The Bin Ladens

by Steve Coll

  They met several times for dinner at another of Abdullah’s favorite restaurants, in Cambridge. It was called Helmand, after a province in southern Afghanistan. It was run by a gregarious, exiled Afghan family—the Karzais.

  Over dinners at Helmand, Hess mentioned to Abdullah that he was having trouble raising money to support some of his academic programs. The Bin Ladens were mostly interested in supporting Islamic studies, Abdullah told him. Hess said that if he had enough funding, he could bring in lecturers and speakers from the Islamic world, to address economic and political issues that fit the Tufts curriculum. Abdullah said he would see what he could do.

  Later, he delivered a check to Tufts for $350,000.25

  31. A TROJAN DESK

  A CAR BOMB bearing about 250 pounds of explosives detonated in Riyadh on November 13, 1995. It was the worst terrorist attack in the kingdom since the almost-forgotten days of proxy war with Yemen during the 1960s. The targets this time were not Saudis, however. Seven people died, including five Americans, and thirty-four others were wounded. The attackers, soon beheaded, were former Afghan jihadis; one said in a televised confession that they had been inspired by the writings of Osama Bin Laden. From the point of view of the Bin Laden family, it was hard to judge which was the more discouraging possibility—that the terrorist’s confession had been authentic, or that he had been encouraged by Saudi interrogators to implicate Osama publicly, in order to discredit him. In an indirect sense, the Bin Ladens had also been on the receiving end of the attack. The targeted building was an American training facility for the Saudi National Guard. One of the facility’s principal contractors, a specialist in military training, was Vinnell Corporation, a low-profile company that has been described by a former board member as associated with the Central Intelligence Agency. Several spouses of Vinnell contractors were among the wounded. At the time, the Carlyle Group owned the firm—although not through the same fund in which the Bin Ladens had just invested. The larger point was the same: the family was now officially at war with itself, even if that war was embryonic and in many respects undeclared.1

  Bakr said nothing in public, beyond the press statements he had previously issued, but in private, he tried to make clear to the Americans and Europeans he knew that he was appalled by Osama’s increasingly violent radicalism. Around Christmas 1995, just a few weeks after the Riyadh attack, Bakr flew a number of Salem’s old American and British friends to Jeddah, all expenses paid. Salem’s eldest daughter, Sara, was marrying a young man from a prominent Jeddah merchant family, one that had a lucrative car dealership. Bakr hosted a reunion of some of the pilots and musicians who had known Salem in the glory days.2

  The contrasts now accumulating within the family, even at its home base in Jeddah, were startling. Bakr’s Red Sea estate lay a few miles south of one of the family’s grand real estate projects, the Salhia Lotus Beach Resort. The development was named for Saheha Bin Laden, the half-brother of Bakr who had traveled widely in Europe and the United States. The resort opened as a private beach club with two hundred furnished chalets and studios, located on Jeddah’s North Obhur Beach. Security guards carefully checked the names of Saudi members and authorized foreign guests before allowing them behind the resort’s walls. Once inside, the reason for such tight security became obvious: there were women in bikinis lounging alongside men in Speedos; Saudis mixing in their bathing suits with foreigners of both sexes; and Lebanese Christians splashing in the swimming pool with crosses and crucifixes dangling around their necks. It was as if the Bin Ladens had built, and were operating for profit, an alternative Saudi Arabia in a wealthy corner of Jeddah’s northern suburbs.3

  Away from the beach club, at Sara’s wedding reception, Bakr was his more traditional self; the genders were duly segregated, and there was an emphasis on fruit juice. Bakr invited some of his foreign guests aboard his large, steel-hulled boat and motored into the Red Sea, where he dropped anchor and hosted an afternoon of shipside swimming. Spirits ran high throughout several days of celebration. Anita Pizza, the pianist, and Gerald Auerbach, the American pilot who had flown both Mohamed and Salem, and who was now in his seventies, were persuaded to run through some of Salem’s favorite numbers. Auerbach belted out “On Top of Old Smokey,” for old times.4

  THE MUTED OPENING of Osama’s war on Saudi Arabia coincided with the end of King Fahd’s reign—at least, the end of his ability to rule actively. On November 29, 1995, Fahd suffered a massive stroke. Perhaps the Riyadh bombing and its aftermath raised his blood pressure, or perhaps it was only age or genetics or his untreated obesity. He almost died, but his doctors, so long the beneficiaries of his patronage and largesse, worked to save him. By doing so they inaugurated an Elizabethan-tinged drama of rivalry and succession maneuvering within the Saudi royal family.

