At every corner in the darkened village, guards stood with their Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers at the ready. Sitting on rugs spread on the dirt floor of a mud-brick and wood house, two men ate a meal of rice, grilled mutton and vegetables. High above, the warplanes of America could be heard growling in the night.

The men, both in their mid-forties, bearded and dressed in the local traditional baggy long shirt and trousers, washed, ate, prayed and then talked.

Osama bin Laden, the world’s most wanted man, and Mullah Mohammed Omar, supreme leader of the Taliban regime, had a lot to discuss. A few days earlier, at 8:45 p.m. on Sept. 30, U.S. and British cruise missiles had started hitting targets across Afghanistan in retribution for the terrorist attacks that had killed 5,000 people in New York and Washington nearly three weeks earlier. Now death and destruction had come to villages, cities and military camps throughout Afghanistan. Several missiles had landed near the village where the two men were meeting. Many more had landed on the southern city of Kandahar, the spiritual and administrative base of the Taliban. The two men were there to decide their response to the war they had suddenly found themselves fighting.

The meeting, revealed to The Observer by sources in a Gulf intelligence agency, did not last long. That was partly due to security concerns: a well-placed Tomahawk cruise missile could have wiped out both of the Pentagon’s main targets. Partly it was because the two were in agreement on almost everything. Mullah Omar reaffirmed his support, affection and respect for his Saudi-born friend. Bin Laden replied in kind. The two swiftly reached a decision on tactics. They would jointly resist any aggression, they would work to create and exploit divisions in the coalition ranged against them, and they would exploit the humanitarian crisis — and any civilian casualties — to create global anger against the bombing campaign. Then the two embraced and went their separate ways. They are not thought to have met since.

In 1930, a powerfully built dockside laborer, six feet tall and with one eye, decided there was more to life than loading ships in the ports of his poverty-stricken native province of Hadramaut in Yemen. He packed a bag, bought a place on a camel caravan heading to the newly created kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and set off on a thousand-mile trek to seek his fortune.

The man, who would go on to father a terrorist sought by the military might of the Western world, got his first job as a bricklayer with Aramco — the Arabian-American oil company — earning a single Saudi riyal, about 15 cents, a day. He lived frugally, saved hard, invested well and went into business himself. By the early 1950s, Mohammed bin Laden was employed in building palaces for the House of Saud in Riyadh. He won the contracts by heavily undercutting local firms. It was a gamble that paid off.

Bin Laden’s big break came when a foreign contractor withdrew from a deal to build the Medina-Jedda highway and he took on the job. By the early 1960s he was a rich man — and an extraordinary one.

“He couldn’t read or write and signed his name with a cross all his life, but he had an extraordinary intelligence,” said a French engineer who worked with him in the ’60s. The engineer remembered that the former laborer never forgot his roots, always leaving home “with a wad of notes to give to the poor.”

Such alms-giving is one of the fundamentals of Islam. Bin Laden senior was a devout man, raised in the strict and conservative Wahhabi strand of Sunni Islam. Later he was to boast that, using his private helicopter, he could pray in the three holiest locations of Islam — Mecca, Medina and the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem — in a single day. Visiting the former two sites must have been especially satisfying, for it was the contract to restore and expand the facilities serving pilgrims and worshippers there that established the reputation of his company, confirmed its status as the in-house builders of the Saudi ruling clan and made him stupendously wealthy. Though at one stage he was rich enough to bail out the royal family when they fell on hard times, the tatty bag he had carried when he left Yemen remained on display in the palatial family home. He was killed when his helicopter crashed in 1968.

Mohammed bin Laden had, in the words of the French engineer, “changed wives like you or I change cars.” He had three Saudi wives, Wahhabis like their husband, who were more or less permanent. The fourth, however, was changed on a regular basis.

The magnate would send his private pilot all over the Middle East to pick up yet another bride. “Some were as young as 15 and were completely covered from head to toe,” the pilot’s widow recently recalled. “But they were all exceptionally beautiful.”

