The Bin Ladens - читать онлайн бесплатно полную версию книги . Страница 7

PART THREETHE GLOBAL FAMILYJune 1988 to September 2001

24. WRITER-DIRECTOR-PRODUCER

THE NEWS ARRIVED in Saudi Arabia in the nighttime. King Fahd called Bakr to offer his formal condolences. Some of Salem’s friends and relatives had forecasted his death in an airplane crash, but as Mohamed Ashmawi put it, few of them imagined that he would die in a “Mickey Mouse plane.” The Bin Ladens, a second person close to them observed, had a way of experiencing such events with particular acuteness, as if they were succumbing to a collective illness. They felt Salem’s death as an overwhelming “family tragedy,” recalled Abdullah, one of his youngest half-brothers. There was also a pervasive confusion about how such an accident could have happened. Was suicide a possibility? Had he suffered an incapacitating heart attack or stroke while airborne? Had someone drugged or killed him? Conspiracy theories were commonplace in Saudi Arabia, where free discourse was forbidden and history was a narrative punctuated by genuine hidden conspiracies. Even if one presumed an accidental cause, Salem’s death marked the second time in two decades that the Bin Laden family had been decapitated by an aviation disaster with an American connection.¹

After telephone calls between Texas, Jeddah, Riyadh, and the Saudi embassy in Washington, Khalid Bin Mahfouz dispatched his private 707 to San Antonio to retrieve his friend’s body. The Bexar County Medical Examiner had taken possession of Salem’s corpse after his death; the office was required to perform an autopsy in a case of this type. Tareq and other family members pleaded with their San Antonio friends to call in local favors to minimize the autopsy’s visible effects. Once Salem’s body was returned to Saudi Arabia, it would be washed, in Islamic tradition, in the presence of Bin Laden brothers and male friends. Gerald Auerbach and Jack Hinson contacted a mortician they knew in San Antonio; he agreed to pick up Salem from the medical examiner and prepare him cosmetically for his journey home.

Family members called Salem’s friends and relatives in Europe to say that if they wished to attend the burial and mourning services, they could converge on Geneva, where the Bin Mahfouz plane would make a stopover. When the 707 lumbered into the airport’s private aviation terminal above Lake Geneva, Yeslam was waiting, along with Shafiq, another half-brother who spent most of his time in Europe. Baby Elephant and several of Salem’s other friends and relatives were there, too.²

Yeslam found himself gripped by paralyzing anxiety; he became so concerned about the prospect of flying with Salem’s coffin that he was unable to walk up the jet’s stairs. His siblings tried to comfort him, but he was stricken. When the plane finally rolled away, Yeslam remained behind.³

Ali, Salem’s estranged former rival for family leadership, and once a favorite of their father, flew to Saudi Arabia on his own private jet to pay his respects. From Jeddah, a group of relatives and friends drove to Medina to await the arrival of Salem’s body. A burial permit for Medina, where the Prophet Mohamed had also been laid to rest, required royal approval, which Fahd’s office readily provided. The group waiting at Medina’s VIP terminal called up to the air traffic control tower for word about the 707’s arrival time, just as they had always done when Salem’s private flights were due. They went outside to watch the landing. Salem often kept his friends waiting for hours, and when his jet would finally appear on the horizon, he often teased them with a touch-and-go—he descended until his wheels touched the runway, then pulled up, flew off, circled around, and landed on the second try. That night, his friends watched in astonishment as the Bin Mahfouz plane badly overshot the runway; the pilot had no choice but to pull up, fly around, and land again. The pilot later said it had been a genuine if rare error on his part; Salem’s entourage agreed that their friend’s spirit had awoken long enough to play one last practical joke on them.

They loaded the coffin into a General Motors Corporation ambulance. The full-bearded Mahrouz was among the brothers who climbed inside; he chanted a prayer for the dead. One of Salem’s friends recalled being hoisted into the ambulance by the Bin Laden brothers, so that he could sit beside the coffin. “You haven’t left him throughout his life,” one of the brothers said. “You’re not going to leave him now.”⁴

They washed the body at Mohamed Bin Laden’s former Medina home. In a gesture of respect, one of the brothers handed Khalid Bin Mahfouz the key to Salem’s coffin, so that he could initiate the washing. Afterward they wrapped his body in a shroud of green cloth, the color of dress in Paradise. The only sounds were of grief and prayer.⁵

At the graveyard, in the darkness, mourners in flowing white robes and headdresses swelled and jostled. The outstretched arms of his brothers and friends carried Salem above shoulder height to a sandy ditch. As he was laid in, a man shouted and approached with the shrouded corpse of a very young girl; it was not clear who she was, or how she had died, but she had been chosen to lie in Salem’s grave at his feet, to keep him company—her soul was pure and innocent, and would comfort and protect his in the passage to afterlife.⁶

Osama was among the brothers who attended Salem’s funeral. It is not clear when he arrived. He continued to travel back and forth from Afghanistan, and it is possible that he was in the kingdom at the time of Salem’s death; the Ramadan holiday, a time when the Bin Ladens often gathered together in Saudi Arabia, had ended only recently. If he was present at the burial, he would have joined Mahrouz in the rigorous prayers that believing Wahhabis offer the dead. He was certainly present through the mourning receptions that followed during the next three days. He felt closer to Salem than to any of his other brothers, according to Osama’s mother, even though they lived by such different creeds. He had regarded Salem “like a father,” she said later. “Salem’s death saddened Osama a great deal.”⁷

In later years, as he held forth loquaciously about America’s alleged crimes against Islam, Osama never spoke about Salem’s death on American soil, just as he never spoke about the airplane crash caused by an American pilot that had claimed his father’s life. Did he consider the possibility of conspiracies? In Arabia, it would be far more exceptional if he did not. The available evidence about Osama’s specific reaction to Salem’s accident, however, is virtually nonexistent. His half-brother Ghalib, who visited Osama at least once near the Afghan border, did consider the possibility that a hidden plot might lie behind Salem’s death. Later that summer, Ghalib flew to Texas to inspect the Kitty Hawk Field of Dreams. He obtained a copy of the Bexar County Medical Examiner’s autopsy report, according to a family business partner. The report found that Salem had no heart disease at the time of his death and had no trace of drugs, alcohol, or other intoxicants in his bloodstream. By the partner’s account, Ghalib was relieved at these discoveries, and seemed willing to accept the autopsy’s formal conclusion, which read, “Manner of Death: Accident.” Jamal Khashoggi, who spoke regularly with Osama during this period, and who shared his Muslim Brotherhood–influenced outlook at the time, said that while he was certain Salem’s sudden death “was a big event in his life,” Osama never discussed it. Nor, according to the publicly available record, did he discuss it with other friends or journalists.⁸

In Jeddah, as they had two decades earlier after their father’s passing, the sons of Mohamed Bin Laden gathered at the family compound, between the evening mahgrib and isha prayers, for formal ceremonies of condolence. Thousands of mourners flocked to the home Mohamed had built for Salem’s mother at Kilo 7 on the Mecca Road, near the headquarters of the family’s main construction company.

This time, however, the receptions had a secondary purpose—many of those who had been close to Salem now shuffled forward to swear bayah, or fealty, to Bakr Bin Laden as the new head of the Bin Laden family. This ritual was a direct and self-conscious echo of the bayah ceremonies in Riyadh that followed the death of a Saudi king. (At the Al-Saud court, the ascending king sits in mourning and receives a line of visitors who demonstrate their loyalty and respect by kissing his shoulder, hand, or cheek.) That it would be Bakr, and not another brother, who received these gestures of obedience was a decision that had accumulated gradually within the Bin Laden family over a period of years. Salem had increasingly designated Bakr as chief of business operations, and Bakr’s central role in the Mecca and Medina renovations put him in the lead of the family’s two most lucrative and politically sensitive construction contracts. He was not the oldest living son after Salem, but he was among the most senior, and by virtue of his civil engineering degree, also among the most qualified. He was, in addition, Salem’s full brother, the guardian of his estate and his legacy, the eldest surviving son of a senior and respected widow of Mohamed. All this made him the natural choice. There is no evidence that Bakr’s anointment required any debate or deliberation within the family; it seems, rather, to have been taken more or less for granted.

Heavily pregnant, Salem’s widow, Carrie, grieved in the company of hundreds of Saudi women at the separate but parallel female condolence receptions. She staggered through the days, and on June 15, less than three weeks after Salem’s accident, she gave birth in Jeddah to a daughter, Sama.⁹ More than five years earlier, Carrie had converted to Islam, fulfilling a promise she made to Salem while a passenger in his glider, which she thought was about to crash. Over the years, her decision secured her acceptance by the larger Bin Laden family. She took her new faith seriously. After her daughter’s birth, Carrie decided to embrace rather than recoil from her unexpected position as a Bin Laden widow—and she agreed to accept the Arabian and Islamic traditions this position carried.

SALEM HAD BEEN responsible in many important respects for Osama’s rise along the Afghan frontier. He publicized Osama’s humanitarian work, contributed to his Peshawar treasury, supplied him with construction equipment, procured him weaponry, and cemented his strong relations with the Saudi royal family, which advanced Osama’s influence and credibility as a fund-raiser. With Salem’s abrupt disappearance, Osama lost an important sponsor. At the same time, he was also losing some of his sense of purpose. The cause that had drawn him to the Afghan frontier was ebbing. The Soviet Union signed the Geneva Accords in April 1988 and announced that all its forces would withdraw by early the following year. The war and the jihad would continue, since Moscow would leave behind an Afghan communist government regarded as apostate by the mujaheddin, but with blond Russians no longer pledged to serve in an enemy occupation force, the Afghan war had already drifted from righteous rebellion toward muddy civil conflict. This development had a parallel within the camps of the Arab volunteers: during the first months of 1988, the variety and intensity of disputes among the Arabs increased.

Osama’s personality and his habits of mind led him to hold himself above this fray. He followed his father’s example. He adapted his work and his attitude to please his mentors, even when they were in competition with one another; simultaneously, as a leader in his own right, he attracted a following that was strikingly diverse.

When Osama returned to the Afghan frontier from Salem’s funeral, he shuttled among several homes, offices, and camps. His wives and children lived in Peshawar, and he held meetings there with followers and comrades. He occasionally joined Abdullah Azzam at his Peshawar area preaching and charitable facilities, which still drew upon Osama’s financial and rhetorical support, even though differences had arisen between them about war tactics. Osama quarreled with Azzam, but they never broke; early in 1988, the pair formed a joint camp along the Afghan border to train and house Arab fighters. Azzam’s rivals, the radical Egyptian military and police exiles led by Ayman Al-Zawahiri, controlled Osama’s other camps. He gave this Egyptian faction $100,000.¹⁰ He spread his money around. This was an instinctive tactic of balancing, drawn from the leadership examples of his father and Arabian regents, but it also reflected Osama’s embryonic philosophy of jihad—a creed that was not particularly sophisticated but that had an inherent populist appeal. All were welcome. The compulsion of jihad was a matter of individual conscience, not a consequence of group initiation. Osama saw himself as an inspirer of jihad, not a cult leader or a dictator.

In this season of disputation, for example, one of the arguments between Osama and Azzam involved whether they should screen and select among applicants to their cause. “Abdullah Azzam wanted to choose—we do not welcome everybody,” recalled Jamal Khashoggi, who was in and out of Peshawar during this period. As an adherent of the Muslim Brotherhood, Azzam sought to recruit elite and talented followers, and train them in the Brotherhood tradition. He felt this method produced more trustworthy and rational volunteers. By contrast, “Osama believed in opening up to everybody—everybody who comes under the banner of jihad is welcome.” This disagreement marked the beginning of his formal break with the Muslim Brotherhood, which had been his ideological point of entry to politically aware Islam as a young teenager at the Al-Thaghr Model School in Jeddah. As Osama put it later, he came to think that the true community of believers originates “from many different places and regions, representing a wide spectrum of the unity of Islam, which neither recognizes race nor color; nor does it pay any heed to borders and walls.” Here, too, he was emerging into his own, but as his father’s son; his camps of racially and nationally diverse volunteers along the Afghan border increasingly resembled the diverse desert camps of olive-skinned and African construction workers he had seen in Arabia as aboy.¹¹

His inclusive outlook also compensated in part for his lack of standing as a scholar. He had long been proud and stubborn, and as he gathered confidence, he probably felt the sting of Azzam’s condescension. Azzam’s widow, reflecting her family’s sense of superiority, later noted pointedly that Osama was “not a very educated man. He holds a high school degree…It is true that he gave lectures to ulema and sheikhs, but he was easy to persuade.”¹² Such attitudes had long hovered just below the surface of Azzam’s patronage. With equal subtlety, Osama now began to assert himself in reply, through his pronouncements about diversity and equality, and also by his decision to spread his financial contributions around, to include Azzam’s rivals among the Egyptians. These Egyptians had already broken with the Brotherhood, which they regarded as too cautious. In critiquing Azzam and his philosophy, they emphasized the doctrine of takfir, by which Muslims judged to be apostates could be ex-communicated or even exterminated.

Salem’s death coincided with these changes in Osama’s world on the Afghan frontier, and it added to the void created by the ebbing of Azzam’s mentorship. In Peshawar that summer, the Egyptians, in particular, saw an opportunity to ingratiate themselves by acting as his publicists. Osama “liked the media spotlight,” recalled a Saudi follower from this period, Hasan Al-Surayhi. “Bin Laden’s finances were not a secret to anyone and I think the Egyptians wanted to exploit this angle,” according to Al-Surayhi. They connected Osama with journalists in Peshawar. The Egyptian military chief at one of Osama’s camps, Abu Ubaidah Al-Banjshiri, who had fought with him at Jaji, explained the Egyptians’ thinking: Osama, he said, “has spent a lot of money to buy arms for the young mujaheddin as well as in training them and paying for their travel tickets. Now that the jihad has ended, we should not waste this. We should invest in these young men and we should mobilize them under his umbrella.”¹³

The meetings that gave birth to Al Qaeda occurred in Peshawar in August 1988, three months after Salem’s funeral. Notes taken at the sessions describe some of the tension Osama felt that summer: he wanted to break away from Azzam, but he did not want to expose himself by too openly adopting a leadership role. “I am one person,” he said. “We have not started an organization or an Islamic group.” The experiments in training and war that he had supported so far had constituted “a period of education, building energy, and testing brothers who came.” The most important accomplishments, Osama recognized, had come from marketing the jihad: “We took very huge gains from the people in Saudi Arabia. We were able to give political power to the mujaheddin, gathering donations in very large amounts.”¹⁴

At a second meeting, held at Osama’s house, a note taker recorded that in considering a new approach, Osama was motivated by “the complaints” about Azzam’s organization, which he had done so much to fund and shape, particularly its “mismanagement and bad treatment.” His emphasis now would be on training a separatist Arab militia, of the kind Azzam opposed, initially numbering about three hundred men. As Banjshiri had urged, Osama would use the arms he had acquired with Salem’s help before they went to waste. The camps where this training would take place would be called Al Qaeda Al-Askariya, or “The Military Base.” Al Qaeda would be “basically an organized Islamic faction” and would develop “statutes and instructions,” but it would also be a vehicle for more open-ended, nonhierarchical participation in jihad. “Its goal will be to lift the word of God, to make His religion victorious.” Recruits would swear by a pledge that made no reference to Osama Bin Laden. They would recite:

The pledge of God and his covenant is upon me, to listen and obey the superiors, who are doing this work, in energy, early-rising, difficulty, and easiness, and for his superiority upon us, so that the word of God will be the highest, and His religion victorious.¹⁵

This ambiguity present at Al Qaeda’s birth—the sense that it was an organization but that its borders dissolved into a wider movement—would persist for years because it was fundamental to Osama’s own outlook. In his mind, Al Qaeda was merely an incidental means to incite and organize the ummah, the community of Islamic believers. Across the years, Osama would struggle at times to remain true to this aspiration, as bureaucracy, factionalism, and petty ambition gnawed at his ideals. Yet he never abandoned his original model. “The situation is not as the West portrays it,” Osama would tell an interviewer many years later, “that there exists an ‘organization’ with a specific name, such as ‘Al Qaeda’ and so on. That particular name is very old, and came about quite independently of me. Brother Abu Ubaida Al-Banjshiri created a military base to train the young men to fight against the Soviet empire…So this place was called ‘The Base,’ as in a training base, and the name grew from this. We aren’t separated from the ummah. We are the children of an ummah, and an inseparable part of it.”¹⁶

He drew upon a rich heritage of Saudi and Brotherhood-influenced ideology, but he synthesized these ideas with his lessons drawn from his family. In the years ahead, Osama would make three indispensable contributions to Al Qaeda, all derived from his experiences as a Bin Laden: his emphasis on diversity and inclusion, his confidence about money and administration, and his attraction to the technologies of global integration. Indeed, arguably, these family-derived strengths of Osama’s would become more important to Al Qaeda’s potency than its underlying Islamic ideology, which was commonplace among militant groups.

Ambition, energy, natural talent, and a gift for managing people had made Mohamed Bin Laden wealthy. Reinterpreted by Salem, these characteristics had girded a secular life of singular creativity and financial success. Reinterpreted through a prism of Islamic radicalism by Osama, they would soon prove just as transforming.

IN APRIL 1989, Ghalib Bin Laden flew to the United States with one of the family’s Pakistani pilots to arrange for final delivery of the Hawker Siddeley private jet that Salem had purchased prior to his death. It was a sleek, spacious two-engine executive jet that could carry a dozen or more passengers. Ghalib had the piloting skills to evaluate the plane’s readiness, and as Bakr’s full brother, he had his trust. He had matured into a smart, sharp-minded administrator who did not suffer fools and who could act decisively, in the judgment of one business partner who worked with him extensively. He had two sons; his wife increasingly kept the veil.¹⁷

On April 22, Ghalib flew to San Diego, where one of his youngest half-brothers, Abdullah, was enrolled in university. He flew on to Honolulu, then Guam, and reached Hong Kong on the 24th. Gerald Auerbach, the family pilot, had joined the flight, as had a second Pakistani pilot and the mechanic Bengt Johansson. They flew to Kuala Lumpur, and then to Bombay. On the evening of April 27, 1989, they continued on to Peshawar. They checked into a hotel in the city, and Ghalib Bin Laden and one of the Pakistani pilots traveled by road to the Afghan frontier.¹⁸

According to two people who were on the trip but who did not travel out from the Peshawar hotel, Ghalib carried about fifty thousand dollars in cash. One of these people, Auerbach, recalled that the money was destined for Osama because he was in need of “some cash.” The second passenger, Johansson, said that he was told by the Pakistani pilot who went out from the hotel that they sought to distribute the money as a Ramadan gift to poor people living in a refugee camp. By Johansson’s account, this act of charity turned dangerous. “They were almost killed there” and “had to jump over some fences” because a crowd of refugees, seeing Ghalib’s bag of money, decided to rush him, rather than wait for an orderly distribution of charity. A family attorney said that Ghalib recalled that “the cash which he [Ghalib] took with him from Peshawar was distributed to the poor in refugee camps” and was not provided to Osama; the attorney emphasized that Ghalib had never provided financial or other support for Osama’s terrorism.¹⁹

At the time of this visit, Osama was suffering through the most trying episode of his Afghan adventure. In March, at the direction of Pakistani intelligence, a large force of Afghan rebels had opened an assault on the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad, about a four-hour drive away from Peshawar, over the Khyber Pass. The city was defended by a rump force of Afghan communist soldiers who feared they would be executed if they yielded their positions, and, therefore, fought fiercely, supported by clandestine Soviet officers who manned Scud missile batteries. Osama joined the siege campaign, leading a company-sized force of Arab volunteers who had been trained over the winter at the inaugural Al Qaeda camps. He ensured once more that his followers were adequately equipped—among other things, he acquired night-vision equipment. On the Jalalabad battlefield, however, he and his militia failed disastrously. The guerrilla and ambush tactics they had honed in the mountains proved futile during assaults on fortified fixed positions. The terrain favored the defenders. About one hundred young Arab men had died under Osama’s leadership by the time the campaign was called off in June.²⁰

So many casualties in such a transparently failed effort only exacerbated the factionalism and dispute that surrounded Osama. In July an Afghan faction led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who was favored by Osama, massacred the leaders of a rival faction led by Ahmed Shah Massoud, who was favored by Azzam. These two powerful Afghan militias embarked on open civil war. Behind the lines, Peshawar “became a horrible place,” recalled Jamal Khashoggi. “Arabs who don’t like each other. Takfiris. Tensions…Splinters, fanatic groups.”²¹

On November 24, 1989, Abdullah Azzam died in a car bomb attack. The crime went unsolved. Egyptian rivals of Azzam, Hekmatyar, Bin Laden, or some combination seem the most likely suspects. Osama later denied any involvement. “At that point, we were both in the same boat, and you are all aware of the numerous conspiracies there were to murder us all,” he said. He recalled telling Azzam to stay out of Peshawar. Ultimately, he said, he concluded that Israel “in collusion with some of its Arab agents” had carried out the attack. His declaration of innocence is difficult to evaluate but probably correct. He had no particular need to kill Azzam, and there is no convincing evidence that he had yet participated in any assassination plots.²²

A few weeks before Azzam’s death, Osama moved home with his family. In quick succession, he had lost the two most important mentors in his life. His sponsor in Saudi intelligence, Ahmed Badeeb, his former high school teacher, urged him to leave Pakistan. Badeeb was trying to “thin out” the number of agents and allies he supported in Peshawar, now that the Soviets had withdrawn. He offered Osama business advice. Financial developments within the Bin Laden family may also have speeded his departure. Bakr was about to oversee a major corporate reorganization and inheritance distribution to all the Bin Ladens of Osama’s generation; it would behoove Osama to be present in Saudi Arabia as this occurred. It was, in a broader sense, a time to find his bearings.²³

As he left Peshawar, Osama was driven primarily by a sense of exhaustion and even fear about the divisive course of the Afghan war. He had no coherent plan for the next phase of his life. He left behind some money and technology to keep his Al Qaeda followers going. At camps near Kandahar, they soon installed some Apple computers.²⁴

TO THE EXTENT it formally existed at all, Al Qaeda at this stage was as much a fundraising network as a militia. This was an aspect of Osama’s leadership that most easily traversed borders. It was also something that could be pursued more readily in Jeddah than in Peshawar. The evidence about the specific reach of Osama’s funding network in 1989 is fragmentary, but it suggests, unsurprisingly, that the Bin Ladens and other wealthy Saudi merchants may have been among the most generous contributors. As Azzam put it just before his death, at a 1989 conference, “Saudi is the only country which stood by the Afghani jihad as a government and people…The Saudi merchants come and establish organizations and give huge amounts—may God reward them.” Documents seized from an Islamic charity in Bosnia, which purport to describe a “Golden Chain” of donors from this period, list more than a dozen Saudi businessmen and bankers, including the “Bin Laden brothers.” American investigators and prosecutors have asserted that the documents are authentic and credible, and have been supported by witness statements. Federal Judge Richard Casey, however, later concluded that the Golden Chain was “only a list of names found in a charity’s office…The Court cannot make the logical leap that the document is a list of early Al Qaeda supporters.” For his part, in an affidavit submitted to Casey, Bakr Bin Laden did not specifically deny making contributions to charities or causes in which Osama was involved during this period, but he did assert, “I have never made any charitable contributions to any organization I understood to be associated with Al Qaeda or terrorism of any sort.” Bakr also said that he was not aware until sometime after 1991 “of any involvement by Osama in terrorist activities of any kind.”²⁵

Such assertions, of course, turn on the ambiguity, in the context of the Afghan frontier of late 1989, of such terms as “Al Qaeda” and “terrorism.” In any event, Osama returned to Jeddah as a Bin Laden family member in good standing. Jamal Khashoggi saw Osama “a number of times” with Bakr, following Salem’s death. On one occasion, he stayed with Osama at the Bin Laden villa in Riyadh. Bakr joined them one evening. “We had a casual conversation over Afghanistan and other issues,” Khashoggi recalled. “Bakr appeared distracted. He did not get into an in-depth discussion with us…They treated each other with great respect, as a younger brother and older brother would.”²⁶

Osama continued to embrace media projects that promoted him and his followers to Arab audiences; he imagined himself as a writer-director-producer of jihad. He continued to finance the Egyptian filmmaker Essam Deraz, who had followed him onto the Jalalabad battlefield. As warfare, Jalalabad had been a calamity; as propaganda, it could be salvaged. During the battle, Osama had cast himself not only as an Islamic warrior but also as an actor in a movie about Islamic warriors. Back in Saudi Arabia, he experimented as a producer, screening the director’s cut for friends who could help him evaluate the film’s progress. He invited Khashoggi to a Bin Laden company auditorium at a conference facility in Jeddah and arranged for employees to screen a print of the 16-millimeter film; the audience consisted only of Osama, Khashoggi, and one or two other people. “He wanted my critique of the film, as his journalist friend,” Khashoggi recalled. Osama had left his following in Peshawar, but he remained a star of his own narrative, and his return to the kingdom had not left him isolated. Among other things, said Khashoggi, “He had access to whatever the company had.”²⁷

25. LUMP SUMS

BAKR BIN LADEN had reached his early forties. He had grown into a serious, hardworking businessman. He was about the same height as Salem, and he shared many of his features, particularly the soft brown eyes and the smooth, boyish face. The timbre of his voice and the lilt of his accent so closely resembled Salem’s that it could be startling, particularly on the telephone; it was as if Bakr’s voice could summon Salem’s spirit back among the living. In person, however, he did not exude the same irrepressible charm. Bakr kept a mustache, which was not particularly thick, and it added to the slight air of officiousness that he sometimes projected. He was dignified and intelligent, responsible and polite, but he could also be stiff.

His time as a student at the University of Miami had influenced him but it had not shaped him; he had become a much more thoroughly Arabian man than Salem had ever been. Bakr received his five sons in a formal diwan, or drawing room, setting at his Jeddah home; they bent to kiss him on the hand or on the forehead. Speaking to the boys, he might drop an edifying quotation from the Koran or make passing reference to a story from the Prophet’s lifetime. Bakr had memorized a substantial portion of the Koran during his own religious studies, and when he was in Saudi Arabia, he maintained a rigorous prayer schedule. He did not drink, according to his friends, and after a time he gave up cigarettes. At Hajj he summoned religious teachers to enhance his family’s experience and Islamic education. Still, along the Bin Laden family’s cultural and religious spectrum, and in the context of puritan Saudi Arabia, Bakr was better described as a centrist than as a conservative. In his dedication to civil engineering and in the time he devoted to construction projects in Mecca and Medina, he had come to model his life on that of his father. He even hired, as his driver in Saudi Arabia, a son of the driver who had been waiting for Mohamed at the desert airstrip where his plane crashed and burned. Bakr reared his children as his father had done, with an emphasis on discipline and self-reliance—he would not let his children fly on private jets and insisted that they take care of their own travel documents, tickets, and baggage. And as Mohamed had been, Bakr was at ease in a business climate of ethnic and religious plurality. He worked in close partnership with Middle Eastern Christians, such as the Sarkissian family, with whom he formed a joint venture for major construction projects in Saudi Arabia. He also relied upon Fuad Rihani, an American citizen of Jordanian origin, a Protestant actively involved with Jordanian churches, who served as an important Bin Laden adviser after Bakr took charge.¹

Bakr remained something of a workaholic. On visits to Cairo, he would check into the royal suite at the Marriott and work around the clock, napping for a few hours on sofas. “All his life was hard,” according to his Egyptian employee Sabry Ghoneim. “He didn’t eat much, because he was afraid of getting fat and developing health problems. He would work all the time, but he didn’t eat well or sleep well…Believe me, he paid for his work with his happiness.” Not long after Salem’s death, Bakr divorced his first wife, Haifa, an event that Ghoneim blamed on his work habits. “Even when he came back home, he was working—he would sleep in the reception area of his home…A woman needs her husband to relax and joke with her, to go out to eat with her. But he was in a bad way after the death of his brother.”²

Salem’s disappearance burdened Bakr with leadership responsibilities that he had never anticipated, but it also freed his considerable ambition. He thrived in business meetings and had a distinctly international outlook. As he gained control of the family during 1988 and 1989, he envisioned diversifying its businesses into new countries and new industries; he started up new divisions in dredging and medical supplies, and made plans to explore new opportunities from Southeast Asia to Europe.

Salem’s schooling had made him something of an Anglophile, and his restless free spirit drew him to America. Bakr was more influenced by France. His education in the former French colonial spheres of Damascus and Lebanon, and his first wife’s Syrian roots, helped draw him toward Paris, where he bought an enormous apartment on the Quai d’Orsay—although, like many of his half-brothers, he often preferred the easy convenience of luxury hotels, and typically, he forsook his apartment for the Ritz. Bakr spoke some French, but he conducted most of his business in English or in Arabic, and he kept private secretaries to assist him in each language; over the course of a typical day, he would slip frequently and easily between the two tongues. In this he resembled many younger, privileged Saudis who had adapted rapidly to global business idioms in the aftermath of the oil shock.

In some respects, he was unprepared for the leadership role he now occupied. As an engineer and an operations man, as Salem’s loyal number two, he had learned to work hard and to concentrate on results, but he lacked a natural touch for the richly diverse human foibles and quandaries that his family members continually presented him. As almost anyone would, Bakr suffered by comparison to Salem. He could seem like a bit of a nerd, eager to imitate the sources of his older brother’s charisma and popularity but not always able to pull it off. Some of Salem’s friends thought that Bakr carried something of a chip on his shoulder because of these deficits. Yet he seemed to have genuinely admired Salem, and as he explored his new circumstances as the boss of all he surveyed, Bakr tried to live in some ways as Salem had done.

He refused, for example, to back off from the family passion for flying, despite the enormous costs that aviation had exacted. Bakr had at first been a somewhat reluctant pilot. He “used to hate flying, maybe because his father died in an airplane” recalled one of his Egyptian instructors, Yahia El Agaty. “And then in Cairo one day at Imbaba Airport, I was flying the [Cessna] 172 which I bought from Salem. And Bakr came to the airport, and he said, ‘Okay, I want to fly.’ I chuckled: ‘You want to fly, Sheikh Bakr!’ He said, ‘Yeah.’”

“You’re a liar!” Salem had exclaimed when Agaty called to report what had happened, but Agaty was right: gradually, Bakr took instruction and conquered his fear.³ He eventually became qualified on jets and was regarded by his private pilots as quite a competent and enthusiastic flier. He did not fly with Salem’s reckless, showy flair—barrel rolls were not his style—but he did enjoy a few modest demonstrations at the controls from time to time, such as taking off in a Learjet or Gulfstream and leveling at a low altitude, and then suddenly tilting back and roaring upward. He came to talk about planes and private aviation with the same all-consuming hobbyist’s passion as Salem had possessed; gossip about new models and nuances of range and performance became for Bakr what baseball or soccer rosters were for other men. His piloting did seem to some of Salem’s old friends to be a metaphor for Bakr’s relationship with his brother’s ghost—he wanted to fly where Salem had been, but he did not embrace the same degree of risk.

AS HE ESTABLISHED himself as the new leader, Bakr decided to clean up some family inheritance issues. At the same time, he set up new business partnerships for the future. Court documents describing this period, while far from fully transparent, provide the most detailed snapshots available of the size of the main Bin Laden company and how its wealth was distributed to the heirs of Bakr’s generation after Salem’s death. Osama’s return to Saudi Arabia in 1989 coincided with this family reorganization, overseen by Bakr; it may even have been a factor in his decision to come home.

Of all the myths that would come to swirl around Al Qaeda, none was greater than the fable of Osama Bin Laden’s wealth. His followers (and, later, some of his adversaries) romanticized every aspect of his leadership, but they particularly exaggerated his personal fortune. The unrestrained, poetic language employed by Islamist propagandists to celebrate Osama’s battlefield achievements in Afghanistan soon extended to the subject of his bank account. To some extent, their exaggerations are explained by Osama’s fundraising achievements; his ability to attract outside donations and government support had made him appear wealthier to his comrades in Pakistan than he actually was. Still, the prosaic truth about his personal finances mattered greatly—because of misreporting about Osama’s wealth, his adversaries, particularly those in the United States, would repeatedly misunderstand him.

None of Mohamed Bin Laden’s children could easily guess what he or she was worth. The family companies did not trade on any stock exchange, and their web of opaque financial entanglements with the Al-Saud complicated any attempt at financial valuation. At the center of the empire stood the Mohamed Bin Laden Organization, the original construction company founded in 1931. Each of Mohamed’s sons—except for Ali, who had sold his shares when he broke with Salem after their father’s death—owned 2.27 percent of the flagship company, and each of the daughters owned half of that amount, or about 1.14 percent.⁴ After Bakr became the Bin Laden emir, or leader, he approved dividend payments to the family shareholders each year, based at least in part on that year’s actual profits. These dividends were separate from salaries that particular brothers might earn, and distinct also from profits that might be distributed from other businesses, such as Bin Laden Brothers. Some of the Bin Laden heirs reinvested their dividends in global stock markets, particularly after Yeslam established his Saudi and Swiss brokerages. Yeslam’s full brother Ibrahim, for example, testified in a court deposition that in 1983, in order to raise about $1 million in cash for the purchase of a mansion in Los Angeles, he sold “stocks that I inherited from my father.” He borrowed the rest of the purchase price, about $600,000. It seems most likely that Ibrahim actually inherited cash from Mohamed’s estate, in the form of dividends, which he then shifted into stocks at Yeslam’s direction; his testimony on this point is not precise, but overall, it suggests the scale and fluidity of the inheritance.

The most reliable portrait of the family dividend system comes from an American certified public accountant, Linda Pergament Swift, a specialist in forensic accounting, who examined the Bin Laden family’s finances during the early 1990s as part of an American divorce proceeding involving Ibrahim. In 1989, Swift reported to an American court, Ibrahim received two dividend payments from the Mohamed Bin Laden Organization totaling just over $325,000. This appears to be roughly the amount allotted to all male shareholders that year, including Osama. Swift wrote, however, that her investigation revealed a strikingly flexible and informal family system: “Each beneficiary receives allotments, usually from profits of the business, on an annual or semi-annual basis. The family business does not simply distribute a lump sum…[but] acts as a money manager or clearing house.” Each son and daughter was credited his or her share of the annual profits, she continued, and then the company doled out the cash as directed by the heir.⁵

Ibrahim’s 1989 take implies that Bakr allotted a total of about $15 million in dividends to family members that year. That is consistent with figures in the 1990 edition of Top 1000 Saudi Companies, a business directory published in cooperation with the Saudi Arabian government. It reported that the Mohamed Bin Laden Organization was the twenty-seventh-largest company in the kingdom and had revenue of about $340 million. Assuming a profit margin of 5 to 10 percent, as would be typical at a large construction firm, the company’s total annual profit around 1989 would have been in the range of $20 to $30 million—an impressive amount, but hardly the stuff of the greatest global business baronies.⁶

Also in 1989, Bakr oversaw a one-time distribution to Mohamed Bin Laden’s heirs from the patriarch’s broader estate, according to what the family later told American government investigators. Mohamed’s children and the four women to whom he was married when he died had inherited not only shares in his company but also his land, his homes, and his personal property. Initially the trustees appointed by King Faisal doled out allowances and conserved the estate’s principal. When Salem eventually gained control, according to the account of one family business partner, he argued with some of his brothers over whether and how to distribute the estate’s underlying assets, which were not easy to divvy up, since they included much land and real property. By this account, Salem resisted a straight application of Islamic law, under which each brother would receive one equal share, and each sister one equal half-share, after provisions for charity and Mohamed’s wives. Among other things, Salem felt that brothers who worked at the company deserved a larger distribution than those who did nothing.⁷ Islamic inheritance law, however, made no such distinction, and it would have been difficult for Salem to sustain his position before a Saudi court if any of his brothers had formally objected.

