ARAB-US RELATIONS - Feb. 13 - Bin Laden's Complex Image.

In a heavily guarded federal courtroom in New York, Osama Bin Laden's former aide Jamal Ahmad Fadl paints a portrait of the Saudi fugitive as an organisation man beset with responsibilities ranging from real-estate management to medical imbursements. Running his militant group Al Qaida demands a broad range of skills befitting top executives of major corporations. There are personnel files to maintain, with false names to keep sorted; diverse subsidiary businesses to run in half a dozen countries; guest houses and farms to oversee; training exercises to organise and conduct; payrolls to meet; squabbles to settle, and hard feelings to deal with over pay and benefits. Fadl testifies that it was a dispute over his own salary and festering envy over the higher pay to Egyptian terrorists that prompted him a siphon $100,000 from the organisation's accounts for personal investments - a transgression that led to a harsh rebuke from Bin Laden and that drove Fadl into an interrogation room with US intelligence agents. Those sessions have provided Western counterterrorist agents with a wealth of inside information that only now is being disclosed in the trial of four men accused in the 1998 bombings of two US embassies in Africa. Those blasts in Kenya and Tanzania killed 224 people and wounded 4,500.

Fadl testified last week in the trial of four men charged with participating in a global terrorist conspiracy that prosecutors say was led by Bin Laden and included the embassy bombings. Fadl told the jury of six men and six women about Al Qaida's headquarters in Khartoum. He said Bin Laden moved his operation to Khartoum at the end of 1990 after years of operating out of Afghanistan during its war against Soviet occupation. Al Qaida opened offices on McNimr Street in Khartoum, complete with a receptionist's area just inside the front door. Visitors were required to present an identification card to a secretary and wait until appointments were confirmed. Inside the headquarters, other secretaries toiled in a centre hall-way with offices on either side. Bin Laden moved into the first office on the left. Bin Laden mostly spent time on a three-story guest house that the group owned. "He liked to sit in the front yard and talk about jihad and about Islam and about Al Qaida in general".

In the offices on McNimr Street, members of the group were busy overseeing businesses the group purchased. These included several farms (also used for explosives and weapons training), an import-export company and an investment company that sold produce and changed Sudanese currency into pounds or dollars. In addition to their salaries, group members received fringe benefits. Each month, bonuses in the form of sugar, tea, vegetable oil and other "stuff" were distributed "just to help them... Sometimes they busy. They can't go shopping, and also because in Sudan sometimes hard to find sugar any time or oil and some stuff... If somebody, the Al Qaida member, he go to doctor or he buys his medicine and he brings a receipt, we pay him the money". Sometimes bosses handed out cash bonuses. After participating in negotiations to buy uranium in Khartoum, Fadl said he received $10,000 from the organisation for a job well done. He told the court he did not know whether the deal had been consummated. Salaries varied, a subject of contention. Fadl, born in Sudan in 1963, was paid $500 a month. He said he once went to Bin Laden and complained.

"Some people, they get a little and they want to know if we all Al Qaida membership; why somebody got more than others. I tell him the people complain about that, and myself, too". Bin Laden replied that some members travelled a lot and were citizens of other countries where they lived and that he tried to make them happy with higher salaries. The organisation chart of Al Qaida was simple. Several committees reported to a Shura Council of leaders. These included a military committee that conducted training and brought weapons; the money and business committee that ran Al Qaida's companies; the fatwa and Islamic study committee and a media committee that published a weekly newspaper about Islam and jihad. Fadl said that Al Qaida had relations with a number of other terrorist organisations, including groups in southern Lebanon, Egypt, Algeria, Libya, Yemen, Syria, the Philippines, Ethiopia and the breakaway Russian republic of Chechnya. It also maintained bank accounts in England, Malaysia, Sudan, Hong Kong and other parts of the world, as well as guest houses in a number of countries where members stayed. Al Qaida dealt largely in cash, used to by farms and guest houses as well as to pay travel expenses for missions. Fadl said he once delivered $100,000 in US hundred-dollar bills to an associate of Bin Laden's in Jordan. He said he had put the money in his bag with his clothes and the associate had arranged for Jordanian customs officials at the airport not to examine the bag.