ON SEPTEMBER 13, 2001, Jason Blum, a former police officer who had moved into the private security industry, received a telephone call from Airworks Inc., a New Jersey broker of charter aircraft operations. The company was arranging a charter to carry members of the Bin Laden family out of the United States, its representative said. Given the events of the previous forty-eight hours, Airworks had decided to hire a security guard to protect the airplane’s crew—the pilot, copilot, and several flight attendants. Blum, however, would not be permitted to carry a weapon on board; he would have to rely on his wits and his training in martial arts.1
Blum asked what the Bin Laden family members would have with them. Any guns? Cash? Had they been cleared to depart by the Federal Bureau of Investigation? These issues would be resolved, the charter representative assured him. Blum agreed to take the job. He was later told to arrive at a private aviation terminal at the Los Angeles International Airport at seven in the morning on September 19.
When the day arrived, Blum dressed in a suit and tie and drove to the airport. Several FBI agents met him; they patted him down and looked through his carry-on bag, and then they escorted him aboard a Boeing 727. The plane belonged to Ryan International, a charter company based in the Midwest. Previously, the Baltimore Orioles baseball team, and more recently, the Chicago Bulls basketball team, had used this particular plane to travel between games. Its cabin was large enough to hold about 180 seats if it were configured for a commercial airliner, but to accommodate the sports teams, it had been outfitted in a more luxurious style. There were about thirty comfortable blue leather chairs and a half-circle wet bar at which passengers could stand and talk.
As Blum stepped inside, he saw there were only two people aboard, both women. One introduced herself as an FBI agent. The other, a woman in her midforties, dressed in the elegant but professional style of an American businesswoman, was Najiah Bin Laden.
The FBI agents all departed, the plane doors closed, and Blum sat down to talk with Najiah. She was “visibly upset,” and “just shaking,” as Blum remembered it. She described the novel experience of being patted down by the female FBI agent before she came aboard; he told her he had just been through the same procedure, and they chuckled about it.2
Najiah said that she had been living in Los Angeles, in the Westwood neighborhood, for years, and that she loved Southern California. She rode horses, played polo, and took piloting lessons, she said, and she did not want to return to Saudi Arabia. She talked about “how horrible this was, and how horrible this was for the name of her family,” Blum recalled.
A few days after the attacks in New York and Washington, Najiah continued, she had gone into a large department store in west Los Angeles to purchase some clothing. The cashier looked at her credit card and made derogatory comments, as Blum recalled her account. Afterward, she had begun to fear for her life. FBI agents had visited her at her home on September 17; she told them that she was deeply upset by the suicide attacks because “violence is not the way of Islam.”3
Najiah told Blum that she had not talked to Osama in thirty years. She could not believe a member of her family had done this.
Maybe it will turn out to be someone else who was responsible, Blum said. He mentioned how after the Oklahoma City terrorist attack in 1995, much of the initial speculation had centered on Muslim extremists, but then it had turned out to be a homegrown terrorist plot.
No, Najiah replied, this is Osama’s work.
She held a Koran. As the airplane accelerated down the runway and lifted into the air, she opened its pages and read.4
SOMEWHERE OVER ARIZONA, Blum ducked into the cockpit to speak with the pilot, who was in his late forties or early fifties. His copilot was a woman who said that she had previously flown for Southwest Airlines. The captain asked Blum who he was, who he worked for, and why he was on the flight.
Blum explained that he used to be a cop, but that he was now working as a security guard, to protect the airplane’s crew.
Why do I need security? the pilot asked. They were just picking up some college students in Florida, he said, and some other college kids in Washington, and then taking them to Boston. Then he asked: Do you have a passenger manifest?
Blum paused. He had one, but it was full of Bin Laden names—obviously, the captain had not been told. He felt it was a bad idea to lie to airplane pilots, however, particularly while they were in the air, so he handed the paper over.
“The guy turned white,” Blum recalled, “just absolutely ghost white.” He was visibly angry as he handed the manifest to his copilot. They all passed it around. Then they pulled out cigarettes and started chain-smoking. Blum found his Marlboros and joined them.
The pilot and copilot contacted their charter company and issued a series of profane complaints. The crew told Blum that, no offense, but they were a little worried about his ability to control things on his own once the rest of the Bin Ladens came aboard—should something go wrong.
“You’ve got one woman in her midforties in the center of the plane,” Blum said. There was nothing to be anxious about.
Now the flight attendants also picked up on who was on their passenger list. “They started going berserk,” Blum recalled. The attendants paced back and forth to the cockpit.
Finally they landed in Orlando. It was late afternoon East Coast time. The charter crew had decided upon their demands: because they were concerned about their safety and also felt they had been deceived, they were not going to fly any farther than Orlando unless they were each paid an additional $10,000.
Blum learned that a TV channel was reporting that a flight related to September 11—the report was sketchy about the nature of the connection—was preparing to take off from Orlando. Great, Blum thought. He started to worry about some nut turning up with a rifle to take pot shots at them on the tarmac or to try to shoot them out of the sky.
He went back out to the 727 to monitor who and what went aboard. Their flight plan was now on indefinite hold because of the crew’s demands. Three FBI agents patrolled the tarmac and the terminal.
Blum talked on his cell phone with a manager at Ryan Air: the longer we sit on the tarmac, Blum pleaded, the bigger target we become.
Blum spotted a tall man, perhaps six feet four inches tall, and handsome. He wore a thin mustache. He looked exactly like Osama Bin Laden, Blum thought, except that he wore designer sunglasses and a five-thousand-dollar Bijan suit.
Khalil Bin Laden introduced himself and apologized to Blum; he said he was sorry that Blum even had to be there.
Najiah came out and asked Khalil what the long delay was all about. Blum explained: The flight crew was not made aware of your identities. One problem, he continued, is that they are terrified to fly with you. The other is they want more money.
Give them whatever they want, Khalil said, exasperated. “Let’s just get out of here.”5
ON THE EVENING of September 13, the same day Jason Blum was first contacted about the Bin Laden flight, Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador in Washington, met with President George W. Bush at the White House. They smoked cigars on the Truman Balcony, overlooking the South Lawn. The number of dead was still uncounted—in the thousands, certainly. The televised imagery of the attacks and their aftermath—the helpless office workers leaping to their deaths from the twin towers; the tear-streaked, dust-covered faces of the wounded; the shards of paper and debris; the impromptu bulletin boards covered by photos of the missing—still pulsed through the country like a crackling current. What the events would mean ultimately for the U.S.-Saudi governmental alliance was difficult to predict, but there would obviously be a rethinking on both sides.
Bandar insisted later that he did not trouble Bush that evening with the plans he had been working on at the Saudi embassy to evacuate the Bin Laden family, as well as the several dozen members of the Saudi royal family and their entourages who were scattered around the United States. (One group of royals had come to the country before September 11 to purchase Thoroughbred horses in Kentucky; another had come to vacation in California and Las Vegas.) According to Bandar, he called the FBI directly to obtain permission for the charter flights he organized and to ensure that Saudi nationals were adequately protected from vigilante revenge attacks. “Those people were scattered all over America and with tempers high at that time, rightly so, we were worried that someone getting emotional would hurt them,” Bandar said later. He did not say whom he telephoned at the FBI, but he had an excellent relationship with the director, Louis Freeh. After settling things with the bureau, Bandar telephoned Richard Clarke, the counterterrorism director at the White House, who told him, “I have no problem if the FBI has no problem.”6
About three or four days after September 11, Bandar also called Fred Dutton, a Washington lawyer who had served as a legal and political adviser to the Saudi royal family for many years. Bandar explained that some of Osama’s half-brothers happened to be in the United States and wanted to retain legal counsel. “Talk to them and see if you can be of any help,” Bandar said. Dutton was reluctant, but he agreed.7
Dutton was a white-haired doyen of the Washington bar, now in his seventies, a man who was protective of his reputation and who spoke with precision and care. He drove to the Four Seasons Hotel on the edge of Georgetown and rode the elevator to a two-room suite. There he introduced himself to Shafiq Bin Laden and Abdullah Bin Laden, the Harvard law graduate. The brothers both wore business suits. They all sat down to talk in the living room area of the suite.
Shafiq Bin Laden had been attending a Carlyle Group investors’ conference at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Washington, near Dupont Circle, when American Airlines Flight 77 smashed into the Pentagon across the Potomac River. Abdullah Bin Laden had been buying a latte at a Starbucks in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when news of the attacks flashed on the television. He had then made his way to Washington to join his half-brother, to assist with the efforts to evacuate his family, and to assess how to manage their legal position.
The brothers asked Dutton for advice on “what to do, how to handle what was obviously a very embarrassing, messy situation for most of the rest of the Bin Laden family,” as Dutton recalled it. They said they were estranged from Osama, hadn’t seen him in a very long time, and thought he was “a bad apple,” as Dutton put it later.8
The brothers did not propose retaining Dutton himself, but they asked him if he could recommend the names of some lawyers who might be willing to take the Bin Ladens on as clients. They wanted a law firm that could provide general advice, but that could also assist them on specific legal issues that might arise for the family in the United States in the aftermath of the suicide attacks. Civil lawsuits filed on behalf of the victims were one obvious possibility. The U.S. government would certainly renew its investigations of family finances and related issues. Dutton knew that the Bin Laden family had previously worked with Sullivan & Cromwell, but the brothers did not say whether they had also contacted Sullivan—whose New York headquarters was near the World Trade Center—or what had come of their inquiry if they had made one.
Dutton recalled that he “tried to throw cold water on them,” saying that he did not think this was a time when legal representation could be of any real help to the Bin Laden family. It was too early and feelings were too raw. But he agreed to explore the matter.
Over the next day or two, Dutton called a few prestigious Washington attorneys he knew to sound them out. He was not going to put people he did not know well on the spot by making cold calls. He concluded from the conversations he held that “this just is not the right time, and it can’t be done.”9
He called the Bin Ladens back and told them; he said he did not believe there was any merit in even holding exploratory meetings. He suggested that they pull back and “let some breathing space” develop. He also advised them to avoid working with any of the sorts of attorneys who might be willing to take them on in this atmosphere—such lawyers would be grandstanders, and would not ultimately help the family. The entire proposition, Dutton felt, was a “non-starter.”10
Shafiq and Abdullah also met in Washington during these initial days after September 11 with Chas Freeman, the former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia who had developed an acquaintance with Bakr. After leaving government, Freeman had become president of the Middle East Policy Council in Washington, to which the Bin Ladens had made financial contributions over many years; he also negotiated business deals in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere overseas. The brothers told Freeman they were receiving a stream of terrible threats. They had found the FBI “solicitous and kind,” and had tried to be helpful themselves in answering the bureau’s questions about family history and Osama’s situation within it, but given their circumstances in the United States, those Bin Ladens still in the country felt they were now essentially under the bureau’s protection.11
They talked with Freeman about the family’s public relations problem. After Osama declared war on the United States, the Bin Ladens had retained a former Wall Street Journal reporter, Timothy Metz, who had started his own public relations firm in New York, but Metz was mainly just a point of entry for the American media; he relayed inquiries from reporters and passed along clippings about the Bin Ladens from the American press. Freeman advised Shafiq and Abdullah to hire someone with specific experience in crisis communications. He felt that law firms were not the ideal advisers in a situation of this kind; they had a distinct orientation. The Bin Laden brothers said they would consider Freeman’s idea. Like many people during those September days, they seemed to be in something of a state of shock.12
WHEN THE FIRST PLANE struck the World Trade Center, Yeslam Bin Laden was driving to the airport in Geneva with a friend. His cell phone rang; a second friend, an American investment banker in New York, told him the news. At first Yeslam thought it was an accident, that a plane had somehow missed its approach. His friend called back a few minutes later to report the second strike. Yeslam said later that he knew then it was not an accident, and yet it still did not occur to him to think that his half-brother might be involved. It seemed “too sophisticated” to be Osama’s work, he said later. He “never thought” even for “a second” that Osama “could have been alone behind this affair.”13
Yeslam drove to a Geneva hotel where his mother and his brother Ibrahim were staying for a visit. They watched the news and heard Osama named as the suspected mastermind of the attacks. His mother fell ill from the strain. They had to call a doctor.
