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Growing up in Saudi Arabia near the Red Sea, bin Laden struck those around him as an ordinary young man. But he was more pious than his brothers, and was deeply affected by the involvement of his family's company in rebuilding the holy mosques in Mecca and Medina. Then in 1979, just after he graduated from King Abdul Aziz University, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and mujahedin resistance fighters put out an international plea for help. Bin Laden responded by packing himself and several of his family's bulldozers off to central Asia. He was inspired, he said, by the plight of Muslims in a medieval society besieged by a 20th century superpower. "In our religion, there is a special place in the hereafter for those who participate in jihad," he told TIME. "One day in Afghanistan was like 1,000 days of praying in an ordinary mosque."
At first his work was political. He recruited thousands of Arab fighters in the Gulf, paid for their passage to Afghanistan and set up the main guerrilla camp to train them. Later he designed and constructed defensive tunnels and ditches along the Pakistani border, driving a bulldozer and exposing himself to strafing from Soviet helicopter gunships. Before long, he had taken up a Kalashnikov and was going into battle. In 1986 he and a few dozen Arab defenders fought off a Soviet onslaught in a town called Jaji, not far from the Pakistani border. To Arabs, it was one of the first demonstrations that the Russians could actually be beaten. A year later, bin Laden led an offensive against Soviet troops in the battle of Shaban. Vicious hand-to-hand fighting claimed heavy mujahedin casualties, but his men succeeded in pushing the Soviets out of the area.
"He was a hero to us because he was always on the front line, always moving ahead of everybody else," recalls Hamza Mohammed, a Palestinian volunteer in Afghanistan who now manages one of bin Laden's construction projects in Sudan. "He not only gave his money, but he also gave himself. He came down from his palace to live with the Afghan peasants and the Arab fighters. He cooked with them, ate with them, dug trenches with them. That was bin Laden's way."
Bin Laden returned home to discover that he had become a celebrity. But his star appeal swiftly faded when he began denouncing the Saudi regime. The government had already come under criticism from Muslim activists for its corruption and its failure to adhere strictly to Islamic law. All these failings offended bin Laden. But the real apostasy was King Fahd's decision to allow Western troops into the kingdom during the Gulf War. In bin Laden's view, armed infidels in the holy land were a desecration of Islam. After publicly criticizing the regime and becoming the target of a harassment campaign, he fled to Sudan in 1991. A sizable contingent of "Afghan Arabs"--Arabs from various countries who fought in Afghanistan--followed him and found work with his companies.
Now bin Laden runs his farms and his businesses in Sudan, criticizes the Saudi government from afar, and, he says, gives money for charities. He suggested a second meeting, this time at his small, walled farm on the bank of the Blue Nile south of Khartoum. At the farm, he made a point of claiming that the Egyptians had cited it as a terrorist camp. All that could be seen were a few horses, cows and goats. "Take pictures of whatever you like," bin Laden said with a smile.