If Al-Qaeda Is Myspace, ISIS Is Facebook

On Nov. 1, 1996, through an office he maintained in London, Osama bin Laden bought an Inmarsat Mini-M satellite telephone, one of the first global telephones. It looked like a laptop and retailed for about $15,000. Associates ferried it to Kandahar, where bin Laden had recently taken shelter with the Taliban. During the next two years he made more than 900 satellite calls to Britain, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the U.S., Yemen, and even a ship sailing in the Indian Ocean. By satellite phone, bin Laden organized suicide truck bombings on U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in the summer of 1998, attacks that killed more than 200 people and announced al-Qaeda as the modern world’s deadliest practitioner of cross-border terrorism.