  The intrigue was more whispered about than witnessed, more presumed than observed, but its outlines were clear enough. As long as Fahd remained technically alive, he would be king, even if he could do little more than nod silently in his wheelchair. The Al-Saud had no precedent for removing an ailing monarch, and after all, the crown prince could govern in his stead. But there was more to this decision than constitutional order. As long as Fahd remained on the throne, his full brothers—Sultan at Defense; Nayef and Ahmed at Interior; and Salman, the governor of Riyadh—might remain unchallenged in their lucrative ministerial fiefdoms, free to supervise their own contracts and to preside over their own patronage machines. Moreover, Fahd’s favorite son, Abdulaziz, might continue to enrich himself and those around him. (By 1993 companies controlled by the Ibrahim family, Abdulaziz’s maternal uncles, owned real estate in the United States valued at more than $1.2 billion worldwide, including Ritz-Carlton hotels in New York, Washington, Houston, and Aspen; a 23,000-acre ranch in Colorado; the Marina del Rey complex in Los Angeles; and a planned resort community near Disney World.) If Fahd died, Crown Prince Abdullah would take the throne—penny-pinching, provincial, isolated, stubborn, unreliable Abdullah, as the Fahd group tended to see him. In “their heart of hearts,” said Wyche Fowler, who served as U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia as this narrative unfolded, Fahd’s full brothers “were not enthusiastic that Abdullah would be their next king.”5

  Abdullah remained, as a British diplomat had described him several decades earlier, “abrupt, impulsive, but popular.”6 He had little formal education, but his steady contact across decades with tribal levies in the National Guard had attuned his ear to public opinion—or, at least, to the opinions of male soldiers from the major tribes. At the time of Fahd’s stroke, Abdullah seemed to grasp, in a way that Fahd’s son, full brothers, and brothers-in-law did not, that the kingdom simply could not continue to drift along, ignoring the excesses of the royal family, as it had done for so long. Oil prices fell steadily during the 1990s, eventually touching record lows, if inflation was taken into account. Saudi Arabia’s per capita income, which had soared during the initial oil boom period, also declined dramatically—in part because the size of the native Saudi population grew at alarming rates. Yet Saudis remained poorly equipped for the modern workplace, and the kingdom’s universities remained dominated by religious curricula. In his seventies, living in his own grand palaces and on his desert farms, Abdullah was no firebrand reformer, but at a minimum, he wanted to bring the most visible excesses and self-enrichment of senior princes under control. He tried after Fahd’s stroke to unwind or cancel some of the most egregious contracts, such as the Al-Yamamah deal overseen by Prince Sultan, but he found his anti-corruption drive to be difficult. Among other things, according to Fowler, Fahd’s group sometimes evaded his edicts on contracting by routing their business through the untouchable young Abdulaziz—he was, after all, still the king’s favorite son. Then, too, Abdullah faced his own family members interested in business opportunities. Some of his own sons were entering into commerce, and one of those sons was a school friend of Abdulaziz. Abdullah might have sound instincts about Saudi Arabia’s needs, but he shared power, lac
ked strong blood allies, and possessed no transformational vision. Political and economic reform in the kingdom, it soon became plain, would be at best an evolutionary project, one where the pace might be barely perceptible to the human eye—nothing like what Osama Bin Laden and his allied dissidents in London had apparently hoped that Abdullah might champion.

  As Osama careened toward violence in 1996, his family moved to strengthen its ties to America, and to hedge their bets. The Al-Saud, on the other hand, allowed their alliance with Washington to deteriorate. A shared antipathy to communism no longer bound Saudi Arabia to America. The rise of potent transnational Islamist ideology and jihadi violence, some of it supported by Saudi fundraising, presented a new divide. There were also more particular factors. Fahd’s sudden incapacitation was one—he had been the most pro-American king in Saudi history, by a considerable margin. At the Saudi embassy in Washington, Bandar Bin Sultan, the longtime ambassador, had failed to strike up a successful relationship with Clinton; they were similar personalities, and they seemed to annoy each other. Bandar drifted into diplomatic irrelevancy, and his embassy, filled with Saudi bureaucrats from the religious and education ministries who did not speak much English, became an impediment to day-to-day communication between the two governments. In an astonishingly short time, the confident, risk-taking, back-of-the-envelope relationship that had prevailed between Washington and Riyadh during the Cold War and the Gulf war came to an end. In its place rose a muddled, mutually resentful engagement in which the top leaders of the two countries rarely spoke, while midlevel and cabinet-level officials fumed at one another over perceived slights and failures to cooperate.

