390. Road To 9/11: The Soviet-Afghan War (Part 2)

Did the CIA actually fund Osama bin Laden during the Soviet-Afghan war? Who was Abdullah Azzam, the radical scholar who turned jihad into a global franchise? How did a bureaucratic office meeting create Al-Qaeda? In Episode 2 of this new series, William Dalrymple is joined by Jason Burke, author of Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam and The Revolutionists, to discuss the founding of al-Qaeda. Summer sale is here: get an annual Empire Club membership for an extra 20% off with code SUMMER26. That's ad-free listening, early-access, every bonus episode, and full access to our exclusive members' series. Sale ends August 31st, so grab it before summer's over. For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. Email: [email protected] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Imogen Marriott Editor: Bruno Di Castri Social Producer: Charlie Johnson Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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  This is the story of how a regional conflict at the end of the Cold War gave birth to the world's most dangerous terrorist network. It's also the story of a charismatic Palestinian preacher and a quiet, shy Saudi financier named Osama bin Laden, who between them built a global army of holy warriors. In this episode, we step into the lion's den. We trace the founding of a tiny, highly secretive vanguard called Al Qaeda and explore how a radicalized, stateless army ultimately fell into the hands of Osama bin Laden. Now Anita's busy with another project today, but instead we have to navigate us through

• 2:00Speaker 03

  the treacherous world of 1980s Peshawar. A man who was there, as was I at this time, in the beginning of both our careers as young hacks, Jason Burke, welcome back to Empire Pod.

• 2:14Speaker 04

  Hi Willie, great to be here.

• 2:16Speaker 03

  But we're going now to Peshawar in the 1980s. So tell us what it was like when you and Osama both turned up.

• 2:25Speaker 04

  Peshawar in the early 80s, it's obviously it's a frontier city. I mean, you're right up against the Afghan frontier. You're also right up against the border zones of Pakistan that were effectively lawless at the time. They're pretty lawless now, but I mean, it was even more anarchic back then. It was a city of around a half a million people, but expanding hugely and very rapidly as this enormous influx of refugees came in from Afghanistan, fleeing the war and particularly the kind of bombardments that the Soviets were doing in villages and so forth. You know, the war started in late 79, but it actually had been unrest for many years previously in Afghanistan. It was a very, very volatile situation.

• 3:07Speaker 04

  And Peshawar was the sort of center, the base for anyone with interests in Afghanistan who was in Pakistan.

• 3:14Speaker 03

  Which meant, we should say, everything from Osama and al-Zawahiri and these discontented Arabs fighting jihad to English public schoolgirls sort of setting up clinics, odd people working for slightly dodgy charities that were trying to help the Mujahideen, the Mujahideen themselves, Pakistani police fleecing everybody.

• 3:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, smugglers, lots of smugglers, drug dealers, like the opium is beginning, opium is just beginning.

• 3:43Speaker 03

  You could drive up towards the Khyber Pass and you'd pass four or five massive compounds of people who were making astonishing fortunes from opium and heroin. And they were, you could just walk in. I remember literally just getting out of a tourist taxi on my first trip to the Khyber Pass, talking my way through the guards and walking into these extraordinary oases. I mean, it was very, for a young journalist, it was the most exciting thing. I once went to dinner with Imran Khan when I was writing a profile of him. And we went out of Pakistan into this wasteland where a whole lot of motorcycle outriders suddenly appeared from nowhere to take his Mercedes through the tribal territories. We arrived at this desert fortress with anti-aircraft missiles on the turrets.

• 4:25Speaker 03

  And after dinner, everyone just took racks of AK-47s off the walls and fired tracer into the air as after dinner entertainment. And then there was a slight change of tone because in the beginning of the Afghan jihad, people like you and I were very welcome and the Mujahideen were very happy to take us into Afghanistan. And it was oddly a safe place despite all the sort of guns and everything. It was a place where we were regarded as allies because we were helping the war on the Soviets and providing the oxygen and humidity for these groups. And then you began to hear reports about people running into groups of Arabs who were far less friendly and who were positively hostile to Western journalists like you and me wandering around.

• 5:10Speaker 04

  Well, you're saying it's really interesting because what happens in the 80s is what starts as a religious, conservative revolt of the provinces against a Marxist, modernizing, aggressively modernizing atheistic regime in Kabul evolves into something that is much more modern in its religious outlook, much more politicized, much more global and increasingly incubating this particular strand of extremist Islamism. Not necessarily among all the Afghans, but among exactly the people you're talking about, those Arabs who've come in to volunteer to fight alongside the Afghans.

