Washington — In a book smuggled out of Afghanistan last month, the man considered second in command of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terrorist network wrote that when faced with military defeat, "the movement must pull out as many personnel as possible to the safety of a shelter," to continue the fight at another time and place.
In what U.S. intelligence officials call his "last will," Ayman al Zawahiri wrote that "if the entire movement, or part of it, faces a situation where the noose is being tightened around it and its collapse is a matter of days or hours," some of its key members must escape. That way, he suggested, those who remain behind can fight to the death without fear that their cause will die with them.
The treatise, filling 100 pages, is perhaps the clearest window yet into the thinking of al-Qaida's leaders as they faced U.S. bombs and Afghan fighters this fall. They appear to have done just what Zawahiri urged, leaving some of their followers to die in caves and forests while others possibly including bin Laden and Zawahiri fled over the mountains into Pakistan.
Zawahiri gave the book to a close aide, who carried it through Pakistan to England, according to Asharq al-Awsat, an Arabic-language newspaper in London that published it in early December. The U.S. government's Foreign Broadcast Information Service recently completed a translation.
Zawahiri's final chapters, which he apparently wrote in a cave near Kandahar during early December, repeat many of the themes bin Laden voiced in a videotape shown last week by the Qatari television station Al Jazeera.
Bin Laden, appearing pale and haggard, called on his followers to continue to attack America no matter what his fate.
In the preface to his book, Zawahiri wrote that he hopes "to spend whatever is left of (his) life in serving the cause of Islam in its ferocious war against the tyrants of the new Crusade," a term that echoed President Bush's first characterization of the war against terrorism.
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