The Bin Ladens

by Steve Coll

  Salem’s mobile phone rang at the Palm Beach airport, where he was waiting for Randa. “She’s gone off the radar—we can’t find her,” the caller said, according to Gail and Robert Freeman, who were with him. Salem “went berserk,” Gail remembered. “He went crazy running around the airport, screaming.” He cried out again and again that his sister was dead. “She crashed! She crashed!” Don Sowell had flown to Palm Beach to receive Randa at her moment of piloting triumph, and the family’s longtime pilot Gerald Auerbach, the air force veteran, was also present. They tried to calm Salem down, but he lashed out at them angrily, almost to the point of striking blows, and demanded that they do something. Salem and the two pilots took off in his Hawker jet for the area where Randa had apparently gone down. They found an airport nearby, but its runway was much too small for Salem’s plane. Salem insisted he would land anyway. “Over my dead body,” Sowell told Auerbach, as he recalled it, because, as Sowell put it, “I felt that was a possibility.” Finally, he appealed to Salem’s common sense; no matter what had happened to Randa, he pleaded, it was not going to help if Salem got himself killed trying to rescue her.30

  They landed safely at a larger airport and at last they got Randa on the phone. She was crying—but she was fine. She had fought through the smoke, and with the help of Sowell’s instructor, she had found a field where she could put the Cessna down. She landed roughly but did no significant damage to the plane and none at all to herself. It was a remarkable feat for a student pilot. “She had plenty of guts,” Sowell said.

  Now Salem was as ecstatic as he had been distraught. He asked the Freemans to help him organize a grand party at the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach, to celebrate Randa’s heroism and survival. “Call up everybody you know!” he said. “Call up your friends in a fifty-mile radius!” In the end, some of the guests flew in all the way from New York and Houston. Once more, aviation and its perils had been the source of great drama for the Bin Ladens. That night at the Breakers, Salem hired a band, and his guests danced and sang. The next day, they all went to Disney World.31

  14. THE CONVERT’S ZEAL

  OSAMA BIN LADEN moved freely as a teenager through overlapping worlds. He joined the Bin Laden family on outings and was a visible presence at its two main companies, Bin Laden Brothers and the larger Mohamed Bin Laden Organization. He played soccer and rode horses with local boys from his suburban Jeddah neighborhood. Each summer, until about 1976, he traveled to the more secular Syrian sphere of his mother’s family, on the Mediterranean coast, where he hiked in the mountains and apparently fell for a younger cousin, whom he had known as an unveiled girl since childhood. All the while, he immersed himself in Islamic study groups—at Al-Thaghr, his elite high school, and also at a special religious school in Mecca, Thafiz Al-Koran Al-Kareem; he continued this study after he matriculated at Jeddah’s King Abdulaziz University in 1976. In all, between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one, Osama managed to integrate his deepening religious faith with his enthusiasm for business administration and the outdoors, as well as his desire for sexual companionship. He accomplished this, after 1973, in a posture of ardent Islamic devotion from which he would never deviate.

  Salem, with his rather different synthesis of enthusiasms, was nonetheless “like a father” to Osama in this period, according to Osama’s mother.1 Their relationship was typical of those between Salem and the group of his younger half-brothers who spent their early adulthoods mainly in the Arab world. When he was in Jeddah, Salem shed his jeans and donned his thobe and headdress. He chain-smoked cigarettes and was not noted for his leadership at prayer time, but he conducted himself nonetheless as a Saudi. He maintained some distance from his brothers and half-brothers. There were a few half-brothers, such as Tareq and Shafiq, with whom Salem seemed to share a genuine friendship. Mainly, however, Salem drew his friends and international entourage from outside the Bin Laden family—from Lebanese, Turkish, European, and American schoolmates, or from pilots and musicians he met on the road. These foreigners were playmates or aides-de-camp who depended on Salem financially or simply enjoyed his company. With them, he was free from censure and complications. With his family, he tried to be a judicious ruler.