• 5:54Speaker 03

  So you have all these different groups with slightly different perspectives on this. From the American perspective, this is part of the Cold War and this is the freedom-loving West stopping the Marxist bear of Russia from getting a warm water port, from launching down to into Pakistan and containing communism. Now, other people are fighting the same war with a completely different perspective. For the Mujahideen, as for the Arab Afghans, the conflict is for Islam against secular or Marxist heresy. These people regard the pro-Russian regime in Kabul as the work of the devil and suddenly they've got to overthrow with the sword of Islam.

• 6:39Speaker 03

  And linking these two worlds is the whole Saudi effort. Now, the Saudis are matching every dollar that the Americans give for the jihad with a dollar of their own.

• 6:55Speaker 04

  That connection is a really important one because it links the Afghan war with what's going on in the Middle East. And that connection with Saudi Arabia is one of the principal conduits for influence and ideas, as well as just material money and so forth, people to flow backwards and forwards. And Saudi is really important, but there's also Egypt and a flow from Egypt backwards and forth and also elsewhere in the Middle East. Right the way actually from kind of Morocco, back the broader Islamic world, from Morocco all the way across to the Philippines, you end up with these connections being established.

• 7:39Speaker 03

  But just to clarify a canard that's often put out there, it's not true, is it, that the CIA are funding extremists like bin Laden to fight against the Soviets? They're not directly receiving CIA money?

• 7:55Speaker 04

  No, that's one of these myths that is just impossible to uproot because so many people want to believe it. But no, it just didn't work like that. So you know, you have the seven major Mujahideen parties who are all led by Afghans and entirely staffed by Afghans. People like bin Laden are a tiny minority. You know, you're talking probably under 100 fighters, even perhaps a couple of hundred at the peak, even before then you're talking dozens in a war where you've got an entire population of Afghans mobilized basically, or two thirds. There are 500,000 Afghans in the field or 250,000 Afghans, or like 150 Arab Afghans.

• 8:36Speaker 04

  So this idea that they either played a significant part or were receiving substantial CIA funds or training or anything else just is a nonsense. There's no evidence for it whatsoever, but it is a nice morality tale, basically.

• 8:50Speaker 03

  But it's also quite an important thing in that it sets bin Laden up within the Saudi establishment. This guy who would have been known to the Saudi establishment and Prince Turkey as the son of a builder is regarded locally in Saudi Arabia and among Arabs interested in the jihad as now a hero figure.

• 9:11Speaker 04

  By the end, yeah, by the end. I mean, I think it's important to remember that, you know, for most of the 80s during the war against the Soviets, bin Laden is a completely obscure figure and nobody knows who he is and nobody's really aware of what he's doing. In fact, he's not really doing very much.

• 9:25Speaker 03

  Now, there's also a very important character who is much less familiar to the world. I know everyone's heard of bin Laden, but very few people have heard of Abdullah Azzam. But he's a crucial figure at this point. Tell us about him.

• 9:37Speaker 04

  So this is a man who is born in the north of the West Bank.

• 9:41Speaker 03

  Jenin, huh?

• 9:42Speaker 04

  Jenin, absolutely. And who is forced to leave his home in 67 when the Israelis take over the West Bank, move to Jordan.

• 9:51Speaker 03

  So for those that don't know this bit of history, in the 1967 war, at the moment when the Israelis captured the wall in Jerusalem and you have those pictures of the paratroopers standing there triumphant, at the same time, 350,000 Palestinians become refugees in Jordan. There is a whole second mini Nakba that takes place at this point, and among them is Abdullah Azzam.

