It was a cool autumn evening in Kabul. Outside a high-walled house in the northern suburb of Wazir Akbar Khan were a dozen Japanese pickup trucks. The guards and drivers lounged against them. Though the area had escaped the worst of the fighting in the seven years since the Russians had withdrawn, shrapnel scars still pitted the walls and sandbags were stacked around every home. It was October 1996 and Osama bin Laden was in Kabul to meet the Taliban. It was his first visit to the city and his first encounter with the hardline Islamic militia army who had captured it a month earlier. In May a specially chartered cargo plane carrying the 39-year- old, three of his four wives, half a dozen children and a hundred of his Arab fighters had landed at Jalalabad airport. But the three Mujahideen commanders who had invited him back from Sudan had since been ousted and bin Laden, politic as ever, knew he needed to ingratiate himself with the new regime.

A month earlier he had sent a Libyan associate to Taliban leader Mullah Omar in Kandahar. Omar ordered Mullah Mohammed Rabbani, the deputy leader and mayor of Kabul, to meet bin Laden and see if he was as much of a friend as his subordinate had claimed. Their meeting was wary but friendly. Bin Laden spoke first. Ignoring their doctrinal differences, he praised the militia's aims and achievements and pledged his unconditional moral and financial support. Rabbani, pleased and flattered, offered the protection of the regime. "Everybody left smiling," a witness said.

The meeting signified more than an alliance between the world's most wanted terrorist and the world's most reviled regime. It was the start of the final -- and most critical -- phase of bin Laden's development. Having secured the Taliban's protection, he was free to start building the most efficient terrorist organization the world had ever seen.

The jihad against the Russians had given bin Laden much-needed confidence, contacts throughout the Islamic world and a taste for fame, respect and adulation. His authority and profile had been boosted further by his stance against Saudi Arabia and exile. And in Sudan he had been able to start the serious work of building al-Qaida -- a global umbrella group of Muslim extremists dedicated to overturning "un-Islamic" governments throughout the Middle East and further afield. But in terms of military capacity and strategic thinking bin Laden's group was still weak. In Afghanistan, he swiftly found a solution.

He had returned to a land that had known anarchy for six years. Thousands of Islamic militants were based in the old Mujahideen complexes in the east of the country. Many were sponsored by the Pakistani secret services who wanted zealots to fight India in Kashmir. Others were backed by a variety of Islamic groups from all over the world. In the camps the volunteers were trained in guerrilla warfare. Many had fought for the Taliban. Bin Laden's first problem was partially solved almost immediately. He had inherited an army.

In Afghanistan he found himself surrounded by men who could help him, especially dozens of exiled Egyptian extremists. They included Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri, a 37-year-old surgeon and a founder of the effective and sophisticated Egyptian al-Jihad group. Another was Mohammed Atef, the group's hard and competent military commander. Al-Zawahiri taught bin Laden about the political realities of global war. Atef lectured him on the military necessities. After several security scares, he moved his household to a former Mujahideen base at Tora Bora high in the mountains south of Jalalabad.

The Egyptians told him the best form of defense was attack. "He did what they told him," one security source said. After two months at Tora Bora, he wrote and circulated a 12-page article, full of Koranic and historical references, promising violent action against the Americans unless they withdrew from Saudi Arabia. In a significant broadening of his view -- showing the influence of the Egyptians -- he also spoke for the first time of Palestine and Lebanon as well as "the fierce Judeo-Christian campaign against the Muslim world" and "the duty of all Muslims" to resist it. Bin Laden bought four of the Stinger missiles that had been supplied to the Mujahideen by the CIA and had them smuggled to Saudi Islamic groups.

When it discovered the plot, Riyadh was incensed. The Saudi government, along with Pakistan, had supported the Taliban as a means of countering Iranian and Russian influence in Afghanistan. Now the Taliban were sheltering one of their most determined enemies and ignoring demands to hand him over. More extreme measures were needed.

In early 1997 the Taliban discovered what they said was a Saudi plot to assassinate bin Laden. The Islamic militia, who by then controlled about two-thirds of Afghanistan, invited bin Laden to move to Kandahar for his own security. Bin Laden agreed and moved into an old Soviet air force base close to Kandahar airport. He cemented his relationship with the Taliban's upper command by funding huge military purchases, building mosques and buying cars for the leadership. He even helped construct a new residence for Mullah Omar and his family on the outskirts of the city and started work on a huge compound to be used for prayers at the start of Ramadan.

Bin Laden set up a system to cream off the elite from the existing training camps to al-Qaida. The camp administrators told the volunteers that the best of them would earn an audience with "the Emir." When bin Laden met them, his aides would pick the most promising and send them to more specialized camps where, instead of basic infantry techniques, they had psychological and physical tests, combat trials and finally instruction in the skills of the modern terrorist. Within a year, bin Laden had created the terrorist version of special forces.

Under al-Zawahiri's tutelage, bin Laden had also realized he needed to internationalize his cause. Towards the end of 1997 he started to work to unify Islamic movements under the al-Qaida umbrella, using his money, charm and reputation to draw in leaders from around the world. He bolstered his support locally, giving money to village clerics to build mosques and, according to one Taliban source, organizing the import of 3,000 secondhand Toyota Corolla estates from Dubai. They were given to the families of Taliban casualties so they could earn a living.

Finally, in February 1998, he felt strong enough to issue a fatwa in the name of the "World Front for Jihad against Jews and Crusaders." It was signed by bin Laden, al-Zawahiri and the heads of major Islamic movements in Pakistan and Bangladesh and endorsed by dozens of other groups throughout the region. It was, according to one Western scholar of Islam, "a magnificent piece of eloquent, even poetic, Arabic prose."

There was nothing poetic about its message. The fatwa said that killing Americans and their allies, even civilians, was a Muslim duty. Shortly afterwards bin Laden told an interviewer that there would be "radical action" soon.

At about 11 a.m. on August, 7 1998, Mohammed Rashid Daoud al-Owhali, a slim-shouldered, bearded 22-year-old Saudi, was standing in front of a toilet bowl in the men's lavatories on the ground floor of a hospital in a suburb of Nairobi. He was holding a set of keys and three bullets. His clothes -- jeans, a white patterned shirt, socks and black shoes -- were stained with blood. The keys fitted the lock on the rear doors of a light brown Toyota pickup truck which 34 minutes earlier had ceased to exist when the huge bomb it had been carrying had exploded. The blast had demolished the U.S. embassy, an office block and a secretarial college, killing 213 people and wounding 4,600. Almost simultaneously a second bomb, at the U.S. embassy in Tanzania, exploded, killing 11.

The driver of al-Owhali's truck, another young Saudi called Azzam, had effectively been vaporized. The two had sung songs in Arabic of martyrdom as they had driven to the embassy. Though at the time they thought they were to die together, in the end they didn't. Azzam was killed when, still sitting in the driver seat, he pressed a detonator button taped to the dashboard. But al-Owhali ran, and later told the FBI he had been handpicked by bin Laden while training in Afghanistan early in 1997, sent to fight for the Taliban that summer, then sent for more specialized training in terrorism by al-Qaida instructors in March of 1998 and finally, in April, given his mission. Azzam had followed a similar path.

Thirteen days after the bombings in Africa, 75 American cruise missiles slammed into six training camps in the eastern Afghan hills. Other missiles demolished a medical factory in Sudan. The Muslim world exploded in anger and outrage. Bin Laden was launched onto the global stage.

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