The Bin Ladens

by Steve Coll

“Osama, don’t you realize that people are afraid to be associated with you?” Khashoggi asked. Osama did not answer. He only smiled, Khashoggi recalled, “as if he were happy he was so important.”12

  ON FEBRUARY 26, 1993, in New York, a car bomb detonated in a parking garage of the World Trade Center, killing six people and injuring just over one thousand. Investigators soon identified a fugitive, Ramzi Yousef, a Pakistani raised in Kuwait, educated in Wales, and trained at camps in Afghanistan, as the leader of the conspiracy. Although Osama Bin Laden was not identified as Yousef ’s direct patron, then or later, in the broader media coverage of transnational jihad that followed the first World Trade Center attack, some journalists and commentators did note Osama’s presence in Sudan and described his reported financial handouts to multinational volunteer fighters. For the Saudi royal family, this attention transformed Osama, for the first time, from a discreet domestic problem into a public embarrassment.13

  Less than three months after the New York bombing, on May 3, 1993, in Riyadh, Mohammed Al-Masari, a professor of physics, and Saad Al-Faqih, a medical doctor, announced the formation of the Committee for the Defense of Legitimate Rights, an organization seeking reform of the Saudi political system. Al-Masari and Al-Faqih were both Islamists; the Muslim Brotherhood, in particular, had influenced Al-Faqih, who came from a well-known Saudi family of doctors who attended to the royals. Al-Masari, for his part, had shown unusual facility as a media spokesman and organizer at a time when unlicensed satellite television dishes and fax machines were proliferating in Saudi households. Both men had been involved in political petition drives and underground sermon distribution after the Gulf war. After two years of organizing, Al-Faqih said later, “Everything appeared to be in place: charismatic preachers, thousands of enthusiastic followers, and a religious public. What was missing was an effective organization to channel this energy and pose a serious challenge to the regime.” They prepared carefully for their committee’s formal launch. Al-Masari met with diplomats at the U.S. embassy and solicited their support. The BBC, Voice of America, and other global media covered the organization’s debut.14

  King Fahd struck back decisively. Perhaps he felt he had allowed these currents of dissent to drift along for too long. On May 12, the kingdom’s official Council of Higher ‘Ulema, its supreme body of religious scholars, denounced the upstart reformers, pronouncing officially and pointedly that they had violated Islamic law. Police arrested Al-Masari, Al-Faqih, and other known troublemakers. A broader attack on Islamist dissenters followed.

  Osama now became a target; it is not entirely clear why. He is not known to have signed any of the important documents associated with the Al-Faqih–led dissident group, which posed a much more visible threat to the Saudi regime. It is possible that Osama issued tape-recorded or other underground sermons denouncing the Al-Saud during this period, and that the Interior Ministry discovered them. “We were there, working secretly,” Khalid Al-Fawwaz, who later served as Osama’s spokesman in London, once boasted.15 It is equally possible, however, that the Saudi government simply decided to include Osama’s case in its broader crackdown, given that he had now acquired an international profile in Sudan and that the government’s previous efforts to reel him in, through Bakr and other family channels, had failed.

  On June 16, 1993, in Jeddah, Bakr undertook proceedings within the Bin Laden family to expel Osama as a shareholder of the Mohamed Bin Laden Company and the Saudi Bin Laden Group. In a later affidavit, Bakr implied that the family took this initiative, but it is likely that pressure from the Saudi government was a substantial cause. Bakr acted, he explained, “because Osama’s increasingly vocal criticisms of the Saudi government were harmful to the companies’ reputations in the Kingdom and elsewhere in the Middle East, and because Osama had refused to comply with the Saudi government’s demand that he return to the Kingdom.”16