Bakr resolved the matter within months of Salem’s death by endorsing a major distribution under Islamic law. Representatives of the Bin Laden family later told the Federal Bureau of Investigation that heirs could choose whether to take cash or to reinvest in the family companies. For his part, Osama seems to have followed both paths. He took about $8 million in cash, according to what family representatives told the FBI. He also became a shareholder in the new partnerships that Bakr organized as he restructured the family businesses. One of these was the Mohamed Bin Laden Company, successor to the original family firm. The other was a new entity called the Saudi Bin Laden Group (SBG), chaired by Bakr and inaugurated in late 1989. These two companies were entirely independent, Bakr later said in an affidavit. After the reorganization and the cash withdrawals, Osama owned about 2 percent of each firm, and his shareholdings were worth about $10 million combined, according to a valuation made several years later.⁸

According to Sabry Ghoneim, director of communications for the Bin Ladens in Egypt, Bakr extended himself on Osama’s behalf throughout this period. Bakr “respected all the mothers of his brothers like his own mother,” Ghoneim recalled. “He always felt that Osama’s mother was weak, so as a way to dignify her, he wanted to give Osama one of the bigger projects. This was what he did with all the mothers—offer their sons projects…Bakr felt that while all his siblings were educated, Osama didn’t get a good education. Osama always felt his mother wasn’t with the rest of the mothers, because she was from a lower social class…Osama always felt broken and felt he didn’t get his share—the siblings got education abroad, and he didn’t. He would isolate himself. Bakr was very smart to try to include his brother.”⁹

The estimated 1989 distribution to Osama and the rest of Mohamed’s sons of about $18 million each—some in cash, some in renewed shareholdings, depending on the choices made by each brother—is largely consistent with several credible accounts of the inheritance. Yeslam Bin Laden later told Swiss television, for example, that “the amount received by each member of the family didn’t go above $20 million.” Also, Yeslam’s own Swiss tax returns, filed between 1989 and 1993, indicate that he may have taken out cash in a manner similar to Osama, around the same time—his declared financial assets suddenly jumped by about 8 million Swiss francs after 1989. In an interview, a business partner briefed by the Bin Laden family, who asked to not be identified, pegged a full share for Mohamed’s sons circa 1989 at $26 million, higher than other estimates but in the same general range. Investigators for the 9/11 Commission, drawing upon classified documents later provided to the Treasury Department by the Bin Laden family and its lawyers, estimated that Osama received a total of about $24 million between 1970 and 1993 or 1994; this figure would have included his annual allowances and dividends, and the $8 million distribution of 1989, but probably not the value of his shareholdings. (It is not clear whether the figure also included the salaries he earned when he worked at the family firm as a junior executive.) The 9/11 Commission report implied that Osama received equal annual installments of about $1 million, but this does not appear to be accurate. His annual dividends probably averaged less than half of that amount, supplemented by salaries, work bonuses, and the large one-time distribution in 1989. Despite the variations in detail, all these well-sourced estimates of the Bin Laden inheritance are in broad accord. They underline several points: Osama was wealthy, but not grotesquely so; after Salem’s death, he received a particularly large sum of cash, just as Al Qaeda was born; and following receipt of this cash distribution, under Bakr’s leadership, he remained a partner in good standing in the most important Bin Laden businesses.¹⁰

The reorganized Mohamed Bin Laden Company had sixty shareholders—all of Mohamed’s sons, except the deceased Salem and the estranged Ali; all twenty-nine of Mohamed’s daughters; his widows; and Salem’s three children. The new Saudi Bin Laden Group, destined to become an important vehicle for wealth creation under Bakr’s leadership, had just twenty shareholders, all of them sons of Mohamed. The shares in SBG were not distributed equally—Bakr, as chairman, owned the most, just under 25 percent. Only four living sons did not initially become shareholders in SBG: Ali, Yeslam, Ibrahim, and Shafiq.¹¹

In the same period that he reorganized his father’s estate and the Bin Laden businesses, Bakr also tried to clean up Salem’s personal estate. Salem had not written a will. This in itself did not present much of a complication, however, because under Islamic inheritance law, the identity of his personal heirs was clear: his mother; his widow, Carrie; and his three children. But Salem had left financial detritus scattered around the world.¹²

On June 4, 1988, Bakr applied to an Islamic court in Jeddah to become the legal executor of Salem’s estate; about two months later, a Saudi judged approved his position. The judge found after evidentiary hearings that Salem “had, during his life, made a verbal will appointing and instituting his brother Bakr…to be the guardian of his minor children…and he maintained such testament until his death.” The court issued a series of instructions to Bakr, including that he “be God-fearing…in private as well as in public.”¹³

Under Islamic law, none of Salem’s brothers or half-brothers would inherit from his personal estate. This presented a potentially tricky question for the family, since the lines between Salem’s individual wealth and that of the family businesses they owned collectively had never been entirely clear. Salem’s private jets belonged to the companies, and Bakr kept them for business use. Salem’s estates in Florida and at Offley Chase were deemed to be private assets, however, and Bakr soon put them up for sale. He hired lawyers in Florida, Texas, and Germany to chase down outstanding financial claims that might benefit Salem’s heirs.

During these investigations, according to Thomas Dietrich, Ghalib Bin Laden, acting for Bakr, accused Dietrich of mishandling a bank account that he had maintained in Germany to fund Salem’s various adventures in Europe. Dietrich argued that the money he had received from the account reimbursed him for legitimate—if at times unorthodox—expenses directly authorized by Salem. He also said that Salem had given him title to a glider they flew together, but that the agreement had not been written up as a contract. Hounded by a German lawyer, Dietrich said, he ultimately settled the dispute by selling the glider and turning the proceeds over to the Bin Ladens; the episode left him with some bitter feelings toward Bakr. Separately, Bakr also agreed to settle, by making a payment of about $1 million, the long-running lawsuit in Canada stemming from the payment dispute with American partners over the Saudi telephone contracts Salem had won. Bakr also hired lawyers in Texas to examine a failed shopping center investment Salem had made with his attorney, Wayne Fagan, but they took no action in that case.¹⁴

One of the biggest paydays from these investigations came at the expense of Dee Howard, the San Antonio aviation pioneer who had remodeled King Fahd’s lavish 747 under the contract obtained through Salem. In a separate deal from the airplane project, Salem had invested just less than 1 million British pounds and had guaranteed an NCB loan of $1 million more to develop with Dee Howard some innovative aircraft-engine technology that could extend the flying range of certain jets. Ian Munro, who had been involved in this project, believed that Howard had profited from the technology Salem funded without properly compensating his partners. Howard denied this. Bakr hired lawyers in Florida to explore the claim, and ultimately they retained Charles Schwartz, a partner at the large Houston firm of Vinson and Elkins, to sue Dee Howard and his company. The case eventually came to trial before a civil jury in Bexar County, Texas. Appealing to the presumed skepticism of Texas jurors toward Saudi millionaires, Dee Howard’s attorney missed no opportunity to talk at trial about Salem’s riches or to refer to him as “sheikh.” Schwartz objected to all the “sheikhs” and tried to counter by emphasizing Salem’s reputation as a friend of Ronald Reagan and his success in international business. Finally, after a six-week trial highlighted by testimony from both Ian Munro and Dee Howard (the former speaking with aplomb in his British accent, the latter quarreling impetuously in a Texas drawl), the Bin Laden side won. The jury returned a verdict of $6 million in favor of Salem’s estate; the case later settled for just over half of that amount.¹⁵

To pursue the claim against Howard, Bakr had to submit certain legal briefs to the Texas court system, and in one of them, he referred to the existence, in the Jeddah courts, of an intriguing-sounding document entitled “Financial Position of the Inheritance of the Late Salem Binladin as of February 10, 1990,” which was “the only financial document filed with the court here in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia regarding the financial affairs” of Salem and his estate, according to Bakr. This document did not make it into the public court file in Texas, however. Its scope is unclear, but one lawyer who read it at the time recalled that it estimated the value of Salem’s personal estate as perhaps several hundred million dollars, and certainly less than one billion dollars. Even that estimate seems high, given Salem’s perpetual cash flow struggles in the last years of his life, although the estimate may reflect the value of his relatively illiquid real estate holdings in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and elsewhere.¹⁶

The question of Salem’s personal wealth was also complicated by his debts. He had borrowed large sums from the National Commercial Bank, but it was not always evident, at least to his foreign business partners, when he was borrowing for a personal transaction and when for the Bin Laden companies. According to two individuals close to Salem and NCB, the bank presented Bakr with a demand for repayment after Salem’s death, and Bakr worked out a settlement; the amounts involved are unknown, but according to these individuals, they may have been very large. “He didn’t always talk about it,” Ghoneim recalled, “but I saw he was exhausted. He had to deal with inheritance problems. He was doing his best to pay all the debts.”¹⁷

Bakr’s settlement agreements and his methodical pursuit of claims for Salem’s estate in Europe and America signaled the family’s new direction—more businesslike, better organized, more Arabian. In the absence of a family crisis, it was perhaps a welcome change for some from the volatility and peculiarity of Salem’s rein. But the Bin Ladens were not destined to live placidly. Very soon, as the family’s troubles deepened, Bakr would confront problems and choices of extraordinary importance and complexity. Was he up to the challenge? Despite all his admirable dedication and hard work, his innate caution framed a question he would never entirely shake: What would Salem have done?

26. AMERICA IN MOTION

THE IRANIAN REVOLUTION of 1979 cast thousands of privileged Persians into exile. Many gathered in Los Angeles, where they poured their agitations into business. First-and second-generation Lebanese and Armenian entrepreneurs maneuvered among them—builders, restaurateurs, retailers, developers, and hustlers sui generis. Some blocks on the west side of Los Angeles already resembled a stucco-and-Spanish-tile bazaar when the Saudis turned up in numbers, their pockets bulging after the second oil shock. Young merchant scions from Jeddah and Riyadh and Dhahran rolled through Beverly Hills in Porsches and Mercedes-Benzes, their sunglasses just a little too fashionable, their aftershave a little too pungent—as conspicuous a population of marks as ever swam in the seas of capitalism. Accountants looked at them and saw fees; lawyers saw billable hours; stockbrokers saw commissions; jewelers saw gold. There were plenty of Saudi businessmen who held their own in America, but many suffered from deficits of guile and ruthlessness. They were newcomers, flush but lacking in confidence and inside angles, and they did not have a locally rooted diaspora to protect them, as the Armenians and Lebanese enjoyed. Their instincts and traditions did not always serve them well. Arabian elites esteemed dignity, decorum, and reticence. Americans shouted, shoved, and brawled over money. Arabians settled disputes discreetly. Americans sued in open court.

Salem had thrived on this frontier, but his death cut the main artery connecting the United States to the Bin Laden family. Bakr was certainly interested in business partnerships with American multinational corporations, but he very rarely traveled to the States. By 1989 the most active family investor on American soil was Khalil Bin Laden, who lived in Los Angeles several months each year, usually in the summer, when Jeddah’s heat was particularly intolerable. He was a younger full brother of Yeslam, a half-brother of Bakr and Osama. He had come to America with considerable business ambition. Gradually, however, Los Angeles and its lawyers were threatening to strip him of his money and his serenity.

Khalil Bin Laden had studied business at the University of Southern California during the 1970s, but he never graduated. He was a thin, shy man, exceedingly polite, curious about American mores but conservative in his habits of mind. He dressed well but not flamboyantly—he wore Greg Chapman gray flannel suits handmade in Beverly Hills and Bally shoes. For a time he drove a Rolls-Royce convertible; later, as he settled into America, he chauffeured his family in a considerably less conspicuous green Ford minivan with cloth seats. He prayed punctually five times each day and gave up alcohol after a few cursory experiments, according to friends. He could be ruthless at French card games—“In cards, I don’t know my own mother”—but he was otherwise gentle and diffident. When he met his future wife in a Beverly Hills nightclub, some of his acquaintances thought she was probably the first woman he had ever dated seriously.¹

She was a formidable character—Isabel Bayma, a Brazilian who had grown up in poverty in her native country, migrated to the United States, and found her way to Beverly Hills. She had had a child by a previous marriage by the time she met and won Khalil. He adored her, according to people who knew them, and he showered her with luxuries she had never known. Some acquaintances described her as strong and stalwart; others as difficult and demanding. They married at the Riviera Country Club in Bel Air. They started a family, and as their household brimmed with young Saudi-Brazilian-American children, they bought a home in fashionable Brentwood, on Jonesboro Drive, and contracted for a $600,000 luxury renovation.²

At USC, Khalil met a Beverly Hills jeweler, Michael Kazanjian, who sold high-end pieces to members of the Bin Laden family. Kazanjian was a client of Alexander Cappello, a young USC business graduate who aspired to build a boutique investment bank with global reach. Cappello was a handsome, dark-haired, Gatsby-esque character from Bakersfield, California, who would become an assiduous collector of Italian Renaissance art and statuary. He met Khalil through the international students department at USC. He operated from well-appointed offices in a prestigious skyscraper in Century City. Initially, he helped Khalil with real estate investments.³

Khalil’s business goals were vague. “If I don’t know what’s going on, I just say no,” he would explain as he turned down one American promoter after another. He seemed mainly to be hedging his bets against political trouble in Saudi Arabia, trying to build up enough American real estate and business activity to generate a secure $200,000 to $300,000 in annual income outside the kingdom, just in case. He tinkered and continually generated new ideas. He was attracted, as were many in his family, to tangible investments such as real estate and aircraft leasing, but he was also willing to consider some unusual ventures.⁴

Early on, Khalil registered a Delaware company called Kabeltan Corporation, where Alex Cappello served for a time as president, according to company documents. Kabeltan acquired a one-story blond-brick office building in Carrollton, Texas, outside Dallas, about five miles north of the Lyndon B. Johnson freeway. In nearby Garland, at 3737 Dividend Drive, the company bought a light warehouse rented out to industrial tenants. Other investments were more exotic. Through Cappello’s firm, Khalil purchased an interest in a loan made to the country singer Kenny Rogers for the purchase of an Arabian horse named Nujad, which was estimated to be worth $10 million to $20 million. The breeder who had sold the horse kept a ranch in Northern California and had agreed to lend Rogers a portion of the purchase price. Later, because he needed to raise cash quickly, the breeder offered to sell Cappello’s firm the loan at a considerable discount. Cappello made sure the horse had adequate life insurance, and Khalil agreed to participate in the transaction; his only risk involved the creditworthiness of Kenny Rogers, which proved to be a sound bet. Bin Laden made a profit of more than 30 percent in less than a year from the country singer’s loan.⁵

During one of his annual sojourns in Saudi Arabia, it occurred to Khalil and Isabel that the kingdom lacked a proper toy store of the kind they and their children had grown accustomed to in Los Angeles—a supermarket for children, like Toys “R” Us. They decided to launch Saudi Arabia’s first large toy store, a somewhat daring venture in a kingdom where many religious scholars regarded dolls as blasphemous idols. Khalil explored the possibility of purchasing a Middle Eastern franchise from Toys “R” Us itself, but the price was too steep. (Companies that issue franchises under a famous brand name can also be sticklers about requiring a franchise owner to perform extensive hands-on work at the business, to ensure its success. The Bin Ladens explored purchasing McDonald’s franchises for the Middle East, according to a family member, but learned that owners were required by headquarters to put in long hours frying hamburgers and french fries; there was some joking within the family about which Bin Laden brother could be dispatched to deep-fat-frying school in America, but they ultimately decided to pass.) In the end, Khalil decided to launch his own business, Toyland, in Jeddah. To stock its aisles he hired in Los Angeles an experienced American toy merchandiser, Mark Love, and they used a new company, BIN Corporation, to handle purchasing and shipping between America and Jeddah.⁶

As these endeavors flourished, Khalil slowly became entangled in American legal proceedings. He seemed allergic to property taxes, and over the years he allowed a number of his real estate properties to fall into arrears, which led government attorneys for the State of California and Dallas County, Texas, to file civil cases against him. His Brentwood home-renovation project produced vituperative civil lawsuits between Khalil and his Iranian-owned building contractor in Los Angeles, a dispute that carried particular irony for a descendant of such a famous contracting family.⁷ But his greatest trouble began, in the aftermath of Salem’s death, as Khalil moved into the novel business of private American prison leasing, through the auspices of a new company he formed called America in Motion Corporation.

America in Motion shared an office suite with BIN at 15260 Ventura Boulevard, a granite-and-glass building more than twenty stories tall in Sherman Oaks, California, in the San Fernando Valley, just over the chaparral hills from Hollywood. When he was in Los Angeles, Khalil worked at the Sherman Oaks office from time to time, but mainly he delegated day-to-day management to his American executives and employees. By the late 1980s, Alex Cappello had faded from the scene. He was replaced by Franklin Frisaura, a real estate broker who was Khalil’s brother-in-law—Frisaura had married Isabel Bayma’s Brazilian sister, Regina, whom he had also met at a Los Angeles nightclub. Frisaura brought a touch of entertainment-industry cachet to the Bin Laden enterprise. He had grown up in Southern California; his father was a comedian, and his mother, after performing as a young adult in the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, had also earned a living as an entertainer. Frisaura had attended junior high school with the sons of Mo Austin, the former president of Warner Brothers Records. The Bin Ladens had accommodated relatives by marriage in jobs at their various enterprises for almost a half century, and Frisaura followed in this tradition; he served as an adviser and manager for Khalil on real estate and other business projects.⁸

America in Motion made an initial foray into tax-oriented aircraft leasing, but this did not turn out very well. One early customer was Steven McKim, the president of a small Northern California company, Magnum Aircraft International, whose investors included Clint Eastwood, the actor then renowned for his Magnum Force and other movies. Magnum Aircraft, headquartered near Eastwood’s home in Carmel, was involved in research into retractable landing gear for helicopters. For reasons that remain opaque, McKim persuaded Khalil to purchase and lease back to Magnum a vintage 1958 twin-engine Spanish fighter jet, according to court documents. McKim’s successor at the company, Darius Keaton, later said that Magnum was “a small corporation located in Monterey with no business outside the state. None of the employees of Magnum did any significant travel…The last thing needed was a $225,000 jet.”

In any event, soon after its purchase, Magnum stopped making lease payments. America in Motion sued. Khalil Bin Laden’s lawyers named as defendants not only McKim but also Clint Eastwood. The lawsuit was ultimately dismissed without a judgment against the actor-director or the payment of any settlement. America in Motion wound up in possession of an old jet suitable for aviation hobbyists.⁹

In addition to his brother-in-law Frisaura, Khalil relied for advice upon Musarrat Ali-Khan, a somewhat mysterious figure with a colonial-era mustache who was described in one court document as “a chartered accountant in Pakistan” who had later settled in Jeddah as an employee of the Bin Laden family. When Khalil first opened his Toyland stores in Saudi Arabia, Ali-Khan worked with him there. Later he moved to Los Angeles to help run America in Motion. Khalil paid him a salary of more than five thousand dollars per month. Ali-Khan looked around for business deals that might interest his employer. During the summer of 1988—in the same months that Osama Bin Laden was secretly forming Al Qaeda back in Ali-Khan’s native country of Pakistan—he arranged an unusual investment for Khalil involving some Massachusetts prison facilities.¹⁰

The deal revolved around a company called Resun Leasing, which was headquartered in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. Founded in 1986, Resun specialized in premanufactured modular buildings for use by governments, schools, hospitals, and businesses; its projects ranged from small offices for security guards to huge warehouses. To avoid tying up too much of its cash, the company looked for private investors willing to participate in its leasing contracts. America in Motion purchased what a court document described as “an undivided one-half interest in certain prison facilities leased to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts” in Hampden and Hampshire counties.¹¹

The price was just over $500,000. Khalil raised the money by borrowing $770,000 from the Banque Indosuez. Resun then returned the difference to Khalil—more than $200,000—in a transaction that Bin Laden referred to as a “rebate,” but which Ali-Khan called a “kick back,” although it was not clear what he meant by that term. Khalil apparently used the extra cash to pay down separate debts to Banque Indosuez. His obligations in Los Angeles were beginning to pile up; for example, his total debts to Banque Indosuez exceeded $3 million, according to a letter written by Ali-Khan to Khalil in 1989. Khalil eventually went into technical default on some of this debt; he sought to sell some of his Los Angeles investment properties to pay off his loans.¹²

In May 1989, America in Motion renegotiated its prison-leasing deal with Resun. As part of the financial transfers generated by this refinancing, one of Khalil’s attorneys in Beverly Hills, Ron Goldie, accepted into a trust account a sum of $227,500, according to court filings. Goldie then agreed to pay $130,000 of this money to Musarrat Ali-Khan, who claimed it was owed to him as part of oral business agreements he had made with Khalil. The confusion was compounded by the fact that Khalil was attempting to monitor the prison transactions by fax and telephone from Jeddah, where he had returned for the winter and spring.

On BIN Corporation and America in Motion Corporation stationery, Ali-Khan wrote several times to Khalil in Jeddah, providing a history of convoluted financial transfers that had culminated with his receipt of the $130,000, which he described as a “loan” that had been made to BIN Corporation on “my personal guarantee.” Khalil faxed back a series of skeptical questions. “Please provide me with the following details of this said loan,” he wrote, including “the purpose for which we get this loan…actual utilization of this loan…when we got this loan…who is the creditor…If there was a loan agreement, fax me a copy.” Ali-Khan tried to satisfy him but failed. In early June, Khalil wrote to him from Jeddah: “The faxes you sent to us…are still vague and I disagree on many of the contents. Please provide us full details of information especially on the $130,000 loan you said you personally guaranteed.”¹³

Khalil flew into Los Angeles, talked to the lawyers and executives involved, and concluded that “the $130,000 was fraudulently taken by Khan,” as he put it in a written declaration later filed in court. Ali-Khan stopped coming to work. On September 22, 1989, Khalil Bin Laden drove to the Van Nuys police station in the San Fernando Valley, approached an officer working at the counter, and asked to file a criminal complaint. With this act, he took yet one more step into the mire of the American legal system. Khalil had initially been unsure “if this could be criminal or just civil,” that is, a situation where he should just sue Ali-Khan to try to get his money back, rather than going to the police. He had decided, however, that he was the victim of a crime under American law. The police “sent me upstairs, and upstairs they sent me back down,” Khalil remembered. Finally, “One of the policemen told me, ‘Okay, fill this form.’”¹⁴

Following an investigation, the Van Nuys district attorney did indict Ali-Khan on charges of felony embezzlement, and the police issued a warrant for his arrest. Prosecutors argued in one court filing that the Pakistani was a “possible international thief…wanted for bank embezzlement in Paris.”¹⁵

Khalil also sued in civil court. Ali-Khan hired lawyers who summoned Khalil to a conference room in a skyscraper in downtown Los Angeles for five grueling days of deposition testimony in July 1990. Ali-Khan’s lawyers grilled Bin Laden about the history of America in Motion, his outstanding loans from Banque Indosuez and other banks, his decision to pursue criminal charges at the police station—they even asked whether Khalil had a vendetta against his former employee because they had both become interested in the same woman at the Sherman Oaks office. (“No,” he answered.) One of the lawyers involved in the examination later described, in a written declaration, the scene that unfolded in the skyscraper’s conference room as the interrogation proceeded:

At some point, Mr. Binladin claimed that I was asking the same questions over and over again…and seemed to be becoming agitated. I then asked a question and, while pondering his response to it, Mr. Binladin got out of his chair and walked around the deposition room to a spot near and behind me and then back to the general area where Mr. Finkel [his lawyer] was sitting…Mr. Grimwade made a comment on the record to the effect that the record should reflect that the witness was pacing…At that, there was a heated exchange…Mr. Binladin (at about 1:40 P.M.) broke into tears, sobbing, holding his head in his hands, with Mr. Finkel claiming on the record that I had “made” his client cry…¹⁶

“The tears in my eyes were real,” Khalil recalled. The opposing lawyers were “disrespectful of both me and my attorney”; they made “nasty comments” and asked “questions full of innuendo”:

The repeated questioning and harassment finally got to me…The stress relates not…to “kickbacks” or my conduct, but rather, to the continuing barrages of questioning…which are intrusive into my personal life…¹⁷

It was enough to make a man nostalgic for shariah courts. Nor had Khalil yet discovered the limits of his aggravations.

ABOUT SIX WEEKS AFTER Khalil’s ordeal by deposition, two officers from the Los Angeles Police Department, accompanied by a Brazilian woman, Elizabeth Borges, appeared at the door of the Bin Laden home in Brentwood. The officers asked to speak with Marta Silva and Auria DaSilva, two Brazilian women who worked as maids and nannies for the Khalil Bin Laden family. When the two women appeared, the police asked questions about the circumstances of their employment; Borges translated between Portuguese and English. The thrust of the police questioning, as Borges later put it, involved whether the maids were “unable to leave the [Bin Laden] residence and were being prevented from leaving by threats and demands that they must pay monies” to their employers.¹⁸

Borges later explained the origins of her visit in court documents. She had been telephoned in June and told that Marta Silva “was being forced to work” for the Bin Ladens “for long hours without days off or relief, and she was not being paid for the work she was performing.” Borges agreed to contact the Brazilian consulate in Los Angeles, but when she did, she found they “would do nothing.” (In Jeddah, Khalil had been appointed Honorary Consul of Brazil, a position designed to help facilitate business between his wife’s native country and Saudi Arabia.) The consulate told Borges to contact the Los Angeles Police if she felt there was a serious problem, and she did. She acted, she wrote in a court declaration, because she believed that the Bin Ladens had “violated the constitutional rights” of their maids “by holding them in their employment against their will.” Borges claimed that the maids told her that:

They were both required to work 18 hours a day without any breaks for breakfast, lunch or dinner…. They were never given any days off and worked seven days a week. They were never paid directly for their work either by cash or check. The conduct of Isabel Binladin was generally very rude and disrespectful to them…Their movement and ability to go outside the family compound in Jeddah or Los Angeles was very limited and restricted…[The Bin Ladens] also made statements to Ms. Silva that past employees had tried to escape and leave their job, that they were apprehended and made to pay for it in more ways than just with money…¹⁹

After interviewing the two Brazilian women, however, the Los Angeles Police Department took no action. The two employees left the Bin Laden home the following day; according to the Bin Ladens, Borges agreed to arrange for their immediate departure by air, home to Brazil. Instead, they remained in Los Angeles.

The Bin Ladens said they were outraged by the allegations made against them. They quickly filed a lawsuit against Borges, accusing her of helping the maids escape from their contractual employment obligations and speaking “slanderous” words in the presence of the two police officers. In their complaint, they explained that because Khalil and Isabel

travel extensively, and because Mr. Binladin has heavy business commitments, it is necessary that they have domestic employees who travel with them to care for their five children…Ms. Silva and Ms. DaSilva agreed to accompany [the Bin Ladens] to Saudi Arabia to take care of the Binladins’ five children and perform light housework and to cook, respectively, at…various homes and vacation locales with the proviso that if they desired to terminate their employ, Ms. Silva and Ms. DaSilva would immediately return to Brazil. In reliance on these promises, [the Bin Ladens] obtained precious Saudi Arabian visas…²⁰

Under U.S. immigration law, the complaint continued, the Bin Ladens were responsible for keeping track of their maids “at all times.” Now that the women had disappeared, their family would suffer because they “may not be able to obtain U.S. visas for their household help in the future.” They had suffered “severe emotional distress” from the incident with the police, they wrote, and had agreed to allow the maids to leave and fly home only “in order to defuse the embarrassing situation (which could have adversely affected the Binladin children if it had continued).”²¹

Borges replied that “any statements made by her to the Los Angeles Police Department…were made to protect the constitutional rights” of the two women and thus were legally privileged.²²

Borges eventually returned to Brazil; the lawsuit’s claims and counterclaims were never resolved, according to the available court file. The Bin Ladens ultimately concluded that they had had their fill of Los Angeles. Khalil agreed to purchase from Salem’s estate the Liberian corporation set up to hold Desert Bear, the Spanish-revival estate near Orlando; he paid just under $1 million, according to a person familiar with the transaction.²³ The Bin Ladens sold their Brentwood home. In the future, their family would spend summer months in Florida.

America was at times baffling and annoying, at times intrusive and insulting, but it was now an inexorable part of Khalil’s hyphenated family, Saudi-Brazilian-American. They were Bin Ladens, but their children were increasingly American influenced. Managing that balance would prove increasingly difficult.

During that summer of 1990, the season of depositions and upstart maids and door-knocking police in Los Angeles, the allied governments of the United States and Saudi Arabia, rocked by crisis, were discovering something similar, on a parallel plane of foreign policy, oil, economics, and war. Here, too, the integrity and wealth of the Bin Laden family would be implicated—and jeopardized.

27. THE SWISS ACCOUNTS

ON THE NIGHT of August 6, 1990, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney led an American delegation to King Fahd’s seaside palace in Jeddah. Fahd preferred the Red Sea port to Riyadh; among other reasons, one of the astrologers he relied upon had forecasted that he might be knifed in the capital. On this particular evening, Jeddah had the additional advantage of placing the king as far from danger as possible and in position to escape Arabia quickly. Four days earlier, Saddam Hussein’s army had invaded and occupied Kuwait; the emirate’s small army had collapsed and the royal family had fled into exile. Iraqi units now seemed to be regrouping for a possible thrust at Saudi Arabia’s eastern oil fields, the largest of which lay below the Kuwaiti border, on the opposite side of the kingdom from Jeddah.

General Norman Schwarzkopf, the senior American military commander for the Middle East, and Paul Wolfowitz, an under secretary of defense, followed Cheney into the king’s reception hall. Fahd sat at the head of the room. Beside him was his half-brother Abdullah, now crown prince, an independent-minded man who prided himself on his warm relations with Saudi Arabia’s northern desert tribes. Several other princes and a Saudi general formed a row down one side of the room. Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, the ambassador to the United States, hovered near the king, prepared to interpret between English and Arabic. As the discussion began, Schwarzkopf kneeled on the floor to review satellite photos that showed Iraqi troop dispositions near Saudi Arabia; some of Saddam’s units, the general pointed out, were patrolling as deeply as twenty-five kilometers inside the kingdom’s sovereign territory.¹

Fahd’s government had showered Saddam with subsidies during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s—as much as $26 billion, by Fahd’s account, a tilt encouraged by the United States in its attempt to contain revolutionary Iran. All that cash had now proved to be a gossamer defense. Equally, the billions spent by the Saudi royal family on British fighter aircraft and weapons systems in the Al-Yamamah deal (which channeled hundreds of millions of dollars in fees each year to Bandar’s Washington bank accounts) had proved worthless; Saudi Arabia lacked the manpower (an army of 70,000, in comparison to Iraqi forces numbering about 2 million) and skill to even blunt, never mind defeat, an Iraqi invasion. Saddam’s incursion into Kuwait had starkly exposed the Al-Saud as rulers of a country that lacked the trained population, industrial strength, and military rigor to protect its treasure of hydrocarbons. Cheney said the United States could do the job, but its troops would have to deploy quickly and in large numbers. He promised that American forces would leave Saudi Arabia as soon as the crisis passed, or whenever Fahd ordered them to go. For his part, Fahd said that if the Americans were to deploy to the kingdom, he wanted large numbers and a serious operation. The security bargain that had long lain just below the surface of the U.S.-Saudi relationship, managed as discreetly as possible so that it would not embarrass the Al-Saud before their xenophobic people, had now been pulled into the open for all to see. America was the guarantor of Saudi Arabia’s independent existence; without that guarantee, the peninsula was vulnerable to any marauder bold or foolish enough to take it—as had been the case for centuries before the Second World War, when Arabia held no great prize but was periodically conquered nonetheless.

Fahd spoke to Abdullah in Arabic. Bandar stopped interpreting, but Chas Freeman, the Arabic-speaking U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, followed their exchange.

“Don’t you think there should be some consultation?” Abdullah asked, referring to the religious scholars and tribal leaders who would surely resent the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Christian and Jewish soldiers to defend the kingdom.

“There’s no time,” Fahd said, as Freeman recalled it. “If we delay, we may end up like Kuwait. There is no Kuwait anymore.”

“Yes, there’s a Kuwait,” Abdullah said. “There is a Kuwait.”

“Yes, and its territory consists of hotel rooms in Cairo and Paris and London,” said Fahd.

“I take your point,” said Abdullah.

Fahd turned away from his half-brother and faced Cheney. “Okay,” he said simply.²

American fighter jets and military transport planes thundered onto Dhahran’s airfields within twenty-four hours, but throughout August, American commanders later acknowledged, their intervention was something of a bluff; if Saddam had poured south from Kuwait with all his forces, he would have certainly been able to occupy some Saudi oil fields, at least temporarily. For several weeks, the kingdom’s fate seemed uncertain.

Awkwardly, Fahd tried to consult with Islamic scholars and tribal leaders, even though it was plain that his decision to rely on Washington for rescue was irreversible. On August 14, the kingdom’s blind grand mufti, Sheikh Bin Baz, issued a fatwa officially blessing the arrival of non-Muslim troops as necessary and permissible under Islamic law. It was a document no more convincing than the sheikh’s pronouncements years earlier about Earth’s place at the center of the solar system. Even Saudis who supported Fahd’s decision could see, as Osama Bin Laden put it later, that the royal family was manipulating its salaried religious leaders “to increase its legitimacy” at a moment of crisis. The Bin Baz decree was particularly offensive, not least because it “insulted the intelligence of Muslims.”³

Osama was certainly among those who were outraged, but his later ridicule of Fahd and Bin Baz belied the complexity of his actions and thinking at the time. He was a Bin Laden and still very much a creature of the Saudi government. He offered no public dissent that summer. Rather, he moved quickly with the rest of his family to protect his personal fortune against the possibility that the Al-Saud regime might collapse. Just as the Americans had been hedging for years against a crisis of this kind, so had the Bin Ladens. For them, too, it was a moment for decisive action, and Osama was a full participant in the family’s program of self-insurance.

Omar and Haider Bin Laden flew to Geneva to confer with Yeslam about how to shift more of the family’s money to the safety of the Swiss banking system. The Bin Ladens had previously established accounts in a Swiss bank for a family foundation; the purpose of this foundation, established by Mohamed Bin Laden, remains unclear, but its Swiss account may have been a hard currency vehicle for overseas charity or inheritance transfers. With Yeslam’s assistance, the brothers now decided to close and liquidate that foundation, and to open a master account at a new bank, the Swiss Bank Corporation. On August 17, Omar, Haider, and Yeslam signed documents at the bank’s offices in Geneva to create sub-accounts for virtually all of Mohamed Bin Laden’s children. As Omar put it later: “Sub-accounts were set up for the benefit of each of more than fifty heirs of Mohammad Binladin, including one sub-account on behalf of Osama, and these sub-accounts were funded…with a portion of the legal inheritance of each heir.” The accounts were created, Omar acknowledged, “in response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait.”⁴

On Osama’s behalf, Omar and Haider signed a “Declaration on opening an account or securities account,” as required by Swiss law. The two formally declared “as holder of the account” that “the beneficial owner of the assets to be deposited with the bank” was “Mr. Osama M. Binladin.” Someone handwrote Osama’s name into the appropriate blank. On the second page they chose the foreign currency to be used in Osama’s account: “U.S. $.”

A second form, signed the same day, provided “full Power of Attorney” to Yeslam over the account; here the beneficiary was handwritten as “Sheikh Osama Mohamed BINLADIN.” The bank’s account form offered a choice between a kind of authority that would require Osama and Yeslam to sign all documents jointly, or one where either Yeslam or Osama would be authorized “to act severally and by their sole signature.” This latter was the approach they chose—Yeslam would be empowered to control money in the account on his own signature, without written approval from Osama. It was a sign of the coherence and confidence that persisted within the family, even amid the strains occasionally produced by Yeslam’s withdrawal to Geneva.

On August 20, Osama’s account was funded with a deposit of $450,000—a modest portion of his inheritance, but a comfortable hedge against sudden disaster in the kingdom. That sum immediately began to earn interest at a rate of about $2,500 per month; the amount of monthly interest would vary with market rates.⁵

In his later sermons, Osama equated interest-paying banking practices with usury, and he denounced them as stark violations of Islamic law. Usury, he once observed, “has been forbidden by all the religions,” yet in the United States, “you build your economy and investments on usury. As a result of this, in all their different forms and guises, the Jews have taken control of your economy.”⁶ That summer, however, amid his family’s panic, Osama showed no reluctance to earn interest—indeed, in his Swiss Bank Corporation account, he would soon take down more interest in a year than many Americans earned in annual salaries. It was a striking instance of his capacity for hypocrisy—and telling that it involved money.

THERE ARE credible accounts that Osama predicted Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait before it occurred. His high school–era friend Khaled Batarfi recalled listening to him speak at an informal luncheon diwaniyah gathering at the home of a wealthy businessman in Mecca early in 1990, when Arab news media were full of stories about Saddam’s buildup of troops on Kuwait’s borders and his bellicose claims to Kuwaiti territory. Osama urged that Saudis begin to train themselves to fight Saddam, as he and his followers had done in Afghanistan. He told an illustrative story, the thrust of which was, as Batarfi paraphrased it:

You are sophisticated, you are an engineer, you are a doctor, and suppose you send [your children] to a good school. But it is a tough neighborhood, and there are other kids who are street smart and very tough. Then your neighbor comes to you and says, “Lend me money or I will send my kids after your kids.” You know he is never going to pay the money back. There is a limit to what you can give him. So it’s about time that you train your kids because you are going to have stand up eventually. Saddam has all these tough kids. He has these soldiers who are poor, unemployed, they are motivated and tough. I’m saying, Let us take advantage of our training in Afghanistan. We have gotten tough. But we have to get ready. We have to go to camps now. We have to get tough now. Otherwise, King Fahd won’t be ready.⁷

This was certainly Osama’s sense of himself in 1990: An international Islamic guerrilla leader who worked in service of his king—someone so loyal to the Al-Saud that he even tried to think ahead on their behalf. Nor were Iraq and Afghanistan the only frontiers where Osama imagined that he played this role.