  Salem had no qualms about smuggling some of his non-Muslim friends or girlfriends into sacred Mecca or Medina, a practice that annoyed Osama when he learned about it. For their part, some of Salem’s friends learned to be wary of Osama’s piety. An Arab friend who was not particularly religious recalled meeting Osama in Medina: The muezzin sang out a call to the first of Islam’s two evening prayers, which usually take place about one and one half hours apart, and Osama insisted on leading his visitors into the Prophet’s Mosque. Salem’s friend waited in the car, and he wound up stuck there for much of the evening—Osama insisted, the friend recalled, that the entourage “pray and pray and pray.” The others in his group eventually returned shaking their heads. “They were complaining very much. I said, ‘Thank God I didn’t go inside with you. At least I’m in the fresh air outside, smoking.’”2

  Osama was “perfectly integrated” into the family during this time, recalled Carmen Bin Laden. Beginning around 1974, while he was still in high school, he received enough money from his allowances, as well as from his work at the family companies, to buy a succession of fancy cars—a Lincoln or a Chrysler, and later, a gray Mercedes sedan, according to his neighbor and friend, Khaled Batarfi. He drove his cars very fast and wrecked at least one of them, in Batarfi’s recollection. He also had access to four-wheel-drive Jeeps and trucks from the family firms, which he drove to work sites and into the desert for weekend relaxation with his friends and his beloved horses. Riding horses, he would say years later, was his “favorite hobby,” and he prided himself on his ability to ride for forty or more miles at a time. He favored modest outdoor clothing, yellow work boots, and a Swiss Army watch.3

  He turned up periodically in the smoke-filled reception room of Bin Laden Brothers, where, sometimes in the company of other younger brothers, he would wait patiently for his allowance or for some check or document to be signed. “I remember him only as a sort of supplicant, presumably for some extra cash,” Rupert Armitage recalled. Salem’s longtime mechanic and friend Bengt Johansson remembered him as “just another kid brother.” He had grown into a tall, thin young man, and as he let his beard come in, it sprouted at first in light tufts, and later to a full, dark thickness. He remained quiet and deferential. Many of his half-brothers possessed a similarly restrained demeanor; Salem’s continual displays of raucous energy were exceptional. The younger sons of Mohamed “floated” into the Bin Laden Brothers offices during school breaks, Armitage remembered, and quietly lined the chairs around the outer edges of the office. They usually needed something, but they learned to be patient. Every action in their lives, it seemed, required a “bloody signature,” which often proved complicated to obtain.4

  During Ramadan, on weekends, and other holidays, the Bin Ladens entertained themselves at communal properties in Jeddah and its environs. There was a barren desert “farm” in Al-Bahra, between Jeddah and Mecca, where Osama fenced off a small ranch for about twenty horses. There was a large bland summerhouse in Taif, constructed during the 1950s or 1960s, where family members sometimes retreated during the hot season. Along the Red Sea there were family “beach houses,” which were little more than concrete sheds where a person might change into swimming trunks or find a little shade. By the standards of the day in Jeddah, these vacation properties were symbols of the family’s wealth and privilege, but they were not particularly opulent. Osama seems to have enjoyed all of them, although as he became more and more of a believer, he could be a pain, particularly at the beach.

  He was self-conscious about his own conversion experience, aware that in some sense he was special or separate because he had been born again. In later years, he referred to 1973 as the year his “interaction” with Islamic groups began, when he was fifteen. He seemed to interpret—or was taught to interpret—his own
conversion or recruitment into the Muslim Brotherhood at that age as the natural passage of a true Muslim: “As is known,” he once said, “from birth to fifteen years of age people do not look after themselves, nor are they really aware of great events…If we’re really honest, we find that this section, between the ages of fifteen to twenty-five, is when people are able to wage jihad.”5