  “In the Name of Allah, Most Merciful, Most Compassionate,” began the text of one resolution setting forth “the Exit of One Shareholder.” The document suggests the family negotiated with Osama before it went forward. For example, Osama designated a “lawful attorney” from Jeddah, Muhamad Salem Al-Yaf ’ei, to represent him. Also, Osama specifically assigned all his divested shares to Ghalib Bin Laden, the younger full brother of Bakr and Salem. It was Ghalib who had visited Peshawar, Pakistan, during Ramadan in 1989, at a time when Osama was fighting in the battle for Jalalabad. There is evidence that Ghalib retained an interest in Islamic financial institutions at the time he agreed to accept Osama’s divested shares: in late 1993, Ghalib transferred $1 million to a new investment account at Bank Al-Taqwa, in the Bahamas, an offshore bank founded in 1988 with backing from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Al-Taqwa funded HAMAS in Israel and other Brotherhood-influenced radical groups in Algeria and Tunisia, according to a written assessment by the U.S. Treasury Department. What involvement Bakr Bin Laden had in the Al-Taqwa investment is not known, but Bakr did have signature authority over Ghalib’s account, which remained active until at least the late 1990s, according to bank documents filed in a U.S. court. Ghalib later sought to withdraw his investment from Al-Taqwa and filed suit against the bank. Through family attorneys, Ghalib said that he had never provided financial or other support for terrorism of any kind.17

  The June 1993 shareholder resolutions initiated a process that lasted until the end of the year, leading to the final disposition of Osama’s assets. Its purpose, according to a family attorney, was “to deprive Osama of access to any funds derived from his interests in the family-owned companies.” Bakr and other family shareholders “were firmly opposed to any direct or indirect financial support from the family companies.” Tareq Bin Laden, a director of Mohamed Bin Laden’s flagship construction firm, felt that “Osama’s vocal criticisms of the Saudi government were harming the companies’ reputations in the Middle East.” There were also consultations during this time between the family and the Saudi Ministry of Commerce. The pace apparently allowed additional family delegations to visit Khartoum and plead with Osama to reconsider his position. His mother was among those dispatched. At least one younger brother met with him, according to Jamal Khashoggi, who was present in Sudan during that particular visit. (It was a “brother-to-brother” conversation, said Khashoggi, and he did not join in.) The most prestigious visitor throughout this period was Abdullah Bin Awadh Bin Laden, the legendary brother of Osama’s father, who was now near eighty years old. Bakr might be the head of the Bin Laden family for all practical and financial matters, but Abdullah, eldest of the male elders, remained a spiritual and moral leader. That a man of his age would fly to rough Khartoum to plead with Osama signaled the seriousness of the situation. Osama dug in. “With God’s grace,” as he described it later, “this regime did not get its wish fulfilled. I refused to go back.”18

  His relatives warned him “that if I did not go back, they’ll freeze all my assets, deprive me of my citizenship, my passport, and my Saudi i.d., and distort my picture in the Saudi and foreign media. They think that a Muslim may bargain on his religion. I said to them: ‘Do whatever you may wish.’”19

  Osama’s shares in the Mohamed Bin Laden Company and the Saudi Bin Laden Group were sold in a transaction designed so that Osama would not profit, yet in a way that would protect the rights of his heirs under Islamic law. The total value of Osama’s combined shares was set at about $9.9 million—a strikingly modest sum, but one that is difficult to evaluate, as an indicator of the market value of the Bin Laden companies, because few of the underlying assumptions used to set the price are available. In round numbers, however, the sale price suggests a total valuation of about $500 million for the two main Bin Laden companies combined. After consultations with the Saudi government, the funds generated by the sale of Osama’s shares were placed in some kind of special trust and eventually frozen, under court supervision. According to Abdulaziz Al-Gasim, a Saudi attorney who was jailed during the 1990s because of his Islamist activism, a Saudi judge ruled tha
t the government could “take this money, seize it” but that it should not permit it to be distributed “to the other relatives.” Under Islamic law, Al-Gasim said, the money should be protected for the possibility of Osama’s reconciliation with the kingdom or, after his death, for his heirs. A number of aspects of Osama’s shareholding divestment remain unclear, however. For example, it is uncertain whether Ghalib paid cash for Osama’s shares, and if so, where he raised the money from. Is there a bank account in Saudi Arabia that has held the $9.9 million in trust ever since the sale was completed? How do Saudi courts assert control over such an account, if it exists? If the sale did not involve a cash payment, but rather a credit of some sort, how was this organized and who has kept track of the proceeds since then? The Bin Laden family has provided little clarity about these details. In any event, Osama was cut off from all dividend and loan payments, according to Bakr Bin Laden. “Osama has not received a penny” from any Bin Laden companies “since, at the latest, June 1993,” Bakr wrote in a later affidavit. Moreover, “I have not authorized and, indeed, have forbidden any person” acting on behalf of any Bin Laden firms “to make any payments, do any business with, or otherwise provide any support directly or indirectly to Osama or any of his companies since June 1993.”20