Even before his return to Saudi Arabia in late 1989, he had provided money to support Islamist rebels fighting against the weakening communist government of South Yemen, the half of divided Yemen that controlled the Bin Laden family homeland in the Hadhramawt. The political and religious equation in Yemen as the Cold War ended was very complex. Ali Abdullah Saleh, an army officer and Sanhan tribesman who had come to power in a coup, led North Yemen; he received some support from Saudi Arabia—primarily because he was not a communist—but his relationship with the Al-Saud was not smooth. He did, however, share Saudi Arabia’s antipathy toward South Yemen’s Soviet-backed regime. As global communism teetered during 1989, confronted by democratic rebellions from China to Europe, South Yemen’s government looked vulnerable. From Afghanistan, where he had become close to a number of Yemeni volunteers to that war, Osama saw an opportunity to extend his achievements in jihad. South Yemen’s leftist government had stripped a number of previously elite families of land and privileges, particularly in the Abyan Governate, and during the 1980s, some younger members of these families had turned to international radical Islam as an ideology of resistance. One of the Abyan leaders, Tariq Hasan Al-Fadli, founded a group called Al-Jihad. Al-Fadli said later that his South Yemen group “did have external support…through the grace of Almighty God and our venerable Sheikh Osama Bin Laden, may God protect him…He funded everything.” Bin Laden supported other Yemeni Islamists as well.⁸

As had been true of the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, Islamist violence in South Yemen advanced both the statecraft interests of the Saudi government and the looser ideology of Bin Laden and his allies. Indeed, Osama may have started his jihad project in South Yemen with encouragement or even direct support from Saudi intelligence, in the same way that he had worked in Afghanistan. Richard Clarke, who later directed counterterrorism programs in the Clinton White House, has written that Prince Turki Al-Faisal “had reportedly asked” Osama “to organize a fundamentalist religion-based resistance to the communist-style regime” in South Yemen. In the context of 1989, such a request would have been entirely consistent with Saudi foreign policy, and with the long use of the Bin Laden family in covert defense projects involving Yemen. Turki has described the matter differently than Clarke, however; he has said that Osama “came to see me with a proposal” to foment rebellion in South Yemen, and that “I advised him at the time that that was not an acceptable idea.”⁹

Whatever the truth, the geopolitical equation changed during the first six months of 1990 in a way that led Riyadh to renounce support for violent rebellion in Yemen. The fall of the Berlin Wall led to Yemen’s peaceful reunification and the formal end of the South Yemen state. On May 22, 1990, Ali Abdullah Saleh became president of a united Yemen; as part of the bargain, he tried to co-opt and calm Islamist groups that had previously waged jihad. Osama and other radicals, however, did not see the virtue in this deal, or in a national government that incorporated former communists, and they persisted with their preaching and organizing. According to Ahmed Badeeb, Turki’s chief of staff, Saleh eventually called King Fahd to complain. The Saudi government responded by pressuring Osama to quiet himself, and by one account, during the late spring or early summer of 1990, the government raided a Bin Laden family farm that Osama was using to support his Yemen project. Afterward, Osama reportedly wrote an angry letter of protest to Crown Prince Abdullah.¹⁰

This fracture in Osama’s alignment with Saudi foreign policy coincided with his rising irritation, during the autumn of 1990, over Fahd’s plan to employ American-led troops in a war to oust Saddam’s forces from Kuwait. Increasingly Osama conveyed a presumptuous attitude to the Saudi officials with whom he met. He employed bodyguards. He wrote a sixty-page paper laying out his idea to recruit and lead his Afghan-trained mujaheddin on a campaign to expel Saddam from Kuwait and save King Fahd from the dark conspiracies of the American occupation troops. He said it would be dangerous for Saudi Arabia to allow Christian troops to fight its wars. He sought a meeting with Fahd but was deflected to other Saudi officials, including a high-ranking prince at the defense ministry—this person has never been clearly identified, but it appears to have been either Abdul-Rahman bin Abdulaziz, a full brother of the king, or Khalid Bin Sultan, the influential son of the defense minister.¹¹ Osama also met with Ahmed bin Abdulaziz, Salem’s longtime contact, number two at the interior ministry. Osama later described what happened:

I directed my advice straight to the deputy Minister of Defense, informing him of the great sins from which the state should desist, and of the danger of persisting with them, but to no avail. Then I met the deputy director of the ministry for security affairs, who strongly reproached me for advising the deputy Minister of Defense and began haranguing me about exactly the same sins that I had mentioned to the minister. Then he said: “This is well known—we don’t need anyone to tell us about it.”¹²

His proposals about the coming war in Kuwait annoyed the Saudi government, but they were inconsequential. It seems, instead, to have been his persistent preaching and contact with jihadis in Yemen that eventually led the interior ministry to seize his passport during the winter of 1990–1991. As Prince Turki put it, speaking of his conversations with Osama about jihad in Yemen: “This shy, retiring and seemingly very reticent person had changed.”¹³

Osama believed—and said repeatedly—that he was working for the true interests of the Saudi royal family, not against them. His older half-brothers, however, particularly Omar and Bakr, interpreted this longstanding family mandate of fealty quite differently after Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait.

Around this time, Bakr got to know Chas Freeman, the U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia; Freeman occasionally took private soundings from prominent businessmen in Jeddah. Buoyed by these contacts, in the autumn of 1990, Bakr and Omar led the Saudi Bin Laden Group (in which Osama was a shareholder) to sign contracts with the United States Army to build facilities that would support the U.S. troop presence and the coming war with Iraq. Between September 30 and November 7, the Saudi Bin Laden Group constructed a heliport at the King Abdulaziz Air Base “in support of the United States Army deployed on Operation Desert Shield,” according to a “Certificate of Achievement” later issued by Major General William G. Pagonis of the U.S. Army Central Support Command. Pagonis recognized one Bin Laden executive for his “personal contribution” to the “most successful logistical deployment in support of a combat victory in military history…We are proud of your accomplishments and humbled by your sacrifices. We salute and thank you.” Bin Laden Telecommunications installed systems for the United States Central Command and the 35th Signal Brigade of the U.S.; its executives were awarded certificates of thanks signed by General Norman Schwarzkopf. They had provided, Schwarzkopf affirmed, “outstanding support” of the American war effort. The Bin Ladens also undertook a project to improve a twelve-hundred-kilometer desert highway “so that U.S. troops could move easily and safely to and from the northern regions of Saudi Arabia,” as Omar Bin Laden put it later; Omar personally oversaw the work. Osama surely knew about these construction projects, from which he profited as a shareholder and dividend recipient; he was in the kingdom throughout this period, although he also apparently traveled back and forth to Yemen.¹⁴

As with the interest accumulating in his Swiss bank account, there is no evidence that he was burdened by pangs of conscience over the profits he earned from his family’s wartime work for the Americans, even as he lectured in the Bin Laden mosque near Kilo 7 and denounced American foreign policy. He was flirting with rebellion but was unable yet to embrace it fully. He postured as a dissenter but he avoided the most serious risks. His views were nuanced, changeable, and laced with contradictions.

THE ARRIVAL OF American soldiers in the kingdom in late 1990, at a time when democratic revolutions were erupting worldwide, provoked the most vigorous and open debate about political freedom and identity in Saudi Arabia since the Nasser period. Urban liberals, particularly women, seized upon this seeming Riyadh Spring. In November, forty-seven women attracted worldwide attention—and shocked many Saudis—by staging a protest in which they climbed into automobiles in Riyadh and drove through the city in open violation of the kingdom’s ban on female drivers. In early 1991, forty-three liberal-leaning businessmen, journalists, university professors, and former government officials signed a petition to King Fahd asking for ten political reforms. It was a relatively timid list and stopped far short of demands for a democratic order, but in Saudi terms, it was bold: the petition sought new councils to widen political participation, reform of the religious police, and “greater participation of women in public life, within the scope of the sharia.”¹⁵

This modest liberal uprising confirmed the deep-seated fears of Saudi Islamists that the royal family’s alliance with America, and particularly its decision to invite American troops into the kingdom, would become a lever for a top-down push by the Al-Saud toward a more secular society. Widely circulated underground tape-recorded sermons and lectures voiced these hysterical warnings throughout that autumn and winter. Two conservative university professors, Safar Al-Hawali and Salman Al-Awda, issued particularly fiery speeches arguing that the kingdom’s real enemy was not Iraq, but the West. Another influential voice belonged to Awad Al-Qarni, author of a 1987 book titled Modernity on the Scale of Islam, which insisted the royal family and its secular allies were promoting alternative forms of national identity that undermined the Koran. The conservative ferment intensified after the women’s driving protest; Islamist leaflets listed the female drivers by name, as well as the names of their husbands, and denounced the women as “communist whores.”¹⁶

The Islamists also gathered signatures for their own petition to King Fahd demanding political reforms. They shared the liberals’ desire for greater participation but crafted an agenda to direct reforms toward even stricter adherence to Islamic law.

Abdulaziz Al-Gasim, a conservative judge in the sharia courts and a leader of the Islamist petition drive, who would later go to prison, sought out Osama Bin Laden in Jeddah in early 1991 to persuade him to add his signature to the cause. As the son of a Hadhrami immigrant with no formal education in Islam, Osama was not a significant figure in the Saudi world of dissident Islamist scholarship, but his martial reputation as a mujaheddin leader in Afghanistan and his membership in a prominent merchant family made him a potentially attractive fellow traveler. “He apologized and refused to sign,” Al-Gasim recalled. “He said he was very busy with Afghanistan and Yemen. He was supporting the ideas [in the petition draft] but he didn’t want any conflict with the Saudi government and lose support for his activities. He didn’t want to start another war. He was not convinced that these goals could be achieved in a peaceful way.”¹⁷ Some Islamists in Saudi Arabia, justifying their meek resistance to corrupt governance by the royal family, had long cited their desire to avoid fomenting fitna, or Koranically undesirable internal division within the Islamic community; Osama relied upon the same rationale that winter.

One night, Osama joined a rooftop dinner meeting in Jeddah where exiled Kuwaiti guests talked about their travails and asked for support, recalled Jamal Khashoggi, who attended. When his turn came to speak, Osama voiced a fear that America had a secret plan to use its presence in Saudi Arabia to “secularize Saudi Arabia, and to make a dramatic change in its regime or the way it ruled by imposing a president and ministers who are secular,” as Khashoggi recalled it. Osama specifically named Ghazi Al-Ghosaibi, the suit-and-tie-clad Saudi ambassador to Great Britain, as a candidate for this imposed leadership. Al-Ghosaibi, Osama predicted, would reform curriculums in school to spread secular ideas, “encourage women to take off their hejab,” and “spread corruption through arts and opening up society.” By Khashoggi’s account, Osama concluded his remarks with a warning:

Be aware. Be careful. We have to be united and rally around the Saudi leadership in order not to be weak against this determined secular campaign, that is no doubt coming with American support, that already has some people and some agents—a fifth column in Saudi Arabia. There are a lot of Saudis who are ready to serve the American alienation project, which will alienate Saudis from their religion.¹⁸

In one sense, Osama’s views remained as they had been since he was fourteen: where Muslims live, they should aspire to a pure society based upon Islamic principles. He remained deeply unsettled, however, about how to chase this ideal within Saudi Arabia. The presence of American troops and presumed secular conspiracies worried him, but his faith in the Al-Saud and his own family restrained him. In communist-influenced lands, such as Syria, South Yemen, and Afghanistan, violent jihad could be embraced because it seemed the only alternative. In Saudi Arabia, the situation looked more complicated. Among other things, Osama continued to accept the essential claim of the Al-Saud that they were righteous and legitimate guardians of Islam’s birthplace—the claim from which the Bin Laden fortune was derived.

THE SWIFT and overwhelming rout of Iraqi forces from Kuwait by American-led coalition troops infused King Fahd and the royal family with pride, relief, and confidence. Fahd exacted immediate revenge against those Arab governments and entities that had supported Saddam—particularly Jordan, the Palestinian Authority, and Yemen. Tens of thousands of Palestinian and Yemeni workers were expelled from the kingdom. On the domestic front, amid the general sense of relief that accompanied the war’s end, Fahd seemed to have a divided mind; he thought some mild political reforms might assuage his subjects, but he and his brothers also sought to ensure that wartime ferment did not lead to postwar revolution. As the weeks passed after Iraq’s surrender, petitioners on both the left and right were fired from their jobs, and some were imprisoned. To all of those who had doubted or needled Saudi Arabia in its season of crisis, the royal family offered an unmistakable message: we are back with a vengeance.

Osama Bin Laden left the kingdom on May 1, 1991, by his own account, less than two months after the end of the war. The circumstances surrounding his departure remain somewhat unclear. He was not forced out, according to Bakr Bin Laden. Through one of his half-brothers—apparently not Bakr—Osama pleaded to the interior ministry that he needed a one-time exit visa to travel to Pakistan to liquidate investments there. The best evidence suggests that he was genuinely uncertain of his plans—that he wanted to reunite with the Al Qaeda followers he had left in Afghanistan but was ambivalent about returning to the Afghan civil war. While in Jeddah during the war, Bin Laden had dispatched followers from Afghanistan to Sudan to rent farms and guesthouses there. Later, using a donation from an Egyptian lawyer, he bought a farm north of Khartoum for $250,000, according to a Sudanese aide. During the same period, according to Khalil A. Khalil, who tracked Islamists for the Saudi government, Osama “spent some time trying to find a tribe” in Yemen “where he could marry a daughter and win the tribe’s allegiance. He worked on this for about eighteen months to establish himself—first in a social context, then to bring his fighters to the south of Yemen…There was speculation that he had weapons in the United Arab Emirates and also investments and businesses there. The framework he was exploring was Yemen first, for the jihad army, and UAE as a base for media and economic activities.”¹⁹

Osama’s motivations are easier to document than his particular logistical plans. The harassment he faced from Saudi officials over his Yemeni organizing, and the humiliation he felt over their rejection of his wartime advice, left him burning with a desire to be free of the kingdom’s stifling repression, to re-create the independence and prestige he had enjoyed during his late years in Afghanistan—preferably without the constant exposure to gunfire, however. He was as exhausted in his own way by the narrowness of Saudi political culture as were the more secular members of his family who decamped periodically to Los Angeles or Orlando or Paris to enjoy some breathing space. As Osama later described his passage into exile during that spring of 1991:

The Saudi regime imposed on the people a life that does not appeal to the free believer. They wanted the people to eat and drink and sing the praise of God, but if the people wanted to encourage what is right and forbid what is wrong, they could not. Rather, the regime dismisses them from their jobs and in the event the people continue to do so, they are detained in prisons. I refused to live this submissive life, which is not befitting of man, let alone a believer. So I waited for the chance when God made it possible for me to leave Saudi Arabia.²⁰

How did Bakr and his half-brothers regard his departure? The evidence is thin, but it nonetheless makes plain that as Osama left the kingdom, his family made no effort to exclude him from access to his own money or from participation in new family investments. In July 1991, for example, Yves Bruderlein, a Swiss lawyer with offices in Geneva, formed a Cayman Islands company called Cambridge Engineering “to make and hold investments,” particularly “in hedge fund products offered by major financial institutions, including Deutsche Bank.” According to Bruderlein, Cambridge was “indirectly owned” by the Saudi Bin Laden Group, and Bakr Bin Laden had signing power at the firm. The Saudi Bin Laden Group chose the Cayman Islands as its place of organization “based on the advice of their attorneys,” he said later. Its Swiss directors received “our instructions solely from the Saudi Bin Laden Group.” In the initial period after the formation of Cambridge Engineering, Bruderlein and other Swiss directors never had contact with Osama, but nonetheless, Bruderlein said he was aware that Osama was “part of the Saudi Bin Laden Group” and thus a participant in the hedge fund investments.²¹

Bakr said later that he “never intervened” with anyone in the Saudi government to help Osama leave the kingdom, “nor was I aware at that time of any involvement by Osama in terrorist activities of any kind.”²² He was, he suggests, passive and accepting of Osama’s decision. The broader credibility of his assertion may depend in part, of course, on the definition of “terrorist activities.” Al Qaeda had been founded three years earlier. Its volunteers still participated in the Afghan civil war; others fought in Yemen or evaded capture by the Egyptian security services from which they had fled. Whether some or all of this violence constituted terrorism lay to some extent in the eye of the beholder. It is also uncertain how much Bakr knew about these militias or Osama’s involvement with them.

The Bin Ladens continued to facilitate financial transfers to Osama. On October 28, 1991, a sum of $482,034.37—his original deposit, plus accrued interest, less banking fees—was transferred out of Osama’s sub-account at the Swiss Bank Corporation in Geneva to the custody of his half-brother Haider. The transfer occurred during a period when other subaccount holders among Mohamed’s children were taking full control of their own Swiss accounts, now that the war crisis had passed. Osama apparently decided to reorganize his banking within the Islamic world. What became of his dollar deposit after it reached his half-brother Haider is unknown, but there is no indication that it was withheld from Osama. The transfer marks Osama’s last known use of the Western banking system.²³ With a stubborn attitude, but without a coherent plan, he passed into a new life of voluntary exile. His circumstances were more complicated than those of his grandfather Awadh, whose flight from debt almost a century earlier had ultimately birthed the family fortune, but Osama’s instinct was the same: he had no choice, he felt, but to start again.

28. A ROLLS-ROYCE IN THE RAIN

IBRAHIM AND CHRISTINE BIN LADEN formally separated on November 22, 1991, after almost five years of marriage. They had a two-year-old daughter, Sibba; Christine moved with her into a Los Angeles–area duplex apartment. She hired divorce lawyers. In February they filed papers in Los Angeles County Superior Court seeking a temporary restraining order against Ibrahim; Christine feared, she wrote in a declaration, that her husband “may become angry with me” over her decision to leave their marriage “and may retaliate by taking my daughter with him to Saudi Arabia.”

Christine was then thirty-one years old, about five years younger than her husband. She told the court of her “desperate financial situation.” It was a sort of desperation, however, that was peculiar to the west side of Los Angeles. “For many years during the marriage, Ibrahim provided me with a monthly allowance of approximately $15,000,” she reported. Yet for January and February of 1992, following their separation, he had provided her only $5,000, which was “woefully inadequate.” She had no income apart from Ibrahim’s support. Because of her husband’s sudden parsimony, she wrote, “our lifestyle has been changed and our living conditions are substandard to those which we had during marriage.” She explained to the court:

Ibrahim, my daughter and I lived in our Bel Air mansion at 634 Stone Canyon Road. This was a 7,000 square foot house, on three acres of property, with a seven car garage. The house is presently worth between $8–$10 million dollars. We employed full-time groundskeepers, household help, chauffeurs, and enjoyed private security. We had many cars, two of which were Rolls-Royces. Ibrahim would take my daughter and I on frequent vacation trips. We always flew First Class or on one of the private family jets. We would spend a month at a time traveling in Europe, or skiing in Switzerland, or short trips to Hawaii. This lifestyle also supported me making trips to New York, to go shopping, the opera and the theater. Last year Ibrahim let me buy a $16,000 fur coat on a shopping trip.

Christine inventoried the considerable investments she had made in education and other forms of self-improvement, such as the $3,250 she had recently spent on cosmetic surgery, as well as additional sums on manicures, pedicures, waxing, hair coloring, and haircuts. She had enrolled in private needlepoint classes and took private lessons in English horseback riding, painting, watercolors, sculpture, and Arabic. It was “not uncommon” for her to spend $3,500 on a dress. Ibrahim bought her “furs, jewelry, a $30,000 watch,” and a $90,000 diamond wedding ring. She purchased a Steinway piano for their Bel Air home, and they “always ate at the best restaurants,” such as Spago and Morton’s.

Not that the issues all revolved around her: Christine reported that she also typically spent $3,000 per month on Sibba’s and her clothing. It cost her several hundred dollars per month just to buy birthday presents adequate for Sibba to give to her Bel Air toddler friends at parties. The Bin Ladens, she added, did not shirk when it came to their own parties for children. In Jeddah, the previous September, she had spent $7,000 on a party for Sibba that included “a monkey, the rental of five horses, a hot air balloon, a private disc jockey, a photographer and catering, decoration and gifts for our guests.”

Christine did not wish to create the impression that she had built this lifestyle on her own. Ibrahim, she reported, also lived well. For example:

He has flown us to Switzerland just for the weekend to see a car show. He has numerous cars: Two Rolls-Royces, a Honda, a Lexus, a Mercedes 500 SEL and a Lamborghini jeep. Ibrahim will, at times, rent a Mercedes at $350 a day so that he does not have to drive his Rolls-Royce in the rain.

His passion for his cars had left her with some resentment. In particular, when she became pregnant with Sibba, Ibrahim had promised “to buy me a Rolls-Royce of my own; however, I only received a Limited Edition Jeep Cherokee.” She expected better of him. He was, after all, involved in construction in Saudi Arabia of the two Holy Mosques, airports, highways, military bases, royal palaces, and other large development projects.

The Bin Laden family is worth in excess of $2 billion dollars. This organization employs 17,000 people and has substantial real estate holdings. This family organization also owns a fleet of 8–9 airplanes, with a full staff of pilots and stewardesses. The family just recently purchased a G-4 Aircraft worth approximately $25 million, and a new Learjet.

Christine’s declaration offered a hint about how she might be assuaged now that she and Ibrahim were destined for divorce. She had found her previous personal allowance of $15,000 per month, she noted in her court filing, to be “adequate.”¹

THEY HAD MET in Beverly Hills during the mid-1980s, according to Jack Kayajanian, one of Christine’s attorneys. Ibrahim was in the company of Dodi Fayed, who later died in a Paris automobile accident with Princess Diana of Wales. (Fayed was the son of a wealthy Egyptian businessman, Mohamed Fayed, who purchased control of Harrods department store in London and the Hotel Ritz in Paris, where members of the Bin Laden family frequently stayed.) Christine Hartunian, as she was then, was a daughter of an Armenian Christian businessman who lived in Orange County, California. At twenty-five, Christine relied upon her father for financial support and had never earned enough money at a job to have filed a tax return. She was tall, slender, dark, and beautiful—“a very attractive, very flashy young lady,” as another of her attorneys, Michael Balaban, recalled. One of her favorite nightspots was the Denim and Diamonds bar in Santa Monica, then a fashionable urban cowboy watering hole with a sparkling globe above the dance floor and stuffed heads of moose and deer mounted on the walls.²

As Balaban got to know Christine, he found that she seemed to drop the names of a number of celebrities, suggesting that they were her friends. Balaban thought she was “full of crap,” as he put it later. One day, however, he was meeting with his client in his Los Angeles office. A partner of Balaban’s represented Paul McCartney, the former Beatle, on a copyright matter, and McCartney happened to be in the law firm’s waiting room. Christine stepped into the corridor; McCartney saw her and exclaimed, “Christine! How the hell are you?” As Balaban said later: “You don’t forget things like that. She knew what the hell she was doing.”³

Ibrahim Bin Laden was not batting in the same league. He was the youngest full brother of Yeslam and Khalil. He had followed them to Los Angeles and attended the University of Southern California for a year, but he did not share his older brothers’ interest in business. He seemed content to drift along on his dividend payments. One of the Americans who occasionally joined him on the L.A. nightclub circuit recalled an evening at a restaurant in Beverly Hills when several of the Bin Laden brothers had come into town and gathered for dinner. It was around the time when Ibrahim fell for Christine. The Bin Laden brothers had a ritual, the American recalled: when the restaurant bill arrived, they would wrestle for control of the check, each more determined than the next to perform the role of host and patron. Ibrahim was the only brother present who did not seem interested in this performance. “In the end, my father is going to pay for this,” he explained. Another time, this person recalled, Ibrahim said he did not see the point of working as an executive in the family business. They could never surpass their father’s financial achievements. They had more than enough money. What was the point of striving so hard?⁴

Ibrahim was devout. Christine regarded herself as a Christian, without allegiance to any particular denomination, but as she and Ibrahim talked about marrying, she agreed to convert to Islam. There would be no other way to live comfortably as a member of the Bin Laden family. As their wedding neared, however, the couple negotiated over how to synthesize—in the form of a written prenuptial contract—the imperatives of his upbringing in Saudi Arabia with those of her upbringing in Southern California.

A Los Angeles–area attorney, Robert Shahin, drafted a proposed agreement, titled “Antenuptial Agreement Submitting Marriage to Islamic Law.” It was an extraordinary document, one that attempted to ensure that Ibrahim was protected by Saudi laws governing child custody and inheritance issues, in exchange for his pledge to Christine to forswear his right under Islamic law to take more than one wife. A draft copy was later filed in court.

It began:

Whereas the Bridegroom and Bride anticipate moving from time to time from various parts of the world to others…The parties agree as follows:

1) Islamic Faith. Both the Bridegroom and Bride shall be practicing Muslims during the marriage and the children of their marriage shall be raised as Muslims…

2) Islamic Law Controls. All incidents of the marriage shall be governed by Islamic law, except as modified herein…

3) Only One Wife. The Bridegroom hereby waives his right during this marriage to have more than one lawful wife.

4) Mahr (Dowry to Bride). The Bridegroom hereby pledges a $____________ dowry to the Bride, as her sole and separate property…In the event of divorce, the Bridegroom shall pay the Bride another $____________…

The draft required Christine to give up her rights under California’s laws governing community property; Ibrahim pledged “under Islamic law” to support any children born to them. A provision captioned “Equalizing Grounds for Divorce” noted that under Islamic law, Ibrahim could initiate a divorce virtually at will, while Christine’s grounds for divorce were more circumscribed. Therefore, “The Bridegroom hereby agrees that he will take steps to terminate the marriage upon the Bride’s request if irreconcilable differences arise between them.” In the event of divorce, Ibrahim “shall have custody of the children after their infancy, as defined by Islamic law.”⁵

Christine later said that she and Ibrahim “never could agree” about all the points in the draft prenuptial contract. They decided to marry anyway. “We were supposed to sign it after the marriage and we still never agreed,” she said later. “So it was never signed.”⁶

Their wedding took place at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The betrothal ceremony consecrated their union under Islamic law. Visiting Bin Laden family members and other guests lodged overnight in the hotel’s pink stucco bungalows “and the wine and champagne flowed throughout the evening,” recalled Robert Freeman, one of those who attended. Half-siblings such as Shafiq and Huda were among those in attendance. Salem was still alive—the wedding took place in January 1987—and he presided over the reception dinner with his usual songs and jokey monologues. Christine was “a beautiful bride,” Freeman later wrote. Her dress molded itself tightly around her hourglass figure and spread out in circular drapes around her ankles. “Her long beautiful flowing red tresses mesmerized the guests…The top florists must have worked into the night preparing the stupendous array of beautiful blooms throughout the hotel. It was an unbelievable sight!”⁷

After their honeymoon, the couple moved into the mansion on Stone Canyon, across from the Riviera Country Club. Sibba arrived in January 1989. As they had planned, they divided their time between Bel Air and Jeddah. Christine found it difficult to be away from her mother, who lived in California, and to share space with the larger Bin Laden family at Kilo 7, Ibrahim later said. To please her, he said, he bought beachfront land beside the Red Sea and broke ground on what would become a seaside estate worth about $3 million.

It was not long, however, before their marriage slipped into difficulty. Their quarrels persisted, and finally, late in 1991, Christine decided to move out of the Bel Air house and take Sibba with her. Ibrahim hired his own lawyers after she sued for divorce. As his brother Khalil had learned in 1990, when America in Motion had its troubles, Ibrahim was about to discover that American attorneys, once loosed, could rattle even a mellow man’s serenity.

“DO YOU KNOW what your assets are worth?”

“No.”

“Do you have any idea what your assets are worth?”

“No.”

Ibrahim sat in a Los Angeles conference room in the summer of 1992, answering deposition questions from Christine’s attorneys. The couple now seemed to be headed for a full-blown Los Angeles divorce trial; among other issues, lawyers for the two sides argued over how much income Ibrahim received, how his fortune might be valued, and what part of it Christine and Sibba might tap as alimony and child support. Christine’s lawyers found Ibrahim elusive on the subject of money. He said it was just not something he worried about or understood in any detail.

“Have you made any attempt to find out what your assets are worth?”

“Yes…I talked to my brothers who run the company. Nobody—nobody knows.”

“Which brothers did you talk to?”

“I talked to Yehia…Y-e-h-i-a…”

“Where is Yehia located?”

“Saudi Arabia.”

“What did you ask him?”

“How much each of them worth. How much each of—each one of us worth.”

“And what did he say?”

“It is hard to tell. He doesn’t know.”

“Did you tell him you needed to have the information to file with the Court in the United States?”

“No. I told that to my brother Khalil, and he told him.”

“And what happened?”

“Nobody knows. They don’t know.”

“…Mr. Bin Laden, other than what you have already stated, what attempts have you made to ascertain what your net worth is?”

“Just pick up the phone, and I talk to my brother, and to my knowledge, you see, I don’t know the work. I don’t work with them. I don’t know what they have, so what they send me, I assume that is what they—that is what they sent. I don’t know…”

“Do you know what your income is on a yearly basis?”

“It goes up and down. It is—it depends on the job we get. It is not like a salary, so I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, it depends on the job you get?”

“Like if the organization this year have jobs from the government, we have more roads. If we are doing good the profit will go up. If we don’t do good or if we don’t have a job, there is no profits.”

“What was your income for 1991?”

“I don’t know.”

“What has been your income so far in 1992?”

“The what?”

“What has been your income so far in 1992?”

“I have no idea.”

Michael Balaban and Christine’s other lawyers had particular difficulty believing that Ibrahim did not work at all, as he claimed, and, indeed, had never worked a day in his life. Under California divorce law, it was in Ibrahim’s interest to maintain during court proceedings that he did not receive any salary during the period of their marriage; if his income derived from assets he owned before he met Christine, it might be harder for her to win a large settlement.

“Do you know any of your brothers who don’t work at some job?” Balaban asked Ibrahim at one point during his deposition.

“Period—they don’t work at all, you mean?” Ibrahim asked.

“Exactly.”

“Yes.”

“Which ones?”

“Myself…”

“Well, give me a number, and then we will identify them.”

“Myself. Abdullah. Mohammed. Shafig…Abdullah Aziz…and some I don’t keep in contact with. I don’t know if they work or not.”

Balaban asked about his purchase of his Bel Air mansion during the early 1980s, before he met Christine; the price of the estate had been just over $2 million.

“How much cash did you pay?”

“I don’t remember, but some—around one million cash…No. More than that. I paid, maybe, one mill, six hundred.”

“Thousand?”

“Yeah, dollars.”

“Okay, so one million, six hundred thousand dollars?”

“Yes.”

“Where did you get the cash?”

“From Saudi Arabia, from my brother, Yeslam.”

“Was that a loan?”

“No. He sold some of my stocks.”

“…And whose name was the house put in?”

“My brother in—my brother’s name.”

“Which brother?”

“Yeslam.”

“Why?”

“Because they told me if I put the house under my name, and then here, I have to pay income taxes if I own something.”

“Who told you that?”

“Some of my friends.”⁸

On and on it went, the lawyers probing, Ibrahim responding in a tone of genial indolence. Following the depositions, as their trial date steadily approached, the estranged couple filed dueling declarations about the collapse of their marriage and their daughter’s best interests.

Christine wrote that she felt trapped when she visited Saudi Arabia with Sibba. Ibrahim would disappear and “stay at the beach or go to one of his brothers’ houses…and if he did come home…he would eat and take a nap or eat and leave the house quickly.” During her stay in Jeddah during 1991, she wanted to go home to California, but Ibrahim “would not allow Sibba and myself to return to the United States.” Ibrahim took her passport and told her “that it was being held at the Bin Laden Organization’s office.” She needed Ibrahim’s signature to obtain an exit visa, and he refused, she wrote, telling her, “If you want to go home, you can go home, but Sibba is staying.” She now feared, she told the court, that if Ibrahim was permitted to take Sibba to Saudi Arabia as part of their postdivorce custody agreement, she might never return. During their quarrels, Ibrahim had told her “numerous” times that Sibba “would go to Saudi Arabia no matter what happens and no matter what the court orders.” Other members of the Bin Laden family had also told her that if Ibrahim took Sibba to Saudi Arabia, “he would not return her to me.”⁹

“I see very clearly the intention of Chris is to punish me by keeping Sibba from going to Saudi Arabia,” Ibrahim wrote in reply. He had “never tried to stop her from leaving” the kingdom; in fact, “I helped her to leave…One time we had an argument and she wanted to leave and I told her you could do whatever you want, she knows very well she could leave if she wanted to. The law a wife can’t leave without a husband’s permission applies on the Saudis only. The only time I take her passport is to get her an exit visa…She did not need any signature from me for her to leave.”

He felt that Christine was deliberately attempting to alienate him from his young daughter. As an example, he reported that he had recently been laughing with Sibba in the car when he asked her if she was happy, and she said she was, and then she asked him, “Are you happy, Baba?”

“Yes,” he had answered.

“But mom said you are unhappy man.”¹⁰

At a deposition called by Ibrahim’s lawyers, Christine described the agreements she and her husband had made about Sibba’s upbringing.

“So it would be correct, then, that you and Mr. Bin Laden agreed that she was going to be reared in the Muslim faith?

“Yes.”

“And would the child be exposed to, and if possible, learn to speak, read and write Arabic?” “Yes.”¹¹

Ibrahim wanted to raise his daughter as a Saudi and as a Bin Laden, he told the court. It was in Sibba’s best interest to understand who she was, and to become a full member of an extended family upon which she could long rely:

It is better for her now to know these things and grow up exposed to that culture, because I believe growing up with different “way of life” make you accept them, and it would be harder if she is not exposed to it until later—after she is grown. The other reason I want her to go to Saudi Arabia is to know her other part of the family, to feel their love for her, to be able to speak the language and feel comfortable to pick up the phone and ask any of her family if she needed anything or had a problem.¹²

He was convinced that Christine was using their daughter as a lever to extract money from him. “She only started to give me this trouble when she found out the Court will not give her what she wants from me,” namely, alimony of $21,648 a month and an additional $6,188 in child support. He was prepared to offer $3,250 in monthly child support, but as for alimony for Christine, his lawyers asserted, she had “remained with Ibrahim for less than five years, during which she enjoyed the benefits of Ibrahim’s family’s largesse. She certainly didn’t earn a lifetime of such living.” She should go out and find a job; she “has been supported long enough.”¹³

Their trial was scheduled for June 1993. As it neared, the two finally began to negotiate. On July 6, 1993, they completed a “Final Divorce Judgment” that brought their struggle to an end—or so they believed.

Ibrahim agreed to pay $5,000 per month in child support and $335,000 in a onetime cash settlement payment to Christine, with no additional alimony or attorney fees. He would be permitted to keep his 1977 Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow; his 1983 Rolls-Royce Corniche; his 1992 Hummer; his 1991 Lexus; his 1984 Honda Civic; his 1987 Lamborghini jeep; his 1986 Mercedes-Benz 500 SEL; and his Mercedes jeep, as well as sole title to his real estate in Los Angeles and Jeddah, his bank accounts, and his interest in the Mohamed Bin Laden Company. Ibrahim agreed to spend six months of each year in the United States and to share custody of Sibba during that period.

Christine agreed to enroll their daughter in an Islamic school and to ensure that she received Arabic lessons. Until she was seven years old, Ibrahim could take her to Saudi Arabia for visits of up to one month; later, the stays could be longer.

It seemed a reasonable if expensively constructed compromise, and, indeed, the divorce decree between Ibrahim and Christine Bin Laden would hold steady for the rest of the decade—until the events of September 11 shattered the bicultural comity on which it rested.

29. THE CONSTRUCTION OF EXILE

BRITISH IMPERIALISTS laid out Port Sudan’s geometrical street grid in 1905. Its harbor lay tucked behind coral reef barriers halfway up the Red Sea’s western coast, across from Jeddah. In Britain’s vision of the coming century, the town would thrive at the head of a rail line linking the Nile River to Europe, via the Suez Canal, but the place was still awaiting its renaissance as the twentieth century neared its close. Postcolonial Sudan’s latest leader-for-life, General Omar Bashir, a veteran of brutal wars against African Christians in the country’s south, overthrew an elected prime minister in 1989. As he consolidated power, Bashir allied himself with an Islamist coalition led by a Sorbonne-educated, self-impressed Sudanese theoretician of religion and politics, Hassan Al-Turabi. In the usual manner of coup leaders, they promised to revive their country by investing in infrastructure projects that would benefit “The People.” In the same year that Bashir came to power, an offshore company controlled by the senior Bin Laden brothers won a contract to build a new airport at Port Sudan, where the country’s modest but economically vital oil exports flowed to market. The government of Saudi Arabia, which sought influence with its Red Sea neighbor, pledged to shoulder most of the $35 million cost.¹

The project was assigned to the Public Buildings and Airports Division of the Saudi Bin Laden Group. Omar Bin Laden, the University of Miami graduate, was placed in charge. By 1992 construction was well under way.

Omar was not the only Bin Laden who now had occasion to visit Port Sudan. At around the same time that his brothers won the airport contract, Osama provided $180,000 to a Sudanese-born aide, Jamal Al-Fadl, to purchase a salt farm near Port Sudan.² It was one of a number of investments in land and businesses that Osama had decided to make in Sudan. He had visited the country from time to time as he wound down his involvements in Afghanistan. It was an unruly, lively, friendly, and deeply impoverished country where a Saudi sheikh could be made to feel very important and where his hard currency accounts could go a considerable distance. After he found himself under pressure at home in Saudi Arabia, Osama came to see Sudan as preferable to either Pakistan or Yemen as a base for voluntary exile. The country’s Islamist-influenced government and its freewheeling poor society accommodated two strains of his evolving ambition—his commitment to international guerrilla warfare and his desire to establish himself as the head of his own business complex, in a manner comparable to other semi-independent Bin Laden brothers living abroad, such as Yeslam in Switzerland and Khaled in Egypt.