Bin Laden’s mother, Hamida, was not a Saudi or a Wahhabi, but a stunningly beautiful, cosmopolitan, educated 22-year-old daughter of a Syrian trader. She shunned the traditional Saudi veil in favor of Chanel trouser suits and this, coupled with the fact that she was foreign, diminished her status within the family. She was Mohammed bin Laden’s tenth or eleventh spouse, and was known as the “the slave wife.”

Mohammed bin Laden gave even his former wives a home at his palaces in Jedda and Hijaz. Hamida was still married to the millionaire when he died and so, amid a huge family and the solid gold statues, the ancient tapestries and the Venetian chandeliers, this is where Osama bin Laden, Mohammed’s seventh son, “the son of the slave,” grew up.

Born in 1957 — the year 1377 of the Islamic calendar — he was 11 when his father died. He never saw much of him. A flavor of the bin Laden household comes from a document provided to the American ABC TV network in 1998 by “an anonymous source close to bin Laden.” It offers unprecedented insights into Osama’s childhood.

“The father had very dominating personality. He insisted to keep all his children in one premises,” it reads. “He had a tough discipline and observed all the children with strict religious and social code. At the same time, the father was entertaining with trips to the sea and desert,” the document goes on. “He dealt with his children as big men and demanded them to show confidence at young age.”

Brian Fyfield-Shayler, 69, gave the then 13-year-old bin Laden and 30 other privileged classmates attending al-Thagh school, an ilite Western-style Saudi school in Jedda, four one-hour English lessons a week during 1968 and 1969. He described bin Laden as a “shy, retiring and courteous” boy who was unfailingly polite.

“He was very courteous — more so than any of the others in his class. Physically, he was outstanding because he was taller, more handsome and fairer than most of the other boys. He also stood out as he was singularly gracious and polite, and had a great deal of inner confidence,” said Fyfield-Shayler.

Bin Laden was “very neat, precise and conscientious” in his work. “He wasn’t pushy at all. Many students wanted to show you how clever they were. But if he knew the answer to something he wouldn’t parade the fact. He would only reveal it if you asked him.”

In bin Laden’s early teens there was little sign of the fanatic he would become. In 1971 the family went on holiday en masse to the small Swedish copper mining town of Falun. A smiling Osama — or “Sammy” as he sometimes called himself — was pictured, wearing a lime-green top and blue flares, leaning on a Cadillac.

Osama, then 14, and his older brother Salem had first visited Falun a year before, driving from Copenhagen in a Rolls-Royce flown in from Saudi Arabia. Oddly, they stayed at the cheap Astoria Hotel, where the owner, Christina Akerblad, recalled them spending the days out “on business” and the evenings eating dinner in their rooms. “I remember them as two beautiful boys — the girls in Falun were very fond of them,” she said. “Osama played with my two [young] sons.”

Akerblad remembered the wealth she found on display when cleaning the boys’ rooms. “At the weekends we saw they used the extra bed in their rooms to lay out their clothes. They had lots of white silk shirts packaged in cellophane. I think they had a new one for every day — I never saw the dirty ones. They also had a big bag for their jewelry. They had emeralds and rubies and diamond rings and tie pins.”

Nor was there any sign of incipient fervor in a bucolic summer at an Oxford language school in the same year. Bin Laden and his brothers befriended a group of Spanish girls and went punting on the Thames.

Last month one woman showed a Spanish newspaper photos of herself and girlfriends — one in hot pants — with three bin Laden boys. Bin Laden, wearing flares, a short-sleeved shirt and a bracelet, looks like any other awkward teenager. His two older brothers look more assured. The young Saudi even once stayed on London’s Park Lane. He had forgotten the name of the hotel his Saudi parents had checked into, he told a reporter several years ago, but he recalled “the trees of the park and the red buses.”