  The intensity of Osama’s conversion experience in his after-school study group had been unusual, but it was not so unusual that it marked him as some sort of cultish outsider. No young man devoted to Islam in Saudi Arabia would feel that way, or would be seen as such by his family and peers—and certainly not a young Bin Laden, whose father had been a steward of Mecca and Medina, and an emissary to Jerusalem. For many hours each week, state television broadcast scenes of thousands of pilgrims clad in white cloth circling slowly en masse around the Holy Ka’ba in Mecca; it was like having an entire network devoted to perpetual scenes from a religious aquarium. At prayer time, loudspeakers rang out in every town and city with the call to worship; shops and supermarkets closed immediately and mutawawa, or “religious police,” patrolled the streets with sticks to enforce compliance. The art hanging on Jeddah’s office walls, the books on living room shelves, the buildings on every other street corner, the calendar of public life, the speeches of public figures, the rituals of birth, seasons, and death—all of these drew heavily, if not exclusively, upon the idioms of Islam. Religion in Saudi Arabia was like gravity; it explained the order of objects and the trajectory of lives. The Koran was the kingdom’s constitution and the basis of all its laws. The kingdom had evolved into the most devout society on earth, not only in its constitutional and legal systems but also in the rhythms of its households, schools, and circles of friendship. The influx of European and American businessmen and advisers during the 1970s, and the widespread introduction of consumer technologies, did not alter Islam’s central place in the daily lives of the great majority of the kingdom’s subjects. Nasir Al-Bahri, a Yemeni who grew up in Jeddah and later served as Osama Bin Laden’s bodyguard, recalled that particularly for those teenagers, like Osama, who were attracted to religious teaching

  [t]he Islamic climate was everywhere in Saudi Arabia, and the Islamic spirit was in everything: in the councils of scholars and in religious gatherings…The entire society there was one fabric. It was impossible to find a house without the fragrance of Islamic trends, in any form. Thus if a household did not have a young man who observed the faith, it had a young woman who observed the faith. If it did not have a young woman who observed the faith, the household perhaps had an Islamic tape or an Islamic book.6

  Osama offered one such touchstone of religious devotion to the extended Bin Laden family. His family saw him—some with skeptical tolerance, others with unequivocal admiration—as their clan’s remarkably committed young preacher and prayer leader. Just as European aristocratic families of past eras considered it a matter of course for one or two sons to join the priesthood, while others became officers in the military or advisers at court, so did the Bin Ladens regard it as unremarkable for some of their sons and daughters to answer Islam’s call. This choice did not in itself make Osama a particularly prestigious Bin Laden son—certainly not under Salem’s leadership. Business, aviation, engineering, interior design, and Salem’s desire for someone in the family to become a medical doctor all competed with Koranic education in the family’s informal honors lists during the 1970s. And yet, of course, the Bin Ladens regarded themselves as an Islamic family, and so Osama’s idealism and commitment were respected, even when he grated.

  Carmen Bin Laden saw Osama, with his gangly height and insistent religiosity, as a “minor figure” hovering censoriously on the family’s periphery. He was “more literal, more fundamentalist” than even some of his colleagues in the Muslim Brotherhood, said his friend and fellow adherent Jamal Khashoggi. He seemed particularly drawn to teachings that a righteous Muslim should imitate the dress and customs that prevailed during the Prophet’s lifetime. Osama scolded his friend Khaled Batarfi for wearing shorts to soccer games, which violated an obscure tenet of theological rule making. He seemed bent on finding a personal state of purity, and to achieve this, he insisted upon introducing Islamic precepts into even the most casual everyday encounters. As his Syrian brother-in-law Najim put it: “He often used to tell us what he had learned about religion.”7

  Osama’s early involvement with the Muslim Brotherhood meant that from the very beginning, his understanding of Islam was inflected by messages of political dissent. The Brotherhood’s Islam was not passive; its members advocated a journey toward a righteous Islamic government. Lectures by its members were informed, too, by the Brotherhood’s recent history of anti-colonial violence in Egypt and the exile to Saudi Arabia of many of its activists. Scholars and writers influenced by the Brotherhood offered varying ideas about how a righteous Islamic government should be pursued, and when, for instance, violence or open political organizing might be justified. They were unified, however, in the view that preaching and teaching should be a bulwark of their campaign. A good Muslim should not only seek out his own state of grace; he should teach others. Brotherhood political precepts might make the Saudi royal family nervous, but this proselytizing vein fitted with the Salafi school of thought that dominated the kingdom. The term “Salafi” refers to the Prophet’s earliest companions, whom Salafi believers are taught to imitate. Mohamed Abdul Wahhab, an influential source of this doctrine in Arabia, emphasized that a man should literally model his life on that of the Prophet and his companions. In this school of thought, the purpose of studying the Koran and the hadiths involved a search for literal truths—facts and laws—which had been made available during the seventh century with the Prophet’s revelations; these pieces of a righteous life could then be adopted and assembled by any Muslim who wished to please God on Judgment Day.

