After finishing high school in Jedda in 1974, bin Laden decided against joining his siblings overseas for further education. Salim, the head of the clan, had been educated at Millfield, a Somerset boarding school. Another, Yeslam, went to university in Sweden and California. Osama entered the management and economics faculty at King Abdul Aziz University. There are some reports, again unconfirmed, that he married his first wife, a Syrian related to his mother, when he was 17. Salim, the elder brother who had run the bin Laden corporation after their father's death, hoped Osama would take up a useful role in the family business and ensured that a key element of his university course was civil engineering. Bin Laden himself preferred the Islamic studies component of the course. Later, he was to combine the two in a radically effective way.

At university he heard tapes recorded by the fiery Palestinian-born Jordanian academic Abdallah Azzam, and these had a powerful impact. Azzam's recorded sermons -- much like Osama's videotapes today -- brilliantly caught the mood of many disaffected young Muslims.

Jedda itself -- and King Abdul Aziz University -- was a center for Islamic dissidents from all over the Muslim world. In its mosques and medressas (Islamic schools) they preached a severe message: only an absolute return to the values of conservative Islam could protect the Muslim world from the dangers and decadence of the West. One bin Laden brother, Abdelaziz, remembers Osama "reading and praying all the time" during this period. Osama certainly became deeply involved in religious activities at university, including theological debates and Koranic study. He also made useful contacts, striking up a crucial friendship with Prince Turki ibn Faisal, a young royal and the future chief of Saudi intelligence services.

But events were to overtake him. In February 1979 Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran, overthrew the Shah and established an Islamic republic. A shudder of excitement and fear ran through Muslims everywhere. In November -- and bin Laden was later to refer to this as a crucial, formative event -- Islamic radicals seized the grand mosque at Mecca and held it against Saudi government forces. Bin Laden, young, impressionable, increasingly devout but still unsure of himself and his vocation, was stunned. Eventually, after much bloodshed, the rebels were defeated. "He was inspired by them," a close friend told The Observer last month. "He told me these men were true Muslims and had followed a true path."

Sooner than anyone expected, bin Laden got his chance to follow them. In the last days of the year Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan.

It is just 30 miles from the Afghan border to the febrile Pakistani city of Peshawar. The road winds down through the Khyber Pass, through the badlands ruled by the violent and unruly Pashtun tribes, past the relics of battles fought by men from a score of armies -- Greek, Arab, Mongol, Sikh and British -- and then disappears into the choking mayhem of the city's bazaars.

In the spring of 1980, with yet another army's tanks parked up against the frontier, Peshawar was seething with soldiers, spies, gun-runners, drug dealers, Afghan refugees, exiles, journalists and, of course, the thousands of sympathizers who had flocked from all over the Muslim world to fight the Soviet forces.

One of them, distinctive in his carefully tailored shalwar kameez and English handmade leather boots, was Osama bin Laden. "I was enraged and went there at once," he has told interviewers. He was 23 and had found the cause he had been looking for.

Bin Laden's time fighting the Russians was critical. It was during this period that he changed from a contemplative, scholarly young man to a respected, battle-hardened leader of men. And though he had yet to fully develop his extremist ideas, the war in Afghanistan gave him crucial confidence and status.

"He came to the jihad a well-meaning boy and left a man who knew about violence and its uses and effects," said one former associate interviewed by The Observer in Algeria last year.

According to Gulf intelligence sources, bin Laden's first trip to Peshawar lasted little more than a month. He returned to Saudi Arabia and started lobbying his brothers, relatives and old school friends to support the fight against the Soviet Union. When he went back to Pakistan with the huge sum of money he had collected, he took with him several Pakistanis and Afghans who had been working in the bin Laden company. They set about organizing an office to support the Mujahideen and the Arab volunteers.

Within weeks of his first arrival in Pakistan, Osama had been introduced to Abdullah Azzam, the charismatic preacher whose taped sermons had made such an impression at university. The pair got on well. The energy, administrative talent and contacts of the young Saudi complemented the profound Islamic knowledge and commitment of the older man. Azzam, then 38, was a founder of the Hamas guerrilla group on the occupied West Bank and Gaza and thus had the experience to run a major organization. For the next two years, bin Laden commuted between the Gulf and Pakistan. All the time his relationship with Azzam grew stronger.

At first, bin Laden kept a low profile. Journalists in Pakistan at the beginning of the 1980s remember hearing stories about the "Saudi sheikh" who would visit wounded fighters in the university town's clinics, dispensing cashew nuts and chocolates. The man would note their names and addresses and soon a generous check would arrive at their family home. Such generosity -- perhaps learned from his father with his wad of notes for the poor -- is something that almost all who have fought for, or alongside, bin Laden mention.

Some -- such as one former al-Qaida member interviewed by The Observer in Algeria -- speak of $1,500 donations for marriages; others talk of cash doled out for shoes or watches or needy relatives. His followers say that such gifts bind them to their emir as effectively as the bayat or oath that many of them swear.

Sometimes his time was as valuable as his money. One former Afghan Mujahideen remembered how he had befriended bin Laden because he wanted to learn Arabic. The young Saudi spent many hours tutoring him in the language of the Koran. Despite his tough reputation, he was still the quiet and softly spoken young man his teachers had remembered.

By 1984, bin Laden and Azzam had rented a house in the Peshawar suburb of University Town and established a logistics base for the thousands of Arab fighters arriving in the city. It was called Beit-al-Ansar (the House of the Faithful).

"Bin Laden ... would receive the Arab volunteers, vet them and then send them on to the various Afghan factions," said one former associate. The venture was condoned by the CIA, the powerful Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI, and the Saudi agency, the Istakhbarat, soon to be headed by his old friend Prince Turki. None, though, gave bin Laden any American aid.

Beit-al-Ansar was on Syed Jalaluddin Afghani Road, a quiet backstreet full of bougainvillea and large houses built for the local elite. By the mid-'80s the area had become a center for the Afghan resistance. All the leaders of the various groups had offices there. There were two newspapers -- one published by Abdullah Azzam and bin Laden. There was even a "neutral" office, in a building rented by bin Laden, where Mujahideen groups could thrash out their differences.

Conditions were spartan -- almost deliberately so. The volunteers, and bin Laden too, used to sleep a dozen to a room on thin pallets laid out on the hard floor of their offices. According to former associates, bin Laden used to sit up late into the night discussing Islam and Middle Eastern history. The young Saudi was yet to develop his radical ideology. Instead his views were a mixture of half-remembered history and heavily skewed, and often ill-informed, analyses of current affairs. Bin Laden was particularly angry about what he called the betrayal of the Arabs by the British after the First World War. He also criticized the Saudi royal family, saying they had exploited the Wahhabi to gain power.

At other times bin Laden would lead religious debates among the volunteers. Many centered on Sura Yasin -- the key passage known as "the heart" or "the source" of the Koran, when Muhammad the prophet reveals the message and the task that God has entrusted him with. "He used to talk a lot about the warriors of Islamic history such as Salauddin [Saladin]," said one associate. "It was as if he was preparing himself."

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