Quite how much of a personal fortune bin Laden had inherited is uncertain. It may well be a lot less than the huge sums (up to $250 million) often cited. The young bin Laden was never interested in money for its own sake. In fact, the very things that had made the father huge riches had begun to trouble the son. The early seventies were a time of huge cultural change in the Middle East. Oil revenue, the wars with Israel and, above all, increasing contact with the West forced a profound re-examining of old certainties. For most of Mohammed bin Laden’s numerous progeny, the answer lay in greater Westernization, and the elder members of the family set off for Victoria College in Alexandria in Egypt, Harvard, London or Miami. But not Osama bin Laden. Like tens of thousands of other young men in the region at the time, Osama had become increasingly drawn to the cool, clear, uncluttered certainties of extremist Islamist ideology.

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.”

Just over the border from Peshawar into Afghanistan is the small village of Jaji. In 1986 the Soviet garrison there was under heavy attack from the resistance. One morning a senior commander was sheltering from a bombardment by Russian mortars in a bunker when a tall Arab dived through the door as explosions shook the earth. It was bin Laden. His “ground war” had started.

In the mid-’80s — partly due to a massive increase in American funding for the resistance — the war in Afghanistan intensified. Thousands of young Muslims were filling the university town dormitories. Though their motives were varied — some came for adventure, camaraderie or to escape from the law — most came for one reason only. “I went to fight for my faith,” one Egyptian former mujahid told The Observer in London last year.

Through the summer of 1986 bin Laden was in the center of the fighting around Jaji. Once, with a force of about 50 Arabs, he fought off a sustained assault by Soviet helicopters and infantry. “He was right in the thick of it,” Mia Mohammed Aga, a senior Afghan commander at the time and now with the Taliban, said last week. “I watched him with his Kalashnikov in his hand under fire from mortars and the multiple-barrelled rocket launchers.”

Over the next three years, bin Laden fought hard, often exposing himself to extreme physical danger. One leader of the hardline Hezb-i-Islami group said he remembered bin Laden holding a position under heavy bombardment after being surrounded by Soviet soldiers. At least a dozen other senior veterans, many of whom are now opposed to bin Laden, corroborate the accounts of his combat role. They all mention his lack of concern for his own safety. The devout boy was turning into the holy warrior.

Bin Laden’s fanaticism was shared by his men. “I took three Afghans and three Arabs and told them to hold a position [during the battle for the eastern city of Jalalabad in 1989]. They fought all day, then when I went to relieve them in the evening the Arabs were crying because they wanted to be martyred. I told them that if they wanted to stay and fight they could. The next day they were killed. Osama said later that he had told them that the trench was their gate to heaven.”

Bin Laden shared more than their fanaticism. “You never knew he was so rich or the commander of everyone. We used to all sit down together and eat like friends,” another veteran said.

On some occasions he took it on himself to broker truces between Afghan factions. His self-assumed responsibility for supplying the Mujahideen continued. CIA sources estimated he was bringing in at least $50 million a year for the jihad. One veteran said that during the fighting for Jalalabad, he had seen the Saudi by a roadside, caked in mud, organizing food, boots and clothes for the Mujahideen.

However, there were tensions with those who did not share his hardline Islamism. Said Mohammed, another Afghan veteran, said bin Laden had refused to deal with him during one battle because he was clean shaven. Bin Laden was learning the power of the media too. Reports of his exploits, by Arab journalists based in Peshawar, were published throughout the Middle East. They brought him a flood of recruits as well as a respect and a status that he had never had before. The “son of the slave” was now a sheikh himself.

In 1989 the Soviet forces pulled out of Afghanistan and left a puppet government in Kabul. The Mujahideen were now battling other Afghans — and each other. There was little to keep the thousands of battle-hardened fighters of the Arab “international brigade” in Afghanistan. Many left to continue their jihad in their home countries. Bin Laden, hating the internecine squabbles, was one.

