The Bin Ladens

by Steve Coll

  On August 1, at two in the morning, Carmen went to Yeslam’s building in Old Geneva and found him with another woman. “The discovery of the affair was a devastating blow for Carmen,” her attorneys wrote. She said she wanted a divorce. Yelsam moved to write a separation contract.

  On August 17, the Dow Jones Industrial Average reached its all-time high, and then began to fall.

  Carmen slipped into a dire emotional state, and a week later, a doctor in Geneva, allegedly anticipating her divorce negotiations with Yeslam, issued a medical certificate indicating that her “anxiety and panic attacks had recently increased” and that “any decision or signature” by her should be “deemed null and void.” She was soon hospitalized, suffering from exhaustion.21

  In London, an accidental power surge of about one thousand volts, originating in the city’s electrical grid, “burned all the hard disks” on the Russell Wood computer system, as Sauter recalled it. The surge destroyed all records of stock and option trading by the firm’s clients. There were no backup disks, according to Sauter. What happened next is not entirely clear. Sauter recalled that some stockbrokers at the firm had drawn many of Russell Wood’s clients into a risky options trading scheme involving the shares of a beer pump manufacturer in Croydon, England, and that suddenly, amid the confusion caused by the computer breakdown, some rival brokers made a run on these shares, causing Russell Wood’s positions to collapse. In any event, that autumn, the brokerage’s finances declined very rapidly. In October the stock market suffered its biggest one-day crash since the Great Depression of 1929. By the end of the year, Russell Wood had lost £3.5 million sterling, or about $6 million. In filings for British regulators, the firm blamed its trouble on the computer failure, which had led to “a breakdown in accounting controls.”22

  All in all, it had been a discouraging encounter between the Bin Laden family and the forces of globalization. There would soon be worse.

  19. THE GRINDER

  BY THE MID-1980S, the twenty-four Bin Laden brothers who owned shares in the main family company resembled a bloc of legislators from the same political party—professional interests bound them, and they often acted with unified purpose, but their membership had distinctly liberal and conservative wings. On the left stood the family’s unquestioned leader, Salem, as well as Yeslam and several others who favored Europe and Beirut. Osama and Mahrouz held down the family’s fervent, activist religious wing. In between, fashioning more traditional and centrist Arabian lives, were the four rising brothers who had all trained as civil engineers: Bakr, Ghalib, Omar, and Yahya. They were inclined neither to collect five hundred pairs of shoes nor to volunteer as jihadi fighters in foreign wars. They were observant Muslims, but they were notable more for their technical expertise and their willingness to work—they were the grinders among Mohamed’s sons, and they invested long hours at the office and on job sites.

  Of the four, Bakr, Salem’s full brother, who had been born just a year or two after him in Mecca, had emerged as a sort of chief operating officer for the family and its businesses. His title was Field Project Manager for the construction division of the Mohamed Bin Laden Organization; he sat on that company’s board of directors, as well as on the boards of several other joint ventures that had emerged from Salem’s separate Bin Laden Brothers enterprise. Salem was the one “who got all the business for the Bin Ladens,” recalled Mohamed Ashmawi, the Saudi oil executive. “Bakr managed it.”1

  He had the efficient air of a natural bureaucrat; he favored wrinkle-free, white traditional thobe gowns, perhaps with a pen or folded business papers in the breast pocket. “Where Salem did everything from the gut,” recalled Francis Hunnewell, the investment banker who worked on the telephone project, “Bakr was much more conservative and more process-oriented.” Michael Pochna remembered him as “a very intelligent person,” but he never heard Bakr say anything in front of his elder brother besides “Yes, Salem.”2

  While his older brother had learned Beatles songs at his Essex boarding school, Bakr had studied in Syria and Lebanon. He spoke some French, but his English was less well developed. After his father’s death, Salem decided that both his younger full brothers, Bakr and Ghalib, should pursue university degrees in civil engineering in the United States, so that they could spend their careers running construction projects for the family. Bakr finished high school first, and at this time, in the late 1960s, Salem had very few acquaintances in America. However, his great carousing Turkish friend from boarding school, Mehmet Birgen, known to all of Salem’s acquaintances as “Baby Elephant,” had moved to Miami. He was a good-looking, loquacious young man with a thick head of black hair. At the time, he was rooming with an American airline pilot, taking a few college classes, and devoting much of his considerable energy to the pursuit of the opposite sex. Salem telephoned and announced that he was dispatching Bakr to attend college in Miami, and he asked Baby Elephant to serve as Bakr’s guardian.

