The Bin Ladens

by Steve Coll

  Christine wrote that she felt trapped when she visited Saudi Arabia with Sibba. Ibrahim would disappear and “stay at the beach or go to one of his brothers’ houses…and if he did come home…he would eat and take a nap or eat and leave the house quickly.” During her stay in Jeddah during 1991, she wanted to go home to California, but Ibrahim “would not allow Sibba and myself to return to the United States.” Ibrahim took her passport and told her “that it was being held at the Bin Laden Organization’s office.” She needed Ibrahim’s signature to obtain an exit visa, and he refused, she wrote, telling her, “If you want to go home, you can go home, but Sibba is staying.” She now feared, she told the court, that if Ibrahim was permitted to take Sibba to Saudi Arabia as part of their postdivorce custody agreement, she might never return. During their quarrels, Ibrahim had told her “numerous” times that Sibba “would go to Saudi Arabia no matter what happens and no matter what the court orders.” Other members of the Bin Laden family had also told her that if Ibrahim took Sibba to Saudi Arabia, “he would not return her to me.”9

  “I see very clearly the intention of Chris is to punish me by keeping Sibba from going to Saudi Arabia,” Ibrahim wrote in reply. He had “never tried to stop her from leaving” the kingdom; in fact, “I helped her to leave…One time we had an argument and she wanted to leave and I told her you could do whatever you want, she knows very well she could leave if she wanted to. The law a wife can’t leave without a husband’s permission applies on the Saudis only. The only time I take her passport is to get her an exit visa…She did not need any signature from me for her to leave.”

  He felt that Christine was deliberately attempting to alienate him from his young daughter. As an example, he reported that he had recently been laughing with Sibba in the car when he asked her if she was happy, and she said she was, and then she asked him, “Are you happy, Baba?”

  “Yes,” he had answered.

  “But mom said you are unhappy man.”10

  At a deposition called by Ibrahim’s lawyers, Christine described the agreements she and her husband had made about Sibba’s upbringing.

  “So it would be correct, then, that you and Mr. Bin Laden agreed that she was going to be reared in the Muslim faith?

  “Yes.”

  “And would the child be exposed to, and if possible, learn to speak, read and write Arabic?” “Yes.”11

  Ibrahim wanted to raise his daughter as a Saudi and as a Bin Laden, he told the court. It was in Sibba’s best interest to understand who she was, and to become a full member of an extended family upon which she could long rely:

  It is better for her now to know these things and grow up exposed to that culture, because I believe growing up with different “way of life” make you accept them, and it would be harder if she is not exposed to it until later—after she is grown. The other reason I want her to go to Saudi Arabia is to know her other part of the family, to feel their love for her, to be able to speak the language and feel comfortable to pick up the phone and ask any of her family if she needed anything or had a problem.12

  He was convinced that Christine was using their daughter as a lever to extract money from him. “She only started to give me this trouble when she found out the Court will not give her what she wants from me,” namely, alimony of $21,648 a month and an additional $6,188 in child support. He was prepared to offer $3,250 in monthly child support, but as for alimony for Christine, his lawyers asserted, she had “remained with Ibrahim for less than five years, during which she enjoyed the benefits of Ibrahim’s family’s largesse. She certainly didn’t earn a lifetime of such living.” She should go out and find a job; she “has been supported long enough.”13

  Their trial was scheduled for June 1993. As it neared, the two finally began to negotiate. On July 6, 1993, they completed a “Final Divorce Judgment” that brought their struggle to an end—or so they believed.

  Ibrahim agreed to pay $5,000 per month in child support and $335,000 in a onetime cash settlement payment to Christine, with no additional alimony or attorney fees. He would be permitted to keep his 1977 Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow; his 1983 Rolls-Royce Corniche; his 1992 Hummer; his 1991 Lexus; his 1984 Honda Civic; his 1987 Lamborghini jeep; his 1986 Mercedes-Benz 500 SEL; and his Mercedes jeep, as well as sole title to his real estate in Los Angeles and Jeddah, his bank accounts, and his interest in the Mohamed Bin Laden Company. Ibrahim agreed to spend six months of each year in the United States and to share custody of Sibba during that period.