The next morning the Swiss federal police telephoned. They asked Yeslam to come for an interview. Earlier, when Yeslam was an applicant for Swiss citizenship, Swiss investigators had interviewed him about family history and his relationship with Osama. Now they wanted to go back through the same questions in greater depth. The session lasted several hours, according to Yeslam. That same day, he decided to issue a written statement from Geneva:
“I am shocked by this criminal attack of terrorism which killed innocent people yesterday,” it said. “I would like to express my deepest feelings of sorrow. All life is sacred and I condemn all killing and all attacks against liberty and human values. My thoughts and profound sympathy are with the victims, their families and the American people.”14
It was the first and most expansive expression of sympathy issued by any member of the Bin Laden family about September 11. It also placed responsibility for the attacks in a generalized context—“all life…all attacks against liberty and human values”—and it made no particular reference to Osama.
Yeslam flew to Cannes, France, to meet with Bakr and another Bin Laden brother on the first weekend after the attacks. They discussed “the possibility of bringing everybody back to Saudi Arabia” to regroup.15
Bakr’s reaction to the attacks seemed to be infused with caution. He did not issue any statement on behalf of the family or provide any media interviews or other public remarks for an entire week. At that point Bakr’s office issued a brief written statement on behalf of the Bin Laden family, under the name of his uncle, Abdullah, Mohamed’s aged brother. The statement expressed “the strong denunciation and condemnation of this sad event, which resulted in the loss of many innocent men, women and children, and which contradicts our Islamic faith.”
Privately, Bakr was more forthright. Sabry Ghoneim, the family’s communications adviser in Egypt, recalled that Bakr told him, “This is a criminal act. If America seeks revenge, it’s their right, because that’s the price of the people who died.” This was not unusual language for Bakr to use about Al Qaeda when there was no public audience listening in. Once, after an Al Qaeda–inspired bombing, he telephoned a British friend from his private jet to denounce the “bloody Arabs” and their destructive terrorism. But he never offered such strong language in public.16
Instead, the belated statement Bakr authorized followed what had become Saudi government policy. In the initial days and weeks following September 11, Saudi princes and spokesmen denounced the terrible violence of that day, expressed sympathy for the victims, and said that the attacks contradicted the tenets of Islam. But Saudi statements usually made no specific reference to Osama, Al Qaeda, or the Saudi nationalities of nineteen of the September 11 hijackers. Indeed, as late as December 2002, Prince Nayef, the interior minister, who had such a long history with Osama and the Bin Ladens, still refused to acknowledge that the hijackers were Saudis at all; he suggested that September 11 was a Zionist conspiracy concocted to discredit Muslims. Nayef ’s comments shocked many Americans. Of course, his opinions about September 11—and his beliefs about Zionists and Jews—were quite commonplace in the kingdom. It was just that Americans previously had little occasion to hear such opinions, and certainly not at a transforming moment of national shock and grief. Nayef ’s words wafted through American political and media circles like a toxic gas released from a long-buried cavern.
There were certainly some Saudis who celebrated the September 11 attacks. Saad Al-Faqih, the exiled dissident, claimed that text messages ricocheted on mobile phones around the kingdom, declaring, “Congratulations” or “Our prayers to Bin Laden,” and that sheep and camels were slaughtered for celebratory feasts. Al-Faqih’s credibility is questionable—he wasn’t in the kingdom—but others who were there acknowledge that celebration was at least an element of initial popular reaction. This joy mingled with fear of retaliation against Arabs and Muslims, and confusion about how such an ambitious conspiracy could have been carried off by a loose band of individuals based in Afghanistan—the improbability of the attacks was widely taken as empirical proof of Zionist involvement. At the heart of the reaction lay the sense of grievance toward the United States and Israel nurtured by many Arabians, even though most of them had little or no meaningful contact with either country. Arab media and governments cultivated this discourse in part because it deflected anger from local failures. September 11 amplified all these perceptions at least temporarily.
Bassim Alim, an attorney in Jeddah who was related by marriage to the Bin Laden family, summed up the typical Saudi attitude: “Even if I do not condone what Osama has done, I’m not going to cry for the broken hearts of American mothers and American daughters and American fathers…Maybe what he did is wrong but it’s God’s justice, God’s way of helping us. Sometimes we have a criminal kill another criminal—it’s God’s way of having his own justice.” After the attacks in New York and Washington, Alim said, he attended “many social events and social gatherings” in Jeddah with “people from different stratas of life and different stratas of society, whether they’re extreme liberals or the extreme religious, and you can see this commonality: ‘Osama has destroyed our image…But you know, at the end of the day, the Americans deserve it.’”17
KHALIL BIN LADEN had been vacationing at Desert Bear outside Orlando on the morning of September 11; he and members of his family had watched the attacks unfold on the television news. An FBI agent telephoned Khalil at his estate on September 12; the agent said that the local FBI office had received reports, apparently from neighbors of Desert Bear, of “a large amount of activity” at the estate. Khalil denied that there was anything unusual going on at his home. He said his main concern was “the safety of his family,” and he asked the agent if the FBI was aware of specific threats against them. The agent told Khalil to call the Orange County Sheriff ’s Department if he or his family ever felt threatened.18
Khalil called the FBI agent back three days later and asked if it would be possible for him and his family to fly by commercial airliner to Washington, D.C., so they could connect with a charter flight home that was being arranged by the Saudi embassy. FBI agents drove out to Desert Bear to talk it over; ultimately, the charter plane was routed through Orlando.
On September 19, as the plane carrying Najiah and Jason Blum flew toward Orlando from Los Angeles, FBI agents escorted Khalil and his family to the Orlando International Airport. The traveling party included Khalil’s wife, Isabel, and their son Sultan. FBI agents interviewed the embarking passengers and looked through their luggage.
Khalil wandered out to the tarmac. There he met Jason Blum and learned of the charter flight crew’s revolt.
As they waited, Khalil mentioned that he and his family had started to receive death threats at Desert Bear. Cars were driving by the estate very slowly, checking them out.19
Blum wore down his cell phone batteries talking to Bob Bernstein, the Ryan Air executive in charge of the charter flight, as they tried to resolve the crew’s demands for extra money. Blum and Bernstein joked on the phone that they were just two Jews trying to get the Bin Laden family out of the country. Finally they resolved the money issue, essentially by giving into the crew’s demands, according to Blum.20
The pilot and copilot climbed back aboard, the Bin Ladens took their seats, and they lifted off for Washington’s Dulles International Airport. At a private aviation terminal they met Shafiq and his London-based financial executive, Akber Moawalla, who had accompanied Shafiq to the United States to attend the September 11 Carlyle Group meeting.
Also boarding the plane in Washington was Omar Awadh Bin Laden. He had apparently once shared an address with the Abdullah Bin Laden who ran the local office of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth. (The office had previously been a subject of FBI inquiries, which had been aborted in part because of the issue of diplomatic immunity.) Of all the passengers on the Bin Laden flight, Omar is the only one known to have even a possible connection to Islamist preaching or organizing. And yet, oddly, Omar may have been one of the few passengers on the charter who was not interviewed by the FBI.21
As the number of Bin Ladens aboard the 727 swelled with each successive stop, there was a growing atmosphere inside the cabin of a mournful family reunion, Blum recalled. Some of the Bin Ladens aboard had not seen each other for a long while, and they greeted each other with excitement. Others were crying and visibly upset. Some stood at the bar and sipped tea or soft drinks. Almost everybody smoked cigarettes nervously, it seemed, and the passenger lounge filled up with thick clouds of blue smoke.22
As the plane flew toward its final departure from American airspace, there was a sense that the Bin Ladens might now be leaving the United States behind for good, or at least for a very long time. Najiah and Khalil talked with Blum about how they might have to change their name if they ever returned.
In Boston a number of college students from the family’s third generation came aboard. One was Nawaf, Bakr’s eldest son. Salem’s son Salman, the student at Tufts University, was another. Altogether, about a dozen younger Bin Ladens joined the plane in Boston, and many of them looked and sounded American. One of the male students mentioned that he was just starting his sophomore year in college and had finally managed to obtain a fake ID of some quality, so that he could go out to clubs and bars with his friends—this was not going to be of much use in Saudi Arabia, he told Blum ruefully.23
The FBI made one last pass through the plane at Logan International Airport in Boston, checking luggage and talking to the passengers. The original pilot and co-pilot disembarked and a new crew took over. Blum was supposed to leave the plane in Boston, too, but Najiah and Khalil asked him to stay all the way to Paris, and he agreed. Finally they lifted off and cleared American airspace. Because of the 727’s limited range, they would refuel in Nova Scotia and again in Iceland before they reached France. But the United States was at last behind them.
The younger Bin Ladens chatted and smoked with Blum and a second security guard who had joined them in Boston, Ric Pascetta, who, like Blum, was a martial arts specialist, and two other private security officers who had come aboard. The Bin Laden kids asked the two of them about police work; the students said they were particularly devastated that so many policemen and firemen had died in New York while trying to rescue others. “I was explaining to them that that’s what we do,” Blum remembered. “It’s like a mental defect that we have—instead of running away, we go after it.”24
Also in Boston, Sanaa Bin Laden, a half-sister of Osama’s who spent much of her time in New England, had joined the flight. She had worked on children’s cultural exhibitions in Boston. She was about forty years old, one of several middle-aged Bin Laden mothers now on the plane. Blum noticed that the older women tended to dress more conservatively—usually headscarves or something similar. Even more striking, as they neared Paris, all the Bin Laden women, young or old, in Western designer clothes or not, prepared to cover themselves in full black abayas. Blum learned that they would transfer in Paris to a Saudi government plane for the last leg home. When they stepped onto that Saudi aircraft, they would effectively reenter the kingdom; some of the women waited as long as possible, as they crossed the Atlantic, to transform themselves appropriately.
ONE BIN LADEN stayed behind: Abdullah, the longtime Harvard law student who lived in Boston. He was thirty-five years old and had now spent the majority of his adult life in the United States. He retained some faith in the resilience and tolerance of American society. After the attacks, he told his younger nieces and nephews, the ones who had been pulled out of college in Boston, “Believe me, if any society is going to understand your case, is going to differentiate between good and evil, it is here.” He later told a reporter, “I’m here, a member of my family is being accused, and still I’m being treated as a human being.” In the weeks following the evacuation flight, Abdullah traveled between Boston, New York, Washington, and London, searching for a public relations strategy that might salvage some of their standing in the United States and Europe.25
He contacted Steven Goldstein, a communications strategist in New York who happened to be Jewish. They met at a café in New York City. The Bin Ladens had no previous connections with his firm. Abdullah said the family was looking for a way to publicize the fact that they had previously renounced Osama, Goldstein recalled.26
He did not know where his half-brother was hiding, Abdullah said. Goldstein asked if Osama had always been “a madman.” Abdullah said that while Osama had never loved America, something in the mid-1990s had made him snap.
Abdullah said he regarded Goldstein’s Jewish heritage as “a plus.” He also asked, according to Goldstein, “Do you know any Jewish lawyers?” Goldstein bristled and tried to keep his composure. Abdullah seemed oblivious to the possibility that his preference for Jewish representation might be offensive. At best Abdullah’s approach was naive—an insensitive attempt to associate the Bin Ladens with American diversity and values. Perhaps he harbored less attractive thoughts—that Jews were always for hire at the right price, or that he could leverage their supposedly hidden powers in America to aid his family. In any event, Goldstein turned Abdullah down.27
IN AFGHANISTAN, Osama Bin Laden held two lengthy and reflective conversations with sympathetic visitors during the first two months after the September 11 attacks. Both conversations were recorded, although neither was broadcast immediately.
The full transcripts suggest that like his adversaries in America, Osama had spent many hours after the attacks glued to a television, watching news report after news report, commentary after commentary. Osama seemed particularly vulnerable to feelings of aggravation about President Bush’s language and attitude. He also apparently was infused by feelings of defensiveness about the accusation, so often repeated in American and some Arab news broadcasts, that whatever the merits of Al Qaeda’s political grievances, Osama had discredited himself by taking the lives of so many innocents.
