Through Our Enemies' Eyes
THROUGH OUR ENEMIES’ EYES
Also by Michael Scheuer
Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror
THROUGH OUR ENEMIES’ EYES
Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam,
and the Future of America
Revised Edition
Michael Scheuer
For the brilliant officers of Alec who gave America opportunities not taken. They now know, with Lieutenant General Daniel Harvey Hill (C.S.A.), that “it is unfortunate to have different views from the rest of mankind. It secures abuse.”
and
For the Bay, past and present; the Class of ’52; the Inchon-Chongju Duo; Ranch Hands Beth and Bernice; and, as always, “So long, Chiefy.”
and
For America’s clandestine service and the U.S. Marine Corps—bringers of victory, if unleashed.
Copyright © 2006 by Michael Scheuer
First edition published in 2002.
Published in the United States by Potomac Books, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Scheuer, Michael.
Through our enemies’ eyes: Osama bin Laden, radical Islam, and the future of America / Michael Scheuer.— 2nd ed.
p. cm.
First edition published: Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, c2002, and entered under title. Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-57488-967-3 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Bin Laden, Osama, 1957- 2. Terrorists—Saudi Arabia—Biography. 3. Jihad. 4. Violence—Religious aspects—Islam. 5. Qaida (Organization) 6. Terrorism— Government policy—United States. I. Title.
HV6430.B55.S34 2006
958.104’6’092—dc22
2005024233
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper that meets the American National Standards Institute Z39-48 Standard.
Potomac Books, Inc.
22841 Quicksilver Drive
Dulles, Virginia 20166
Second Edition
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
Contents
Foreword by Bruce Hoffman
Preface to Revised Edition
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part 1: Context
1. Context for Understanding bin Laden’s Aims
Part 2: Arrogance, Money, and Ideas
2. Obstacles to Understanding bin Laden
3. Chasing bin Laden’s Money
4. Getting to Know bin Laden: Substantive Themes of the Jihad
5. Getting to Know bin Laden: Character Traits
Part 3: Years of Preparation, 1957–1996
6. The Young bin Laden, 1957–1979: Family, Education, and Religion
7. Bin Laden and the Afghan War, 1979–1989: Facilitator, Engineer, Fighter, and Visionary
8. Bin Laden and the Saudis, 1989–1991: From Favorite Son to Black Sheep
9. Bin Laden in Exile: Afghanistan and Sudan, 1991–1996
10. Bin Laden Begins: Inciting and Waging Jihad from Sudan, 1992–1996
Part 4: War Years, 1996–2001
11. Bin Laden Returns to Afghanistan: Getting Settled and Politicking
12. Bin Laden in Afghanistan: Targeting America and Expanding al Qaeda
13. Bin Laden Stands at Armageddon and Battles for His Lord
Part 5: No End in Sight
14. What to Expect from al Qaeda
15. Spring 2002: Where Are We? Where Are We Going?
Epilogue: “That They May Go in and Look Their Redeemer in the Face with Joy”
Epilogue to the Revised Edition
Appendix: “We Are Not Ashamed of Our Jihad”: Bin Laden’s Growth as an Islamic Leader and Hero After 1996
Note on Sources
Notes
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
Foreword
Through Our Enemies’ Eyes is among the most important books published on terrorism since September 11, 2001. At a time when it has become fashionable to blame the U.S. intelligence community for the failures that led to those tragic events, Through Our Enemies’ Eyes provocatively challenges such broad-brush indictments, clearly showing that not everyone was asleep at the wheel. Written during 1998 and completed the following year, it not only “connected the dots,” but did so in a uniquely authoritative and compelling manner that would eventually establish its reputation as a classic in the field.
First published in 2002, Through Our Enemies’ Eyes was arguably a most unlikely candidate to attain that stature. Written by a long-serving Central Intelligence Agency officer, it initially attracted scant attention. The nature and importance of its author’s national security work required that he remain anonymous. This meant that there was no intriguing photograph of a suitably contemplative figure available for publicity purposes. There was no one to invite onto television and radio talk shows for interviews or to profile in the features sections of newspapers. There could also be no public book launches, signings, or opportunities to field interested readers’ questions. That the author also had the temerity to compare Osama bin Laden to some of America’s most hallowed statesmen and political figures in order for readers to better understand our enemy and comprehend his magnetism and standing within the Muslim world, doubtless rendered Through Our Enemies’ Eyes a publishers’ and publicists’ nightmare.
Yet Through Our Enemies’ Eyes slowly but inexorably began to gather a loyal readership and increasingly enthusiastic following. Among the “war on terrorism cognoscenti” in and around Washington, D.C., mere word-of-mouth established the book as required reading for anyone seeking to understand bin Laden, the movement that he cofounded and led, and the profound threat that it posed (and continues to pose) to the United States and to international peace. Accordingly, the book’s reputation spread as a thoroughly reliable, trenchant, and commendably clear exegesis of al Qaeda’s ideology, goals, and alarming ambitions.
