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With his supporters, his three wives (he is rumored to have since added a fourth) and some 10 children, bin Laden moved again to Afghanistan. There he returned full time to jihad. This time, instead of importing holy warriors, he began to export them. He turned al-Qaeda into what some have called "a Ford Foundation" for Islamic terror organizations, building ties of varying strength to groups in at least a few dozen places. He brought their adherents to his camps in Afghanistan for training, then sent them back to Egypt, Algeria, the Palestinian territories, Kashmir, the Philippines, Eritrea, Libya and Jordan. U.S. intelligence officials believe that bin Laden's camps have trained tens of thousands of fighters. Sometimes bin Laden sent his trainers out to, for instance, Tajikistan, Bosnia, Chechnya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen, according to the State Department. As a result, U.S. officials believe bin Laden's group controls or influences about 3,000 to 5,000 guerrilla fighters or terrorists in a very loose organization around the world.
Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian who was arrested entering the U.S. from Canada in December 1999 with a carful of explosives, has told interrogators that his al-Qaeda curriculum included lessons in sabotage, urban warfare and explosives. He was trained to attack power grids, airports, railroads, hotels and military installations. Visitors to al-Qaeda camps say that students receive instruction not only in using intricate maps of U.S. cities and targeted venues but also in employing scale models of potential sites for strikes. A 180-page al-Qaeda manual offers advice to "sleepers" (agents sent overseas to await missions) on how to be inconspicuous: shave your beard, wear cologne, move to newly developed neighborhoods where residents don't know one another.
Bin Laden's far-flung business dealings have been a tremendous asset to his network. U.S. officials believe he has interests in agricultural companies, banking and investment firms, construction companies and import-export firms around the globe. Says a U.S. official: "This empire is useful for moving people, money, materials, providing cover." Though American authorities did break up two al-Qaeda fund-raising operations in the past year, they have been mostly unsuccessful in finding and freezing bin Laden's assets.
As he built his syndicate, bin Laden also became more open about what he was up to. In 1996 he issued a "Declaration of Jihad." His stated goals were to overthrow the Saudi regime and drive out U.S. forces. He expanded the target with another declaration in early 1998 stating that Muslims should kill Americans, civilians included, wherever they could find them. Later that year, his operatives used car bombs against the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224, mostly Africans. Those blasts provoked a U.S. cruise-missile attack on an al-Qaeda base in Afghanistan that missed bin Laden and only burnished his image as an authentic hero to many Muslims.