After he left Saudi Arabia in 1991, although he retained his shareholdings in the two major family firms, Osama seems to have regarded Bakr’s leadership of the Bin Ladens with gathering contempt. On some foreign policy issues of the day—the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the suffering of Muslim civilians in Bosnia and Chechnya—Osama’s outlook remained in broad alignment with the conventional wisdom of the Saudi establishment, which his elder brother took such pains to internalize and represent. Osama’s tactical approaches to these conflicts were increasingly independent, however. In 1992 the war in Bosnia measured the new equation between Osama and Bakr. Violence erupted around Sarajevo early in the year, and satellite news broadcasters beamed terrible images of Muslim civilian suffering to the Middle East. In July Bakr attended a glittering fundraising dinner at Jeddah’s Laylaty Hall, a site of society wedding receptions near the Red Sea. The guest list that night included Saudi foreign minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal. Contemporary Saudi newspaper stories reported that the donors, including Bakr, contributed about $5 million to the Bosnian cause, channeled through international Islamic charities. Osama was stirred by the same television imagery that spring, but his response was of a different kind—from Sudan, he dispatched a team of Afghan veterans to join the shooting war against Croatia’s attacking Catholics. “Gifts of charity,” Osama later wrote pointedly, “are weak…Bosnia is in need of men [and] weapons.”³

He seemed increasingly proud of his martial ambitions, particularly in comparison to the softer, regime-authorized foreign policy work of his brothers. A Bin Laden employee who had helped Osama during the anti-Soviet period in Afghanistan recalled meeting him at the Port Sudan airport construction site, where the employee was overseeing Bin Laden work camps. Osama seemed disappointed in him, as the employee remembered it. “I’m fighting a war here,” Osama said, “and you’re building an airport.”⁴

It would have been natural for Osama to visit the airport site—he was, after all, a shareholder of the Saudi Bin Laden Group, which was carrying out the contract—but whether he participated in that multimillion-dollar project to a greater extent, or profited from it, remains unclear. At some point between late 1991 and mid-1992, Osama decided to move permanently with his four wives and growing number of children to Sudan’s capital of Khartoum, which lay about seven hundred miles southwest of Port Sudan. He organized a number of new businesses in the city, with names such as Ladin International Company and Al-Hijra Construction; the latter referred to the Prophet Mohamed’s famous passage into exile, from Mecca to Medina. It was a presumptuous self-reference but one that spoke to Osama’s rising sense of himself as both righteous and persecuted, a self-image drawn in part from the experiences of his earliest mentors—his exiled prep school gymnasium teacher, who indoctrinated him, as well as the itinerant Palestinian organizer, Abdullah Azzam. As Osama now refitted, he may have imported construction equipment he had previously stored in Pakistan. His early projects in Sudan included some road building, according to Al-Fadl, particularly an eighty-three-mile road in the southwest of the country, near the border with Ethiopia.⁵

Several sources—although not Al-Fadl—have also mentioned Osama’s involvement with the Port Sudan airport project. Richard Clarke, the Clinton administration’s counterterrorism supervisor, has identified “a new airport” as among Bin Laden’s early Sudan projects, which Clarke said were undertaken as “a joint project” with the Islamist leader Al-Turabi. (Hassan Al-Turabi was fast becoming the latest in a succession of older religious intellectuals to mentor Osama self-interestedly, stroking his ego while reaching for his wallet.) Al-Turabi’s wife has been quoted as saying that Osama “built the Port Sudan airport.” Omar Bin Laden, however, has sworn in an affidavit that “to the best of my knowledge, Osama had no role in the performance of the Port Sudan airport construction project.” Omar also denied that the major Bin Laden family firms participated in joint construction projects of any kind with Osama or “with any other company controlled by Osama” while he was in Sudan during the 1990s.⁶

The Port Sudan airport was mostly finished by June 1992. That month, Prince Mohamed bin Abdullah Al-Saqeer of the Saudi Development Fund led an official delegation, including newspaper reporters, to attend a ribbon-cutting ceremony. Omar Bin Laden, dressed in a red-checked headdress, his round face sporting a neatly trimmed mustache, took the podium. He recited statistics about the new airport’s size and facilities. “This project has been accomplished by the will of God, and according to the international requirements and specifications,” Omar said. “We are happy to participate in this celebration to inaugurate this large cultural edifice and we ask God to bless this project and everyone who participated in it.”⁷

An account published in the London-based newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi almost a decade later reported that Osama was a “guest of honor” at this ceremony and that he sat in the front row. Omar Bin Laden has denied this, writing in an affidavit, “To the best of my recollection, Osama was not in attendance.” Omar produced contemporary Saudi newspaper stories that made no mention of Osama’s presence. “I did not see or meet with Osama on that trip or, in fact, on any other trip I made to the Sudan.”⁸

Bakr Bin Laden did meet with Osama in Khartoum during 1992. He traveled there “accompanied by other family members,” according to a family attorney, “to make a plea to Osama to return to his country, make amends with the Saudi government, and abandon the path of political opposition and exile from country and family on which he appeared to have set.” This was Bakr’s last meeting with Osama according to Bakr. Other family members and emissaries apparently continued to visit Osama and plead with him to come home. There were “almost nine” such missions, in Osama’s oddly phrased counting, and they appear to have lasted at least into 1994. Osama’s half-brother Tareq, for example, recalled visiting Khartoum in “late 1992 or early 1993.” His purpose, he remembered, was “to convince Osama to abandon his criticisms of the Saudi government and return to Saudi Arabia.” It was a short visit; Osama said that “he was happy in the Sudan and did not want to return to Saudi Arabia, as he was focused on building his businesses in the Sudan.” Tareq believed that Osama was engaged in legitimate business, he later told an American court. Tareq “did not see or hear anything during the visit suggesting that [Osama] was involved in terrorist or violent activities of any kind. Nor did he express any hostility to the United States.”⁹

These missions to Khartoum began when it “became clear to us that he had a hand in one way or another in some of these things, such as terrorist operations in Egypt and Libya,” according to Ahmed Badeeb, then chief of staff to the head of Saudi intelligence, Prince Turki. “The King ordered that Osama Bin Laden be called into the Kingdom. He was asked to return in order to discuss some of the things that needed to be discussed, and other things that were harming the Kingdom, but he refused to. He was sent a few messages, and his family was contacted; he continued to refuse to return.”¹⁰

King Fahd ordered Bakr to see Osama and persuade him to come home for consultations, according to two people who have discussed the matter with Bakr. He found Osama stubborn and arrogant. In his own account, Osama has emphasized that he did not blame any of his relatives for their entreaties—he regarded them as victims of King Fahd’s pressure, and he believed that his family’s dependency on the Al-Saud for construction contracts made them vulnerable to a form of extortion by the Saudi government. “I apologized to my family kindly,” Osama said, “because I know that they were driven by force to come to talk to me. This regime wants to create a problem between me and my family in order to take some measures against them.”¹¹

Some people in and around the Bin Laden family wondered if Bakr was really an adequate match for Osama. Bakr could come across as a less than commanding presence; one person who knew him well said he could seem like the boy on the playground who is often picked last for team games. As the family’s Osama problem accumulated during 1992 and early 1993, even some who respected and admired Bakr wondered how Salem might have handled things differently. Salem had been such a forceful whirlwind—he was physical, insistent, and difficult to stop. If he had been alive to undertake these early missions to Khartoum, Osama might have been returned to the kingdom in a burlap sack, tossed into the cabin of a private jet with a pile of Salem’s designer-brand luggage. But Salem was gone; Osama seemed to exploit the void.

He seemed also to revel in the attention that came with his family’s pleading. “He was out of touch in Sudan,” recalled his friend Jamal Khashoggi, who visited him there several times. Bodyguards, acolytes, employees, and volunteer fighters encased him as he moved around Khartoum; the nationalities and occupations of his followers varied, but they all depended on his money and his patronage. He shuffled between comfortable offices on King Leopard Street and a shaded home-office compound in posh Riyadh City. He attended horse races and stabled his own horses on his farms. His grandest business project involved an enormous tract of agricultural land in the southwest granted to him by the Sudanese government, where seasonal Sudanese laborers in his employ harvested oil and seeds from sunflowers; Osama showed off his largest flowers with the pride of a passionate gardener. He was tossing money by the bucketful into new and questionable Sudanese businesses, but in 1992 and early 1993, he nonetheless had plenty of cash to go around—enough to spend $480,000 on the purchase and renovation of a used airplane ferried in from the United States, and enough to meet payroll for several hundred Arab jihadis flown in from Pakistan, as well as the many hundreds of Sudanese laborers at his sunflower farm. Osama seemed to believe during this period that he could have it all in Sudan—wives, children, business, horticulture, horse breeding, leisure, pious devotion, and jihad—all of it buoyed by the deference and public reputation due a proper sheikh. He did not yet seem to grasp that his enterprise, particularly in its support for violence against governments friendly to or dependent upon the Al-Saud, might prove difficult to reconcile with the interests of his family in Jeddah. He could seem oblivious to the fissures opening up around him. When Jamal Khashoggi visited, Osama even spoke at length about his desire to organize an investment drive that would draw prominent Saudi businesses to Sudan, in order to strengthen this important new Islamist-leaning country.

“Osama, don’t you realize that people are afraid to be associated with you?” Khashoggi asked. Osama did not answer. He only smiled, Khashoggi recalled, “as if he were happy he was so important.”¹²

ON FEBRUARY 26, 1993, in New York, a car bomb detonated in a parking garage of the World Trade Center, killing six people and injuring just over one thousand. Investigators soon identified a fugitive, Ramzi Yousef, a Pakistani raised in Kuwait, educated in Wales, and trained at camps in Afghanistan, as the leader of the conspiracy. Although Osama Bin Laden was not identified as Yousef ’s direct patron, then or later, in the broader media coverage of transnational jihad that followed the first World Trade Center attack, some journalists and commentators did note Osama’s presence in Sudan and described his reported financial handouts to multinational volunteer fighters. For the Saudi royal family, this attention transformed Osama, for the first time, from a discreet domestic problem into a public embarrassment.¹³

Less than three months after the New York bombing, on May 3, 1993, in Riyadh, Mohammed Al-Masari, a professor of physics, and Saad Al-Faqih, a medical doctor, announced the formation of the Committee for the Defense of Legitimate Rights, an organization seeking reform of the Saudi political system. Al-Masari and Al-Faqih were both Islamists; the Muslim Brotherhood, in particular, had influenced Al-Faqih, who came from a well-known Saudi family of doctors who attended to the royals. Al-Masari, for his part, had shown unusual facility as a media spokesman and organizer at a time when unlicensed satellite television dishes and fax machines were proliferating in Saudi households. Both men had been involved in political petition drives and underground sermon distribution after the Gulf war. After two years of organizing, Al-Faqih said later, “Everything appeared to be in place: charismatic preachers, thousands of enthusiastic followers, and a religious public. What was missing was an effective organization to channel this energy and pose a serious challenge to the regime.” They prepared carefully for their committee’s formal launch. Al-Masari met with diplomats at the U.S. embassy and solicited their support. The BBC, Voice of America, and other global media covered the organization’s debut.¹⁴

King Fahd struck back decisively. Perhaps he felt he had allowed these currents of dissent to drift along for too long. On May 12, the kingdom’s official Council of Higher ‘Ulema, its supreme body of religious scholars, denounced the upstart reformers, pronouncing officially and pointedly that they had violated Islamic law. Police arrested Al-Masari, Al-Faqih, and other known troublemakers. A broader attack on Islamist dissenters followed.

Osama now became a target; it is not entirely clear why. He is not known to have signed any of the important documents associated with the Al-Faqih–led dissident group, which posed a much more visible threat to the Saudi regime. It is possible that Osama issued tape-recorded or other underground sermons denouncing the Al-Saud during this period, and that the Interior Ministry discovered them. “We were there, working secretly,” Khalid Al-Fawwaz, who later served as Osama’s spokesman in London, once boasted.¹⁵ It is equally possible, however, that the Saudi government simply decided to include Osama’s case in its broader crackdown, given that he had now acquired an international profile in Sudan and that the government’s previous efforts to reel him in, through Bakr and other family channels, had failed.

On June 16, 1993, in Jeddah, Bakr undertook proceedings within the Bin Laden family to expel Osama as a shareholder of the Mohamed Bin Laden Company and the Saudi Bin Laden Group. In a later affidavit, Bakr implied that the family took this initiative, but it is likely that pressure from the Saudi government was a substantial cause. Bakr acted, he explained, “because Osama’s increasingly vocal criticisms of the Saudi government were harmful to the companies’ reputations in the Kingdom and elsewhere in the Middle East, and because Osama had refused to comply with the Saudi government’s demand that he return to the Kingdom.”¹⁶

“In the Name of Allah, Most Merciful, Most Compassionate,” began the text of one resolution setting forth “the Exit of One Shareholder.” The document suggests the family negotiated with Osama before it went forward. For example, Osama designated a “lawful attorney” from Jeddah, Muhamad Salem Al-Yaf ’ei, to represent him. Also, Osama specifically assigned all his divested shares to Ghalib Bin Laden, the younger full brother of Bakr and Salem. It was Ghalib who had visited Peshawar, Pakistan, during Ramadan in 1989, at a time when Osama was fighting in the battle for Jalalabad. There is evidence that Ghalib retained an interest in Islamic financial institutions at the time he agreed to accept Osama’s divested shares: in late 1993, Ghalib transferred $1 million to a new investment account at Bank Al-Taqwa, in the Bahamas, an offshore bank founded in 1988 with backing from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Al-Taqwa funded HAMAS in Israel and other Brotherhood-influenced radical groups in Algeria and Tunisia, according to a written assessment by the U.S. Treasury Department. What involvement Bakr Bin Laden had in the Al-Taqwa investment is not known, but Bakr did have signature authority over Ghalib’s account, which remained active until at least the late 1990s, according to bank documents filed in a U.S. court. Ghalib later sought to withdraw his investment from Al-Taqwa and filed suit against the bank. Through family attorneys, Ghalib said that he had never provided financial or other support for terrorism of any kind.¹⁷

The June 1993 shareholder resolutions initiated a process that lasted until the end of the year, leading to the final disposition of Osama’s assets. Its purpose, according to a family attorney, was “to deprive Osama of access to any funds derived from his interests in the family-owned companies.” Bakr and other family shareholders “were firmly opposed to any direct or indirect financial support from the family companies.” Tareq Bin Laden, a director of Mohamed Bin Laden’s flagship construction firm, felt that “Osama’s vocal criticisms of the Saudi government were harming the companies’ reputations in the Middle East.” There were also consultations during this time between the family and the Saudi Ministry of Commerce. The pace apparently allowed additional family delegations to visit Khartoum and plead with Osama to reconsider his position. His mother was among those dispatched. At least one younger brother met with him, according to Jamal Khashoggi, who was present in Sudan during that particular visit. (It was a “brother-to-brother” conversation, said Khashoggi, and he did not join in.) The most prestigious visitor throughout this period was Abdullah Bin Awadh Bin Laden, the legendary brother of Osama’s father, who was now near eighty years old. Bakr might be the head of the Bin Laden family for all practical and financial matters, but Abdullah, eldest of the male elders, remained a spiritual and moral leader. That a man of his age would fly to rough Khartoum to plead with Osama signaled the seriousness of the situation. Osama dug in. “With God’s grace,” as he described it later, “this regime did not get its wish fulfilled. I refused to go back.”¹⁸

His relatives warned him “that if I did not go back, they’ll freeze all my assets, deprive me of my citizenship, my passport, and my Saudi i.d., and distort my picture in the Saudi and foreign media. They think that a Muslim may bargain on his religion. I said to them: ‘Do whatever you may wish.’”¹⁹

Osama’s shares in the Mohamed Bin Laden Company and the Saudi Bin Laden Group were sold in a transaction designed so that Osama would not profit, yet in a way that would protect the rights of his heirs under Islamic law. The total value of Osama’s combined shares was set at about $9.9 million—a strikingly modest sum, but one that is difficult to evaluate, as an indicator of the market value of the Bin Laden companies, because few of the underlying assumptions used to set the price are available. In round numbers, however, the sale price suggests a total valuation of about $500 million for the two main Bin Laden companies combined. After consultations with the Saudi government, the funds generated by the sale of Osama’s shares were placed in some kind of special trust and eventually frozen, under court supervision. According to Abdulaziz Al-Gasim, a Saudi attorney who was jailed during the 1990s because of his Islamist activism, a Saudi judge ruled that the government could “take this money, seize it” but that it should not permit it to be distributed “to the other relatives.” Under Islamic law, Al-Gasim said, the money should be protected for the possibility of Osama’s reconciliation with the kingdom or, after his death, for his heirs. A number of aspects of Osama’s shareholding divestment remain unclear, however. For example, it is uncertain whether Ghalib paid cash for Osama’s shares, and if so, where he raised the money from. Is there a bank account in Saudi Arabia that has held the $9.9 million in trust ever since the sale was completed? How do Saudi courts assert control over such an account, if it exists? If the sale did not involve a cash payment, but rather a credit of some sort, how was this organized and who has kept track of the proceeds since then? The Bin Laden family has provided little clarity about these details. In any event, Osama was cut off from all dividend and loan payments, according to Bakr Bin Laden. “Osama has not received a penny” from any Bin Laden companies “since, at the latest, June 1993,” Bakr wrote in a later affidavit. Moreover, “I have not authorized and, indeed, have forbidden any person” acting on behalf of any Bin Laden firms “to make any payments, do any business with, or otherwise provide any support directly or indirectly to Osama or any of his companies since June 1993.”²⁰

In February 1994—for the first time—the Bin Laden family publicly repudiated Osama in a press statement. Bakr authorized a short release, which appeared in a Saudi newspaper under the headline “Bakr Bin Laden: All Family Members Condemn Osama Bin Laden’s Behavior.” The story referred to “reports by the media” about Osama and then offered two sentences from Bakr “to clarify his family’s position towards him.” Bakr announced:

I myself, and all members of the family, whose number exceeds fifty persons, express our strong condemnation and denunciation of all the behavior of Osama, which behavior we do not accept or approve of. As said Osama has been residing outside the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for more than two years despite our attempts to convince him to return to the right path, we, therefore, consider him to be alone responsible for his statements, actions, and behavior, if truly emanating from him.²¹

It was a careful formulation, focused on Osama’s conduct, not his character, and expressing a whiff of doubt about the reliability of media reporting about him. Two months later, in April, an equally terse statement from the Ministry of Interior announced that Osama Bin Laden had been formally stripped of his Saudi citizenship. The release cited Article 29 of the “Saudi nationality regulation”; it declared that Osama had refused to obey instructions, and that his actions “contradict the Kingdom’s national interest.” A Saudi government freeze on the proceeds of Osama’s divested shareholdings also took effect that month. According to attorneys for the Saudi Bin Laden Group, Osama “never had access to these funds” although they were not placed “in trust outside [his] control” until 1994, about nine months after the divestment proceedings began.²²

Osama issued no formal statement of his own on any of these occasions. Instead, beginning in the summer of 1994, he began to behave like a man who felt, so far as the Saudi royal family was concerned, that he no longer had anything to lose.

BY EARLY 1994, Osama had already secretly dispatched groups of jihad fighters, arms smugglers, and organizers to Somalia, Kenya, Yemen, Bosnia, Egypt, Libya, and Tajikistan, among other places, according to letters and testimony by his followers and allies. Some of these fighters arrived at their destinations and found that local conditions were not ripe for warfare. Others, like the Egyptian exiles around Ayman Al-Zawahiri, organized violent and ambitious conspiracies, such as an attempt to assassinate Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak—the plot went forward in 1995, when Mubarak was visiting Ethiopia, but it failed.

Al Qaeda persisted as a formal organization during these years; in Khartoum, steering committees wrestled with drafts of a wordy constitution. Its mission was to seed jihad in Muslim lands seen as under occupation or ruled by apostates. Still, it was a group more characterized by diversity than discipline. Partly this was because Osama himself remained unsettled about how he would define and organize his own participation in the international jihad—with his loss of citizenship and family shareholdings, he was in a renewed state of flux. His gifts of foresight and political analysis had always been limited; he now entered a period of groping and searching. Yet he made one explicit, forthright decision during the summer of 1994: he openly joined the opposition to the Saudi royal family.

His chief aide in this project was Khalid Al-Fawwaz, who was then in his early thirties. He had been born in Kuwait and studied engineering at King Fahd University in Saudi Arabia; he spoke English well. He had moved to Nairobi, where he dealt in automobiles and was in contact with other Al Qaeda adherents in the country to plan for a violent attack against Western targets. In early 1994, Al-Fawwaz was arrested; afterward he decided to escape from Kenya with his family. He made his way to London.²³

Al-Faqih and Al-Masari, the Saudi activists arrested the previous spring after unveiling their Committee for the Defense of Legitimate Rights, had escaped to London as well, with help from the Islamist underground. Osama had initially doubted the credibility of Al-Faqih’s reform group: “We thought at first that this may be a ploy by the regime to take the wind out of the sail of our movement, but by the time we realized that these were our brothers, they were taken into custody,” Al-Fawwaz later explained.²⁴ Now they were all united in London exile, protected by Britain’s asylum laws, which were among the most liberal in Europe. Working from ramshackle houses in North London, Al-Faqih and Al-Masari relaunched their opposition group, which represented the most serious political challenge to Al-Saud rule in Arabia since the Nasser period. Al-Fawwaz shared office space with them. Osama, however, did not wish to formally join. He wanted an organization of his own.

The Committee for Advice and Reform debuted in July 1994 in London. It was Osama’s own vehicle for participating in Saudi politics as an exiled dissenter and pamphleteer. It was little more than a musty room and a fax machine, but it described itself as “an all-encompassing organization that aims at applying the teachings of God to all aspects of life.” It had four aims: to eradicate all forms of non-Islamic governance; to achieve Islamic justice; to reform the Saudi political system and “purify it from corruption and injustice”; and to revive the traditional Islamic system by which citizens had the right, guided by religious scholars, to bring charges against government officials.²⁵

Osama’s committee was born in a period of technological prelude, on the eve of the explosion of the World Wide Web. At the time, fax machines offered the easiest way to send text documents across government borders without the risk of censorship. By the autumn of 1994, Al-Faqih, Al-Masari, and Al-Fawwaz were all blasting faxes from their allied groups to lists of numbers all around Saudi Arabia, the Gulf, and to international media outlets.

In Khartoum, released at last from any constraints of family and national loyalties, Osama sat at his several desks during late 1994 and early 1995 and wrote out lengthy essays, as frequently as once a week. He sent them to Al-Fawwaz, who put them on the blast fax. Some pieces were the length of op-ed articles; others went on for thousands of words, laced with religious quotations. Osama’s subject was not so much Islam as Saudi Arabia. His tone about the kingdom, the country his father and his family had done so much to build and legitimize, was often intemperate, impetuous, petty, sarcastic, or unreservedly angry. On September 12, 1994: “Saudi Arabia Unveils Its War on Islam and Its Scholars.” A week later: “Do not Give Inferiority To Your Religion.” On October 15, referring to the Saudi government’s Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs: “Supreme Council for Damage.” On March 9, 1995: “Saudi Arabia Continues War on Islam and Its Scholars.” On July 11: “Prince Sultan and Flight Commissions.”²⁶

He denounced by name King Fahd and his full brothers, the so-called Sudeiris, who were now the dominant grouping in the royal family—Nayef, at the Interior Ministry; Sultan, at the Defense Ministry; and Salman, the governor of Riyadh. Osama did not write subtly about them. Nayef, with whom he had met regularly and collaboratively during the Afghan war of the 1980s, had a “shady history” and was “filled with craftiness towards Islam and hatred for its advocates and religious authorities.” These princes were unworthy of their roles as guardians of the birthplace of Islam:

How could any intelligent person who knows the facts believe that these kinsmen—who corrupt the land and wage war on Allah and His Prophet—could possibly have been brought to serve Islam and Muslims?²⁷

Prince Salman, he later wrote, “has a shady past in which he has defrauded Islam and waged war on its people.” Prince Sultan was one of the “tricksters” who milked contracts for commissions and helped to drive the Saudi economy into the ground. And over all of this perfidy, greed, and incompetence presided King Fahd, who had impeded God’s laws, aligned himself with nonbelievers, and had proved to be “hostile to Islam and Muslims.”²⁸

To Saudi readers, his explicit attacks on Fahd and his full brothers had an obvious corollary—Osama was silent about the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Abdullah, who was presumed by many Saudis to be estranged from the Sudeiris and who enjoyed a reputation for relative piety and financial rectitude. It was possible to imagine in 1995 that pressure from Islamist campaigners abroad and jailed religious scholars at home might create a quiet coup among the Al-Saud, favoring Abdullah, similar to that which had brought Faisal to the throne three decades earlier. Osama seemed to be developing this angle in his essays. In one tract, he explicitly listed the late years of Faisal’s reign as an exception to his criticisms of royal family rule. From Switzerland, Yeslam Bin Laden predicted that Osama would be restored to power within the Bin Laden family, and Bakr would fade, once Abdullah came to the throne, according to Carmen Bin Laden.²⁹ Osama did probably fantasize that the Islamists might force Fahd out, and that Abdullah might then welcome him home on terms he could embrace. Who could predict the future? It was in God’s hands.

OSAMA’S EXPERIENCE as a businessman in Sudan was similar to that of his half-brother Khalil’s in Los Angeles, with America in Motion. His grandiose schemes did not pan out. His mentors took advantage of him. His employees misappropriated tens of thousands of dollars, money he could no longer afford to lose—Jamal Al-Fadl, for example, took Osama for $110,000 in a series of manipulated land and commodity deals. Osama had reorganized his personal banking at the Al-Shamal Bank in Khartoum, but his accounts gradually dried up. In the past, his personal wealth had provided him a financial cushion, but much of the money he spent on jihad came from private donors, charities, or quasi-governmental channels. Now his access to family dividends and loans had been pinched, and, simultaneously, as an enemy of the Saudi state, his charity fundraising had become complicated. As early as 1994 or 1995, “We had a crisis in Al Qaeda,” recalled L’Hossaine Kherchtou, one of his adherents. “Osama bin Laden himself said to us that he had lost all his money, and he reduced the salary of his people.” He was forced to lay off as many as two thousand workers at his sunflower farm during 1995. It was an extraordinarily fast downturn—Osama had blown through his lump sum inheritance, his dividends, and his charitable funds in just four to five years, a total of perhaps $15 million or more. In his essays, he denounced the Saudi royal family for corruption and financial malfeasance, but he had managed his own funds with all the prudence of a self-infatuated Hollywood celebrity.³⁰

He betrayed his desperation in a blast fax he issued on February 12, 1995, titled “Prince Salman and Charity Offerings in Ramadan.” He slandered the royal government with typical bombast, denouncing them in particular for new regulations that required annual zakat, or “charity,” contributions to be routed only through officially approved charities overseen by Prince Salman. “The Saudi regime’s previous general history of managing donations has been extremely bad,” Osama wrote. “It took popular donations for the Afghani mujaheddin as a means to put pressure on them, in order to realize Western and, in particular, American policies.” As he went on, however, Osama made clear that his essay was intended less as a critique than as a solicitation. He was worried about his own continued access to the Saudi charity on which he had so long depended:

We at the Committee for Advice and Reform alert all philanthropists and givers of charity of the danger of submitting any funds or alms to these harmful institutions, bodies and associations which use them to wage war on Allah and His Prophet. We call them to submit funds directly to those who deserve them domestically and abroad. They can also submit funds to religious or custodial persons who can assure that those who legally deserve the funds will receive them without them first being tampered with by the Saudi clan…There are safe agencies that will transmit funds to those who deserve them such as charitable associations in Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan, Yemen, Sudan and others. To ensure that funds are transferred to the accounts of these associations, we alert you of the importance of transferring outside the Gulf—far from tracking by the regime’s spies.³¹

His problems at the office were compounded by his troubles at home. One of his wives, known as Om Ali, or the “Mother of Ali,” traveled back and forth between Saudi Arabia and Sudan; she grew tired of Khartoum. She asked Osama for a divorce because “she could not continue to live in an austere way, and in hardship,” according to Nasir Al-Bahri, who later served as Osama’s bodyguard.

Osama’s eldest son, Abdullah, a teenager, also chafed at being cut off from the privileges enjoyed by a Bin Laden in good standing. He had seen enough of his cousins’ lifestyles in Jeddah—the slick cars, the Harley motorcycles, the wave runners on weekends in the Red Sea—to know what he was missing. He asked his father for permission to return to the kingdom and take up a job in the family business. He had already become engaged to one of his relatives “because my father supports early marriage,” as he later explained, and in 1995 he pressed his father to return to Saudi Arabia:

He would ask me to be patient and wait every time. On one occasion, I went into his bedroom when we were in Sudan to wake him up to pray, and he said to me with no introductions: “Abdullah, you can go to Saudi Arabia if you want.” I started crying for joy without saying a word. My father smiled calmly and said nothing. On the next day, I called my uncles in Jeddah and they helped in speeding up my arrival there…I wanted to be independent and build my life on my own, and according to my desires.

The defection of his firstborn pained Osama, according to Al-Bahri. Thereafter he “avoided mentioning Abdullah’s name…because he had been hurt by him.”³²

Osama’s mother still visited him, but now the Saudi authorities monitored her to ensure she was not ferrying cash surreptitiously. Osama reportedly continued to have contact with some of the religious wing of the family—his brother-in-law Jamal Khalifa said later that he stayed in touch. They had been fast friends during the early 1980s, and now Khalifa found himself in legal trouble over allegations that he supported violent Al Qaeda–inspired Islamic groups in the Philippines. A second brother-in-law may also have participated in Osama’s campaigns from Sudan. Yet for the senior brothers in Jeddah who led the Bin Ladens, and who managed the family’s relationships with the Saudi royals, Osama was now plainly an anathema. King Fahd’s court put the senior brothers on notice, according to a person who worked with them in Jeddah at the time; the Saudi government made it plain that the Bin Ladens would pay a steep price if they succored Osama. Nothing got the family’s attention like the prospect of losing its wealth. To ensure there could be no question about their loyalties, the family decided during this period to donate all of its zakat funds directly to the king’s charities, according to the person working with them in Jeddah.³³

Osama could probably sense the change in his family’s attitude. In 1995 one of his half-sisters died of cancer; she was the first of Mohamed Bin Laden’s daughters to pass away. Her death left the number of his surviving children at fifty-two. From Sudan, Osama telephoned Omar Bin Laden to express his condolences. “That conversation lasted only about a minute, as I purposely cut it short,” Omar said later.³⁴

Out of money, divorced by one of his wives, abandoned by his eldest son, estranged from his family—a hint of King Lear in the wilderness began to enter Osama’s exile. He told a Saudi visitor, “I am tired. I miss living in Medina. Only God knows how nostalgic I am.” He was so unmoored during 1995 that he explored the possibility of moving to London. There he would join his colleagues in the self-styled Saudi opposition in a more traditional, more political exile, one that would inevitably reduce his scope for participation in violence. It is easy to imagine the appeal of London: occasional press conferences attended by the international media; long afternoons at the writing desk penning poetry and unrelenting political essays on behalf of a new Saudi Arabia; visits from his son Abdullah and other family; a chance to live by principles, but also amid some of the comfort craved by the middle-aged.³⁵

It proved to be a passing fantasy. Saudi Arabia pressured Britain to do something about Al-Faqih and Al-Masari, and the government did initiate deportation proceedings against the latter. It would likely have been impossible politically for Osama to receive asylum by the time he considered seeking it.

In Khartoum he remained surrounded by other wives, children, employees, and followers, and his calendar of business and conspiracy meetings mitigated his isolation. Yet there was now a self-reinforcing quality to the narrative Osama was constructing around his exile. The more pressure he faced, the more readily he compared his circumstances to those of the Prophet Mohamed, who had been driven by political opponents to Medina, where he waged a righteous war and eventually returned home. “Emigration is related to jihad, and jihad will go on until the Day of Judgment,” Osama wrote while in Sudan. It was not the sort of formulation likely to appeal to a restless wife or teenager with memories of Jeddah’s better restaurants. Yet there is no reason to doubt that Osama believed precisely what he penned.

Moreover, the wealth and global visibility of his enemies—King Fahd, and his patron, the Americans—only highlighted for him the enduring righteousness of his cause. He even seemed to regard some of the missions undertaken by his relatives as a form of outreach from the United States, the country on which Osama increasingly focused his wrath, particularly after Washington put pressure on Sudan’s government to expel him from Khartoum. At first he had regarded his family members as helpless, manipulated agents of the Al-Saud. Now he came to see his exile as a contest of will and faith between himself and the government of the most powerful country on earth. Each iteration of this contest only highlighted for him the significance of his struggle and his leadership. “I tell you that the Americans are bargaining with us in silence,” Osama would explain in late 1996. “America and some of its agents in the region have bargained with us discreetly more than ten times, I tell you: [they say] shut up and we’ll give you back your passport and possessions, we’ll give you back your i.d. card, but shut up. These people think that people live in this world for its own sake, but they have forgotten that our existence has no meaning if we do not strive for the pleasure of God.”³⁶

30. HEDGE FUNDS

DURING A LONG CAREER as an American diplomat, Philip Griffin became a specialist in the Arab world, and he acquired particular experience in the Persian Gulf region—he served in Kuwait, Abu Dhabi, and twice in Dhahran, the principal city in Saudi Arabia’s oil-producing region. He was a mild man with blue eyes and a full head of graying hair; his years in diplomacy and his extended exposure to reticent Arabia had left him with impeccable manners and a habit of speaking in cautious, deliberate, fully articulated paragraphs. In 1989 Griffin arrived in Jeddah as consul general, the State Department’s highest-ranking officer in the Hejaz and a liaison to the U.S. embassy in Riyadh.

On his early diplomatic rounds, Griffin met Henry Sarkissian, of the Sarkissian business family, Armenian Christians who had migrated to Lebanon, established themselves in the electrical and industrial air-conditioning field, and then become important partners of the Bin Ladens in Saudi Arabia. Sarkissian introduced Griffin to Bakr Bin Laden, a connection that led to periodic discreet conversations among Bakr, Griffin, and Chas Freeman, then the U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia. The two American diplomats used Bakr as a sounding board about goings-on in the court of King Fahd and about the king’s private views on issues of the day. They found Bakr to be very careful during these conversations, which usually took place in his Jeddah office; Bakr was far from a natural gossip, and he was protective of the king, but he occasionally passed along a useful nugget or insight.¹

During the summer of 1992, Griffin’s posting neared its end, and he let it be known that he was planning to retire from the diplomatic service; he was then sixty years old. Through Sarkissian, Bakr asked to see him. He did not mention Osama, although by now, the trouble with his half-brother had begun to percolate. Bakr did mention that although the Bin Ladens had enjoyed many business connections in the United States over the years, they had no one person—no brother, no other representative—to oversee their scattered investments in the U.S., or to develop new ones. After this encounter, through Sarkissian, Bakr inquired if Griffin might be interested in opening an office for the Saudi Bin Laden Group in Washington, an office that would be supported partly by Sarkissian’s joint venture with the Bin Ladens and partly by the Saudi Bin Laden Group itself. The inquiry Bakr relayed was not specific about the office’s writ or purpose, but in follow-up discussions, Sarkissian mentioned that in addition to maintaining ties with existing partners such as General Electric and pursuing new business development in the United States, they would want someone in the capital who could give them access to the American government if it was required.

“Well, that’s easier said than done,” Griffin responded. “Let me think about it.”²

He returned to his home in the Washington suburbs, but he stayed in touch as he moved through the State Department’s formal retirement process. By early 1993, the Bin Ladens made clear that they wanted to go ahead with the plan, and Griffin decided to come on board. The Bin Ladens agreed to allow him to open an office near his home in Maryland so he would not have to endure a grueling daily commute into downtown Washington. He found an office building that specialized in providing packaged services, such as telephone-answering and conference facilities, to very small companies. On June 16, 1993, in the same week that the Bin Laden brothers were in the midst of their still-private legal proceedings in Jeddah to divest Osama of his shareholdings, Griffin, as “resident agent,” incorporated a company in Maryland as the Saudi Bin Laden Group’s new American outpost. The firm was initially called Cromwell Corporation, but it then formally became SBG (USA), Inc.³ Griffin moved into an office at 51 Monroe Street, in downtown Rockville, Maryland, near Rockville Pike, a cluttered six-lane avenue lined with strip malls, consumer electronics stores, and brightly lit chain restaurants. It was perhaps not the marbled outpost in imperial-tinted Washington that Bakr might initially have imagined, but it was at least a foothold, manned by an experienced American diplomat, in a country that was coming to play an increasingly complicated role in the family’s life.

