the kind of tough, remote areas of the Hadramount actually is the name of the region

that his father came from, really the sort of last bastion of the true Muslims and the true Arabs. And there's that sense. Later on, he sees Nation States as a abomination, something that has divided the Islamic world as being imposed by Western Imperials. Yes, so if European imposed, these kind of like lines on the map, yeah, okay. Exactly, absolutely. But he does have this great sense of the Yemenis being or the Arabs being authentic and real and true to their culture and their faith. And that's important, I think.

And I think a lot of it comes actually partly because he's in Jeddah. He's not in Riyadh. So he's not up on the high plateau and the interior of the Arabian Peninsula. He's in a coastal city, a port city. And there is a lot of churn. There's a lot of different influences. There's a lot of trading. It's kind of where Saudi Arabia meets the world, isn't it? Absolutely, yeah. And he is too, as a young man. He travels, but he spends time in Berwick. He goes to school in Lebanon for a while. He travels to the UK as a young teenager.

He doesn't join this very well photographed and documented family bin Laden trip to Sweden at one point in the 80s. That's the one that people will see that shared on social media and it's incorrectly labeled as Azama, okay. Yeah, he's not there. But it's his fan, they were wearing flares and they've got, you know, I think it might be late 70s, actually. Big grins, all living a lovely time. Yeah, he wasn't on that trip. He may have gone on a safari in East Africa, actually. But he was definitely in the UK. He didn't like it much, interestingly, in his early teams. The morals of the British didn't please him. He was, by that stage, had become quite conservative. But the point being, this is not a man who is growing up in a completely isolated,

austere conservative world. I mean, it's Saudi Arabia. Of course, it is conservative in that perspective. But he's not being completely without exposure to the broader currents of what's going on in the Middle East and in the wider world at the time. And I think that's really important to remember. And we should, I mean, people have worked this out. But he's not growing up faced with precariousness.

He's not sort of worrying about where the next meal is going to come from, staying warm at night. No, no. The home he's in is, it's relatively modest. He's not in the big bin Laden palace where his dad lives, but it's comfortable. He doesn't want for anything. He goes to a exclusive local private school. And he knows that he is one of the dozens of bin Laden children and will inherit a significant amount, or at least have some kind of stipend from the family as well as some capital. So, no, he's a wealthy young man or certainly will be when he becomes major and knows that from the beginning. He's also got a job lined up if he wants to do it. He doesn't have to in the Bin Laden Corporation. So, yeah, he's in a very privileged position, certainly. You mentioned that he develops into a conservative young man. Is that just a product of the school he goes to?

Is he notably more conservative even than his peers? Absolutely. It's definitely not a product of the school. The school's pretty secular and relatively speaking. I mean, it's sort of religious components to the curriculum, but it's actually modelled on British public schools. That's the main influence. It has, you know, blazers and ties and stuff like that. One turning point seems to be when his dad is killed in a plane crash, when he's about 11.

But he's already a serious child, and that kind of reinforces the sort of religious elements, perhaps, rather than start it. One thing that is important is by his mid-teens, he's becoming involved with the Muslim Brotherhood, the big Islamist organization that is flourishing across the whole of the Middle East and the Islamic world in the 1970s. It was about 40, 50 years after it was found in an Egypt, but is really becoming a significant presence in Saudi Arabia. And there is a teacher at school, a sports teacher who is a Muslim brother, and sets about recruiting young students as part of his local branch of the organisation. And that is a big influence. To what extent is Israel-Palestine a sort of chief motivation for this movement? Or are we talking about a much more general and wider set of ambitions and motivating factors for people who join the Brotherhood? Both.

The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928 by a guy called Hassan al-Banah in Egypt, and it was primarily anti-colonial in many ways in its focus against the British. Israel had actually been created, then it was created 20 years later. But very rapidly, the issue of Israel-Palestine becomes key, very central to the Muslim brothers, not necessarily in terms of their project, which is effectively to take over and to Islamisize existing states in the Middle and the Middle and East and the Islamic world and impose their vision of a kind of technocratic, modernized, but pretty rigorous Islam. But it becomes very much a kind of mobilizing cause.

I mean, one of the things they talk about a lot is how it is the failure of Muslims in the Middle East to adhere to the right principles that has allowed Israel to be created and to thrive and to not be destroyed. by the Arabs and the Muslims. It's only because of that failure, the failure of Muslims more generally that Israel can exist. And that's a key principle.

And again, the circumstances of Bin Laden's youth, they're really important. It's teenage years because you have 67 war happens when he's 10. 73, he's a mid-teenage. I mean, these are the 73 war I'm talking about. These are key moments. And then later, as he's just 80,

90, 20, you have these seismic events in the Middle East. You have the kind of camp David peace process between Egypt and Israel, and then you have in very quick succession, the Iranian Revolution, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and various other events. So he's very much steeped in this world at the time. And I think because we focus so much on what's happening later in his life and his career, We forget that he's basically a child of the 70s. He comes out of that moment where there is a lot of radical energy.

There's a lot of mobilised activism, and there's a lot of violence in political and in increasingly towards religious aims across that region. This is formative for a young man. There were students at the school he was at who were telling their teachers that they should dump school and getting buses and go fight. I mean, they wouldn't have done it, obviously. These are privileged Saudi kids in age 14 or 15. But that was the kind of feeling at the school at the moment.

