The Bin Ladens

by Steve Coll

  The events of that year—the Grand Mosque uprising, the Iranian revolution, and in December, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan—forced all the Bin Ladens to reckon with global politics to a greater extent than ever before. In this, too, they tracked the Al-Saud. Self-preservation motivated both families more than ideology. From the Nasserite revolution onward, the Bin Ladens had often been instruments of clandestine Saudi foreign policy projects whose primary purpose was the protection of the royal family’s rule. After the crises of 1979, they were called upon again.

  The Al-Saud and the Carter administration both interpreted the invasion of Afghanistan as an initial thrust by Moscow toward oil supplies in the Gulf. This was a misperception of Soviet motives, but Kremlin secrecy made it impossible to know otherwise. Despite their arms purchases and military construction projects during the 1960s and 1970s, the Saudis were hopelessly ill prepared to defend the kingdom from any serious attack; only the American military could do this. Fahd had always leaned toward Washington within the councils of his family; he responded to the events of 1979 by deepening the kingdom’s protective alliance with America. He negotiated secret agreements to build oversized military bases in Saudi Arabia that would permit the United States to preposition equipment for a crisis or quickly deploy large forces after one began—this undeclared policy was known in Washington as “overbuilding, overstocking.”2 Abroad, Fahd decided to partner more actively with America’s campaign to contain and defeat communism around the world. Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 made such collaboration more palatable to the Saudis; Jimmy Carter’s human rights rhetoric and Camp David peacemaking had alienated them. Yet if Fahd embraced Reagan’s priorities too openly, he risked angering his kingdom’s Islamic activists, whose potency and underground organizing had just been revealed so shockingly at Mecca. The shah of Iran had fallen, in part, because he had come to be seen by ordinary Iranians as a stooge of the Americans. All this argued for yet greater secrecy in U.S.-Saudi collaborations. Here, too, the Bin Ladens had a reliable track record.

  Both the Americans and the Saudis were initially cautious about supporting the Afghan mujaheddin as the rebels revolted spontaneously against Kabul’s new communist government. The Central Intelligence Agency’s analysts doubted the rebels could do more than harass the mechanized Soviet occupying army. American policy toward the Afghan rebels during the early 1980s rested not on a premise of future victory but on the notion that providing them guns could raise the cost of the invasion for the Soviets. Fahd agreed to match dollar for dollar the secret U.S. aid budget for the rebels, which initially was in the range of only $30 million annually.3 For Fahd, the war offered a convenient way to redirect the attention of Islamists outside the kingdom’s borders. Even in this era before Al-Jazeera, Afghan suffering had quickly become a celebrated humanitarian cause across the Muslim world. Hundreds of thousands of destitute refugees poured by the month into Pakistan. Soviet planes bombed them as they fled. Fahd organized charitable support for the war’s victims; he blessed such donations as official Saudi policy. The Afghan war united in a foreign cause factions of Saudi society that might have been in conflict had they focused solely on domestic matters.

  It had the same effect within the Bin Laden family. Through his ambition, force of personality, and control of purse strings, Salem had held the secular and religious wings of his family together. This balancing act became more difficult after the Mecca uprising because the kingdom’s Islamist movement acquired new legitimacy and budgets; this revival, often referred to as the sawa, or “awakening,” emboldened many Saudi believers to assert themselves, including those among the Bin Ladens. “It was not uncommon for a single Saudi family to have its own members divided along these lines,” a Saudi writer observed:

  A relative would be labeled mutawawa if he internalized the rhetoric and discourse of the new Islamist groups. He would be identified by his constant preaching among family members, listening to religious cassettes, regular denunciation of Western culture, music and luxury goods, and his enforcing of a strict moral code among his female relatives. The era witnessed the emergence of a new generation of self-appointed, literate and articulate mutawawa. They coexisted with less conservative members of their families…Within families, tolerance and tension progressed hand in hand.4