• 10:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, Azzam is, he's a school teacher. He's young, he's forced to leave his home, he goes to Jordan, he wants to become an Islamic scholar and he's not immediately active. He's deeply involved with the cause of the Palestinians in the sense that he is a victim of the occupation of the West Bank by the Israelis in 67. But he doesn't see a clear path. He's more interested in a career in Islamic scholarship. Really interestingly, there's a very good anecdote, which is well verified, which is the moment for him where he is already blaming the failure to fight the Israelis and to defeat the Israelis in 67 on the lack of faith among Arabs and Muslims in the region. And he's

• 11:02Speaker 04

  At home, it's late at night and he's, he hears singing and the singing is nationalist, secular Palestinian fighters, possibly belonging to Yasser Araf's Fatah, maybe Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, people like that. And he hears them singing nationalist songs about their fight for Palestine and he thinks, what am I doing? I'm an Islamic scholar, aspirant Islamic scholar, a Palestinian who's lost his home, I haven't done anything. And at that moment, he sees a different way forward, a much more militant way forward. He spends some time with an armed group of Islamists who are operating within, actually interestingly, the PLO with quite a lot of tension.

• 11:44Speaker 03

  I haven't heard this story.

• 11:45Speaker 04

  They don't get on very well because the PLO is predominantly kind of secular and so there are lots of arguments. He gets into trouble for insulting Che Guevara, who is the great hero of the Palestinian nationalist armed movement at the time. And he's very derogatory about some of the other practices that are going on. That ends in 1970. He ends up studying clerical studies in Damascus. He goes from there to Egypt, interestingly, in the early seventies, where he's exposed to and part of the circles around Saad Kuttub.

• 12:21Speaker 03

  Did he know Saad Kuttub personally?

• 12:23Speaker 04

  No, he's there too late. Kuttub's been hanged in 66. He gets there in the early seventies, but he knows the family and he's quite impressed by the family and their devotion to the memory of Kuttub and also their own personal commitment to a fairly militant form of Islam. And he's in those circles in Cairo. Although, there's one moment where he does meet a sort of genuine militant who's going to go on within a few years to sort of into an armed revolt against the Egyptian authorities and who tells him that he's a backslider, he isn't sufficiently militant. He's, you know, he's a hypocrite. And Azzam, who is no shrinking violet ideologically, is quite shocked by this. He gets his PhD in Islamic

• 13:08Speaker 04

  Studies. He goes to Jordan. He's quite successful in Jordan's university system as a young academic.

• 13:15Speaker 03

  Teaching Islamic law or what's he teaching?

• 13:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, Islamic Studies generally. And he really enjoys the contact with the students and teaching and so forth. But he rubs up pretty fast against the Jordanian security services who aren't very keen on his sort of implicit criticism of the king. So they boot him out and he goes to, he gets a contract in Mecca to teach Islamic Studies again, you know, in Mecca. I mean, this is for him enormously important. Also gets him out of Jordan.

• 13:44Speaker 03

  This is heaven, yeah.

• 13:46Speaker 04

  Again, he's part of this, like he was in Cairo. He's part of this really interesting and important new world milieu of quite radical, very modern, contemporary Islamist extremist thinkers. Publishers a couple of books. One is called Red Cancer and it is a kind of diatribe against the left, communism is atheistic and all that stuff. But he blames it all on the Jews, echoing decades of similar conspiracy theories. And then he publishes another one, which is called Islam and the Future of Mankind. One is a prescription of what's gone wrong

• 14:26Speaker 04

  and the other is a prescription of what should be done. It's a pretty, pretty brutal prescription, you know, and they sell like hotcakes. They, they're bestsellers.

• 14:37Speaker 03

  He becomes a kind of Islamist celebrity.

• 14:39Speaker 04

  He's on the circuit, lecture circuit. This is a moment where you've got better communications, end of the seventies, earlier eighties.

• 14:45Speaker 03

  Cassets of his sermons, that sort of thing?

• 14:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, he's, and all over. He's all over the Middle East, but he's also in, he's in Italy. He goes to the US. He's travelling really widely and he's a very good public speaker. He's quite striking. He's a handsome man. He's full of fire and he has the kind of Islamic clerical scholarship behind it, which a lot of the lay preachers, the activists don't have.

• 15:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. So at what point does he issue this famous fatwa, the defence of Muslim lands?

• 15:16Speaker 04

  Well, that comes out of his experience in Afghanistan. So in 81, he goes from Mecca to take up a job in Islamabad, a job that's actually funded by the Saudi, one of the big Saudi NGOs. And he's really impressed by the Afghan Mujahideen. He believes they're on the front of the battle against global unbelief. And he starts to build a support network for them. And he starts to build a huge propaganda network devoted to bringing in funds and volunteers for that.