So these are events that are key to understanding his makeup, as they would be key to understanding the makeup of any teenager who's exposed quite immediately to major geopolitical events. He goes to university in the same city, Cheddar, doesn't he? He baptises university, yeah. And he studies business administration, which is to prepare him for a potential career, or at least activity in the company of his father. He studies Sharia, Islamic religious law,

and he also gets involved in a series of lecture courses that are run by quite radical figures under the general umbrella of the university. And there are other people are moving around some quite radical figures, some who have been expelled from other countries in the Middle East. One lecturer is a very famous Palestinian called Abdullah Azam,

who goes on to play a very important part in Bin Laden's life and in fact in the global jihadi movement more generally. There are others too, like the brother of one of the most famous of all jihadi ideologues, who was Saeed Khutub, who was hanged in Egypt in 66. And these people are in and around some of the circles that bin Laden is mixing in. But generally, at this time of his life, there's nothing to show that he's not going to follow a fairly standard path as a fairly spoiled young Saudi Arabian wealthy, non-royal, but nonetheless quite privileged individual.

he's got young kids, he's got a young wife, he's got a house, he's beginning some kind of a career. And yeah, he's devout and he gets annoyed with his family if they show any sign of being less devout when he would like them to be. But still, you know, he's got his foibles. He likes fast cars. He smashes one at one point into a barrier. He likes horse riding. There's nothing there that tells you that he's going to go on to do the kind of thing he does. And then Saudi Arabia is just getting wealthy and wealthier.

Oil is bringing vast amounts of money into the country. Just bring us up to speed a little bit on how that kind of affects the internal politics of Saudi Arabia. And why Saudi Arabia then it becomes famous for this, what we might call Wahhabi, this very austere, very strict Islamic revivalism. We've got various things going on here. But the first thing we need to understand is the basic pact that underlies the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. that is that the House of Al-Saud will run the kingdom, and it's Saudi Arabia after all, it's their kingdom.

But they will do so only with the consent, collaboration, support, cooperation of the clergy, the senior Islamic scholars, all of whom are deeply, deeply conservative, and come out of this tradition that we call Wahhabi, and the Saudis don't, but a lot of people do, which goes back to revivalist leaders over the previous couple of hundred years in the Arabian Peninsula, but is basically all about a very literal, very rigorous interpretation of the Quran and other Islamic texts, which enjoins a pretty ferocious approach to anything that could be seen as deviating from this very austere single message, the unity of Allah, God, the world, the impossibility of tolerating any

other messages, the absolute necessity to guard against innovation, against polytheism, against shrines, saints, all that kind of foxy Islam and Islamic practice, which has been traditional in much of the Islamic world for so long. And this is absolutely central to, in a sense, understanding what bin Laden is as well and what he does. So there's this emphasis on the need to go back to the source of Islam and to renew society through that and to run society through that. And in the 70s, over the previous decade or so, Saudi rulers, particularly King Faisal,

have tried to introduce some elements of modernism. There's also been this huge expansion of the economy, as you say, with the petrodollars pouring in, I mean, just insane amounts of money that are now being pumped after 1973, the price of oil has gone up enormously. There's huge amounts of cash. And it all comes to a head in this one moment. moment in 1979, when a bunch of militants, mainly Saudi, sees the grand mosque in Mecca, the holiest place in the whole of the Islamic world and under the protection of the Saudi royal

family. They seize it, they keep it for 10 days, they fight off successive assaults by Saudi police, army, all sorts of forces. In the end, they're crushed, there are only a few hundred of them, lightly armed. The mosque in Mecca, which has been reconstructed by, guess who, the bin Laden family over the years, has been expanded successfully with these big contracts by Bin Laden's own family. This mosque is now semi-ruin. And the royal family have had this terrible shock. They look to how they can bolster their religious credentials, and they think, right, we crack down on all this innovation, anything, you know, we've been know the reforms that we've been pushing through quietly, forget it. We'll dump all of that,

which is what the clergy want them to do. And we will also double down on rolling out this Wahhabi message, this ideological message across the Islamic world. We're going to pour cash into this, all the petrodot dollars that we're getting, hundreds of monsoon, we will be putting into paying for preachers, scholarships to Saudi universities, printing Qurans, printing all sorts of other texts, including some pretty radical ones, some pretty anti-Semitic ones too. We're going to push those out across the world, and we will use that for our soft power.

Externally, internally, will rely on the clergy to keep us in power. And Bin Laden sees too this attack on the Grand Mosque, and he takes a different message away from it, and he looks at the desecration of the mosque, and he thinks, the Saudi Royal family, to stay in power, have used tanks in the holiest place in the world.

And he thinks about the men who had attacked, the militants. And I know this because I spoke to one of his friends about 10 years later, who told me this. And bin Laden said, they are the men who are an example to me. Their faith, their commitment, their ability and willingness to die. That is something I admire. And I think that was a critical moment for him. And it spang on in 1979, the end of 1979,

just when so many other big things are happening in the Middle East. And we'll come to one now. Just stepping back, is this another interesting example of young, rich guy who develops these sort of radical reactionary, in this case, jihadi ideas? You know, is there something we're able to say about this type of radical, be they French and the 18th century, Russian in the early 20th century? Have you thought about it in a more general sense? I mean, is what we're witnessing here kind of very peculiar, or does it feel quite sort of familiar in some ways? It is familiar. I just read on holiday Simon Shum as brilliant book Citizens about all these 18th century radicals, lots of whom were with aristocrats. It's an interesting point. And the reality is that you get an awful lot of educated middle class or above radical leaders who take it on themselves to fight the good fight for the oppressed. I don't think they're necessarily being kind of cynical about it. I mean, some are probably, but. Most actually genuinely believe it, and there's that sense that there is a great injustice

that needs to be redressed. I think with bin Laden, I think he's an anomaly in some ways. His background is so exceptional in terms of the amount of wealth, the fact that he's in Saudi Arabia at that time. He's already a kind of weird kid within the vast bin Laden family and even that kind of social strata in Saudi Arabia at the time. I mean, he's very serious. He's very interested.

