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Chapter Two

From the IRA to Al Qaeda

As I watched the Northern Ireland peace process move towards its close in the late 1990s, I never suspected that events unfolding thousands of miles away would determine what I was to do for the next decade. Little did I think that Al Qaeda would come to dominate my working life as the IRA had done for the previous three decades, and that I would be faced with the task of trying to understand and analyse a terrorist organisation that was very different from the IRA.

As the name Osama Bin Laden began to emerge in the mid-1990s, I was about to embark on a television trilogy for the BBC, Provos, Loyalists and Brits, which examined the histories of the three parties to the conflict, and was starting to write the three accompanying books. Al Qaeda was barely on my radar. I didn’t know at the time that the IRA was about to put itself out of business just as Al Qaeda was beginning to make its bloody and indiscriminate mark. I was aware of Al Qaeda’s existence, and had heard of Bin Laden from newspaper reports and mentions on radio and television, but I never took either seriously enough to think that I should start focusing my attention on them. I was too busy concentrating on whether the efforts and hopes of Brendan and Michael Oatley would finally bear fruit.

On the eve of Good Friday, 10 April 1998, I stood in the freezing rain outside Government Buildings at Stormont, where negotiations between Sinn Féin and Northern Ireland’s other political parties were balanced on a knife-edge. I remember watching through the distant windows as the silhouetted outlines of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness paced back and forth, deliberating whether enough was on offer to enable them and their Sinn Féin and IRA comrades to do a deal. I noted in my diary that I didn’t sleep for thirty-six hours, not wishing to miss the dénouement of the events I had covered for the previous twenty-five years. I tried to catch some sleep in the middle of the night, lying on the floor of the press tent, and being awakened by the booming voice of the Reverend Ian Paisley, obviously far more wide awake than I was, who swept in and declared that as far as he was concerned, the talks were doomed, and he was not going to be party to any agreement with Republicans and the IRA.

The historic Good Friday Agreement (or Belfast Agreement) was signed after long and tortuous labours through the night between Tony Blair, the Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern, and Northern Ireland’s political parties. It was a remarkable achievement. Essentially, the compromise was that the IRA and Sinn Féin recognised partition as the political status quo, and agreed to share power with Unionists in a devolved assembly and government at Stormont. This did not mean that in the longer term they had to abandon their historic aspiration to achieve a united Ireland; the difference was that now they agreed to pursue it via political, not violent, means.

Two fundamental principles underpinned the Agreement: first, that any change in the constitutional status of Northern Ireland could only be implemented following a vote in favour by the majority of its citizens; second, that all parties were committed to use ‘exclusively peaceful and democratic means’.¹ These cardinal principles were a vindication of all that Brendan Duddy and Michael Oatley had impressed upon the IRA over so many years. The IRA, despite great reluctance in many quarters, finally came to accept them.^q In return, Unionists agreed to share power with the Nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) – which believed that Irish unity could only be achieved by peaceful means – and with Sinn Féin, which most Unionists regarded as the IRA in suits, and which they insisted on always referring to as ‘IRA/Sinn Féin’. As part of the deal, all prisoners belonging to organisations from both sides were to be eligible for conditional early release, and all Loyalist and Republican paramilitaries were to decommission – or ‘put beyond use’, as the phrase later became – all weapons within two years. Unionists’ political sensitivities were calmed by Dublin’s agreement to drop its longstanding constitutional claim to the North,^r and the establishment of institutional links between the United Kingdom and the Irish Republic, in the shape of a British–Irish Council. On the security front, Republicans were assuaged by a decision to reform the Royal Ulster Constabulary,^s an organisation they hated – and over three hundred of whose members they had killed – and the reduction in the number of British troops to peacetime levels. It was ‘Brits Out’ of Nationalist areas, but not the whole province. On the political front they were mollified by the setting up of a North-South Ministerial Council – separate from the British-Irish Council – and cross-border bodies covering health, transport, agriculture, education, environment and tourism. Nobody got all of what they wanted. If they had, there would have been no deal. As the opening to the Good Friday Agreement began: ‘We, the participants in the multi-party negotiations, believe that the Agreement we have negotiated offers a truly historic opportunity for a new beginning.’ It was subsequently ratified with referenda on both sides of the border.

