By JAMES GORDON MEEK, New York Daily NewsWASHINGTON - Osama bin Laden talks tough, but other mujahedeen laughed at him in Afghanistan because he would get scared and bolt when under fire, a new documentary claims.
"When bin Laden used to hear the explosions, he used to jump. He used to run away," his longtime friend Hutaifa Azzam says on "CNN Presents: In the Footsteps of Bin Laden."
"I still remember that me, and my elder and younger brothers, we used to laugh," says Azzam, the son of Abdullah Azzam, bin Laden's mentor in radical Islam.
Abdullah Azzam and bin Laden jointly created a mujahedeen support organization that later became al-Qaida. Azzam was assassinated in 1989, with Hutaifa's two brothers, in a bombing tied to Egyptians close to bin Laden.
Hutaifa's CNN interview - as well as interviews of others who had known bin Laden from childhood to when he made the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list - was his first with a Western broadcaster. The documentary, airing Aug. 23, is based on CNN terrorism expert Peter Bergen's book, "The Osama bin Laden I Know."
Bin Laden's friends describe a man who shed the materialism of a millionaire to become a survivalist. He readied himself for a life of jihad by idolizing gunfighters from old television shows and kung fu star Bruce Lee. "We would watch cowboy movies, karate movies . . . action movies," remembers Khaled Batarfi, schoolmate and soccer pal.
To toughen themselves, bin Laden and his pals galloped across the sands of Arabia without food or shelter. "We had our dates with us in our pockets and water - that's it. We sleep on the sand," says Jamal Khalifa, whose sister was bin Laden's first wife.
Though heir to a billion-dollar construction firm, bin Laden slept on the floor and shunned air conditioning and cold water, Bergen says on the program.
But not everyone in bin Laden's family liked life on the run after he declared war on the United States. Bergen says bin Laden's son Omar, in his mid-20s, was so upset by the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001 that he left Afghanistan and moved home to Saudi Arabia. "[Omar] basically said to his father, "These attacks were dumb, they were stupid. Now we've got this 800-pound gorilla after us,' " Bergen says. "He washed his hands of his father."
Speaking to the Daily News this week from Kabul, Bergen said bin Laden "overreached on 9/11 and now surrounds himself with yes-men and believes his own propaganda that the U.S. is weak. . . . Unfortunately, he's still perhaps the most important leader in the Arab world."