  At the periodic family meetings where he reviewed business and financial issues and received requests from his brothers and sisters, Salem had to manage not only his openly religious half-brothers Osama and Mahrouz, but other brothers and sisters for whom Islam was an increasingly important part of their young adult lives—and even their political outlooks. Charity, one of the five pillars of the Islamic faith, offered the least problematic way to meet such aspirations. The Mohamed Bin Laden Organization, like every other merchant company in Jeddah, operated a zakat fund, or family foundation, to handle much of the formal tithing required by Islamic law.5 Such routine charity in Saudi Arabia typically ranged from local mosque construction to feeding hungry orphans overseas—a range of activities little different from those of churches in the American heartland. During the first years of the 1980s, organizing donations to Afghan refugees offered Salem, who was a savvy manipulator, a kind of triple play—it fulfilled his family’s tithing obligations, it supported Fahd’s clandestine foreign policy, and it diverted the energies of the Bin Laden family’s religious wing.

  Salem had his own connections to the Afghan frontier. He had flown his sisters to boarding school in Peshawar and visited Kabul. His stable of pilots, based in Jeddah, included several veterans of the Pakistani air force, as well as an Afghan pilot named Mohammed Daoud, who had been forced into exile by the Afghan communists. Flight logs show that Salem flew into Karachi as early as November 1980. It was around then, according to his fellow Muslim Brother Jamal Khashoggi, that Osama took his first trip to Pakistan, announcing himself there as a junior philanthropic activist.6

  BENEATH A BILINGUAL sign that reads “Al-Thaghr Model Schools,” Ahmed Badeeb is pictured alongside other teachers in the second row of the official photograph of the class of 1976, the year Osama Bin Laden graduated from Jeddah’s elite private high school. Badeeb was a full-faced man with a rakish expression that reflected his profane, unruly, entertaining personality. He was also highly ambitious—an attribute that some who knew him traced to his Yemeni roots. Like the Bin Ladens, the Badeebs had emigrated to Jeddah from the Hadhramawt. By the late 1970s, Ahmed and his brother Saeed, who was studying for a doctorate in political science in the United States, had begun to forge connections to the Saudi government. Ahmed taught biology at Al-Thaghr, where his students included young members of the royal family. He also knew Osama from the school’s religious committee and remembered him as “not an extremist at all…I liked him because he was a decent and polite person.”7

  After Osama left Al-Thaghr, Ahmed Badeeb came to the attention of Turki Al-Faisal, the youngest son of the late king who, although he was only in his thirties, had recently been appointed by Fahd to succeed his uncle, Kamal Adham, as Saudi Arabia’s chief of foreign intelligence. Faisal named Saeed Badeeb as his chief of analysis, and he hired Ahmed as his chief of staff—a job that involved much discreet travel. After 1979, Badeeb became, among other things, Turki’s bagman for transfers of government cash to Pakistan. In this role he soon revived his mentorship of Osama.

  The official Saudi-American channel for funneling money to the Afghan rebels ran through Pakistan’s main intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI. By insisting upon this conduit, Pakistan ensured it would maintain secrecy, as well as greater control over how the funds were distributed. One of Badeeb’s roles during these early years was to purchase weapons clandestinely on the international market, and then ship them into Pakistan through ISI. From the beginning, Badeeb said, this Pakistan-dominated channel made him uncomfortable; he wanted to develop independent contacts among Afghan fighters. “We cannot depend only one hundred percent on what the Pakistanis give us,” he recall
ed. “We have to know the number of fighters, how many in this organization, how many in that, and how much they received.” One easy way to develop such unilateral relationships for Saudi intelligence was to invite particularly important Afghan rebel commanders to visit the holy cities of Mecca and Medina for the minor umrah pilgrimage or the annual Hajj. It was an ideal environment for making friends and recruiting clients—on Saudi soil, amid feasts and informal gatherings in the desert evenings, shadowed by the holiest mosques in Islam, at the site of the religion’s birth. The visiting Afghans could be showered, too, with cash donations from admiring Saudi businessmen. And who better to help manage such invitations, and to participate in the ensuing charitable and religious festivities, than Osama Bin Laden, a scion of the family that played such an influential role in the holy cities?8