a lot of these militant ideas and so forth. But yeah, I mean, I think what actually happens is later this idea that he is the multi-millionaire who has given so much up to fight, in quotes, the good fight for the oppressed. That is hugely important. That's an absolutely principal part of his myth and, you know, the attraction he has, his charisma. You listen to Dan Snow's history.

Talk about Salma bin Laden all coming up. Let's talk about the other events going on in the world at the time, obviously, most importantly, the Soviet forces invade Afghanistan. And this is where I suppose this story changes from being a kind of intellectual interest in jihad, sort of swimming in waters where these ideas are talked about and proselytized to actually really doing something about it. Yeah, and on this too, there's a lot of mythology. So he says later that I, the moment I heard that the Soviet forces had invaded Afghanistan, which happens in December 79, and that they go in to prop up a failing Marxist regime that is having great difficulty overcoming an existing conservative,

often religious rebellion in the provinces of Afghanistan. They actually go in to try and put a more moderate leader in, who they think will do better at managing this unrest. But Bin Laden says, Oh, the moment I heard the Soviets had invaded, I went to Afghanistan at once. It's total rubbish. It didn't get to Afghanistan from 1984. And then it was for a couple of days. He actually only went to Pakistan, neighboring Pakistan, in 1981, I think. But it is an enormous event, I mean, particularly if you're in the Middle East. And it also coincides with the Iranian revolution within weeks. It's extraordinary. And the combination of two, the Iranian revolution obviously says to anyone interested in radical Islamist projects, you can do this. You can

overthrow a really powerful ruler. Then you get the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which looks like this kind of communist predatory attack on the Muslim community of Afghanistan, and by extension, the broader Muslim community of the world, the Orma. So it's a really, really powerful moment, especially for a suggestible 21-year-old, 22-year-old, who you kind of feel this, here I am sort of speculating psychologically. I had this sense that he's looking for another path. He's at that moment in his early 20s when he could just have this really conventional life of comfort and religiously orientated activism or learning as a kind of hobby, basically,

and domestic conventional whatever. and I think he's looking for another purpose. And he gets it because one of the things that happens with the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviets, it's happening to an extent before, is that lots of people in the Islamic world start to rally around the Afghans, particularly in Saudi Arabia.

And a lot of the big families kind of depute one of their members, minor sums or whatever, to be a fundraiser or to do some good work, works with the Afghans or whatever. You know, they've got an obvious candidate in Ozama. I mean, he's shown himself to be quite conscientious. He's actually been working quite hard at the company firm, driving trucks around, which is pretty amazing for wealthy Saudis don't usually get involved in manual labor.

They don't get involved in any labor very often. So he's kind of impressed people with that. He's very devout. He's serious and he's a bit odd. So that seems to be a role for him. So he gets this job for the family of liaising with the Majahed, commanders when they come to Mecca for Hajj, the pilgrimage. So he's liaising with them.

He's also fundraising. And the bin Laden's are wealthy. They're very well connected. They raise huge sums. So he's going back and forwards to Pakistan, carrying all this cash, basically, giving it often to Muslim Brotherhood organisations there. Some go straight to the Majahdine. But he's basically involved in that big charity effort.

And the money is mainly going for kind of hospital. It's going for clinics. It's going for refugees. It's not going for weapons or training or anything like that. And then after a couple of years, about 83, 84, it suggested to him that he should go into Afghanistan. And he's a bit reluctant to start with. And then eventually he does go over the border. He goes over to a place called Jaji, goes over, being up there actually, goes across the mountains near a place called Prachina, into Afghanistan.

Very stunning, amazing kind of impressive scenery, mountains. rushing rivers, snow, cliffs, and up in this little hilltop thing, there's a base run by one of the Majahideen, the Afghan-Majahadi factions who are fighting the Soviets and their Afghan auxiliaries. And he spent a few days there. And the male may not have been an air raid. He sort of claims there was, but we don't know. Anyway, it's an extraordinary, powerful experience. He's on the front line, there's stuff flying about, they're bangs, and they're these Afghan fighters. You've got Zip, you know, they've got nothing. They've got rubbish equipment.

The fortifications aren't very well done. He can see that. He's been involving construction and engineering. They've got really bad weapons, not enough. And he thinks, A, I can do something here. B, I should have done it years ago. And C, this is just extraordinary. This is just really a powerful, powerful experience.

And he comes out and he says, basically it's that moment, you know, now I know what I want to do in my life. Wow. Will he lead men in combat? What sort of role does see? Yeah, it does. A bit later. So he starts off, this guy, he's six foot four, he's rail thin. He's quite timid until this point.

