The avengers

Osama: The Making of a Terrorist
By Jonathan Randal
Knopf, 339 pp., $26.95

Most US reporters and writers see the Al Qaeda phenomenon and Osama bin Laden through the cloudy prism of their largely American experience. Jonathan Randal, however, is an old-fashioned foreign correspondent who has lived abroad for decades and regularly frequented hell holes in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. He has written an account that is simultaneously detailed and fast paced, a story that places our current struggle in a multicultural context in which it is more easily understood.

Randal has combined a thorough reading of years of open source literature with extensive personal research, including his literally knocking on bin Laden's door in Khartoum, Sudan. His sources are spies, diplomats, police, politicians, and fellow journalists whose bona fides he has tested over many years. I should acknowledge that I was one of his many sources (which doesn't prevent Randal from taking me to task for the Clinton administration's policy toward the vile Sudan regime), for he admits to testing me in a nearly empty White House in February 2000. He writes that he expected the White House guy to blow smoke about our extensive knowledge of Al Qaeda's finances and was pleased when I replied that the CIA didn't have a clue. I had passed the test.

Randal, in turn, passed the traditional initiation and evaluation of the legendary Al Qaeda hunter John O'Neill. That process involved a "pub crawl" through Manhattan, ending in the wee hours with the reporter about to experience a memorable hangover. Randal placed more than his liver at risk, as he used his source network to track down those who really knew what was going on in the back alleys of Peshawar, Pakistan; Kandahar, Afghanistan; and Algiers.

Why did these real players talk to this older, ex-pat reporter? He told us more than we already knew. Questions that would stump CIA's experts, Randal answered in detail, often without understanding the value of his knowledge. His book continues that charming style, as when he answers longstanding questions about bin Laden:

How did he fit into his large and wealthy family? One of 54 siblings, he was fobbed off as a baby, along with his Syrian mother, to his father's accountant, following an Islamic divorce.

Did he visit the United States and the United Kingdom to sow wild oats or reconnoiter the enemy in the 1990s? No, but he is fluent in English, having studied at Oxford as a teenager.

Was he a US or Saudi agent in Afghanistan fighting the Soviets? He knew the head of Saudi intelligence, but freelanced. Indeed, his personal attempt to undermine the regime in Yemen ran him afoul of Saudi intelligence.

Is he the mastermind behind Al Qaeda's successes? Only partially. Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, the 9/11 planner, was the visionary for most attacks. He joined bin Laden in 1996, but ran a somewhat independent division within Al Qaeda.

In chapters that dive deep into Algeria, Lebanon, Sudan, Pakistan, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Turkey, and other front lines, Randal makes clear how the old Al Qaeda construct fits into what is really a mosaic of preexisting religious, ideological, nationalist, and anarchic groups. He traces Al Qaeda's lineage through twists and turns to Damascus of 1928 and the birth of the Muslim Brotherhood.

"In keeping with the Middle Eastern principle that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, members of the Brotherhood were also welcomed in Saudi Arabia and other conservative pro-Western oil emirates of the Gulf. There they prospered as businessmen; their financial success was to have important consequences in future decades for furthering subversive Islamic political projects elsewhere. Many other Brothers became teachers. As such they exercised an enormous influence on impressionable young Saudis, such as Osama, whose notions of the outside world, even of the wider Arab world, were limited."

Randal demonstrates the historical cause and effect between such events as the Saudis relying on French forces to liberate the Holy Mosque in Mecca in 1979 and the later Saudi funding of radical Wahhabist activities that created an infrastructure for Al Qaeda. He documents Pakistan's cooperation with the Taliban and Al Qaeda that officially ended only after 9/11.

Trying to see America through the eyes of Islamic media, Randal notes: "The Reverend Jerry Vines, a former president of the Southern Baptists, America's largest Protestant denomination, said the Prophet Mohammed was a 'demon-possessed pedophile.' Reverend Jerry Falwell said, 'I think the Prophet Mohammed was a terrorist,' on CBS's 60 Minutes. His fellow televangelist, the Reverend Benny Hinn, described the Arab-Israeli conflict 'not as a war between Arabs and Jews, but as war between God and the devil.' Franklin Graham, evangelist Billy Graham's son, dismissed Islam as a 'very evil and wicked religion.' "

Randal's witty, opinionated, and highly urbane style will at least once or twice send the Generation X reader to a dictionary. Yet his anecdotes and allusions create a vivid imagery lacking in most contemporary terrorism analysis.

Randal encourages Americans to realize that terrorist groups have often arisen and gone dormant, Middle Eastern regimes have crumbled and been replaced by radicals for almost a century. Like almost all real experts and practitioners in dealing with the Islamic world, Randal makes a convincing case that the US war on Iraq has needlessly extended the lifetime and ferocity of this generation of terrorists as never before.

Of all the flutter of bin Laden and Al Qaeda books, Randal has produced the most readable and informative. Well, maybe the second most.

Richard A. Clarke is a former senior White House official in three administrations and author of "Against All Enemies."