A copy of the software had also ended up in the hands of Osama bin Laden. It had been stolen by Richard Hanssen, a senior FBI computer specialist who was a longtime key spy in the bureau. He is now serving a life sentence for espionage. By then the KGB had sold it to bin Laden for a reported $2 million.
By the spring of 2004, Mossad had continued its hunt for bin Laden. Along the way Meir Dagan had acquired, through his field agents and analysts, a striking psychological profile of bin Laden that probably no other intelligence service could equal. It included how the world’s most wanted man ran al-Qaeda.
If it was a multinational, bin Laden would be its chief executive. There is a board: the close group of terrorists who have been with him from the foundation of al-Qaeda. It has, just like any corporation, divisions: one for finance, another for forward planning, a third for recruiting. There is even one division that handles the making and distribution of his audio- and videotapes. Al-Qaeda’s sole reason for existing is to launch global holy war.
No other organization in living memory has changed the world as completely as al-Qaeda did when on September 11, 2001, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center came crashing down and one side of the Pentagon burst into flames. Thousands of men, women, and children lost their lives in the most deadly terrorist attack on American soil. Never in its history had the mainland United States been the target of such a massive attack. The surprise bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japan was the only precedent in living memory—and that had been an assault against a distant military base on a Pacific island.
“The carnage of September 11 was deliberately aimed at civilians and struck at the principal symbols of American hegemony, commercial and financial power, military supremacy and political power. It was a seismic event with incalculable consequences. It exposed the fragility of the United States empire, exploded the myth of its invincibility, and called into question all the certainties and beliefs that had ensured the triumph of American civilisation in the twentieth century. Many correctly feared it was only the first of many atrocities,” wrote Professor Gilles Kepel of the respected Institute for Political Studies in Paris.
Since then, the world has watched numbed at the destruction in Bali and Istanbul, and the massacre in Madrid. The result has been a continual witnessing of the agony of the victims and their families, precipitate drops in stock markets, the threat of bankruptcy of several airlines, and a general upheaval in the world’s economy.
Those are the inescapable truths about a fanatic who knows almost nothing about Western culture, Western thought, or Western ways. He is a man of the Word, and, as history shows, absolute adherents to the text—Hitler and Stalin being two examples—seldom have any imagination, or it is warped beyond comprehension.
Bin Laden is a slave to literal interpretations: the normal intellectual extrapolations upon which much European thinking depends is far beyond his power. For instance, in one of his rambling speeches, he once said he was certain that “a few attacks will see American states secede from the U.S.”
“We must look with total revulsion at the way he has made al-Qaeda a brand name for terror. He has ensured that neither his death, nor a refutation of violence on his part—never likely—will halt Islamic terrorism. Instead, he will continue to release a toxin of poison on our world,” said Dr. Ariel Merari, director of terrorist studies at the Jaffee Center in Tel Aviv.
Bin Laden has resurrected his claim for the restoration into Arab hands of Andalusia, whose civilization marked the high point of Islamic pride. He has began to rekindle across the Muslim world a reminder of that golden era in 1200, for instance, when the Spanish city of Córdoba had nine hundred public baths, and seventy libraries whose shelves were filled with the finest writings in the Muslim world. It had the finest doctors, the greatest restaurants, and, it is said, the most beautiful women. The Madrid bombing massacre has more to do with this dream than with the presence, and now withdrawal, of Spanish troops in Iraq. That is why al-Qaeda terrorists—having been efficiently located by Spanish security hiding in an apartment block in a Madrid suburb—blew themselves up even after the election of Jose Zapatero as the country’s new prime minister in March 2004.
The nearest parallel in history of using violence to reclaim ancient lands was the Nazi dream of Aryan reclamation of those parts of Europe that had Germanic roots. The distinguished commentator Janet Daley has written that “the Wagnerian German romantic mythology of expulsion from homelands leading to a sacred Teutonic mission of rebirth has an uncannily similar ring to the new Islamic claims of Muslim displacement and injustice.”
