The Bin Ladens

by Steve Coll

  Raised by his father, Bin Laden became used to responsibility, confidence, generosity, and modesty…It is known that he is also shy and taciturn, usually appearing serious, though trying to appear friendly, and avoiding raising his voice, generally, or laughing excessively…Osama is quite intelligent, confident, and observant, but also somewhat hesitant in making decisions and taking control, which has sometimes hurt him…One of the contradictions within Osama is his emotion and tenderness on the one hand, and his strength and stubbornness on the other hand. He loves to read, and does so frequently, and has an unusual passion for going through information, documents, and archives, as well as following the press.10

  Some of his most uncompromising conduct involved women. Dating among suburban Jeddah teenagers was a difficult, risky, and frustrating endeavor even among relatively secular families, and for a young man as devout as Osama, it was just about out of the question. He was notably attracted to girls, however, according to Batarfi; by his account, Osama decided to marry at seventeen essentially because he wanted to have legitimate sex. The female cousins he saw in Syria in the summers did not veil or segregate themselves as rigorously as young women in Jeddah did. During his sojourns there, he had gotten to know Najwa, a daughter of his mother’s brother. Marriages among first cousins were commonplace in Arabian families; Osama’s mother and family may have encouraged and even arranged the match. Najwa’s brother, however, has suggested that the initiative came from Osama, and that he asked formally for his cousin’s hand. She was fourteen.11

  Initially they lived with Osama’s mother and stepfamily in Jeddah; Najwa became pregnant and gave birth to a son, Abdullah. The marriage bed seems only to have sharpened Osama’s conviction that a righteous Muslim man should not cast his eyes even in passing on women other than his legal wives and his mother. He did not permit his wife to meet strangers. He averted his eyes from the family maid. When he made social calls on his brothers, he would back away and cover his eyes if an unveiled woman opened the door. He would not shake hands with any woman.12

  Osama graduated from Al-Thaghr in 1976. The class photo depicts several rows of boys and teachers in ties and blazers, but Osama is not in the picture. By then, photography was one of the innovations that he rejected—photographs drew faithful eyes to false idols, to human imagery that competed with God’s oneness. Around this time he rejected secular music as well, because, as his teachers would have explained, it had not been a part of the Prophet’s life and it competed with the sacred sounds of Koranic recital and prayer. Osama did not smoke. He condemned gambling. His only conspicuous pleasures were sex, cars, work, and the outdoors. If he sometimes imagined himself as living in his departed father’s image, as some of his friends have suggested, he did so with considerable faithfulness.13

  An exception was his view of polygamy. He talked with his friend Jamal Khalifa about the serial marriages their fathers had each undertaken, apparently from sexual motives. They felt this was “not the Islamic way at all.” They believed that there were more women then men in society, and so for that reason, multiple marriages were desirable, since they “solved a social problem,” Khalifa recalled. Yet, according to Islamic teaching, “you have to be fair, you have to give equal justice between all of them, and you have to divide the time, to give each of them what is enough for her.” They pledged to handle their married lives more responsibly—they might take the four wives permitted, but they would not divorce frivolously, and they would concentrate on the issue of equity.14

  As his house filled up with young children (Najwa’s intervals between her pregnancies were short), he banned videotapes of Disney cartoons or Sesame Street. He rejected most television for the same reasons that he rejected photography and music; it coursed with blasphemous imagery. He did watch news programming, but he trained his children to stand by the television when the news was on, so they could turn down the volume knob when pulsing music announced a broadcast’s introduction.

  He seems to have derived his early ideas about fatherhood in part from the lessons about self-reliance, faith, and parsimony imparted by his own self-made father. He took his young children camping in the desert. He taught them to ride horses, to sleep in the open, and to cover themselves with sand if they needed warmth. “He did talk a lot about how we lived in luxury, and how we would have to toughen up,” Batarfi recalled. “He wanted them to grow up tough—they would practice hunting and shooting.” He would not let his children drink from a straw, because these had been unknown in the Prophet’s lifetime; on one particularly hot family outing, Carmen Bin Laden watched, appalled, as Osama’s wife, draped in black, tried to hydrate her sweating children by spooning water into their mouths. The other Bin Ladens present, she felt, were “simply awed by Osama’s zeal, intimidated into silence.” Yet others who knew him then have said that while he could be severe with his children about Islamic precepts and instruction, he could also be playful and warm, particularly on family camping trips to the desert.15

