The Bin Ladens

by Steve Coll

  The Saudi religious establishment viewed Azzam as its bridge to Pakistan, which held one of the world’s largest Muslim populations and had long been a target of Wahhabi proselytizing. In late 1981, King Abdulaziz University dispatched Azzam to oversee the curriculum at the Islamic University in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital; the campus had been founded recently with $35 million in Saudi funds.18 Azzam also consulted for the Muslim World League, an arm of official Saudi charity. Peshawar, the frontier city that served as the principal base for the Afghan mujaheddin, lay less than two or three hours away by road. Azzam’s move to Islamabad created an Arabic-speaking, Jeddah-connected wing of the Muslim Brotherhood through which Osama could channel donations.

  THE AFGHAN COMMANDER with the deepest connections in Saudi Arabia was Sayyaf, a white-bearded Arabic speaker schooled in Islamic law who embodied the religious romanticism many Saudis saw in the war. Sayyaf toured Saudi mosques in royal limousines during his periodic fundraising tours in the kingdom; the Saudi government permitted him to open permanent offices to raise money. Badeeb cultivated him on behalf of Saudi intelligence. Increasingly, however, commanders like Sayyaf had to weigh the lure of Saudi money against the headache of hosting teenaged Saudi volunteers on their Ramadan holidays. It was a hassle to provide them guns, light training, and a tour of the battlefield about which they could boast when they went home, but Sayyaf and a few other commanders came to accept their roles as jihad camp counselors—it was a necessary cost of their fundraising operations. In 1984, with Badeeb’s support, Sayyaf opened the first formal training camp for Arab volunteers, called Sada, or “Echo.” It was an appropriate name—it was a reverberation from the real war. The camp was near the Pakistan border, an easy day trip for Saudi and other wealthy Gulf Arab visitors. “They would watch some militant-inspired plays that would end with the guests donating all the money they had in their pockets,” according to one Arab history of the camps. “They would also write down lists of items that must be purchased urgently in order to enable Sayyaf to conquer Kabul.”19

  In 1984 Osama entered Afghanistan for the first time, essentially as a tourist. He may have visited Sada. He witnessed some fighting around Jaji, near the new Arab camp. It was the first time in his life that he had heard the concussive thump of shells or felt the blood-quickening pulse of exposure to war. The experience seemed to thrill him but also infuse him with guilt over the length of time it had taken him to put himself at physical risk in the cause he had espoused with such conspicuous pride. “I feel so guilty for listening to my friends and those that I love not to come here, and stay home for reasons of safety,” he told a Syrian journalist. “I feel that this delay of four years requires my own martyrdom in the name of God.”20

  It was a refrain he would repeat for many years, while managing, nonetheless, to persistently avoid what he claimed to welcome. Certainly Azzam wished to keep him in one piece. Osama’s fundraising prowess had reached new heights.

  Azzam moved to Peshawar in October 1984 to establish the Makhtab Al-Khadamat, or “Services Office,” to support Afghan fighters and serve Arab volunteers who traveled to the war. His vision for the office blended Islamic charity and marketing. His projects included Al-Jihad magazine, whose first issue, published in December, concentrated mainly on fundraising. The start-up money came from Osama, who provided initial cash infusions at an annual rate of between $200,000 and $300,000. For the first time, too, the Bin Laden family also provided engineering and construction personnel to support the war effort—an Arab volunteer who arrived in Peshawar in 1984 recalled meeting a construction engineer assigned from the Bin Laden organization. During the Hajj pilgrimage of the Islamic year 1405, which took place in June 1985, Azzam lodged for days at a Bin Laden home in Mecca. “The entire Bin Laden family were hosting people. And they had food and busses to take people,” recalled Abdullah Anas, Azzam’s future son-in-law. A document about Osama’s work from that same year describes contributions provided by the Bin Laden family foundation.21

  Osama associated himself with Azzam’s radical voice, yet he remained an entirely orthodox Saudi figure, a minor emissary of its establishment. His volunteerism remained inseparable from his family’s identity and its business strategy.

