traveling between Afghanistan and Peshawar, which remained active after 2001, according to Rahimullah Yusufzai. It was during this time that Bin Laden met his future al-Qaeda collaborator, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, a member and later head of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Alleged CIA involvement Whether Osama bin Laden and his group are "blowback" from CIA's Operation Cyclone to help the Afghan mujahideen is a matter of some debate. Robin Cook, UK Foreign Secretary from 1997 to 2001 and Leader of the House of Commons from 2001-2003, has written that bin Laden was, "a product of a monumental miscalculation by western security agencies" and that the mujahideen that formed Al-Qaeda were "originally ... recruited and trained with help from the CIA". However, CNN journalist Peter Bergen, known for conducting the first television interview with Osama bin Laden in 1997, calls the idea "that the CIA funded bin Laden or trained bin Laden ... a folk myth. There's no evidence of this. ... Bin Laden had his own money, he was anti-American and he was operating secretly and independently. ... The real story here is the CIA didn't really have a clue about who this guy was until 1996 when they set up a unit to really start tracking him." Break with Azzam Osama bin Laden was recruited to be part of Azzam's Maktab al-Khidamat (Services Bureau), the support network of Arab fighters in Pakistan that was helping resist the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. For a while, bin Laden worked at the Services Bureau working with Abdullah Azzam on Jihad Magazine, a magazine that gave information about the war with the Soviets and interviewed mujahideen. Although bin Laden and the other Afghan Arabs were considered a minor "sideshow" in the war, bin Laden did establish a camp in Afghanistan and, with other volunteers, fought the Soviets and Marxist Afghan troops. One of his most significant battles was the battle of Jaji, which was not a major fight, but it earned him a reputation as a fighter. As time passed, Ayman al-Zawahiri encouraged bin Laden to split away from Abdullah Azzam. This stemmed from al-Zawahiri's differences with Azzam such as their conflicting interpretations of the jihad. Some believe that al-Zawahiri's motive was driven by his desire to exploit bin Laden's finances as well as the ambition to control the fractured Egyptian jihadist movement and so al-Zawahiri favored an aggressive view. On the other hand,