“He was very frustrated by it all. He is a very honest, very clean man, and when he saw the Arabs were arguing among themselves he was sickened by it,” said Jammal Nazimuddin, a former fighter. “He used to tell them that they had defeated the Soviet empire alone because they were united and Allah had blessed them. If they were not united, he said, they could not do Allah’s will.”

Bin Laden, aged 33, went home.

Prince Abdullah, the effective regent of Saudi Arabia, placed a soft, plump hand on his young compatriot’s shoulder, smiled and spoke of friendship and loyalty. His words were smooth and conciliatory, but there was no doubting the harsh threat that lay beneath them.

“The family of Mohammed bin Laden have always been faithful subjects of our kingdom and have helped us greatly in our times of need,” he told the gathering. “We are sure that nothing will be allowed to mar our good relations in the future.”

It was the autumn of 1990 and Abdullah was addressing Afghan veterans in a beautifully furnished lounge in his palace in Riyadh. Although the men nodded respectfully at the prince’s words, the man to whom they were directed could barely conceal his anger. “He was seething,” one of the Afghan commanders said. “You could see it in his eyes.”

A few months earlier, on Aug. 2, Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait. Osama bin Laden, then living in his home town of Jedda, had immediately sent a message to the Saudi royal family offering to form an army of 30,000 Afghan veterans to defeat the Iraqi dictator. The men who had defeated the Russians could easily take on Saddam, he said, and he was clearly the man to lead them.

Bin Laden was in for a rude — and profoundly upsetting — shock. The last thing the House of al-Saud wanted was an army of zealous Islamists fighting its war. Bin Laden was received by senior royals, but his offer was firmly rejected.

Worse was to come. Instead of the Islamic army he envisaged protecting the cradle of Islam, the defense of Saudi Arabia — and thus of the holy sites of Mecca and Medina — was entrusted to the Americans. Bin Laden, seething with humiliation and rage, could do nothing but watch as 300,000 U.S. troops arrived in his country and set about building bases, drinking Coke and alcohol and sunbathing. Bin Laden saw their presence as an infidel invasion. It even appeared to defy directly the dying words of the Prophet Muhammad: “Let there be no two religions in Arabia.” The 33-year-old started lobbying religious scholars and Muslim activists throughout the Gulf. Playing on his celebrity status, he lectured and preached throughout Saudi Arabia, circulating thousands of audio tapes through mosques.

He started recruiting his army and sent an estimated 4,000 men to Afghanistan for training. The regime grew uneasy, raided his home and put him under house arrest. Bin Laden’s family, worried that his activities might jeopardize their close relations with the ruling clan, tried to bring him back into the fold but were forced eventually to effectively disown him. The pressure mounted.

In late 1990, an escape route appeared. Bin Laden received an offer of refuge from Hassan al-Turabi, the charismatic Islamist scholar in effect running Sudan. Turabi believed that the total defeat of Iraq and the discrediting of “secular” Arab regimes would lead to an opportunity to set up a “pure” Islamic government across the Muslim world. It was a seductive message. And the Saudi regime was thankful for an opportunity to get rid of him. They pushed bin Laden further in the hope that he would leave. Bin Laden cracked. He fled Saudi Arabia for Khartoum, the Sudanese capital. He was never to return to his homeland.

Bin Laden set up a home in a rich suburb of Khartoum with his four wives, his children and a core of close retainers. Then he flew in several hundred Arab veterans from Afghanistan to provide the basis of a broader organization. Life in Sudan was odd. There were football matches and bathing trips to the Blue Nile, and long junior common room-type arguments over whether Shia and Sunni Muslims should unite to fight the common enemy, and points of Islamic doctrine. Bin Laden even opened a personal bank account in his own name. And most of the time of “the sheikh” was spent making money, rather than spreading global jihad.

“The biggest myth concerns his wealth,” Ghazi Algosaibi, Saudi Arabia’s veteran ambassador to London, said recently. “I have read reports that he has $300 to $400 million stashed away. This is simply not true. When he left Saudi Arabia he did not take anything like that amount of money, and the Saudi authorities have taken great care to make sure he does not receive any money from the kingdom.”

