The Bin Ladens

by Steve Coll

  His inclusive outlook also compensated in part for his lack of standing as a scholar. He had long been proud and stubborn, and as he gathered confidence, he probably felt the sting of Azzam’s condescension. Azzam’s widow, reflecting her family’s sense of superiority, later noted pointedly that Osama was “not a very educated man. He holds a high school degree…It is true that he gave lectures to ulema and sheikhs, but he was easy to persuade.”12 Such attitudes had long hovered just below the surface of Azzam’s patronage. With equal subtlety, Osama now began to assert himself in reply, through his pronouncements about diversity and equality, and also by his decision to spread his financial contributions around, to include Azzam’s rivals among the Egyptians. These Egyptians had already broken with the Brotherhood, which they regarded as too cautious. In critiquing Azzam and his philosophy, they emphasized the doctrine of takfir, by which Muslims judged to be apostates could be ex-communicated or even exterminated.

  Salem’s death coincided with these changes in Osama’s world on the Afghan frontier, and it added to the void created by the ebbing of Azzam’s mentorship. In Peshawar that summer, the Egyptians, in particular, saw an opportunity to ingratiate themselves by acting as his publicists. Osama “liked the media spotlight,” recalled a Saudi follower from this period, Hasan Al-Surayhi. “Bin Laden’s finances were not a secret to anyone and I think the Egyptians wanted to exploit this angle,” according to Al-Surayhi. They connected Osama with journalists in Peshawar. The Egyptian military chief at one of Osama’s camps, Abu Ubaidah Al-Banjshiri, who had fought with him at Jaji, explained the Egyptians’ thinking: Osama, he said, “has spent a lot of money to buy arms for the young mujaheddin as well as in training them and paying for their travel tickets. Now that the jihad has ended, we should not waste this. We should invest in these young men and we should mobilize them under his umbrella.”13

  The meetings that gave birth to Al Qaeda occurred in Peshawar in August 1988, three months after Salem’s funeral. Notes taken at the sessions describe some of the tension Osama felt that summer: he wanted to break away from Azzam, but he did not want to expose himself by too openly adopting a leadership role. “I am one person,” he said. “We have not started an organization or an Islamic group.” The experiments in training and war that he had supported so far had constituted “a period of education, building energy, and testing brothers who came.” The most important accomplishments, Osama recognized, had come from marketing the jihad: “We took very huge gains from the people in Saudi Arabia. We were able to give political power to the mujaheddin, gathering donations in very large amounts.”14

  At a second meeting, held at Osama’s house, a note taker recorded that in considering a new approach, Osama was motivated by “the complaints” about Azzam’s organization, which he had done so much to fund and shape, particularly its “mismanagement and bad treatment.” His emphasis now would be on training a separatist Arab militia, of the kind Azzam opposed, initially numbering about three hundred men. As Banjshiri had urged, Osama would use the arms he had acquired with Salem’s help before they went to waste. The camps where this training would take place would be called Al Qaeda Al-Askariya, or “The Military Base.” Al Qaeda would be “basically an organized Islamic faction” and would develop “statutes and instructions,” but it would also be a vehicle for more open-ended, nonhierarchical participation in jihad. “Its goal will be to lift the word of God, to make His religion victorious.” Recruits would swear by a pledge that made no reference to Osama Bin Laden. They would recite:

  The pledge of God and his covenant is upon me, to listen and obey the superiors, who are doing this work, in energy, early-rising, difficulty, and easiness, and for his superiority upon us, so that the word of God will be the highest, and His religion victorious.15

