Did the CIA create bin Laden?

From 1981 to 1991 the United States covertly spent about $3 billion arming the Afghan mujahedin, according to the Congressional Research Service, “particularly the Islamic fundamentalist Afghan factions.” The weapons went through Pakistan’s military intelligence service, which trained the rebels and handed out the arms. [1][2]

Saudi Arabia matched and added to that money. Bin Laden, the seventeenth of 57 children of a Saudi construction magnate, became known in that war less as a fighter than as a man with access to his family’s fortune. With the cleric Abdullah Azzam he built a “Bureau of Services” that funneled Arab volunteers into Afghanistan, funded by Gulf donors in a network investigators later called the “Golden Chain.” [2]

The 9/11 Commission put it plainly: bin Laden and his comrades “had their own sources of support and training, and they received little or no assistance from the United States.” [1]

The journalist Steve Coll, whose history of the CIA in Afghanistan won a Pulitzer Prize, wrote that CIA archives “contain no record of any direct contact between a CIA officer and bin Laden during the 1980s,” adding that if there was contact and a cover-up, the agency “has so far done an excellent job.” Peter Bergen, who interviewed bin Laden in 1997, told FactCheck.org there is no evidence the CIA “funded or armed bin Laden or even knew who he was until 1993.” [2]

The CIA’s own statement is flat: it “never employed, paid, or maintained any relationship whatsoever” with bin Laden. Milton Bearden, who ran the agency’s Afghan program in the late 1980s, said the CIA did not need to recruit Arabs, because there were hundreds of thousands of Afghans willing to fight, and the Afghans found the Arab volunteers “very disruptive.” [3]

That is a denial from the people accused, and readers can weigh it that way. But no document, witness or paper trail has surfaced in more than 30 years to contradict it.

The claim survives because it compresses a real history into one sentence. America did fund a holy war against the Soviets, the war did produce the men who formed al Qaeda, and Pakistan, whose intelligence service handled the money, went on to hold real influence over the Taliban, the regime that later sheltered bin Laden. U.S. officials pressed Pakistan to use that influence before 9/11. See the Pakistan file. [2][3]

When Senator Rand Paul said in 2013 that “the war caucus in Congress armed bin Laden,” FactCheck.org asked his office for evidence and got no reply. [1] The fair version is this: U.S. policy helped build the battlefield on which bin Laden rose. It did not hand him the weapons.