He kind of shrinks into his own skin in gatherings, doesn't say very much, you know. And then he starts to sort of come out with a shell in a really important way. And one of the reasons, one of the main people involving this is, this Palestinian major preacher and propagandist called Abdallah Azam, who encourages him a lot, and who, with him, creates a center to raise awareness of what they call the jihad against the Soviets, and to bring in volunteers and to bring in money and to look after those volunteers and also to try and work with Afghan mujahideen forces to make them more effective. Of course, what they're doing is tiny in terms of overall cash, yeah?

The Saudi government are pouring in huge sums. The Americans are matching it pretty much dollar for dollar. Others are donating loads. It's all going to the Afghan Mujahide, the Afghans. It's not going near these Arab volunteers and so forth. And that's where the fighting is, you know, that's where the war is. There's kind of a million Afghans under arms or something, not a few dozen around bin Laden. But that doesn't matter for the myth.

and it doesn't matter for bin Laden. So in 87, he's collected a group of a few dozen, maybe a few score, young, often Saudi, some Egyptians, some others men who want a fight. He has been in and out of this place, Jadji, a few times now. He sets up a kind of permanent base there. They fortify it. And they stick this base right opposite, basically, a Russian, Soviet military installation and asking to be attacked.

and they are attacked and they're a series of skirmishes, some quite intense. They lose some people, they kill some Russians, but they sort of survive. Bin Laden's likely injured. But it's immense. I mean, for him, it's huge. And he does fight, and their eyewitness accounts of him on the front line and with lots of bullets flying around and so forth, air strikes, what have you. And this is a major step in changing him as a person, as a young man, and also in broadening

his vision into this kind of purely militaristic idea that a small group of men equipped with faith primarily in his view can take on a superpower and win. And the weapon he says he seized from a dead Spetsnat Russian Special Forces soldier, that weapon is in the videos he later broadcasts after 9-11 puts it next to him. There's a, it's a, short-boweled AK-47 sort of thing, assault rifle. And that is how important this is to him, this moment is he takes a weapon that he allegedly took from this Russian court, and he keeps it with him as a sort of talisman. The Soviets do withdraw from Afghanistan, but I learned from you, not particularly because

of what Osama bin Laden was doing, but certainly he played a small role. What is Al-Qaeda born in one of the circumstances of that? Well, so I like Ida really born, is really born, about a year before the Russians pull out, maybe a bit less. And this is when it's pretty clear that the Soviets are going to go. And there is a discussion really among the Arab Afghans, as I know, these Arab volunteers as to what happens next. Because if the Soviets gone, what are they going to do? Are they going to fight the Afghan government? Okay, the Afghan government is Marxist and socialist, but they're not.

a superpower and they're not, without wanting to get into all the theology of it, there are a sort of different category of enemy. Yep, they're unbelievers, but they're not coming from outside the domain of Islam and invading the domains of Islam. So there are all these kind of theological and political, geopolitical, other discussions going on, quite debate among the Arab Afghans. And incidentally, the Arab Afghans have been very split all the time. There are loads of arguments. There are lots of factions going on. The Egyptians don't go on with the Saudis and the Jordanians don't like the Syrians. I mean, But they get to this point in 88, and bin Laden says, okay, and we have the minutes of this.

He says, right, why are we going to do an organisation? We're going to take the base that we've got at the moment and we're going to create something new. And this is going to be a project, which it's quite bureaucratic to start with, actually, but it's going to be the kind of foundation for a new offensive or at least a new presence, a new force, a new actor going forward over the coming years, which will have as an aim the continuation of this victorious jihad elsewhere in the Islamic world, wherever we're needed. And that's basically the foundation of al-Qaeda.

They're 15 of them in a room in Peshawar, this frontier city in Pakistan. I mean, this is not a big organisation. And they've got bin Laden's money and contacts behind them. They've got some experience. They've got pretty good propaganda set up. But it's not, you know, we're not talking about a major force. So in a sense, it's an ambition that he has.

It's a vision that he has that he wants to realize. He doesn't really know how, but this is formally where Al-Qaeda, as it becomes known, starts. And earlier just talking, I used the word the base, and I use the word the foundation, either can be translated as al-Qaeda. Another translation in some ways is as a kind of a database or something of that nature, or indeed a kind of a vanguard, so a sort of a base of something that can develop into something much bigger. So the discussion of what actually al-Qaeda means is still ongoing,

but it is that sense of it is the basis of something, the foundation of something that can then grow into something much bigger. or holds up something much bigger. Obviously, we did have time. I won't make you take us through the whole Gulf War of 1991, the invasion of Kuwait and the first of all, the defense of Saudi Arabia, and then the liberation of Kuwait by Allied forces.

But that's often held up, isn't it, Jason, to be this, again, a big moment where Sam bin Laden's appalled that US troops are on the... Yeah, yeah. It's a key moment. It's a key moment because it separates him from Saudi. The Gulf War is a really important moment, because it starts to really cement his split from Saudi Arabia, if you like.

Certainly his opposition to the House of Al-Sahed, as rulers of the kingdom. Because when Saddam invades, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia is threatened, bin Laden goes to the royal family and says, I've got an army of Mujahideen, I've got an army of fighters, Islamic fighters, I can raise tens of thousands of them, and we can defend the kingdom. Now, slightly unsurprisingly, the rulers of Sada Arabia are not overly enthusiastic about this prospect, and they politely decline. There are so many reasons why the 101st Airborne are more attractive than that option, I must say.