Through Our Enemies’ Eyes is especially noteworthy for another reason: it was based entirely on open source literature—that is, nonclassified information. This is particularly significant at a time when America’s national security architecture and intelligence community have undergone the most extensive reorganization and reorientation since their creation following World War II. Through Our Enemies’ Eyes incontrovertibly demonstrates that probing analysis, deductive reasoning, and accurate conclusions can be drawn about even highly secretive movements and reclusive leaders independently of classified and other highly restricted government information.
As a result of a second book published in 2004 titled Imperial Hubris—which also challenged the conventional wisdom, this time in the context of America’s conduct of the war on terrorism—we now know the identity of the anonymous author of both works. He is Michael Scheuer, a twenty-two-year CIA veteran who headed its bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999 and was at the vortex of the intra- and interagency disputes and disagreements since laid bare by the 9/11 Commission, congressional investigations, and other inquiries into the events leading up to the attacks that fateful day. Scheuer’s academic training as a historian—and his longstanding personal interest in the American Civil War—explains his command of primary sources, his identification and interpretation of seminal events, and most importantly, his profound understanding of the role of leadership and ideology in shaping world events and affecting the course of history.
Publication of this second edition of Through O
ur Enemies’ Eyes is timely. Four years into the war on terrorism, the United States seems at a crossroads in this monumental struggle. The sustained successes of the war’s early phases appear to have been stymied by the protracted insurgency in Iraq, the inability to kill or capture bin Laden and his chief lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and most critically by an inability to break the cycle of recruitment and regeneration that has sustained a terrorism campaign that, as Through Our Enemies’ Eyes persuasively argues, commenced long before 9/11. The recent bombings in Bali and London, no less those in Madrid, Istanbul, Jakarta, Casablanca, Riyadh, and elsewhere, demonstrate the continued resonance and appeal of a movement and an ideology that Scheuer magisterially charts and describes in these pages. The key to success in warfare, the Chinese strategist Sun Tzu wrote, is to “know your enemy and you will know yourself.” In Through Our Enemies’ Eyes, Scheuer answers the first part of that irrefutable formulation. It is up to the book’s readers to answer the second. Thanks to Mike Scheuer they have a very solid foundation from which to begin.
Bruce Hoffman
Washington, D.C.
Preface to Revised Edition
The future always comes as a surprise, but political wisdom consists at least in some partial judgement of what may surprise us. And for my part I cannot but believe that a main unexpected thing of the future is the return of Islam. Since religion is at the root of all political movements and changes and since we have here a very great religion physically paralyzed but morally intensely alive, we are in the presence of an unstable equilibrium which cannot remain permanently unstable.
Hilaire Belloc, 1938
The great Catholic apologist and historian Hilaire Belloc believed Islam a heresy and a permanent enemy of Christianity, but he recognized and respected its mobilizing power, vitality, and durability. Belloc, in 1938, marveled that over Islam’s history, “No fragment of Islam ever abandons its sacred book, its code of morals, its organized system of prayer, its simple doctrine…. [it] has always possessed a reservoir of men, newcomers pouring in to revivify its energies.” Lost in the confusion and feverish politics and intrigues of the final prewar years, Belloc’s 1938 warning to the West never received the attention it deserved. “It has always seemed to me,” he wrote in The Great Heresies,
possible, and even probable that there would be a resurrection of Islam and that our sons or our grandsons would see the renewal of that tremendous struggle between the Christian culture and for what has been for more than a thousand years its greatest opponent…. I say the suggestion that Islam may re-arise sounds fantastic—but this is only because men are always powerfully affected by the immediate past:—one might say they are blinded by it!”1
One does not need to be a Catholic, or a believer of any sort, to appreciate Belloc’s warnings about Islam’s latent power, mobilizing force, perserverance, and theological indestructibility. America’s leaders, however, seem never to have read Belloc. And so, America’s war against Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, and their allies continues, and, unfortunately, the elected leaders of America and its allies continue to choose to lose the war. Ten years after the CIA began to analyze, track, and attack bin Laden and his organization, U.S. leaders of both parties continue to tell the citizenry that bin Laden and Sunni militants are attacking America for who we are, what we think, how we live, and not for what we do in the Muslim world. A decade ago, our leaders might have been given the benefit of the doubt for failing to understand the motivation of our enemy. Today, they merit no such indulgence from American citizens. They merit only scorn and contempt. President George W. Bush, Senator John Kerry, Vice President Dick Cheney, Senator John McCain, Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, Senator Hillary Clinton, Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, former President Bill Clinton, and their print and electronic media acolytes are, quite simply, lying to Americans. The motivation of these leaders to lie is not for me to say; I cannot see into their hearts or minds. On the basis of easily accessible evidence, however, that they are lying is irrefutable.