  This ambiguity present at Al Qaeda’s birth—the sense that it was an organization but that its borders dissolved into a wider movement—would persist for years because it was fundamental to Osama’s own outlook. In his mind, Al Qaeda was merely an incidental means to incite and organize the ummah, the community of Islamic believers. Across the years, Osama would struggle at times to remain true to this aspiration, as bureaucracy, factionalism, and petty ambition gnawed at his ideals. Yet he never abandoned his original model. “The situation is not as the West portrays it,” Osama would tell an interviewer many years later, “that there exists an ‘organization’ with a specific name, such as ‘Al Qaeda’ and so on. That particular name is very old, and came about quite independently of me. Brother Abu Ubaida Al-Banjshiri created a military base to train the young men to fight against the Soviet empire…So this place was called ‘The Base,’ as in a training base, and the name grew from this. We aren’t separated from the ummah. We are the children of an ummah, and an inseparable part of it.”16

  He drew upon a rich heritage of Saudi and Brotherhood-influenced ideology, but he synthesized these ideas with his lessons drawn from his family. In the years ahead, Osama would make three indispensable contributions to Al Qaeda, all derived from his experiences as a Bin Laden: his emphasis on diversity and inclusion, his confidence about money and administration, and his attraction to the technologies of global integration. Indeed, arguably, these family-derived strengths of Osama’s would become more important to Al Qaeda’s potency than its underlying Islamic ideology, which was commonplace among militant groups.

  Ambition, energy, natural talent, and a gift for managing people had made Mohamed Bin Laden wealthy. Reinterpreted by Salem, these characteristics had girded a secular life of singular creativity and financial success. Reinterpreted through a prism of Islamic radicalism by Osama, they would soon prove just as transforming.

  IN APRIL 1989, Ghalib Bin Laden flew to the United States with one of the family’s Pakistani pilots to arrange for final delivery of the Hawker Siddeley private jet that Salem had purchased prior to his death. It was a sleek, spacious two-engine executive jet that could carry a dozen or more passengers. Ghalib had the piloting skills to evaluate the plane’s readiness, and as Bakr’s full brother, he had his trust. He had matured into a smart, sharp-minded administrator who did not suffer fools and who could act decisively, in the judgment of one business partner who worked with him extensively. He had two sons; his wife increasingly kept the veil.17

  On April 22, Ghalib flew to San Diego, where one of his youngest half-brothers, Abdullah, was enrolled in university. He flew on to Honolulu, then Guam, and reached Hong Kong on the 24th. Gerald Auerbach, the family pilot, had joined the flight, as had a second Pakistani pilot and the mechanic Bengt Johansson. They flew to Kuala Lumpur, and then to Bombay. On the evening of April 27, 1989, they continued on to Peshawar. They checked into a hotel in the city, and Ghalib Bin Laden and one of the Pakistani pilots traveled by road to the Afghan frontier.18

  According to two people who were on the trip but who did not travel out from the Peshawar hotel, Ghalib carried about fifty thousand dollars in cash. One of these people, Auerbach, recalled that the money was destined for Osama because he was in need of “some cash.” The second passenger, Johansson, said that he was told by the Pakistani pilot who went out from the hotel that they sought to distribute the money as a Ramadan gift to poor people living in a refugee camp. By Johansson’s account, this act of charity turned dangerous. “They were almost killed there” and “had to jump over some fences” because a crowd of refugees, seeing Ghalib’s bag of money, decided to rush him, rather than wait for an orderly distribution of charity. A family attorney said that Ghalib recalled that “the cash which he [Ghalib] took with him from Peshawar was distributed to the poor in refugee camps” and was not provided to Osama; the attorney emphasized that Ghalib had never provided financial or other support for Osama’s terrorism.19

  At the time of this visit, Osama was suffering through the most trying episode of his Afghan adventure. In March, at the direction of Pakistani intelligence, a large force of Afghan rebels had opened an assault on the eastern Afghan city of Jalalab
ad, about a four-hour drive away from Peshawar, over the Khyber Pass. The city was defended by a rump force of Afghan communist soldiers who feared they would be executed if they yielded their positions, and, therefore, fought fiercely, supported by clandestine Soviet officers who manned Scud missile batteries. Osama joined the siege campaign, leading a company-sized force of Arab volunteers who had been trained over the winter at the inaugural Al Qaeda camps. He ensured once more that his followers were adequately equipped—among other things, he acquired night-vision equipment. On the Jalalabad battlefield, however, he and his militia failed disastrously. The guerrilla and ambush tactics they had honed in the mountains proved futile during assaults on fortified fixed positions. The terrain favored the defenders. About one hundred young Arab men had died under Osama’s leadership by the time the campaign was called off in June.20