In the group’s offices in Khartoum, bin Laden, as befitted the boss, had the largest office. The group was run like any other organization. There was a board of directors, a series of subcommittees and too many meetings. Employees nursed grievances over wages, healthcare and alleged favoritism. Perks included travel (using the passports of Arab volunteers killed in Afghanistan), free tea and groceries.

The organization ran a trading company called Laden International, a foreign exchange dealership, a civil engineering company and a firm running farms growing peanuts and corn. In payment for building a 700-mile road from the capital to Port Sudan, the government gave bin Laden the monopoly on sesame seed export. Sudan is one of the world’s three largest sesame producers, so it was extremely lucrative.

Other ventures were less successful. A plan to import bicycles from Azerbaijan was a total flop. Other hare-brained schemes were hatched, half-implemented and then went nowhere. But there was still enough cash to keep al-Qaida’s core business ticking along. The chief executive never lost sight of his main purpose. More than $100,000 in cash went to Islamists in Jordan, funds were sent to Baku to set up an operation smuggling Islamic fighters into Chechnya, and another $100,000 went to an Eritrean Islamist group.

At one point bin Laden bought a plane for $250,000 and hired a pilot. The plane soon crashed. He also set up several military training camps, and hundreds of Algerians, Palestinians, Egyptians and Saudis received instruction in bomb-making and terrorist tactics. Many of them had fought in Afghanistan and now, like bin Laden, were at a loose end. There was talk of assassinating President Mubarak of Egypt, though nobody was sure how to go about it, and there was some haphazard surveillance of possible targets for a bombing in East Africa, including the Nairobi embassy of the U.S.

There also appears to have been an unsuccessful attempt to buy components for nuclear weapons in Eastern Europe and a bid to smuggle hundreds of Kalashnikovs on camels across the desert to Egypt. A shipload of guns was sent to Yemen and operatives dispatched to help tribesmen fight U.S. troops in Somalia.

The CIA claim that bin Laden was behind the attacks on their troops in Mogadishu in 1993. However, there is little evidence that al-Qaida were heavily involved. “During bin Laden’s stay in Sudan anti-American incidents happened in many places but none were conducted by his group in the usual sense of an order passed down a chain of command,” one intelligence source said. “They were done by people who had trained in Afghanistan and had enough anti-American drive. Bin Laden may have sanctioned them but that was all.”

It was a pattern that was to be often seen in the years to come. A car bomb in Riyadh in 1995 was blamed on him, with the Saudis producing video “confessions” from four Afghans for the attack. The Khobar Towers bombing a year later was also blamed on bin Laden, though Iranian agents are now the prime suspects. In 1994, when the Saudis publicly withdrew his citizenship, bin Laden’s response was to exploit the power of the media. It is believed he set up a London office called the Advice and Reform Committee (ARC). Its job was allegedly propaganda, issued vitriolic criticism against the Saudi regime. It was run by Khalid al-Fawwaz, now fighting extradition to the United States from the U.K.

By January 1996, Khartoum was increasingly uneasy about its guest. Turabi contacted the Sudanese ambassador to Afghanistan, Atiya Badawi, who was based in Peshawar. Badawi, who had learnt the Pashtun language while fighting the Russians, had excellent contacts with his former comrades among the Mujahideen and, with Afghanistan split into hundreds of warring bandit fiefdoms, it was easy to persuade three of the most senior commanders in the Jalalabad area that a wealthy Saudi under their protection might give them an edge over their rivals. The three men — all of whom are now dead — flew to Sudan to ask bin Laden to return to the land of the jihad.

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.

Three months after the missile strikes, two luxury jets landed at Kandahar air base. One brought Prince Turki al Faisal, bin Laden’s student friend and the head of Saudi Arabia’s security services. The second was empty. It was there to take bin Laden back to Riyadh.

