What Peter Arnett asked Osama bin Laden

By Peter Bergen, CNN

(CNN) — It was a bitterly cold night in March 1997 in a mud hut high in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan and we were surrounded by well-armed al-Qaeda fighters.

Peter Arnett asked their leader a simple question: “What are your future plans?”

Osama bin Laden replied, “You’ll see them and hear about them in the media, God willing,”

It was bin Laden’s first TV interview, and he and his team had chosen Arnett and CNN to conduct it, an interview I produced.

In the following year, bin Laden made good on his chilling threat with al-Qaeda’s near-simultaneous attacks on two US embassies in Africa that killed more than 200 people. In 2000, his men bombed the USS Cole in Yemen, killing 17 American sailors. Then, of course, there were the 9/11 attacks which killed almost 3,000 people and resulted in a “Global War on Terror.”

I first got to know Arnett, who died on Wednesday, in 1993. He was then one of the world’s most famous people and certainly its most well-known foreign correspondent. It was only two years after the first Gulf War and Arnett’s brave decision to remain in Baghdad after other Western reporters left, while American bombs were raining down on Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, transformed CNN’s standing among viewers around the world. And it turned Arnett into a global celebrity.

You often heard Arnett before you saw him coming; a stocky man with a booming New Zealand-accented voice that could cut thorough glass. And then you saw the man himself: Larger than life does not do him justice; Arnett was a newsman’s newsman, full of tales of derring-do in Vietnam and many other wars around the globe.

I was thirty when I first met Arnett and I’d never been to a war zone. And soon, we were flying into Afghanistan in the middle of the civil war there. Kabul, the capital, was in ruins resembling Dresden after World War II; various warlords were fighting block to block. Child soldiers were a common sight. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the Afghan prime minister, had the distinction of likely being the only prime minister in history to shell his own capital on a daily basis.

Arnett interviewed all the major players in the civil war for CNN including Hekmatyar, Hekmatyar’s main opponent Ahmad Shah Massoud — who would be assassinated by al-Qaeda two days before 9/11 — and Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani who was killed by the Taliban in 2011.

During the Afghan civil war, shells were dropping constantly on Kabul and various ethnic and sectarian militias were battling each other in continuous firefights, yet Arnett seemed completely content. He wanted to be where the action was and Afghanistan in 1993 had action aplenty.

One piece of advice Arnett gave me then has stayed with me: “Never do anything for fun in a war zone,” which struck me as wise counsel.

We were in Afghanistan because we were tracking the bombers of World Trade Center in 1993, a group of men – some of whom had fought in Afghanistan against the Soviets in the 1980s or had supported that effort – who had parked a van packed with explosives in the basement aiming to bring down the Twin Towers. They failed to do so but six people were killed.

In 1997, I spent weeks negotiating with a group of bin Laden associates living in London to try and secure an interview with the al-Qaeda leader. We believed that bin Laden might have had a role in the 1993 Trade Center bombing. (We didn’t know it then, but Ramzi Yousef who masterminded the 1993 bombing, was the nephew of Khalid Shiekh Mohammed, al-Qaeda’s operational commander of the 9/11 attacks.)

Other networks were also pursuing an interview, including the BBC, and CBS “60 Minutes”. I believe that Arnett’s reputation for fairness in covering the Gulf War was crucial in CNN securing the interview.

Back on the Afghan mountaintop, Arnett asked bin Laden why he was declaring a jihad, holy war, against the United States.

Bin Laden gave a long answer critiquing American support for Israel and US allies in the Middle East such as Saudi Arabia.

This reply undercut President George W. Bush’s frequent later claims after 9/11 that the United States was attacked because of its “freedoms.”

In his CNN interview four years before 9/11, bin Laden said his rationale for jihad against the United States was American foreign policy in the Middle East.

It was a privilege to spend many weeks in Afghanistan with Arnett in 1993 and then again four year later producing the first TV interview with bin Laden.

Arnett was a man who fear seemed to have no hold over. And I’ve never done anything for fun in an active war zone since.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2025 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.