The Bin Ladens

by Steve Coll

  The Brotherhood’s Egyptian roots and emphasis on political activity would have an influence on the course of Osama’s life once he reached adulthood. In high school, however, its precepts were probably difficult to distinguish from the general emphasis on Islamic piety that Faisal promoted in Saudi Arabia as an antidote to Nasserism. Largely because of the Saudi royal family’s repression of political organizing in the kingdom, religious scholars usually tried to avoid overt politics, preferring instead to concentrate on the theological topics of prayer, Islamic rituals, and a Muslim’s private conduct. Bin Laden’s group at Al-Thaghr, Khaled Batarfi said, was influenced to some extent by this emphasis on the search for a truly Islamic life, but it also adopted “a more activist or a political agenda” drawn from the Brotherhood. Saud Al-Faisal, a son of the king who would become foreign minister of Saudi Arabia, complained years later that Islamist teachers from Egypt and Syria had “misused” the hospitality offered them by preaching politics. “We dealt with them honestly, and they dealt with us underhandedly.”19

  In June 1973, when Osama was finishing tenth grade, the British ambassador to the kingdom composed a confidential report for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office titled “The Young People of Saudi Arabia.” His findings suggested that Osama’s education, while perhaps more ideological than that of some of his peers, was hardly unusual. The ambassador wrote:

  The Royal Family are alive to the dangers to their position that education could represent if modern ideas were allowed to flow so freely in schools…that they challenged traditional beliefs and customs. Thus the study of Islam features very heavily…Prominent families will admit that in choosing to send their children to school abroad, for example to the Lebanon, they are influenced not by any lack of quality in teaching of the best local private schools, but the fact that the syllabus is so taken up with religious instruction and study as not to leave enough time for the children to reach normal proficiency in other subjects.

  The report described how teenagers in these local elite schools were taught to understand the place of Saudi Arabia and its holy cities in the wider world:

  That God should have endowed his Holy Land with the means to finance it by the accident of oil is seen as a natural part of His plan for a world Islamic revival. Islamic maps in local classrooms show Saudi Arabia at the centre of the world, with two concentric circles drawn around Mecca. The Arab and other Islamic countries are coloured bright green, and countries with Muslim minorities…in gradually paler shades of green. Most other parts of the world are not even named.20

  A FEW YEARS AFTER he enrolled at Al-Thaghr, Osama moved with his family into a comfortable new suburban house in the Al-Musharifah neighborhood of Jeddah. At the time it was one of the city’s newest residential areas. The local roads were not asphalted, and patches of open desert wasteland separated the houses, where neighborhood boys played soccer and other games. The ground was slightly elevated, and it was possible on some days to see the Red Sea in the distance. The house Osama shared with his mother and her four other children by Mohamed Al-Attas was spacious but not luxurious—two full stories, with four bedrooms, one of which Osama occupied by himself on the ground floor. As is common in Saudi Arabia, walls and iron railings surrounded the house; it had a garden but no swimming pool.21

  Osama was a fan of a professional soccer team in Jeddah, Al-‘Alim, and he played on a boys’ team captained by his neighbor Khaled Batarfi. “He was tall, and so I would put him in front to use his head,” Batarfi remembered. “Sometimes I would put him on defense.” Once, when they were playing in another area, a boy on the opposing team became angry at Bin Laden and seemed as if he was about to hit him. Batarfi pushed the boy out of the way, but Osama told him, as Batarfi recalled it, “I was going to resolve this peacefully.” Batarfi said that years later, he and Osama used to laugh about the incident’s irony—“Osama the peaceful negotiator,” as Batarfi put it.22

  After he became immersed in Al-Thaghr’s student Islamic movement, Osama could be a stickler on matters of religious conduct—quiet, usually, but insistent. He prayed five times a day, called other boys to join him, and insisted that they wear long pants on the soccer field, as Saudi religious teachers said was proper. “His younger stepsiblings respected him very much,” Batarfi said. “He was older. He was tough on them on religious issues, on not mixing with girls, on being modest around women. When a female servant came into the room, he would duck his head modestly and not look at her.”23