  IT WAS AZZAM who first introduced Osama to the concept of transnational jihad. “When the Sheikh started out,” Bin Laden said years later, “the atmosphere among the Islamists and sheikhs was limited, location-specific and regional, each dealing with their own particular locale, but he inspired the Islamic movement and motivated Muslims to the broader jihad. At that point we were both in the same boat.” As an exiled Palestinian, Azzam spoke passionately about his homeland but encouraged his followers to regard the conflict with Israel as part of a larger war waged by unbelievers against Muslims—a millenarian conflict, leading inevitably to Judgment Day, as forecasted in the Koran. Azzam’s speeches and books dwelled on the suffering of Muslim innocents. He deified Afghan and Palestinian civilians as victims of aggression and cried for revenge. The women and children dying in Afghanistan under Soviet guns and in Lebanon after the Israeli invasion of 1982 were united by their identity as Muslims. These incursions into Muslim lands gave rise to fard ayn, a compulsory duty upon all Muslims to repel them. Azzam’s ideas traced to the writings of the thirteenth-century jihadi theorist Ibn Taymiyya, which Bin Laden himself would later quote: “As for repelling the enemy aggressor who corrupts religion and the world, there is no greater duty after faith than uncompromising struggle against him.” Azzam argued that Afghanistan was the most pressing theater for such jihad, and that it would strengthen the ummah, or “community of believers,” for a later war to liberate Palestine. Here the ideological and opportunistic sides of Azzam merged in argument; as a practical matter, in Afghanistan, he could raise money and influence events, whereas in Palestine, at least for the time being, he was a powerless and not particularly influential exile.22

  The 1982 Israeli campaign in Lebanon lit up the Arab world; it was a televised war filled with infuriating news and images. Osama watched at a time when he was absorbed by Azzam’s lectures about jihad and mesmerized by his mentor’s stature as an unyielding Islamic activist and an exiled Palestinian. In later years it would become common to describe Osama’s overheated rhetoric about Palestinians as little more than media-savvy lip service from a Saudi who pandered to his Arab following. That interpretation overlooks Osama’s self-conscious pride about his father’s work in Jerusalem, however, as well as his close relationship with Azzam. It also ignores his recollections, which may be suspect in their emphases but are not likely invented. “The events that made a direct impression on me were during and after 1982, when America allowed the Israelis to invade Lebanon,” scene of his boyhood schooling, Osama wrote years later:

  I still remember those distressing scenes: blood, torn limbs, women and children massacred. All over the place, houses were being destroyed and tower blocks were collapsing, crushing their residents…In those critical moments, many ideas raged inside me, ideas difficult to describe, but they unleashed a powerful urge to reject injustice and a strong determination to punish the oppressors. As I looked at those destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me to punish the oppressor in kind by destroying towers in America, so that it would have a taste of its own medicine…On that day I became sure that the oppression and intentional murder of innocent women and children is a deliberate American policy.23

  This reminiscence—ideas that “raged inside” and were “difficult to describe”—suggest some of the tension and confusion in Osama’s expanding intellectual and political life. Inspired by Azzam, he began in Peshawar to synthesize the banal tasks of organizing and fundraising—forming bureaucratic committees, reviewing publishing plans, creating rules and systems to provide financial subsidies to young Saudi volunteers—with a more mystical and poetical rhetoric of martyrdom. Partly this reflected Azzam’s millenarian beliefs, but partly it was a marketing strategy crafted by a money-conscious prose
lytizer and the former business student who funded him. Their conduct suggests that Osama and Azzam were less interested in becoming martyrs than in creating a movement based on the emotional power of other people’s martyrdom. Azzam used testimonials and memorials to sanctify the sacrifices of the first young, poorly trained volunteers who passed through his guesthouses in Peshawar and died in Afghanistan. “Lucky him who is rewarded with martyrdom,” Azzam wrote. “Allah rewards him with seventy-two virgins and he can choose seventy of his relatives to join him in heaven.” Of the first four committees Osama organized at the Services Office, one promoted media operations and a second promoted education.24 His instincts were hardly surprising; he had spent much of his early working life in Bin Laden offices filled with glossy brochures and staffed by specialists in advertising and marketing. In his work for the royal family and the religious authorities in Medina and Mecca, Osama had learned that a project was a success only if its sponsors saw it as a success, and to ensure that they did, publishing and advertising had to play a role. He brought some of this modern business ethos to his earliest projects in Peshawar.