  He was approaching his midtwenties, married to three wives, with a brood of small children scampering across the floor of the partitioned Jeddah apartment building where his expanding family lived. At his office in Medina he was the boss; he roared around in a desert-beige Land Cruiser and drove bulldozers at job sites, as his father had done. On visits to Pakistan he was a sheikh, deferred to obsequiously because of the cash he carried. On religious holidays at Mecca, he possessed a new aura in the Bin Laden hospitality tents—a righteous activist, a rising son in a respected family. In clandestine meetings of Brotherhood activists in the Hejaz, he may also have joined the movement’s planning sessions for violent, secret campaigns in Syria and Yemen; he later said that he was involved, but because these campaigns operated outside the boundaries of Saudi policy, he seems to have participated only quietly and cautiously.

  Osama’s connections to the Afghan frontier ran through the Muslim Brotherhood, which had recruited him as a teenager. In Pakistan, the Brotherhood affiliate was a political party named Jamaat Islami. When Osama flew to Pakistan for the first time carrying donations for the Afghan rebels, he traveled not to the Afghan border, but to the eastern city of Lahore, where many of Jamaat’s senior political leaders were based. Osama “was not trusting ISI,” Badeeb recalled. “He doesn’t want to give the money to ISI or directly to the mujaheddin because he thinks Jamaat Islami in Lahore can get that money in the hands of the real mujaheddin,” or those who were truest to the Brotherhood’s aims. Bin Laden met two Arabic-speaking Afghan commanders, Burhanuddin Rabbani and Abdurrab Rahul Sayyaf; his trip lasted about a month.9

  This initial travel signaled a pattern of Osama’s relationship with the Afghan war between 1980 and 1983: he was a commuter who did little more than carry cash and hold meetings. He made his contacts in Pakistan through several overlapping networks: his Brotherhood network of religious activists, the charitable circles of Jeddah merchants inhabited by his family, and the Saudi intelligence operation run by Badeeb. “The arrangement” during the early years of the Afghan war, recalled Jamal Khashoggi, was that the Saudi government, through its foreign intelligence service, would “support the military part,” while private philanthropists and religious activists would “support the humanitarian and relief work” along with the United States and Pakistani intelligence. These spheres overlapped, however. The donors Osama helped to organize for the Afghan cause included “members of the government,” recalled Khalil A. Khalil, a Saudi who tracked Islamic activists for the royal family. Also, Badeeb used humanitarian offices on the Afghan frontier as cover and infrastructure for intelligence operations. Because of Badeeb, Osama developed cordial relations with Prince Turki Al-Faisal, whom he met during Faisal’s periodic visits to Pakistan. He also won audiences with the powerful full brothers of Fahd—Nayef and Ahmed, with whom Salem had hunted in the Iraqi desert. Nayef and Ahmed ran the Saudi Interior Ministry, overseeing the kingdom’s domestic security.10

  Because of his rising visibility and contacts with important princes, Osama began for the first time to create value for the Bin Laden family. Nothing was more important to the Bin Ladens than building and revitalizing royal connections. In this new era of Islamic awakening, Osama’s role as a courier and religious philanthropist complemented the concierge services Salem provided for Fahd and other secular-minded princes in Europe and America. Osama’s work also provided the Bin Ladens with renewed credibility among the religious leaders who influenced contracting in Mecca and Medina. Osama “was a very lovely figure in the family,” said Bassim Alim, a relative by marriage who knew him during these years and who traveled occasionally to Pakistan to support the Afghans. “They liked him.”11

  In 1982 Salem appointed Osama as an executive overseeing a new round of renovation at the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina—a visible role, and another step in “the training or internship program that his elder brother gives to a younger brother,” as Khashoggi put it. Salem also ordered one of his aides to build a vault in Jeddah where Osama could temporarily store gold jewelry and cash donated for Afghans by businessmen and their wealthy wives. These rich Saudis had come to believe “that the Afghans were angels…the holy people,” recalled Ahmed Badeeb. “Women used to give their jewelry—huge amounts, you could not measure it.” The Bin Laden vault was twenty meters by twenty meters, fireproofed, and bombproofed, recalled the aide who built it.12