  This was not a natural match; like Salem, Baby Elephant was less than fully devoted to the traditional precepts of Islam, while Bakr, although young, was nonetheless devout; he had formally studied the Koran. Baby Elephant enrolled him initially at Miami-Dade Community College’s North Campus, several miles north of downtown, at 119th Street, three blocks from Interstate 95. He bought Bakr a Vespa scooter, helped him find an apartment, and talked up Miami’s many social enticements. He found it difficult to tempt him, with one exception. He invited Bakr to Shorty’s Bar-B-Q, on South Dixie Highway, a pungent room where customers sat side by side at wooden tables and doused their ribs with hot sauces squirted from plastic bottles. Baby Elephant ordered a big rack of steaming ribs; when Bakr asked apprehensively if they were pork, his guardian assured him that no, they were beef. Bakr engorged himself, and for months afterward, he returned again and again. Finally, a visiting cousin from Saudi Arabia pointed out that, actually, he had been eating pork ribs all along, in violation of Islamic law. Shocked, Bakr asked a waitress for confirmation, stormed over to Baby Elephant’s apartment, and confronted him: “What kind of guardian are you! You knew! You lied to me!” He telephoned Salem and complained, but his brother only replied, “At least he allowed you to discover how good pork ribs actually taste.” Shorty’s, however, lost a customer.3

  Bakr polished his English, adjusted to American classrooms, and transferred to the engineering school at the University of Miami, then a sprawl of palm trees and low-slung concrete buildings in Coral Gables. He joined the class of 1973. There were more than four thousand Jewish students at the school, and just over fifteen hundred international students—from Taiwan, Venezuela, Iran, Algeria, and elsewhere. Protests over the Vietnam War roiled the campus. The Republican Party staged its convention in Miami in 1972, and university students joined other protestors in violent battles against police. Three quarters of University of Miami students smoked marijuana, according to a professor’s poll. “Three things are essential for a pot party,” noted the 1972 edition of the university yearbook, “namely, people, a place and pot.”4

  Bakr joined a clique at the engineering school that seemed oblivious to all this. “We never talked about race or the war,” recalled Joaquin Avino, a Cuban American classmate. “The only thing we talked about was graduating, getting a job, becoming an engineer, and making some money.” Many of the civil engineering students were second-generation Cuban exiles; they belonged to “a relatively conservative culture within the university,” said John Hall, another classmate. Most commuted to school from their parents’ homes. Hall’s father was a city fireman; Avino worked part-time as a baggage handler at the airport. Bakr fit right in—quiet, serious, pleasant, a bookworm, with no interest in rambunctious student life. He was particularly friendly with the Cubans, and he partnered with them on lab projects that involved analyzing soil composition and calculating stability and stress in building structures. At exam time, his results were solid but average. He stood out among the twenty to thirty students in the civil engineering course only
because he wore silk shirts and drove a Cadillac Seville.5