  In February 1994—for the first time—the Bin Laden family publicly repudiated Osama in a press statement. Bakr authorized a short release, which appeared in a Saudi newspaper under the headline “Bakr Bin Laden: All Family Members Condemn Osama Bin Laden’s Behavior.” The story referred to “reports by the media” about Osama and then offered two sentences from Bakr “to clarify his family’s position towards him.” Bakr announced:

  I myself, and all members of the family, whose number exceeds fifty persons, express our strong condemnation and denunciation of all the behavior of Osama, which behavior we do not accept or approve of. As said Osama has been residing outside the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for more than two years despite our attempts to convince him to return to the right path, we, therefore, consider him to be alone responsible for his statements, actions, and behavior, if truly emanating from him.21

  It was a careful formulation, focused on Osama’s conduct, not his character, and expressing a whiff of doubt about the reliability of media reporting about him. Two months later, in April, an equally terse statement from the Ministry of Interior announced that Osama Bin Laden had been formally stripped of his Saudi citizenship. The release cited Article 29 of the “Saudi nationality regulation”; it declared that Osama had refused to obey instructions, and that his actions “contradict the Kingdom’s national interest.” A Saudi government freeze on the proceeds of Osama’s divested shareholdings also took effect that month. According to attorneys for the Saudi Bin Laden Group, Osama “never had access to these funds” although they were not placed “in trust outside [his] control” until 1994, about nine months after the divestment proceedings began.22

  Osama issued no formal statement of his own on any of these occasions. Instead, beginning in the summer of 1994, he began to behave like a man who felt, so far as the Saudi royal family was concerned, that he no longer had anything to lose.

  BY EARLY 1994, Osama had already secretly dispatched groups of jihad fighters, arms smugglers, and organizers to Somalia, Kenya, Yemen, Bosnia, Egypt, Libya, and Tajikistan, among other places, according to letters and testimony by his followers and allies. Some of these fighters arrived at their destinations and found that local conditions were not ripe for warfare. Others, like the Egyptian exiles around Ayman Al-Zawahiri, organized violent and ambitious conspiracies, such as an attempt to assassinate Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak—the plot went forward in 1995, when Mubarak was visiting Ethiopia, but it failed.

  Al Qaeda persisted as a formal organization during these years; in Khartoum, steering committees wrestled with drafts of a wordy constitution. Its mission was to seed jihad in Muslim lands seen as under occupation or ruled by apostates. Still, it was a group more characterized by diversity than discipline. Partly this was because Osama himself remained unsettled about how he would define and organize his own participation in the international jihad—with his loss of citizenship and family shareholdings, he was in a renewed state of flux. His gifts of foresight and political analysis had always been limited; he now entered a period of groping and searching. Yet he made one explicit, forthright decision during the summer of 1994: he openly joined the opposition to the Saudi royal family.

  His chief aide in this project was Khalid Al-Fawwaz, who was then in his early thirties. He had been born in Kuwait and studied engineering at King Fahd University in Saudi Arabia; he spoke English well. He had moved to Nairobi, where he dealt in automobiles and was in contact with other Al Qaeda adherents in the country to plan for a violent attack against Western targets. In early 1994, Al-Fawwaz was arrested; afterward he decided to escape from Kenya with his family. He made his way to London.23

  Al-Faqih and Al-Masari, the Saudi activists arrested the previous spring after unveiling their Committee for the Defense of Legitimate Rights, had escaped to London as well, with help from the Islamist underground. Osama had initially doubted the credibility of Al-Faqih’s reform group: “We thought at first that this may be a ploy by the regime to take the wind out of the sail of our movement, but by the time we realized that these were our brothers, they were taken into custody,” Al-Fawwaz later explained.24 Now they were all united in London exile, protected by Britain’s asylum laws, which were among the most liberal in Europe. Working from ramshackle houses in North London, Al-Faqih and Al-Masari relaunched their opposition group, which represented the most serious political challenge to Al-Saud rule in Arabia since the Nasser period. Al-Fawwaz shared office space with them. Osama, however, did not wish to formally join. He wanted an organization of his own.

