Portraits of Osama bin Laden

Osama bin Laden could be reading this right now, along with you: Legend has it that he's the most wired terrorist ever, running a holy war via satellite phones and modems from a Batcave deep in the mountains of Afghanistan. " Inside the cave, in rooms hollowed into the rock face, computer screens glow, fax machines whirr, messages are sent via satellite telephone", wrote the Newark Star Ledger on August 21, in a vivid account of the superterrorist's lair. " Western intelligence believes that he e-mailed instructions from here to his supporters on the timing of a 1995 car bombing in Riyadh that killed five Americans". Curiously enough, this man who controls $300 million and kills with the Send button of his e-mail is described as living on " gritty bread", cheese and tea. " A recent visitor found Bin Laden and his entourage sharing a meal of four fried eggs between 12 people", the Ledger reports.

Just one more bizarre portrait feature in the burgeoning, Bond-movie-baddie legend of the superterrorist blamed for the East Africa embassy bombings. The little that we know about the man whose face has in two short weeks become the scariest icon in the American media since Ayatollah Khomeini suggests that Osama bin Laden is a fact-checker's migraine. He was born either in 1956 or 1958 as the 17th of the 52 (or 53) children of Saudi construction magnate Muhammad Awad bin Ladin. His mother (variously reported as either Palestinian or from the conservative Saudi hinterland), is unanimously derided as the billionaire's 10th and least-favored wife (a claim bolstered by the fact that Osama is their only child).

By all accounts a quiet and unremarkable boy, Osama learned the family business in his school holidays and graduated college (either in Riyadh, Jeddah or London) with a degree in business management (or engineering). Most accounts have the teenage Bin Laden becoming fired up with religious fervor while working on restoring the Islamic holy sites at Mecca and Medina. The Washington Post, however, offers an alternative account, in which he leaves high school in 1973 to carouse in the bars and nightclubs of swinging Beirut, happy to trade insults and punches over the attentions of a pretty barmaid or belly dancer until the Lebanese civil war ended the party in 1975.

It is generally agreed, however, that Bin Laden's life-changing experience was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In 1980 the young Saudi went there to fight the infidel invaders, and organized thousands of volunteers to join him from Arab countries — the core of his latter-day international Islamic revolutionary army. Reported to have been in the thick of fierce battlefield action in the mid-'80s, he became a legend in Afghanistan and in the Arab world.

It is also widely speculated that Bin Laden was a major beneficiary of CIA assistance, although these days both parties have good reason to deny any past connection — even in the face of video evidence that Bin Laden's fighters in the '80s were using Stinger missiles supplied to the Afghan resistance by Washington. (Today, those missiles are supposedly carried by the 12 to 100 masked personal bodyguards who accompany Bin Laden on every stroll.)

The defeat of the Soviets left Bin Laden burning to spread Islamic revolution, setting him at odds with the conservative Saudi monarchy. When Saudi Arabia became a staging point for the Gulf War, Bin Laden declared a war to " liberate" Islam's holy lands (Saudi Arabia and Israel) from " Jews and Crusaders" and targeted the Saudi monarchy as allies of the West. That got him ejected from Saudi Arabia, and later Sudan caved in to U.S. demands to do the same, sending Bin Laden back to his camps in Afghanistan and the protection of the Taliban militia.

Bin Laden had been training Islamic fighters from all over the world both for local conflicts — Egypt, Algeria, Chechnya, Tajikistan, Kashmir, Somalia, the Philippines, Bosnia and others — as well as to target the Saudis and the U.S. He was linked with attacks on Saudi-based U.S.

Intelligence analysts suggest his role is more complex than simply that of the guy at the center of an international web giving orders by e-mail. His entrepreneurial skills are held to have created a unique base for funding terrorism without state backing, and he is alleged to have been trying to establish a consensus on strategic direction among disparate but similar Islamic groups, each with its own leadership. To this end he has released fatwas, or decrees, declaring war on the U.S. and Israel and urging Muslims around the world to attack American targets, military and civilian.

The exact nature of his involvement in the East Africa embassy bombings remains to be specified by U.S. authorities. For now, however, we'll have to make do with the image of a mysterious high-tech superterrorist who flies his own private jet to Iran, Switzerland, the Philippines and beyond, controls millions in bank accounts all over the world and yet also supposedly lives in a cave, has three wives (or four, depending on which reports you believe), eats " gritty bread" and splits a fried egg three ways. He's always reported to be modest, shy and reclusive, and yet has in the past two years given exclusive interviews to TIME, CNN, ABC and Britain's Independent newspaper. International man of mystery, consummate Tom Clancy-meets-Harold Robbins-and-gets-Hollywood-salivating bad guy? Perhaps. But one skill that Osama bin Laden appears to have mastered better than most is the ability to persuade major U.S. media outlets that he's giving them an exclusive priority. He is believed to be behind the attack on U.S. personnel at Riyadh (1995) and Dhahran (1996), an assassination attempt on Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak and a string of worldwide terrorist actions that keeps growing along with his fable.