• 15:54Speaker 03

  So this is actually quite an important point, Jason, isn't it? Because in the pop version of this story, Bin Laden is absolutely the, you know, the, the, the central and the overwhelming figure. But Azzam is actually the guy who is, who is turning the jihad into a global franchise before Bin Laden gets anywhere near this.

• 16:16Speaker 04

  Bin Laden is nobody. I mean, Bin Laden is this young, rich kid from Saudi Arabia, the son of a tycoon who's never done anything. He's been into Afghanistan. He goes into Afghanistan once in 1984 for a couple of days and he's sort of transformed by it. But Azzam has been doing this for years and is really, really good at it.

• 16:36Speaker 03

  This is so interesting. I remember after 9/11, writing pieces in newspapers saying how much the Palestinian issue was generating, how important it was as one of the principal elements in the Muslim complaint against the West. And got a lot of pushback at that time. People saying, oh, it's absolutely separate, nothing to do with, nothing to do with al-Qaeda, absolutely different. Azzam shows that there is a direct link, doesn't it?

• 17:06Speaker 04

  Well, Azzam's a Palestinian. You're actually right in the sense that in 1985, he publishes this extraordinarily influential book, which is in defence of Muslim lands and in which he innovates by saying that the obligation, individual's obligation to commit to jihad in whatever way you can, is incumbent on everybody, wherever they live and wherever or whenever a jihad is necessary. So that even if you are in the US as a Muslim or in Egypt or in Saudi or in the Philippines, wherever, and there is a jihad underway,

• 17:48Speaker 04

  a defensive war against unbelief in Afghanistan or in wherever it might be, then it's still your duty to act, even if, and this is important too, your sovereign, your ruler, your parents, your cleric says you shouldn't. And this is a kind of globalisation. It's the global call to jihad, which is really powerful, particularly when it's backed by Azzam's rhetorical gifts. But this big propaganda network is built up with magazines and with videos and cassettes, particularly influential audio cassettes, and with this vocabulary that

• 18:30Speaker 04

  he's developed, which talks of martyrdom and of the almost supernatural interventions of birds that make Soviet helicopters crash and of the wonder and mystique of death for the faith and the beauty of the violence and the cause. And this is really heady stuff, particularly if you're an 18-year-old, it's somewhere in Algeria or wherever, who are reading, is reading this for the first time.

• 19:03Speaker 03

  Now, we need to bring these two currents together, Bin Laden and Azzam. They meet for the first time in Peshawar, is that right?

• 19:11Speaker 04

  No, they've met previously in, in, in Mecca, which is only just up the road from where Bin Laden lives in Jeddah. He's there often. Bin Laden has attended some of the lectures, but Azzam has done.

• 19:25Speaker 03

  So when they bump into each other again in Peshawar, they're already friends?

• 19:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, they know each other and they've stayed in touch. And in fact, Azzam is going to, when he goes to Saudi Arabia, sometimes he stays with Bin Laden. Bin Laden is much younger. He's very inexperienced. He's completely overawed by the older, very accomplished and famous Azzam. Azzam sees someone who could be very useful, and he's right. But they do have a, have a prior relationship. And when Bin Laden first goes to Pakistan, which is in about 81, he's taking money that he's raised, not his own money, but money he's raised from others to give to the Mujahideen. He checks in with Azzam and eventually it's Azzam who in 84 convinces him to go over the border and spend a few days with one of the

• 20:13Speaker 04

  Mujahideen factions and experience the war firsthand for the first time. And that, as I say, is just this extraordinary powerful experience for Bin Laden and it changes his outlook in a really significant way.

• 20:26Speaker 03

  We need to take a break, but after the break, we're going to see how these two men, Azzam and the young Bin Laden, establish the Maktab Al-Khidmat, the services bureau in Peshawar, essentially a reception desk for holy war.

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• 22:06Speaker 03

  Welcome back. So Jason, tell us about the Machtab al-Qidmat, the services bureau in Peshawar. Is this the first stab at al-Qaeda?

• 22:17Speaker 04

  Well, it becomes a sort of prototype perhaps for al-Qaeda. It's important to the formation of al-Qaeda. But when it's created, which is about 1985, and no one's thought of al-Qaeda. Nobody's even thought of taking the jihad beyond Afghanistan. And certainly not at that moment. And it's funded by Bin Laden, not by Bin Laden's personal fortune, but by the donations that Bin Laden is able to get in Saudi Arabia, where he has loads of contacts and so forth.

