On August 20, 1988, in one of the first meetings of al Qaeda, “The founders divided the military work, as they termed it, into two parts: ‘limited duration,’ in which the Arabs would be trained and placed with Afghan mujahideen for the remainder of the war [against the invading Soviets]; and ‘open duration,’ in which ‘they enter a testing camp and the best brothers of them are chosen.’ The graduates of this second camp would become members of the new entity, al-Qaeda.”
– Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower, Pages 152-153