Lawrence Wright, author of The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, couldn't have imagined one of the other characters in his book was going to be at the centre of a huge political and diplomatic controversy, no less than the book’s central character, namely Osama Bin Laden.

The book was adapted for television as a series with the same title and tells the story of Al-Qaeda’s infamous attacks on New York and Washington. In one paragraph, Wright mentions a close friend of Bin Laden's who shared the latter’s ambition to “establish an Islamic state anywhere.” That friend was Jamal Khashoggi. Both Bin Laden and Khashoggi were at the time active members of the Muslim Brotherhood and later Bin Laden would split from the Brotherhood to form with Abdullah Azzam Al-Qaeda, the most dangerous organisation in the world. Khashoggi, Bin Laden, and Azzam, were all the merry companions of the same extremist group.

On page 78 of his book, Wright quoted Khashoggi as saying that he and Bin Laden believed that “the first one [Islamic state] would lead to another, and that would have a domino effect which could reverse the history of mankind.” The noun phrase looming tower in the book’s title was taken from Surah An-Nisa in the Holy Quran and clearly refers to the attack on the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York.

Today, the world is busy keeping up with the news of the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi, journalist and Human Rights activist in Saudi Arabia, but very few know the man’s past and his affiliation with Al-Qaeda during the war in Afghanistan. He promoted Saudi Mujahedeen focusing on his friendship with Bin Laden.

On May 4, 1988, the Saudi daily Arab News published a report by Jamal Khashoggi about his tour in Afghanistan in the company of Al-Qaeda operatives. Even though Khashoggi was just a journalist doing a report, the photos published with the article show him wearing Afghani garb and shouldering a RBG rocket launcher.