US and Pakistani intelligence funded and trained bin Laden’s mujahideen network

Evidence

In a 1985 speech, Reagan described the mujahideen as “freedom fighters.” With the help of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence, the Reagan administration armed and trained the mujahideen from Afghanistan and elsewhere. He justified such support through the 1980s by stating that the mujahideen are “our brothers,” and “we owe them our help.” One such brother was the Saudi billionaire Osama bin Laden, whose family had benefited from Saudi state contracts and US funding. Bin Laden became interested in Afghanistan after the Soviet Union invaded the country in 1979. He had contacts with Afghan mujahideen leaders and moved to the country in 1982. Working with his former teacher Abdullah Azzam, he brought in and trained thousands of volunteers. By the mid-1980s he had established several camps of his own and in 1988 he created a database of the volunteers who passed through his camp; the file was named al-Qaeda. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 396

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• QUESTION: How much direct contact did US intelligence actually have with bin Laden personally, versus just his network? Worth chasing the primary-source trail on whether he met CIA agents directly.

Related

• The US trained the mujahideen from which al-Qaeda later emerged (similarity 0.87)
• CIA-trained Afghan militants constituted direct blowback against US empire (similarity 0.82)
• Al-Qaeda’s name originated as bin Laden’s 1988 database of camp volunteers (similarity 0.82)
• US support for the mujahideen inadvertently seeded the creation of al-Qaeda (similarity 0.80)