On October 20, 2001, he sat down with the Syrian-born, Spanish national Taysir Allouni, a reporter for Al-Jazeera. In the first part of their interview discussion, Osama performed in a familiar manner, and he sounded some of his stock themes: America was a paper tiger; its economy and political system would collapse in the face of determined jihad, as had happened to the Soviet Union. He reeled off a series of calculations based on the reported figures of Wall Street stock market losses after September 11. He sounded as if he had recently been sitting in front of his television or his computer, furiously scribbling down numerical estimates:
According to their own admission, the share of the losses on Wall Street market reached sixteen percent. They said that this number is a record…The gross amount that is traded in that market reaches $4 trillion. So if we multiply 16 percent by $4 trillion…it reaches $640 billion of losses from stocks, with God’s grace, an amount that is equivalent to the budget of Sudan for 640 years…The daily income of the American nation is $20 billion. The first week they didn’t work at all as a result of the psychological shock…So if you multiply $20 billion by one week, it comes to $140 billion…If you add it to the $640 billion, we’ve reached how much? Approximately $800 billion…28
On he went, swerving between accountancy and the poetical rhetoric of a typical tenor. Then the interview took a striking turn.
“What about the killing of innocent civilians?” Allouni asked.
“It is very strange for Americans and other educated people to talk about the killing of innocent civilians,” Osama answered.
“I mean,” he continued, “Who said that our children and civilians are not innocents, and that the shedding of their blood is permissible. Whenever we kill their civilians, the whole world yells at us from East to West, and America starts putting pressure on its allies and puppets…There is a strong instinct in humans to lean towards the powerful without knowing it, so when they talk about us, they know we will not answer them…”
“So you say that it is an eye for an eye? They kill our innocents, so we kill theirs?”
“Yes, so we kill their innocents—this is valid both religiously and logically. But some of the people who talk about this issue, discuss it from a religious point of view…They say that the killing of innocents is wrong and invalid, and for proof, they say that the Prophet forbade the killing of children and women, and that is true…”
“This is precisely what I’m talking about!” Allouni interrupted. “This is exactly what I’m asking you about!”
“…But this forbidding of killing children and innocents is not set in stone, and there are other writings that uphold it.”
Now Osama embarked on a different justification, one that seemed to contradict his own argument: He defended himself by saying that he hadn’t actually intended to kill people who should be classified as innocents. “[We] didn’t set out to kill children,” he said, “but rather attacked the biggest center of military power in the world, the Pentagon, which contains more than 64,000 workers, a military base which has a big concentration of army and intelligence.”
“What about the World Trade Center?”
“As for the World Trade Center, the ones who were attacked who died in it were part of a financial power. It wasn’t a children’s school! Neither was it a residence. And the general consensus is that most of the people who were in the towers were men that backed the biggest financial force in the world…And those individuals should stand before God, and rethink and redo their calculations.”
Immediately, however, Osama returned to his first argument: Even if they were innocent, his attack was justified on the basis of retribution: “We treat others like they treat us. Those who kill our women and our innocent, we kill their women and innocent, until they stop doing so.” These were the evasions of a man who had apparently not expected to be criticized or questioned on the issue.
A little later, Osama assessed Bush’s ill-considered use of the word “Crusade” to describe America’s response to September 11: “So Bush has declared in his own words: ‘Crusade attack.’ The odd thing about this is that he has taken the word right out of our mouth…People make apologies for him and they say that he didn’t mean to say that this war is a Crusade, even though he himself said that it was! So the world today is split into two parts, as Bush said: Either you are with us, or you are with terrorism. Either you are with the Crusade, or you are with Islam. Bush’s image today is of him being in the front of the line, yelling and carrying his big cross.”29
There was something striking and authentic in this entire exchange—perhaps it was the absence of Osama’s self-mystifying verses, and the absence, too, of archaic language, Koranic justification, or reference to ancient maps. Here was a well-informed, up-to-date media consumer and amateur political analyst defending the violence he sponsored through straightforward argument, as if he were appearing at a mosque debate or on a televised current-affairs program.
And yet as his exchange with Allouni continued, Osama spoke just as fluidly in the vernacular of a religious cultist—with the seeming flick of a switch, he could find the voice in which he recounted dreams, spoke in Koranic riddles, or expressed his conviction that he and his followers were engaged in a preordained war that would continue until the climax of earthly time—a war that was not a means to a political end, but was rather an expression of God’s will, and as such, could offer no peace to the enemies of His true religion.
“What is your opinion,” Allouni asked him, “about what is being said concerning your analogies and the ‘Clash of Civilizations’? Your constant use and repetition of the word ‘Crusade’ and ‘Crusader’ shows that you uphold the saying, the ‘Clash of Civilizations.’”
“I say there is no doubt about this,” Osama answered. “This [clash of civilizations] is a very clear matter, proven in the Koran…The Jews and America have come up with a fairytale that they transmit to the Muslims, and they’ve unfortunately been followed by the local rulers and a lot of people who are close to them, by using ‘world peace’ as an excuse. That is a fairytale that has no substance whatsoever!”
“Peace?”
“The peace that they foist on Muslims in order to ready and prepare them to be slaughtered…Whoever claims that there is permanent peace between us and the Jews has disbelieved what has been sent down through Mohamed; the battle is between us and the enemies of Islam, and it will go on until the Hour.”30
Several weeks after this interview, a Saudi religious scholar, Ali Al-Ghandi, arrived in Afghanistan on a tour. Near Kandahar, he was granted an audience with Osama. The transcript of their informal conversation is peppered with risible passages, particularly as Al-Ghandi tries awkwardly to flatter Osama: “We don’t want to take much of your time…Everybody praises what you did, the great action that you did…Hundreds of people used to doubt you and few only would follow you until this huge event happened. Now hundreds of people are coming out to join you.”
Osama explained how the planes operation had exceeded his expectations, and he referred to his own background in civil engineering and demolition: “We calculated that the floors that would be hit would be three or four floors. I was the most optimistic of them all…due to my experience in this field. I was thinking that the fire from the gas in the plane would melt the iron structure of the building and collapse the area where the plane hit, and all the floors above it only. This is all that we hoped for.” Osama said he was pleased and surprised when both buildings collapsed entirely.
“By God,” Al-Ghandi said obsequiously, “it is a great work.”31
OSAMA’S SUDDEN POPULARITY among ordinary Saudis redoubled the complexity of the Bin Laden family’s position: Had they brought shame and disrepute upon the kingdom, or had they nurtured a new Arab folk hero? It did not require professional expertise in public relations to see the contours of this dilemma as the Bin Ladens searched for a legal and communications strategy. To please American audiences, the Bin Ladens would have to seek forgiveness and denounce Osama. To please audiences in the Arab world, where the family’s financial interests predominantly lay, such a posture would be seen as craven.
It was perhaps unrealistic to expect Abdullah, in Boston, with his diffident personality and his very junior standing in the family, to manage these questions on his own.
Abdullah joined Andrew Hess for dinner one evening that autumn at the Helmand Restaurant, run by the Karzai family, whose own exiled scion would soon be restored to power in their native country, displacing Osama’s influence there. Hess was the Tufts professor whose academic program the Bin Ladens had supported during the 1990s. From his many years spent in Saudi Arabia, Hess had come to think that there was “a certain posture that Arabs take in cases of tragedy” and that Abdullah Bin Laden, over dinner, now exuded this posture, which Hess saw as a sort of burdened fatalism: What can one do?
“He regarded this as a huge tragedy for the family,” Hess recalled. Abdullah took pains to convince him that the Bin Ladens were “hugely hostile” to what Osama had done, and that they had “no interest whatsoever in supporting anything he’s doing…that he’s receiving no money from the corporation.” Abdullah made this last point more than once.32
In December, after flying over to London, Abdullah agreed to meet with Charlotte Edwardes, a British journalist with the Telegraph. Bakr had tentatively given Abdullah some scope to humanize his section of the family through occasional contact with the media. Edwardes found Abdullah a sympathetic figure—a “tall, slight foreigner dressed in an expensively cut black overcoat,” who worried about his many allergies, and walked somberly through the Mayfair streets, oblivious to Christmas shoppers. Abdullah could barely speak of Osama; he referred to his half-brother as “Mr. O.”33
He talked to Edwardes about his new life in America and Britain. He used cash as much as possible, to avoid that awkward moment when a clerk might stare down at the raised letters on his credit card. At home in Boston, he had stopped jogging out of doors and had given up private piloting. Flying, he said, “is like nothing else. When I am up there in the plane I feel free,” and none of his family’s history with tragic aviation events had diminished his passion. And yet, he understood that “it would be an insult for me to pilot a plane in America now.”
During one of several meetings, Abdullah sat down with Edwardes at the Four Seasons Hotel in Knightsbridge. Abdullah paid for his Evian water (it was Ramadan, and he was fasting during the daytime) from a wad of fifty-pound notes. As they prepared to leave for dinner, Abdullah asked the hotel waiter if it might be possible to book a table at Nobu, then the most sought-after restaurant in London.
“Sorry, no, not unless you are a name,” the waiter said.
For a moment, Edwardes thought, Abdullah Bin Laden “allowed himself the shadow of a smile.”34
RICHARD NEWCOMB, the attorney who ran the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, led a delegation to Saudi Arabia in December 2001 to speak with businessmen in the kingdom about the problem of terrorist financing. The delegation’s purpose—although its members did not put it quite so bluntly as this during meetings—was to shake up the attitudes of wealthy Saudis about their charitable giving and other financial dealings in the Islamic world. Newcomb and colleagues from the State Department and other agencies hoped to accomplish this by enumerating for audiences of Saudi businessmen the penalties that individuals and companies could incur under American law if they passed money to the wrong people. The Bush administration had identified the disruption of terrorist financing as an important priority after September 11, and Treasury had already designated several dozen individuals, charities, and businesses as supporters of terrorism, which meant their U.S.-held assets could be frozen. Newcomb and his colleagues scheduled roundtable meetings with the Jeddah Chamber of Commerce and other businessmen in Riyadh and Jeddah. The Treasury team also asked for a private meeting with the Bin Laden family, and somewhat to their surprise, they learned that Bakr Bin Laden would meet with them.1
The meeting took place in the elegant offices of the Saudi Bin Laden Group. Shafiq and Abdullah, who had met with Newcomb at Treasury prior to September 11 to outline the history of Bin Laden inheritances, joined Bakr in his office. This time, instead of the business suits they had worn to the Treasury Annex in Washington, the two brothers appeared in traditional Saudi robes and headdresses. No one from Treasury had met Bakr before; they were struck by his relatively modest stature, at least in comparison to Osama.
Bakr apologized to the Americans about the September 11 attacks. He said that Osama was no longer considered a part of the Bin Laden family, and that he had been cut off for years. Bakr added that he had no idea where Osama was hiding. He offered the cooperation of his family and his company.
Newcomb and his colleagues walked through their presentation about American terrorist-financing laws. They tried to speak in a diplomatic, nonthreatening tone. They did not go into depth with Bakr about specific Bin Laden family or inheritance issues; Newcomb’s office believed the letter sent to Treasury by Sullivan & Cromwell in 2000 had adequately addressed these questions.
The Bin Laden brothers were cordial. Shafiq suggested to one member of the delegation that he come back when he wasn’t so busy so they could go fishing together in the Red Sea. In a more serious vein, one of the brothers mentioned that his American Express card had been blocked after September 11—he presumed this was because of the family name on the card. He wanted to go back to America, he said, but he could not do so without a working American Express card. One of the American officials joked that this was a pretty good advertisement for the credit card company.
