Journalist Peter Bergen, who met the al-Qaida leader in 1997, says that a series of events kept pushing bin Laden "further and further down the path of radicalization."
"[Bin Laden] could have chosen a different path at several points in his life," Bergen says. "But the introduction of American troops into Saudi Arabia [in 1992] turned his sort of latent anti-Americanism into a passionate hatred of the United States."
Bergen says bin Laden thought the Sept. 11 attacks, which he is credited with masterminding, would result in the U.S. withdrawing troops from Saudi Arabia and other places in the Middle East. "That, of course, was a delusion," he adds. "It didn't work."
Bin Laden was killed in 2011 when U.S. Navy SEALs raided his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Bergen's new book, The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden, draws on materials recovered from the compound as well as on interviews with a dozen people in bin Laden's inner circle.
Bergen says some of the items recovered in the 2011 raid were particularly surprising: "When I visited the compound, I actually saw what was in his bedroom, the bedroom in which he was killed," Bergen says. "I saw in his toilet area Just for Men hair dye. ... He wanted to look younger. When bin Laden died, he was 54, but he certainly looked a lot older in reality. So he was using Just for Men hair dye."
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