  Christine agreed to enroll their daughter in an Islamic school and to ensure that she received Arabic lessons. Until she was seven years old, Ibrahim could take her to Saudi Arabia for visits of up to one month; later, the stays could be longer.

  It seemed a reasonable if expensively constructed compromise, and, indeed, the divorce decree between Ibrahim and Christine Bin Laden would hold steady for the rest of the decade—until the events of September 11 shattered the bicultural comity on which it rested.

  29. THE CONSTRUCTION OF EXILE

  BRITISH IMPERIALISTS laid out Port Sudan’s geometrical street grid in 1905. Its harbor lay tucked behind coral reef barriers halfway up the Red Sea’s western coast, across from Jeddah. In Britain’s vision of the coming century, the town would thrive at the head of a rail line linking the Nile River to Europe, via the Suez Canal, but the place was still awaiting its renaissance as the twentieth century neared its close. Postcolonial Sudan’s latest leader-for-life, General Omar Bashir, a veteran of brutal wars against African Christians in the country’s south, overthrew an elected prime minister in 1989. As he consolidated power, Bashir allied himself with an Islamist coalition led by a Sorbonne-educated, self-impressed Sudanese theoretician of religion and politics, Hassan Al-Turabi. In the usual manner of coup leaders, they promised to revive their country by investing in infrastructure projects that would benefit “The People.” In the same year that Bashir came to power, an offshore company controlled by the senior Bin Laden brothers won a contract to build a new airport at Port Sudan, where the country’s modest but economically vital oil exports flowed to market. The government of Saudi Arabia, which sought influence with its Red Sea neighbor, pledged to shoulder most of the $35 million cost.1

  The project was assigned to the Public Buildings and Airports Division of the Saudi Bin Laden Group. Omar Bin Laden, the University of Miami graduate, was placed in charge. By 1992 construction was well under way.

  Omar was not the only Bin Laden who now had occasion to visit Port Sudan. At around the same time that his brothers won the airport contract, Osama provided $180,000 to a Sudanese-born aide, Jamal Al-Fadl, to purchase a salt farm near Port Sudan.2 It was one of a number of investments in land and businesses that Osama had decided to make in Sudan. He had visited the country from time to time as he wound down his involvements in Afghanistan. It was an unruly, lively, friendly, and deeply impoverished country where a Saudi sheikh could be made to feel very important and where his hard currency accounts could go a considerable distance. After he found himself under pressure at home in Saudi Arabia, Osama came to see Sudan as preferable to either Pakistan or Yemen as a base for voluntary exile. The country’s Islamist-influenced government and its freewheeling poor society accommodated two strains of his evolving ambition—his commitment to international guerrilla warfare and his desire to establish himself as the head of his own business complex, in a manner comparable to other semi-independent Bin Laden brothers living abroad, such as Yeslam in Switzerland and Khaled in Egypt.

  After he left Saudi Arabia in 1991, although he retained his shareholdings in the two major family firms, Osama seems to have regarded Bakr’s leadership of the Bin Ladens with gathering contempt. On some foreign policy issues of the day—the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the suffering of Muslim civilians in Bosnia and Chechnya—Osama’s outlook remained in broad alignment with the conventional wisdom of the Saudi establishment, which his elder brother took such pains to internalize and represent. Osama’s tacti
cal approaches to these conflicts were increasingly independent, however. In 1992 the war in Bosnia measured the new equation between Osama and Bakr. Violence erupted around Sarajevo early in the year, and satellite news broadcasters beamed terrible images of Muslim civilian suffering to the Middle East. In July Bakr attended a glittering fundraising dinner at Jeddah’s Laylaty Hall, a site of society wedding receptions near the Red Sea. The guest list that night included Saudi foreign minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal. Contemporary Saudi newspaper stories reported that the donors, including Bakr, contributed about $5 million to the Bosnian cause, channeled through international Islamic charities. Osama was stirred by the same television imagery that spring, but his response was of a different kind—from Sudan, he dispatched a team of Afghan veterans to join the shooting war against Croatia’s attacking Catholics. “Gifts of charity,” Osama later wrote pointedly, “are weak…Bosnia is in need of men [and] weapons.”3