• 22:48Speaker 03

  So we should say that this is actually a bit of a low point in the jihad against the Soviets. In a few years' time, the Stinger missile will appear, which is a small shoulder had held missile that the Mujahideen can take in with them and which changes the whole nature of the resistance. But at this point, it's not at all clear that the Mujahideen are going to succeed, is it, Jason?

• 23:08Speaker 04

  No, it's a horrendous, bloody, attritional struggle. You know, the villages are in smoking ruins all over rural Afghanistan. The Soviets can't win. They famously, they own the roads and the towns. But the Mujahideen own the countryside and the night. It's just one of those classic insurgent wars that no one's going to win. And the sufferers are the rural Afghans. And millions have fled. I think four, five million fled. Something like a third of the population, more. And a lot of them are around Peshawar, right in the face of the people who we're talking about, the Arab Afghans who are arriving. And it's important to say that,

• 23:52Speaker 04

  and it's directly relevant to the creation of Machtab al-Qidmat, that a lot of those Arab Afghans who are arriving, and there are a few hundred at any one time, maybe up to 1,000. 90% of them, certainly 18% of them, are involved in what would be called charitable activities. They're involved in clinics, schools for refugees, handing out food parcels, whatever it is. They're not involved in military activities at all. And Machtab al-Qidmat is set up as, as you say, a reception center, a logistics center for the volunteers who are coming in in answer to Abdullah Azzam's call for support.

• 24:35Speaker 04

  And it kind of fits into this NGO role, offering some multiple pathways for helping the Afghans. But primarily, it's about the military assistance that these volunteers can offer.

• 24:52Speaker 03

  And it's dealing with things like finding guesthouses for, or opening guesthouses for these fighters who are coming in, which, as we'll see in later episodes, the registers that they keep later become very important intelligence documents.

• 25:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's bureaucratic. It's like a lot of NGOs, you know, there are a lot of meetings, there are a lot of registers and records. Because a lot of the volunteers turn up with their families. And families are often quite numerous. So they've got to find accommodation for them. They've got to give them some money for food, whatever. Find jobs for people, get them into school. And it's in the sort of nicer bit of Peshawar, which is going towards the Hiba Pass over in university town Hyattabad.

• 25:33Speaker 03

  Up to the Kantonment, yeah.

• 25:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, which is where a lot of the Mujahideen factions are based and the drug smugglers as well.

• 25:40Speaker 03

  This is the year I first turned up, the 86. And these guys are very much around.

• 25:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, and visible. And visible, particularly distinct from the Afghans and the Pakistanis because these guys have got a lot more money. You know, they're the ones driving around in the big four wheel drive trucks.

• 25:54Speaker 03

  All brand new, exactly.

• 25:55Speaker 04

  And that's important too, because there's a lot of resentment from some of the Afghan Mujahideen to these Arab Afghans who turn up, who don't even speak Pashto or Dari or any of the Afghan languages, have a very different form of Islamic observance, much more rigorous, much more Saudi style, Wahbi style, much less kind of involved in the Sufi inflected local traditions of Baralvi in Pakistan and elsewhere.

• 26:19Speaker 03

  I went on that first visit to a Sufi shrine outside Peshawar. And already there was tension between the, between, every Thursday night, all the Afghans would turn up with their rabbabs and start singing songs to the saint. And there was a new madrassa funded by the Saudis down the same lane. And these guys would turn up and argue with these guys, saying you shouldn't be playing music. That this is completely, completely wrong.

• 26:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. And there are other things that were causing a lot of tension inside Afghanistan as well. Particularly the fact that these guys, the Arab Afghans, often have no military experience and are pretty useless, frankly.

• 26:58Speaker 03

  So it's at this point, 1986, exactly at this point, that Bin Laden actually builds a base in eastern Afghanistan that will become very important.

• 27:07Speaker 04

  To his legend.

• 27:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, so tell us about this, Jadi.