  IN THE PHYSICAL WORLD, liquids and gases swirl or condense when temperatures and densities rise and fall. A similar convection of cultures molded Osama’s late adolescence. He stood one degree separated from Mecca and two degrees from Las Vegas. And yet, in his own way, he seemed as comfortable with the presence of those competing densities as was Salem; he just managed their demands and temptations differently. Osama, in any event, was hardly the only Bin Laden of his generation to adhere strictly to Islamic teaching. In addition to his half-brother Mahrouz, two of his sisters, Sheikha and Rafah, became particularly devout in this period; they started a religious school in Jeddah for young family members. A number of his other brothers studied Islam formally and circulated in religious circles in the Hejaz. Among other things, religious credibility remained an imperative of the family business—Islamic scholars on urban planning committees in the two holy cities influenced contracting and real estate development decisions, as they had in Mohamed’s time.

  Osama did not appear in the famous Swedish family portrait, but he certainly knew Europe. According to Batarfi, he visited London at age twelve, with his mother, to receive medical treatment for an eye condition; he stayed for at least a month and did some sightseeing. On a second trip, as a teenager, Bin Laden joined some friends and relatives on a big-game safari in East Africa. According to Batarfi, he also made one trip to the United States. Walid Al-Khatib, Osama’s supervisor at the family construction company, has also said that he “went on trips to the U.S. and Europe.” In Batarfi’s account, the visit to America came about because he and his wife sought treatment for a medical problem of one of their sons.16

  Only one aspect of the journey made a particularly strong impression, according to Batarfi. On the way home, Osama and his wife were sitting in an airport lounge, waiting for their connecting flight. Najwa wore a black abaya, a draping gown, as well as the full head covering often referred to as hijab. Other passengers in the airport “were staring at them,” Batarfi said, “and taking pictures.” When Bin Laden returned to Jeddah, he said the experience was like “being in a show.” By Batarfi’s account, Bin Laden was not particularly bitter about all the stares and the photographs; rather, “he was joking about it.” The provenance of this account of Osama’s journey is uncertain; Batarfi is generally reliable, but in this case, his firsthand knowledge is limited. It seems clear that Osama did travel to the West to seek medical treatment for a son during the late 1970s, but he may have gone no further than Britain.17

  Whatever his itineraries, the same themes prevail: Osama was not a stranger to the West, but he was not radicalized there. Through his own travel and that of his family, he knew something of Europe and America, but by age fifteen, he had already erected a wall against their allures. He felt implicated by the West, and by its presence in his own family, and yet, as he would demonstrate in the years ahead, he lacked a sophisticated or subtle understanding of Western society and history. He used his passport, but he never really left home.

&n
bsp; THE AMBITION that most firmly bound Osama to his half-brothers was his interest in the family business. As his generation of Mohamed’s sons reached college, some of them drifted away from the prospect of a life in the construction trade—a few of his half-brothers managed to never work a day in their lives. Osama was among the larger group of boys who were strivers. They jockeyed for influence, salaries, and leadership roles. Osama’s religious inclinations made him a natural for management assignments involving the family’s Mecca and Medina renovation work. Assigning the most ardently religious Bin Laden brothers to work on projects in the holy cities would become a pattern as the family allocated management roles over the years.

  Walid Al-Khatib, a Palestinian who supervised Osama in the Mecca office when he was still a teenager, remembered him as “serious for his age, and from the first day, I noticed his interest in small details. We operated heavy equipment, and soon this tall skinny boy was driving them all. His technical ability was impressive.”18

  There were two main educational pathways for those brothers interested in a career at the company—engineering and business administration. The former was demanding academically and required a willingness to attend university abroad, as Saudi universities were not adequate. Between his religious studies and his swelling young family, the prospect of four or more years in Cairo or the West may have seemed undesirable to Osama. Whatever his reasoning, after Al-Thaghr, he enrolled as a business administration student at King Abdulaziz University, a sprawling white-walled campus built less than a decade earlier along the Mecca Road, near the Bin Laden family’s main compound at Kilo 7. It was a private university founded by Jeddah merchants who wanted a place to train their sons for business. Abdullah Suleiman, the former finance minister who had helped make Mohamed Bin Laden’s fortune, donated the land on which it stood, and had been among the Jeddah moguls who funded its creation during the 1960s.19