  He seemed increasingly proud of his martial ambitions, particularly in comparison to the softer, regime-authorized foreign policy work of his brothers. A Bin Laden employee who had helped Osama during the anti-Soviet period in Afghanistan recalled meeting him at the Port Sudan airport construction site, where the employee was overseeing Bin Laden work camps. Osama seemed disappointed in him, as the employee remembered it. “I’m fighting a war here,” Osama said, “and you’re building an airport.”4

  It would have been natural for Osama to visit the airport site—he was, after all, a shareholder of the Saudi Bin Laden Group, which was carrying out the contract—but whether he participated in that multimillion-dollar project to a greater extent, or profited from it, remains unclear. At some point between late 1991 and mid-1992, Osama decided to move permanently with his four wives and growing number of children to Sudan’s capital of Khartoum, which lay about seven hundred miles southwest of Port Sudan. He organized a number of new businesses in the city, with names such as Ladin International Company and Al-Hijra Construction; the latter referred to the Prophet Mohamed’s famous passage into exile, from Mecca to Medina. It was a presumptuous self-reference but one that spoke to Osama’s rising sense of himself as both righteous and persecuted, a self-image drawn in part from the experiences of his earliest mentors—his exiled prep school gymnasium teacher, who indoctrinated him, as well as the itinerant Palestinian organizer, Abdullah Azzam. As Osama now refitted, he may have imported construction equipment he had previously stored in Pakistan. His early projects in Sudan included some road building, according to Al-Fadl, particularly an eighty-three-mile road in the southwest of the country, near the border with Ethiopia.5

  Several sources—although not Al-Fadl—have also mentioned Osama’s involvement with the Port Sudan airport project. Richard Clarke, the Clinton administration’s counterterrorism supervisor, has identified “a new airport” as among Bin Laden’s early Sudan projects, which Clarke said were undertaken as “a joint project” with the Islamist leader Al-Turabi. (Hassan Al-Turabi was fast becoming the latest in a succession of older religious intellectuals to mentor Osama self-interestedly, stroking his ego while reaching for his wallet.) Al-Turabi’s wife has been quoted as saying that Osama “built the Port Sudan airport.” Omar Bin Laden, however, has sworn in an affidavit that “to the best of my knowledge, Osama had no role in the performance of the Port Sudan airport construction project.” Omar also denied that the major Bin Laden family firms participated in joint construction projects of any kind with Osama or “with any other company controlled by Osama” while he was in Sudan during the 1990s.6

  The Port Sudan airport was mostly finished by June 1992. That month, Prince Mohamed bin Abdullah Al-Saqeer of the Saudi Development Fund led an official delegation, including newspaper reporters, to attend a ribbon-cutting ceremony. Omar Bin Laden, dressed in a red-checked headdress, his round face sporting a neatly trimmed mustache, took the podium. He recited statistics about the new airport’s size and facilities. “This project has been accomplished by the will of God, and according to the international requirements and specifications,” Omar said. “We are happy to participate in this celebration to inaugurate this large cultural edifice and we ask God to bless this project and everyone who participated in it.”7

  An account published in the London-based newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi almost a decade later reported that Osama was a “guest of honor” at this ceremony and that he sat in the front row. Omar Bin Laden has denied this, writing in an affidavit, “To the best of my recollection, Osama was not in attendance.” Omar produced contemporary Saudi newspaper stories that made no mention of Osama’s presence. “I did not see or meet with Osama on that trip or, in fact, on any other trip I made to the Sudan.”8

