Elusive Osama

Bush can't find him. Pundits can't define him. Now a new book tries to pin down America's most wanted.

By Laura Miller

Aug 18, 2004 | "Osama bin Forgotten" -- that's the joking way some Americans referred to the terrorist leader behind the Sept. 11 attacks after President Bush suddenly and utterly ceased to speak his name in early 2002. Osama bin Laden had slipped through U.S. fingers in the battle of Tora Bora and disappeared into the mountains around the Afghan-Pakistani border. Presumably, he's still there and perhaps even now handing down orders via personal messenger for fresh attacks on Americans. (He has long since abandoned his satellite phones after learning that Western intelligence agencies could monitor the signals.)

For a man who, whatever George W. Bush might wish to the contrary, still casts a long and ominous shadow across the imagination of the American public, bin Laden remains an enigma. Compared with Saddam Hussein, the guy Bush tried to offer as a substitute bogeyman, bin Laden is practically a blank. We read about Saddam's taste for vulgarian luxuries and the depredations of his troglodyte sons in fine detail; no one even seems to know exactly how many wives bin Laden has (although he's said to have fathered 11 children by the first -- so he must have quite an entourage).

"Osama: The Making of a Terrorist," by Jonathan Randal, a former Washington Post reporter and longtime Middle East correspondent, promises to fill in the gaps. Randal spent several years researching bin Laden after the east African embassy bombings in 1998. He'd even made a half-hearted attempt to interview bin Laden before that, in Sudan, at the prompting of unnamed American officials, but was rebuffed. In the end, as Randal confesses up front, he never got his interview (bin Laden hasn't met with a Western journalist since 1998), but he's scoured all the available documents and coaxed bits of information out of his many sources in the region.

I wish I could say that all this has led to remarkable revelations about bin Laden's history and character, but the truth is that there's little here that hasn't appeared in print somewhere before. What Randal does provide, however, is reliable guidance through the clouds of bin Laden-related legend, rumor and disinformation. Unlike, say, Yossef Bodansky's dubious "Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America," which became a bestseller after the Sept. 11 attacks, Randal's book isn't peddling a political agenda. Intelligence agencies surely possess more information about bin Laden than they have made available to the public, but what Randal offers in "Osama" is likely the soundest portrait incorporating what we know now.

"Osama" is also the most psychological treatment of bin Laden's story, although it is only intermittently so. Randal laments his inability to "ferret out a coherent view of [bin Laden's] character, especially of his early formative years," but at least he has tried, unlike the counterterrorism wonks who usually write these books. "I was confronted by a series of oddities with little insight into how they might mesh together or not," Randal writes, and for him the great mystery of bin Laden's recent exploits is that he seems not to have welcomed martyrdom after the fall of the Taliban government in Afghanistan in 2002. The journalist fully expected the terrorist to die in a blaze of glory and secure for himself the supreme spot in the pantheon of militantly anti-American Islam. But, Macavity-like, bin Laden eluded his enemies again.

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