Back in Washington, in the first weeks of 2002, Treasury officials discussed the credit card matter at the White House, where several interagency working groups convened on a weekly or biweekly basis to review global counterterrorism operations. The Taliban had fallen by now, intelligence operations against Al Qaeda were unfolding in dozens of countries, and preparations had quietly begun for an invasion of Iraq. In this interregnum the Bush administration was also focusing intently on terrorist-financing matters, and its interagency groups on terrorism reviewed many detailed case files. After the mission to Saudi Arabia, a sensitive question arose: Was the Bush administration prepared, at least provisionally, to clear Bin Laden family bank accounts and credit cards, so that members of the family resident in Saudi Arabia and Europe could travel more freely?2
U.S. government investigators had learned a great deal about the Bin Laden family in the several months since September 11, particularly about its business history in America. The Federal Bureau of Investigation had carried out much of this work after the attacks in Washington and New York. Dennis Lormel, an agent with a background in financial crime investigations, had been appointed on September 13 to lead a team at FBI headquarters assigned to concentrate on the financial aspects of the September 11 plot, and more generally on Al Qaeda’s money trail. The FBI’s fifty-six field offices scattered around the United States also carried out investigations into the Bin Laden family, some in cooperation with Lormel’s group, others on a more ad hoc basis. On the evening of September 11 itself, for example, agents from the Boston field office turned up at the local condominium where Abdullah and his half-brother Mohamed had owned apartments; the FBI agents started what would become weeks of shoe-leather police work in the Boston area. They interviewed neighbors, investigated nightclubs and bars where younger Bin Ladens were said to appear on occasion, and dug for evidence about family money. Similar investigations, none of them announced to the public, took place in New York, Washington, Los Angeles, Florida, Texas, and elsewhere. Through the autumn, FBI agents gathered an enormous sheaf of files and interview reports about the Bin Ladens, although as ever, the bureau struggled to pull its data together and deliver it in a way that policy makers outside the FBI could use.3
FBI agents and investigators from the nascent Department of Homeland Security spent long hours with some of the Bin Ladens’ key American business partners after September 11, talking through the minutia of each long-ago business transaction involving Salem, Khalil, Yeslam, and other brothers active in the United States. The agents examined where and how the money had flowed in these deals. The investigators also took flight logs from family pilots and interviewed some pilots at length about Bin Laden family travel history, reaching as far back as the 1970s. The FBI learned, for example, about the flight to Peshawar, Pakistan, by Gerald Auerbach and Ghalib Bin Laden early in 1989.4
These investigations amounted to intelligence collection; there were no grand juries convened to consider criminal charges. Some of the work fell inevitably into the gray area between the mandate of the FBI and that of the Central Intelligence Agency. Charles Tickle, who had directed commercial real estate investments in Richmond, Virginia, and elsewhere for Yeslam Bin Laden, telephoned the CIA switchboard on his own after the attacks. He volunteered to the operator, “We had business dealings with the Bin Laden family.” They asked a few questions and later called back to say, in effect, “No, everything’s good.”5
All this digging on American soil turned up no evidence of complicity by the Bin Laden family in terrorist violence. Dale Watson, the FBI’s chief of counterterrorism in the fall of 2001, concluded that the Bin Laden family “couldn’t help us and they were not a threat,” as he put it later. Dennis Lormel and his terrorist-finance team reached a similar judgment, although they felt there were a few areas of family activity where it was difficult to be conclusive.6
Because he was new to the subject, it took Lormel a while to unravel and move beyond the misleading U.S. intelligence reports he inherited, originating at the CIA, which described Osama’s supposedly vast personal fortune. Lormel and his team felt they could not simply accept at face value the Bin Laden family’s report, through Sullivan & Cromwell, about the size and timing of Osama’s inheritance and dividend payments—that account might well be correct, and the FBI had no specific reason to doubt it, but a letter from a family lawyer hardly counted as definitive evidence in a matter as important as Osama’s wealth. Where were the original documents? Where was the evidence that could hold up in a courtroom?
Another area that seemed to require additional investigation was the Swiss and offshore banking and investments overseen by Yeslam Bin Laden and other family partners and aides in Switzerland. After the September 11 attacks, Swiss and French investigators had initiated their own inquiries into Bin Laden bank accounts and investment vehicles in Switzerland and elsewhere. On March 27, 2002, Swiss police raided nine offices and companies connected to Yeslam Bin Laden, including his principal firm, Saudi Investment Company, in Geneva. They hauled away boxes and records, but ultimately filed no charges against him.7
Despite these lingering issues, the FBI’s counterterrorism investigators felt by early 2002 that they had no reason to argue for the continued blocking of Bin Laden family credit cards and checking accounts in the United States. The final decision, according to one person involved in the discussions, was carefully reviewed by interagency groups run by the National Security Council and approved at a very high level.8 Such a decision would almost certainly have required President Bush’s personal endorsement, although what role, if any, Bush actually played in the ruling is not known. What seems clear is that a specific decision was made at the White House sometime early in 2002: barring the emergence of new evidence, the U.S. government would not sanction the Bin Laden family in any way because of its history with Osama.
An FBI analyst summed up the bureau’s assessment of the evidence in a breezy e-mail written in September 2003: There were “millions” of Bin Ladens “running around” and “99.999999% of them are of the non-evil variety.”9
FBI SCRUTINY of the Bin Ladens had at least one virtue, from the family’s point of view—it took place almost entirely in private. Far more painful were the public repudiations of the family by American universities and corporations that had courted them in the past. In the emotional climate that pervaded during the autumn of 2001, some of these institutions felt they had no choice but to end or suspend their dealings with the Bin Ladens. None explicitly declared that the family might still be aiding Osama, but this was a possibility that could be freely interpreted from their decisions to cut ties.
Harvard University, which had accepted $2 million in donations from Bakr Bin Laden, received many calls from people “who were emotional” and who “said it was murder money and we should give to the victims,” recalled Peri Bearman of the Islamic Legal Studies program. Harvard soon chose to suspend its Bin Laden fellowships.10
The University of Miami, Bakr’s alma mater, also backed away from him. Before September 11, university fundraisers had contacted the Bin Ladens, looking to coax funds from their wealthy alumni. Bakr had indicated that he might be willing to fund a research project into the health of the Red Sea’s coral reefs, which were under assault from pollution, silt, and too much fishing. John C. McManus, a University of Miami professor who specialized in coral reef management, obtained a Saudi visa and planned to leave for the kingdom to meet with Bakr and others on September 24, 2001. The trip was canceled and the project was abandoned. McManus recalled that the decision was mutual: “The family wasn’t pursuing it, so we didn’t either.” Bakr, however, believed that the university had shunned him because of September 11, and he felt hurt by the episode, according to a person who talked with him about it.11
Cadbury-Schweppes, the British chocolate maker, announced that it was breaking ties with a Bin Laden subsidiary. Companies that sold telecommunications equipment through the Bin Laden’s company made similar announcements. A few of the family’s more prominent corporate partners stood by them. A General Electric spokesman said that it was confident that the Saudi Bin Laden Group “is fully separated from Osama Bin Laden.” Chas Freeman, the former U.S. ambassador who now developed business projects in the kingdom, said that “Bin Laden” remains “a very honored name,” and he suggested pointedly that American companies that “had very long and profitable relationships” with the family were “now running for public relations cover.”12
Even after their American Express cards were restored, the Bin Ladens were reluctant to travel to the United States. None of the senior brothers around Bakr was willing to go. The atmosphere seemed too unsettled, too threatening. Saleha, Bakr’s half-sister, did go back from time to time with her Italian husband, but she was often detained at U.S. airports for two hours or more, which she found increasingly depressing. “I don’t know if we’re going to be able to keep this up because we just can’t travel this way,” she told Gail Freeman.
Europe seemed easier to navigate, particularly since the Bin Ladens often moved in the protective bubble of private aviation and so did not have to worry about alarming fellow passengers on a commercial airliner. Still, they had trouble. Police from Scotland Yard boarded Bakr’s private jet at Luton Airport and questioned him before allowing him on his way. A man punched Hassan Bin Laden in the face on the street outside the Inter-Continental Hotel in London in August 2002. In Germany or Austria, a local police chief surrounded a hotel where Bakr was vacationing, apparently in the belief that he was about to write himself into the history books for nabbing the world’s most wanted fugitive.13
Yasser Bin Laden was a younger half-brother of Bakr who lived in Jeddah and played squash with an English-speaking circle of friends in the city. He also belonged to a local Harley-Davidson motorcycle club. Each summer he and his Saudi friends would roar out on their Harleys on a cross-country road trip. After September 11 they biked through Europe. The other Saudi motorcyclists in the club joked with Yasser relentlessly, saying that his passport was going to cause them nothing but trouble every time they crossed a border. They were right: when Yasser presented his travel documents to British immigration at the entrance to the tunnel that runs beneath the English Channel from France, the British officer ordered Yasser aside, peered out his booth, and waved back all the rest of the motorcycle gang, which had previously been cleared. It took hours to run their names through all the relevant terrorist databases.
The Harley club members decided to bike through Syria and Lebanon on the next trip they took. When they reached the Saudi-Syrian border station, they all started joking with Yasser again, complaining about the trouble they would now endure from the Syrian border officials.
A Syrian guard combed through their passports and then came out to address the motorcyclists. “Where’s the sheikh? Where’s the sheikh?” the guard demanded.
They found Yasser, but the interest of the police turned out to be of a different sort than that to which they had grown accustomed: when Yasser Bin Laden thundered past on his Harley, the Syrian guards stood and saluted. For them, Osama had turned all Bin Ladens into heroes.14
“WHEN 20/20 RETURNS, a family name to be proud of—until September 11th. But what if your last name were Bin Laden now?”15
Barbara Walters traveled to Saudi Arabia early in 2002 to produce an ambitious report for the ABC television network’s evening news magazine program 20/20. In setting up the trip, Walters and her producers worked closely with Bandar Bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador in Washington, and Adel Al-Jubeir, then a political and media adviser in the court of Crown Prince Abdullah. Walters told both of them that she very much wanted to interview a member of the Bin Laden family for her report. Her broadcast would offer an opportunity for the family to humanize themselves before a large American television audience and to emphasize their estrangement from Osama. This in turn might salve some of the wounds in U.S.-Saudi relations, which had become increasingly constrained by the mutually hostile attitudes of the two countries’ publics. The Saudi officials Walters spoke with agreed that the program might be helpful. Adel Al-Jubeir, in particular, enlisted the support of Crown Prince Abdullah, and he met with Bakr Bin Laden and two other members of the Bin Laden family in an effort to persuade them to cooperate. But Crown Prince Abdullah had made clear that he would not order the Bin Ladens to appear on American television; the choice was theirs. Bakr proved reluctant, despite repeated entreaties from Al-Jubeir and other Saudi officials.16
The Bin Ladens had by now become a commodity in the media marketplace. According to Khaled Al-Maenna, editor of the Arab News in Jeddah and a frequent interlocutor with foreign media, an American media outlet (which he would not identify) telephoned to offer him a fifty-thousand-dollar fee if he could get a Bin Laden family member on camera. As a media strategist, Al-Maenna agreed that the Bin Ladens might have helped Saudi Arabia if a confident, English-speaking member of the family would appear on television, apologize, and try to make themselves accessible to American audiences. Yet the hostility and presumptuous attitudes of the American media offended him and many other Saudis.17 Pride, resentment, and fear predominated after September 11 in both America and Saudi Arabia. The Bin Ladens—with so much to lose, and in Bakr’s evident judgment, so little to gain from media publicity—kept their collective heads down.
Mark Bridges, Bakr’s principal attorney in London, who also served as personal solicitor to the Queen, reinforced these instincts. His advice was that there was simply no reason for the Bin Ladens to speak publicly or to make unnecessary disclosures.18
Bridges was perhaps unable to conceive, however, of the force of nature that was Barbara Walters. As she traveled in Saudi Arabia early in 2002, conducting a number of interviews with members of the royal family and with families of September 11 hijackers in Asir, she grew increasingly frustrated. She had sought an interview with Crown Prince Abdullah, the most powerful man in the kingdom; this did not materialize. Without a Bin Laden on camera, she told the Saudis assisting her, her trip would be a bust—and the implication was, of course, that she would be very angry. Sensing a public relations fiasco, Bandar and Al-Jubeir concocted a bold ploy to help Walters. As it happened, Bandar owed the Bin Ladens a large sum of money for work they had completed on his palace in Jeddah. The Bin Ladens had been agitating for payment. Bandar proposed inviting Abdullah Bin Laden, the Harvard graduate, to his home, supposedly for a meeting with accountants called to settle the final palace bill. Barbara Walters would arrive—and Abdullah would have no choice but to submit to an interview.19
The ambush came off seamlessly. Walters walked in on the business meeting and Abdullah, as Bandar hovered, reluctantly agreed to sit for a few questions. On her broadcast, Walters did not burden viewers with the story of how the interview had come about, but she did note on air, during her introduction, “As we sat down together, he was so nervous—and who could blame him?”