  Early in 1996, alarmed by Osama’s support for violent attacks against American and Arab targets, the CIA formed a new unit to track him. Michael Scheuer, its leader, as one of his first tasks, submitted a request to the Saudi government for basic information about Osama Bin Laden—his medical records, his birth certificate, if one existed, and copies of the residence permit and passport the government claimed it had previously seized from him. Scheuer never heard a word in reply. He soon concluded that the Saudi government should be regarded as “hostile” to the United States on the subject of Osama and his Islamist militia. That was the same terminology used at the CIA to describe the intelligence services of Cuba and Iran. “They refused to do anything to help us, or even to provide us the minimal information,” Scheuer said later. He and other CIA officers also thought it was possible that Osama had recruited sympathizers or followers inside the Saudi intelligence or security services. Equally, the Saudi services themselves, in Scheuer’s analysis, wanted from the very beginning of the violence Bin Laden inspired to protect themselves from American investigations into Saudi Arabia’s private collaborations with Osama in the past, dating back to the anti-Soviet Afghan war. “Bin Laden knows so much about who the Saudis dealt with during the Afghan war, how the mechanisms for moving money work,” Scheuer concluded. “They were protecting the royal family, they were protecting the skeletons in the closet from the Afghan war.” Scheuer also believed, as did Clinton’s counterterrorism aide Richard Clarke, that the Saudi government had authorized some of Osama’s adventures in South Yemen—that they were not the rogue jihadi operations later depicted by Prince Turki. This history, too, had to be shielded from the Americans, in Scheuer’s analysis.7

  Scheuer did not want to share sensitive CIA information with the Saudis, for fear it would leak through to Osama. For their part, some of the Saudis felt the same way about the CIA. When they passed on information they regarded as sensitive, they, too, often read it in the American papers or heard it on CNN.

  Prince Nayef, the interior minister, presented perhaps the greatest obstacle to trust and cooperation after Fahd’s stroke. Nayef was particularly hostile toward the CIA. During the 1970s, the CIA had presented him with a new desk for his office as a gift. Afterward, Nayef discovered a listening device on the desk. He had a long memory.8

  32. THE AESTHETICS OF WORSHIP

  CITIZENS OF SAUDI ARABIA made up a tiny percentage of the world’s Muslim population—less than 2 percent by the mid-1990s. The kingdom’s influence on Islamic thought, however, had become pervasive. Oil wealth and its missionary purchases—mosques built in poorer Muslim countries, salaried imams of the Wahhabi school to oversee those mosques, pamphlets and textbooks to instruct the young—explained some of its reach. Yet the number of Muslims individually touched even by this expansive proselytizing remained relatively small. Far more important to the lived experience of Islam by its faithful was the annual Hajj. When King Abdulaziz founded Saudi Arabia early in the twentieth century, a busy Hajj season might see fifty thousand pilgrims visiting the kingdom. The jet age, the oil boom, and the growth of middle-class Muslim populations in Asia and elsewhere meant that by the end of the 1990s, a typical number annually was about 2 million. The pilgrims all arrived at the same time of year and all went to the same places, Medina and Mecca, more or less simultaneously. They arrived, too, in a heightened state of spiritual awareness, if not longing or near-rapture. On this heavily preconceived yet richly emotional journey, millions of Muslims discovered and judged modern Saudi Arabia. It was a process about as reliable as the one by which Saudis discovered America through vacations in Disney World and west Los Angeles. But it was no less true or powerful, in either case, for being incomplete.

  Well-educated, globally conscious Hajj pilgrims from poorer Muslim countries such as Egypt or India sometimes resented Saudi Arabia for two reasons: its garish, wasteful nouveau wealth, and its intolerant religious orthodoxy. To encounter for the first time the kingdom’s pre-stressed concrete modernity and its designer-label greed, all integrated with its insistent theological doctrines, could be unsettling. A pilgrim might approach Saudi Arabia aspiring to inner purity; what he found there could be polluted by banality.

