Terrorist made by the USA 

   The man who is now an enemy had an earlier
 incarnation as friend of the West, reports Richard
 Norton-Taylor 

 The London Observer, Saturday August 22, 1998 

 Osama bin Laden, the exiled Saudi millionaire accused by
 Washington of being the mastermind behind the bombings
 of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and implicated in a
 series of earlier terrorist attacks in the Middle East, was
 once hailed by the CIA as a freedom fighter. 

 He was feted by the CIA for his role as a fighter, financier
 and recruiter of the mojahedin guerrillas who fought the
 Soviet army occupying Afghanistan during the 1980s. His
 forces were supplied with weapons by the CIA, and with
 British-made blowpipe anti-aircraft missiles by MI6.

 His camp in Khost, in north-east Afghanistan - one of the
 targets of US cruise missile attacks on Thursday - was built
 with the help of the CIA.

 Mr Bin Laden was backed by the United States on the
 principle that your enemy's enemy is your friend. He,
 presumably, made a similar calculation. Once Afghanistan's
 Soviet occupiers were defeated, Mr Bin Laden turned
 against the US, regarding it as equally an enemy of Islam.

 While he was protected in Afghanistan by the ultra-Islamist
 Taliban, whose leaders were also equipped with weapons
 supplied by the West and by Pakistan, thousands of his
 Middle Eastern fighters from the anti-Soviet war returned
 home to Egypt, Algeria, Yemen, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, and
 elsewhere - a kind of militant Islamist diaspora in states
 where jobs were scarce and governments autocratic.

 Mr Bin Laden, who is in his 40s, inherited a fortune
 estimated at up to $300 million (almost £190 million) from
 his late father, a Saudi construction magnate. A former
 associate, Khaled Fuawaz, is quoted in the latest issue of
 the Reader's Digest as recalling that early in the Afghan war
 Mr Bin Laden volunteered the services of his family's firm to
 blast new roads through the mountains.

 When he could not find drivers willing to face Russian
 helicopters, he drove the bulldozers himself, Mr Fuawaz
 maintained.

 His support for the Afghan mojahedin was, initially,
 encouraged by Saudi Arabia. But he soon made it clear his
 aim was to drive the West, and the US in particular, from
 the Middle East. He is reported to have met the Saudi
 defence minister, Prince Sultan, after the Iraqi invasion of
 Kuwait in 1990 offering his help in defeating Baghdad on
 condition the US was not involved.

 'Bin Laden spread out maps in front of Prince Sultan,' an
 unnamed Saudi official told the Reader's Digest. 'He had all
 kinds of plans for how to defeat the Iraqis without
 American help. Prince Sultan asked what he planned to do
 about the Iraqi tanks, aircraft, and chemical and biological
 weapons. Bin Laden said, "We will defeat them with our
 faith".'

 Mr Bin Laden and his followers have since been implicated
 in a series of terrorist attacks, according to Western
 intelligence. These include the bombings of a Saudi National
 Guard training centre in Riyadh in 1995 and of a military
 barracks near Dhahran a year later - in which 19 Americans
 died. He described the Dhahran attack as 'a laudable kind
 of terrorism' though denying responsibility.

 He has been linked to Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind
 behind the 1993 bombing of New York's World Trade
 Centre; and his followers have been linked to the massacre
 of tourists in Luxor, Egypt, last November.

 In 1994, Mr Bin Laden was stripped of his Saudi
 citizenship and disowned by his family after criticising the
 royal family, and was forced to move to Sudan. He was
 expelled from there in 1996 under the threat of US
 sanctions, and he returned to Afghanistan. The Washington
 Post reported yesterday that he has spent the past 15
 months living about 200 miles south of the site of Thursday's
 US attacks, using as his base a fortified and heavily guarded
 hilltop compound outside the city of Kandahar.

 In February a new group sponsored by Mr Bin Laden - the
 Islamic International Front for Jihad Against Jews and
 Crusaders - issued a statement. 'We - with God's help - call
 on every Muslim who believes in God and wishes to be
 rewarded to comply with God's order to kill the Americans
 and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find
 it,' it said. This dictat was signed by Islamic militant leaders
 in Egypt, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.

 On Wednesday, the London-based Arabic newspaper,
 al-Hayat, received a further statement from the group
 pledging new 'holy struggle operations' and warning that
 'strikes will continue from everywhere' against the US.