Abdullah Abdullah

Eventually, bin Laden would come out of one of those.

There was a group in a place called, in a city called Peshawar in Pakistan, an organization called Maqtab al-Hidmat, the services organization run by a Palestinian by the name of Abdullah Azzam.

He had three deputies, Osama bin Laden, Ayman Zawahiri and Mohammed Saeed.

And those three guys would each run militant organizations, bin Laden, Al-Qaeda, Egyptian Islamic Jihad was Zawahiri, and Mohammed Saeed eventually would lead the left, the Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistani group.

But out of those groups came bin Laden, the whole concept of having Arabs fight, not just as part of these militant groups, but to have their own group, the army, the base is what it was called.

Yes, because Al Qaeda is... is literally the Arabic word for the base, right? When it's translated.

Gary, you mentioned Abdullah Azzam.

What many people may not realize is that Abdullah Azzam was the Palestinian philosopher who really was responsible for uniting Sunni and Shia, which is the great schism in the Islamic faith between the Sunni and the followers of the Prophet Muhammad, who are the Shiites, right? And one of the things that made Al-Qaeda so powerful as the base was, was trying to unite Sunni and Shia as the Islamic Ummah against everybody else, particularly against the West.

And he is the one who provided them with their initial access.

And then over the next couple of weeks, they journeyed from Sayyaf's lair in Northern Alliance territory through the fastnesses, through the towns and villages of a number of other Northern Alliance officials, which included Bismillah Khan, Abdullah Abdullah, and others, until they reached Hojabawdin, which is right on the Tajik border and where Massoud was living.

at the time.

And despite warnings, despite warning signs that later all of these men who passed them along from one to the other had, they were allowed into the room with Massoud to have a television interview.

He spoke in a very officious kind of way.

He's a difficult person to read.

Abdullah Abdullah, I did not disbelieve when he talked to me, and quite full of regret about the couple of days I think these guys were in his village and he'd handed them on.

I think some of the people along the way were credulous, they weren't focused.