  Years later, after he had declared war against the United States, Osama said that even as a young man, he had been fired by anger over America and its conspiracies with Jews and Christians to destroy Islam. “Every Muslim,” he said, “from the moment they realize the distinction in their hearts, hates Americans, hates Jews, and hates Christians. This is a part of our belief and our religion. For as long as I can remember, I have felt tormented and at war, and have felt hatred and animosity for Americans.” In fact, prior to 1979, there is not much evidence that Osama was especially political. He seems to have concentrated in these years mainly on learning how to define and live an Islamic life, as outlined by the mentors and scholars he followed in Jeddah and Mecca. He certainly listened to speeches and read books containing anti-colonial and revolutionary political views, particularly the influential works of the hanged Egyptian Islamist Sayid Qutb, whose exiled brother, Mohamed, lectured at Osama’s university in Jeddah. According to his friend and university classmate Jamal Khalifa, Osama read Qutb’s Signposts and In the Shade of the Koran for the first time around 1976 or 1977; the books expounded on provocative theories for offensive action, including violence, to protect Islam from imperialists and nonbelievers. In later years, Osama often cited approvingly the works of Taqi Al-Din Ibn Taymiyya, a thirteenth-century theorist of violent jihad against apostate “occupiers,” and he cited a particular book by Mohamed Qutb, Concepts That Should Be Corrected, which had helped him understand that impious rulers of Islamic countries were “incapable and treacherous, and they have not followed the right path of Islam, but have followed their wishes and lusts—[and] this is the reason for the setbacks in the nation’s march during the past decades.” When he first heard these lectures and read these texts in the late 1970s, however, he had no practical way to consider their calls to political action, and no evident desire to take the political risks they urged upon him.8

  He talked with his friends during this time about the problem of Palestine, according to Batarfi, but his views were unexceptional. In the aftermath of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, in which American military support fo
r Israel figured prominently, Osama would have heard many anti-American and anti-Semitic harangues in Jeddah’s mosques, classrooms, and salons. These themes would also have been an aspect of his formal religious study. The Koranic narrative of Islam’s birth and spread is one of territory and warfare, a story in which the supposed treachery of Arabian Jews figures significantly. In later years, Osama would connect his anti-Semitism, which he attributed to Koranic teaching, with his outrage over American support for Israel:

  It appears to us, from the writing of the Prophet, that we will have to fight the Jews under his name and on this land [Palestine]…And the United States has involved itself and its people again and again…and dispatched a general air supply line in 1973 during the days of Nixon, from America to Tel Aviv, with weapons, aid, and men, which affected the outcome of the battle, so how could we not fight it?…Any nation that joins the Jewish trenches has only itself to blame.9

  It would be a mistake to attribute statements Osama made in his late forties to his state of mind three decades before, yet there is continuity in his opinions. His repeated references to 1973 as a turning point in his own life and as a touchstone of his anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic viewpoints suggest that year’s resonance in his life. Still, in Saudi Arabia during the mid-1970s, for an eighteen-year-old to describe Americans and Jews as enemies of Islam was little more than an expression of conventional wisdom. The testimony about him from contemporaries emphasizes other aspects of his religiosity—his insistent piety and his search for a life that was well rounded and pure.

  A biography later published by his media office, drawn from the observations of an aide who knew him at a time when Osama was still interacting with the Bin Laden family, tried to inventory the sources of influence in his outlook and character. It read like the comment section in a schoolteacher’s report card: