The CIA and al-Qaeda

In intelligence it's not so much what you don't know as what you won't know.

Al Qaeda was initially formed in 1988, when the Soviet Union announced the humiliating withdrawal its forces from Afghanistan, whence it had invaded in 1979. The Saudi magnate, Osama bin Laden, and Abdullah Azzam, the charismatic Palestinian co-founder of Hamas, birthed al Qaeda from the Services Bureau (Mektab al-Khidmat) the pair had set up in the mid-1980s to promote the so-called "Arab Afghans"-- Muslims from around the world (but mostly from Arab nations) who flocked to Afghanistan to fight in the jihad.

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