  He lived off campus in a suburban rambler with a small swimming pool in the Kendall/Pinecrest neighborhood, just south of Coral Gables. His neighbors included an elementary school and a “Youth For Christ” facility. Family joined him eventually. His half-brother Omar also enrolled in the University of Miami’s engineering school, class of 1974, and rented an apartment a half mile from Bakr’s house. At one point, Bakr returned home to marry, and he brought his new wife to Miami. She was Haifa Nabulsi, a beautiful Syrian blonde whom he had first met in Damascus when she was about sixteen; she came from an exiled Palestinian family originally from Nazareth. While Bakr completed his studies, Haifa gave birth to two sons, Nawaf and Firas; the Bin Ladens obtained American passports for each of the boys. Bakr would not permit his university classmates to socialize with his wife, and he made a lasting impression on one of them while describing his family when he mentioned that no man in Saudi Arabia bothered to count how many sisters he had. Still, apart from these cultural idiosyncrasies, with his big-finned car, his young boys, his house on a manicured corner lot, and his earnest sense of purpose, Bakr seemed to some of his classmates to be just like them—a young immigrant householder in pursuit of the American dream. As they got to know him better, however, they learned that he would be returning to his family’s business in Saudi Arabia after graduation. Bakr offered one Cuban American classmate, Jorge Rodriguez, a job in Jeddah at double the starting salary he could expect to earn in the United States, but Jorge’s wife announced, “By no means—I’m staying in America.” Bakr departed and they gradually lost touch with him.6

  In Jeddah he and his family moved into one of the suburban villas at the Kilo 7 family compound. Carmen Bin Laden befriended Haifa and found her “open-minded and lively”; they tanned together beside Haifa’s swimming pool and “howled with laughter at how depraved the mothers-in-law would think us if they caught sight of our bathing suits.” Carmen found Bakr formal but kind, and unlike some Saudi men, he did not criticize or shun Haifa when she gave birth to a daughter. Bakr was religious but not insistent or strident. He prayed punctually when in Saudi Arabia, but when he traveled to France, he did not search for mosques or carry a prayer rug to business meetings. “He is the type of person who doesn’t like to attract the attention of others for things that are not necessary,” said a longtime business partner.7

  At the office, Bakr tried to keep up with Salem’s demands and peripatetic deal making. Gradually other brothers returned to the kingdom with engineering degrees to ease some of his burden. Ghalib ran the construction equipment yard, helped to manage procurement from Caterpillar, and supervised projects in the field. Omar supervised complex building projects on his own.

  Yahya proved to be a particular workhorse; he was exceptionally well organized and seemed to pride himself on putting in the very longest hours. He made a strong impression on some of the business partners and bankers who met with him. He had always been devout and deeply reflective; asked a question, he might pause for several searching minutes before he answered. He smoked cigarettes from a long plastic holder and had slightly bulging eyes, which created an exaggerated effect when he stared out during these long, contemplative pauses. In a top hat, he would have resembled Penguin from the Batman movies.

  This engineering coterie spent most of their days concentrating on their work as young construction executives, but as they approached middle age, and as the Islamic awakening spread in Saudi Arabia, their lifestyles became, in some cases, more overtly pious. Non-Muslim partners and friends noted this more explicit religiosity, but they saw, too, that it fell very much within the kingdom’s mainstream, which was becoming more conservative. Yahya’s wife, who had not previously covered herself, took the veil. Ghalib’s did, too. Charity and the Hajj became even more important to family routines. By the mid-1980s, at least one of the Bin Ladens’ business partners felt that some of the more traditional engineering coterie—Yahya, in particular—had begun to push Salem to ensure that Osama received all the support he needed as he became involved with the Afghan war. In this partner’s analysis, while these brothers did not share Osama’s radicalism, they had become very proud, nonetheless, of Osama’s charitable work on behalf of suffering Afghans, and they appreciated his ardent commitment to a defining Islamic cause. According to a senior Saudi government official, Bakr accompanied Osama to Pakistan on one of his early visits there.8

  These were also the brothers who took the lead on construction and renovation work in Mecca and Medina. After he became king, Fahd took a number of steps to enhance his credentials as the regent and guardian of Islam’s birthplace. In 1985 he inaugurated an eight-year, multibillion-dollar project to expand, once more, the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, so that it could accommodate almost a half million additional worshippers. The massive spending in Medina helped Fahd to ingratiate himself with the Saudi religious authorities who mistrusted his secular lifestyle, and it increased his visibility across the Islamic world. As Saudi kings had done for four decades, Fahd handed the work to the Bin Ladens—without competitive bidding. The king’s decision was consistent with his method for allocating spheres of commissions in government contracting, according to the senior Saudi government official. Fahd identified reliable agents or business families—some Saudi, and some, such as the Lebanese developer Rafik Hariri, who were not—and gave them sole control of a particular sector, such as arms sales, roadwork, or palace construction. In this way Fahd could direct how contracts and commissions would be distributed, and who would benefit from extra payments. The system reinforced loyalty and secrecy. The Bin Ladens had once been dominant in highway construction, but after 1985 their major windfalls came through the huge, exclusive contracts Fahd awarded them in the holy cities—first the Prophet’s Mosque renovation in Medina, and then a similar project in Mecca.