True to his word, the Reverend Ian Paisley was not a signatory. It was all the more remarkable therefore when almost ten years later, on 8 May 2007, he was sworn in as First Minister in the new Northern Ireland devolved government, with his old IRA enemy Martin

McGuinness as his Deputy. I was filming in America at the time, and could hardly believe what I heard, read and saw. Why did Paisley perform such an astonishing volte-face and embrace his long-hated opponents? I heard one (probably apocryphal) story that he had been very ill, possibly close to death, but had made a remarkable recovery, and believed it was because the Lord had saved him for one final mission – to help bring peace to the tortured province. It is more likely that he believed the Union was secure, given that any change to the status of Northern Ireland would have to be agreed by the majority of its population – which remained firmly Protestant and Unionist – and that the IRA was effectively beaten once it had finally put its arms ‘beyond use’. In other words, although the phrase never passed Paisley’s lips, the Protestants had won. Nationalists, however, pinned their hopes on Catholics one day becoming a majority in Northern Ireland, although predictions put that far in the future. In his remarkable opening speech as First Minister, Paisley said, ‘I believe Northern Ireland has come to a time of peace, a time when hate will no longer rule. How good it will be to be part of a wonderful healing in our province.’² On 4 March 2008, at the age of eighty-one, Paisley announced that he was stepping down as First Minister. Martin McGuinness paid tribute: ‘The decision he took to go into government with Sinn Féin changed the course of Irish history forever.’³

Perhaps in the case of Paisley and McGuinness the mellowing effects of age also played their part. Some young Republicans, however, of the age that McGuinness and his contemporaries were at the outset of the Troubles in the late sixties and early seventies, were alienated and disaffected, feeling that the peace process had done nothing for them, and seeing any hope of a united Ireland disappearing over a distant horizon. As a result, a growing number of them were inclined to give their practical and moral support to the dissidents of the Real and Continuity IRA, whose increasingly sophisticated military campaign risks threatening the stability of the power-sharing government at Stormont.

* * *

On 7 August 1998, four months after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, Al Qaeda suicide bombers in trucks loaded with explosives blew up America’s embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing over two hundred people. I suddenly became aware of a threat potentially far more deadly than that posed by the IRA, a threat confirmed by Al Qaeda’s subsequent suicide attack on 12 October 2000 on the US Navy destroyer the USS Cole, refuelling in Aden harbour, in which seventeen American sailors were killed. But I remained focused on Ireland. Al Qaeda still seemed far away. Then came 9/11.

Al Qaeda’s attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001 changed the world, and shook me as they did the untold millions who watched the scenes of unimaginable horror taking place before them. Everyone remembers what they were doing when they heard of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963. It’s the same with 9/11.

I was at the BBC with my producer Sam Collyns, editing True Spies, a series on Britain’s intelligence services, when someone rushed into the edit suite and asked breathlessly if we’d seen what had happened. We switched on BBC News, and were transfixed as we watched events unfold. First reports had indicated that an aircraft had crashed into the World Trade Center, possibly as a result of pilot error, but this was immediately discounted the moment the second plane hit home. I remember speculating about who might lie behind the attack, and what their motives could have been. It was not long before Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda came into the frame, and I knew that I would have to turn my attention from Ireland to Al Qaeda. The prospect was daunting. I was almost starting from scratch. It was reminiscent of the moment on Bloody Sunday almost thirty years earlier when I realised how little I knew about the Irish conflict, and how much I would have to learn even to begin to catch up. As with Ireland, I had to start at the beginning – the difference being that with Ireland the beginning was many centuries earlier. By contrast, Al Qaeda was barely a quarter of a century old.

Where did it come from? Just as it’s necessary to consider the history of the IRA in order to understand it, it’s equally important to look at the much shorter history of Al Qaeda. In the process of doing so I talked to a ‘terrorist’ – who believes the USA still regards him as such – who has first-hand experience of the controversial origins of Al Qaeda, since his father was Osama Bin Laden’s spiritual and military mentor, and ultimately became his rival. His name is Hutheifa Azzam, a former jihadi whose father, Abdullah Azzam, is widely regarded as the father of jihad. But first, a brief history.

Al Qaeda was conceived in the mountains and sand of Afghanistan, where the superpowers America and the Soviet Union were fighting out their ideological and geopolitical rivalries through their proxies. Afghanistan has been the cockpit of conflict from the late nineteenth century to the present day because of its crucial strategic position, sandwiched between the former Soviet Union and Asia.