  Osama later conceded that he worked during these years in cooperative alignment with clandestine Saudi policy; one of his assignments was to not get caught. “Due to my arrival in Afghanistan,” he recalled, “and due to my family’s closeness to the Saudi governmental system, a letter arrived commanding Osama not to enter Afghanistan, and to stay with the immigrants in Peshawar, because if the Russians were to capture or imprison him, it would be construed as proof of Saudi backing for the mujaheddin against the Soviet Empire.”13

  His ego and his ambitions were swelling, yet he remained a reticent, almost painfully shy man in conversation. Sabry Ghoneim, a Bin Laden executive in Cairo, recalled Osama’s arrival in Egypt during this period for a meeting with construction engineers involved in a project Osama was supervising in Jubail, a coastal industrial city in Saudi Arabia. Ghoneim remembered him as “a young man with the attitude of a shy girl. He was always looking at his feet.” Nor was he a particularly effective executive. He said little during the interviews with the engineers. Ultimately, according to Ghoneim, the project Osama supervised lost more than $15 million.14

  He was shy, but he now had several important mentors who decidedly were not: his elder half-brother, his former teacher Badeeb—and increasingly, a Muslim Brotherhood scholar and fundraiser fired by the Afghan war, Abdullah Azzam.

  Like Osama, Azzam had been recruited into the Brotherhood as a young man. He was born in a village near Jenin, in the West Bank, and went into exile after Israel occupied the region during the 1967 war. He studied and taught Islamic politics in Egypt and Jordan before his subversive views led him to refuge in Saudi Arabia, where he won an appointment on the faculty of King Abdulaziz University; he lectured at the university when Osama was a student there. Azzam became an elder, charismatic, international figure in the Hejaz circles of the Brotherhood, in which Osama also moved. He was the author of a book about jihad, Signs of the Merciful, and he was developing the thesis for what would become an even more influential tract, Defense of Muslim Lands.

  Like many subversive professors before him, Azzam was burdened by financial debts accumulated during his itinerant and poorly compensated career. Saudi Arabia—and Osama in particular—offered the prospect of financial liberation. There is more than a hint of opportunism in the way Azzam flattered and gradually befriended the high school–educated Osama during the first years of the 1980s, promoting the young philanthropist as a saintly patron of a righteous, assertive Islam. Azzam’s wife developed a friendship in Jeddah with Osama’s wives. They socialized at Bin Laden farms in the desert. By 1984 their acquaintanceship had deepened into partnership. It was “a meeting of money, will and youth, represented by Osama Bin Laden, and knowledge, direction and experience, represented by Abdullah Azzam,” observed Nasir Al-Bahri, Osama’s lat
er bodyguard.15

  Osama Bin Laden “was a soft person, and Abdullah Azzam was empowering him to become a symbol of the Saudi wing of the cause,” recalled Khalil A. Khalil. “Azzam saw Osama as a bridge to Saudi Arabia.”16

  Sheltered Saudi teenagers and college students drilled in Islamic ideology but living far from any battlefield embraced the Afghan war as a romantic cause, a weekends-and-holidays rite of youthful passage. Religious students flew on direct Saudia Airlines flights to Peshawar to spend the last ten days of the holy month of Ramadan doing volunteer work or shooting off guns in the hills. Their commitment to the Afghans resembled that of American students who spend a few days a year hammering houses together for the poor. They might be moved by altruism, but they also sought a touch of cool. “When we used to look at the Afghan suits that the mujaheddin who returned from Afghanistan wore as they walked the streets of Jeddah, Mecca, or Medina, we used to feel we were living with the generation of the triumphant companions of the Prophet,” Al-Bahri remembered.17 For young Saudis during the early 1980s, the Afghan war was fashion, ideology, a fundraising opportunity, a touchstone of religious revival, a bonding experience—everything but the brutal combat known by the Afghans who actually fought it.