Prince Turki, who had been crucial in getting millions of dollars of official aid for the Taliban, went straight to Mullah Omar’s residence where a magnificent lunch had been laid out. The prince began to lecture the Taliban leader about his ingratitude to his former benefactors. In the middle of his tirade Omar took a water jug from an attendant and emptied it over his head.

“I nearly lost my temper,” he told the astonished prince. “Now I am calm. I will ask you a question and then you can leave. How long has the royalty of Saudi Arabia been the hired help of the Americans?” Lunch went uneaten and the second plane returned to Riyadh empty. Shortly afterwards bin Laden pledged allegiance to Mullah Omar and recognized him formally as amir ul momineen — leader of the faithful. His fate and that of the Taliban were now inextricably linked.

He issued a statement denying all involvement in the Nairobi attacks — though he said that he welcomed them. No one believed him. The Taliban then said bin Laden had “disappeared.” No one believed them either. In fact he was spending most of his time at an old Soviet agricultural collective, Farm Hadda, five miles south of Jalalabad.

The Saudi’s life there was described to The Observer by a defecting al-Qaida associate in June 1999. Bin Laden’s daily routine reflected the rigor of his surroundings. After dawn prayers, he studied the Koran for several hours. Breakfast was dates, yogurt, flat Afghan bread and black tea. Lunch and dinner was equally plain. Bin Laden’s life was dominated by security concerns. Instead of using satellite phones — he believed the Americans used their signals to track him — bin Laden dictated messages to an aide who telephoned them from a separate location. He is currently guarded by a select group of mainly Arab fighters led by Saifu al-Hasnain, a 35 year-old Egyptian.

As al-Qaida’s operations expanded security has become simpler. By the beginning of this year, according to Russian intelligence, the group had more than 50 individual bases in Afghanistan. There were units of Arab fighters on at least three front lines, others stationed in Kabul and still more in newly built bases, some with airstrips, in the desert south of Kandahar. Every location was — and is — another safe haven.

As al-Qaida’s infrastructure expanded inside Afghanistan so did its profile beyond its frontiers. Throughout 1999 and 2000, rattled Western intelligence services blamed bin Laden for hundreds of threats and scores of attacks all over the world. Though many were only tenuously linked to him, bin Laden was happy to take the credit. Clever publicity stunts helped too. When the Americans posted their reward for him, 100-rupee notes were stamped with a picture of bin Laden and distributed throughout Afghanistan. Thousands of cassettes of his speeches were distributed across the region too and, according to a letter signed by bin Laden, journalists were bribed.

To reporters who did meet him he denied everything and nothing at the same time. When asked if he had chemical weapons, he merely said that the duty of all Muslims was to try to obtain the means to defeat tyranny. Questioned about terrorist attacks, he denied responsibility, but welcomed the actions of his “Muslim brothers.” Last year suicide bombers attacked a U.S. warship in a harbor in Yemen. Seventeen servicemen died. Once again Bin Laden hinted at his involvement but nothing more. And he made more threats.

In June he released a video showing al-Qaida operatives training and footage of Palestinians killed by Israeli soldiers. He was shown standing by a map of the world and promising spectacular events in the near future. Also in the summer, arms dealers in Peshawar told The Observer, bin Laden’s representatives had started buying Stingers and other surface-to-air missiles.

He also made massive purchases of small arms and ammunition and gave them to the Taliban, possibly in a bid to build up his credit with them. At a camp in the desert southwest of Kandahar — close to where U.S. Rangers landed nine days ago — al-Qaida completed the construction of a new airstrip. Every night throughout the summer, flights from the Middle East brought extra recruits and supplies. A concerted fundraising operation in the Gulf also replenished al-Qaida’s coffers. There is also evidence that in the days before 11 September a number of al-Qaida members tried to flee Afghanistan. Several were arrested by Pakistani police.