• 27:11Speaker 04

  Jadi, okay, so he's been to Jadi before. Jadi is a small outcrop, basically, very close to the Pakistan-Afghan border, just over into Afghanistan. It's hilly, woody, forested. A faction called Itahade Islami, which is quite close to the Saudis, one of the Saudis' favorite factions, Mujahideen Afghan factions, has been based there for a while. That's where Bin Laden went on his first little trip into Afghanistan in 84. He goes back in 87 and he builds a military post there, basically, which he then kind of staffs up, if you like, with his various followers or people from Machtab al-Qidmat and the other Arab Afghans in this little group of Afghans that he's trying to do. And one of the interesting things about this is that previously, the Arab Afghans,

• 27:55Speaker 04

  when they have fought, have fought within another group. They've kind of done embeds with Afghan factions, just joined them and fought with them. Now, he's trying to create something that is purely sort of Arab Afghans, volunteers from overseas, Saudis, Egyptians, Kuwaitis, whoever.

• 28:12Speaker 03

  It gets quite rough. By April, May 87, the Soviets have located this camp. They're pounding it not just with rockets, but also in a palm, which is a terrifying thing. And Bin Laden is present at this point.

• 28:27Speaker 04

  They don't really know who's in it, I don't think. But then they just attack it. As they were attacking all the way up that front at that particular time, trying to sever the supply lines from the Pakistanis' logistics bases into Afghanistan, they attack the camp. And yeah, there's no doubt, and lots of eyewitness accounts, I heard people talk about it, there's audio, there's some video, that Bin Laden was on the front line and fought bravely, was injured slightly. A dozen or so of his people were killed. They may or may not have inflicted casualties on the Soviets and their Afghan auxiliaries. You know, we don't know.

• 29:04Speaker 03

  13 Arab fighters die, I think, in this attack.

• 29:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's something around that, I figure. And the main thing is the myth. I mean militarily, it's of absolutely no significance whatsoever. But it kind of launches Bin Laden.

• 29:20Speaker 03

  There's publicity about this, isn't there?

• 29:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 29:22Speaker 03

  In the Saudi papers, Bin Laden is for the first time shown to be this sort of fighter for Islam.

• 29:28Speaker 04

  Well, a young reporter called Jamal Khashoggi goes to interview him about it, actually.

• 29:32Speaker 03

  It's Jamal Khashoggi, the guy with the bone saw? The guy who gets bone sawed?

• 29:36Speaker 04

  The very same. But he also, and this is where, you know, you start to see the transformation of Bin Laden. He's suddenly much more confident. He's suddenly a kind of leader of men. And he also discovers this talent for self-promotion. And a lot of the publicity... Is pretty much orchestrated by Bin Laden. I mean, he starts to invite the journalists. He starts to stage manage stuff. I mean, this audio that you can find, which is of Bin Laden during one of the attacks in Jadi, kind of issuing commands and talking to his men, is really interesting. You know, who records themselves in the middle of a battle unless you've got in your head?

• 30:18Speaker 03

  This is going to be useful and you can use it, yeah.

• 30:20Speaker 04

  So this is where you start to see Bin Laden's talent for, you call it self-promotion, you call it propaganda, or at least communication in its very broadest sense, communication designed to radicalise, to mobilise, to polarise, you know, that emerging.

• 30:38Speaker 03

  So this is a point in the story where a minor ex-prisoner who no one's ever heard of, called Aiman al-Zawahiri, turns up in Peshawar. Now, he's no one actually at this point, while Azzam is very much the boss with the Islamic training and with the global reputation.

• 30:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, and Zarakhri turns up and he's been in an Egyptian jail, he's been on the run afterwards effectively, and he gets to Peshawar. It's a town he knows, he's been there twice before, some years before, at the beginning of the war against the Soviets, when he came as a doctor to treat Afghan refugees from these terrible injuries inflicted by Soviet bombardment. And he comes back to Peshawar, partly because it's one of the few places he can actually be safe. I mean, he's still, he can't go back to Egypt, clearly.

• 31:27Speaker 03

  And he slightly missed the boat, hasn't he? In the sense that in August 1988, the whole thing has turned around. These stingers have arrived, the Soviets are in retreat, they're not formally in retreat, but they're not winning the war. And it's now looking more and more as if the Butch are going to win this. And it raises the question of what's going to happen to all these trained, radicalised, stateless young men who've come here for jihad.

