"Once I was only thirty meters away from the Russians and they were trying to capture me," he said. "I was under bombardment, but I was so peaceful in my heart that I fell asleep. This experience has been written about in our earliest books. I saw a 120-millimeter 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. No, I was never afraid of death. As Muslims, we believe that when we die, we go to heaven. Before a battle, God sends us sequina--tranquillity." Here was a man, then, who felt God protected him. "My fellow Muslims did much more than I. Many of them died but I am still alive."

I was myself in Afghanistan in 1980, when bin Laden arrived there. I still have my reporting notes from those days. They record Afghan mujahedeen fighters burning down schools and cutting the throats of Afghan Communist schoolteachers because the government had ordered boys and girls to sit together in mixed classes. In those days, The London Times was calling them "freedom fighters." Later, when Afghan mujahedeen shot down an Afghan civilian airliner carrying forty-nine passengers and five crew members (with a British-made Blowpipe missile), the same paper called them "rebels." Oddly enough, the word "terrorists" was never used--except by the Russians.

In 1996 Sudan expelled bin Laden, partly because of American pressure--for which the United States has now rewarded Khartoum with a missile attack--and, stripped of his passport, he returned to the land where he fought the Russians. Already, Arabs dressed in Afghan clothes were fighting the government of Algeria after Islamists were prevented from winning a general election. bin Laden regards the Saudi regime as traitors who sold their birthright when Abdul Aziz Al Saud failed to apply full Islamic law. "The country was set up for his family. Then, after the discovery of petroleum, the Saudi regime found another support--the money to make people rich and give them the services and life they wanted and to make them satisfied." But this was nothing compared with what happened in 1990.

"When the American troops entered Saudia Arabia [after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait], the land of the two holy places [Mecca and Medina], there was strong protest from the ulema [religious authorities] and from students of the Shariah law all over the country against the interference of American troops," bin Laden said to me in a meeting in Afghanistan in 1996. "This big mistake by the Saudi regime of inviting the American troops revealed their deception. They had given their support to nations that were fighting against Muslims. They [the Saudis] helped Yemen Communists against the southern Yemeni Muslims and helped Arafat's regime fight against Hamas. After it had insulted and jailed the ulema...the Saudi regime lost its legitimacy."

His own country still keeps contact directly with bin Laden, via the Saudi Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, because he has supporters among important figures in the kingdom--a fact the United States prefers to ignore. He told me that an emissary from the Saudi royal family had offered his family 2 billion Saudi riyals (about $535 million) if he abandoned his "holy war." He rejected the offer.

Somewhere in the Sudanese desert, bin Laden decided that if he could drive the Russians out of Afghanistan, he could drive the Americans out of the Middle East. He denied to me any involvement in the 1996 bombing of US service personnel at the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, in which nineteen Americans died, although he said he knew two of the three young men later beheaded by the Saudis for the explosion. "The explosion at Khobar did not come as a direct result of American occupation but as a result of American behavior against Muslims," he said. "When sixty Jews are killed inside Palestine, all the world gathers...to criticize the action, while the deaths of 600,000 Iraqi children [because of the US sanctions] did not receive the same reaction. Killing those Iraqi schoolchildren is a crusade against Islam.... Resistance against America will spread in many, many places in Muslim countries. Our trusted leaders, our ulema, have given us a fatwa that we must drive out the Americans." Because of America's refusal to acknowledge any reason for the US Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania--hatred of America, per se, is the usual explanation--few chose to point out that they occurred on the eighth anniversary, to the very day, of the arrival of the first US troops in Saudi Arabia in 1990.

When I last saw bin Laden, he was still obsessed with the Israeli massacre of 107 Lebanese refugees sheltering at the UN camp at Qana in April 1996. Israel claimed it was a "mistake," the UN conceded otherwise and President Clinton called it only a "tragedy"--as if it was a natural disaster. It was, said bin Laden, an act of "international terrorism." There must be justice, he said, and trials for the Israeli perpetrators.

Clinton used almost exactly the same words about bin Laden and his supporters in August. But the deaf, as usual, were talking to the deaf.

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