  Years later, in an interview, Osama would boast that he balanced his academic studies with his assignments at the family company more successfully than any of his brothers. This was not only immodest, it was wrong. He apparently sought to leave university early to take a supervisory job in Mecca but may have changed his mind because of his mother’s pleadings. He implied in the interview that he had completed his university education, but according to Khalifa, he never earned a degree. A brief résumé prepared by Bin Laden or his aides in 1996 stated only that he “studied management and economics” at the university. In any event, he certainly fell well short of the achievements in academics and business management of a number of his older brothers.20

  Osama was appointed as a manager in Mecca after he left university, according to Al-Khatib. The Bin Laden firms were responsible for a number of renovation projects in the area during this time. They built a new staircase at the Zamzam well, the Haram’s ancient source of sacred water; they demolished buildings to expand platforms and roads around the Mosque; and they restored walls and gates. Al-Khatib remembered Osama as stingy about distributing cash bonuses but fastidious about conserving food and handing out leftovers to the workers. Like his father, Osama prided himself on his ability to think through complex problems of demolition or engineering, even though he lacked the requisite formal training. As Al-Khatib put it: “He liked to solve technical problems by himself.”21

  15. WIRED

  FRANCIS HUNNEWELL grew up in a stone hilltop mansion above a lake; he belonged to a Massachusetts family who traced their line-age and landholdings to the period of America’s founding. Michael Pochna’s father had been a legal adviser to J. Paul Getty. They were both Harvard men, class of 1960. Later they moved to Paris to seek their fortunes in private finance. They made lists of contacts from family, schools, sports teams, and social clubs, and then started calling around, looking for deals—an attractive line of work if you had the right lists, spoke French, and could raise some stake money. By the early 1970s, they operated a boutique merchant bank. Headquartered in Paris but registered in the Bahamas, it was called Lansdowne Ltd.; it engaged in the kinds of financings that would later be commonly known as venture capital and private equity.1

  The multiple economic upheavals of 1973 and 1974—the Arab-Israeli war, the international oil embargo, inflation, and stagnating economic growth in America and Europe—forced them to rethink. Liquidity, a banker’s synonym for ready cash, was draining rapidly out of Europe and toward the oil regions of the Arab world. Hunnewell, Pochna, and their third active partner, Jan Baily, decided to relocate to the Middle East. Beirut and Cairo seemed the most appealing places for a new headquarters; they flipped a coin, and it came up Cairo. Pochna moved there, equipped with new lists of contacts. Hunnewell’s brother-in-law was an influential banker at Credit Suisse. He suggested that they call on a young Saudi he had met, Sheikh Salem Bin Laden.

  Hunnewell arranged an introductory meeting and flew into Jeddah. He was a tall, athletic man in his thirties who projected the languid confidence of old money. Salem had grown used to these solicitous bankers who wanted a piece of what they presumed to be his outlandish fortune. He judged them not by the services they offered, about which he was generally indifferent, but by whether they enjoyed his sort of fun. He hosted lunch and then suggested they all ride out to the desert to see some of the Bin Laden horses. He had just bought a new dune buggy, a motorized contraption with a Volkswagen chassis and tires that could roar through soft sand. He loaded Hunnewell and Jan Baily into the passenger seats and began speeding at sixty miles an hour through the open desert, bouncing across dunes. One of the vehicle’s wheels soon fell off. Salem stopped and rounded up Bedouins who happened to be walking nearby and forced them to search for the missing wheel. They found it and a few of its nuts and bolts. Salem had no wrench, however. Hunnewell lifted the entire buggy into the air while Salem held a Bedouin’s hand in the position of a wrench, twisting it, which Hunnewell imagined must have been very painful for the volunteer. Baily tried to put the wheel back on. It worked, sort of, and Salem was impressed. For years later he would tell the story about how Hunnewell had lifted up the car like a superhero. He seemed to decide then and there that he would do business with them. They got back in the buggy and wobbled on; Salem sped almost as fast as before. What industry they might enter, how, and by what plan—those were details for another day.2

  Michael Pochna flew out a few weeks later to try to put something specific together. He suffered through the usual long waits and chaotic scheduling before he received an audience with Salem. He pitched a Swiss company that could set up a factory in Saudi Arabia to manufacture pre-stressed concrete and modular housing, which could then support the Bin Ladens’ construction projects.

