Experts are almost unanimous in saying that bin Laden is a creature of a US foreign policy which recklessly fed and nurtured him and his Islamic warriors with million of dollars worth of money and arms to fight the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan. The money was funnelled largely through Pakistan's maverick Inter-Services Intelligence. Even at that time, Bin Laden and his holy warriors had made it clear that the US was as much anathema to them as the communists.

The CIA is now trying to destroy the same camps it helped set up, Robert Fisk, a British writer who covered the region and who met bin Laden at his camp recently said on Friday in an interview on National Public Radio. Fisk said Bin Laden did not appear to be such a fearsome international terrorist that the US was making him out to be. On the contrary, he was isolated, lonely, virtually unlistened to, and was constantly trying to know what was happening in other parts of the world.

US officials have made Bin Laden out to be a terrorist mastermind operating out of a high-tech cave filled with satellite phones and other gizmos overseeing a worldwide network of extremist organisations. Bin Laden is said to be around 43 years old. Born in Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, he is the youngest son of Mohammed bin Laden, a wealthy Saudi who founded the Bin Laden Group, a construction firm that thrived on Saudi government contracts. Osama Bin Laden is said to have inherited some $ 300 million from his father. In his mid-20s he left Saudi Arabia for Afghanistan to fight in the so-called Jihad against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan. Several accounts have it that he was cultivated by the CIA, which helped him set up camps in and around Khost, the same town now bombed by US forces.

After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia to work in his father's construction business. But he soon began to oppose the Saudi royal family, especially after the Gulf War when US troops landed in Saudi Arabia and remained there. He launched a local movement to force US troops out of the country, railing against the defilement of the Muslim holy places of Mecca and Medina.

But he was thrown out of the country by the rulers and was virtually disowned by his family. He relocated to Sudan in 1991 and resumed his construction operations there. Sudanese officials said they expelled him in 1996 under US pressure after Washington suspected him to be indulging in terrorist activities.

US officials think he and his followers were involved in the bombing of US training facility in Riyadh in 1995 which killed seven people (including two Indians) and the Khobar Towers bombing in 1996 which killed 19 US servicemen.

Bin Laden relocated to Afghanistan in 1996 and has been on the US terrorism watchlist since. Earlier this year, the US ambassador to UN Bill Richardson contacted the Afghan Taliban rulers to ask for bin Laden but was reportedly turned down. In several interviews this year, bin Laden openly issued threats to the US, calling for a holy war to evict the infidels from Saudi Arabia. In February this year, he is said to have issued a fatwaurging holy Islamic warriors to kill Americans everywhere, whether military or civilian. In June this year, he is said to have presided over a conclave of extremist leaders from across the world in Peshawar under the umbrella of the Islamic Front, which endorsed the fatwaand decided upon an undisclosed course of action.

American intelligence agencies tracked all these movements closely and issued a heightened alert warning to its US personnel and establishments in South Asia and the Middle East. But bin Laden, they now say, struck in East Africa.