• 31:51Speaker 04

  And more than that, because it's actually, this, the last couple of years of the war against the Soviet, that the most volunteers come in from the Arab world. It's actually in like 88, 89, right at the very end, that you get the bigger numbers. I mean, earlier, they're just dozens. And by the end, you've got hundreds. So when, in 1989, Bin Laden deploys a big force at Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan in a kind of pitched battle, he deploys hundreds and it goes very badly, actually. They lose a lot of people. But it's at the end of the conflict that you get all these people coming in. And as you say, the actual end of the conflict, the Russians pull out and it leaves all these

• 32:30Speaker 04

  hundreds with nothing to do. Now, a lot are coming in just for sort of two months or three months and then they go back to Saudi or they go back to wherever. But there's a kind of hardcore, often the most militant, people who've come from the Middle East because they simply can't stay where they are because of the repression, like al-Zawahiri. It leaves those people sitting there in Peshawar, thinking, we have defeated the Soviet Union, they're on their way out. And they kind of credit themselves with this. So it's completely spurious.

• 33:04Speaker 03

  So then now comes this issue, Jason, of what to do with these guys. They've all gathered, there's now hundreds, not dozens, and the war is almost over. So how does this bureaucratic meeting at Zama Bin Laden's house in August 1988 lead to the founding of al-Qaeda?

• 33:21Speaker 04

  So this meeting is amazing. And we have this sort of minutes of it. And it's like some kind of, you know, office bureaucratic meeting. Anywhere, they're all sort of sitting there. It goes on for too long, you know, and then there's been arguments over the agenda. And there's lots of politics between the people involved, who is there and who hasn't come. But it's basically 15 senior people in Peshawar, all from the Arab world, not Afghans or Pakistanis, who are looking to find a way to continue the role of the Mahtab al-Khidmat or similar kind of organisations in the future, once the Afghan war is over.

• 34:06Speaker 04

  They don't want to go on and fight just the Afghan regime, which is going to be left there once the Soviets have gone. They are now looking elsewhere and they are looking at Palestine, Egypt, Algeria, Kuwait, Saudi.

• 34:21Speaker 03

  The ISI are of course desperate to get them into Kashmir at this point, aren't they?

• 34:24Speaker 04

  Well, I said, got their thing going with their own people to get into Kashmir, not least Kashmiris, to try and get them across. But it's an interesting question whether the ISI knew about this meeting. Actually, I doubt it, to be honest.

• 34:35Speaker 03

  Interesting. So they're on, they're operating below the radar because they're simply not important enough at this point?

• 34:41Speaker 04

  My guess would be that they don't really know about that meeting. Also, it's very, it's very incoherent. It's not like a defined project. But they do say, okay, we're going to create this group and it's going to be a kind of foreign legion of all of us international jihadi militant fighters.

• 35:01Speaker 03

  And the name, Jason, tell us what it means. Al-Qaeda al-Askariya?

• 35:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's the warriors' base, which may have been sort of stonied from the idea that Bin Laden had when he'd created his little base in Jadi and fought there. But it may also be a reference to other things. So al-Qaeda in Arabic can refer to the base of a, you know, a pillar or anything that supports something else. And there's that sense of it being the foundation, the kind of the fundamental element of something that's much bigger and depends on it. There's also an al-Qaeda al-Sulba, which is a kind of vanguard in almost a Leninist sense. And that's quite interesting. So some people

• 35:48Speaker 04

  have thought, translated it as a kind of database, taking the Mahtab al-Khidmat kind of bureaucracy very literally. But the bottom line is, it is a group, a concerted organised group with a leader and a sort of directive committee and so forth.

• 36:05Speaker 03

  And a bank account.

• 36:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. Well, very importantly, a lot of funds, sufficient funds to keep going. And they have this mission, which is again, sort of not entirely clear, but is going to go above and beyond the war in Afghanistan.

• 36:25Speaker 03

  This is, this is this crucial moment. So we've now got al-Qaeda funded. The Afghan Soviet war is now won, 1989. The 15th of February, 1989, General Boris Gromov walks alone across the bridge from Afghanistan into Soviet Uzbekistan, officially the last Soviet soldier to leave. The jihad has actually won.

• 36:52Speaker 04

  Yeah. And in their view, crucially, in the view of Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri and all the others, won by the forces of Islam against the superpower of the Soviets.

• 37:05Speaker 03

  And against Marxism and a secular ideology that is anti-Islamic in their view.

• 37:10Speaker 04

  The forces of unbelief globally.