Bakr assigned Griffin’s office to his half-brother Hassan, who had been appointed to oversee international business development under Bakr’s new management regime. This sounded fairly clear-cut, but the inner workings of the Bin Laden companies remained idiosyncratic. Once, when a non-Saudi executive complained to Henry Sarkissian that he was puzzled about what the Saudi Bin Laden Group actually wanted him to do, Sarkissian quipped, “You’ll never learn,” by which he meant that vagueness and mystery were permanent features of the corporate culture. Under Bakr, in comparison to Salem’s reign, there was a new veneer of professional organization charts, yet Bakr himself made many of his most important decisions not in boardrooms, but while sitting in his afternoon majlis in Jeddah, in the manner of an Arabian sheikh, or while flying from place to place in his private jets. The corporate culture he oversaw remained utterly dependent on the boss, habitually secretive, compartmented, and at times confusing, particularly for outsiders who joined as executives or partners.⁴

During the mid-1990s, Bakr signed a number of lucrative contracts in partnership with General Electric to develop power stations in Saudi Arabia, and he even hosted a celebratory party in the kingdom for GE’s famous chief executive, Jack Welch—but none of this U.S.-connected work was routed through or coordinated with the new U.S. office. Also, at the time Griffin set up shop, elements of the family were invested in a number of commercial real estate partnerships in the United States—those developed by the Daniel Corporation of Alabama, whose project money was channeled by Yeslam Bin Laden; those purchased by Yeslam’s full brother Khalil, through America in Motion; and another suite of projects overseen by the Sarkissians from an office in New Jersey. These latter developments included commercial properties in the Dallas area; some of those partnerships were named in reference to iconic places or events of the American Revolutionary War period, such as Concord or Bunker Hill. None of these projects was assigned directly to the new American office opened by Griffin, either. If anything, Griffin would be subordinate to the family’s real estate partners: listed as directors of SBG (USA) in the official corporate records were Kourken Sarkissian, in Canada, who helped oversee some family investments in North America, and Robert McBride, of Spicewood, Texas, who worked in a similar vein.⁵

The Bin Ladens’ business and advisory network in the United States also included an additional outpost, in the person of Fuad Rihani, a businessman who had run a European company that supplied lighting equipment to the two holy mosques in Mecca and Medina. Rihani was originally from Jordan; he was a Christian who was active in that country’s Protestant Church circles. By the time SBG (USA) opened outside Washington, Rihani had become a senior and respected adviser to the Bin Ladens; he eventually purchased a home in North Carolina, carried the title of Director of Research and Development for the Saudi Bin Laden Group, and served on the board of a Washington think tank, the Middle East Policy Council, to which the Bin Ladens made donations. Its later chairman was Chas Freeman, the former U.S. ambassador in Riyadh.⁶

These contributions and connections offered the Bin Ladens a way to distinguish themselves from Osama, to deepen their contacts with American and British elites—to construct, subtly but unmistakably, an alternative basis to evaluate the family’s attitude toward the West. The more trouble Osama caused, the more Bakr seemed to search for ways to make offsetting donations and financial investments.

ALL OF THE BIN LADEN companies, whether in Saudi Arabia or abroad, operated as privately held entities, so the family was not legally required to disclose its spider’s web of global holdings to stock market regulators or public investors or even to their own executives. There was a random and whimsical nature to some of the family’s investments. A brother might go on vacation in Eastern Europe, meet an enterprising local man, invest in a travel agency, and then neglect it, until the company’s very existence was forgotten. Family firms sold casual wear in London’s Covent Garden and in shopping malls in Cairo and Beirut (“tank tops, jogging shorts, jeans, denims…”); produced television programming and commercials in a Jeddah photo lab; published children’s books in London; and licensed intellectual property in Dubai. The lines between the hobbies of family members and serious businesses were not always easy to discern. Offshore companies would open, fall dormant, and then sit on the books for years, earning fees for the lawyers and accountants who renewed their registrations, but doing little else. By the early 1990s, there were so many small companies and affiliates scattered around the world that at one point, around the time Griffin opened the Rockville office, executives at headquarters retained an American firm just to inventory the family’s holdings, according to a person familiar with the study.⁷

The locus of the family’s most significant international investments during this period was not Washington but London. As Bakr’s control of the family tightened, he worked out an arrangement with Yeslam to transform Russell Wood & Company—the London Stock Exchange broker-dealer that had endured a computer meltdown and other troubles after its initial purchase in 1987—from a brokerage that relied upon outside clients to a more discreet portfolio-management firm that could coordinate Bin Laden family investments in global markets. How this transformation was arranged financially is not entirely clear—for example, the Cayman Islands parent company of Russell Wood remained Falken Limited, an entity owned by Yeslam and his full siblings, but the firm had booked loans with a number of other offshore companies in Panama, the British Virgin Islands, and the Netherlands Antilles. The changes in management evolved over a number of years, according to company records filed with regulators in London. As late as 1991, Russell Wood’s British auditors were still struggling to make sense of records from the 1987 market crash period. “We are unable to form an opinion,” the auditors reported “as to a) whether the financial statements give a true and fair view of the state of affairs of the Company…and b) whether the financial statements have been properly prepared in all respects…” Eventually Britain’s Securities and Futures Authority required the Bin Ladens to inject about 4 million British pounds into the brokerage, to cover the earlier losses, according to regulatory records.⁸

Akbar Moawalla, originally from Tanzania, managed the London office. He lived in a large Tudor-style home in suburban Woking, south of the city, and commuted to offices on Berkeley Square in the central Mayfair district, near the Saudi Arabian embassy. Some colleagues found Moawalla particularly secretive, even by the standards of a company that valued discretion. He had a long history with the family and he seemed to know as much as anyone about its finances. Moawalla would sometimes answer a seemingly routine business inquiry from a fellow executive by saying matter-of-factly, “You don’t have a need to know.” He did not seem to be the architect of family investment strategy, however; rather, he was a reliable and efficient administrator. As the London office settled down after its crises of the late 1980s, John Pilley, an experienced British financial executive, joined Moawalla.⁹

At Bakr’s direction, the two men reported to his half-brother Shafiq, who was placed in charge of international financial issues—an assignment designed to complement Hassan’s role overseeing international business development. Shafiq spent a great deal of time in Europe, where he still lived exclusively in hotel rooms, such as one in the Noga Hilton in Geneva. His Quaker-supervised boarding-school education in Lebanon and his college education in America had led him, by his forties, to a notably Western lifestyle of business meetings and exuberant nightlife, a way of life that provided a notable contrast to that of his half-brother Osama—particularly since the two were both singleton sons of Mohamed’s who had apparently been born in the same month of January 1958. Shafiq remained a quirky character; his hair sometimes grew out in long tufts and his hotel rooms, according to one visitor, could be as messy as a teenager’s. Yet he had earned a bachelor’s degree in business from the University of San Francisco in 1981, and he was one of the few Bin Laden brothers who could hold his own in the technical vernacular of finance and investing, a sometimes mysterious realm of puts and calls, options and warrants, margin calls and vesting dates. In time, according to a business partner, Bakr chaired an investment committee consisting of five Bin Laden brothers, and Shafiq became the committee’s chief manager.¹⁰

For years the Bin Ladens had invested on the obscure margins of the United States—the odd strip mall or apartment complex, or blue chip stocks that were very widely held. During the mid-1990s, for the first time, the family began to make more diverse and sophisticated financial investments, particularly in firms that had connections to political elites in Washington and London.

The Carlyle Group operated from majestic offices at 1001 Pennsylvania Avenue, between the White House and the U.S. Capitol. It was a private equity firm, meaning that its partners raised money from wealthy and institutional investors, pooled those funds, and then used them to buy and sell stakes in private companies and other assets. The partners made their money—considerable amounts—by charging management fees to their investors and by orchestrating profitable deals. The moving force at Carlyle was a young workaholic lawyer named David Rubenstein, who had served at a very young age as a domestic policy adviser to President Jimmy Carter. With Stephen Norris, a mergers specialist, Rubenstein formed Carlyle in 1987; they drew its name from the posh Carlyle Hotel in New York. By 1993 the firm’s portfolio of investments had grown to about $2 billion.¹¹

Rubenstein had lured Frank Carlucci, secretary of defense in the first Bush administration, to serve as vice chairman; his connections among Pentagon contractors drew Carlyle into the defense arena. Carlucci’s success impressed upon Rubenstein the advantages of attracting prominent, connected politicians as partners to the firm—their reputations and fame helped attract investors, and their inside connections led to profitable deals. After Bush’s defeat by Bill Clinton in 1992, Rubenstein and Norris visited the White House to meet with outgoing secretary of state James Baker. With the Democrats back in power, Baker was ready to make money. He decided to sign on as a consultant to an upstart energy company in Houston called Enron Corporation. And he agreed to become a partner at Carlyle.¹²

Baker enjoyed an excellent reputation among Arab elites in the Middle East, particularly in the Persian Gulf region, largely because of his performance in the Gulf war. With other partners and promoters at Carlyle, he traveled the Middle East to raise investment funds from wealthy Arab investors. His most important role—and those of other big-name promoters, such as President George H. W. Bush and former British prime minister John Major—was to draw the deepest pockets in Arabia to dinners and private seminars, to impress upon them Carlyle’s profitable record and outstanding prospects. The tactic worked: between 1994 and 1996, the firm raised $1.3 billion for an investment fund called Carlyle Partners II. The investors included George Soros—the enormously wealthy currency trader, who put in $100 million—and pension funds, such as the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, which put in $80 million.¹³

The Bin Laden family heard Carlyle’s pitch in 1995, through its London office. The family agreed to put in at least $2 million. Jim Baker “knew them very well” and was the family’s “favorite politician,” said Charles Schwartz, the Houston lawyer who represented Bin Laden family interests in Texas. Shafiq Bin Laden, although an unlikely dinner or hunting partner for the former secretary of state, was appointed by Bakr to attend Carlyle conferences and keep track of the family’s investment. It was this assignment that would ultimately carry him to Washington, D.C., on the same day his half-brother attacked the city.¹⁴

Shafiq also supervised the family’s investment in United Press International, the venerable American wire service, which a consortium of Saudi investors, including the Bin Ladens and the Alireza family, had purchased at a bankruptcy auction in 1992 for $4 million. The spread of satellite television dishes on the rooftops of Saudi households during the early 1990s, and the birth of popular Arabic-language broadcasters such as Al-Jazeera, who were hostile or indifferent to the Saudi establishment, had led the Saudi government to encourage the development of Saudi-owned alternatives, such as Al-Arabiya and Middle East Broadcasting. The theory of the UPI purchase seemed to be that its news gathering could support Middle East Broadcasting, although it was never entirely clear to some UPI executives whether families like the Bin Ladens had made this investment on their own accord or as silent partners of the Saudi government. Ahmed Badeeb, former chief of staff to Prince Turki, the head of Saudi intelligence, eventually became chairman of the board. Badeeb had retired and now operated international companies from Paris and Lebanon. Arnaud de Borchgrave, who served for a time as UPI’s editor, struggled with him over the company’s perpetual financial problems. At one point, de Borchgrave recalled, Badeeb sent him a resentful message: “I don’t appreciate your criticism of my business procedure. I’ll have you know I’ve made over $500 million in over thirty-one years of government service.”¹⁵

At the quarterly board meetings, Shafiq sat silently. He seemed to Borchgrave to be “clearly a man who had never done anything with his life—spoiled.” The Saudis on the board struggled with one another and tried to forestall bankruptcy; they sold out eventually to business interests controlled by the controversial South Korean church of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon.¹⁶

AT THE TIME Osama began to publish his first faxes attacking King Fahd’s dependence on America, a number of his half-siblings continued to spend lengthy periods of time in the United States. Khalil Bin Laden now summered with his wife, Isabel, and their children at Desert Bear, outside Orlando. They turned the estate, at least initially, into a considerably quieter place than it had been during its earlier heyday as Salem’s princely vacation resort. Khalil sat out by the swimming pool in the evenings, overlooking the willow trees and the lake, and puffed tobacco from a tangled Arabian water pipe. He invited the neighbors over for July 4 barbecues, and he occasionally set off fireworks to punctuate his celebrations of American independence. Gaggles of American-accented children belonging to Khalil and Isabel, as well as nieces and nephews visiting from Saudi Arabia or attending preparatory school in the States, occasionally passed through the compound. So did Khalil’s half-sister Rajia, who visited from Los Angeles, where she lived for significant periods of time. She was a pilot and a particularly fast driver of automobiles—so fast that some members of Khalil’s circle joked that they were frightened to ride as a passenger if Rajia was at the wheel.¹⁷

The family member with the most embedded life in America was Abdullah Bin Laden, the second youngest of Mohamed’s sons. Some of his friends joked that he was a student for life, and there was some literal truth in this assessment. He had attended college in San Diego, studied law in Saudi Arabia, took courses in business and finance, and then applied to Harvard Law School—not to enroll in its rigorous, spirit-breaking program that churned out lawyers qualified to take American bar exams, but rather to earn first a master’s degree and then a doctoral degree in the academic study of law or legal theories. This was a track at Harvard Law School that attracted a number of international students. Ultimately, Abdullah Bin Laden would remain at Harvard Law for about eight years, not quite a record for the school, but not too far from one, either, his professors said. His enrollment was not continuous, however. He maintained a small office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he worked on his theses and on various family business projects. (In the early 1990s, two of his half-sisters spent time in Boston, and his younger half-brother, Mohamed, whose mother had been pregnant with him when Mohamed Bin Laden died in 1967, also lived in the city.) Among other endeavors, he invested in condominiums along Boston Harbor. Between these siblings and various nieces and nephews, Abdullah found himself acting occasionally as the Bin Ladens’ all-purpose guardian in New England. Throughout these years he kept an apartment near Beacon Street, where he lived alone. By the mid-1990s, he had reached his late twenties. He was a man of medium height, slim, with traces of his father’s distinctive nose and cheekbones. Like a number of his half-brothers, he exuded rectitude to the point of pathological shyness, yet he could also project an air of regal dignity, and he could be a genial and intelligent companion. He drove a Range Rover, and he favored an Italian restaurant, Papa Razzi, near his flat.¹⁸

He befriended other students from Arab and Islamic countries at Harvard and occasionally invited them over for dinner; he impressed some by cooking many of the dishes himself, which they knew was an unusual hobby for a Saudi man, particularly a wealthy one. He had no maids or servants on display during these evenings, and he ladled out his Middle Eastern vegetable dishes on plastic plates. He was so reserved and polite that he was a natural target for teasing. One of his most audacious tormentors was Lama Abu-Odeh, a young Jordanian woman with a considerably more exuberant style than Abdullah’s. She liked and admired him unreservedly, but “I would tease him a lot about being conservative—make him laugh and blush, laugh and blush,” she recalled. “I would try to push him to his edge.” The elites in her native Jordan prided themselves on their relatively secular sophistication, and she enjoyed ranting about “how conservative his country was, how Saudis appear to be socially conservative. I would say, ‘Behind every plain Saudi is a whiskey addict.’ Just to make him laugh.” She particularly liked to get on Abdullah about how he was handsome and rich, yet he never seemed to date. In fact, Abdullah deflected friends who tried to fix him up with women by describing himself as someone who was not interested in Western-style dating.

“Abdullah, if you’re gay, you can tell me,” Lama would announce. He only laughed some more, and then returned to his reserved mannerisms.¹⁹

By the mid-1990s, many of his fellow Arab students at Harvard—much more so than fellow American students—were becoming aware of Osama’s dissident activity and particularly his open defiance of the Saudi government. If Lama was in an especially feisty mood, she would start praising Osama in front of Abdullah and other students. “At least there’s somebody who’s gutsy in that family,” she would pronounce. “You all just want to make money—at least there’s someone who’s said ‘No!’”

Abdullah’s reply was succinct, as Lama recalled it: “Shut up,” he said.²⁰

His academic adviser was Frank E. Vogel, who had conducted his own scholarly research in Saudi Arabia, visiting its Islamic courts and analyzing its approach to legal and religious doctrines. Vogel took an appreciative academic interest in the Saudi system, and he found that Abdullah was interested in questions related to his own research. In May 1992, Abdullah completed a 101-page master’s thesis under Vogel’s supervision titled “Western Banking Practices and Shari’a Law in Saudi Arabia.” His paper explored the conflict between the interest-paying practices of the Western financial system and the prohibitions on interest decreed by many Islamic legal authorities, and how these doctrines had evolved through history and from religious text. He strived to find solutions, a synthesis that would allow both modern banking and Islamic law to thrive in Saudi Arabia. “It could well be,” he wrote, “that when a society as a whole is operating in full compliance with the shari’a code and an Islamic economic system is instituted, that the prohibition of interest would be feasible.”²¹

In pursuit of his doctoral degree, Abdullah embarked on a much more detailed elaboration on the same themes—his thesis would ultimately run to 327 pages, bearing the distinctly unglamorous title “Negotiability of Financial Instruments in Contemporary Financial Markets: An Islamic Legal Analysis.” Here Abdullah wrestled with how certain instruments of the global markets—such as warrants bonds and profit-sharing contracts—might be accommodated in an Islamic financial system. It was a lucid and richly footnoted thesis, if often arcane, and when it was eventually completed, it marked at least two milestones in the centuries-long history of the Bin Laden family: Abdullah became the family’s first academic doctor (alongside his half-sister Randa, the family’s first medical doctor) and the holder of the Bin Ladens’ first Harvard degree. Intellectually, Abdullah strived to reconcile the two worlds, Arabian and Western, in which the Bin Ladens lived and worked. Vogel respected “the academic seriousness” of his doctoral thesis, “that he really put himself to difficult research, and quite difficult or abstruse text.” As for the subject matter, and what it indicated about the Bin Ladens or Abdullah, in Vogel’s judgment, “For a Saudi to work on a topic related to Islamic law is not saying very much about whether he’s preoccupied with religion.” In the kingdom, there simply was no other way to approach economics, he believed.²²

The fundraising opportunity represented by the presence of a young Bin Laden at Harvard was not lost on the law school’s professors. Around 1993—the same year Philip Griffin opened the Bin Laden office outside Washington—the Bin Ladens entered into discussions with the dean of Harvard Law School. “They were interested in the study of Islam, in lots of places,” Vogel recalled. The discussions were “extraordinarily sort of low-key.” Abdullah indicated to Harvard that Bakr would be interested in making a $1 million donation to the university to support the study of Islamic design, one of Bakr’s personal interests, plus an additional $1 million to support visiting scholarships and stipends for students from Arab League countries who wished to follow Abdullah’s footsteps and study at Harvard Law. Vogel and the law school dean traveled to Saudi Arabia; they were received by Bakr at the headquarters of the Saudi Bin Laden Group, where they admired the display models of the family’s work on the holy mosques in Mecca and Medina. Vogel explained to the family, “One of the purposes of our program is to build links with the Middle East.” There was, of course, no discussion of Osama; he was little known outside the Arab world.²³

During this same period, Salem Bin Laden’s oldest son, Salman, enrolled as an undergraduate student at Tufts University, just outside Boston. Abdullah helped to keep an eye on him; Salman struggled at times to manage his money and his friendships. One of his business professors, Andrew Hess, felt that Salman had suffered psychologically because of Salem’s sudden death in Texas in 1988. Salman took after his father in some ways, and played the guitar, and he spoke fluent English in a British-inflected accent. But he had his ups and downs at Tufts. He made a personal connection with Hess, who prior to his professorship had worked for many years in Saudi Arabia, in the oil industry. Salman then introduced Hess to his Harvard uncle, Abdullah.²⁴

They met several times for dinner at another of Abdullah’s favorite restaurants, in Cambridge. It was called Helmand, after a province in southern Afghanistan. It was run by a gregarious, exiled Afghan family—the Karzais.

Over dinners at Helmand, Hess mentioned to Abdullah that he was having trouble raising money to support some of his academic programs. The Bin Ladens were mostly interested in supporting Islamic studies, Abdullah told him. Hess said that if he had enough funding, he could bring in lecturers and speakers from the Islamic world, to address economic and political issues that fit the Tufts curriculum. Abdullah said he would see what he could do.

Later, he delivered a check to Tufts for $350,000.²⁵

31. A TROJAN DESK

A CAR BOMB bearing about 250 pounds of explosives detonated in Riyadh on November 13, 1995. It was the worst terrorist attack in the kingdom since the almost-forgotten days of proxy war with Yemen during the 1960s. The targets this time were not Saudis, however. Seven people died, including five Americans, and thirty-four others were wounded. The attackers, soon beheaded, were former Afghan jihadis; one said in a televised confession that they had been inspired by the writings of Osama Bin Laden. From the point of view of the Bin Laden family, it was hard to judge which was the more discouraging possibility—that the terrorist’s confession had been authentic, or that he had been encouraged by Saudi interrogators to implicate Osama publicly, in order to discredit him. In an indirect sense, the Bin Ladens had also been on the receiving end of the attack. The targeted building was an American training facility for the Saudi National Guard. One of the facility’s principal contractors, a specialist in military training, was Vinnell Corporation, a low-profile company that has been described by a former board member as associated with the Central Intelligence Agency. Several spouses of Vinnell contractors were among the wounded. At the time, the Carlyle Group owned the firm—although not through the same fund in which the Bin Ladens had just invested. The larger point was the same: the family was now officially at war with itself, even if that war was embryonic and in many respects undeclared.¹

Bakr said nothing in public, beyond the press statements he had previously issued, but in private, he tried to make clear to the Americans and Europeans he knew that he was appalled by Osama’s increasingly violent radicalism. Around Christmas 1995, just a few weeks after the Riyadh attack, Bakr flew a number of Salem’s old American and British friends to Jeddah, all expenses paid. Salem’s eldest daughter, Sara, was marrying a young man from a prominent Jeddah merchant family, one that had a lucrative car dealership. Bakr hosted a reunion of some of the pilots and musicians who had known Salem in the glory days.²

The contrasts now accumulating within the family, even at its home base in Jeddah, were startling. Bakr’s Red Sea estate lay a few miles south of one of the family’s grand real estate projects, the Salhia Lotus Beach Resort. The development was named for Saheha Bin Laden, the half-brother of Bakr who had traveled widely in Europe and the United States. The resort opened as a private beach club with two hundred furnished chalets and studios, located on Jeddah’s North Obhur Beach. Security guards carefully checked the names of Saudi members and authorized foreign guests before allowing them behind the resort’s walls. Once inside, the reason for such tight security became obvious: there were women in bikinis lounging alongside men in Speedos; Saudis mixing in their bathing suits with foreigners of both sexes; and Lebanese Christians splashing in the swimming pool with crosses and crucifixes dangling around their necks. It was as if the Bin Ladens had built, and were operating for profit, an alternative Saudi Arabia in a wealthy corner of Jeddah’s northern suburbs.³

Away from the beach club, at Sara’s wedding reception, Bakr was his more traditional self; the genders were duly segregated, and there was an emphasis on fruit juice. Bakr invited some of his foreign guests aboard his large, steel-hulled boat and motored into the Red Sea, where he dropped anchor and hosted an afternoon of shipside swimming. Spirits ran high throughout several days of celebration. Anita Pizza, the pianist, and Gerald Auerbach, the American pilot who had flown both Mohamed and Salem, and who was now in his seventies, were persuaded to run through some of Salem’s favorite numbers. Auerbach belted out “On Top of Old Smokey,” for old times.⁴

THE MUTED OPENING of Osama’s war on Saudi Arabia coincided with the end of King Fahd’s reign—at least, the end of his ability to rule actively. On November 29, 1995, Fahd suffered a massive stroke. Perhaps the Riyadh bombing and its aftermath raised his blood pressure, or perhaps it was only age or genetics or his untreated obesity. He almost died, but his doctors, so long the beneficiaries of his patronage and largesse, worked to save him. By doing so they inaugurated an Elizabethan-tinged drama of rivalry and succession maneuvering within the Saudi royal family.

The intrigue was more whispered about than witnessed, more presumed than observed, but its outlines were clear enough. As long as Fahd remained technically alive, he would be king, even if he could do little more than nod silently in his wheelchair. The Al-Saud had no precedent for removing an ailing monarch, and after all, the crown prince could govern in his stead. But there was more to this decision than constitutional order. As long as Fahd remained on the throne, his full brothers—Sultan at Defense; Nayef and Ahmed at Interior; and Salman, the governor of Riyadh—might remain unchallenged in their lucrative ministerial fiefdoms, free to supervise their own contracts and to preside over their own patronage machines. Moreover, Fahd’s favorite son, Abdulaziz, might continue to enrich himself and those around him. (By 1993 companies controlled by the Ibrahim family, Abdulaziz’s maternal uncles, owned real estate in the United States valued at more than $1.2 billion worldwide, including Ritz-Carlton hotels in New York, Washington, Houston, and Aspen; a 23,000-acre ranch in Colorado; the Marina del Rey complex in Los Angeles; and a planned resort community near Disney World.) If Fahd died, Crown Prince Abdullah would take the throne—penny-pinching, provincial, isolated, stubborn, unreliable Abdullah, as the Fahd group tended to see him. In “their heart of hearts,” said Wyche Fowler, who served as U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia as this narrative unfolded, Fahd’s full brothers “were not enthusiastic that Abdullah would be their next king.”⁵

Abdullah remained, as a British diplomat had described him several decades earlier, “abrupt, impulsive, but popular.”⁶ He had little formal education, but his steady contact across decades with tribal levies in the National Guard had attuned his ear to public opinion—or, at least, to the opinions of male soldiers from the major tribes. At the time of Fahd’s stroke, Abdullah seemed to grasp, in a way that Fahd’s son, full brothers, and brothers-in-law did not, that the kingdom simply could not continue to drift along, ignoring the excesses of the royal family, as it had done for so long. Oil prices fell steadily during the 1990s, eventually touching record lows, if inflation was taken into account. Saudi Arabia’s per capita income, which had soared during the initial oil boom period, also declined dramatically—in part because the size of the native Saudi population grew at alarming rates. Yet Saudis remained poorly equipped for the modern workplace, and the kingdom’s universities remained dominated by religious curricula. In his seventies, living in his own grand palaces and on his desert farms, Abdullah was no firebrand reformer, but at a minimum, he wanted to bring the most visible excesses and self-enrichment of senior princes under control. He tried after Fahd’s stroke to unwind or cancel some of the most egregious contracts, such as the Al-Yamamah deal overseen by Prince Sultan, but he found his anti-corruption drive to be difficult. Among other things, according to Fowler, Fahd’s group sometimes evaded his edicts on contracting by routing their business through the untouchable young Abdulaziz—he was, after all, still the king’s favorite son. Then, too, Abdullah faced his own family members interested in business opportunities. Some of his own sons were entering into commerce, and one of those sons was a school friend of Abdulaziz. Abdullah might have sound instincts about Saudi Arabia’s needs, but he shared power, lacked strong blood allies, and possessed no transformational vision. Political and economic reform in the kingdom, it soon became plain, would be at best an evolutionary project, one where the pace might be barely perceptible to the human eye—nothing like what Osama Bin Laden and his allied dissidents in London had apparently hoped that Abdullah might champion.

As Osama careened toward violence in 1996, his family moved to strengthen its ties to America, and to hedge their bets. The Al-Saud, on the other hand, allowed their alliance with Washington to deteriorate. A shared antipathy to communism no longer bound Saudi Arabia to America. The rise of potent transnational Islamist ideology and jihadi violence, some of it supported by Saudi fundraising, presented a new divide. There were also more particular factors. Fahd’s sudden incapacitation was one—he had been the most pro-American king in Saudi history, by a considerable margin. At the Saudi embassy in Washington, Bandar Bin Sultan, the longtime ambassador, had failed to strike up a successful relationship with Clinton; they were similar personalities, and they seemed to annoy each other. Bandar drifted into diplomatic irrelevancy, and his embassy, filled with Saudi bureaucrats from the religious and education ministries who did not speak much English, became an impediment to day-to-day communication between the two governments. In an astonishingly short time, the confident, risk-taking, back-of-the-envelope relationship that had prevailed between Washington and Riyadh during the Cold War and the Gulf war came to an end. In its place rose a muddled, mutually resentful engagement in which the top leaders of the two countries rarely spoke, while midlevel and cabinet-level officials fumed at one another over perceived slights and failures to cooperate.

Early in 1996, alarmed by Osama’s support for violent attacks against American and Arab targets, the CIA formed a new unit to track him. Michael Scheuer, its leader, as one of his first tasks, submitted a request to the Saudi government for basic information about Osama Bin Laden—his medical records, his birth certificate, if one existed, and copies of the residence permit and passport the government claimed it had previously seized from him. Scheuer never heard a word in reply. He soon concluded that the Saudi government should be regarded as “hostile” to the United States on the subject of Osama and his Islamist militia. That was the same terminology used at the CIA to describe the intelligence services of Cuba and Iran. “They refused to do anything to help us, or even to provide us the minimal information,” Scheuer said later. He and other CIA officers also thought it was possible that Osama had recruited sympathizers or followers inside the Saudi intelligence or security services. Equally, the Saudi services themselves, in Scheuer’s analysis, wanted from the very beginning of the violence Bin Laden inspired to protect themselves from American investigations into Saudi Arabia’s private collaborations with Osama in the past, dating back to the anti-Soviet Afghan war. “Bin Laden knows so much about who the Saudis dealt with during the Afghan war, how the mechanisms for moving money work,” Scheuer concluded. “They were protecting the royal family, they were protecting the skeletons in the closet from the Afghan war.” Scheuer also believed, as did Clinton’s counterterrorism aide Richard Clarke, that the Saudi government had authorized some of Osama’s adventures in South Yemen—that they were not the rogue jihadi operations later depicted by Prince Turki. This history, too, had to be shielded from the Americans, in Scheuer’s analysis.⁷

Scheuer did not want to share sensitive CIA information with the Saudis, for fear it would leak through to Osama. For their part, some of the Saudis felt the same way about the CIA. When they passed on information they regarded as sensitive, they, too, often read it in the American papers or heard it on CNN.

Prince Nayef, the interior minister, presented perhaps the greatest obstacle to trust and cooperation after Fahd’s stroke. Nayef was particularly hostile toward the CIA. During the 1970s, the CIA had presented him with a new desk for his office as a gift. Afterward, Nayef discovered a listening device on the desk. He had a long memory.⁸

32. THE AESTHETICS OF WORSHIP

CITIZENS OF SAUDI ARABIA made up a tiny percentage of the world’s Muslim population—less than 2 percent by the mid-1990s. The kingdom’s influence on Islamic thought, however, had become pervasive. Oil wealth and its missionary purchases—mosques built in poorer Muslim countries, salaried imams of the Wahhabi school to oversee those mosques, pamphlets and textbooks to instruct the young—explained some of its reach. Yet the number of Muslims individually touched even by this expansive proselytizing remained relatively small. Far more important to the lived experience of Islam by its faithful was the annual Hajj. When King Abdulaziz founded Saudi Arabia early in the twentieth century, a busy Hajj season might see fifty thousand pilgrims visiting the kingdom. The jet age, the oil boom, and the growth of middle-class Muslim populations in Asia and elsewhere meant that by the end of the 1990s, a typical number annually was about 2 million. The pilgrims all arrived at the same time of year and all went to the same places, Medina and Mecca, more or less simultaneously. They arrived, too, in a heightened state of spiritual awareness, if not longing or near-rapture. On this heavily preconceived yet richly emotional journey, millions of Muslims discovered and judged modern Saudi Arabia. It was a process about as reliable as the one by which Saudis discovered America through vacations in Disney World and west Los Angeles. But it was no less true or powerful, in either case, for being incomplete.

Well-educated, globally conscious Hajj pilgrims from poorer Muslim countries such as Egypt or India sometimes resented Saudi Arabia for two reasons: its garish, wasteful nouveau wealth, and its intolerant religious orthodoxy. To encounter for the first time the kingdom’s pre-stressed concrete modernity and its designer-label greed, all integrated with its insistent theological doctrines, could be unsettling. A pilgrim might approach Saudi Arabia aspiring to inner purity; what he found there could be polluted by banality.

“Through the window, I had my first glimpse of Medina—buses parked in rows and rows as far as the horizon,” recalled the Moroccan anthropologist Abdellah Hammoudi, who arrived on Hajj in the late 1990s. He made his way to the center of the city, where he encountered King Fahd’s “spectacular renovations” to the Prophet’s Mosque, carried out by the Bin Ladens. The floodlights and shiny brass fixtures awed him: “There it was in its immensity, with its minarets like giant chandeliers charging the sky. It seemed for a moment to be floating in the firmament.” And yet, when Hammoudi walked through the surrounding streets, in neighborhoods remade by Saudi modernization drives, he saw nothing of Medina’s rich architectural or religious history, only “shop windows and consumer displays”:

Carpets, caps, sheets, turbans, sandals, belts, watches, compasses, radios, tea sets, coffee sets, shirts, dresses, blankets, shoes, televisions, VCRs, computers, calculators, perfumes, incense, aromatic plants…elevators, air-conditioning, restaurants, cafeterias, ice-cream vendors, all American-style: self-service, cardboard plates and cups, plastic forks and knives, menus and prices displayed on neon-lit boards…“Modernity” ravaged everything.¹

Inside the mosque, jostling in crowds for a glimpse of the Prophet Mohamed’s tomb, which lay in an unadorned chamber, Hammoudi spied the omnipresent Saudi religious police, who patrolled Medina with sticks so they could beat worshippers who dallied too long at the tomb or displayed excessive emotion there—signs of shirk, or forbidden worship of idols. Elsewhere in the city, these police patrolled cemeteries, historical battlefields, and Shiite shrines to prevent unauthorized prayers or other displays of fervor by the deviant or the nostalgic. For centuries, under previous dynastic rulers, culminating in the Ottomans, Medina had tolerated and, indeed, cultivated Islam’s global diversity of belief and practice; in Saudi Arabia, Hammoudi concluded, the dominant creed was propagated with all the subtlety of a bulldozer:

They have brought the Koran and the Prophet’s example down to the level of a recipe book and consigned its implementations to militias…This was actually a form of modern totalitarianism, far closer to the defunct Soviet system than the constitution of Medina or to Bedouin informality. A merciless formula managed by technocrats with sophisticated means of communication and espionage, technique for daily intimidation, and a propaganda force that could recycle traditions and social pressures to its own benefit. In Medina, as elsewhere, it served us its exclusive version of the holy city. Its version and no other.²

Whose version, exactly? The theological framework belonged to the semi-independent Saudi religious establishment, subsidized by the royal family. Saudi Islamic scholars controlled much—but not all—of the religious rule making around the Hajj. (Left to their own devices, for example, Saudi Arabia’s ardently sectarian Sunni scholars would probably ban Shia from attending altogether, but the royal family, wishing to avoid a global confrontation, managed a compromise, under which Shia could come if they accepted certain quotas and constraints.) King Fahd shaped the Hajj’s physical environment. The architectural ambition of the two renovated holy cities—bigger, better, shinier, ringed by condominium towers and shopping malls, and under surveillance by security cameras—reflected the same spirit Fahd had brought during the early 1980s to the refurbishment of his Boeing 747. Among other things, his ideas about urban planning seemed to express a “deliberate desire to erase the past,” as Hammoudi put it. This was partly another bow to his religious establishment, who tended to view all of the schools of Islamic art and architecture between the Prophet’s death and their arrival in the Hejaz in the 1920s as illegitimate. There was also a more general disinterest among the Saudi royal family about historical preservation and archaeology. The design sensibility that evolved during the Mecca and Medina projects of the late 1980s and mid-1990s—one that evoked Disney, Mall of the Americas, and the Ritz-Carlton Hotel chain—originated with Fahd but also came in substantial part from the Bin Ladens, and particularly from Bakr, who looked after the Fahd account in Riyadh and took a close personal interest in the holy city work. Among other compulsions, these renovation projects had become, by 1995, the largest single source of revenue for the Mohamed Bin Laden Company: Fahd’s total spending in Mecca and Medina during this period has been estimated at $25 billion. That may have been an exaggeration designed to impress Muslim publics, but the contracting work—all handled on a sole-source, no-bid basis by the Bin Ladens—certainly ran into many billions of dollars.³

Before his stroke, when King Fahd visited the construction sites in Mecca and Medina, Bakr steered him around at the wheel of a white golf cart, a form of transport that only reinforced the Florida-derived vision they seemed to share. At the University of Miami during the early 1970s, Bakr had studied basic architecture on a campus full of mid-century white concrete boxes, in a state where the cutting edge of the spectacular tourist destination built for international crowds was Disney’s Epcot Center—a place, like renovated Mecca, that advertised itself as a microcosm of global diversity, lit up in floodlights and neon. It was also America, and particularly humid Florida, that pressed upon Saudi elites the apparent correlation between national progress and the spread of air-conditioning, an imperative that Fahd and the Bin Ladens carried at considerable expense to Mecca and Medina.

The renovation projects began in 1985 and proceeded in two sequential phases—Medina first, then Mecca. In Medina the needs were greatest. For all the effort Wahhabi scholars made to discourage the veneration of the Prophet’s Mosque and other local historical sites, practicing Muslims simply could not be persuaded to forgo the journey to the city of the Prophet’s storied exile. Hajj spiritual rituals are entirely centered on Mecca, but most pilgrims, having taken the time and expense to travel to Saudi Arabia in the first place, felt compelled to include Medina as a side journey. The trouble was that the worship area in the Prophet’s Mosque was about one-tenth the size of the one in the Grand Mosque in Mecca, and as the number of pilgrims swelled during the 1980s, the squeeze in Medina appeared unsustainable. Fahd embraced an expansion plan that would transform Medina into a viable, if still undeclared, companion destination to Mecca. The urban clearance work necessary to extend the mosque’s footprint was completed by 1988; at that point, with Salem gone and Bakr fully in charge, renovation of the sanctuary itself began.⁴

For all of its modernity and scale, and despite its disregard for inherited architectural diversity, the Bin Ladens’ work in Medina did produce some beautiful and striking innovations, such as an array of retractable domes and umbrella-like coverings. The modernized mosque’s polish and lighting and soaring minarets, in the clear desert sky, against the silhouettes of barren hills, could produce spectacular visual effects, particularly at night; it could snatch the breath of even a skeptic like Hammoudi. These were achievements in which the Bin Ladens could and did take pride; the truth was, however, that most of their important and impressive work lay hidden from view. The Bin Ladens were not masters of architecture; they were masters of infrastructure.

