He summoned reporters to a cave in Afghanistan when he needed to get his message out, but like the most controlling of C.E.O.'s, he insisted on receiving written questions in advance. But he was media-savvy and acutely image-conscious before a CNN crew that interviewed him in 1997 was allowed to leave, his media advisers insisted on editing out unflattering shots. He styled himself a Muslim ascetic, a billionaire's son who gave up a life of privilege for the cause. He railed against globalization, even as his agents in Europe and North America took advantage of a globalized world to carry out their attacks, insinuating themselves into the very western culture he despised. Al Qaeda members kept bomb-making manuals on CD-ROM and communicated with encrypted memos on laptop computers, leading one American official to declare that Bin Laden possessed better communication technology than the United States. He sent fatwas - religious decrees - by fax and declared war on Americans in an e-mail message beamed by satellite around the world. He waged holy war with distinctly modern methods. To this day, the precise reach of his power remains unknown: how many members Al Qaeda could truly count on, how many countries its cells had penetrated, and whether, as bin Laden boasted, he sought to arm Al Qaeda with chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. Groups calling themselves Al Qaeda, or acting in the name of its cause, attacked American troops in Iraq, bombed tourist spots in Bali, and blew up passenger trains in Spain. He bought the time and the freedom to make his group, Al Qaeda - the name means "the base" - a multinational enterprise to export terror around the globe.įor years after the September 11 attacks, the name of Al Qaeda and the fame of bin Laden spread like a 21st-century political plague. For five years, 1996 to 2001, he paid for the protection of the Taliban, then the rulers of Afghanistan. Terrorism before bin Laden was often state-sponsored, but he was a terrorist who had sponsored a state. He had united disparate militant groups, from Egypt to Chechnya, from Yemen to the Philippines, under the banner of his Al Qaeda organization and his ideal of a borderless brotherhood of radical Islam. Long before, he had become a hero in much of the Islamic world, as much a myth as a man - what a longtime officer of the Central Intelligence Agency called "the North Star" of global terrorism. For more than nine years afterward, he remained an elusive, shadowy figure frustratingly beyond the grasp of his pursuers and thought to be hiding somewhere in Pakistan and plotting new attacks. Despite days of pounding by American bombers, bin Laden escaped. The manhunt was punctuated by what culminated in a December 2001 battle at an Afghan mountain redoubt called Tora Bora, near the border of Pakistan, where Bin Laden and his allies were hiding. It took nearly a decade before that quest finally ended in Pakistan with the death of bin Laden during a confrontation with American forces who attacked a compound where officials said he had been hiding. "And there's an old poster out West, as I recall, that said, 'Wanted: Dead or Alive.'" "I want him - I want justice," the president answered.
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