In 1978 a pro-Moscow Communist government was established in Kabul, but was no more able to exercise control over the whole country than the pro-Western regime of President Hamid Karzai is today. The lesson of history is that Afghanistan appears to be unconquerable and ungovernable. To maintain its grip on its key strategic client, the Soviet Union sent in troops the following year, triggering fierce resistance from Muslims not only in Afghanistan but from all over the world. In 1979 the Afghan jihad was born. At the time there was no question as to its legitimacy. Jihad was to be waged in accordance with the tenets of the Koran against the infidel invaders of a Muslim land. Thousands of volunteers poured in to join the mujahideen, most from the Arab world, primarily from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Algeria and Morocco. They were known as the ‘Afghan Arabs’, and came to exercise the key strategic and military role in the jihad and subsequently in Al Qaeda.

One of these volunteers was called Osama Bin Laden. He came from one of Saudi Arabia’s richest families, its wealth based on a conglomeration of construction companies that had grown fabulously wealthy in the oil boom of the 1970s, and beyond that financed the Kingdom’s infrastructural development. The Bin Laden Group built 13,000 miles of roads and was responsible, among many other things, for the refurbishment of the Muslim world’s most sacred mosques at Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem. The Group was the Saudi royal family’s builder of choice. Its founder, Mohammed Bin Laden, was originally a poor immigrant from Yemen who had twenty wives and sired fifty-four children. Osama Bin Laden was his seventeenth son.⁴ Osama’s main contribution to the Afghan jihad, although he did take part in some of the fighting⁵ – notably at the battle of Jaji in 1987, when a small group of mujahideen stopped a Russian advance – was to provide finance and construction expertise, not least in the building of a vast network of caves and tunnels in the mountains of Tora Bora, in which he and his inner circle took refuge and from which they subsequently escaped following the American invasion, Operation Enduring Freedom, in the months after 9/11.

Osama was educated at Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where he was powerfully influenced by the Palestinian Sheikh Abdullah Azzam who was teaching at the university at the time. Azzam was a political cleric who practised what he preached. He was one of the co-founders of Hamas in Gaza, and he saw Hamas through the same prism as the jihad in Afghanistan.⁶ No doubt the Israelis had marked his card.

Azzam had been influenced by the writings of the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb, the leading intellectual force behind the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna, among the aims of which was to reclaim ‘Islam’s manifest destiny: an empire founded in the seventh century that stretched from Spain to Indonesia’.⁷ In 1949 Qutb spent some time in the United States, and concluded that Western civilisation had led humanity to ‘corruption and irreligion from which only Islam can save it’.⁸ Qutb was executed in 1966 as the leader of a group that was plotting to overthrow the Egyptian government. Six other Muslim Brotherhood members were executed with him.

Qutb’s brother Mohammed also taught at Abdul Aziz University, where he spread his brother’s word. Osama Bin Laden attended Mohammed Qutb’s public lectures.⁹ The influence on Bin Laden of the Muslim Brotherhood and Egypt’s violent insurgent groups cannot be overestimated. The relationship was cemented when the leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ), Ayman al-Zawahiri, joined Al Qaeda in 1998 (see p. 84). He subsequently went on to become Bin Laden’s number two, credited with being the military brains behind the organisation. Zawahiri, a surgeon and a committed revolutionary, was arrested following the assassination of the Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981. He was convicted of dealing in weapons, and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment. On his release he spent time practising medicine at a clinic in Jeddah before travelling to Peshawar in Pakistan’s Tribal Areas to treat the wounded in the anti-Soviet jihad. It was there that he first met Osama Bin Laden, and forged the ideological bond that was later to elevate him to a terrorist status second only to that of Bin Laden himself. Each man came to rely on the other.¹⁰ Zawahiri was a seasoned revolutionary who brought with him an equally experienced cadre of militants. Bin Laden had all the money and contacts in the Afghan jihad that Zawahiri lacked.

These were the powerful radical influences that lay behind the evolution of Osama Bin Laden’s ideology, cemented by his close association with Abdullah Azzam. Together in the mid-1980s Bin Laden and Azzam established the Bureau of Services (Mektab al Khidmat) in Peshawar, through which money and mujahideen recruits were channelled into Afghanistan. The Bureau also provided humanitarian aid to the thousands of refugees who streamed across the border. Initially Azzam was the Bureau’s titular head, until Bin Laden effectively took it over. In time fundamental differences developed between the two allies. Bin Laden wanted the Arab contingents of mujahideen to train and operate separately, and not as part of joint forces with the native Afghan jihadis. Azzam opposed this, on the grounds that the Arabs would bring greater Islamic understanding to the Afghans, who were not necessarily au fait with the ideologies espoused by himself and Bin Laden. Meanwhile Bin Laden secretly set about putting together an organisation in his own image made up entirely of a small group of Arab mujahideen. It became known as Al Qaeda Al Askariya, ‘the Military Base’. It seems to have been established during a three-day meeting in mid-August 1988 held at Bin Laden’s house, believed to have been near Kandahar. One of its purposes was to compile a directory of trusted mujahideen, initially a list of those who had fought in Afghanistan but subsequently including many more who had proved themselves in jihadi campaigns elsewhere.