The Prophet’s Mosque, across all its centuries as an icon in the desert, had never, of course, enjoyed air-conditioning. The Bin Ladens, however, had formed a partnership during the 1980s with York International Corporation, of York, Pennsylvania, the world’s leading manufacturer and installer of what are known as “large tonnage chillers,” industrial systems for cooling very large buildings. York chillers cooled the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York, and the Kremlin. The systems typically worked by reducing water to a temperature of about forty degrees and then piping the water through the targeted building; this was the only practical way to distribute cool air through such large spaces. Large and mechanically complex machines cooled the water initially and then expelled its heat into the air upon its return from the building. York manufactured these chiller systems in a 1.5-million-square-foot plant in Grantley, Pennsylvania. The Medina chillers ordered by the Bin Ladens posed a number of unusual challenges. Desert temperatures and the project’s enormous size meant that York would have to manufacture a number of its heaviest-duty machine, later dubbed the Titan. Also, because only Muslims are allowed inside the Medina city center, there were questions about how the chillers could be reliably serviced if they occasionally required the attention of a non-Muslim engineer or technician. To address this concern, the Bin Ladens decided to install the principal chiller plant outside the Muslim-only exclusion zone, more than four miles from the Prophet’s Mosque; they dug a wide tunnel, big enough for a sport utility vehicle to drive in, between the chiller plant and the mosque, down which traveled trunk cooling pipes and other utilities. By the time the plant was finished, by 1993, it had given the marketing department at York headquarters something new to boast about: the air-conditioning project in Medina had become the largest heating or air-conditioning project of its type in world history.⁵

Anwar Hassan, a York manager who worked on it, was originally from Sudan. On his trips to Jeddah or Medina, the Bin Ladens would invite him to receptions, or to an iftar fast-breaking dinner during Ramadan. They projected “a great sense of pride” about their work in the holy cities. Hassan shared their vision that the Hajj could and should be modernized. He felt it was misleading to romanticize the past. He remembered stories he had heard as a child from one of his great-uncles in Sudan, who recounted how, in the days before Abdulaziz and the birth of Saudi Arabia, if a hundred African-looking Sudanese pilgrims attended Hajj, only sixty or seventy might return—the rest were victims of highway robbers, or disease, or worse. Even during the 1960s, when another of Hassan’s uncles undertook the pilgrimage, “He came back appalled at the poor level of hygiene. People would slaughter sheep in the street.” By the early 1990s, Hassan could ascend an escalator to stand amid the crowds by the Prophet’s tomb, and as he touched his head upon the floor in prayer, he might feel a touch of cool air on the back of his neck. “That’s a fabulous transformation,” he believed. “You have to appreciate that they did it for the comfort. It’s a great thing that they’ve done.”⁶

THOSE WHO THOUGHT otherwise did so at their peril.

Sami Angawi tied his thinning, graying hair behind his head in a ponytail, and he draped himself in undulating Hejazi robes, not the flat white uniform of Saudi national dress. He looked like a Saudi hippie. He adhered to Sufism, a school of Islam that emphasized diversity and individual spiritual experience. He had been born in Mecca to a traditional family of mutawwafs, or “pilgrimage guides,” an ancient vocation in decline in the age of Hajj package air-hotel tours and Saudi nationalization (by the 1990s, a federal ministry administered most aspects of the pilgrimage). At the University of Texas, Angawi studied architecture and urban planning; he wrote a master’s thesis about a possible renovation of Mecca that would emphasize historical preservation, pedestrian zones, and environmental conservation.

In 1975 he returned to Saudi Arabia to form and supervise a Hajj Research Center at King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah. Its goal, approved by the Saudi government, was “to preserve the natural environment as created by God and the Islamic environment of the two holy cities.” This was a tricky principle to interpret on Saudi ground, since if Angawi advocated historical conservation per se, he would run afoul of the religious establishment’s opposition to false monuments. Still, he believed that he could see a way forward. Angawi and his staff carried out surveys in Jakarta, Karachi, Cairo, and elsewhere, trying to document the experiences and desires of Muslim pilgrims in all of their heterodoxy. He incorporated this research into his evolving plans for Mecca and Medina. In his vision, influenced by environmentally conscious European urban planning, automobiles and buses would be excluded from the two city centers—vehicles would park on the perimeter, and pilgrims would flood through the worship areas on foot, praying not only at the mosques but also in parks and in traditional, renovated souks.⁷

This was not, of course, the image of Mecca and Medina’s future that King Fahd or the Bin Ladens had in mind as they undertook their massive renovations. Angawi was not a radical—he tried to work within the Saudi system, and he earned a lucrative living as an architect, enough to design and construct a stunning traditional Hejazi home in a wealthy neighborhood of Jeddah. Yet he had given much of his professional life to the proposition that Mecca and Medina need not succumb to the same soulless sprawl that was engulfing every other city in Saudi Arabia. He tried to suggest the purchase of Westinghouse fast trains that could speed large numbers of pilgrims between Mecca and Medina. He produced a film about the worsening traffic problems in the holy cities.

Angawi emphasized, prudently, that he did not doubt “for a second” King Fahd’s good intentions, but he challenged the basic assumptions of the Bin Laden–managed projects. “We keep the foreigners out, but allow everything else you can think of—shopping malls, Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald’s, neon signs,” he said later. “The companies that plan, that construct, that buy the land—you only have one company [the Bin Ladens]. I have nothing against them. But this is the wrong approach. It’s a fantastic conflict of interest. The answer is bulldozers and dynamite. Knock it down, build it up, pour it over with marble and decorate it with things that look Islamic…If you want to accommodate more people praying, that’s one thing. If you want to accommodate more cars, that’s another. We ended up with skyscrapers and buildings.”⁸

By 1989, because of his dissent, Angawi had fallen under so much pressure from the Saudi establishment that he resigned from his Hajj center. At that point, the Medina renovation was a lost cause—the new mosque and its supporting infrastructure were under construction, and York International had its orders for multiton chillers. In Mecca, however, where the plans for renovation were not yet fully committed, Angawi saw an opportunity to push for at least some historical preservation of ancient monuments and sites. He and the Hejazi intellectuals around him in Jeddah who joined his quiet agitation felt a connection, often through their family histories, to the pre-Saudi architecture of Mecca. In some respects, Angawi’s circle in Jeddah—lawyers, architects, writers, business executives—constituted a new generation of globally minded Saudi intellectuals, who had been influenced through travel and schooling by preservation movements elsewhere in the Arab world, as well as in Europe. They understood that in Wahhabi-dominated Saudi Arabia, advocating historic conservation was a dangerous political and theological stance, but they also felt protected by the global respectability of their cause. So they pushed back—not enough to end up in prison, but enough, as it happened, to annoy the Bin Ladens.

The family’s renovation work in Mecca during the 1990s was of a different character than its renovation of the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina. In Medina a single building had to be expanded and updated. In Mecca the priorities had less to do with the Grand Mosque itself than with surrounding sites visited during the Hajj rituals. Each year, for example, all the pilgrims assembled in tent camps on the plain of Arafat, about nine miles from Mecca city; at a prescribed time, known as the Day of Standing, they stood together in an awesome assembly in the desert, beseeching God. That huge gathering was followed by a mass symbolic stoning of the Devil, carried out by hurling pebbles at certain columns several miles from Arafat. Each pilgrim was also expected to purchase and sacrifice a sheep or other animal, as an offering to God. The logistical and sanitary challenges presented by the occupation of an open desert camp of 2 million people, followed by group rock throwing and animal slaughter, can be readily imagined. Hajj after Hajj, a stampede, fire, collapsing bridge, or other mishap would claim hundreds of pilgrim lives. Even in the absence of such calamities, the heat of a summer Hajj on Arafat could be too much for many elderly pilgrims. Then, too, there was the traffic: “The largest traffic jam I have ever seen,” recalled Mark Caudill, an American pilgrim. It took hours to move just a few miles around Arafat, and even after the day’s rituals were completed, “The sounds and smells of diesel trucks idling through the night were accompanied by occasional screams of sirens, Saudi traffic police barking admonitions through bullhorns, and the roiling murmur of more than two million souls.”⁹

King Fahd, with the Bin Ladens as his instrument, tried to alleviate this traffic-induced suffering. His approach, however, was typical of transportation development approaches popular in the United States: more roads, more parking lots, more tunnels, and more bridges. The Mohamed Bin Laden Company built parking lots at Arafat and elsewhere during the mid-1990s, totaling millions of square feet. Above the Arafat plain, to cool off the faithful during the Day of Standing, they installed an overhead water piping system that spewed out thin jets of water above the pilgrims’ heads. They dug new connector roads and flyovers, laid down pedestrian walkways, installed water fountains, and put in 14,200 public toilets. They built a modern slaughterhouse that could accommodate 500,000 goats and sheep, plus another that could handle 10,000 camels and cattle—these facilities supported a new government-run voucher system for the slaughter ritual, whereby pilgrims could purchase a ticket that ensured a Saudi official carried out their sacrifice in a sanitary manner. All this was supported by new security systems in and around Mecca, designed to ensure that the 1979 uprising at the Grand Mosque was never repeated—surveillance cameras were installed copiously, along with command centers, alarm systems, and supporting communications. Here, too, the Bin Ladens were in charge.¹⁰

Sami Angawi consulted for the governor of Mecca following his resignation from the Hajj center. He tried to keep track of the city’s archaeological heritage. There had been a time, he knew, prior to the Saudi kingdom, when pilgrims in Mecca diverted themselves with visits to several hundred historical and mythical sites, much as visitors to Jerusalem and its surrounding areas still do. One semi-mythical site that had been long discussed in Meccan tradition was the Prophet Mohamed’s original home, where he lived during his days as a businessman, prior to receiving divine revelations. Around 1991, as the Bin Ladens began to shift their renovation work from Medina to Mecca, Angawi learned from a local preservationist that a site had been discovered that might be the Prophet’s house. It seemed to be in the right place. An ancient wall of the structure had been exposed by initial bulldozer work undertaken during Mecca’s redevelopment.

“I was told by one of the elders of the city that this place might be destroyed,” Angawi recalled. “So I moved in and I tried to use every connection and authority I have.” He found a professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London to advise his preliminary archaeological work at the site. He began to dig and to inventory carefully what he found. He undertook historical research to explore evidence that could confirm or refute the discovery.¹¹

As he worked, the question became whether it might be possible to accommodate both Angawi’s vision of Mecca and that of Fahd and the Bin Ladens. Angawi and his allies acknowledged that the renovations had eased the experience of visiting pilgrims. Mecca and Medina could now “accommodate more, and it could accommodate them more comfortably,” said a Jeddah professional aligned with Angawi. “But it was done at the expense of other things.

“This is where they used the Bin Ladens,” Angawi’s ally recalled. “In the Holy Mosque of Mecca, there were columns with engraved inscriptions a thousand years old. And they’d say, ‘Wouldn’t a marble column be nice here?’ And the Bin Ladens would say, ‘Sure, we can give you a polished marble column.’ And they didn’t preserve what they knocked down for a museum, and they did it without any control or supervision…We have all these slick brass lamps, but no accounting of the heritage.”¹²

The Bin Ladens, of course, were considerably more influential than the preservationists. Within forty days after he started working at the presumed site of the Prophet’s house, Angawi won the formal attention of the Saudi government: Officials ordered him to stop what he was doing and vacate the place.

Angawi contacted the Bin Ladens, including Bakr. Couldn’t they find some way to work around this one particular area of the Prophet’s house during their renovation projects? Or could they at least proceed in gradual steps, so he could finish some of his digging and documentation? No, he was told. Either Angawi would get out of the hole or he would be bulldozed over himself, he was told. “We have our orders.”¹³

At that point Angawi began to lose some of his equilibrium. “I brought my children out to the site,” and he dared the Bin Ladens to start up their bulldozer engines. “They took that in for a couple of weeks,” he recalled. “I was really going wild. My mind was fixed.”¹⁴

Gradually the two camps shuffled toward a partial compromise. This was not jihad, after all; it was a struggle over principle and ideology between two wealthy and privileged camps of the Saudi elite, a struggle in which leaders on both sides carried memories of noisy but passive sitins at their Vietnam-era American university campuses overseas. In the end, Angawi was permitted to spend some time making a fuller inventory of his dig site—but he was then ordered to stay away from the site for three months. The Bin Ladens moved in and did their bulldozing.

Ultimately, the Bin Ladens installed a sparkling new public toilet facility on top of the ruin that Angawi believed had been the Prophet’s home. At times, it seemed, there was something about being a Bin Laden that made it hard to be subtle.

IN 1996 Bakr published a book to celebrate the family’s work in Mecca and Medina during the previous eight years. It was titled Story of the Great Expansion, and it was intended as a coffee table volume for Bin Laden customers and for the royal family. Bakr dedicated the book, of course, to King Fahd. In the florid and obsequious tones of courtly Arabic, he summarized the history of the alliance between the Bin Ladens and the Al-Saud, from the time of Mohamed Bin Laden until the present:

It was a dear trust your father, the founder of this great nation that has been built on the cherished principles of love, nobleness and purity, gave to our father, who felt greatly honored by it throughout his life…Our father went the way of all mortals, and your brothers followed in the footsteps of their great father. We were young and grew up in glorious and proficient hands. You, my Lord, conferred on us a great badge of honor, for we have been honored to carry out your two most magnificent projects of the Holy Mosque in Mecca and the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina…Could the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques please accept this dedication, offered with heartfelt affection and invocation, deep amity and allegiance.¹⁵

By now, in exile, Osama Bin Laden enjoyed a luxury that Bakr did not: he no longer felt a need to curry favor with the royal family, and also, free from government censors, he could write whatever he pleased. On April 16, 1996, around the same time that Bakr published his self-promoting book, Osama sent out a blast fax from London, titled “The Saudi Regime and Repeated Tragedies of the Pilgrims.” It was Hajj season, and as was typical of his essays, Osama played off recent news headlines—a massive tent fire had killed or injured a large number of pilgrims.

He aimed his venom at the Saudi royal family. He never referred to the widely known fact that his own family was responsible for the design and implementation of renovations in Mecca that were supposed to keep pilgrims safer and more comfortable. More than any single essay Osama is known to have written, this one seemed to carry an open subtext of resentment, anger, and disapproval directed at the Bin Ladens, particularly at the senior brothers in charge of the Mecca and Medina renovations. Since they had just forced him out of the family firm, in obedience to Fahd, Osama’s anger was perhaps not surprising, and it was telling, as ever, that he could still not express himself directly on the subject of his family. Not all of the criticisms in his essay implicated his brothers; for instance, he argued that the Saudi government’s budgeting for Mecca and Medina had been inadequate and that the royals should be spending more money on renovations, an argument Osama’s brothers might have appreciated, if it were not coming from him. Other aspects of his critique, however, seemed to express Osama’s ambition not only to overthrow the Saudi government, but to take charge of the Bin Laden family, perhaps in partnership with a new and improved Riyadh regime:

It has become very normal for pilgrims to the House of God to be exposed to disasters and tragedies that result in hundreds of deaths and injuries every year…If we examine the reasons for these disasters, we find that they include: narrowness of the facilities which leads to collision and trampling in the crowds…negligence in security procedures, poor response to incidents, or neglect of pilgrims by not taking the necessary security precautions.

He turned to the question of who bore responsibility for this pattern of avoidable neglect. The royal family, as ever, was to blame. That he also meant, at the same time, to criticize Bakr and other brothers in the company leadership could hardly be mistaken:

Preparing, maintaining and equipping the necessary facilities in a sufficient manner and at the level appropriate for the needs of the pilgrims is supposed to be the responsibility of the rulers of this country, who have massive resources and huge budgets to work with. The facilities they have built and services they have provided thus far do not vouch for them. Experiences and incidents have already proven that these facilities and services are not at the desired and sufficient level.¹⁶

If only I were in charge. How long had he harbored this thought, behind his passive veneer? Since childhood, when he had mumbled about his ambitions inside the family on summer vacations with his cousins in Syria? Since his return from Afghanistan, when his reversion to the life of junior contracting executive, subordinate to his older brothers, had proved so frustrating? Was family leadership a possibility that he considered only occasionally, a rumination that merely reflected his rising opinion of himself as a business executive and jihad leader? Or was it deeper and enduring? No one could say with any confidence, because Osama never said, certainly not in public. Perhaps he did not know himself.

33. ONE PHONE, ONE WORLD

“IF YOU BELIEVE in God,” an executive of the satellite telephone company Iridium said in 1996, “Iridium is God manifesting Himself through us.”¹

At the century’s end, of all the developments in technology and culture lumped under the graceless label of globalization, none seemed to inspire more passion—or more hubris—than the familiar telephone. More than a hundred years after its invention, the phone still shined with potential—more mobility, more connectivity, more speed, and more innovation. Among other things, it would no longer be tethered to walls and floors; it would be portable, and oblivious to national borders. This mobility would mirror—and stimulate—an era of global business and society that promised, paradoxically, both greater transience and greater community.

By 1990, particularly in America, there were competing visions—and competing business plans—describing how telephone portability might be constructed in the most practical and profitable way. There were those who believed globally linked cellular towers, erected on the earth’s surface, might offer the most efficient path. And then there was Iridium, named for a rare element with the atomic number 77, which was the number of low-earth orbiting satellites the company’s founders believed they would need to launch into space to provide worldwide telephonic connections, so that an Iridium owner might use his phone anywhere on the planet, at any time, to dial any telephone number.

In 1945 the budding science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, then an electronics officer in Britain’s Royal Air Force, published a short article called “Extra-Terrestrial Relays” in a magazine bearing the premature title Wireless World. Clarke imagined an array of manned satellites beaming television pictures down to Earth. His was the first outline of integrated global communications enabled by orbiting machines. The launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik in 1957, the subsequent space race between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the worldwide growth of the television industry fulfilled much of Clarke’s vision. Yet the commercial satellite industry, shadowed by the Cold War, remained largely a province of government and defense, and its initial market economics favored television, not telephony.²

Among the companies experimenting with portable telephones was Motorola Corporation, which manufactured a number of mobile radios that could connect to landline telephone systems. These devices were marketed for use on ships at sea, or by businesses with remote job sites, such as those working along the remote oil pipelines that crossed Saudi Arabia’s empty deserts.

Salem Bin Laden’s peripatetic life and his love of gadgetry had introduced his family to global telephony long before most American consumers imagined the possibilities. He used Motorola and other radio devices while flying or traveling on the ground—not only for his continent-hopping business and pleasure trips but also for camping and hunting in the Saudi deserts. He positioned himself as an agent for Motorola as he built his own telephone company during the 1970s and 1980s. The kingdom’s vast spaces, its weak infrastructure, and its excess cash all suggested Saudi Arabia as a natural marketplace for portable telephones that could function in remote locations.

Around 1987, while conducting experiments in the Arizona desert, Motorola engineers conceived the idea that would become Iridium—a network of satellites that orbited at a lower altitude than most others and that could assume the role normally played in telephony by ground-based switching and routing systems. By 1991 Motorola had developed the outlines of a business plan, one that would ultimately cost more than $5 billion to carry out. The corporation eventually spun off Iridium as a separate business, but Motorola designed and built the satellites it would use, under a fixed-price contract worth about $3.5 billion. It was a grandiose project infused with risk and uncertainty.³

Motorola’s executives approached major phone companies in Europe and Asia, seeking investors. Iridium’s founders were so convinced of the genius of their vision that when they held an initial conference in Switzerland, the legend was that they charged participants $1 million or more just to hear about their business plan—a price that kept many companies away, recalled F. Thomas Tuttle, who later served as Iridium’s general counsel. Ultimately, because interest in the venture was not as overwhelming as initially hoped, Motorola had to “drop down a tier or two” and form partnerships with secondary phone companies, Tuttle said. Iridium’s idea was to recruit a number of “gateway” investors scattered around the world, each of which would take responsibility for managing its global service in a particular region, such as the Middle East. Since Motorola had a prior business relationship with the Bin Ladens, they were natural targets for Iridium’s pitch.⁴

Bakr was interested. He formed an offshore corporation, Trinford Investments S.A., which was later described in U.S. regulatory filings as an affiliate of the Saudi Bin Laden Group. Trinford then purchased an interest in Iridium’s gateway for much of the Arab world and Central Asia with the right to appoint two of six directors. In 1993 this company, called Iridium Middle East Corporation, put up $40 million in cash to join the parent consortium, according to a second former Iridium executive involved. The following year, Iridium Middle East put up another installment of $40 million. The Bin Ladens reduced their initial exposure by syndicating some of their investment to other Saudi backers, including members of the royal family, according to the former Iridium executive. Worldwide, Iridium raised about $3.46 billion from gateway partners like the Bin Ladens.⁵

Flush with optimism and cash, the company opened its headquarters in Washington, D.C., at 1575 I Street, N.W. Bakr Bin Laden assigned the investment to his half-brother Hassan, as part of Hassan’s international portfolio. (He was already the liaison to the Saudi Bin Laden Group’s American office in suburban Maryland, and he also traveled regularly to Texas on assignment, where he helped oversee the refurbishment of Saudi Air Force planes at a U.S. facility.) Iridium Middle East opened a small office in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington. Two or three young Arabs with backgrounds in economics worked there, keeping in touch with Iridium headquarters as the satellites were built and launched, and as consumer marketing plans developed. Hassan joined the Iridium board of directors and flew to the United States for quarterly board meetings.⁶

He was a clean-shaven, congenial man in his late thirties or early forties who seemed to live nocturnally. He invited some Iridium executives to join him for chain-smoking late-night bull sessions fueled by Johnny Walker. Some of these executives had long worked in Saudi Arabia, and they were accustomed to encountering split personalities among their Saudi counterparts—social drinkers in the West, stern teetotalers at home. Hassan was different: he seemed to party the same way whether he was in Jeddah, Washington, or Beirut. After 1996, one of the former executives recalled, the subject of Hassan’s half-brother Osama occasionally arose at their after-hours bull sessions. Hassan practically spit in vitriol. Osama “has been ex-communicated,” he said, as the participant remembered it. That was about all Hassan had to say on the subject. He did not talk much about Islam or the sources of grievance in the Islamic world. It would be unusual for a Saudi to expound openly about his religious views with a foreigner. In any event, Hassan, it turned out, was more interested in vintage cars and rock and roll.⁷

HASSAN BIN LADEN was a major shareholder in Hard Rock Cafe Middle East, Inc., the official Hard Rock Cafe franchisee for much of the Arab world, Greece, Cyprus, and Turkey. More than satellite telephones or commercial real estate, Hard Rock’s music-themed restaurants seemed to be aligned with his personality. He had spent much of his youth in Beirut; he could speak in the local urban Lebanese slang, and he seemed to know every pinball machine in the city. He met his first wife, Layla, in Lebanon. They lived in hotel rooms, and Hassan collected cars—Ferraris, Cadillacs, a vintage Chrysler New Yorker, Rolls-Royces, and Mercedes-Benzes. He entered the import-export business as a young man, but he seemed to love soccer, music, casinos, and nightlife more. He was a committed follower of the Jeddah soccer team, Al-Ittihad (rival to the team Osama had supported as a teenager), and he was such a devoted fan of the Egyptian singer Umm Kulsum that he would fly to Cairo on weekends just to attend her concerts. When civil war broke out in Lebanon during the 1970s, Hassan moved his base to Jeddah, but he returned to Beirut as soon as the city began to revive, in the mid-1990s. It was a period of great longing among Beirutis for a return to cosmopolitan normalcy, and so even an event like the grand opening of a local Hard Rock Cafe franchise could seem special.⁸

Fireworks, not shells, burst brightly above the Beirut Corniche, alongside the Mediterranean, on opening night in December 1996. The Gipsy Kings, a pop-flamenco band from France, headlined on the restaurant’s main stage. Hassan roped off a special seating section for Bin Laden family members—about two dozen flew in for the occasion, including a number of Hassan’s half-brothers, such as Shafiq and Tareq. It was the sort of night that Salem had once lived for—it was easy to imagine him seizing the stage and singing off-key with the Gipsy Kings’ rhythm section.

Music paraphernalia draped the restaurant walls: a red shirt with glass stones sewn into the fabric that had once been worn by Michael Jackson; an embroidered silk shirt that had belonged to Elvis Presley; a crêpe de chine shirt worn by John Lennon of the Beatles; a 1958 Fender Stratocaster used by members of the Cars; another Stratocaster, signed by Eric Clapton; the playing surface of a Rolling Stones pinball machine, signed by members of the band; and an Oberheim electronic keyboard used and signed by Billy Joel. Most impressive of all was a sheet of lined paper on which John Lennon, using a black ballpoint pen, had written out the lyrics to his song “Imagine.”⁹

A night in late 1996: one son of Mohamed Bin Laden lives in exile, seeking utopia in Islamic revolution, while several others launch a restaurant and bar in an Arab capital promoting reified utopian rock lyrics. Perhaps more striking than the competing content of their dreams was the shared stage: a world in which jihad and emotion-laden Western popular music spoke to young and overlapping global audiences.

IRIDIUM’S BUSINESS PLAN relied on an expansive forecast of the coming wireless world. The company’s gateway investors included phone companies that already possessed about 14 million wireless customers, to whom the new phones could be marketed. In its regulatory filings, Iridium estimated that the world’s “traveling professional market”—by which it meant employed adults with wireless phones who left their local phone service area at least four times per year—would grow to about 42 million people by 2002. This forecast, if even approximately accurate, suggested that signing up the 500,000 or so customers that Iridium needed to break even would not be very difficult. There were clear challenges, nonetheless. The most obvious was price: Iridium’s initial handsets would cost about three thousand dollars each, and international calls would be billed at rates as high as seven dollars per minute. Even in this pre-cellular era when consumers did not know what kinds of prices to expect for portable phone service, those numbers looked steep.¹⁰

The sheer romanticism of Iridium’s plan sometimes seemed to quiet skeptics, however. As if to emphasize its groundbreaking character, the company turned to China to launch its satellites into space, and by early 1997, Long March Rockets, named for the events surrounding the birth of Chinese communism, were blasting into the sky every few months, lifting Iridium’s decidedly capitalist machines into position. Al Gore, America’s futurist vice president, invited Iridium executives to the White House Rose Garden to celebrate their vision. Gore placed a ceremonial call to a great-grandson of the telephone’s nineteenth-century inventor, Alexander Graham Bell. Satellite systems like Iridium’s “complete the telephone coverage of the Earth’s surface that Alexander Graham Bell began more than a century ago,” Gore said when his call went through. “Your great-grandfather would be very proud.”¹¹

Iridium burned its bankroll at a breathtaking pace as it raced toward its service launch. Its greatest challenge was to win timely government permissions to sell and operate its telephones within the borders of more than 150 different countries. The company had chosen Washington for its headquarters, in part to facilitate this licensing drive through embassies in the capital, and by seeking diplomatic support from the U.S. government. The final responsibility for winning licenses fell to each Iridium gateway operator, however. Iridium Middle East had to secure permission from more than twenty governments in the Arab world and Central Asia—many of these governments possessed corrupt, serpentine bureaucracies, or they barely functioned at all. Lawyers at Iridium headquarters rendered the final judgment about when “permission” from a particular country had actually been obtained. The forms of acceptable permission varied greatly—some governments simply issued a ministerial announcement, while others negotiated a more traditional legal agreement. “I had a Mongolian license on a napkin,” recalled one Iridium executive. In some cases, recalled Tuttle, the general counsel, “What we had was basically the country saying, ‘Just tell us what you’re doing. We don’t need an approval.’”¹²

The campaign proved to be slow going, particularly in the Middle East. Hassan Bin Laden and other gateway executives came under intense pressure to secure permissions in their areas of operation. As of July 1997, about a year before the service was supposed to begin operation, Iridium had secured a conditional license to operate in only one country within Iridium Middle East’s region, according to regulatory filings. That country was Afghanistan.¹³

Three former Iridium executives involved in the licensing effort, including Tuttle, said they could not recall how permission from Afghanistan was secured, when it was received, what form it took, or what Afghan authority granted it. As of July 1997, the Taliban, a radical Islamist militia, controlled the country’s government. At the same time, however, a competing faction manned the country’s embassy in Washington; it is possible the initial permission was obtained there. According to a Bin Laden attorney, Iridium never acquired a final Afghan license or a single Afghan customer.

The Taliban had already become notorious for their repression of women’s education and their bizarre Islamic rule making. That summer of 1997, they also faced criticism because of the radical statements, supporting violence, which emanated from a foreign guest the Taliban’s one-eyed leader, Mullah Omar, had decided to embrace: Osama Bin Laden. There is no evidence that Osama played any role in detailing the initial license for Afghanistan. The Bin Ladens’ attorney, Timothy J. Finn, later wrote that the family believed that the initial license was obtained by Iridium before the Bin Ladens came on the scene. “In any event, Hassan did not have any involvement with this and does not know how it came about,” Finn wrote. “Indeed, Hassan does not believe he had any significant involvement at any time with Afghanistan, which was not regarded as a significant market for this high-priced service. Needless to say he never contacted Osama about any aspect of this.”

It seems likely that Osama was at least aware of his family’s investment in Iridium. He could have offered them a testament supporting their investment gamble; he was learning himself about the powers of a global satellite telephone.

“MOTHERS SUFFER MOST,” Osama’s mother later remarked, but it was not because her son failed to phone home from political exile. “He used to call regularly” even from Afghanistan. “He would tell me about his and his family’s well-being—mother-son talk.”¹⁴

Osama’s fealty to his mother had become a greater technical challenge after his departure in May 1996 from Sudan, which had a shaky but functioning phone network, to Afghanistan, where communications were considerably more unreliable. He conceived his exile as an echo of the seventh-century journeys of the Prophet Mohamed; at the same time, he had become a model customer for a twenty-first-century company like Iridium.

He did not go to Afghanistan voluntarily. Sudan’s government sought a modicum of international legitimacy; the United States made clear it could not achieve this as long as Osama Bin Laden lived and operated openly in Khartoum. Osama’s former mentor, Hassan Al-Turabi, told him he had to go, and then compounded the betrayal, along with others in the Sudanese government, by failing to pay off debts owed to Osama and by taking his businesses at fire sale prices. Osama “sold them all,” recalled his bodyguard Nasir Al-Bahri, “for a very cheap price, because he had no other option.”¹⁵

Under financial pressure, less one wife and his eldest son, who had already returned to Saudi Arabia, Osama flew with his remaining family to Jalalabad, Afghanistan, on a chartered jet. He left behind a comfortable urban sheikh’s life of air-conditioned offices, horse farms, and business and jihad meetings. In the considerably more unplugged and violent landscape of eastern Afghanistan, he tried to make a virtue of necessity, often lecturing his children about the character-building benefits of an austere lifestyle, such as that endured by the Prophet and his companions. Yet it was plain, from the first weeks after his arrival in Afghanistan, that he did not relish his rough circumstances and that he was feeling a degree of psychological pressure. He fumed with renewed intensity at those who had forced him to endure a return to Afghanistan. Increasingly, in particular, he concentrated his anger on the government of the United States.

While in Khartoum, in his political essays, Osama had directed his incitement and sarcasm at Riyadh. The royal family’s failures and depredations were his dominant literary obsession, but he never formally declared war on the Saudi government. His expulsion from Sudan seems to have convinced him once and for all, however, that the Al-Saud were best understood as mere puppets of Washington. In any event, soon after he arrived in Afghanistan, Osama composed a rambling declaration of war against the United States, the first document he ever published that formally and openly endorsed a violent campaign against the West.

Its most striking passages were stanzas of poetry, particularly an autobiographical passage that suggested the anger and defiance building up within him. In these lines, Osama chose words and images associated with insanity or loss of control. He made near-explicit reference to those family members who had abandoned him, and to those he had defied in the name of Islam. He described his burning feelings about the “loss” of the Al-Quds mosque in Jerusalem, which he had never visited, so far as is known, but which he associated with his father in other public comments; perhaps this passage is best read as entirely political, but the possible complementary reading of an unconscious paternal reference is at least notable, particularly since the line is quickly followed by references to death, his mother, and her sanity. Overall, Osama’s self-portrait in verse suggested a man grappling with new extremities of personal experience—but while these feelings might be tormenting, he wrote, he retained a faith that they could ultimately be cleansed by righteous violence:

I am willing to sacrifice self and wealth for knights who never disappointed me.Knights who are never fed up or deterred by death, even if the mill of war turns.In the heat of battle they do not care, and cure the insanity of the enemy by their “insane” courage…I rejected all the critics, who chose the wrong way;I rejected those who enjoy fireplaces in clubs, discussing eternally;I rejected those who, despite being lost, think they are at the goal;I respect those who carried on, not asking or bothering about the difficulties;Never letting up from their goals, despite all hardships on the road;Whose blood is oil for the flame guiding in the darkness of confusion;I still feel the pain of the loss of Al-Quds in my internal organs;That loss is like a burning fire in my intestines;…Death is truth and ultimate destiny, and life will end anyway. If I do not fight you, then my mother must be insane!…The walls of oppression and humiliation cannot be demolished except in a rain of bullets.The free man does not surrender leadership to infidels and sinners.Without shedding blood, no degradation and branding can be removed from the forehead…¹⁶

Some of Osama’s agitation may have been caused by the insecurity of his situation immediately upon arrival with his family near Jalalabad that summer of 1996. Eastern Afghanistan was then in violent flux, and Osama’s old Afghan contacts were in disarray as the Taliban swept to power. With a reputation for wealth and little political protection, he was fortunate during these initial weeks not to have become one more collateral victim of the ever-shifting Afghan civil war.

By the end of the year, however, his circumstances had improved dramatically. Bin Laden won an introduction to Mullah Omar and established cordial relations. Omar offered him hospitality in the poor but entirely peaceful southern Afghan city of Kandahar. Osama moved there with much of his large family—at least eleven sons by this point, three wives, and a brood of daughters whom none of his aides could or would try to count.

Even after his world calmed, he remained preoccupied by the United States. He collected and read an odd assortment of books about America, according to Al-Bahri, who later joined him as a bodyguard. These included accounts of former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger’s discussions about the seizure of Saudi oil fields during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war; a book by an American military commander about the use of rapid-deployment forces; and a book of undetermined origin that described a supposed plan by former U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt to control the world.¹⁷ Osama’s public comments during this period make clear that, like many Saudis, he subscribed to hoary anti-Semitic screeds such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an invented text about supposed global Jewish conspiracies that had been one of Adolf Hitler’s preferred “historical” sources. In Osama’s spare library, these sorts of tracts lay interspersed with traditional Koranic texts, faxed essays from radical Islamic scholars in Saudi Arabia, and bits and pieces from Western media reports. Sitting cross-legged on wool carpets, sharing meals of bread and yogurt, as the electricity flickered on and off, the line between history and fantasy would have been difficult to discern, even if Osama had been interested in locating it.

Osama and his colleagues asked, as Al-Bahri recalled it: “What is America?” If they had succeeded in jihad against the Russians in Afghanistan and Chechnya, and against the Serbs in Bosnia, then “America will not be something new.” They heard oral reports from veterans returning from participating in combat against American troops in Somalia. They heard about the confessions of the bombers who had struck American targets in Saudi Arabia. The United States, they concluded, “has become a target for all and sundry.”¹⁸

The broad political-military equation they perceived was sadly familiar, particularly in its fundamental view of Judaism as a fountain-head of evil global conspiracy: Jews and Christians, or “Zionists” and “Crusaders,” sought to destroy Islam and seize its lands. This war had been described and forecasted in the Koran, which called upon Allah’s followers to resist in His name, to hasten Islam’s ultimate victory and the arrival of Judgment Day. Possession of oil was one contemporary object of this contest because God had placed vast oil reserves in Saudi Arabia in order to strengthen those who resided in Islam’s birthplace; fearing this, the Jews and Crusaders had conspired to take the oil for themselves, preying on the weakness and infidelity of local Arab rulers. In this light, American manipulations in Saudi Arabia constituted the worst crimes by infidels in more than a thousand years of struggle, Osama wrote in his August 1996 declaration. He included himself among the victims:

The latest and greatest of these aggressions incurred by the Muslims since the death of the Prophet is the occupation of the land of the two Holy Places. By orders from the U.S.A. they also arrested a large number of scholars in the land of the two Holy Places…Myself and my group have suffered some of this injustice. We have been pursued in Pakistan, Sudan and Afghanistan…¹⁹

When at home with his family, away from his fax-writing offices, Osama remained in many ways the same puritan, quirky, middle-aged father he had become in Sudan: he was an insistent scold about the requirements of prayer and self-reliance, but he could also be kind and forgiving, and playful, particularly on outings to the desert. He refused to allow his children to put ice in their water on the grounds that it would soften them, and he banned such indulgences as Tabasco sauce as part of his relentless boycott of American goods. Yet he organized relaxing volleyball games, horseback-riding adventures, shooting expeditions, and family picnics. Armed bodyguards wove constantly among him and his wives; there was no mistaking Osama’s importance now, particularly in relief against the poverty and isolation of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. Even so, there remained something distant, soft, and inscrutable about Osama. He had a flaccid handshake; greeting him was “like sort of shaking hands with a fish,” recalled Peter Jouvenal, an English journalist. One of his former wives recalled that after his return to Afghanistan, there were periods when he “did not like anybody to talk to him,” and that “he used to sit and think for a long time and sleep very late.”²⁰

Like many of his half-brothers, Osama preferred to be surrounded by family and followers, he liked to move from place to place, and he craved connections to the wider world. He continued to rely upon his London office. There his colleague Fawwaz stayed in touch with him in Kandahar by trundling down to a small international telephone and fax shop in North London called The Grapevine, where he could exchange written messages with his boss.²¹ Yet fax machines were becoming a relatively frustrating and declining technology.