  It was only about three months after Osama established the Services Office with Azzam that Salem, while on his hunting trip with Saudi royalty in Pakistan, flew into Peshawar with his video camera and his unbelieving entourage, consisting of a Swedish mechanic and an American specialist in ultralight aircraft.25 Osama seemed to instinctively understand where his own passion for jihad overlapped with Salem’s potential interest in the Afghan war—Osama chose to put orphans, not volunteer fighters, on display for his brother’s camera. This was mainstream charity marketing on which they could collaborate without any hint of conflict: “God instructs you to treat orphans fairly,” holds a Koranic verse. “He is well aware of whatever good you do.”26

  Even now, as he began to think of himself as a war fighter and perhaps, eventually, a martyr in the name of jihad, Osama interacted respectfully with his cigarette-smoking, patently irreligious elder brother. The sawa, or religious awakening, in Saudi Arabia might tug at family unity, but Osama also stretched himself to forgive secular-minded siblings, recalled his friend Jamal Khashoggi. What Osama feared more than individual sinfulness was “a mass movement of secularization, mixed schools, top-down changes.” Also, recalled Khashoggi, “the Brotherhood emphasized the role of love and care and compassion in reaching out to non-observant Muslims. He had no problem with that, with non-observant Muslims. His method was to be compassionate and patient.” Osama regarded his family’s contributions to his work as nothing more or less than their duty: “Financial jihad,” he would later write, “likewise, is an obligation…particularly for those who have the resources, rather than those who don’t.”27

  Salem visited Peshawar a second time during this period, according to Bengt Johansson, who accompanied him. They met Osama in a suburban villa, “an Arab office, with some sofas around.” They talked together for an hour or two, he remembered. Salem carried a large amount of cash in a case. “I don’t know where the money was coming from—if it was from Salem, all this money, because they were sponsored from different people in Saudi Arabia,” Johansson said.28

  By 1985 Salem had learned to serve both Fahd’s clandestine foreign policy in Afghanistan and his self-indulgent luxuriating. At the time, these lines of activity did not seem to be burdened by contradictions.

  FOLLOWING THE DEATH from heart failure of his placid brother Khalid, Crown Prince Fahd had ascended to become the king of Saudi Arabia. Now that the throne belonged to him, Fahd told Salem he wished to travel in a more regal style. The king wanted a Boeing 747—and not just any one, but the largest model then in existence, known as a 747-300, which had a stretched upper deck, offering the potential for an aerial duplex.

  Fahd had become king at sixty-two, just young enough to indulge in one last splurge. His health remained poor and he sometimes had difficulty walking. But he had fallen hard for his new and younger wife, Jawhara Al-Ibrahim, who had left her husband for Fahd and had given him a son, Abdulaziz, upon whom the king doted without restraint. He decorated identical bedrooms for the boy at his various palaces, and he had taken Abdulaziz to the White House to meet Ronald Reagan, early in 1985. Jawhara’s brother, also named Abdulaziz, had become one of Fahd’s most influential court advisers and had amassed great wealth in a short time. He kept an apartment in London’s Mayfair neighborhood, and he purchased his own private planes—a Gulfstream and a DC-8. Salem cultivated a relationship with him; when the king went looking for a 747, his brother-in-law turned to Salem for help.29

  Fahd knew he wanted something grand, but like a business mogul choosing among architects for a new mansion, he sought several imaginative proposals to which he could react. It would be a demanding, improvisational job to customize a single 747 to Fahd’s tastes, however. This was not a project naturally suited for a large company like Boeing, which earned its profits by engineering standardized airline models. Still, to curry favor with Fahd, whose government airline purchased many jets, Boeing developed a proposal for a unique and kingly 747. Its bid for the interior and systems renovations alone exceeded $100 million, however, and the Boeing designs did not excite Fahd’s imagination. In fact, the king was unhappy about Boeing’s plan, which made his brother-in-law unhappy, which made Salem unhappy.

