Word: turki
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...June 1998, King Fahd dispatched Turki to Kandahar to meet with Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar. His instructions were to "ask him to hand over bin Laden." Turki argued that bin Laden was endangering Afghanistan's greater interests. Mullah Omar "agreed in principle," Turki says...
...organizer of the joint Saudi-American-Pakistani support for Afghan rebels fighting the Soviet Union in the 1980s, Turki met bin Laden, a prominent volunteer in that war, five times and remembers him from those days as enthusiastic but gentle and shy. The Saudis first began to be worried about bin Laden in 1990, after he returned home from Afghanistan still hungry for more jihad. Soon after, according to Turki, bin Laden began taking veterans of the Afghan war to North Yemen to fight the Marxist regime in the Republic of South Yemen. "North Yemen is an arms market...
Though the Sudanese at first welcomed bin Laden, eventually they decided he had to go, according to Turki. In 1996, Turki says, a Sudanese envoy arrived with a message: "We want to get him out. Will you take him?" The deal fell through, according to Turki, because the Saudis refused to accept the condition that bin Laden would not be prosecuted for his activities. Bin Laden wound up instead back in Afghanistan...
There he began issuing diatribes against the Saudi government and called for jihad against the U.S. That, says Turki, prompted the Saudis and Americans to start systematically sharing intelligence on him. By then, Turki notes, assassinating bin Laden was not an option. The Saudis did not have the "assets"--the undercover agents--to do it. "If we had the assets, maybe we would have made a proposal--to infiltrate people in to take him out. I don't think [the CIA] had the assets [either...
...when the two met again, after the U.S. had struck Afghanistan with cruise missiles in retaliation for the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania--which were attributed to bin Laden--they had a tense, half-hour exchange. "He reverses himself completely," Turki recalls. "He starts spouting bin Laden propaganda against the kingdom. He was very, very hysterical, high-pitched, screaming, gesticulating. I just stood up and said, 'I'm not going to hear any more of this.' I told him, 'What you are doing is going to bring harm to Afghanistan.'" Just as Turki never grasped...