Well, yes, there are, but the 101st Airborne come with half a million troops, I think it wasn't in, come with a serious cost, and that is the Hare American, and a lot of them are Christian or certainly not Muslim. And one of the claims bin Laden makes is that the Prophet Muhammad said very clearly that there should be no two religions in Arabia, that it should just be Muslim. And so for the Saudis to invite in all these Americans and women and there's some Jews among them and all this sort of thing is a really high political price to pay. but clearly preferable to bin Laden and his legion of 100,000 or so former Arab Afghan fighters. But bin Laden takes this quite personally, and he starts to really think about the regime in Saudi, the rulers of Saudi Arabia and his opposition to it. He's not very vocal to start with because it's quite dangerous to be, and he's also part of this established family.

But he does start to take steps towards criticism of the Saudi government, very tentative steps, but slightly more vocal steps towards criticism of the US. And these culminate in a series of more strident statements and basically he is told where to go and that it would be a good idea for him to leave and he does and he goes to Sudan. He's given a sort of asylum in Sudan by

a really important Islamist political and religious figure called Hassan al-Turabi, who's pretty much running the place at the time, and he has quite a close personal relationship with. And it seems to me that he's seeing himself partly as a kind of, almost as a benefactor of this struggling Islamist project in this poor African country. And so he spends a lot of his time investing in farms, building roads, big sort of infrastructure projects for the Sudanese government. He spends an awful lot of money, huge sums.

And he's wealthy, but I mean, he hasn't just got bottomless pockets. He's also, I think, by this stage it might have come later, but certainly he's getting less cash from the bin Laden family. Because the money that he gets depends slightly on the decisions of the senior bin Laden, his brothers, basically, and how much gets handed out. And he's now pretty much a black sheep of the family and can cause some problems with the Saudis. So there's some issues there. He's got all this money, but it's not infinite.

He's living in a, I went to it actually, the house in Sudan he's living in. I went to a few years ago in Khartoum. He's living in a, it's a relatively modest kind of three-story semi-detached in a decent area of Khartoum, but nothing spectacular. There's some threats to his life. There's some security things going on with, of other factions in Sudan, Islamist factions, and they really like what he's doing. He's kind of involved in some military training, so he's got some military training camps. He's interested in the violence going on in Somalia, when the US going there, may have had

a tangential involvement there. So he's still got his sort of hand in the game, if you like, of the more violent activism. He's funding some groups in former Yugosavir, during the fighting the Balkans, who are Islamists, there's some money going there. he's sending some money to Algerian Islamists as well. But on the whole, it's all a bit of a hodgepodge. It's not quite clear that he's got this sort of central focus and project that becomes clear later. And I was about to say, does that central focus become clear? So he gets kicked out of Sudan in 96, partly or largely, there are various internal dynamics going on, political stuff in Sudan, but really the Americans start leaning very heavy.

on the Sudanese government, threaten them with being listed as state sponsors of terrorism and so forth. There's also some regional dynamics which means they're under pressure too, and he gets expelled. And the Americans are annoyed briefly, what, because of Somalia? His name's cropping up in Somalia and in... Yeah, his name's being mentioned. He may have been involved in attacks on Hosni Mubarak. Okay, so he's a troublemaker. Yeah, he's increasingly seen as a troublemaker. And the Sudanese are just under pressure from lots of other aspects as well, what's going on. And so he ends up in Afghanistan, which is in the process of being taken over by the Taliban. He actually ends up with some warlords who are actually anti-Taliban, who he knew

previously, he sort of say, yeah, yeah, come over, you know, we'll put you up in a actually really grotty farm complex near Jalalabad. Then they get booted out by the Taliban. Taliban arrive, and he does a really good job of ingratiating himself with the Taliban. It's not inevitable that they're going to like him or feel that he's going to be useful to them or even accept his view on a lot of things in the world. But they do eventually, and he does this very good job of convincing them of that. And this, I think, is where he finds that concentrated project, because before the end of 96, he's issued a declaration of war,

against the US, who he blamed for just booting him out of Sudan. And within a couple of years, he issues another much more kind of swinging, sweeping declaration of jihad against the US. And by then, he's well on the way to organizing major, major terrorist attacks. and the first really big one comes in that summer, August 98, in Tanzania and Kenya, when Al-Qaeda operatives, militants, whatever, basically demolish two U.S. embassies simultaneously. Tell me, this is something that people seem to have debated a lot over the line. I'm sure it's changed over the last 30 years.

Is Al-Qaeda, was there a sort of Dr. Evil organization, a Bond villain, a guy, and he's sending out instructions, there's salaried junior ranks doing these things, or is it a kind of ideology that's attracting lone wolves and they are acting in the name of it, but it's very, very dispersed in terms of its hierarchy? What's the organisation look like? And he's been a hardened sort of ordering these take place and monitoring them from a control room somewhere. It really depends when. I mean, it's never that thing of like him sitting in a cave in Afghanistan at some kind of on a leather chair with a console in front of them and a white cat. Some of the images that came out after 9-11 of these supposed cave complexes were,

I went to those cave complexes. They were caves, not very big ones and quite dirty ones and very smelly ones, but as how I got to them. And they were not sort of Bond, doctor, evil style things at all. There's a different dynamics of different times without idea. At the moment we're talking about, which is the sort of late 90s, you've got this group of men in Afghanistan, led by bin Laden,

who have a specific project. The thing that happens in the late 90s in Afghanistan is they begin to attract lots of other people and other people who have their own projects who hear that bin Laden and Al-Qaeda have resources, have training camps, have money, have expertise. and they start coming to Afghanistan to get all of that so they can get their own groups or their own personal projects underway. And this is coming at the end of the 90s. You've had 20 years now of a broad radicalization

in many places in the Middle East. Due to a whole variety of factors, some of it is kind of backwash from the Afghan conflict. Some of it is like internal factors. There's the conjunction of the two. There's a lot of anti-Americanism around. There's a lot of anti-Zionism around. It's post-Cold War.

