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…