  So many casualties in such a transparently failed effort only exacerbated the factionalism and dispute that surrounded Osama. In July an Afghan faction led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who was favored by Osama, massacred the leaders of a rival faction led by Ahmed Shah Massoud, who was favored by Azzam. These two powerful Afghan militias embarked on open civil war. Behind the lines, Peshawar “became a horrible place,” recalled Jamal Khashoggi. “Arabs who don’t like each other. Takfiris. Tensions…Splinters, fanatic groups.”21

  On November 24, 1989, Abdullah Azzam died in a car bomb attack. The crime went unsolved. Egyptian rivals of Azzam, Hekmatyar, Bin Laden, or some combination seem the most likely suspects. Osama later denied any involvement. “At that point, we were both in the same boat, and you are all aware of the numerous conspiracies there were to murder us all,” he said. He recalled telling Azzam to stay out of Peshawar. Ultimately, he said, he concluded that Israel “in collusion with some of its Arab agents” had carried out the attack. His declaration of innocence is difficult to evaluate but probably correct. He had no particular need to kill Azzam, and there is no convincing evidence that he had yet participated in any assassination plots.22

  A few weeks before Azzam’s death, Osama moved home with his family. In quick succession, he had lost the two most important mentors in his life. His sponsor in Saudi intelligence, Ahmed Badeeb, his former high school teacher, urged him to leave Pakistan. Badeeb was trying to “thin out” the number of agents and allies he supported in Peshawar, now that the Soviets had withdrawn. He offered Osama business advice. Financial developments within the Bin Laden family may also have speeded his departure. Bakr was about to oversee a major corporate reorganization and inheritance distribution to all the Bin Ladens of Osama’s generation; it would behoove Osama to be present in Saudi Arabia as this occurred. It was, in a broader sense, a time to find his bearings.23

  As he left Peshawar, Osama was driven primarily by a sense of exhaustion and even fear about the divisive course of the Afghan war. He had no coherent plan for the next phase of his life. He left behind some money and technology to keep his Al Qaeda followers going. At camps near Kandahar, they soon installed some Apple computers.24

  TO THE EXTENT it formally existed at all, Al Qaeda at this stage was as much a fundraising network as a militia. This was an aspect of Osama’s leadership that most easily traversed borders. It was also something that could be pursued more readily in Jeddah than in Peshawar. The evidence about the specific reach of Osama’s funding network in 1989 is fragmentary, but it suggests, unsurprisingly, that the Bin Ladens and other wealthy Saudi merchants may have been among the most generous contributors. As Azzam put it just before his death, at a 1989 conference, “Saudi is the only country which stood by the Afghani jihad as a government and people…The Saudi merchants come and establish organizations and give huge amounts—may God reward them.” Documents seized from an Islamic charity in Bosnia, which purport to describe a “Golden Chain” of donors from this period, list more than a dozen Saudi businessmen and bankers, including the “Bin Laden brothers.” American investigators and prosecutors have asserted that the documents are authentic and credible, and have been supported by witness statements. Federal Judge Richard Casey, however, later concluded that the Golden Chain was “only a list of names found in a charity’s office…The Court cannot make the logical leap that the document is a list of early Al Qaeda supporters.” For his part, in an affidavit submitted to Casey, Bakr Bin Laden did not specifically deny making contributions to charities or causes in which Osama was involved during this period, but he did assert, “I have never made any charitable contributions to any organization I understood to be associated with Al Qaeda or terrorism of any sort.” Bakr also said that he was not aware until sometime after 1991 “of any involvement by Osama in terrorist activities of any kind.”25