There's conflicts all over the place. There's a lot of churn. And there are a lot of disaffected young men across the Middle East who are making their way to the training camps in Afghanistan, looking for to learn the skills they need to go and fight. And really significantly, just to take us, to kind of where we're going. Among those who come to these training camps in this period

are a bunch of young Middle Eastern Muslims who are living in Germany. And they actually want to go to Chechnya and fight there against the Russians in that particular little conflict. But they don't, they get diverted. They end up in Afghanistan. They end up in one of the training camps

and when they're in training camps, they get seen by one of the instructors and the instructor thinks, these guys are useful. Someone will speak English. They're used to the West. They can operate in the West. I better tell the boss.

And those are the guys who end up leading the 9-11 attacks just a year or so later. Just before we get to those, you mentioned. So two US embassies blown up Kenya and Tanzania and East Africa. Then the USS coal bombing. It killed 17 Americans.

I remember this very clearly. It's such an interesting example. It's Navy ship being refueled in Yemen. Aiden, off Aden, yeah. So the USS Cole is a successful, more or less attack on a US at warship. And I think it kills 17 servicemen, and it nearly sinks it. Two suicide bombers ram a small dingy effectively packed with explosives into just the side of the destroyer, yeah. Absolutely right. They drive or sail or whatever you do with a motorized boat, you know, better than me, at this war ship waving. And the sailors, you know, at this period, nobody's heard of a maritime, suicide attack, wave back, and they just crash it into the side of the ship. And it is packed with explosives.

In fact, they tried earlier with another US vessel, the USS, the Sullivan's, but they'd overloaded the dingy, so it sank. And then they then had to drag it out and retrieve the explosives and try again, which they did. And that was the USS coal attack, which is 2000. And, yeah, I mean, it nearly sank pretty size. U.S. warship off Aden. And it's seen historically by analysts as it showed that the 98 bombings of the embassies

wasn't just a one-off, that this is a concerted campaign that is inventive, wide-ranging in geographic terms and also in tactical terms, and clearly very dangerous. And Al-Qaeda is claiming both embassy and just coal, there's no doubt, it's being associated with this man. Yeah, yeah, there's no town. The embassy attacks, actually most of the people involved were picked up and put on trial in the US, those that had survived. So most of the suicide attackers were killed. But one failed suicide attacker was actually detained and then a load of other people who were connected to the detained.

to over the months or so afterwards. This is a huge FBI investigation. And I first really started learning about what was going on inside al-Qaeda in any detailed way when I was reading all those transcripts of that trial in the US because you had these extraordinary witness statements all about the training in Sudan and some of the training in Afghanistan. And it was the first real glimpse into the workings of al-Qaeda. So though a lot of attacks are attributed to al-Qaeda when the group had not.

to do with them or a very tangential connection. Certainly the coal and the emberses attack were the work of the group. There's a wedding video actually from, I think, early 2001, in which bin Laden recites poetry in this sort of grand Arabian style, classical style, an ode to the attack on the USS Cole. And I mean, it's dreadful perjury, but I mean, there's no doubt that he was behind it. We're going to come on September 11, 2011 and 9-11. Right. It's being planned at the time when the USS Coal was attacked. They were already involved in the planning of 9-11. So this is an example of al-Qaeda at this point is capable of there's planning. Bin Laden is across that planning. Is it going on? Oh yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. As a boss, he's quite demanding.

And it's not a big organisation. So they've got the training camps and they've got a few hundred recruits going through those. But really, you're talking about a few dozen people. And they're mainly concentrated in Afghanistan and Pakistan at this moment. And that changes. Really Afghanistan, I mean, there are few in and going in and out of Pakistan because that's the kind of entry point to Afghanistan. More on the rise of Osama bin Laden after this, don't go away.

And so he was hoping to bring down the World Trade Center strike at the Pentagon. perhaps Congress as well. What did he hope might happen? Was it just a spectacular punishment? What were the strategic consequences that he was hoping? Sure. I mean, that's a really good question. I mean, earlier I was talking about how he had his real kind of anti-U.S. turn after getting kicked out of Sudan. But we wrong to suggest that this was a sort of personal vendetta just because the Americans were involved in him being expelled from cartoon. He had long seen. like many, many others in the region and indeed the world had seen the US as the sort of great wrongdoing,

harm, evil in the Middle East and beyond. I said he was a child of the 70s earlier. I mean, I spent a lot of time looking at left-wing radicals in the 70s. They were pretty anti-American as well. So it's a moment in the 70s formative for him where there was a lot of really powerful anti-U.S. sentiment. There's been a lot of anti-U.S. sentiment in the Middle East previously as well, in part because of the support for Israel, but also because a lot of the Islamists thinkers, the most

influential ones, see Western capitalism, democracy, culture as decadent, as damaging, as immoral, and as deeply threatening to their own community. and societies. And Biladan was steeped in that as well. Thinkers like Abdullah Azam, earlier Syedkut, both of whose books he had read repeatedly, talk about this at great length. And so there is a basic foundation of anti-American understanding,

of world view, that the US is responsible for much of the evil in the world. And this is kind of render more specific. There's Israel, of course, and US support for Israel. But I think in the case of bin Laden, particularly, it's the US relationship with the House of Al-Sat and the very close links there and the support over the years that Washington has given the kings on the ruling family of Saudi Arabia. And so a lot of his early writing, particularly 96, 98, yeah, they're anti-U.S. but there's also screeds that are anti-Saudi,