  The Committee for Advice and Reform debuted in July 1994 in London. It was Osama’s own vehicle for participating in Saudi politics as an exiled dissenter and pamphleteer. It was little more than a musty room and a fax machine, but it described itself as “an all-encompassing organization that aims at applying the teachings of God to all aspects of life.” It had four aims: to eradicate all forms of non-Islamic governance; to achieve Islamic justice; to reform the Saudi political system and “purify it from corruption and injustice”; and to revive the traditional Islamic system by which citizens had the right, guided by religious scholars, to bring charges against government officials.25

  Osama’s committee was born in a period of technological prelude, on the eve of the explosion of the World Wide Web. At the time, fax machines offered the easiest way to send text documents across government borders without the risk of censorship. By the autumn of 1994, Al-Faqih, Al-Masari, and Al-Fawwaz were all blasting faxes from their allied groups to lists of numbers all around Saudi Arabia, the Gulf, and to international media outlets.

  In Khartoum, released at last from any constraints of family and national loyalties, Osama sat at his several desks during late 1994 and early 1995 and wrote out lengthy essays, as frequently as once a week. He sent them to Al-Fawwaz, who put them on the blast fax. Some pieces were the length of op-ed articles; others went on for thousands of words, laced with religious quotations. Osama’s subject was not so much Islam as Saudi Arabia. His tone about the kingdom, the country his father and his family had done so much to build and legitimize, was often intemperate, impetuous, petty, sarcastic, or unreservedly angry. On September 12, 1994: “Saudi Arabia Unveils Its War on Islam and Its Scholars.” A week later: “Do not Give Inferiority To Your Religion.” On October 15, referring to the Saudi government’s Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs: “Supreme Council for Damage.” On March 9, 1995: “Saudi Arabia Continues War on Islam and Its Scholars.” On July 11: “Prince Sultan and Flight Commissions.”26

  He denounced by name King Fahd and his full brothers, the so-called Sudeiris, who were now the dominant grouping in the royal family—Nayef, at the Interior Ministry; Sultan, at the Defense Ministry; and
Salman, the governor of Riyadh. Osama did not write subtly about them. Nayef, with whom he had met regularly and collaboratively during the Afghan war of the 1980s, had a “shady history” and was “filled with craftiness towards Islam and hatred for its advocates and religious authorities.” These princes were unworthy of their roles as guardians of the birthplace of Islam:

  How could any intelligent person who knows the facts believe that these kinsmen—who corrupt the land and wage war on Allah and His Prophet—could possibly have been brought to serve Islam and Muslims?27

  Prince Salman, he later wrote, “has a shady past in which he has defrauded Islam and waged war on its people.” Prince Sultan was one of the “tricksters” who milked contracts for commissions and helped to drive the Saudi economy into the ground. And over all of this perfidy, greed, and incompetence presided King Fahd, who had impeded God’s laws, aligned himself with nonbelievers, and had proved to be “hostile to Islam and Muslims.”28

  To Saudi readers, his explicit attacks on Fahd and his full brothers had an obvious corollary—Osama was silent about the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Abdullah, who was presumed by many Saudis to be estranged from the Sudeiris and who enjoyed a reputation for relative piety and financial rectitude. It was possible to imagine in 1995 that pressure from Islamist campaigners abroad and jailed religious scholars at home might create a quiet coup among the Al-Saud, favoring Abdullah, similar to that which had brought Faisal to the throne three decades earlier. Osama seemed to be developing this angle in his essays. In one tract, he explicitly listed the late years of Faisal’s reign as an exception to his criticisms of royal family rule. From Switzerland, Yeslam Bin Laden predicted that Osama would be restored to power within the Bin Laden family, and Bakr would fade, once Abdullah came to the throne, according to Carmen Bin Laden.29 Osama did probably fantasize that the Islamists might force Fahd out, and that Abdullah might then welcome him home on terms he could embrace. Who could predict the future? It was in God’s hands.