This edition of Through Our Enemies’ Eyes is meant, as was the first edition, to explain bin Laden, his motivation, and his appeal in the Muslim world to Americans. In many ways, this expanded edition of the book may be of more value to Americans now, four years into a war about which their leaders have intentionally misled them and in which most of the media have not had the wit to ask the obvious questions that would puncture the penumbra of bipartisan fairy-tale telling. If people of other countries can profit from this book, so much the better. But the book is meant for Americans, because it is their country and children—and those of their English-speaking allies—that are most at risk from al Qaeda, and it is their leaders who have been the most resolute liars about the threat they face.
When drafting the book in 1999, I envisioned it, in the pedantic way of a historian, as a sort of nineteenth-century “life and times” biography, one of those in which the author and publisher allow the book’s subject to speak in his own words to the greatest extent possible. Bin Laden’s words are plentiful, thoughtful, historically aware, and brutally direct. They are the indispensable key to understanding the religious motivation driving him and his allies. Most important, his words leave no room to doubt that Americans are being attacked for what they do in the Islamic world, not for how they think, live, or govern themselves.
Sadly, bin Laden’s words are available to Americans only in snippets, and those usually taken out of context. Several U.S. publishers have raised the idea of publishing bin Laden’s “works” but have been pilloried by the media for even suggesting a project that would “support” terrorism. Nonsense, and nonsense that will kill Americans. The decision to publish the works of Karl Marx and V. I. Lenin in English did not make the publishers “communists,” but it did help Americans understand and eventually defeat the communists. From another angle, reading and understanding bin Laden’s words might save today’s Americans from the fate of the generation of Americans and Europeans who failed to read and heed the words that explained the thinking, motivation, and plans of the author of the book entitled Mein Kampf.
In preparing this expanded edition of the book, I defined my job not as revision or update but as reconstitution; readers interested in the updating of this book can find it in Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terrorism, where I devoted a good deal of space to updating the nuts and bolts of the U.S.–al Qaeda war through January 2004. In Imperial Hubris, I also covered what bin Laden had said in the period since Through Our Enemies’ Eyes was published in 2002. Thankfully, bin Laden is a man who, in U.S. political parlance, stays on message, and so the bin Laden of Imperial Hubris remains the man I encountered and presented in my first book—calm, eloquent, persuasive, supremely confident, experienced, patient, and immensely dangerous to America. He has added detail and sharpened his message’s clarity—as always, he is eager to ensure Americans understand what he is up to and why—but the crux of the message is the same.
Restoration, therefore, is what the second edition of this book is about; about 35,000 new words have been added. When I gave the original manuscript to Potomac Books (then Brassey’s, Inc.) in October 2001, the firm—to its credit—kept a good deal of the draft intact. That said, the manuscript was substantially reduced. The reduction was the result of two considerations, both of which I thought at the time were legitimate. First, because of my status not only as a first-time author, but also as one who was obligated by his employer to remain anonymous, the publisher was taking an economic risk. Without a readily identifiable author, significant advertisement and promotion were nearly impossible.
Second, the book was going to be controversial; indeed, it clearly was going to offend some people. In writing the book for Americans, I had compared bin Laden’s words and justifications for fighting the United States with those written and uttered by several figures from the Anglo-American pantheon, including men who had instigated and led America’s revolution against Britain. Americans, that is, who used ide
as and words to deliberately incite violence against a country they deemed irredeemably repressive. My goal was not to suggest moral equivalence, but rather to provide context and points of comparison for Americans reading about a leader—Osama bin Laden—evolving and acting in a culture far different from their own. The folks at Potomac Books expected some rancor over this approach and were not disappointed. They sent the book, for example, to one eminent Washington wise man—the holder of top defense and intelligence posts in several administrations—and he damned the comparisons; said they made him “gag,” and refused to be associated with the book. This wise man would later greet the book, and later Imperial Hubris, with the favored tool of the bipartisan league of the they-hate-us for-our-freedoms liars—he labeled me an anti-Semite in a cowardly effort to foreclose debate on the topics the books raised. In this edition, I have restored several additional comparisons between the founders’ justifications for inciting violence and destruction and those of bin Laden. May that wise man’s gagging be horrific.
Because of these circumstances, my publisher cut more than 40 percent of the original manuscript, including several full chapters. The cutting, I believe, was masterfully done, and the central message of the book remained clear and pointed. The book was published, reviewed sparsely but favorably, and sold moderately well. So far, in terms of accuracy and forecasts, it has stood the tests of time and subsequent events.