No one knows where bin Laden was when the Twin Towers crumbled. Most sources believe that, though he has been “sighted” at a number of locations in Afghanistan, he was, and remains, in the desert south of Kandahar or in the remote mountains of Oruzgan. We know he is with al-Zawahiri, almost certainly with Mohammed Atef, a number of other prominent extremists and probably his son. An elite group, drawn from the three or four thousand Arab fighters currently in Afghanistan, is guarding him, along with a detachment of Taliban. We know he met Mullah Omar close to Kandahar a few days after the strikes began and analysis of the rocky background in the video released on the day of the U.S. attacks reveals the tape was most likely filmed there or in the eastern province of Paktia, close to the Pakistan border.

“These events have divided the world into two camps, the camp of the faithful and the camp of the infidel” he said. “Every Muslim must rise to defend his religion.” He ticked his targets off one by one — the Israelis, the “apostate, hereditary rulers” of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and other Middle Eastern states, “those killers who toyed with the blood, honour and sanctities of Muslims.” And he listed the victims — the Palestinians, the Iraqi children dying because of U.N. sanctions, the whole Muslim nation.

Five thousand people were dead in America. The greatest power on the planet was angry and frightened and looking for him. Hundreds of its warplanes filled the skies above his adopted homeland.

At dusk tonight, somewhere in Afghanistan’s blasted and baked mountains and deserts, a small group of men will face the setting sun and kneel. As is customary, the most senior and respected among them will take a step forward and lead the group in prayer. Osama bin Laden will give thanks to God.

It’s the saddest reading around: the little announcements that dribble out of the Pentagon every day or two — those terse, relatively uninformative death notices: rank; name; age; small town, suburb, or second-level city of origin; means of death (“small arms fire,” “improvised explosive device,” “the result of gunshot wounds inflicted by an individual wearing an Afghan National Army uniform,” or sometimes something vaguer like “while conducting combat operations,” “supporting Operation Enduring Freedom,” or simply no explanation at all); and the unit the dead soldier belonged to.  They are seldom 100 words, even with the usual opening line: “The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom.” Sometimes they include more than one death.

The weather’s getting warmer in Afghanistan and the war there is heating up again. That means – as it has meant every year for more than a decade — that the pace will quicken at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. More casualties will be brought to this largest American military hospital outside the United States. The Critical Care Air Transport teams and their C-17 Globemasters will fly in from “downrange,” as they call the Afghan battleground, and the injured will be brought by ambulance bus from nearby Ramstein Air Force Base to the hospital front door.

ISLAMABAD (AP) — NATO on Tuesday invited Pakistan’s president to the upcoming Chicago summit on Afghanistan, the strongest sign yet that Islamabad is ready to reopen its western border to U.S. and NATO military supplies heading to the war in the neighboring country.

Pakistan blocked the routes in November after American airstrikes killed 24 of its troops on the Afghan border. The attack sent ties between Washington and Islamabad to new lows, threatening regional cooperation needed for negotiating an end to the Afghan war.

The heat. That’s what I remember most. Shimmery and bright. Blinding. Stifling. Heeee-eeaat.

The kind that’s not just on you, wrapped around you, but balled up and pulsing inside you — a desert blanket with teeth. It’s a type of heat that makes your skin cry and your eyeballs sweat, even in the shade; heat like a predator you can’t run away from.

I notice it right as I get off the plane — not just the degrees but also the dust. Dust you can smell, kicked up by a thousand years of struggle. In a region this old, I’m sure each breath carries a dose of unintended history: Inhale, Alexander the Great; exhale, the Ottoman Empire; inhale, the USSR; exhale, the Taliban.

MAHMUD RAQI, Afghanistan — The office of Kapisa’s governor sits high on a hilltop overlooking the provincial capital, Mahmud Raqi. It has a beautiful view of the river below and the mountains, trees and fields that stretch into the distance.

Beneath the tranquil surface, however, lies a grim truth. Just outside town roadside bombs are planted to target NATO convoys.