  “Through the window, I had my first glimpse of Medina—buses parked in rows and rows as far as the horizon,” recalled the Moroccan anthropologist Abdellah Hammoudi, who arrived on Hajj in the late 1990s. He made his way to the center of the city, where he encountered King Fahd’s “spectacular renovations” to the Prophet’s Mosque, carried out by the Bin Ladens. The floodlights and shiny brass fixtures awed him: “There it was in its immensity, with its minarets like giant chandeliers charging the sky. It seemed for a moment to be floating in the firmament.” And yet, when Hammoudi walked through the surrounding streets, in neighborhoods remade by Saudi modernization drives, he saw nothing of Medina’s rich architectural or religious history, only “shop windows and consumer displays”:

  Carpets, caps, sheets, turbans, sandals, belts, watches, compasses, radios, tea sets, coffee sets, shirts, dresses, blankets, shoes, televisions, VCRs, computers, calculators, perfumes, incense, aromatic plants…elevators, air-conditioning, restaurants, cafeterias, ice-cream vendors, all American-style: self-service, cardboard plates and cups, plastic forks and knives, menus and prices displayed on neon-lit boards…“Modernity” ravaged everything.1

  Inside the mosque, jostling in crowds for a glimpse of the Prophet Mohamed’s tomb, which lay in an unadorned chamber, Hammoudi spied the omnipresent Saudi religious police, who patrolled Medina with sticks so they could beat worshippers who dallied too long at the tomb or displayed excessive emotion there—signs of shirk, or forbidden worship of idols. Elsewhere in the city, these police patrolled cemeteries, historical battlefields, and Shiite shrines to prevent unauthorized prayers or other displays of fervor by the deviant or the nostalgic. For centuries, under previous dynastic rulers, culminating in the Ottomans, Medina had tolerated and, indeed, cultivated Islam’s global diversity of belief and practice; in Saudi Arabia, Hammoudi concluded, the dominant creed was propagated with all the subtlety of a bulldozer:

  They have brought the Koran and the Prophet’s example down to the level of a recipe book and consigned its implementations to militias…This was actually a form of modern totalitarianism, far closer to the defunct Soviet s
ystem than the constitution of Medina or to Bedouin informality. A merciless formula managed by technocrats with sophisticated means of communication and espionage, technique for daily intimidation, and a propaganda force that could recycle traditions and social pressures to its own benefit. In Medina, as elsewhere, it served us its exclusive version of the holy city. Its version and no other.2

  Whose version, exactly? The theological framework belonged to the semi-independent Saudi religious establishment, subsidized by the royal family. Saudi Islamic scholars controlled much—but not all—of the religious rule making around the Hajj. (Left to their own devices, for example, Saudi Arabia’s ardently sectarian Sunni scholars would probably ban Shia from attending altogether, but the royal family, wishing to avoid a global confrontation, managed a compromise, under which Shia could come if they accepted certain quotas and constraints.) King Fahd shaped the Hajj’s physical environment. The architectural ambition of the two renovated holy cities—bigger, better, shinier, ringed by condominium towers and shopping malls, and under surveillance by security cameras—reflected the same spirit Fahd had brought during the early 1980s to the refurbishment of his Boeing 747. Among other things, his ideas about urban planning seemed to express a “deliberate desire to erase the past,” as Hammoudi put it. This was partly another bow to his religious establishment, who tended to view all of the schools of Islamic art and architecture between the Prophet’s death and their arrival in the Hejaz in the 1920s as illegitimate. There was also a more general disinterest among the Saudi royal family about historical preservation and archaeology. The design sensibility that evolved during the Mecca and Medina projects of the late 1980s and mid-1990s—one that evoked Disney, Mall of the Americas, and the Ritz-Carlton Hotel chain—originated with Fahd but also came in substantial part from the Bin Ladens, and particularly from Bakr, who looked after the Fahd account in Riyadh and took a close personal interest in the holy city work. Among other compulsions, these renovation projects had become, by 1995, the largest single source of revenue for the Mohamed Bin Laden Company: Fahd’s total spending in Mecca and Medina during this period has been estimated at $25 billion. That may have been an exaggeration designed to impress Muslim publics, but the contracting work—all handled on a sole-source, no-bid basis by the Bin Ladens—certainly ran into many billions of dollars.3