  On his Texas travels, Salem had taken some of his own Learjets to San Antonio for interior renovations, and there he had met a ninth-grade-educated legend of American aviation named Dee Howard, who ran an aircraft service and engineering company at the San Antonio airport. Howard was a compact, fast-talking white-haired man with an intuitive knack for engineering. He lived in a riverside mansion and collected antique cars, but his business rode cycles of boom and bust, and he was always looking for a big score. Salem told him that Fahd’s 747 project offered a golden opportunity to move his company into the global business of custom head-of-state aircraft renovation.

  “He and I just hit it off real good,” Howard recalled. “We liked each other, and he liked the kinds of things I did…He insisted that I come over and meet King Fahd and talk about it.” Howard was reluctant; his San Antonio hangars weren’t even big enough to hold a 747. Salem paid him $60,000 just to prepare a presentation, however. “I was doing Salem a favor.”30

  Salem was right to choose him; he had an instinct for theatrical luxury. Rather than turning to his San Antonio staff for initial designs, Howard hired Syd Mead, a Hollywood illustrator who had recently attracted attention for his work on the futuristic movie Blade Runner, directed by Ridley Scott. Mead flew with Howard and Salem to Riyadh to present their ideas to King Fahd. The illustrator dazzled them all by sketching ideas while holding his pad upside down, so that Fahd could see his work more clearly. “Your Majesty, I really want to do this plane for you,” Dee Howard told the king. “I’m sixty-three years old, and I’ll never get to do another one.” Fahd squeezed his hand and smiled, and Howard thought to himself that the king was feeling something similar.31

  Fahd and Salem engaged in strikingly informal banter; between design sessions, over lunch, they would debate one subject or another in jocular and animated voices, and Salem felt free to shout at Fahd across the table, denouncing the king’s opinions. “Some people said, ‘Ah you can’t say that to the King—you can’t,’” remembered one member of the group. “He got away with it—he finally quieted down a little bit, but he got away with it.” They spent hours with Fahd working on the 747 designs; this was an aspect of royal life that the king seemed to particularly enjoy. Eventually, after arduous negotiations handled by Ibrahim, which included some unexpected demand, Dee Howard won the contract. It would ultimately be worth $92 million.32

  The plane would include a number of features not normally found on commercial airliners. Among them was a fully equipped surgical operating theater linked by a private satellite communications system to the Cleveland Clinic, the American medical center. In an emergency, Fahd’s surgeons could operate on him while park
ed on a runway, transmit images by satellite to Cleveland, sedate their patient, then take off and fly to the clinic for follow-up. To protect Fahd from his enemies, Raytheon Corporation installed electronic warfare equipment on the plane, including a system to defend against heat-seeking missiles.33

  In the absence of medical crises or assassination attempts, the king could expect a comfortable ride. After considerable effort, Howard designed an elevator system that would allow the six-foot-four-inch Fahd to exit his limousine on an airport tarmac, wave to the crowd, and then walk a few steps onto a ground-level lift without any undignified bending of his head. From there, out of view, he would be hoisted into the plane’s belly, where he could ascend a second elevator to the upper floor. His majlis contained a chandelier with five thousand unbreakable polycarbonate crystals. Beneath it, on either side of Fahd’s throne, these crystals also sparkled in two artificial waterfalls; a Mead-inspired painting of a field of stars spread out on the wall behind. The royal bedroom suite contained a shower large enough to comfortably accommodate the king’s girth, as well as a sitting room and a bed billowing with silks. Lest any of this luxury lead the king or his entourage to stray from their devotions, the ceiling of each room contained an electronic compass, linked to a global-positioning satellite system, which pointed continuously toward Mecca.

  By 1985 the work on this fantasia was in full swing at the San Antonio airport. As Howard’s workers passed certain benchmarks, payments arrived by wire from the royal treasury, sometimes in single increments of more than $10 million. Salem—without compensation, so far as any of his American employees and partners knew—flew in frequently from Saudi Arabia to inspect Howard’s progress and urge him toward his deadlines. As Howard recalled it, speaking of Salem, “He was very interested in pleasing the king.”34