I mean, really kind of detailed criticism of Saudi Arabia. So I think his project has got various elements. One is to combat what he sees as the violent, aggressive effort of the US to exploit, divide, and repress Muslims. A second is that he wants to destroy Israel. basically, liberate all of the holy places of Islam, as he would put it. And specifically there too, he would want to overthrow the Saudi regime, but also all the, as he would call them, hypocrite,

apostate rulers of Syria, of Egypt, of Jordan, you know, King Hussein, then Bashal Assad, Sadat, and then Mubarak in this period. I could go on Saddam and say, all these, people, he would see as false Muslims who do the work of, in his view, the Americans and in his view, the Jews. There's a lot of anti-Semitic conspiracy in there as well. To bring about their overthrow, you need to attack what he would call the head of the snake. He did call it the head of the snake. And that's Washington. I think the idea that he was trying to bring the Americans into a global conflict and so forth is sort of secondary. I don't think he'd really thought. it through that far.

So it's not unlike Hitler in 1941. It's just kick the door in and hope good things happen after that. Which is what terrorism usually does. That is often the way. Certainly this kind of, is spectacular terrorism. It's designed to mobilize, radicalise and polarise.

And sort of shake up the status quo. Yeah. Right. Interesting. And make your message, this is really important with Bin Laden, communicate your message in the most effective and direct way

to audiences you could not otherwise reach. He certainly did that, didn't he? Because it's the most famous and poured over events of modern history. The US invaded Afghanistan a month after 9-11 to disrupt Al-Qaeda and then to punish the Taliban government for giving them safe haven. Did Bin Laden, do you think he expected that? Did that come as a nasty shock? I mean, some people say it was playing into his hands. What's your sense of that? There was a big argument within Al-Qaeda before 9-11 over whether it would be a good idea for exactly that reason. So it was a live debate. A risk of this would be that the US would invade. I think he felt that having taken on the superpower of the

Soviet Union and beaten them as he saw it in the 80s, he could do the same with the US if they came into Afghanistan. Oh, interesting. Instead, the campaign was reasonably swift to certainly remove the Taliban, obviously the extent to which they ever pacified Afghanistan is a fascinating question. But the invasion of Afghanistan did seriously remove the Taliban leadership from the cities anyway, and did disrupt al-Qaeda and forced bin Laden, for example, into hiding. Oh, massively. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. By 2001, they had this extensive infrastructure of training camps, had safe houses, had good relations with the Taliban government. You know, this is partly what allowed them to do 9-11. The campaign of 2001 stripped them of all

that infrastructure. This was why a lot of people within al-Qaeda were saying, no, it's a really bad idea to do this attack because we're going to lose everything we've got. Much better to keep what we've got and we'll carry on doing attacks rather than go for this kind of cataclysmic biggie and lose it all. So they lost all of that. A lot of really senior people were killed. People were very close to bin Laden. People were very effective within the organization. They were scattered. They fled. They didn't have any plan B. Some went into Iran. A lot went into Pakistan. I mean, it was a massively disruptive event for the organisation, which is why it had to evolve so rapidly into something else. And it ousted the Taliban who were their hosts.

I was reporting on it from Afghanistan all through that campaign. And it was pretty effective use of massive military power against a pretty unequal opponent. Jason, every time I've gone for beers with Royal Marines and members of the British army, they've told me that the Brits were very close to capturing Assam bin Laden in the end of 2001. Tell me, what's the truth? Am I allowed to swear violently? They weren't anywhere near. I was up there.

I was at Torabora. There weren't any Brits up there. Toraborah was where he hid out at the end. You know, there were a few SAS moving around. But, I mean, basically, Torabora was the kind of culminating battle of the first campaign in Afghanistan in 2001. And bin Laden and the remnants of al-Qaeda hold up in a basic cave system high up in the Spingar Mountains, way above Jalalabad. It gave him a stunning landscape.

It was just extraordinary. And then behind them was the Pakistani border, and in front of them were a very small number of U.S. special forces, who were not particularly talkative to reporters. It must be said, but some of them warmed up a bit. and a large number of fairly flaky US recruited local allies who were all various militia, Afghan militia, from that region. And there wasn't really a strategy as such. And I watched it.

I sat on this or stood on this, a mole watching what was going on. And you had these militia who were kind of pushing up on a screen, like a kind of beat in a hunt in Scotland or something, with the US special forces amongst them, and maybe there were a couple of British special forces in there as well, but given the numbers were so small, they're not enough to be significant. And then the Americans were using B-52s to drop absolutely massive bonds on this supposed cave system.

And they were big enough, I know it was about a mile or so away, they were big enough to nearly knock us over with the blast wave when they were dropped. I mean, there were huge explosions. And all that happened, Everybody thought Bin Laden was going to go over the back of the mountain range into Pakistan, and he didn't. He was clever, took a risk, and he came out, probably bribing his way through or just evading the fairly flaky militia.