Osama understood the rising influence of global satellite television networks. He saw them as a crucial mechanism for marketing and fundraising. The loss of his personal inheritance, family dividends, and his business assets and savings in Sudan meant that, upon his return to Afghanistan, he needed a strong media profile, primarily to attract donors and volunteers. This had been his essential strategy during the anti-Soviet Afghan war; now, through global television networks, he could update and extend it, by speaking to worldwide audiences previously unavailable. The technology-phobic Taliban generally regarded media as a tool of the Devil, but it was not only crucial to Osama’s conception of his jihad operations; it was also something he loved to consume: during his long days in exile, he seems to have evolved into something of a global news junkie.

He granted a series of interviews inside Afghanistan during 1997 and 1998—he gave an early and significant interview to CNN, another a year later to ABC, and he also made himself available to several Arabic language print reporters whose work he respected. He saw early on the power of Al-Jazeera, an independent Arabic-language satellite broadcaster, and in late 1998, he sat for an influential interview that allowed him to speak more directly and more thoroughly to Saudi and other Arab audiences than ever before. He became self-conscious about visual staging: the books that appeared behind him; the assault rifle he propped beside him; the tracer bullets that flew into the sky like fireworks upon his arrival for an interview.

Early in 1998, after a period of separation, Bin Laden reunited with the Egyptian Al-Jihad faction led by Ayman Al-Zawahiri; they announced their new coalition, the International Islamic Front for Jihad Against the Crusaders and the Jews, at a press conference attended by television cameramen and print journalists. Bin Laden and Al-Zawahiri sat a table draped by a banner—they looked like a pair of dubious marketing executives at a small Islamic pharmaceutical firm, announcing their debut of a new product line. The imagery harkened back to Osama’s self-produced videos during his late Afghan period.

Rahimullah Yusufzai, a Pakistani journalist who attended, asked Osama about his family’s decision to disown him.

“Blood is thicker than water,” he answered wryly.

“Are you still a billionaire?” Yusufzai asked. Osama clearly enjoyed the wordplay; he had grown comfortable with the media. “My heart is rich and generous,” he said.²²

Fax machines could distribute his essays, satellite television could convey his presence and his speechmaking, but Osama needed a telephone for more private operations.

On November 1, 1996, just as he was securing his new sanctuary with the Taliban, Osama purchased, through his London office, an Inmarsat Mini-M satellite telephone, a device about the size of a laptop computer. It had a retail price of about fifteen thousand dollars. His office also purchased several thousand prepaid minutes. Inmarsat had begun as a government consortium, but it had more recently been privatized. Its Mini-Ms had beaten Iridium to market, but unlike Iridium, Inmarsat did not target the general consumer. Its phones were intended primarily for businesses with remote job sites. Al Qaeda might not be a conventional company in its market set, but its geography—headquarters in remote Afghanistan, regional offices in Africa and the Arab world—fit the Mini-M niche.²³

Calling records from Osama’s phone suggest that he was something of a chatterbox. The numbers he and his aides dialed between late 1996 and the autumn of 1998 conjure the image of Osama checking in regularly with far-flung publicists, financial aides, and terrorist-cell leaders, then suddenly remembering that he owed his mother a hello. He called his liaisons in Britain most often—260 times, to 27 different numbers. He or his aides placed more than 200 calls to Yemen, 131 calls to Sudan, 106 to Iran, 67 to Azerbaijan, 59 to Pakistan, 57 to Saudi Arabia, 13 to a ship sailing on the Indian Ocean, and 6 to the United States.²⁴

From early 1997, the American government listened in. A CIA officer in Europe discovered in January or February that listening systems run by the National Security Agency (America’s principal intelligence agency for intercepting communications) were picking up Inmarsat phone calls emanating from Afghanistan. The phone, upon investigation, appeared to belong to Osama Bin Laden, who was by now a formally designated target of CIA intelligence collection. A reports officer in the CIA station tracking Bin Laden from suburban Virginia drew up link diagrams showing the telephone numbers Bin Laden was calling, and in some cases, what numbers those phones dialed in turn. But according to Michael Scheuer, who then ran the Bin Laden tracking unit, the CIA could not persuade the NSA to deliver regular transcripts of the intercepted satellite calls. Frustrated, Scheuer managed to deploy his own interception equipment to the region, but this system could pick up only one side of Bin Laden’s conversations—the side emanating from Afghanistan, as Scheuer remembered it. Nonetheless, even with this limitation, throughout 1997 and early 1998, Bin Laden’s satellite phone calls generated for the CIA the first truly reliable global map of Al Qaeda’s spreading reach.²⁵

Bin Laden seemed to be using vague code words during some of his conversations, but the analysts could not sort out his meanings. In the end, so far as is known (the partial transcripts of the calls have never been declassified), the intelligence collected from his phone was not specific enough to save the lives taken by Osama’s first spectacular terrorist attack.

For years, dating back to his time in Sudan, Bin Laden had been nurturing a plan to bomb American embassies in East Africa. On August 7, 1998, after a last round of phone conversations with Afghan headquarters, two of Al Qaeda’s clandestine African cells struck. Suicide truck bombers tried to ram themselves into American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. They detonated near the buildings; they killed more than 225 people and wounded several thousand more.

Osama had used his satellite phone to cross the Indian Ocean and strike American targets by remote control. It was an innovation in global terrorism derived from his instincts and experiences as a Bin Laden: as his half-brothers invested in satellite telephony in Washington, Osama used the same technology to attack Washington’s embassies abroad. It was not the last time that he would use technologies of global mobility familiar to his family as a means of brilliant tactical innovation.

That August, in the name of a previously unknown front organization, Bin Laden sent a claim of responsibility by fax, through the North London fax shop, The Grapevine: “The days to come are sufficient for the U.S., God willing, to see a black fate like the one that befell the Soviet Union,” he wrote. “Blows will come down on the U.S. one after another from everywhere and new Islamic groups will emerge one after another…”²⁶

PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON fired cruise missiles at Osama several weeks after the Africa attack. The evidence from Osama’s monitored satellite phone, combined with admissions by detained Al Qaeda operatives, left no doubt about Bin Laden’s responsibility for the bombings. The intelligence used to target him proved faulty, however, and the missiles failed to find him. Osama realized that his satellite phone might be employed to track him as a target; he turned it off and never used it again.

The retaliatory missile attack instantly elevated Osama’s global profile. He was now certified as worthy of the military attention of the most powerful political leader on the planet. That August, televised press conferences in Washington held by Clinton administration officials and generals responsible for the missile strike introduced Bin Laden’s name to mass audiences who had never heard of him. Muslims rallied in Pakistan to praise Osama’s leadership; his bearded face appeared on posters and T-shirts.

In the midst of Osama’s global brand launch, Iridium was itself just weeks away from inaugurating its phone service. “It suddenly occurred to all of us that we had one of these people on our board,” General Counsel Tuttle recalled, referring to the Bin Ladens. Iridium executives hurriedly tried to research the Bin Laden family. They inquired about Osama with Hassan in a “dignified and tactful way.” He assured them that Osama had been cut off. Iridium’s executives decided to issue no formal statement; they did not want to call attention to themselves at such a crucial moment, with $5 billion in investments at stake. When reporters called, a spokeswoman said only that Osama had been cut off from his family and its businesses.²⁷

Iridium’s executives soon had other problems to worry about. When the company’s phones went on sale, it became clear that Iridium was destined not to change the world, but to be recorded as one of the most spectacular bankruptcies in recent business history.

The company had misjudged the price question. It had also been so slow to bring its service to market—more than a decade had passed between conception and launch—that cellular telephone service and the World Wide Web began to overtake its initial vision. Iridium persuaded only about fifty-five thousand people and businesses to purchase handsets and subscribe to its service, about one-tenth of the number required. Motorola ultimately wrote off losses totaling more than $2.5 billion.²⁸ Iridium filed for bankruptcy in 1999. Its gateway investors, the Bin Ladens among them, lost all of their money.

The company’s satellites were soon in danger of falling from the sky and burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere. To prevent this, the Pentagon signed a contract to pay $3 million a month for Iridium phone service, to help keep the system operating. A Pentagon spokesman explained that a global phone network offered some unique military advantages. “Iridium provides service to some areas of the world that are very underserved,” the spokesman said. For the American armed forces, the network’s reach and security “has some operational implications,” he added.²⁹

They were learning, but not fast enough. Osama Bin Laden had now announced himself as a formal enemy of the United States. The American government knew remarkably little about him or his family, however, and some of the information it possessed—and circulated at the highest levels—was wrong. Investigating the Bin Ladens, however, was proving to be a daunting and complicated task, even for the CIA.

34. LAWYERS, GUNS, AND MONEY

DANIEL COLEMAN, an agent at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, arrived on assignment to the CIA’s Bin Laden unit in March 1996. The CIA and the FBI sought to foster cooperation; because of his prior experience with intelligence investigations, Coleman was a natural emissary. He was a bulky, plain-speaking man who had lived for most of his life in New York or New Jersey. The Bin Laden unit was then housed in a suburban office building in Northern Virginia. As Coleman settled in, he immersed himself by reading what is referred to at the CIA as a “201 file,” a kind of case history. The Bin Laden 201 ran to thirty-six volumes, although some of it included duplications and repetitions. Remarkably, Coleman noted, there was not a single written record of Osama Bin Laden’s involvement in the anti-Soviet Afghan war of the 1980s, a conflict in which the CIA had played such a prominent role.¹

CIA officers had collected intelligence about Osama from the agency’s station in Khartoum; their files, mainly accumulated between 1993 and 1995, contained detailed information about Bin Laden’s bank accounts in Sudan and Dubai, his Sudanese businesses, farms, and equipment inventories. Beginning in the summer of 1996, two informants who had worked for Bin Laden, and who volunteered to help the United States, added considerably to this portrait. One of the defectors, Jamal Al-Fadl, described the existence and history of Al Qaeda—it was the first time anyone in the U.S. government had heard the name.

The amounts of money the CIA had discovered in Osama’s bank accounts were not very large, but at least they knew where some of his funds were located. The presumption was that he had hidden larger sums in other accounts, possibly in Europe, which had not yet been identified. The CIA’s analysts took for granted that Osama Bin Laden was independently very wealthy, as a result of his inheritance. And yet, until 1996, nobody in the United States government had attempted to investigate in depth basic questions about Osama’s supposed riches: How much cash had he actually received from his father? How much income had he received from the Bin Laden businesses? Had the family truly cut him off? If he was still receiving aid from Saudi Arabia, where was it coming from? How much cash savings had he retained?²

Anthony Lake, national security advisor to President Clinton during the first term of Clinton’s presidency, had pushed for the creation of a special Bin Laden tracking unit at the CIA; Lake was concerned about the threat of transnational terrorist financing. The unit was initially referred to as CTC-TFL, which stood for Counterterrorist Center–Terrorist-Financial Links.³ Its chief when Daniel Coleman arrived was Michael Scheuer, a blunt and aggressive CIA intelligence analyst who had followed the covert Afghan war during the 1980s.

Scheuer was skeptical about the value of investigating terrorist finance, compared to other lines of investigation or covert action; he gradually concluded that following money trails would not reveal very much about Osama’s intentions and plans for violent attacks. Nonetheless, toward the second half of 1996, Scheuer and Coleman decided to investigate how many Bin Laden family members were in the United States, what they were doing, and how they viewed Osama. Through formal interviews, they figured, they might learn something useful about Osama’s resources and motivations. The CIA was prohibited by law from collecting intelligence inside the United States in many circumstances; that mission fell primarily to the FBI, and so Coleman took on the task of rounding up Bin Laden interviews.⁴

Coleman and another agent in the FBI’s Washington field office went to visit with Philip Griffin, the former State Department diplomat who now ran the Bin Laden office in suburban Maryland. Coleman felt the session was not particularly fruitful: “We just got a lecture about how saintly the Bin Laden family was,” he recalled. Coleman returned to Rockville a second time and asked Griffin if it would be possible to arrange a meeting with Bakr Bin Laden, since he was the head of the family and would know the most about Osama’s history and finances. Griffin said that Bakr traveled to the United States rarely, if at all, and he suggested that the FBI would do better to focus its request on other brothers, such as Hassan or Shafiq, who had senior roles in the company and spent more time in the West.⁵

When Bakr learned of the FBI’s interest in the family, he took a direct interest. He held discussions in Jeddah about how to respond; ultimately, Bakr told Griffin that he should not serve as the family’s representative in these contacts with the FBI. Bakr contacted James Baker, the former secretary of state, and drew upon advice from Baker’s law firm, Baker Botts; Jim Baker’s son, a highly regarded attorney, ran the firm’s Washington office. Bakr also consulted and retained the influential Wall Street law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell, whose clients included Microsoft Corporation and the investment bank Goldman Sachs.

On April 17, 1997, Daniel Coleman arrived at the Washington offices of Sullivan & Cromwell for an interview with Shafiq and Hassan Bin Laden. They convened in a conference room. As Coleman conducted the questioning, another agent took notes. After conducting interviews for the FBI over many years, Coleman had concluded that the best approach in a situation like this one was to be as informal as possible—no stenographer typing a transcription of the interview, no legal pad on his lap with a written script of questions. He knew the Bin Ladens would feel defensive and anxious, and he wanted them to relax. He preferred to develop a “proper conversation,” one in which he would take his time to learn “what the guy’s interested in talking about,” and then try to gradually develop mutual confidence.⁶

The lead attorney for the Bin Laden brothers was Richard J. Urowsky, a Yale Law School graduate and a senior partner at Sullivan & Cromwell who specialized in litigation. In addition to Urowsky, two other Sullivan lawyers were present. The interview lasted about two hours and covered at least a dozen subjects—the shape and history of the Bin Laden family, Osama’s relationship with his half-siblings, the number of Bin Ladens who were in the United States, and inheritance matters. The atmosphere was subdued but not confrontational. Shafiq and Hassan were responsive but not loquacious. On the subject of Osama’s wealth, they told the FBI agents that Osama’s allowances, salaries, and inheritances ran into the millions of dollars, but did not amount to hundreds of millions; it is not clear, however, how specific the brothers were about numbers during this initial interview.

Coleman felt that Urowsky handled the meeting as if his clients were criminal suspects, which they were not. Coleman tried to explain that this was not intended as a confrontational session, but he felt that Urowsky interrupted him and prevented him from establishing the sort of rapport he valued with interview subjects of this kind.

After the Washington interview, Abdullah Bin Laden, the half-brother of Osama enrolled as a graduate student in legal affairs at Harvard University, received a call from another FBI agent who wanted an interview. Bin Ladens scattered around the United States also received interview requests from agents in local FBI field offices; these approaches were not coordinated with Coleman. Different FBI field offices were competing, in effect, to interview Bin Ladens residing in the United States now that Osama was a subject of interest.

Urowsky telephoned Coleman to report the latest request, and they scheduled a meeting with Abdullah Bin Laden in Sullivan & Cromwell’s Boston office. Two agents joined Coleman. Urowsky was there again and “was just horrible,” or so Coleman felt. At one point Urowsky accused Coleman of distorting what Shafiq and Hassan Bin Laden had said during their interview in Washington; it was all Coleman could do to restrain himself from leaping across the conference table and throttling Urowsky. “Guys like him think they can talk to everybody the way they do in court,” Coleman recalled. “Not to me, you can’t…He’s just an arrogant jerk.” Coleman knew “damn well” that the half-brothers had nothing to do with Osama anymore. “I was just trying to figure out who was in his family…I just need somebody to tell me who’s who. That’s all.” But he found it impossible to fight past the posturing by their lawyers.⁷

After these initial interviews, according to Scheuer, lawyers for the Bin Ladens contacted the FBI “at the senior level” and told them “you can’t talk to the Bin Ladens like that.” One reason cited, as Scheuer recalled it, was that some members of the Bin Laden family had been issued diplomatic passports by the government of Saudi Arabia, which meant that they could not be subjected to American legal proceedings of any kind—they enjoyed sweeping privileges under the doctrine of diplomatic immunity, which offers reciprocal protections to diplomats serving on accredited missions. The number of Bin Ladens who had been issued diplomatic passports is not clear—Coleman recalled that only a few members of the family had them, and that the rest carried ordinary passports. In any event, as Scheuer remembered it, the thrust of the message from FBI Director Louis Freeh, as passed through to him, was loud and clear: No more of that crap. Scheuer recalled arguing in reply: “Well, listen, these guys are related—it’s a big family, it’s a lot of money, and we have a suspicion that some of these guys support Osama.” But he was told, in effect, “No, we don’t need that kind of trouble.”⁸

Scheuer’s frustration accumulated steadily. He saw Osama Bin Laden emerging as a dangerous adversary of the United States and its allies, particularly Egypt, and he felt that his supervisors at the CIA and the White House were unwilling to take risks to disrupt Bin Laden’s increasingly violent ambitions. His supervisors, for their part, saw Scheuer as a career analyst, admittedly hardworking and dedicated, but one who lacked the experience and maturity to run risky field operations and who was such a combative personality that he undermined his own work by alienating many of the people he served.

Scheuer proposed a number of intelligence-collection and covert-action plans targeting Osama’s money and businesses; all were rejected or aborted. In one operation, Scheuer’s unit sought to recruit an agent in Switzerland who could obtain encryption codes necessary to break into Geneva and Zurich banks electronically, to search for Osama’s presumed accounts. The CIA’s European Division and the Treasury Department both objected, the latter on the grounds that a successful operation might undermine confidence in the global banking system. Scheuer also proposed an operation to steal the relatively small amounts of money identified in Osama’s Sudanese and Dubai accounts, but again Treasury objected, according to Scheuer. “They said, ‘Yeah, it’s evil money, it’s bad for Bin Laden to have money, but if the Europeans even found out that we had such a capability, they would not like it, and there would be repercussions in the economic system.’”⁹

Scheuer then tried to target Islamic banks where Bin Laden reportedly did business. He discovered, however, that these banks sometimes routed money through New York, and so Treasury argued they could not be targeted. Finally, after Bin Laden had moved to Afghanistan, Scheuer recalled, his unit proposed, “Okay, let’s do it the old-fashioned way: let’s burn the bastards down.” He proposed the use of covert-action authority to destroy by arson one of the Sudanese banks where Osama still kept money. The CIA could not guarantee, however, that there were no U.S. citizens holding accounts at the bank, and so that plan was also scuttled. Scheuer made a separate proposal to burn or sabotage all the equipment at Osama’s large farm near the Ethiopian border. That, too, was rejected, he recalled. In the end, after almost four years of “feckless, and at times, dangerous recruitment efforts and safe-house establishments,” as he put it later, he had nothing to show. Osama still had his money—and the CIA still was uncertain about how much he had.¹⁰

THE AFRICA EMBASSY bombings made it plain that Osama was more than a rich radical who authored threatening essays and poems, and occasionally provided financial grants to violent Egyptian and Central Asian jihadist allies. He had now built an organization that responded to his direct leadership, had declared war against the United States, and could carry out sophisticated attacks across oceans. Osama’s understanding of America was fragmentary and distorted, but so was America’s understanding of him. In the more urgent atmosphere that followed the Africa bombings, the United States revitalized its attempts to collect intelligence about Osama’s biography, his finances, and his relationship with the larger Bin Laden family.

The U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia in that summer of 1998 was Wyche Fowler Jr., a former Democratic senator from Georgia. He worked closely with John Brennan, then the CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia, a veteran officer with silver sideburns and a diplomat’s demeanor. By the time of the Africa attacks, Bin Laden had been a subject of cable traffic in and out of the Riyadh embassy for several years. Some of it was routine reporting—translations of Osama’s interviews on Arabic-language satellite television or in the Arabic-language press. Occasionally Fowler or Brennan would discuss Bin Laden’s case with senior princes in the royal family, but these were often general conversations in which the Saudis emphasized their complete repudiation of a man they had, after all, stripped of citizenship.¹¹

About six weeks after the Africa attacks, Fowler and Brennan sought a meeting with Bakr Bin Laden in Saudi Arabia, and he agreed. Bakr arrived for the discussion without any lawyers. He seemed eager to reassure the American government that Osama enjoyed no favor in his family. Bakr said the Bin Ladens had nothing to do with Osama, that he had been cut off years ago, and that they were embarrassed and sorry about his recent violence.

The Americans told Bakr that Osama had now been formally charged with crimes under U.S. law. As a consequence, the United States would try to apprehend him in Afghanistan. To do this, they explained, they wanted help from the Bin Laden family. Among other things, they needed to learn more about Osama’s financial history and current resources.

“President Clinton has asked me to seek your assistance,” Fowler said pointedly.

Bakr said his family would cooperate. He referred the American officials to his half-brother Yahya, who was now functioning as chief of operations for the main Bin Laden businesses. Bakr explained that on financial matters, the family’s office in London possessed most of the important records, particularly those concerning international accounts and investments. Shafiq Bin Laden, who oversaw that office, could help answer any questions the U.S. government might have.¹²

Bakr’s view of Osama, as he explained it during this meeting and in subsequent conversations with American officials, was that his half-brother had essentially gone off the deep end. Osama’s extremism had surprised Bakr in some respects, he said, because as a younger man, Osama had always seemed relatively bookish and thoughtful, and he was certainly very shy. As a younger man, Bakr said, Osama had never really voiced strong political convictions, even when he was active in Afghanistan.

American officials in Saudi Arabia who visited occasionally with the Bin Ladens could see that the senior brothers around Bakr were relatively conservative in cultural terms. For example, at receptions they hosted in private homes in Jeddah, the Bin Ladens did not serve alcohol to Western visitors, unlike some other Saudi merchant families, and they adhered rigorously to Islamic prayer schedules. And yet, in Bakr’s view, as he presented it to the American officials he met, there was a bright line between the religious orthodoxy of his family and the violent radicalism now being espoused by Osama. Why Osama had crossed that line remained a mystery. There were theories within the Bin Laden family: some talked about the impact of Osama’s participation in the violence of the Afghan war, or about the influence of Egyptian radicals who had ingratiated themselves with Osama over the years. But there could be no certainty or pat explanations.

It remains unclear how much cooperation the Bin Ladens actually provided to the FBI and CIA during the months following the initial meeting with Fowler and Brennan in the late summer of 1998. One former senior American official involved described multiple “depositions” provided by Bin Laden representatives in London and Geneva to the FBI, the CIA, or both. If so, none of this information ever reached the White House’s counterterrorism office, or was referred to in public investigations such as those carried out by the 9/11 Commission. Accounts from other former officials suggest that the private cooperation from the Bin Ladens may have been limited. These officials said that while Bakr wanted to be helpful, he also sought to protect his family’s wealth and investments. After the Africa bombings, he and his American and British attorneys grew particularly concerned about a scenario in which the Bin Laden family might be formally accused by the United States of aiding Osama. They might be threatened with economic sanctions, asset seizures, forfeitures, or civil lawsuits filed by victims of Osama’s attacks. Throughout late 1998 and into 1999, the family and its attorneys proceeded at times with caution in their dealings with American government officials. At the U.S. embassy, Fowler’s primary objective was to try to identify Osama’s current bank accounts and to discover if any money was still reaching him from Saudi Arabia or elsewhere; in this endeavor, Fowler felt that he received particularly strong cooperation from senior princes in the Saudi government.¹³

For their part, the Bin Ladens and their lawyers feared, Brennan recalled, that even if they provided off-the-record and confidential assistance to American investigators, “they would expose themselves, and that because of the animus to the Bin Laden name, that people in the U.S. government might take advantage of their cooperation to freeze their assets.” Considering such risks, as Brennan put it, “Why make yourself vulnerable?”¹⁴

At the CIA’s Bin Laden unit, Michael Scheuer increasingly perceived this caution, and U.S. acceptance of it, as a form of appeasement. Scheuer detected “a decided reluctance to even ask the questions” that might make the Bin Ladens or the Saudi government uncomfortable. Partly, Scheuer believed, this reticence reflected Bakr’s skillful management of Fowler, Brennan, and others at the U.S. embassy in Riyadh. “Bakr was very good,” Scheuer said later. “He used to go into the ambassador, or he used to go into the consul general in Jeddah on the Fourth of July, or other American holidays, and say, ‘What great guys you are—we love to be in America, we love to invest there, and we’ve divorced ourselves from the black sheep’—very, very good PR work by Bakr and his brothers.”¹⁵

“There was never a reluctance on our parts to ask questions of the Saudis,” Brennan said later, responding to Scheuer’s criticisms. Added Wyche Fowler, the ambassador: “From the moment Bakr Bin Laden agreed to my request for the family’s cooperation, they provided the Treasury Department and the FBI access to their books, family records—and their contract with the U.S. military on its base in Saudi Arabia was not terminated. Further, I never heard a complaint from our government about their lack of cooperation.”¹⁶

Among Scheuer’s particular concerns, he said later, were continuing reports he saw that the Bin Ladens’ Cairo office, overseen by Osama’s half-brother Khalid, provided work and travel visas to Egyptian Islamists who wanted to travel to Afghanistan. Other CIA officials regarded Scheuer’s fears as plausible but unproven. Their most widely shared concerns about the Bin Laden family involved Jamal Khalifa, Osama’s brother-in-law and former Afghan war comrade, who had been tried and acquitted of supporting terrorist activity by a Jordanian court. During the mid-1990s, through his wife Sheikha, Osama’s half-sister Khalifa used the Mohamed Bin Laden Company’s travel office to obtain a U.S. visa and for other family travel help. Another concern was Osama’s continuing telephone contact with his mother and stepbrothers in Jeddah. CIA officers also tried to get a grip on Osama’s own scattered offspring—the wife and sons who had returned to Saudi Arabia, another son who was reported to be living in Karachi, and other family members who reportedly traveled back and forth between the kingdom and Pakistan. The CIA pressed the Saudis informally for intelligence about all these issues but learned little.¹⁷

There were so many sources of mutual frustration in the liaison between the two governments that it was difficult to separate one source of irritation from another. However, for those in the U.S. intelligence community assigned to the specific problem of Osama Bin Laden and his money, the case of Osama’s one-legged former London financial aide was a particular cause of aggravation. Al-Ghazi Madani Al-Tayyib had kept track of some of Al Qaeda’s money and businesses during Osama’s Sudan years. Exhausted and demoralized by exile in Britain, Al-Tayyib had turned himself into the Saudi authorities. He seemed likely to possess a wealth of knowledge about Osama’s personal accounts and, perhaps even more important, about his access to sympathetic religious charities and individual fundraisers. A succession of senior American officials, from the CIA and other U.S. agencies, asked Crown Prince Abdullah, Prince Nayef, and other Saudi officials for the opportunity to meet and question Al-Tayyib directly. The Saudis steadfastly refused.¹⁸

The ambassador and the CIA station chief also pressed the Saudi government to curtail flights between the kingdom and Afghanistan by the Taliban-controlled airline, Afghan Ariana, which appeared, in the late 1990s, to be operating as Al Qaeda’s air-courier service, shuttling guns, money, and volunteers to Osama. On this matter they eventually won greater, if belated, cooperation.¹⁹

THE CONNECTIONS among Saudi charities, radical Islamist networks, and members of the Bin Laden family were particularly difficult for American investigators to assess. Around 1996, for example, Scheuer and Coleman took an interest in a proselytizing group, the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, which operated an American branch out of modest quarters in Falls Church, Virginia, only a few miles from the offices of the CIA’s secret Bin Laden tracking unit. The president of the U.S. branch was listed in public incorporation documents as Abdullah Awadh Bin Laden. It took investigators some time to sort out how Abdullah fit into the Bin Laden family tree, since there were several other prominent Abdullahs in the family, such as the one at Harvard and the family’s venerated patriarch, Mohamed Bin Laden’s brother. Eventually the American investigators learned that the particular Abdullah running the World Assembly branch was the son of one of Osama Bin Laden’s half-siblings—possibly, the son of one of his half-sisters. Osama, then, was one of Abdullah’s many uncles.²⁰

The World Assembly of Muslim Youth had headquarters in Riyadh and advertised itself as the world’s largest Muslim youth group, dedicated to the spread of Islamic ideas, values, and sacred texts; it operated more than fifty regional and local offices on five continents. Abdullah Bin Laden incorporated an American branch in 1992. In a 1997 speech in Riyadh, he described his work: He offered financial subsidies to needy American Muslims wishing to undertake the Hajj; he ran one-week summer camps for Muslim youth in Texas, New York, Florida, California, Ohio, and Washington State; he sought to visit schools, universities, and prisons. His aim, as a journalist’s account of his speech put it, was to combat “the deliberate distortion of Islam” by “certain information and media outlets” that sought to “make people hate Islam, and to give Islam the label of terrorism by exploiting certain incidents, such as the explosion at the World Trade Center in New York in 1993.” Abdullah Bin Laden was particularly proud of his “good word” project to help converted American Muslims absorb Islamic values and remain on the correct spiritual path. He said that he had created kits of proselytizing materials—a silver kit, a golden kit, and a diamond kit. All the kits contained translations of the Koran and a book by Sayed Abdullah Al-Mawdudi, an early twentieth-century Islamist radical who was one of the intellectual founders of the Muslim Brotherhood.²¹

The materials distributed by the World Assembly of Muslim Youth did not explicitly promote violent jihad in the style of Osama’s published essays, but they did contain the sort of vicious anti-Semitic tracts that were all too typical of the publications of Muslim Brotherhood–influenced organizations. In an Arabic-language book titled A Handy Encyclopedia of Contemporary Religions and Sects, the World Assembly’s authors listed reasons for Muslims to hate Jews, using language that echoed the extermination-promoting tracts of Germany’s Third Reich:

The Jews are enemies of the faithful, God and the angels; the Jews are humanity’s enemies; they forment immorality in this world; The Jews are deceitful, they say something but mean the exact opposite; Who was behind the biological crisis which became like brain washing? A Jew; Who was behind the disintegration of family life and values? A Jew;…Every tragedy that inflicts the Muslims is caused by the Jews.²²

As part of his inquiries into the Bin Ladens’ presence in America, the FBI’s Daniel Coleman visited Abdullah at his Northern Virginia office with two other agents from the Washington field office. He found the young man “very friendly,” and he seemed as if he “would have been somebody interesting to talk to.” Soon after Coleman arrived, however, Abdullah presented him with a Saudi diplomatic passport. The World Assembly described itself as a nongovernmental organization, but the Saudi embassy had issued its representatives diplomatic passports, as Coleman later confirmed after requesting State Department records. Abdullah was listed as an attaché of the Saudi embassy and had been formally accredited to the United States as a Saudi diplomat. Coleman knew that this legal protection was impermeable; he left Abdullah alone.²³

In addition to his proselytizing, it later became clear, Abdullah Bin Laden invested $500,000 in U.S. business vehicles controlled by an Egyptian citizen, Soliman Biheiri, who operated a number of investment firms adhering to Islamic principles. Abdullah was joined in these investments by two of Osama’s half-sisters, Nur and Iman. These women were among a number of Osama’s more religious half-siblings who made investments in Islamic banks or investment firms with offices scattered around the world, including in bank secrecy havens, according to court records and media reports.²⁴

One of these entities was the Al-Taqwa Bank, which “has long acted as financial advisers to Al Qaeda,” according to an affidavit later filed in an American court by a U.S. government investigator. The bank’s chairman and an aide involved in Al-Taqwa operations provided “indirect investment services” for Al Qaeda, which included “investing funds for Bin Laden and making cash deliveries on request.” Like the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, Al-Taqwa had historical ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Its banking and investment entities operated offices in Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Italy, and the Bahamas. In 1999, according to a number of published reports, the FBI obtained a list of about seven hundred investors in Al-Taqwa. Among them were two of Osama’s half-sisters, Iman and Huda. The latter had once been a playful member of Salem Bin Laden’s European entourage, but after Salem’s death, she became more religious. Another Al-Taqwa investor was Ghalib Bin Laden, Bakr’s full brother, who had visited Osama in Peshawar in 1989 and who had been selected to receive Osama’s shares in family companies when he was forced to sell in 1994. His initial deposit of $1 million in an Al-Taqwa investment account in the Bahamas grew to just under $2.5 million by 1997; at that point, losses incurred by the bank and charged to Ghailb’s account caused him to seek the return of his money. When the bank failed to satisfy him, Ghailb sued, in 1999, “seeking to put the bank out of business,” as lawyers for the Saudi Bin Laden Group put it later. The U.S. government later designated Al-Taqwa as a terrorist entity. A Bin Laden lawyer later wrote: “Any suggestion that the [Bin Laden] family or their businesses were somehow aligned with or supportive of Osama’s terrorist activities is completely at odds with the facts.”²⁵

An offshore entity controlled by the Saudi Bin Laden Group invested $3 million in late 1997 in Global Diamond Resources, Inc., a California-headquartered mining company that owned diamond mines in South Africa. Through a Bin Laden executive, Global Diamond executives met Yasin Al-Qadi, a Saudi businessman in Jeddah who was a wealthy contemporary of the Bin Laden sons. In 1998 Al-Qadi also invested and became one of the mining company’s largest shareholders. Al-Qadi was later designated as a terrorist financier by the U.S. Treasury Department, a designation Al-Qadi rejected as untrue and unjust. Blessed Relief, a charity Al-Qadi cofounded, which operated in Bosnia, Sudan, Pakistan, and other countries between 1992 and 1997, was described in a Treasury citation as a “front” for Bin Laden, one that had been used to pass money to him from wealthy Saudis. Al-Qadi denied these accusations, too. He said that he had met Osama at religious gatherings in Saudi Arabia during the 1980s but that these meetings had been casual and inconsequential, and he adamantly denied providing any support to Al Qaeda or other terrorists at any time.²⁶

Taken together, these offshore financial connections, while far from offering proof that some members of the Bin Laden family might have found ways to quietly pass funds to Osama after he had been forced to sell his family shareholdings, nonetheless offered fragments of intriguing evidence—strands that certainly demanded further and more rigorous investigation than the American government had yet managed to undertake, at least in the opinion of Michael Scheuer, the CIA’s lead analyst. By the end of the 1990s, Scheuer had reached the conclusion, as he wrote, that there was “every reason to believe members of Bin Laden’s extended family have ensured that he has gotten his share of family profits.”²⁷

Osama’s relationship with his half-sisters was a particularly murky and frustrating subject. The American ambassador or CIA station chief in Riyadh might be able to meet with senior brothers such as Bakr or Yahya, and they might win limited cooperation from them, but given Saudi Arabia’s systematic segregation of women, and the general limitations placed upon American investigators in the kingdom, it was impossible to explore in any depth the finances, attitudes, investments, and travel of Osama’s half-sisters. Observations by family members such as Carmen Bin Laden suggest that Osama seemed to have more comfortable relations with some of his half-sisters than with many of his half-brothers. Dominic Simpson, who served as a British intelligence officer in charge of Saudi Arabian matters during the mid-and late-1990s, recalled “lots of talk about odd members of the Bin Laden family” who “still claim to stay in touch with him,” reports that raised the possibility of “monies being channeled in some way.” The concern within intelligence agencies at the time, Simpson recalled, focused on “particularly some of the sisters—a couple of his sisters.” For his part, Simpson saw no convincing evidence that any Bin Laden family members, including these sisters, were “covertly or discreetly funding” Osama “in any way” or that they had allowed themselves to be “used as the channel for others…But it may well be that some members of the family were in occasional contact for purely personal reasons. And again, some of the sisters have been named.”²⁸

Simpson’s analysis was that Osama “always got on better with his sisters than his brothers,” in part because of the relatively weak status of Osama’s mother within the family. “Some of the brothers would sneer, and the sisters would feel sorry for him and pat poor little Osama…Women often like the chance to sort of mother a man, and I think that perhaps that’s how they replied to him, slightly…But I’m sure there was no institutionalized support for him.” American investigators with the 9/11 Commission, who later reviewed the evidence available to U.S. intelligence, reached a somewhat more cautious conclusion: after the Africa embassy bombings, they wrote, the Bin Laden family “generally turned away” from Osama. But these investigators, too, offered no evidence of culpable financial support for Osama.²⁹

The U.S. intelligence community simply did not know very much about the Bin Laden family, and an important aspect of what it claimed to know was wrong: even after 1998, the CIA’s evaluation of Osama and his capabilities rested on mistaken assumptions about the scale and history of the Bin Ladens’ wealth.