  Batarfi said he and Osama watched television together—soccer games, both Saudi and international, but also American family fare such as Bonanza. Osama was a particular fan of action films and Westerns, especially those with prominent roles for horses. Batarfi recalled that they watched the American television series Fury, which was made between 1955 and 1960, and then was syndicated around the world, usually under the title Brave Stallion. The show was about a troubled orphaned boy named Joey who goes to live on the Broken Wheel Ranch with a man who has lost his own wife and son in an automobile accident. The boy learns to tame wild horses and becomes particularly close to Fury, a black stallion; through this relationship, the wounds of Joey’s earlier life are gradually healed. The sources of appeal in this narrative for Osama are not difficult to imagine; in any event, as he grew up, he became passionate about horses. His father had left a family farm—more of a desert ranch—outside of Jeddah, a place that was shared by his sons and daughters after his death. Osama spent weekends there with half-brothers from his father’s side of the family and learned to ride and handle horses. Later he acquired his own ranch, south of Jeddah, where he ultimately kept as many as twenty horses.24

  Many years later, some members of the Bin Laden family, in seeking to distance themselves in public from Osama, emphasized that he had grown up in a separate household and did not have much contact with his half-siblings while he was in high school. It was certainly true that he lived away from the principal family compound with his stepfamily, but he seems to have had at least as much contact with his father’s children as did other similar “singleton” boys without full brothers or sisters. Batarfi remembered that Osama would “visit his Mohamed Bin Laden brothers on weekends and such.” Moreover, some of these half-brothers were enrolled with him at Al-Thaghr; the teacher Fyfield-Shayler re-called that “several” of Osama’s half-brothers were students at the school during various periods when Osama was also there. He seems clearly to have had a sense of himself as one of his father’s heirs and to have harbored ambition to work in the family construction firm; his cousins in Syria and his mother all recall his interest in the company, and one cousin remembers him speaking of his aspirations to leadership there. As Salem gradually established his grip on the family during the early 1970s, Osama was far from isolated.25

  It was Salem, in his role as overseer of his siblings’ education, who first brought the family into contact with Pakistan and Afghanistan. Late in 1973, Salem decided to enroll two of his half-sisters at a boarding school in Peshawar, a Pakistani city on the Afghan frontier. At the time, Pakistan and Afghanistan were enjoying periods of relative quietude. The chief engineer at the Mohamed Bin Laden Organization, as it was still called, was a Jordanian whose wife happened to be the daughter of the governor of Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province, of which Peshawar is the capital. Salem flew to Peshawar on a private airplane with his wife, Sheikha, his two school-aged sisters, the Jordanian, and his wife. The local stores were poorly provisioned, and in those days, Kabul, the Afghan capital, was a relatively prosperous town with thriving markets. Salem decided to fly his sisters there to shop for supplies for their school year ahead—pots, pans, dishes, and the like. Once in Kabul, Salem met the Saudi ambassador to Afghanistan and disappeared on business; he sent his sisters into the city’s markets with the American pilot who had flown in with them. Later they all flew back to Peshawar and settled the girls into school. So far as is known, it was the first visit by members of the Bin Laden family to Peshawar
. There would be many more.26

  11. REALM OF CONSPIRACY

  THE TENETS OF Osama Bin Laden’s education were inseparable from the national ideology promoted by King Faisal in the late years of his reign. Al-Thaghr was not idly named a “model” school; it was a conspicuous example of Faisal’s program of modernization without secularization. The Muslim Brotherhood’s revolutionary goals made the king uncomfortable because they challenged the authority of the Al-Saud family, yet Faisal’s own vision of a politically conscious Islam echoed the Brotherhood’s call for action against enemies of the faith. After the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, for example, Faisal spoke repeatedly of a jihad to retake Jerusalem. His speeches denouncing the Israelis as an “impudent gang” bent on the “desecration” of Islam were not just designed to pander to Arab popular opinion; they were deeply felt, voiced by the king as forcefully in private as in public. As a young and increasingly active Saudi subject at Al-Thaghr, Osama identified with Faisal’s campaign against Israel—after all, his father had been the king’s emissary to Jerusalem before the 1967 war. Osama’s radicalization during high school did not, then, carry him into a state of opposition toward the Saudi government; in some respects, it deepened his alignment with Faisal’s foreign policy.1