“How difficult has this been for your family?” Walters asked Abdullah in her signature tone of empathy.
“We went through a tough time, it was difficult. But—and we felt we are a victim as well, but no matter what happened to us, it is not—our tragedy is not as bad, or we didn’t feel as bad, as those victims, the families and victims in New York. Our tragedy compared to their tragedies—there is no comparison, and we do feel for them.”
“Do you have any idea what made Osama bin Laden the man he is?”
“I wish I can answer this question.”20
JACK KAYAJANIAN practiced family law in Costa Mesa, California, south of Los Angeles. He was a gregarious man who spent some of his spare time at the Del Mar racetrack, where he dabbled in Thoroughbreds and kept his eyes peeled for long-shot winners. He was an active member of the Armenian American community in conservative Orange County, and he regarded himself as a fiercely patriotic American. So when an Armenian friend of his telephoned in the summer of 2002 to say that his daughter, Christine, was having custody trouble with her ex-husband, who happened to be a member of the Bin Laden family, Kayajanian took up the case with some gusto.1
After their divorce in 1993, Ibrahim Bin Laden and Christine Hartunian had accommodated one another for eight years without notable difficulty. They cooperated in raising their only child, their daughter Sibba. She lived with her mother and attended school in Southern California but also spent summers and Ramadan holidays with Ibrahim in Jeddah or at his Stone Canyon estate in Bel Air. The rise of Osama Bin Laden during the late 1990s created some tension within the family because Ibrahim started to think that he might not be safe in the United States. “I began to feel uncomfortable in Los Angeles in the summer of 2001,” he said later, “as a result of remarks that were made to me even before September 11.”2
When the Bin Ladens evacuated to Jeddah, Ibrahim took Sibba with him; they had been vacationing in Geneva when the attacks took place. Sibba found the scene in Jeddah somewhat unnerving, according to Kayajanian: she told family members that some of the young people at the Bin Laden compound openly celebrated the September 11 attacks. Ibrahim enrolled his daughter in the British International School in Jeddah that autumn. Christine Hartunian, now a struggling artist who lived in a gated community in west Los Angeles, did not initially object, but she opposed the idea that Sibba would take up indefinite residence in Saudi Arabia. She was struggling financially; she had little money in her bank accounts and relied on loans from her parents. Christine flew to Jeddah to visit with Sibba at the Bin Laden compound.3
By the summer of 2002, her daughter had developed some health problems; these were not life threatening, but they required a specialist’s care. Doctors in Saudi Arabia referred her to specialists in Southern California, and Christine took Sibba back to Los Angeles. Ibrahim, however, wanted Sibba to return to live with him and his new wife in Saudi Arabia; he argued that Sibba could get the treatment she required in the kingdom, and that she would be better off attending school there and living among the Bin Ladens. Sibba’s parents could not reach an agreement about where she should live, as required by their divorce decree, and Christine believed she was about to lose custody of her only daughter to a Saudi system where she enjoyed few legal rights. She tried initially to represent herself in the court proceedings, but in about August 2002, her family called Jack Kayajanian onto the case.
Kayajanian pored through the old divorce files, rushed to Los Angeles Superior Court, where the original decree had been filed, and won an order that would at least delay Sibba’s departure for Jeddah. Ibrahim hired a Santa Monica law firm that specialized in divorce; the lead partner on the case was a woman, as were two of her associates. These lawyers buried Kayajanian with motions and papers—new filings seemed to arrive almost around the clock. Kayajanian decided to concentrate on the medical issue, arguing that Sibba could obtain the care she needed only in the United States.4
Ibrahim refused to travel to America for a hearing. Because of September 11, he feared for “my own safety” because of “the backlash against people of Arabic descent in the United States…The fear is real and justified, given the notoriety of our last name. I know that our surname triggers very strong reactions in many individuals.” Judge Roy L. Paul agreed to permit Ibrahim to testify by live video transmission from a studio in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, so that he would not have to travel to Los Angeles.5
On October 4, 2002, Kayajanian and Ibrahim’s lawyers arrived at a special secure courtroom in Los Angeles known as “the bank,” where high-profile cases involving Hollywood celebrities were sometimes convened. Ibrahim appeared on a video monitor.6
Judge Paul ordered Ibrahim’s testimony to be sealed, ostensibly to protect Sibba from possible vigilante violence. Open court records nonetheless make clear what happened at the hearing: By day’s end, Kayajanian had won on the crucial custody question. Judge Paul ruled that Sibba should attend school in Southern California and receive medical treatment in the U.S. The judge ordered Ibrahim Bin Laden to put up a $4 million bond to ensure that he would return his daughter to her mother after summer vacations and religious holidays. For almost a decade, Sibba’s custody arrangements with the Bin Laden family in Saudi Arabia had been based on mutual trust. On both sides, that era was gone.7
IBRAHIM AND CHRISTINE had their difficulties, but their troubles remained unpublicized, and they paled beside the epic divorce between Yeslam and Carmen Bin Laden. Their lawsuit began in the Swiss courts during the early 1990s, but like many Bin Laden endeavors, it soon hopped international boundaries. Carmen sued Yeslam in Los Angeles, seeking (unsuccessfully) to prove that Ibrahim’s Bel Air house should be considered one of her marital assets because it had been purchased in Yeslam’s name. She also alleged that her husband had improperly sold jewelry originally purchased in Beverly Hills that belonged to her. Motions, pleadings, and sworn declarations piled up on two continents, but the years passed without resolution. The shock of September 11 seemed only to spur on both sides. After the terrorist attacks, Carmen chose what many Saudis would regard as the nuclear option: she wrote a book.
Inside the Kingdom became an international bestseller. Its tone was often respectful toward the Bin Ladens and even toward Yeslam, but Carmen suggested that the family had probably continued to support Osama long after the time it claimed to have cut him off. Carmen also offered this opinion repeatedly in television and newspaper interviews during her book tours in Europe and America. In addition, she was outspoken about the second-class condition of women in Saudi society, and she criticized the Islamic system of family law that empowered men in custody and divorce struggles. The descriptions in her book of the privileged but suffocating lives of Saudi women—accounts drawn from Carmen’s years as a wife and mother in the Bin Laden compound in Jeddah during the 1970s and early 1980s—were particularly powerful.
The book’s success exacerbated the strains between her ex-husband, Yeslam, in Geneva and the senior Bin Laden brothers around Bakr in Jeddah. Carmen might not be the world’s most compliant woman, but Bakr and the brothers around him tended to blame Yeslam for Carmen’s decision to go public. Presumably money had been one motivation in her decision to write the book: Why couldn’t Yeslam reach a settlement with her that would satisfy her? Why had he allowed the divorce to drag on for so long? How had Yeslam allowed himself to become estranged from his own daughters—what kind of father would permit this?8 There had been many divorces among the Bin Ladens, but none with the Dickensian duration or humiliating public profile of this one.
Yeslam and Carmen were both entrepreneurial; in the aftermath of September 11, they competed not only in their divorce litigation but also for control of the Bin Laden brand. Through her book tours, Carmen became the most famous Bin Laden in the world after Osama. Yeslam seemed determined to catch up.
On her side, Carmen had an ally in this contest—her eldest daughter, Wafah, who followed her into the limelight after 2003. Wafah had been a graduate student at Columbia University at the time of the September 11 attacks; she lived in a $6,000-per-month rented loft in New York City’s West Village. She was a strikingly beautiful woman in her early twenties who aspired to a career as a popular singer. To promote her first recording, she sat for an interview with Barbara Walters. Wafah seemed to be in search of the marketing equivalent of a jujitsu move, in which a wrestler uses an opponent’s momentum as a weapon against him—in Wafah’s case, she would flip Osama’s notoriety into her own pop music career. She posed for come-hither pictures in a popular American men’s magazine, GQ. She changed her surname to Daufour, her mother’s maiden name, but Wafah did not shy away from her status as a Bin Laden; this brought the media to her door. And yet, she said, “I feel that everybody’s judging me and rejecting me. Come on, where’s the American spirit? Accept me. I want to be embraced, because my values are just like yours.” She spoke no Arabic and did not carry a Saudi passport. Perhaps her feeling of isolation was genuine, but there was also a hint of rock-and-roll posture in her complaints—she was an ingénue rebel without a culture. Her CD sales proved to be modest.9
Yeslam raced to the marketplace ahead of his estranged wife and daughter in one respect: In February 2001 he had applied to trademark “Bin Laden” under Swiss law, through Falcon Sporting Goods, one of his companies. Yeslam planned to develop a line of Bin Laden–labeled clothing, glasses, and perhaps jewelry, bicycles, backpacks, and luggage. After the September 11 attacks, Yeslam’s Swiss attorney, Juerg Brand, confirmed their plans to go forward with a Bin Laden clothing line, initially in the Arab world. “The name is one of the most famous names in the world,” Brand said. Asked if he also intended to sell the jeans in the United States, Brand followed one unfortunate phrase with another: “We can’t make an immediate jump across the ocean,” he said.10
Bin Laden jeans might appeal to rebellious Arab teenagers, but Yeslam and his partners did not account for the reaction in Switzerland and the United States. The Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property announced that it would revoke the Bin Laden trademark because it violated “accepted moral standards.” Yeslam then said his plans had been misunderstood. He recognized, he said, that selling a Bin Laden–labeled clothing line would be “insensitive.” And yet, he declared later, “I am not only a Bin Laden. I am Yeslam Bin Laden. I have my own identity.” Osama to him was now only “a name in a newspaper.”11
Yeslam opened a luxury boutique in a pedestrian square in Old Geneva, where he sold luxury handbags, silk scarves, perfumes, and handmade watches whose faces were engraved with a map of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia; the watches cost upwards of twenty thousand dollars. He settled on a new brand: Yeslam. He spent hours blending the perfumes that bore his name; he sifted jasmine and fruit scents in a perfume he labeled “Passion.”
The British writer Marianne MacDonald visited him in Geneva and found him a “shy, quiet man dressed in an Hermès jacket with Dior jeans covering his narrow legs.” Yeslam struck her as sensitive; he spoke openly about the anxieties that had bothered him since childhood.12
Had Osama ruined his life? Yeslam clasped his hands. “Whatever had to happen, happened,” he told MacDonald. “There is nothing I can do. If you say, ‘Look what happened to me,’ I would only put myself into a depression. If I can do something I love, and create perfume and watches and so on, then I am doing something that’s good for me.”
He felt that his Yeslam brand could compete successfully for market share with Hermès and Chanel, the Parisian fashion houses. This was an ambitious goal, he acknowledged, “But I am offering better quality, and I hope this will come across.”13
SALEM’S ENGLISH WIDOW, Caroline, expressed a desire after her husband’s death to remain part of the Bin Laden family. It was not unusual in Arabia for widows to marry a brother of the widow’s former husband. When Sama, Caroline’s daughter by Salem, was about eight years old, Bakr approached his half-brother in Egypt, Khaled, about taking Caroline as a wife. “She’s still young,” Bakr said of Caroline, according to Khaled’s aide Sabry Ghoneim. “She wants to live in Egypt. If she marries a foreigner, we lose our daughter, Sama. We need one of the family to marry her and be kind with her. We know you are close with her because you were close with Salem, and you will be good to Sama.” With his horse farms, his passion for Thoroughbreds, art, and poetry, and his apartment in open-minded Cairo, Khaled presided over a household more suitable for Caroline than any available in Jeddah. Khaled agreed to wed her.1
On November 18, 2005, Caroline Carey arrived with her husband Khaled at the El Zahraa Farm, in the desert countryside outside Cairo, for the annual International Arabian Horse Show. She wore white pearl earrings, a white blouse, and tan pants, and she had a sweater wrapped around her waist. She has piercing blue eyes and a strong jaw. She was “Mum” to her daughter, Sama, who was now a spirited teenager with an interest in diplomacy; some in the family describe Sama as an heir to her father’s most attractive qualities. She, too, arrived for the horse competition; Khaled Bin Laden had entered a number of his Arabians.2
In the entourage as well was Salem, Khaled’s son by an earlier wife. He had attended boarding school in Virginia and now worked in one of the family companies. He also has bred his own Arabian horses and has trained to enter Olympic shooting competitions as a Saudi marksman. He wore a black Prada turtleneck, narrow Giorgio Armani jeans, black boots, and reflective sunglasses. The screen saver on his silver Nokia cellular telephone was the Armani logo.