ON NOVEMBER 17, 1998, the CIA circulated within the U.S. government an intelligence report stating that Osama had inherited $300 million after his father’s death. This estimate did not come from hard evidence, the report conceded; it had probably originated with rumors circulating in the Saudi business community. The FBI had learned in its interview with Shafiq and Hassan Bin Laden that Osama’s income and inheritance had been considerably smaller. Yet in its intelligence reports, the CIA affirmed the $300 million figure as a “reasonable estimate” as of the mid-1990s, based on its valuation of Osama’s business activities in Sudan and its estimate of the amounts he might have inherited from Mohamed Bin Laden. Analysts felt that Osama could have built up Al Qaeda so quickly only if he had access to a large personal fortune. Other U.S. intelligence agencies circulated similar assessments to Clinton administration decision makers after the Africa attacks. A Defense Intelligence Agency report of October 1998 passed along, without comment, a document that claimed Osama had a fortune of $150 million, with $35 million invested in Sudan.³⁰

Richard Clarke, Clinton’s counterterrorism czar at the White House, expressed chronic dissatisfaction with intelligence reporting about Osama’s finances. In the autumn of 1998, he reorganized the National Security Council’s work on Al Qaeda. He summoned a young aide, William Wechsler, who had studied illicit financing and organized crime issues, although never Al Qaeda. Clarke told Wechsler to set up a new interagency working group devoted solely to the subject of Al Qaeda’s money. The government’s terrorism specialists had neglected the subject, Clarke said, and now they had their hands full with other matters, such as trying to find Bin Laden in Afghanistan and locating other violent cells worldwide.

Clarke and Wechsler designated their new task force the UBL Finances Sub-Group; it would report to the larger counterterrorism group that Clarke chaired. They recruited Richard Newcomb, who ran an office at the Treasury Department in charge of identifying and freezing the wealth of terrorist and drug-trafficking groups. They also brought in an analyst from Scheuer’s Bin Laden unit; an analyst from another CIA unit that specialized in black market global finance, called the Illicit Transactions Group; a representative from the Defense Intelligence Agency; and others from the FBI, the State Department, and the National Security Agency.

Wechsler read into the existing intelligence files, particularly those reporting on Osama’s inheritance, and he began to ask questions. As a newly assigned, relatively young White House aide, he could get away with posing some basic, even naive queries, such as where the information about Osama’s $300 million had actually come from, what efforts had been made to verify it with reliable documentation from the Bin Laden family or the Saudi government, and so on. The answers he received from the CIA were mushy. The FBI seemed to have little hard data, either, or if it did, its representatives were unable or unwilling to share it with the White House.

“This is insane,” Wechsler told Clarke, as the latter recalled it. “FBI thinks we should just leave this to them, but they can’t tell me anything I can’t read in the newspapers. CIA has given us a data dump of everything they have ever come across on the subject, and thinks that answers the question. There are no formal assessments at all, no understanding of the whole picture of where the money is coming from…The general impression I get out there is that this is all a waste of time because, they keep saying, it doesn’t take much money to blow something up and Osama’s got all he needs from daddy.”³¹

It was Richard Newcomb, the director of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, who had previously developed sanctions against nations supporting terrorism and against such complex criminal groups as the Cali cocaine trafficking cartel in Colombia, who first asked, during a subgroup meeting, one fundamental question: “What is the theory of the case that we’re working on here?” Was it one rich person—Osama—spending his own money? If so, the implication was that they should search for Osama’s big pot of money and take it away. And yet as they examined the government’s reporting, what they saw was not evidence of a unitary fortune, but continual references to Osama’s relations with Islamic charities, donors, and proselytizing networks—a complex, international web of religious and political fundraising. They also confronted the fact that they knew very little about the real state of Osama’s investments in Sudan. (The fact that he had been stripped of some of his wealth as he left that country was unknown to the U.S. government at the time.) Above all, the analysts in Wechsler’s group realized that they needed greater cooperation from Saudi Arabia.

One problem with asking for help from the Saudis on terrorist finance issues was that the questions were usually lumped into the larger government-to-government agenda, where they had to fight for priority with other subject matter—terrorism prosecutions, regional politics, the Palestinian conflict, oil. Wechsler’s group decided to propose a special mission to the kingdom solely dedicated to the exploration of Al Qaeda and terrorist money. Vice President Al Gore agreed to contact Crown Prince Abdullah—his counterpart under diplomatic protocol—to plead for cooperation.³²

Abdullah agreed to arrange for a meeting with Saudi counterterrorist police and banking officials. Newcomb led an interagency delegation to Riyadh in early 1999. They flew out by commercial airliner. In the U.S. group, besides Newcomb and Wechsler, were representatives from State, the CIA, and Treasury. They met with their Saudi counterparts at the Ministry of Interior, in a typically ornate and heavily air-conditioned conference room. The Saudis brought senior officers from their domestic security service, the Mubahith, and specialists from the Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority, the kingdom’s central bank.

The Americans unfolded a diverse list of agenda items. Some of their issues involved suggestions for new laws or banking rules that might improve Saudi Arabia’s capacity to detect and stop illicit transactions. Other agenda items concerned international campaigns to isolate the Taliban, particularly by shutting down Afghan Ariana flights. Finally, there was the sensitive subject of Osama Bin Laden, his money, and his relationship with his family.

Newcomb issued a formal request to meet with members of the Bin Laden family. The Saudi Interior Ministry delegates seemed startled. They were the Saudi equivalent of senior FBI investigators, but such a meeting was not something they could promise, they said—it seemed to be above their pay grade. The Saudi officials emphasized that the Bin Ladens were a respected, law-abiding family. They had ostracized Osama, as had the Saudi government. Why would the Americans need to meet with them?

The Saudis knew, of course, that Newcomb’s office at Treasury was in charge of identifying and administrating U.S. sanctions on foreign governments and groups involved in terrorism or other crimes. This may have explained some of their protective instinct. Here was the scenario the Bin Ladens and their lawyers feared: voluntary cooperation with U.S. investigators that might lead to a legal attack on the Bin Laden fortune.

The Saudis told Newcomb and his colleagues that they would have to coordinate his request with Wyche Fowler, the U.S. ambassador. They did so, but members of the delegation had the sense that Fowler was not happy about their intrusion into an area that he had been handling. Nonetheless, Fowler pressed the Saudis and the Bin Ladens to cooperate with Treasury.

Newcomb and his colleagues told their Saudi counterparts that they wanted specific information about the size and disposition of Osama’s inheritance. In the meeting, the Saudis did provide an outline of the 1994 forced sales of Osama’s shares in the Bin Laden companies, and the relatively modest $9.9 million in proceeds that had been frozen in Saudi accounts. Some of the American delegates were struck by how much smaller this amount was than U.S. intelligence reporting had led them to expect. In any event, the money was out of the Saudi banking system and was not accessible by Osama, the Saudi side asserted.

Were there documents available to describe all this? No, the Saudis answered. How are you sure, then, the Americans asked, that it was all done properly? It’s the Bin Laden family, the Saudis answered—of course we are sure.

The Americans mentioned their concern that Osama continued to telephone his mother in Jeddah. Did this suggest continuing relations with his family? “You can never ask an Arab mother not to speak to her son,” one of the Saudi officials replied.³³

Listening, one American in the room found himself thinking: Well, then they’re not really separated, are they? And also: We would insist that a mother stop talking to her son, if the son were a fugitive accused of mass murder.

CONFUSION PERSISTED at the White House and the CIA about the basic facts of Osama’s wealth and inheritance until the spring of 2000. That March, Richard Newcomb’s office telephoned Richard Urowsky, the Sullivan & Cromwell partner, and requested a meeting with Bin Laden family members to discuss financial issues. Urowsky, Abdullah Bin Laden, and Shafiq Bin Laden flew to Washington to meet with Newcomb at the Treasury Department.

Newcomb explained that he and his colleagues were struggling to evaluate reports that Osama had inherited $300 million. The Treasury and the White House wanted to know if this was accurate, and if not, how much Osama had received and when he had received it. They wanted to understand the nature of his income, past and present.³⁴

The two Bin Ladens answered Newcomb’s questions. A few weeks later, Sullivan & Cromwell forwarded a formal letter to Treasury from the Saudi Bin Laden Group to confirm in writing what Abdullah and Shafiq had conveyed. This document provided—about a year and a half after the Africa embassy bombings—a specific accounting from the Bin Laden family of Osama’s inheritance and income. Over his lifetime, Osama had received a total of about $27 million, but never all at once, the letter disclosed. He had received regular dividends and salaries, beginning in the early 1970s and ending in the early 1990s. This income averaged slightly more than $1 million per year.³⁵

Even after these formal disclosures, analysts within the U.S. government remained uncertain about a number of questions. Daniel Coleman at the FBI, for example, had been told during his interviews with Osama’s half-brothers that there had been a major distribution of perhaps $8 million after Salem Bin Laden’s death, when Bakr reorganized the family’s finances and businesses. Mohamed Bin Laden’s children had the option to take their distribution in cash or to reinvest it. What, exactly, had Osama done? The answer seemed murky—he had taken out a substantial amount of cash, according to Bin Laden family accounts, but he also had remained a shareholder in good standing in both of the major family firms. There were a number of similar issues that seemed confusing; perhaps they were mere details, but there was a continuing sense among some of the American investigators that they could never quite see the picture in clear relief.³⁶

The myth of Osama’s $300 million inheritance had at last been punctured—that much was certain. He had enjoyed a healthy bank account, but he had never been among the extremely rich, and at this point, after years in exile, he clearly was not funding his terrorist operations from his inheritance.

It infuriated some officials in the White House counterterrorism office that the CIA never seemed to acknowledge that it had circulated at the highest levels of government such misleading information about such an important question for so long. Rather than admitting error, CIA reporting now took the line that the entire subject was a confounding mystery: “We presently do not have the reporting to determine how much of Bin Laden’s personal wealth he has used or continues to use in financing his organization,” said an intelligence report circulated in April 2001. “We are unable to estimate with confidence the value of his assets and net worth; and we do not know the level of financial support he draws from his family and other donors sympathetic to his cause.”³⁷

The FBI’s reporting was no better, where it existed at all. Several years later, investigators from the bipartisan 9/11 Commission examined all the classified files on the subject of Bin Laden’s wealth and terrorist finance at the CIA and the FBI alike. They found CIA reporting on Bin Laden’s money to be beautifully written, elegantly printed, and efficiently distributed within the national security bureaucracy—but it was crafted from thin, poorly audited sources that turned out to be wrong. The FBI’s raw files, by comparison, contained accurate and specific data, but the files were scattered loosely around field offices and poorly analyzed. The bureau lacked the culture and capability to pull this information together, synthesize it in writing, and distribute it so that it might aid decision makers.³⁸ The FBI also never conducted significant physical surveillance of Bin Ladens in the United States or launched a systematic review of their businesses and finances.³⁹ Throughout the 1990s, any American or foreign citizen could have walked into the Los Angeles County Superior Court, ordered for free archived Bin Laden family divorce files, and read rich details about annual dividends, profits, loans, and business matters—information that would have refuted the CIA’s reporting about Osama’s $300 million inheritance. Yet this publicly accessible information was probably never examined, and it certainly was never reflected in intelligence reports circulating to decision makers in the Clinton administration as they tried to understand the threat Bin Laden posed to American lives and interests.

The failure to unearth the truth about Osama’s finances “hampered the U.S. government’s ability to integrate potential covert action or economic disruption” into its attempts to stop Bin Laden before he could strike again, American investigators later concluded. The cost of particular terrorist attacks was low—perhaps $10,000 for the Africa attacks, and several hundred thousand dollars for the more challenging September 11 conspiracy. Yet the financial pressures on Bin Laden as he planned for September 11 were much greater than those numbers would suggest.⁴⁰

To maintain good graces with the Taliban, for example, Osama had to raise about $20 million per year for training camps, weapons, salaries, and subsidies for the families of volunteers. Operations outside Afghanistan cost approximately $10 million more, American investigators later concluded, when they had the benefit of a much richer archive of Al Qaeda documents and testimony. Some of these budgets overlapped with business and construction projects Osama engaged in to please Mullah Omar: a new palace for the Taliban leader outside of Kandahar in 1999, a new mosque in the city, and later, a new covered shopping market downtown.⁴¹ The funds came from sympathetic charities and from individuals who raised funds from rich individuals in the Persian Gulf; some of these donors might know where their money was going, but some might not. By 2000 Osama was running an international Islamist nonprofit whose fundraising and spending cycles looked similar to many other global charities, and whose rising use of the Internet was particularly innovative. He had restored himself to the position he enjoyed during the early 1980s when he first arrived in Afghanistan espousing Islamic charity, and learned how to use the media, the religious calendar, and his own charisma to raise millions year after year. Then, as later, when Osama needed money, he seemed to know how to find it.

35. BIN LADEN ISLAND

BY THE LATE 1990S, it was common within Bin Laden corporate culture to refer respectfully to each of the sons of Mohamed Bin Laden by the honorific “Sheikh.” Its usage was similar to “General” or “Colonel” within the American military—a routine prefix. One day, as Bakr Bin Laden received a rundown of management items, his briefer kept referring to his younger half-brothers in this manner, as in, “Sheikh Shafiq called from London with a question,” or “Sheikh Hassan is flying in from Lebanon tomorrow.” A person who was present recalled that Bakr waited for a suitable pause and then remarked wryly: “There’s only one sheikh in this family.”¹

Osama might wish it otherwise, but Bakr had a point. By the time the Bin Laden name became globally infamous—or celebrated, depending upon the audience—Bakr had freed himself from much of the strain and awkwardness that had accompanied his unexpected transition to family leadership after Salem’s death. He was still a very hard worker, and he still did not always seem comfortable in his own skin, but by now, in his early fifties, as the chairman of a diversified business empire, there could be no doubt about his success. The Saudi Bin Laden Group and the Mohamed Bin Laden Company employed many thousands between them. They had expanded their geographical reach: Their international construction contracts at the decade’s end included the Cairo International Airport, the Kuala Lumpur International Airport, and the Amman Grand Hyatt Hotel. They had become substantial players in new fields such as the medical industry; the United Medical Group, founded by the Saudi Bin Laden Group in 1990, was growing into a global company with $120 million in annual revenue, more than two thousand employees, and offices in London, Australia, and across the Middle East. Bakr and the brothers closest to him, particularly Yahya, had created this growth despite a series of risky political and business episodes after Salem’s death: Osama’s excommunication, falling oil prices, King Fahd’s stroke, and Crown Prince Abdullah’s attempts to exert greater control over the kingdom’s contracting system. Any one of these challenges might have set them back, but Bakr had finessed them, and in part because of his strategy of business modernization and diversity, he had emerged with greater wealth and financial independence than either Salem or his father had enjoyed.²

He was twice divorced, but his children remained under his roof. He hired guardians and tutors, and if the boys were perhaps more interested in the latest Sony PlayStation games than in their father’s ponderous Islamic verses, the generation gap between them seemed of normal expanse. Bakr sent his talented eldest son, Nawaf, an American passport holder, to the United States for schooling, and in the Arabian tradition, he cultivated the boy for a leadership role in the next generation.

When Bakr was at home in Jeddah, his world revolved around his palace near the Red Sea, a campus with a main home, a guesthouse, buildings that served as offices for executive staff, and his majlis, where he received executives and visitors in the afternoons and evenings. He attended banquets and receptions hosted by the Al-Saud, but these soirees often had more to do with attending to his royal clients than with the pursuit of pleasure. He retained a passion for aircraft, and he built out his private fleet of jets; when traveling, he moved in the privileged and luxurious bubble of private aviation—a subculture of exclusive lounges, limousines, and white-glove service far removed from the bus station ambience of commercial aviation. He commissioned a Swedish Egyptian boat builder to construct a 190-foot aluminum yacht with a landing pad for helicopters on its deck, but the project proceeded slowly, so in the meanwhile, Bakr motored back and forth across the Red Sea, between Jeddah and the Egyptian resort at Sharm El Sheikh, on one of several smaller yachts. Once out of Saudi Arabia, his lifestyle was active but restrained. His idea of a night out was ogling jets at the Dubai Air Show or taking in the Ice Capades in Paris. He could be generous, particularly to charitable or educational causes to which he had a personal or family connection, but he generally preferred to act discreetly, all the more so after Osama declared war on the United States.

It was a testament to Bakr’s temperament that his employees rarely left him unhappy. He was usually a reasonable boss—respectful and correct. It was difficult to find former business partners or executives who felt badly used by any of the Bin Ladens, although there were some. The salaries paid by Bin Laden companies were not extravagant, but they were in line with international standards, and once housing subsidies and Saudi aversion to taxation were taken into account, a Bin Laden engineer or accountant could do fairly well. As the Bin Laden companies modernized, they took on the trappings of typical multinationals, or at least of those typical in the Arab world: Employees were assigned to various categories, depending on their rank, and issued color-coded badges—red, yellow, or blue. There were regular vacations, home leave, and even a formal severance policy for expatriate employees at the Saudi Bin Laden Group: half a month’s pay for each year of service for those remaining less than five years, and a month’s pay for each year of service after five.³

Those who stayed long and developed personal connections to the family could expect exceptional rewards. A Pakistani on Bakr’s household staff in Jeddah had been with him so long it was rumored that he had a net worth of at least several million dollars. Bakr’s driver in London, a Pole nicknamed “Martin,” had put his children through fine British schools on the money and abandoned luxury cars he had been given by various Bin Ladens over the years. In middle age, Bakr had become something of a health nut, and Martin eventually found a Polish-born personal trainer and masseur who accompanied him on his travels, worked him out, and kept his muscles loose. Perhaps the most remarkable case of an accidental fortune in Bakr’s entourage belonged to Nur Bayoun, the Lebanese travel agent who had served as an informal guardian to some of the Bin Laden boys during the early 1960s. After civil war erupted in Lebanon, Bayoun was invited to Jeddah. He won a luxury Bulgari jewelry franchise in Saudi Arabia; the attractiveness of owning such a business in the kingdom can be readily imagined, and Bayoun became exceptionally wealthy. He eventually married a young woman who seemed to be about half his age and who traveled on vacations with the Bin Laden family draped in what appeared to be two to three million dollars’ worth of Bulgari jewelry.⁴

Apart from Osama, the primary source of concern in Bakr’s world seemed to be his relationship with the Al-Saud. All the confidence and swagger he had built up in the years since Salem’s death could vanish the instant a prince walked in the room. In the confines of his own majlis, he was a sheikh among sheikhs, but in the royal courts of Riyadh, he remained just an overachieving Yemeni, vulnerable to the whims of the genealogy-conscious Al-Saud; he could never marry into their ranks or expect their full acceptance. Bakr would leap to open the door deferentially for even a minor royal. He seemed to worry chronically about the disposition of the major Al-Saud on whom his businesses relied—Crown Prince Abdullah, of course, but also Prince Salman, the governor of Riyadh, and Abdulaziz bin Fahd, the son of the disabled king. Abdulaziz had built himself a palace campus along the Red Sea in Jeddah that made Bakr’s look cramped by comparison. The Bin Ladens watched after the king’s son attentively.

Bakr kept track of the news, and he had some contemporary political interests: For example, he was more interested in environmental issues, such as the health of the Red Sea, than many Arabians. He spoke up with friends and colleagues about the Palestinian cause, and his majlis sometimes filled with the usual Arabian talk about the unseen power of Jews in American government and media. But those who issued these harangues regarded them as commonplace, hardly controversial.

Bakr had become a kind of Babbitt of the Hejaz by the turn of the century, an optimistic embodiment and promoter of the Saudi Arabian mainstream. The question was how durable this mainstream order would prove to be in a world that had lost communism but gained Osama. At the heart of Saudi Arabia’s dilemmas—involving national identity, foreign policy, and defense—was its partnership with America, forged at the Cold War’s dawn and rarely questioned afterward. By the time of Osama’s war declarations, Saudi elites were already searching tentatively for a new direction—one that could accommodate the American partnership (which remained essential to defend the kingdom’s oil from predators) but also enhance Saudi pride, room for maneuver, and, of course, the power of its royal family.

IN APRIL 2000, Prince Khaled Al-Faisal, the governor of Asir Province, near the border with Yemen, published a poem in the Jeddah daily newspaper Al-Medina. A son of the former king, Khaled was a painter, falconer, and writer regarded as one of the more progressive and effective Al-Saud governors. He traveled; he counted Britain’s Prince Charles among his personal friends; and he seemed to reflect the modernizing and internationally minded wing of Saudi royal opinion. His outlook about American and European human rights and democracy campaigning, however, was less than accommodating. Khaled titled his poem “Human Rights”:

If they accept it or do not accept it,We have only the rights of our Islam.Even if they do not declare it,We know their goal is to spread vice among us.Why do we have to accept their liesAnd abandon for their sake our traditions? ⁵

Two months after he published these lines, Khaled stood with Prince Charles at the head of a reception line in Whitehall, London, the seat of British government. The occasion was the formal launch of “Painting and Patronage,” a joint art exhibition of twenty-six oil paintings by Khaled and thirty-five watercolors by Charles. Prince Khaled’s work depicted the sunlit contrasts of Asir’s barren mountains and verdant watered valley; Charles’s included scenes of Balmoral, Scotland, and a few of Asir as well, painted on his periodic private visits to the kingdom.⁶

Bakr Bin Laden arrived at the gala opening, waited in the reception line, and approached the two princes; Khaled introduced him to Charles.

“This is Mr. Bin Laden.”

Charles arched his eyebrows. “Not the Bin Laden?”

“No, no, it’s his brother,” Khaled hastened to explain.

The Prince of Wales turned to Bakr and shook his hand. “What’s your brother up to these days?” he asked.⁷

Bakr’s reply is not recorded. He apparently took no offense; he and Charles soon opened a cordial acquaintance. Bakr even landed on the royal Christmas card list; each December, he received warm seasonal greetings, typically accompanied by a photograph of young princes Harry and William.

Prince Charles took seriously his role as an informal emissary to Saudi Arabia. He had developed a deep and personal interest in the Islamic world. There was something about its suspicion of Western consumerism and media culture that seemed to appeal to Charles’s own traditionalism. He sought to promote a more emphatically multireligious Britain; he wished, if he became king, to be called Defender of the Faiths. In 1993 Charles had made these inclinations conspicuous, by becoming a formal Patron of the Oxford Center for Islamic Studies. As he announced this priority, he delivered a prescient speech based upon the premise that “misunderstandings between Islam and the West…may be growing.” Predictably, he argued for mutual accommodation and respect for peaceful Islamic traditions. More interesting was his personal identification with the sources of Muslim grievance in the era of globalization:

Some of us may think the material trappings of Western society which we have exported to the Islamic world—television, fast-food and the electronic gadgets of our everyday lives—are a modernizing, self-evidently good, influence. But we fall into the trap of dreadful arrogance if we confuse “modernity” in other countries with their becoming more like us. The fact is that our form of materialism can be offensive to devout Muslims—and I do not just mean the extremists among them…Western civilization has become increasingly acquisitive and exploitative in defiance of our environmental responsibilities. This crucial sense of oneness and trusteeship of the vital sacramental and spiritual character of the world about us is surely something important we can re-learn from Islam.⁸

In February 2001, Charles and Khaled brought “Paintings and Patronage” to the Al-Faisaliah Center in Riyadh, a glass shopping mall, office tower, and luxury hotel complex constructed by the Saudi Bin Laden Group. At a celebratory banquet, Charles sat beside Crown Prince Abdullah and Bakr Bin Laden sat at a nearby table. The Saudi press dutifully promoted the works on display and honored the kingdom’s distinguished royal guest—there was, of course, no risk of independent-minded art criticism in the newspapers that might irritate either of the royal painters.

Also in attendance that night at the Al-Faisaliah was Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, chairman of the Committee of Managing Directors of the Royal Dutch/Shell Group of Companies, the international oil giant, a cosponsor of the Riyadh exhibition, along with BAE Systems, the British defense contractor. Their financial contributions to the gala might not reflect the “vital sacramental and spiritual” link between Islam and the West that Charles had earlier emphasized, but unlike his friend Khaled, of course, Charles was only a figurehead prince, an informal ambassador in service of Her Majesty’s government, whose elected job it was to attend to more material concerns of British factory workers and automobile owners.⁹

Prince Charles’s Christmas cards offered Bakr one additional source of reassurance as Osama’s violent ambitions became more visible. Bakr and his brothers actively sought other such contacts in the United States and Europe after the Africa embassy bombings. Philip Griffin, from his office in Maryland, telephoned his former contacts at the State Department, but his connections operated at a lower level than that to which the Bin Ladens were accustomed. The Carlyle Group, where the Bin Ladens had already made investments, offered a more influential pathway: George H. W. Bush, the former American president, traveled to Saudi Arabia in November 1998, three months after the Africa attacks, and again in 2000, to speak at Carlyle events designed to raise money from Saudi investors. He met the Bin Ladens and wrote them gracious thank-you notes for their hospitality.¹⁰

Former president Jimmy Carter, seeking to raise money for the Carter Center, which promoted human rights and disease eradication worldwide, met with a group of ten Bin Laden brothers during a fundraising campaign in Saudi Arabia in early 2000. The Bin Ladens assured Carter that they had nothing to do with Osama; the former president, in turn, urged them to support his efforts to combat poverty and suffering in the Third World. Perhaps the Bin Ladens realized that at the end of a two-term Clinton administration, with Vice President Al Gore looking like a plausible next president, it would be useful to broaden their political contacts beyond the Republican-heavy, Texas-centric networks offered by Carlyle. In any event, Bakr flew to New York in September 2000, on the eve of the U.S. presidential election, and had breakfast with Carter. It was a very rare effort on Bakr’s part—one of only two trips to the United States that he had made since he left the University of Miami in 1973. Bakr pledged a $1 million gift to the Carter Center, to be paid over several years; the initial donation was $200,000. The funds would support Carter’s campaign to control and prevent river blindness disease.¹¹

INSIDE THE UNITED STATES itself, after 1998, what the Bin Ladens sought most was to avoid attention, but even this did not always prove easy. Bin Laden children continued to attend prep schools, colleges, and universities in the U.S. Khalil Bin Laden’s children were among them. Although he had long since abandoned America in Motion, Khalil still visited Desert Bear, the estate outside Orlando. His wife’s Brazilian mother often stayed there, as did his wife’s sister, Regina Frisaura, and her four daughters. Regina had lived in Jeddah during the mid-1990s, but she had gone through a divorce from her American husband, Franklin Frisaura, and had returned to Orlando. She was a deeply troubled woman, and her behavior increasingly threatened to attract the interest of the police at a time when the Bin Laden family did not need such attention.

On June 11, 1999, Michele Smith, a local Florida police officer, arrived at Regina Frisaura’s home, where she discovered the aftermath of a violent argument. Regina’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Vanessa, told the policewoman that her mother had beaten her with her fists, thrown a picture frame at her, thrown a skateboard at her three times, and grabbed her by the hair. Vanessa said that “for as long as she can remember, she has been physically and emotionally abused by her mother,” according to Smith’s police report. Two other daughters joined Vanessa in recounting “numerous acts of violence” over the previous several years.¹²

That police encounter plunged the Orlando outpost of the extended Bin Laden family into the debilitating world of American family court, with its custody struggles, social worker reports, and judicial hearings. A report filed in July 1999 by a county social worker quoted one of the Frisaura girls saying that Regina used drugs, including crack cocaine, and “that the mother would disappear for days when they lived in Saudi Arabia, and the father once found the mother in a crack house.” This was only the beginning, it turned out, of a disturbing series of reports filed in an Orange County, Florida, courthouse after 1999, which described abusive behavior by Khalil Bin Laden’s sister-in-law toward her own children. Khalil appeared occasionally at Orlando court hearings called to evaluate the best interests of Regina’s children. It was a sad and prolonged ordeal; Regina sometimes disappeared in the night and left her children alone, according to reports filed with the court. Much of her violence appeared to be related to her abuse of crack cocaine, which continued into the spring of 2001, according to a home study filed by the Department of Children and Families.¹³

Addictive drugs ruined lives in Jeddah just as they did in Orlando, and it was hardly surprising that a family as large as the Bin Ladens would be affected. The timing and geography of this particular case was awkward, but the Bin Ladens were fortunate: there was no publicity.

BY EARLY 2001, the biggest change occurring in the Bin Laden family was the rise of a large third generation. The older children of Mohamed’s fifty-four sons and daughters were reaching their twenties, and a phalanx of teenagers stood right behind them. The sheer numbers were staggering: well over one hundred direct descendants of Mohamed, plus the collateral branch descending from his brother Abdullah Bin Laden’s many children, plus dozens more incorporated into the family through marriage. The children of Mohamed still tried to assemble together as a family, particularly in the summer. A number of them gathered each year at a modern, gated seaside resort in Egypt called the Marina, an archipelago of islands fashioned from reclaimed land along a palm-draped shore of the Mediterranean. The Bin Ladens had helped to develop the resort, and they had claimed an island for themselves—Bin Laden Island, as locals called it—where the family had built a ring of stone vacation homes side by side. It was an Egyptian version of the Oaktree family village in Florida that Salem had once envisioned. On their Marina island, the Bin Ladens laid themselves out on the seashore in all of their diversity—women who were fully covered, and women who were not; men who were bearded and prayed conspicuously, and others who strapped on earphones and jogged to contemporary music.¹⁴

The Bin Laden women were by now just as striking in their diversity as the men; the difference was that they were much better hidden from view. Among Mohamed’s daughters, Randa remained an impressive figure, at least to the family’s American and European friends. She had retired from medical practice and raised her family in Jeddah. Bakr occasionally drew upon her unconventional life and comfort with the United States by inviting her as a guest at dinner when he hosted visiting American dignitaries, such as the U.S. consul general in Jeddah. One summer, Randa and her husband insisted that their teenaged son take a summer job at a Pizza Hut in Jeddah, so he would know something of ordinary life. In the family’s Westernized caucus, in addition to her, there was also Saleha, still married to her Italian designer and living on the Riviera. There was Najiah, who spent much of her time in Los Angeles, where she had taken up piloting lessons at the Santa Monica Airport. That such unconventional Arabian women shared membership in a family—and occasionally, a summer seashore—with much more traditional sisters, draped in their black abayas, was perhaps no more or less striking than the fact that Osama and Shafiq Bin Laden had been born in the same month and had now fashioned such different worlds. Indeed, without Osama, by the year 2001, the Bin Ladens might have seemed no more remarkable than thousands of other Muslim melting-pot families in an age of cultural integration.

As Hadhramis, they came from a long line of confident global travelers. As Mohamed’s children, they had inherited a spark of creative genius. As Saudis, they had learned to accommodate contradictions. These qualities described and complimented them; unfortunately, they also described and complimented Osama.

THE “PLANES OPERATION,” as it was then being called among the few around Osama who were authorized to know about it, was apparently conceived as a media event.¹⁵

Its origins are not entirely understood; the only full narrative available is one that was related under American interrogation by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. He was a Pakistani raised in Kuwait, educated in North Carolina, and radicalized on the Afghan frontier during the anti-Soviet war of the 1980s. He was not particularly close to Osama in those years, but he was an uncle of Ramzi Yousef, who had led the first attack on the World Trade Center. By Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s account, he and Yousef first conceived of using hijacked airliners as weapons while they were in exile in the Philippines during the early 1990s. His nephew was then arrested in Pakistan by a team that included FBI agents and CIA officers. At some point afterward, Mohammed met with Osama to discuss an idea that would offer a spectacular reply.

The initial discussion unfolded like a pitch meeting for a Hollywood fireball thriller. Mohammed proposed hijacking ten airplanes in the United States. Suicide pilots would fly nine of them into landmark targets on the East and West Coast—the Pentagon, the White House, the U.S. Capitol, the World Trade Center, CIA headquarters, FBI headquarters, nuclear power plants, and skyscrapers in California and Washington State. The tenth plane, bearing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed himself, would touch down at an American airport. He would then kill all of the male passengers aboard, alert the media, and deliver a speech denouncing American foreign policy. The pitch was “theater, a spectacle of destruction,” American investigators wrote later, but it was one in which Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, not Osama Bin Laden, would be “the self-cast star—the superterrorist.”¹⁶

Bin Laden heard Mohammed out, but he was not enthusiastic. Perhaps it was because, as Mohammed recounted later, Osama saw the first draft of the plan as a bit too ambitious, not practical enough to justify a green light. That was certainly a plausible reaction, and consistent with Osama’s history of caution and care in the planning of violent operations. Perhaps, too, Osama preferred a different approach to the casting of the star role.

Late in 1998 or early in 1999, Osama summoned Mohammed back, and they met at the Al-Matar complex outside Kandahar. This time they discussed a scaled-back version of the plan, one with a more manageable budget and supporting cast, and one that would not involve any press conferences presided over by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Osama said he would provide the necessary money.¹⁷

AT THE WEDDING of Osama’s second-eldest son, Mohamed, which took place in January 2001, upward of five hundred bearded guests sat cross-legged on the open ground outside Kandahar, lined up as if for prayer. They faced the groom and the groom’s father, who sat cross-legged before them, on carpets. The bride was a fourteen-year-old daughter of a former Egyptian policeman, Mohamed Atef, who was Osama’s closest military adviser—she was not in sight, of course; this was a male-only affair. The groom appeared to be about nineteen years old. He had a fuzzy, immature mustache. He wore white robes and a white Saudi headdress. Mohamed Osama Bin Laden bore a striking resemblance to his father, having inherited his thin features and flared nose. He had appeared at earlier media events with Osama; he carried an assault rifle and spoke passionately about his commitment to jihad, although he looked so young and frail that the effect was half-comical, like something from a Saturday-morning adventure cartoon. Now, on the occasion of his marriage, when Mohamed looked into the video cameras on hand, his smile seemed awkward and lacking in confidence. So, for that matter, did his father’s smile, as he sat beside Mohamed; despite appearing over many years in self-produced videos, Osama still was prone to self-consciousness when the cameras rolled.¹⁸

After Osama’s son Abdullah had decided to abandon his father to take up a normal Saudi teenager’s life in Jeddah, Mohamed had assumed the role of faithful eldest son in exile, and so his wedding was an unusually important occasion. There were other teenagers in Osama’s Afghan brood—the Al Qaeda leader had done more than many of his half-brothers to contribute to the swelling size of the family’s third generation. His sons alone now numbered about a dozen. In addition to Mohamed, the next eldest, Sa’ad, had been groomed for future leadership. Three other younger boys—Khalid, Hamzah, and Ladin—would soon appear in war-fighting propaganda videos, posing like African or Sri Lankan child soldiers.

Osama seemed to regard Mohamed’s wedding as an opportunity to create a video postcard that could be enjoyed by relatives unable to attend, and at the same time, as a chance to contribute a new propaganda piece for Arab television audiences. His aides telephoned the Al-Jazeera bureau chief in Pakistan, Ahmad Zaidan, and invited him to Kandahar. When he arrived, they promised him a copy of the wedding video, so he could arrange for its broadcast by satellite. Osama’s team filmed the ceremony with their own cameras, discreetly tucking them beneath robes at times so as not to offend photography-phobic Taliban guests.

Osama was in an expansive mood. Three months earlier, Al Qaeda suicide bombers in Yemen had piloted an explosive-laden skiff into the hull of the USS Cole, an American guided-missile destroyer; when the two attackers blew themselves up, they killed seventeen sailors and wounded more than thirty others.

“I will tell you one thing,” Osama told Zaidan afterward, as the latter recalled it. “We did the Cole and we wanted the United States to react. And if they reacted, they are going to invade Afghanistan and that’s what we want…Then we will start holy war against the Americans, exactly like the Soviets.”¹⁹

He was not preoccupied only by office talk, however. Osama’s mother had flown in from Jeddah, and she had brought along at least two of Osama’s younger stepbrothers, with whom he had shared his suburban household after his mother’s remarriage. (The Saudi intelligence service, which had been informed of her decision to travel to Afghanistan, still felt that it could not interfere with a mother’s desire to see her son, even after the brazen Cole attack.) Osama, Zaidan recalled, felt bad that his position among the FBI’s Most Wanted had forced his mother to fly commercial and by an indirect route. “I am very much feeling guilty,” Osama said, as Zaidan remembered it. “If there is no embargo on the Taliban, I could bring a special plane to take from here to Saudi Arabia.” He chastised himself: “I am not so kind to my mother.”²⁰

The wedding ceremony itself did not take long—perhaps one hour, by Zaidan’s estimation, followed by a banquet of food and a dessert course of fruits. Osama decided against a speech honoring his son but chose instead to recite a poem he had written about the USS Cole operation. He stood before the assembled and began to recite:

A destroyer: even the brave fear its might.It inspires horror in the harbor and in the open seaShe sails into the waves…

His performance did not go particularly well, however. He stumbled. The crowd shouted “Allah Akhbar!” to encourage him. He carried on, but afterward he called Zaidan aside.

“I don’t think my delivery was good,” he confessed. Zaidan deduced that Osama was “very much caring about public relations—very much caring about how he would appear on the TV.”

Osama decided to try it a second time. He went back outside, the cameras rolled, and he recited the poem again:

…Flanked by arrogance, haughtiness and false power.To her doom she moves slowly…

He went back inside and looked at the video, reviewing his performances. “No, no, the first one was better,” he concluded.²¹