He came out through the screen, through the beaters, if you like. He made his way out one night, and he disappeared up north, actually. So in the other direction from where he was expected to go. And he got away. And then when, you know, disappear for 10 years. So bin Laden goes into hiding. What's al-Qaeda look like in this period? Because you do get these al-Qaeda sort of affiliates, don't you?

You aren't in Iraq and North Africa and the Maghreb? Is he pulling strings there? Is he just a sort of a king across the water who's inspiring in his name and lives on in poetry and song? What's going on? He's trying to inspire them. He's trying to rally the troops. He starts off pretty shocked, actually. Some of his early communications are kind of, I'm really sorry.

this is really bad. But then he rallies himself and he starts ramping up the propaganda. But basically the way to look at it is, Al-Qaeda in this period had, say on 9-11 at the moment then, there were three components. There was an ideology.

There was a series of kind of just about tangentially linked groups around the world who had some kind of personal connection often with their leaders and some people close to him or they were just individual actors. And then there was the kind of hardcore al-Qaeda.

So what happens in, Afghanistan basically scatters the hardcore, but it leaves the individuals around the world and the various groups that had some kind of relationship, all it pretty much intact, and it absolutely turbocharges the ideology. So over the next 10 years, really, you see successive attacks by individuals who are linked often in some way to al-Qaeda. they have a connection, they get trained by some proxies of Al-Qaeda or they get to a camp or whatever. And they're doing these attacks like we saw in Madrid or we saw in London in 2005 elsewhere.

Big spectacular attacks. And then you also, as you say, you have these affiliates being set up, which are a bit more formal, a kind of formalized version of Al-Qaeda at a distance. So you've got Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb, for example. you have one in South Asia, and perhaps most importantly, you have one in Iraq, which eventually evolves into ISIS and Islamic State and causes no end of problems. So by the end of the decade, you've had this rolling series of attacks, often by people who are semi-autonomous or autonomous, following the message of al-Qaeda, but not actually formally part of it. And you've also got this ideology, which is powering a lot of recruitment and a lot of it, as you put it,

lone wolf action and is spreading into parts of the world where government is weak. There are a lot of people that are annoyed about various things. There's a lot of conflicts. There's a lot of factors that can help a radical ideology get a halt. And what's his day-to-day look like in this period? Well, so Bin Laden spent 10 years on the run, basically, mostly in Pakistan, almost exclusively in Pakistan, and mostly in a single compound with a house in it, in Abtabad in northern central Pakistan. And that's where he was found by the US, Sealed Team 6 in 2011.

He'd been there for five or six years. He had two wives, I think, with him, a dozen children, a kind of load of retainers, a couple of people who were working for him, a courier guy, a bloke who was in a cooking and a gardening. I mean, you know,

they saw a little village, and they all lived all inside, this one compound, completely kind of hermetically sealed. And the only reason the US got to him was because after a long, long, long search and a lot of false leads and so forth, they've got hold of the courier who took Bin Laden's messages to the outside world out of the compound, drove them on his motorbike up to an internet cafe, a hundred or so miles away, and sent them from there. and they picked them up there, Pakistan, yeah, perhaps, but certainly CIA surveillance, and then traced it all the way back to this compound in northern Pakistan. And once they had this location, they then had to kind of verify who was in there.

They did this by a variety of ways. They tried using dummy vaccination campaigns to get DNA. They tried to hold a variety of ways of doing it. In the end, they could see this tall figure who they called the Payser, who was walking round and around around the garden. And they just about judged his height and he was kind of six foot four-ish. And there were various other indications. And it was a risk.

But in the end, President Obama ordered the raid. And it was him. And he, the token resistance, what was he going to do realistically? as kind of a dozen super, the highly trained US Special Forces literally came up the stairs of his house to his bedroom. And he was shot dead.

And we think body dumped in the Arabian Sea, waited to sink and never be seen again. And that really was the end of, that's the end of Bin Laden. But actually, the big growth area for Al-Qaeda in the recent years has, been Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in Sahel. So at the moment, the big success stories, if you were a call it like that, would be Mali for an Al-Qaeda offshoot. And there are other

Yemen. There's still some activity. Al-Shabaab is in East Africa. Their relationship of these people with any kind of Al-Qaeda hardcore is the kind of central. It's a bit difficult to discern. the last significant leader of al-Qaeda was Iman al-Zawahri, who has bin Laden's deputy. He was killed in 2022 by the Americans in Afghanistan. And since there is a leader of al-Qaeda, but he's pretty low profile. And there's no real kind of outreach. And so they've lost that sensual dynamic figure. And what there are are a lot of charismatic local leaders now.

The main guy in the middle is less important. They're the people who are running operations on a day-to-day basis. And the big question is, are they interested in attacking the West? Do they want to? Do they have the capabilities? It's much discussed. We don't know. Well, Jason, thank you for that.

Gosh, you took us right the way through that life. Tell us what the new book's called. The book is called The Revolutionists, the story of the extremists who hijacked the 1970s. And it looks at the secular leftist terrorists of the period, the extremists then, but also looks at how during this period, people like Bin Laden began that new wave of Islamist, radical activism and eventually terrorism too. Well, thank you so much coming back on the podcast and telling us all about Salman Martin. Thank you. It's a pleasure. Thanks, Dan.

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