• 37:12Speaker 03

  Now, it's at this point that something extremely important happens. Now, you've made the very important point that in 1989, the really towering figure is Abdullah Azzam. He is the one everyone knows. His cassettes are viral across the Islamic world. And both Aiman al-Zawahiri and Osama Bin Laden are minor players at this point. We big them up in retrospect, but they're not important at the time. Now, what happens? What is this mysterious bomb that goes off, which kills Azzam in 1989? Just at the moment of victory, he's taken out. Who does it?

• 37:52Speaker 04

  I'm going to disappoint you, Willie. We just don't know. We just don't know.

• 37:57Speaker 03

  You have suspicions though, Jason.

• 37:59Speaker 04

  It's really difficult. The kind of list of possible suspects is absolutely endless. I mean, the number of people who want to take Azzam out at that particular moment.

• 38:10Speaker 03

  It was a quick, a quick shortlist of?

• 38:12Speaker 04

  Well, you could have Soviet intelligence of one sort of another. You could have Pakistani intelligence of one sort of another who want to get rid of him because he's just getting too, he's getting too big, he's getting too influential, you know, there could be a threat to Pakistan. You could have a range of other security services from across the Arab or Islamic world. You could also have, and this is, has often been mooted as a possibility, you could also have rivals within the jihadi movement. And as you mentioned previously, it's incredibly fissile. I mean, it's fragmented, there are enormous numbers of personal and ideological disputes, usually the two going together, as is so often the case.

• 38:57Speaker 03

  We should say that one year before this, General Zia has been assassinated in a similar sort of strike. A bomb has gone off.

• 39:05Speaker 04

  And we don't know who did that either.

• 39:06Speaker 03

  We don't know who did that either. The box of exploding mangoes.

• 39:09Speaker 04

  The exploding mangoes. Or even if it was a mango, although mangoes are a much better story than anything else. But with, with Azzam, you know, even the best scholars who have looked at this, there's no, no solid evidence as to who killed Abdullah Azzam at that moment. And, you know, it's a big bomb. It kills one or two of his sons. He's on his way to the mosque. But it leaves the international, globalising jihadi movement leaderless and to an extent rudderless. And that's important too, in its way, because it clears space for all these other actors who commit all sorts of increasing extreme

• 39:53Speaker 04

  acts over the next decade.

• 39:55Speaker 03

  And so tell us, Jason, who is it who steps into his shoes?

• 39:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm going to disappoint you again. It's not immediately Bin Laden. There's this moment for about, you know, 10 years where there are so many different actors. There is Bin Laden and he actually goes back to Saudi and he goes to Sudan and so forth. But there are loads of others, all acting, all coming out of this world that has been created in Peshawar in the 80s. All of them have connections to each other. They all have connections to the various training camps that were established to train them with jihadine. The 1993 attack on the World Trade Centre in New York was committed by people involved in this kind of, I mean, attacks on the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad.

• 40:41Speaker 04

  And obviously, there are the attacks all around the world that start to come through as Afghan veterans go home. And it's a kind of boiling cauldron through the early 90s, a very broad and fragmented, diverse movement. Bin Laden emerges towards the end of the decade as the obvious preeminent. But in the early 90s, it's even in the late 80s, when this all starts to break up. In Peshawar, it's really unclear. At the death of Azzam genuinely just leaves this very complicated, fragmented landscape.

• 41:19Speaker 03

  I'd say, Jason, it's your unwillingness to to take the the easiest and most pleasing storyline that gives such credibility to what you're saying. As historian, it chimes very much with my experience. Anyway, the next episode, we're going to be going to the brilliant double Pulitzer winner, Steve Cole, who is the real sort of Hercule Poirot of jihadism and who's got these extraordinary contacts within Langley and the CIA. He is taking us on to the next stage of this story. Now, if you want to access that right now and ad free, then head straight

• 42:00Speaker 03

  to empirepoduk.com. That's empirepoduk.com and become a member. It also also helps us keep this whole show on the road. Jason, thank you so much. You've been an amazing, amazing source. Lovely to see you again after after.

• 42:13Speaker 04

  Absolutely. Yeah, it's fun. It's fun. It's nice to talk about our old tramping grounds.

• 42:18Speaker 03

  It is very much a place where you and I cut our teeth and with and where we had a lot of fun, actually, as a in our twenties. Anyway, goodbye from me, William Derempel.

• 42:28Speaker 04

  And from me, Jason Burr. Goodbye.

• 42:37Speaker 02

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