  Faisal was a popular king because the synthesis of Islam and modernity he called for was consistent with the choices he made in his private life. There was no free press or political opposition to investigate and expose the hypocrisy of the Saudi royal family’s irreligious self-indulgence, yet through rumor, informal observation, and Western press reports that filtered in, Saudis knew well enough which princes drank or gambled or extorted commissions from business contracts. By these channels they learned, too, that Faisal was exceptional. He refused to move into a garish palace built for him in Jeddah, preferring a suburban-style compound on a busy road. He had long ago given up alcohol. Operations on his digestive tract had left him able to tolerate only a bland diet of grilled meat, boiled vegetables, and rice. He worked several hours each morning at his palace office, prayed, held a working lunch, meditated privately, and then returned to his office for a second shift. At sunset each day he drove in one of his American sedans to the edge of the desert, sometimes taking his sons along, where he prayed alone in the sand. He returned yet again to his office to work into the night.2

  For years Faisal had talked about transforming Saudi Arabia into a modern country but had delivered little. That had changed by the late 1960s. Gradually the Saudi state became a pervasive force in its subjects’ lives—an employer, an issuer of identity cards and passports, and a repository of commercial records. The long and troubled national highway program slowly linked the kingdom’s disparate regions. A few schools and universities opened. The ministries of Faisal’s government were far from efficient, but they now employed large numbers of Saudis, and in contrast to previous decades, they often issued their paychecks on time.

  Faisal’s marriage to Iffat bint Ahmed Al-Thunayan, who became known as Queen Iffat, offered the most inspiring example—at least for women—of the king’s modernizing impulses. He had not always lived monogamously, but Iffat had been his only wife since about 1940, and by the 1960s, she had become an archetype of progressive womanhood, in a Saudi style. She had been raised in Istanbul to a Saudi father and a Hungarian or Circassian mother, and she was influenced by Turkish secularism as she came of age. She and Faisal had nine children. Iffat adhered to Wahhabi rules, never accompanying her husband on state visits or appearing unveiled before the Saudi public, yet she managed nonetheless to campaign on women’s issues. As early as 1955, she founded a school for orphaned girls, and supported girls’ education even in the kingdom’s most conservative regions.

  She also traveled widely, shopped for modern clothes in Paris and San Francisco (only her husband and other women would see her wear them in Saudi Arabia), and promoted the business endeavors of her half-brother Kamal Adham, who became conspicuously wealthy. Adham served as one of Faisal’s most trusted emissaries, delivering cash subsidies to favored Arab leaders. In the early 1970s, Faisal appointed him as the first director of Saudi intelligence.3

  The king did need someone to watch his back. Nasser had been weakened by his failure in the 1967 war against Israel, yet his pan-Arab nationalist movement, and its offshoots, such as Baathism, still threatened the Al-Saud. In 1969 the Saudi government arrested several hundred Saudis, including sixty to seventy military officers, whom Faisal suspected of plotting to kill him or overthrow his regime. The detentions quelled dissent, reported the bureau of intelligence and research at the U.S. Department of State, and yet “the basic causes of dissatisfaction remain. The process of modernization is creating a new middle-class elite in the military, bureaucratic and commercial fields. Many of the new elite are antagonized by the concentration of power in the Saudi royal family [and] they chafe at the narrow limits on social freedom and political expression.”4

  Nasser died in 1970, succeeded by Anwar Sadat, with whom Faisal developed an alliance and a friendship. They were both cautious men, yet they shared a desire to avenge past losses to Israel. Faisal was profoundly anti-Semitic. From boyhood he had been instructed in a school of Islamic scholarship that cast Arabia’s Jews as treacherous betrayers in the narrative of war that culminated in the birth of the Prophet Mohamed’s new religion. As king, Faisal subscribed wholeheartedly to conspiracy theories about secret Jewish power. He regarded communism as a clever plot by Jews in their quest for world domination. During meetings with foreign visitors, he would often turn to his chief of protocol and ask, “Have they got the book?” The king was referring to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious forgery about Jewish plotting, copies of which Faisal kept in a bookshelf outside his reception room, so they could be handed out as gifts.5

  A pointed British memo summed up the tensions eating at the Saudi king during these years:

