Life as the most wanted man on earth has changed him. It has made him clinical and cold. But people who have seen him recently say he has an extraordinary aura. He didn't have it the only time I came across him. It was in July 1989, close to his present base in Jalalabad.
Then he was just another rich Saudi, come to fight the infidel. I was filming a Mujahedin group firing mortars at the city when bin Laden leapt on to a wall, magnificently bearded and white-robed, and urged the Mujahedin to kill my colleagues and me. When the Mujahedin voted, on balance, not to kill us, he offered a nearby lorry driver $500 to run me over: disturbingly little, I felt. The driver turned him down too, and bin Laden went off and lay on a bed, weeping with frustration.
