The core was a bureaucracy. Bin Laden led from the top as emir, consulted with an advisery council, and directed the group. Beneath him were committees in charge of religious authorization, military affairs, finance, the group’s security, and propaganda. From here, bin Laden exerted command and control and distributed resources. Still building its brand, Al Qaeda needed its attacks to be spectacular and successful. Through what an Al Qaeda defector called “centralization of decision and decentralization of execution,” the leadership selected targets and approved proposals that came from below. The bulk of the planning, equipping, and execution was delegated to the local parts of the network, which received guidance and funds as necessary from the professionals in the top-level Military Affairs Committee.
As they planned and executed the attacks, local cells adopted a more traditional terrorist “blind” cell model, whereby the links among its members were limited. Single intermediaries—cutouts—connected different clusters, so arresting one or a number of members only made a limited dent in the organization. If a detainee could resist questioning long enough, the people he knew could scramble and reposition, maintaining the integrity of the cell. The night before the attack on the embassy in Nairobi in 1998, all members of Al Qaeda left East Africa except those preparing to kill themselves in the trucks and those staying to clean their tracks.
The auxiliary support for the group included the networks that funneled donations from sympathetic patrons in the Gulf, in Europe, and elsewhere. Al Qaeda had unofficial partnerships with at least twenty other groups, some of which bin Laden attempted to bring under his control.
Attraction to the brand during the late 1990s was most noticeable in the robust training camps Al Qaeda established, primarily in Afghanistan. These camps trained and indoctrinated between ten thousand and twenty thousand (estimates ranged as high as seventy thousand) young Muslim men in the way of modern jihad. Some of those trainees came from hard, poor lives. Many were well-to-do men who had science and engineering degrees but had never fired a gun. Al Qaeda adopted the pedagogy of bin Laden’s influential high-school gym teacher, who had mixed Koranic study with soccer—running violent, macho physical training alongside indoctrination classes that fed a narrow but potent ideology.
To spur innovation, the leadership invited attendees to brainstorm and share their own macabre ideas about how to kill a lot of Americans and Jews. At the same time, the organization enforced some strict tenets of its own. For example, it ensured that suicide bombing became an Al Qaeda trademark by belaboring the prestige of such “martyrdom operations.”
Like a spinneret, these camps spit out the threads that would compose the web of the growing network. While a small portion of these trainees remained in the core—staying to fight the Northern Alliance or graduating to advanced training—the camps ensured that the organization had supporters and agents of varying commitment worldwide. As the men returned to their corners of the world, including western Europe, they did so with strong links to fellow jihadists. At times, those global relationships crossed social strata or cultural divides they wouldn’t have crossed before the camps. Even as these men dispersed, they did so bonded by a shared consciousness. They saw the same “problem” and endorsed the same strategy for redress: to restore Muslim pride and dignity by demonstrating moral and political strength, largely through violence. By 1999, their increasingly thick network stretched across sixty countries.
Those durable relationships made the movement difficult to target, as its dynamics were often known only to the people who shared those bonds. We tried to think of it less as an organization easily defined by a hierarchical chart and talked instead of associations and a network of relationships: Who communicated with whom? Who was married to whose sister or daughter? Who, ultimately, influenced whom?
September 11 represented the high-water mark of Al Qaeda’s triumph. Even a dedicated enemy of Osama bin Laden could acknowledge the impressive operational feat of simultaneously hijacking four airliners and crashing three into different buildings. The attacks also established Al Qaeda as a brand. Thenceforth, no group was more recognizable as the credible, effective Islamic resistance to America. Its appeal swelled beyond the confines of the jihadist community. But the swift response by the United States quickly forced the organization to adapt.