Remarkably, the minutes of that meeting were recovered among computer files in Bosnia in March 2002 as part of a US investigation into a Muslim charity based in Chicago known as the Benevolence International Foundation which had long supported jihadis around the world.¹¹ They show Bin Laden and a handful of his closest Arab associates deciding on the new organisation’s initial military strategy. Recruits were to be trained at a camp on the Pakistan–Afghanistan border before they joined the jihad. They would then enter a ‘testing camp’, and the ‘best brothers’ would be chosen to enter Al Qaeda Al Askariya. Requirements for admission included an open-ended commitment, the ability to listen and obey, good manners, recommendation from a trusted source, and agreement to abide by the statutes and instructions of Al Qaeda. It was estimated that within six months, ‘314 brothers will be trained and ready’. To what extent Abdullah Azzam was aware of all this is unclear. Just over a year later he was dead, killed by a car bomb in Peshawar. Who or what agency was behind his death has never been satisfactorily established. Some believe that Bin Laden wanted his main rival out of the way, and sanctioned the attack. Others see in the methodology the hand of the Israeli intelligence agency, the Mossad,^t which is certainly possible given that Abdullah Azzam was a founder of Hamas, whose aim is the destruction of Israel. Whatever lay behind Azzam’s assassination, the way for Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda was now clear, with no powerful figure to oppose him.

On 15 February 1989 the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan, the second most powerful army in the world humiliated by a guerrilla band of Islamic fighters financed, supported and equipped by the United States and the West, largely channelled through Pakistan’s controversial intelligence agency, the Inter Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI).^u Afghanistan had been the Soviet Union’s Vietnam. Bin Laden could point to the victory of the mujahideen as an illustration of how the power of Islam could defeat the armies of the ungodly, however powerful they were and however great the odds. He subsequently drew on the precedent to convince his increasing number of followers that America, the Great Satan, could be defeated too.

In 2006 I secretly met Abdullah Azzam’s son Hutheifa at his flat in Amman, Jordan. Given his father’s fate, he was meticulous about security. He told me he’d been to Bosnia – I assumed, as he was the son of the father of jihad, that he had been there to do more than just observe. When I asked if he’d fought jihad in Iraq, he was suitably evasive. Jihadis tend not to give details about their military activities, and often explain their presence in a theatre of conflict by claiming they were involved in the delivery of humanitarian aid. In some cases this may be true. In many others it most certainly is not. Hutheifa was nervous: ‘I am considered by the United States as a terrorist. I can’t move freely to any of the Western countries because I know they [the Americans] will get me and send me to Guantánamo.’

Hutheifa was not what I expected. As so often, he didn’t fit the popular stereotype of a terrorist. He was urbane, charming and, as my colleague Patricia de Mesquita, who had arranged the meeting, pointed out, ‘very good-looking’. He was married, but we never set eyes on his wife, who according to custom was kept well out of sight. Patricia was adept at finding her way into the kitchens of strict Islamic households and chatting to wives who I was never allowed to meet or see. One wife once told her that she and her daughters secretly listened to Western music, but said that her husband would be furious if he ever found out.

Hutheifa made us welcome, and brought a tray with small glasses of thick black Arab coffee and an array of incredibly sweet biscuits. It was getting close to midnight, and coffee usually keeps me awake at night, but it would have been ill-mannered to refuse. I also calculated that several draughts of hot, sugary coffee would see me through what looked like being a very long evening. It brought back memories of listening to Brendan Duddy in his ‘wee room’ in the small hours of a Derry morning.

We sat on the sofa and talked. I wanted to know more about my host and his father. Had Hutheifa fought in Afghanistan too? He said he had. As a teenager? Perhaps he noted a degree of incredulity in my voice. He got up, left the room and returned with a large, battered brown suitcase. He flicked its old-fashioned clips, opened it and scattered its contents on the floor. Strewn in front of me were piles of photographs, maps and memorabilia, a historical treasure trove of the Afghan jihad. He went through many of the objects, talking animatedly as the memories came flooding back. Here was his father, kneeling on the ground and holding an AK-47. Here he was surrounded by his close friends and, I assumed, his bodyguards. And here was Hutheifa in combat fatigues, looking every inch a young, handsome, poster-boy jihadi.