A song played over the loudspeaker: “Barbie Girl.” Salem sat in the grandstands, watching stallions prance and trot in the ring below. He smoked fresh green tobacco in a pipe, a habit he picked up in the Gulf.
He entertained a question: Has Osama changed life among the Bin Ladens? “What can we do?” Salem replied. “He is one of us, he has our name. We can deal with it…It affects us all. But we are a big family, we can absorb it.” The issue passed like a breeze.
His father circulated below among the spectators, trainers, and riders participating in the competition. In his fifties, Khaled was well maintained. He wore stiff blue jeans, a blue shirt, running shoes of a mustard color, and a yellow, blue, and red tie. His receding hair was cropped closely.
“My father sees horses as art,” Salem said. “He paints, too. He paints horses.”
Khaled agreed to speak for a few minutes, “but only about horses.”
The Bin Ladens had amassed a table beneath a tent near the competition ring. Khaled took a seat, pleasant but reticent.
Like so many of his brothers, Khaled had once been a recreational pilot, but he gave up the hobby after running out of fuel one day above Luxor. He enjoys hunting and frequents the colonial Shooting Club in Cairo. He has owned a horse farm in Egypt since 1982 and now keeps about fifty Arabian horses there. The bloodlines of these animals trace to the great Bedouin herds of the precolonial Arabian Peninsula; they were brought to Egypt by Ottoman conquerors of previous centuries. The horses do not race but are bred for show; the competitions revolve around appearance and presentation maneuvers. Khaled selects stallions and mares for breeding on his own Egyptian farm, Rabab Stud. There he also cultivates cactus plants, date palms, and mango trees in the desert. His stables are designed in old Arab and Moorish styles. In the main house there is a photograph of his father, Mohamed Bin Laden, as well as portraits of two Saudi kings, Fahd and Faisal. Khaled says that he has been refining his passion for Arabian horses over a quarter century.
“We make the selection from the stable and see which one is the best,” he said. Even anodyne questions about horses seem to pain him, however. Straining to be polite, he conceded that his favorite is named Afrah, or “Joy.”
In a pamphlet he has published, which he offers to visitors, Khaled has been more expansive about his passion: “I am trying to create a symphony with the horse,” he said. “It is like a composition where you take elements from many sources to form a piece of living art that must be harmonious.” The history of Arabia moves through these animals. “You have to see an Arabian horse moving with pride and elegance,” he says. “It has to snort and trumpet with the tail flowing and flying over the ground, catching the wind. Then you are seeing what you should.”
Khaled’s horses have performed well in the competition this day—one first place, two seconds, and a third.
Several middle-aged British women approached his table beneath the tent to offer congratulations. “Mabruk!” one of them exclaimed. She leaned down to kiss him on each cheek. Khaled returned the kisses.
He looked over. “So I can kiss like a European,” he said.3
EGYPT BECAME A LOCUS of recovery and sanctuary for the Bin Ladens after September 11. There was Khaled’s farm and his other properties in and around Cairo, as well other town houses and estates owned by other half-brothers and half-sisters of Bakr. There was Bin Laden Island and Bakr’s separate resort property at Sharm El Sheikh, on the Red Sea. Like Beirut, Egypt offered a respite from the puritanical humidity of Jeddah, without the complications that came with crossing borders or using credit cards in Europe or America. It was a lively and welcoming country—a place where the mosque and Hard Rock Cafe wings of the family could each relax.
It also offered the distractions of work. The Bin Laden subsidiary in Egypt employed about a thousand people and won several contracts for airport work in Cairo and Sharm El Sheikh after 2002; the contracts were partially supported by the World Bank, which offered a visible endorsement of the family’s continuing business legitimacy. Osama’s violence did force one adjustment: The Egyptian government felt that if construction signs scattered around two of its most important international airports advertised the name Bin Laden, this might confuse and worry foreign tourists, and so the local subsidiary changed its name to Al-Murasim.4
By late 2005, it was clear that the Bin Ladens would not only survive Osama, but might thrive as never before. The Saudi royal family stuck by them and ensured their continuing prestige as the most important building contractors in Mecca and Medina. King Fahd died in the summer of 2005, but Bakr had already cultivated ties with his successor, Abdullah; the Bin Ladens gathered hurriedly in Riyadh that summer to swear loyalty to the new king. Rather than the dawn of a new period of uncertainty for the Bin Ladens, Abdullah’s ascension promised new opportunity. The Bin Ladens suffered from no political backlash in Saudi Arabia. As a large family with its share of black sheep, the Al-Saud acted on principle by supporting them, but Abdullah also sent a subliminal message to the Islamic world—the Saudi royal family might not condone Osama, but they would not seek revenge against him or his family, either, as sometimes happened to the families of dissidents in Arab countries. As ever, the Al-Saud needed the Bin Ladens’ expertise. As the war in Iraq deteriorated, oil prices soared above seventy dollars a barrel, and construction boomed in the kingdom and in neighboring Dubai. New condominium and office skyscrapers, shopping malls, freeways, mosques, and airports were announced one after another—even an inexperienced and poorly organized construction company could thrive in this atmosphere, which resembled the 1970s in its indiscriminate showers of cash. The Bin Ladens were particularly well positioned to profit.
The drive to modernize and internationalize the family companies, overseen by Bakr and Yahya, had largely succeeded. The engineer brothers might not be as glamorous or amusing as Salem, but after many years of hard work, they had positioned the Bin Ladens to enjoy sustained and secure wealth, and to successfully pass the family fortune intact through several generations. In his heyday, Salem had paraphrased King Faisal: “My father was riding on a camel. I am flying in jets. My children will fly in jets. My grandchildren will ride a camel again.” Bakr and Yahya had not rendered this forecast implausible, but they had certainly reduced its likelihood, with a notable assist from the geopolitical forces that drove oil prices up and up.5
Yahya Bin Laden said late in 2005 that he expected the number of employees at the Bin Laden firms to rise from about thirty-five thousand toward about seventy-five thousand during the next decade as oil wealth continued to pour into the Gulf region. He hoped to further diversify the family companies, he said, so that construction contracts of the traditional type might ultimately generate only about a quarter of the Bin Ladens’ revenue. He quoted an Arabic saying: The first generation makes the money, the second generation tries to preserve it, and the third generation squanders it. The family could avoid this fate, he believed. His own children and those of Bakr and other brothers had acquired excellent educations at the finest universities in the West, and some were committed to the future of the business. Younger half-brothers such as Mohamed, not yet fifty years old, were proving to be capable and modern executives. But these younger Bin Ladens were not going to spend two weeks sitting around a Riyadh majlis waiting for a moody prince to sign a contract, as Salem and then Bakr had done patiently and obsequiously for so many years. It was imperative to modernize the company and then hope that something similar would happen to Saudi decision making.6
The chances of this did not look especially promising. As had been true since the 1950s, the more oil money flowed into Saudi coffers, the less urgent seemed any imperative for change. In an unusually candid soliloquy, Bandar Bin Sultan described the assumptions of the Al-Saud:
The way I answer the corruption charges is this: In the last thirty years—we have implemented a development program that was approximately… close to $400 billion worth. Okay? Now, look at the whole country, where it was, where it is now. And I am confident, after you look at it, you could not have done all of that for less than, let’s say, $350 billion. If you tell me that building this whole country, spending $350 billion out of $400 billion, that we had misused or [were] corrupt with $50 billion, I’ll tell you, “Yes. But I’ll take that anytime.” There are so many countries in the Third World that have oil that are still thirty years behind. But more important, more important—“Hey, who are you to tell me this?” What I’m trying to tell you is: So what?7
Not long afterward, citing national security concerns, the British government dropped a criminal investigation into the sale of defense equipment to Saudi Arabia during the 1980s and 1990s. According to a British newspaper, as part of the financial arrangements required by the Saudis to consummate these arms deals, hundreds of millions of dollars flowed into bank accounts controlled by Bandar Bin Sultan.8
So what? Unlike Bandar, the Bin Ladens lacked the nerve to ask this question out loud, and yet, the more time passed after September 11, the less significance the attacks seemed to hold for the family’s future. Lawsuits filed in the United States by families of the victims, consolidated under the title In Re: Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001, named the Saudi Bin Laden Group, and four Bin Laden brothers—Bakr, Omar, Tareq, and Yeslam—as defendants. One of the lawsuits alleged that, “under Bakr Bin Laden’s control,” the Saudi Bin Laden group had “provided substantial material support and assistance to Al Qaeda.” The Bin Ladens hired Jones Day, a large American law firm whose Washington offices occupied a polished building across from the U.S. Capitol, to handle the family’s defense. The legal bills endured by the Bin Ladens in this and related matters quickly exceeded $10 million, according to what Bakr told the Saudi government, but it was money well spent: early in 2005, U.S. District Judge Richard Casey in New York dismissed the individual Bin Ladens as defendants on jurisdictional grounds. He allowed some further investigation of whether the Saudi Bin Laden Group might have been significantly active in the United States to justify its inclusion in the lawsuit, but at the very minimum, it would be several years before the lawsuit considered the merits of the company’s history with Osama if it did so at all.9
Desert Bear went up for sale in 2004 for about $4 million, more than twenty years after Salem first purchased the estate and began landing his helicopters on the lawn. Since the property was owned and titled in Florida by a Liberian corporation, the purchaser would not be able to buy the land or the home directly, but would have to buy portable bearer shares in the Liberian company and then try to prove ownership to Florida real estate authorities, according to several people who inquired about the property listing. Potential buyers were told that they would have to bring or deliver cash overseas to purchase control of the Liberian corporation; the Bin Ladens did not want to enter the United States to close the transaction. The buyers who persisted through these negotiations planned to subdivide the property and build suburban homes.10 It was an untidy end to the estate’s remarkable history, one that began with a Jell-O patent at the beginning of the twentieth century and ended, in effect, with the September 11 attacks.
As the pressure on the family eased, Bakr flourished. He took as his third wife a much younger woman—she was still in her late teens when he met and married her around 2004. Bakr now wove more leisure into his schedule: he vacationed on a private island in the Maldives, visited a resort in Bali, socialized with other yacht-owning wealthy Saudi businessmen in Beirut, attended air shows in Dubai, and gossiped for hours with colleagues about the latest models of private jets. His sons took up the family passion for fast-moving machines; late in 2006, Abdulaziz Bin Bakr won the U.A.E. National Superstock Bike Trophy.11 By then, Bakr’s confidence seemed to reflect that of Saudi Arabia: The kingdom’s tormentor, Saddam Hussein, was headed to the gallows; Osama was in hiding and Al Qaeda’s attacks inside Saudi Arabia, while occasionally unnerving, had amounted to little more than a nuisance; oil prices were sky high; Saudi politics and succession plans were stable; and the Americans would surely take care of any future threats from Iran. What was there to fear?
IN MECCA, the heart of Islam and the headwaters of the Bin Laden fortune, York International Corporation of Pennsylvania installed during 2005 a complex of industrial air-conditioning units, or water chillers, on a hilltop of volcanic rock called Jabal Al-Qala, or “Castle Mountain.” The units constituted the largest industrial air-conditioning project undertaken by York since it serviced the Prophet’s Mosque at Medina in partnership with the Bin Ladens. This time it was not a religious sanctuary that would be cooled in the desert, but a seven-tower condominium and hotel project overlooking Mecca’s Grand Mosque. According to a York executive, by the time it was completed, this Mecca condo project would overtake the Prophet’s Mosque as the largest air conditioner in the world.12
In the latest oil boom, every Gulf businessman with real estate profits or a corporate bonus to spend seemed to covet a condo overlooking Mecca; by 2005, the real estate rush in the holy city rivaled that in Miami’s fevered South Beach. The Bin Ladens initially thought they would not bother with the time and expense required to sell individual condo units at Castle Mountain, so they sold an entire tower to Kuwaiti investors. When they learned the soaring retail prices units in the building were attracting, the Bin Ladens “were furious,” said Anwar Hassan of York International. The family’s executives decided in the future they would “retail every apartment themselves” to maximize profits.13
With the Faqih family—another Saudi business group with a black sheep living in exile—the Bin Ladens planned for an even more ambitious condominium tower project on Omar Mountain, overlooking Mecca, a project that would require blasting off the volcanic mountain-top in order to build. This development contemplated the construction of four towers, each about thirty stories high, containing one hundred elevators and a total of more than forty-six hundred apartment units. There would be a five-star hotel, a shopping mall, and parking for two thousand cars.14 The sprawl-inducing, profit-making commercial evolution of Islam’s holiest places had reached its apotheosis, and the Bin Ladens were partners in all of the most ambitious projects.