  He is formidable if over-bearing in argument…The effect of sickness and advancing years has been to make him tetchy, opinionated and impatient of contradiction…He has in his recent years been almost obsessed by an apocalyptic vision of the forces of religion and morality (conveniently identified with his regime) being sapped by atheism, communism and Zionism. He has made his choice between the political west and east, but he is disenchanted with the west for its lack of support for him and his causes.6

  Richard Nixon, better qualified than some world leaders to recognize a man with paranoid and anti-Semitic tendencies, remembered that Faisal “even put forward what must be the ultimate conspiratorialist notion: that the Zionists were behind the Palestinian terrorists.” Nixon’s Jewish national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, endured several of Faisal’s long harangues on the “dual conspiracy of Jews and communists,” which tested the diplomat’s patience considerably.7

  Faisal’s theories might disappoint London and Washington, but ultimately, in an indirect fashion, his convictions helped to enrich Saudi Arabia beyond the king’s imagining. When Sadat told him early in October 1973 that Egypt and Syria had prepared a surprise attack against Israel, Faisal unhesitatingly pledged his support. The war that followed, although it proved another disappointment for Arab forces, led to a prolonged international oil embargo imposed by Arab producers, of which Saudi Arabia was the largest. The embargo was designed in part to punish the United States for its airlift of military supplies to Israel. For a time, the Nixon administration was so infuriated that it developed contingency plans for an invasion of Saudi oil fields. Faisal, however, sensed just how far he could go, and he bent just enough to keep the Americans at bay—he secretly allowed oil sales to support American forces fighting communists in Vietnam, for example, and he also agreed to pour billions of dollars from the embargo’s cash windfall into U.S. Treasury bonds.

  The embargo was not a Saudi initiative, but it did more to transform the kingdom than any event since the discovery of oil itself. Faisal was arguably the 1973 war’s biggest winner.

  The price o
f Saudi crude soared sixfold by early 1974 and kept rising. The kingdom’s gross domestic product quadrupled between 1973 and 1975. Its oil revenue had been about $4.3 billion in 1973; it now zigzagged upward each year, to a peak of $102 billion by 1981. This gusher of cash stimulated a new boom in construction and luxury imports that exploded so quickly it choked Jeddah’s ports; ships lined up for weeks to unload or pick up goods. Hotel lobbies teemed with frustrated salesmen unable to find a vacant room. In Jeddah a new Safeway opened, its shelves stocked with Jell-O and Campbell’s soups. Queen Elizabeth flew in for a visit and commented, “I’ve never seen so many cranes in my life.” Faisal’s grandson Amr remembered that “you’d go away for a summer holiday, and you’d come back, and you’d get lost…Things that would normally have taken twenty years to do were done in a few months. And it made people a little bit crazy.”8

  The boom seemed only to deepen the frugal Faisal’s dour mood. He particularly deplored the cultural styles of his kingdom’s nouveaux riches. “In one generation we went from riding camels to driving Cadillacs,” he commented. “The way we are spending money today, I fear we will soon be riding camels again.”9

  Faisal bin Musaid, a nephew of King Faisal, was a failed graduate student in political science who had pleaded guilty to conspiring to sell LSD while at the University of Colorado and then had been sent home from the University of California at Berkeley. In 1965 his brother had been shot dead by Saudi police during a protest against the kingdom’s television studio in Riyadh; the protestors feared that television would undermine Islam. Musaid, who apparently lived in a chronic state of intoxication, decided to avenge his brother’s death.10

  King Faisal held open majlis receptions about twice weekly, and on March 25, 1975, Musaid followed an old acquaintance, the Kuwaiti oil minister, into the palace hall, shielding himself behind the minister’s girth. He pulled out a .38-caliber pistol and fired three shots at Faisal, striking him in the throat. Guards wrestled Musaid to the floor as aides rushed the king to the Central Hospital in Riyadh, one of the monuments to Faisal’s development campaigns. A blood transfusion and heart massage failed, however, and Faisal died that afternoon. The king was sixty-nine years old. Mourners hoisted his body, wrapped in brown cloth, onto a gurney and carried it through the streets of Riyadh to the royal family’s burial ground. Three months later, twenty thousand Saudis watched an executioner behead Musaid in a public square.