He then went to a cupboard in the corner of the room and took out a keffiyeh, an Arab headdress, and a torn jacket. He said his father was wearing them the day he was assassinated. He pointed out some dark stains. ‘This is the blood of my father,’ he said. Hutheifa had been with his father when he died, and holding the jacket and headdress clearly brought back painful memories. He explained that he had been in a car with his father in a motorcade heading for the mosque in Peshawar. His father changed vehicles a few minutes before the bomb went off. Why he did this, Hutheifa did not know. I asked who he thought was responsible. ‘The Mossad,’ he said without hesitation.

Although it was now getting very late, I wanted to talk about Abdullah Azzam’s views on jihad and his rulings on its meaning, given that he was regarded as not only the Father of Jihad but its leading spiritual interpreter. Hutheifa got up and left the room again. This time he returned with two or three massive volumes of his father’s writings, not just on jihad but on a whole range of Islamic issues. Every page was neatly written by hand in immaculate Arabic script. He flicked through one of the books, muttering quietly to himself until he found the relevant page. ‘Look,’ he said, pointing to a passage with his finger. ‘The rules of how a mujahid, a freedom fighter, should fight jihad. “Don’t kill any child or any woman,” it says.’ He said his father would never have sanctioned the Madrid train bombings of 2004, or the attacks on London’s transport system in 2005. He went on to explain that his father believed it was lawful to fight the invaders of Muslim lands, and that he himself could understand why young men were prepared to become shaheeds, martyrs or suicide bombers: ‘The nearest way to heaven, to Paradise, is by being mujahideen, being killed in battle with the non-Muslim occupiers, the attackers.’

Just before we said goodbye in the early hours of the morning, Hutheifa left me with an unequivocal message. ‘Let me tell you clearly. America won’t win the war. Hundreds of millions in the Muslim countries are ready to be terrorists because of America’s policies. The problem started in Palestine, spread into Afghanistan and is now spreading into whole countries.’ He said that if the United States changed these policies, there would be no problem. ‘Just be fair,’ he said, referring to American policy. I knew it wasn’t quite as simple as that.

I thought of my meeting with Hutheifa when I later talked to one of the young, wannabe shaheeds he had referred to and said he understood. To meet a shaheed face to face was a chilling exposure to the murderous power of his determination to blow himself up, slaughter those around him and thereby, he believed, enter Paradise as a martyr. It felt a million miles from talking to the IRA. I met him secretly in a middle-class home that sympathisers had made available for the interview. He was, I guess, in his late teens or early twenties, and very nervous. He covered his face with a keffiyeh so that only his eyes were visible. His host told me his story. He’d tried to get into Iraq via Syria, and been turned back at the border, but remained determined to try again. ‘I planned to go to Iraq to support our oppressed brothers, raise the banner of Islam and jihad and send the usurping, renegade enemy out of Muslim lands and fight in the name of God asking for entry to Paradise,’ he told me through an interpreter. ‘This is an order that God obliges us to follow. The important thing is to be killed as a martyr.’

The more I read the last testaments of suicide bombers, and the more interviews I saw with them on the internet recorded before they embarked upon missions from which they never returned, the more convinced I became that they had to believe that the gates of Paradise, with all its pleasures and delights, would be opened for them in order to give them the courage to press the button and blow themselves to pieces, and many others with them. However, there is, contrary to popular assumption, no reference in the Koran to the seventy-two virgins who await the pleasure of the new entrant.^v I asked the young man if he had received any training. ‘The training operation was going to be in Iraq,’ he told me. ‘There men are prepared physically and ideologically, and then sent to fight.’ Why didn’t he want to live a normal life, instead of being prepared to go to Iraq and die? ‘This life is cheap,’ he said. ‘It lasts for a moment, and after it there is death. And what is after death? Nothing. But if you fight on behalf of God, in the afterlife there are many gardens of Paradise and a higher Paradise joining [the Prophet] Mohammed and all the Muslims to whom God has promised Paradise.’

I later wondered what had happened to him. Had he succeeded in getting into Iraq, joined the resistance, blown himself up and gone to Paradise? Had he added to the long list of terrorist victims, whether blown up by suicide bombers or living the nightmare of being hijacked by Islamist extremists? I never found out.