They were partners, too, in the planned King Abdullah Economic City, announced in late 2005 as oil prices moved above fifty dollars a barrel. The new king commandeered undeveloped land along the Red Sea north of Jeddah and announced a city designed to rival Dubai. Abdullah said the project would cost about $27 billion. He planned a Millennium Seaport to rival the largest commercial ports in the world; high-speed rail and air links to the rest of the kingdom; an Industrial District of petrochemical and other plants; a waterside resort to attract tourists, complete with the kingdom’s first world-class 18-hole golf course; a Financial Island topped by two office towers reaching sixty or more stories into the sky; an Education Zone filled with modern universities; and, of course, more condominiums. The project, said a Bin Laden executive, “could either make or break the local economy.” For the Bin Laden companies, the construction work alone would be “absolutely huge in scope.”15
“For the Roads Ahead,” was the headline on a self-promotional advertisement purchased by the Saudi Bin Laden Group in the Washington Post late in 2005. “Construction may be at the heart of what we do. But our interests also extend into the worlds of media, retail, industrial projects and telecommunications. It’s all part of our vision to ensure Saudi Arabia remains a modern and dynamic regional center in the 21st Century.”16
There seemed to be no aspect of Saudi Arabia’s second wave of modernization projects from which the Bin Ladens would not profit handsomely. Even the sometimes shaky security environment in the kingdom offered opportunity. In May 2003, Al Qaeda cells inside Saudi Arabia launched a series of mostly ineffectual attacks against the Interior Ministry, American compounds in the oil zones, and against the U.S. consulate in Jeddah. Osama Bin Laden’s son Sa’ad, in exile in Iran, was accused of playing a role in organizing the strikes. Saudi security forces, aided by surveillance technology acquired from the United States, launched violent crackdowns against suspected Al Qaeda sympathizers. Hundreds of Islamists were rounded up and interrogated. The violence soon subsided. In April 2006, the Saudi government announced a fast-track project to build nine new prisons across the kingdom within twelve months. The construction contract was awarded to the Saudi Bin Laden Group; it was valued at $1.6 billion.17
THE OFFICES of Fame Advertising are on the second floor of a strip mall in downtown Jeddah, on Palestine Street. The shopping center also houses a Starbucks, a Java Lounge, a Vertigo Music Café, and a Body Master, a massage and health club. Inside the Fame Advertising suite, the ambience suggests a Silicon Valley startup company. There is a juice bar with tall bar stools, and on the wall hangs a large black-and-white photograph of cable cars on an undulating San Francisco street. Impressionist paintings of European café scenes grace other rooms. The furniture is chrome, black leather, and cherry wood; the computers sport the labels of International Business Machines.1
This is the realm of Osama Bin Laden’s eldest son, Abdullah, who started Fame as an outlet for his entrepreneurial ambitions after he returned to Saudi Arabia, following his separation from his father in Sudan. As of late 2005, Fame enjoyed an association with the larger Saudi Bin Laden Group, and it had about fifteen employees. Unlike many Saudi companies, the firm did not enforce gender segregation within its offices. It produced a stylish Web site, www.fame-adv.com. Its clients included large Jeddah-based merchant groups such as the Jufallis and Western companies such as Phillips, the electronics maker.
The proprietor, now in his midtwenties, often wore blue jeans and a baseball cap. In the spring of 2002, he stunned diplomats at the nearby American consulate by turning up in such an outfit at a July 4–style celebration of U.S. independence (held a little early on the calendar because Jeddah’s weather in July is unbearable). Abdullah vacationed in Europe, and when in Jeddah, he became a fixture at the relatively freewheeling Bin Laden–owned beach club along the Red Sea.
To promote Fame’s services, Abdullah created marketing brochures, in the form of small and colorful cards, which could be handed out to prospective clients. A card entitled “Corporate Identity Management” exuded, “At FAME ADVERTISING we believe that the development of a successful corporate identity is essential to any project or business. Our creation of corporate identities is based on extensive research…with innovative methods that succeed every time.” On the back of the card was a one-word slogan: “Strong.” A second brochure was titled “Event Management.” It boasted, “FAME ADVERTISING events are novel, planned meticulously and executed with efficiency.” The slogan on the back: “Different.” If Abdullah was conscious of the way he quoted his father’s methodology, he did not extend the parallels too far: colorful balloon displays, rather than simultaneous car bomb explosions, were a typical motif of Fame events, according to the photographs posted on its Web site.2
As Osama Bin Laden’s exile lengthened after September 11, his own large family, the product of at least five marriages over two decades, scattered and drifted, much as had happened to Osama’s own generation after the death of Mohamed Bin Laden. As of 2002, Osama had fathered at least twenty-three children. The great majority of them, apart from Abdullah and a few others, lived with him in Afghanistan during the run-up to September 11. As that attack approached, however, Osama seemed to decide that he would endure the next phase of his banishment without the company of most of his current wives. In the summer of 2001, some of Osama’s older sons arranged for at least one of his wives and her children to take shelter with tribesmen along the Afghan-Pakistan border; they later turned her over to the Pakistan government, and after several months, this wife apparently returned to her native Saudi Arabia with some of her children. Two of Osama’s earlier wives had already returned to the kingdom. By December 2001, his recent, very young Yemeni wife had also returned home.3
Osama’s sons divided themselves into two camps—those who stayed to fight with him, and those who returned to Saudi Arabia, where they could enjoy some of the benefits of Bin Laden family membership. Sa’ad, Hamzah, Sayf, Mohamed, Khalid, and Ladin were among the sons who stayed with Osama or devoted themselves to his cause from separate (and ambiguous) exile in Iran. Those who returned to Saudi Arabia, in addition to Abdullah, included Osama’s sons Ali and Omar; the latter had decided to leave Afghanistan in 2000, at the age of nineteen.4
When Omar reached Jeddah, he found that he lagged behind his peers in the Bin Laden family. “Osama did not educate his children” in conventional schools, explained Jamal Khalifa, Osama’s brother-in-law, who came to know Omar after his return. In Afghanistan, he insisted that they only “memorize the Koran…So Omar, he was feeling really sorry. He saw the difference between himself and others in the family.”5 Nonetheless, he established himself as a scrap dealer in Jeddah. He married a Saudi woman, developed a muscular physique, donned blue jeans, and trimmed his beard into a fashionable goatee.
In the autumn of 2006, while riding horses near the Pyramids in Egypt, Omar, now in his midtwenties, met Jane Felix-Browne, a fifty-one-year-old grandmother from Cheshire, England, whose own well-preserved physique owed something, according to a British newspaper account, to the eighty thousand pounds she had spent over the years on plastic surgery. Omar and Jane fell in love, by her account, and quickly married. She had previously been married five times and had converted to Islam; their romance had to overcome some of the tensions that arose from his father’s notoriety. “Omar is wary of everyone,” Felix-Browne said. “He is constantly watching people who he feels might be following him. Not without reason, he is fearful of cameras…But when we are together, he forgets his life.” She said Omar had “left his father because he did not feel it was right to fight or to be in an army,” and yet “he misses his father.” When news of his union generated sensational headlines in Britain, Omar issued a statement to a Saudi newspaper defending his marriage. He explained that his first wife had agreed to this expansion of their family—“Polygamy is not strange in our Arab and Islamic society”—and he pointed out that the Prophet Mohamed had married his wife Khadjia “when he was twenty and she was forty.” There seemed to be some confusion about this issue among his two wives; Felix-Browne soon announced their divorce. She said that she and Omar feared for their lives.6
ON DECEMBER 14, 2001, Osama Bin Laden wrote and signed his last will and testament. At Tora Bora, around this time, he had endured heavy aerial bombardment by American-led forces, and now he prepared to die. He opened his will with religious invocations, and then wrote, “Allah commended to us that when death approaches any of us that we make a bequest to parents and next of kin and to Muslims as a whole…Allah bears witness that the love of jihad and death in the cause of Allah has dominated my life and the verses of the sword permeated every cell in my heart, ‘and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together.’ How many times did I wake up to find myself reciting this holy verse!”
His tone, reflecting the military and political setbacks his organization had suffered throughout the autumn of 2001, was thoroughly down-hearted:
If every Muslim asks himself why has our nation reached this state of humiliation and defeat, then his obvious answer is because it rushed madly for the comforts of life and discarded the Book of Allah behind its back, though it is the only one that has its cure…The Jews and Christians have tempted us with the comforts of life and its cheap pleasures and invaded us with their materialistic values before invading us with their armies, while we stood like women doing nothing because the love of death in the cause of Allah has deserted the hearts…The principal cause of our nation’s ordeal is its fear from dying in the cause of Allah…Today, the nation has failed to support us.7
To his wives, Osama wrote, “You were, after Allah…the best support and the best help from the first day you knew that the road was full of thorns and mines…You renounced worldly pleasures with me—renounce them more after me. Do not think of remarrying and you need only to look after our children, make sacrifices, and pray for them.”
To his children, he wrote, “Forgive me because I have given you only a little of my time since I answered the jihad call. I have shouldered the Muslims’ concerns and the concerns of their hardships, embitterment, betrayal and treachery. If it was not for treachery, the situation would not be what it is now and the outcome would not be what it is now.”
He explicitly advised his children not to work with Al Qaeda. He cited the story of a Muslim leader, Omar Bin Al-Khattab, who forbid his son from becoming caliph, telling him, “If it is good, then we have had our share; if it is bad, then it is enough…”8
During his years in Sudan, as his family gradually disowned him, Osama’s writings sometimes rang with anger and frustration, but never before had a document attributed to him conveyed such despair and exhaustion. He had apparently assumed that the American military would quickly fall victim to a popular uprising by ordinary Afghans, as had occurred to the Soviet army after its invasion in 1979; instead, his allies in the Taliban had collapsed as the United States and its allies swept into every major Afghan city and town, and a number of his trusted compatriots in Al Qaeda had been killed or captured. If Osama imagined himself as the triumphant leader of a guerrilla vanguard, he now confronted the humiliating prospect of retreat, and the serious possibility that he would be killed or imprisoned.
The winter passed, however, and none of these fears materialized. By June 2002, Osama remained safe, and he had established a network of personal protection stable enough to allow him to return cautiously to jihad publishing and video production. His initial work that spring still expressed an unusual degree of self-pity; a jihadi Web site published a poetic exchange with his son Hamzah, evoking the conditions and causes of their shared exile:
“Oh father!” Hamzah wrote. “Where is the escape and when will we have a home? Oh father! I see spheres of danger everywhere I look. How come our home has vanished without a trace?…Why have they showered us with bombs like rain, having no mercy for a child?…Tell me, father, something useful about what I see.”
“Oh son!” Osama answered. “Suffice to say that I am full of grief and sighs. What can I say if we are living in a world of laziness and discontent…Pardon me, my son, but I can only see a very steep path ahead. A decade has gone by in vagrancy and travel, and here we are in our tragedy. Security has gone, but danger remains. It is a world of crimes in which children are slaughtered like cows. For how long will real men be in short supply?”9
NOT FOR LONG, as it happened. As the months passed, and still he remained free, Osama’s courage and confidence returned. The particular circumstances of his life as a fugitive are, as of this writing, unknown, but the open record of his published statements and recordings from exile during this period—more than a dozen altogether—makes plain the general trajectory of Osama’s experience: an initial period of giddy celebration immediately after the attacks on New York and Washington, followed by a rapid descent into desperation, and then a gradual recovery and a reawakened sense of purpose, producing a return to the ambition and boastfulness of his past. Osama’s statements make clear, too, that by 2003, at least, he enjoyed regular access to satellite television and the Internet.