  Such assertions, of course, turn on the ambiguity, in the context of the Afghan frontier of late 1989, of such terms as “Al Qaeda” and “terrorism.” In any event, Osama returned to Jeddah as a Bin Laden family member in good standing. Jamal Khashoggi saw Osama “a number of times” with Bakr, following Salem’s death. On one occasion, he stayed with Osama at the Bin Laden villa in Riyadh. Bakr joined them one evening. “We had a casual conversation over Afghanistan and other issues,” Khashoggi recalled. “Bakr appeared distracted. He did not get into an in-depth discussion with us…They treated each other with great respect, as a younger brother and older brother would.”26

  Osama continued to embrace media projects that promoted him and his followers to Arab audiences; he imagined himself as a writer-director-producer of jihad. He continued to finance the Egyptian filmmaker Essam Deraz, who had followed him onto the Jalalabad battlefield. As warfare, Jalalabad had been a calamity; as propaganda, it could be salvaged. During the battle, Osama had cast himself not only as an Islamic warrior but also as an actor in a movie about Islamic warriors. Back in Saudi Arabia, he experimented as a producer, screening the director’s cut for friends who could help him evaluate the film’s progress. He invited Khashoggi to a Bin Laden company auditorium at a conference facility in Jeddah and arranged for employees to screen a print of the 16-millimeter film; the audience consisted only of Osama, Khashoggi, and one or two other people. “He wanted my critique of the film, as his journalist friend,” Khashoggi recalled. Osama had left his following in Peshawar, but he remained a star of his own narrative, and his return to the kingdom had not left him isolated. Among other things, said Khashoggi, “He had access to whatever the company had.”27

  25. LUMP SUMS

  BAKR BIN LADEN had reached his early forties. He had grown into a serious, hardworking businessman. He was about the same height as Salem, and he shared many of his features, particularly the soft brown eyes and the smooth, boyish face. The timbre of his voice and the lilt of his accent so closely resembled Salem’s that it could be startling, particularly on the telephone; it was as if Bakr’s voice could summon Salem’s spirit back among the living. In person, however, he did not exude the same irrepressible charm. Bakr kept a mustache, which was not particularly thick, and it added to the slight air of officiousness that he sometimes projected. He was dignified and intelligent, responsible and polite, but he could also be stiff.

  His time as a student at the University of Miami had influenced him but it had not shaped him; he had become a much more thoroughly Arabian man than Salem had ever been. Bakr received his five sons in a formal diwan, or drawing room, setting at his Jeddah home; they bent to kiss him on the hand or on the forehead. Speaking to the boys, he might drop an edifying quotation from the Koran or make passing reference to a story from the Prophet’s lifetime. Bakr had memorized a substantial portion of the Koran during his own religious studies, and when he was in Saudi Arabia, he maintained a rigorous prayer schedule. He did not drink, according to his friends, and after a time he gave up cigarettes. At Hajj he summoned religious teachers to enhance his family’s experience and Islamic education. Still, along the Bin Laden family’s cultural and religious spectrum, and in the context of puritan Saudi Arabia, Bakr was better described as a centrist than as a conservativ
e. In his dedication to civil engineering and in the time he devoted to construction projects in Mecca and Medina, he had come to model his life on that of his father. He even hired, as his driver in Saudi Arabia, a son of the driver who had been waiting for Mohamed at the desert airstrip where his plane crashed and burned. Bakr reared his children as his father had done, with an emphasis on discipline and self-reliance—he would not let his children fly on private jets and insisted that they take care of their own travel documents, tickets, and baggage. And as Mohamed had been, Bakr was at ease in a business climate of ethnic and religious plurality. He worked in close partnership with Middle Eastern Christians, such as the Sarkissian family, with whom he formed a joint venture for major construction projects in Saudi Arabia. He also relied upon Fuad Rihani, an American citizen of Jordanian origin, a Protestant actively involved with Jordanian churches, who served as an important Bin Laden adviser after Bakr took charge.1