  Bakr Bin Laden did meet with Osama in Khartoum during 1992. He traveled there “accompanied by other family members,” according to a family attorney, “to make a plea to Osama to return to his country, make amends with the Saudi government, and abandon the path of political opposition and exile from country and family on which he appeared to have set.” This was Bakr’s last meeting with Osama according to Bakr. Other family members and emissaries apparently continued to visit Osama and plead with him to come home. There were “almost nine” such missions, in Osama’s oddly phrased counting, and they appear to have lasted at least into 1994. Osama’s half-brother Tareq, for example, recalled visiting Khartoum in “late 1992 or early 1993.” His purpose, he remembered, was “to convince Osama to abandon his criticisms of the Saudi government and return to Saudi Arabia.” It was a short visit; Osama said that “he was happy in the Sudan and did not want to return to Saudi Arabia, as he was focused on building his businesses in the Sudan.” Tareq believed that Osama was engaged in legitimate business, he later told an American court. Tareq “did not see or hear anything during the visit suggesting that [Osama] was involved in terrorist or violent activities of any kind. Nor did he express any hostility to the United States.”9

  These missions to Khartoum began when it “became clear to us that he had a hand in one way or another in some of these things, such as terrorist operations in Egypt and Libya,” according to Ahmed Badeeb, then chief of staff to the head of Saudi intelligence, Prince Turki. “The King ordered that Osama Bin Laden be called into the Kingdom. He was asked to return in order to discuss some of the things that needed to be discussed, and other things that were harming the Kingdom, but he refused to. He was sent a few messages, and his family was contacted; he continued to refuse to return.”10

  King Fahd ordered Bakr to see Osama and persuade him to come home for consultations, according to two people who have discussed the matter with Bakr. He found Osama stubborn and arrogant. In his own account, Osama has emphasized that he did not blame any of his relatives for their entreaties—he regarded them as victims of King Fahd’s pressure, and he believed that his family’s dependency on the Al-Saud for construction contracts made them vulnerable to a form of extortion by the Saudi government. “I apologized to my family kindly,” Osama said, “because I know that they were driven by force to come to talk to me. This regime wants to create a problem between me and my family in order to take some measures against them.”11

  Some people in and around the Bin Laden family wondered if Bakr was really an adequate match for Osama. Bakr could come across as a less than commanding presence; one person who knew him well said he could seem like the boy on the playground who is often picked last for team games. As the family’s Osama problem accumulated during 1992 and early 1993, even some who respected and admired Bakr wondered how Salem might have handled things differently. Salem had been such a forceful whirlwind—he was physical, insistent, and difficult to stop. If he had been alive to undertake these early missions to Khartoum, Osama might have been returned to the kingdom in a burlap sack, tossed into the cabin of a private jet with a pile of Salem’s designer-brand luggage. But Salem was gone; Osama seemed to exploit the void.

  He seemed also to revel in the attention that came with his family’s pleading. “He was o
ut of touch in Sudan,” recalled his friend Jamal Khashoggi, who visited him there several times. Bodyguards, acolytes, employees, and volunteer fighters encased him as he moved around Khartoum; the nationalities and occupations of his followers varied, but they all depended on his money and his patronage. He shuffled between comfortable offices on King Leopard Street and a shaded home-office compound in posh Riyadh City. He attended horse races and stabled his own horses on his farms. His grandest business project involved an enormous tract of agricultural land in the southwest granted to him by the Sudanese government, where seasonal Sudanese laborers in his employ harvested oil and seeds from sunflowers; Osama showed off his largest flowers with the pride of a passionate gardener. He was tossing money by the bucketful into new and questionable Sudanese businesses, but in 1992 and early 1993, he nonetheless had plenty of cash to go around—enough to spend $480,000 on the purchase and renovation of a used airplane ferried in from the United States, and enough to meet payroll for several hundred Arab jihadis flown in from Pakistan, as well as the many hundreds of Sudanese laborers at his sunflower farm. Osama seemed to believe during this period that he could have it all in Sudan—wives, children, business, horticulture, horse breeding, leisure, pious devotion, and jihad—all of it buoyed by the deference and public reputation due a proper sheikh. He did not yet seem to grasp that his enterprise, particularly in its support for violence against governments friendly to or dependent upon the Al-Saud, might prove difficult to reconcile with the interests of his family in Jeddah. He could seem oblivious to the fissures opening up around him. When Jamal Khashoggi visited, Osama even spoke at length about his desire to organize an investment drive that would draw prominent Saudi businesses to Sudan, in order to strengthen this important new Islamist-leaning country.