Planning for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, more than any other event, seemed to draw Osama back to himself; judging by what he said and wrote, the war arrived as a kind of spiritual and political elixir, just when he required it most. The buildup to combat early in 2003 brought forth a burst of lengthy and ambitious writing, essays that harkened to his prolific period of pamphleteering from Sudan. After a period of quietude and anguish, suddenly Osama seemed to have much that he wished to say.
“I am rejoicing in the fact that America has become embroiled in the quagmires of the Tigris and Euphrates,” he wrote in October 2003. “Bush thought that Iraq and its oil would be easy prey, and now here he is, stuck in dire straits, by the grace of God Almighty. Here is America today, screaming at the top of its voice as it falls apart in front of the whole world.”10
Osama saw the Iraq war as “a rare and essentially valuable chance in every sense of the word to mobilize the ummah’s potential and unchain it.” He urged young volunteers to “take off to the battlefields in Iraq to cut off the head of world infidelity.”11 Many answered his call, particularly from Saudi Arabia.
Osama made no secret of his disdain for Saddam Hussein, but this, of course, could not justify the American occupation, he said: “It is true that Saddam is a thief and an apostate, but the solution is not to be found in moving the government of Iraq from a local thief to a foreign one.” When the United States announced increases in the reward money available for his capture or death, Osama retaliated by announcing his own reward schedule, in units of gold, for the murder of Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, as well as for the deaths of other Americans.12
He seemed to particularly cherish the rhetoric of transformation in the Middle East enunciated by Bush and his cabinet. Their formulations about a “new” Arab world, anchored by a secular, democratic constitution in Iraq, confirmed Osama’s belief that he was engaged in an epochal conflict. The occupation of Iraq “shows that the struggle is an ideological and religious struggle, and that the clash is a clash of civilizations,” he wrote in May 2004. “They are keen to destroy the Islamic identity in the entire Islamic world.”13
He mocked his Western adversaries for misunderstanding him as a premodern fanatic, a bearded loner in a faraway cave; he saw himself, instead, as a master of global technology and change. Indeed, after 2001, encouraged by Bin Laden’s embrace of digital technology, Al Qaeda—now an organization, a movement, and a franchised brand—rapidly adapted itself to the loss of physical sanctuary in Afghanistan by making greater use of the Internet for training, tactical communication, and preaching. When American officials suggested that some of Osama’s self-produced videos might contain secret codes to trigger terrorist attacks by sleeper cells, Bin Laden reacted to these fears with contempt. “The Americans have made laughable claims,” he said. “They said that there are hidden messages intended for terrorists in Bin Laden’s statements. It is as if we are living in a time of carrier pigeons, without the existence of telephones, without travelers, without the Internet, without regular mail, without faxes, without e-mail. This is just farcical; words that belittle people’s intellects.”14
One of his most remarkable essays, published as preparations for the invasion of Iraq were under way, presented a list of grievances—numbered and subnumbered into categories—that described the fullness of his opposition to the United States, its foreign policies, and its national values. The essay suggested that Osama had been perusing American news magazines during the long hours of his exile and had grown frustrated by the typical analysis he read of his motivations. “Some American writers have published articles under the title ‘On what basis are we fighting?’…Here we wanted to outline the truth.” He posed two essential questions: “Why are we fighting and opposing you?” and “What are we calling you to, and what do we want from you?”15
The answer to the first question, he wrote, “is very simple: 1) Because you attacked us and continue to attack us.” He listed the venues where he perceived these attacks: Palestine, Somalia, Chechnya, Kashmir, Lebanon. “You steal our wealth and oil at paltry prices because of your international influence and military threats. This theft is indeed the biggest theft ever witnessed by mankind in the history of the world.”
As to the second question, his essential war aims, “The first thing we are calling you to is Islam.” Americans should convert to the “seal of all previous religions” in order to rescue themselves from a profound state of debauchery:
We call you to be a people of manners, principles, honor and purity; to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling, and usury…You are a nation that permits acts of immorality, and you consider these acts to be pillars of personal freedom…Who can forget your President Clinton’s immoral acts committed in the official Oval office? After that you did not even bring him to account, other than that he “made a mistake,” after which everything passed with no punishment…You are a nation that exploits women like consumer products or advertising tools, calling upon customers to purchase them…You then rant that you support the liberation of women.16
The more idle time Osama spent as a fugitive, the more hours he watched satellite television or perused Web sites for news of the world outside, the more he seemed to internalize and synthesize, in a characteristic fashion, diverse strands of anti-American grievance, whether they had originated with the European left, the Christian right, or the anti-globalization movement. He valued rhetorical effect over consistency of argument. His lines of poetry might be labored and archaic, but from time to time, he could turn a memorable sentence. Describing his impervious defiance in the name of Islam, he wrote: “The swimmer in the sea does not fear rain.”17 When he was not elegant, he was at least clear: “The freedom and democracy that you call for is for yourselves and for the white race only,” he wrote. “As for the rest of the world, you impose upon it your monstrous, destructive policies and governments, which you call ‘friends of America.’”18
He often blended these secular-tinted criticisms of the United States with the millenarian and anti-Semitic creeds that had long been at the heart of his outlook. Throughout his essays and recordings, like many Arabians, Osama presumed the power and relentlessness of Zionist and Jewish conspiracies.
“America didn’t start by taking my money and didn’t hurt me personally at all,” he conceded, “but it made claims about me as a result of our incitement against the Jews and the Americans…The government will take the American people and the West in general into a choking life, into an unsupportable hell, because of the fact that it has very strong ties with and are under the payroll of the Zionist lobby.” He described Jews in dehumanizing terms, “the idiots of the age,” who, when confronted by righteous Palestinian youth, “have become like agitated wild asses fleeing from a lion.”19
He rejected the borders of many nation-states as illegitimate lines drawn by pagan colonialists, yet he retained an emotional identification with the particular country of his youth—no longer as a “Saudi,” a word that honored the hated Al-Saud family, but rather as a “Hejazi,” a son of the land of Mecca and Medina. “I miss my country greatly, and have long been absent from it; but this is easy to endure because it is for the sake of God,” he wrote in late 2004. “Love for the Hejaz is deep in my heart, but its rulers are wolves.”20
By now he forswore almost all his earlier sympathy for Crown Prince Abdullah, soon to become king, although he suggested that Abdullah was a victim, to some extent, of American blackmail. Many had believed, Osama wrote, “that when Prince Abdullah…took over management of the country, he would save it from the mires of religious disobedience, and administrative, financial and media corruption…and that he would save it from subservience to America. But although people were expecting good to come from him, he brought them evil.”21
As yet more months passed and he still remained at large, and as Al Qaeda steadily revitalized itself and supported prominent attacks in London and elsewhere, Osama expressed open pride in what he had achieved since 2001. He had long thought of himself not as the general of an Islamic army or the self-anointed ruler of a prospective caliphate, but as the vanguard of a much broader and looser Islamic political resistance, in which his own band of violent operators would play no more than a galvanizing role. The September 11 attacks, he now concluded, had served to “demonstrate the enormous hostility that the Crusaders feel towards us” and had “revealed the American wolf in its true ugliness.”22
For the future, he promised a patient, long-term guerrilla strategy in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, punctuated by occasional “raids,” or terrorism, on Western territory: “The balance of terror has evened out.” He wanted to “underline the importance of dragging the enemy forces into a protracted, exhausting, close combat, making the most of camouflaged defense positions…Further, we emphasize the importance of martyrdom operations which have inflicted unprecedented harm on America and Israel, thanks to God Almighty.” He retained a considerable interest in nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, which he had once referred to as “war winners.”23
In January 2006, apparently provoked once again by watching Bush on satellite television, Osama issued an audiotaped statement, which would be his last communiqué for a prolonged period.
“I had not intended to speak to you about this issue,” he began. “However, what prompted me to speak are the repeated fallacies of your President Bush, in his comment on the outcome of the U.S. opinion polls, which indicated that the overwhelming majority of you want the withdrawal of the forces from Iraq—but he objected to this desire, and said that the withdrawal of troops would send a wrong message to the enemy. Bush said: It is better to fight them on their ground than they fighting us on our ground.” This rhetoric, although mainly intended for domestic political audiences in the United States, plainly infuriated Osama:
Reality testifies that the war against America and its allies has not remained confined to Iraq, as he claims. In fact, Iraq has become a point of attraction and recruitment of qualified resources. On the other hand, the mujaheddin, praise be to God, have managed to breach all the security measures adopted by the unjust nations of the coalition time and again. The evidence of this is the bombings you have seen in the most important European countries of this aggressive coalition.
Osama then issued a warning:
As for the delay in carrying out similar operations in America, this was not due to failure to breach your security measures. Operations are under preparation, and you will see them on your own ground once they are finished, God willing.
As for himself, he said, “I swear not to die but a free man.”24
He fell into a long silence. On the sixth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, Al Qaeda’s revived media operation, Al-Sahab, or “The Clouds,” delivered a new videotape in which Osama donned a gold formal robe and read out a political essay to a single fixed camera. The images were blurry, but his eyes appeared a little baggy—hardly surprising for a man now almost fifty years old living under conditions that presumably carried some stress. The most striking aspects of his appearance reflected his unembarrassed middle-aged vanity: Since his last video, he had trimmed his long beard to a rounded shape and dyed its gray streaks black.
His speech again synthesized disparate and not particularly religious anti-American critiques. He managed to praise both Noam Chomsky, the linguist and ardently left-wing intellectual, and Michael Scheuer, the former CIA analyst whose professional life had once been devoted to killing him, because both men denounced in books they had recently published the business-influenced imperial strains in American foreign policy. Osama seemed clearly to be hiding in or near Pakistan, or somewhere else where English books were readily available, as he appeared to be using the considerable time on his hands to read in English, advancing the linguistic training he had first acquired from Irish and British instructors at the Al-Thaghr school. He also seemed, as before, to be watching and reading English-language news. Western media aggravated him: they were often worse “than the condition of the media of the dictatorial regimes which march in the caravan of the single leader,” a view that also placed him in the company of many Western leftists.
Yet when Osama watched American or British television, sequestered in his hideaway, he now gazed into a flattering mirror—the media might distort his image, but they also depicted him as one of the most pervasive and powerful political figures on earth. Through the events of September 11, and their cascading aftermath, he now considered himself the author of this singular achievement, as an instrument of Allah. America might be “the greatest economic power” and “the major state influencing the policies of the world,” and yet by recruiting nineteen young men to fly as suicide pilots and bodyguards, Osama had achieved the improbable: He had “changed the direction of its compass.”25
This was Osama in his later exile: A man who, although relatively young, lived continuously close to death, and who worried, considering the short time he might have left, about how he might be remembered. His speeches were political and religious oratory of a now familiar type, but his lines also seemed intended to draft or at least influence the themes of his own posthumous reputation. Osama lacked a valid passport. He spoke in a Saudi accent but had been stripped—and had stripped himself—of conventional Saudi identity, and he was almost certainly living, at least some of the time, in an area of western Pakistan that lacked a recognizable government. In this denationalized condition, he chose wardrobes and props for his video statements that suggested three overlapping strands of self-imagining: the formal gowns of a religious scholar; the assault rifle of a modern jihadi warrior; and the traditional dagger of his Hadhrami origins.
A century before, British colonial officers had struggled to understand the global Hadhrami diaspora from which the Bin Laden family and its wayward son later arose; the Hadhramis’ mobile and independent networks eluded or surprised the empire’s census takers because they spilled across diverse political territory, often indifferent to the border posts of imperial mapmakers. Osama constructed his life as a political fugitive after September 11 in territory of just this character—a mountainous moonscape inhabited by tribally organized Pashtuns whom neither British colonial armies nor their Pakistani and American successors could penetrate or subdue. The history of similar exiles in Pashtun territory suggested he would probably face betrayal, eventually, by one of his local hosts. In the meanwhile, each time his audio-or videotapes reached Al-Jazeera or CNN, Osama reemphasized, like a Barbary pirate with a marketing degree, the impunity that he still enjoyed, as well as his continuing capacity to plan and inspire mass violence by exploiting the channels and the ethos of global integration.