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? (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.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

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 known with certainty. He was born into one of Saudi Arabia's wealthiest families sometime in the mid-1950s. He is one of the youngest of more than 50 children. His father, who emigrated from Yemen in 1931, built a vast construction empire. He died in 1968, leaving the young Osama a $300 million inheritance.

"The story of bin Laden makes a very good Hollywood movie," says Azzam Tamimi, director of the Institute of Islamic Political Thought, in London. "He's a very simple person; he has a grudge against America."

Bin Laden didn't always hate America. He grew up within the elite power circles of the American-backed Saudi royal family. In 1979, he graduated from King Abdul Aziz University in the Saudi Arabian port town of Jidda with a degree in civil engineering.

Many experts say bin Laden expressed little interest in politics until that year. But three key events shook the Islamic world in 1979 and seem to have planted the seeds of his militancy: Egypt, defying the rest of the Arab world, signed a peace treaty with Israel; Islamic fundamentalists overthrew the pro-Western sovereign of Iran; and Soviet tanks roiled into Afghanistan, beginning a decade-long battle.

"I was enraged," he told an Arabic newspaper. Like many young men across the Muslim world, bin Laden went immediately to Afghanistan and joined the resistance movement fighting to expel the Soviet Union's troops. There, bin Laden fell in with a radical faction of the Islamic resistance fighters known as mujahideen (meaning "holy warriors"); his wealth earned him quick popularity.

"What he had was a lot of money," says Abdullah Anas, an Algerian who fought alongside bin Laden in Afghanistan in the late 1980s. "He's not very sophisticated, politically or organizationally. But he's an activist with great imagination. He ate very little. He slept very little. Very generous. He'd give you his clothes. He's give you his money."

Bin Laden and his fellow resistance fighters received military and financial support from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, which viewed the mujahideen as allies against the Soviet Union, America's longtime Cold War adversary. In 1989, the mujahideen succeeded in forcing the Soviets to withdraw from Afghanistan.

After the war, bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia to work in the family construction business. But in 1990, his world turned upside down. When Iraq invaded the tiny Persian Gulf nation of Kuwait, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia invited America and its allies to post troops in his oil-producing kingdom to help defend the country. Bin Laden was furious, seeing the presence of American soldiers in Saudi Arabia--the birthplace of Mohammed, Islam's founder and prophet, and the home of the two holiest Muslim shrines--as a huge offense to Islam.

In 1991, Saudi Arabia expelled bin Laden for anti-government activities. He took refuge first in Sudan, which is ruled by a militant Islamic government. In 1996, he was forced out by the Sudanese under American pressure and returned to Afghanistan, where the radical Taliban had taken control.

The Taliban allowed bin Laden to set up training camps that have become magnets for radicals from all over the Muslim world. From these camps, bin Laden created a kind of clearinghouse for Islamic terrorism called Al Qaeda (Arabic for "the base"). U.S. officials say Al Qaeda not only conducts its own operations, but also trains other militants in the use of small arms and explosives, and the logistics of organizing terrorist attacks.

Bin Laden has long been clear about his mission: "To kill Americans and their allies, both civil and military, is an individual duty of every Muslim who is able in any country where this is possible," he pronounced in 1998.

TO JUSTIFY THIS VIOLENCE, BIN LADEN AND his supporters use centuries-old interpretations of the Muslim holy book, the Koran. Their vision is on the religion's farthest extremes. But their operations are thoroughly modern: encrypted e-mail, bomb-making recipes stored on CD-ROMs, cell phones, and satellite communications.

While attention turned quickly to bin Laden in the days following last month's attacks, some experts warn that he may not be responsible--or at least, not solely responsible. "Islamic fundamentalism is a political phenomenon that involves many more people than just Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda group," says Frank Griffel, a professor of Islamic Studies at Yale University. Griffel says the American government's early refusal to reveal its evidence against bin Laden made him skeptical. "Where is the evidence? If America is going to war against a declared enemy, we should know why he's our enemy."

RELATED ARTICLE: Focus: perceived assaults on Islam turn playboy Osama bin Laden into terrorist.

TEACHING OBJECTIVES

To help students understand the motivation that drove Saudi-born Osama bin Laden to become the most notorious terrorist in the world.

Discussion Questions:

* Should the U.S. pursue Osama bin Laden if that means that innocent people may be killed or wounded in the process?

* Should the U.S. pull its troops out of Saudi Arabia to appease fundamentalist Muslims?

* What in this article most surprised or disturbed you?

CLASSROOM STRATEGIES

Background: Direct students' attention to the three events that helped transform Osama bin Laden from an apolitical playboy into a radicalized terrorist.

* Egypt-Israel peace treaty. Tell students that more than 30 years of hostility and outright war had marked relations between Israel and the Arab world at that point.

* Fundamentalist overthrow of the Shah of Iran. Tell students that the U.S. restored the sovereign to power in 1953 after he had been overthrown. His secret police, Savak, quashed fundamentalist Muslims in a state that was pro-Western and secular.

* Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Tell students that the fundamentalist mujahideen argued passionately that they were on the front lines in the fight against atheism.

Discussion: Ask students how each of these events could have transformed bin Laden into the extreme fundamentalist he has become. Did the peace treaty and the Soviet invasion lead him to consider that his world was collapsing? Did the fundamentalist uprising in Iran lead him to consider that fundamentalist Islam had an opportunity to overcome Western "evil"?

Discuss U.S. support for Afghanistan's mujahideen during the Soviet occupation of that country in the 1980s. Should the U.S. always support the enemy of our enemy? What factors should American leaders consider before they give money, weapons, and training to one side or the other in a military conflict? Should potential recipients of aid demonstrate that they are democratic, or is that a hopeless ideal?

With reporting by JUDITH MILLER of The New York Times.