America's most wanted: the man who declared it "the duty" of Muslims everywhere to kill Americans, Osama bin Laden is the leading suspect in the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history. Who is this Saudi Arabian millionaire? What events led him to become such an extremist? And why does he harbor such an intense hatred of the United States?

• Author: Smith, Patricia
• Position: International

HIS BACKGROUND IS HARDLY WHAT YOU'D expect for the leader of an international terrorist ring: a childhood full of servants and personal tutors, palatial homes and luxury cars. His teenage years were marked by nights of heavy drinking that sometimes finished with bar brawls in the famous nightclubs of Beirut--in those days, a playground for much of the Arab world.

But from what Western intelligence has pieced together, little about Osama bin Laden is what you might expect.

This millionaire son of a Saudi Arabian construction mogul transformed himself from a spoiled Arab playboy into the leader of a self-declared Islamic "holy war" against the United States and its allies.

The feared guerrilla has been at the top of the FBI Most Wanted list since 1999, when an American grand jury indicted him for masterminding terrorist attacks on American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Investigators suspect bin Laden was also involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1996 bombing of an American military housing complex in Sandi Arabia, and the 2000 assault on the U.S. Navy destroyer Cole. In the days following the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon outside Washington, D.C., attention once again focused on bin Laden as the government's prime suspect.

For five years, bin Laden has found shelter in the remote mountains of Afghanistan, a central Asian country (see map, page 22) ruled by Islamic extremists who call themselves the Taliban (the word is derived from the Arabic for "student"--in this case, students at Islamic religious schools). With the Taliban's protection, American officials believe, bin Laden operated about a dozen camps that trained as many as 5,000 militants who formed small, independent terrorist "cells" in 50 countries.

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A slender man with a scraggly beard, bin Laden carries a Kalashnikov rifle and a hatred of the United States that in some ways echoes the resentment toward America that simmers in much of the Islamic world (see "Why Do They Hate America?" page 10).

"Osama bin Laden is a person, but as an idea, he's larger than that," says Jon B. Alterman, an expert on terrorism and the Middle East at the United States Institute of Peace, in Washington. "He represents many people's unhappiness with the status quo, the resentment that people feel. He represents somebody who has taken force into his own hands to redress grievance."

Few things about bin Laden are...