Elusive Osama

Bin Laden then spent the early '90s in Sudan, at the invitation of the silver-tongued, Sorbonne-educated and infinitely wily cleric Hassan al-Turabi, who was running things after masterminding the overthrow of the elected government from a jail cell. Eventually, Turabi (a character worthy of Shakespeare), under pressure from the United States, double-crossed bin Laden and ejected him from Sudan with very little notice in 1996. This was Osama's third revelation; the focus of his animus had become the United States: He now understood it to be the source of everything that outraged him, from his humiliating ouster from Sudan to that most galling violation, the stationing of infidel soldiers in the holy land. His next major terrorist attack after his return to Afghanistan was the 1998 embassy bombings.

Disappointingly, Randal offers little information about Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian surgeon and terrorist leader who became bin Laden's right-hand man in the late 1990s. What is the nature of their relationship? A defector from the Sudan period reported plenty of friction among al-Qaida followers there over the differences in salaries between Egyptians and the members from other countries. The Egyptians were paid sometimes twice as much -- why? Randal repeatedly describes bin Laden as a "skinflint," more likely to provide seed money to terrorist operatives than to fund entire actions from start to finish. (Once in-country, the operatives would have to fend for themselves and often fell afoul of law enforcement while attempting scams and petty theft.) So what made the Egyptians worth so much?

Randal is also of the conviction that the Sept. 11 attacks represented a rare "splurge" for bin Laden. Americans may have marveled at how little it cost al-Qaida -- initial estimates were $500,000 -- to achieve so much carnage, but as Randal points out, "Americans alone would find that a small sum. In fact, 9/11 cost exponentially more than any of Osama's previous operations." (The FBI later reduced the estimated cost to somewhere between $175,000 and $250,000.) The spectacular, world-changing horrors of Sept. 11 no doubt proved to the penny-pinching bin Laden that you get what you pay for.

This may also be good news for bin Laden's targets, since there are signs that al-Qaida is in financial trouble. Randal reads much signficance into an unusual demand from two senior al-Qaida members, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who before their capture in Pakistan tried to extract $1 million ("later scaled back to a paltry $17,000") from an Al-Jazeera reporter in exchange for an interview. He also passes on rumors that bin Laden and Zawahiri have quarreled over where to focus al-Qaida's attentions in the future.

There are revealing tidbits about bin Laden that appear in books like Steve Coll's "Ghost Wars" and not in "Osama" -- such as bin Laden's effort to be a good Muslim by equally distributing his visits among his wives. Does Randal discount such stories, or did he simply miss them? A more in-depth consideration -- even if it's just speculative -- of bin Laden's private life would be far more welcome than Randal's long and largely irrelevant chapter on Algeria. (It seems to indicate that this book wasn't originally conceived of as a biography of bin Laden, and in fact the result can't honestly be called that.)

A soft-spoken man who seeks the spotlight, a well-mannered mass murderer, a son of religious moderates turned hardcore fundamentalist, a fugitive from the world's greatest army with wives and children that possibly number in the dozens (where are they?), a warrior ostensibly resigned to martyrdom who cheats death again and again -- you could cover pages with lists of Osama bin Laden's contradictions. Add to that that he's the enemy the Bush administration can't seem to remember, and the rest of us can't afford to forget.

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