  “Well, I’m not interested,” Salem said. “What else have you got?”

  A silence followed, Pochna recalled, as he tried to come up with another idea. Salem then spoke.

  “I think the future is telephones,” he said.

  Pochna readily agreed, even though he had not previously given the subject any thought. They talked some more. Pochna made some calls to one contact he had in the American telephone industry. It became clear that Salem was thinking very ambitiously. He wanted nothing less than to win a contract from the royal family to build the kingdom’s first modern telephone network.

  “My father built the roads,” Salem said. “I will build the telephones.”3

  His vision was rooted in his global lifestyle. Salem and his generation of Bin Ladens were innovators of the jet age; they hopped effortlessly from Jeddah to Cairo to Corfu to Paris to New York and back again, sometimes in the course of just a few days. The more they moved around, however, the more they wished to stay connected. Salem lived at the center of a spinning family wheel, perpetually in motion. He could not bear to be out of touch—with Randa, or his European and American girlfriends, or his pilot friends, or his mother, or his brothers and sisters, or his royal patrons, or, if it was truly necessary, his business partners. In the 1970s, his and his family’s need for tel
ephones with global reach far out-paced the technology’s development. Telephone service was particularly dire inside Saudi Arabia, where there were only a few tens of thousands of unreliable phone lines. When he was grounded in Jeddah, Salem resorted to flirting with his overseas girlfriends by telex from his Bin Laden Brothers office.

  The idea that the world economy might be rapidly connected together and speeded up by affordable, border-crossing voice communication was barely understood or discussed in this divided era of the late Cold War. Russia and its East European clients lay firmly isolated behind the Iron Curtain. China was cut off and staggering after its dark period of Cultural Revolution. Even in the West the development of international satellites and telephones had only begun. Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke’s pioneering essay “Extra-Terrestrial Relays,” which first imagined the possibility of global satellite communications, had been published just three decades earlier, in 1945. Sputnik’s launch inaugurated the military satellite age in 1957, but missile and space races between the United States and the Soviet Union dominated the technology’s initial evolution. Governments and sclerotic monopolists controlled the major phone companies in America and Europe. There were no cell phones yet, and the only mobile satellite phones available to consumers were bulky and difficult to operate. The few global phones available usually required a user to identify his location and then call through a patchy private network. These devices improved incrementally every few years, but only a very passionate and very wealthy user (and Salem was both) could find them at all appealing.

  It was often easier in these years for Salem to chat with friends and family while he was flying his airplanes than when he was moving around on the ground. Salem installed high-frequency radios in his private planes, at a price of about thirty thousand dollars each—these radios enhanced safety during transatlantic flights, but they also allowed him to connect to various telephone networks while he was up in the air. In Europe, he would call in from the cockpit to a company called Stockholm Radio. For a steep price, its operators would then route him into the Swedish phone system, through which he could connect to just about anyone in Europe. Salem so often called Stockholm Radio—and a similar firm in Houston, Texas—that the operators often just asked him for the name of the friend or sister he wanted to reach, since they already had all his numbers on hand. While flying over San Antonio or Houston, Salem would call down to friends in their houses below and tell them to come outside and look up in the sky. He would flash his jet’s lights and shout into his mobile telephone: “Do you see me? Do you see me?” On gliding trips in Europe, he would call his favorite sister in Montreal: “Randa! I’m over the Alps at twelve thousand feet! Do you believe this?” Flying between European capitals at night, he would talk for hours with his girlfriends while the Stockholm operators listened in sympathetically. If he was bored and his friends were asleep, he would call the Stockholm operators from his plane and play songs on his harmonica.4