  The expansion of the Prophet’s Mosque contemplated by Fahd was mind-boggling in its scale—a new building of eighty-two thousand square meters, a new plaza and pedestrian spaces of more than two hundred thousand square meters, new and taller minarets, eighteen new staircases, six new escalators, sixty-four new doors and gates. For the Bin Ladens, Bakr played the key role in creating the detailed plans and executing them after approval by Fahd.

  The work spoke to Bakr as an engineer, a businessman, a Bin Laden, a Saudi, and a Muslim; the projects became the overriding source of his professional identity and his pride. The work offered a rare and privileged opportunity to leave an authorial mark on the holiest places in his faith. European and Arab architects, designers, and suppliers all contributed to the project over time, but from the beginning, Bakr played a decisive role. He delivered the detailed presentations of designs to Fahd and answered the king’s questions, and he drove the golf cart when Fahd visited Medina for an inspection tour. “Many a time he would require us to repeat the plans and the designs, to improve on this side, or develop that side,” Bakr later wrote of Fahd. “He used to visit the two projects at various phases and choose the best and most suitable materials with no regard for financial cost.” The king even issued “a standing order to establish an open-ended account” to fund the work.9

  Osama was an executive in the Bin Laden’s Medina office at the time this enormous undertaking took shape. He was still commuting from Saudi Arabia back and forth to the Afghan war. He had deepened his involvement after his brief visit to the fighting front in 1984, but he had not moved his family to Pakistan. He typically stayed in Pakistan for only three or four months at a time.

  Fahd’s Medina project led to conflicts within the Bin Laden family that may have influenced Osama’s priorities, according to a former senior American government official who has discussed the episode with Bakr. The details are unclear, but according to this official, the Medina contract and its many pressures produced a “sort of realignment in the family,” which left Osama unhappy about his role. The essential issues were control and authority. “He just basic
ally made a giant pest of himself and everybody wanted him gone,” according to the former official. By this account, Bakr and Salem stood on one side of the quarrel, and Osama and some of his more religious half-sisters tried to oppose them. “Salem told me, ‘This brother of mine in Afghanistan is going to be our family’s big problem,’” said a second business partner who worked very closely with the Bin Ladens during this period. Osama “didn’t bother Salem, he bothered all his family.” Whatever the nature and extent of this disagreement, it did not result in a full rupture between Osama and his half-brothers, however. Indeed, Salem’s risk taking on Osama’s behalf would soon increase. But the episode may have led both Osama and his half-brothers to see Pakistan, rather than Medina, as the best outlet for Osama’s energies.10

  EARLY IN 1986, Abdullah Azzam wrote to Osama from Peshawar, urging him to move there. He told his protégé that administrative and financial problems had accumulated at the Services Office, the support service they had founded more than a year earlier for Arab volunteers in Afghanistan. Azzam urged Osama to help put the place in order. Here, at least, was an enterprise that wanted and appreciated Osama fully.

  Later that year, Osama moved with his family to a pine-shaded house in the Hyatabad section of Peshawar. In the ensuing months, he would act like an ambitious young man who felt a need to prove himself. He threw himself more actively into the war, and for the first time, he independently sought publicity for his work, to extend his reputation in Saudi Arabia and the Muslim world. Was undeclared competition with Bakr and Salem, now themselves celebrated in Saudi media as the renovators of Medina, one strand in Osama’s web of motivations after he moved his family to Pakistan? Even if it was, one constant remained: to achieve his goals on the Afghan frontier, he needed the Bin Ladens.11