The Bin Ladens

by Steve Coll

  It was a dear trust your father, the founder of this great nation that has been built on the cherished principles of love, nobleness and purity, gave to our father, who felt greatly honored by it throughout his life…Our father went the way of all mortals, and your brothers followed in the footsteps of their great father. We were young and grew up in glorious and proficient hands. You, my Lord, conferred on us a great badge of honor, for we have been honored to carry out your two most magnificent projects of the Holy Mosque in Mecca and the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina…Could the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques please accept this dedication, offered with heartfelt affection and invocation, deep amity and allegiance.15

  By now, in exile, Osama Bin Laden enjoyed a luxury that Bakr did not: he no longer felt a need to curry favor with the royal family, and also, free from government censors, he could write whatever he pleased. On April 16, 1996, around the same time that Bakr published his self-promoting book, Osama sent out a blast fax from London, titled “The Saudi Regime and Repeated Tragedies of the Pilgrims.” It was Hajj season, and as was typical of his essays, Osama played off recent news headlines—a massive tent fire had killed or injured a large number of pilgrims.

  He aimed his venom at the Saudi royal family. He never referred to the widely known fact that his own family was responsible for the design and implementation of renovations in Mecca that were supposed to keep pilgrims safer and more comfortable. More than any single essay Osama is known to have written, this one seemed to carry an open subtext of resentment, anger, and disapproval directed at the Bin Ladens, particularly at the senior brothers in charge of the Mecca and Medina renovations. Since they had just forced him out of the family firm, in obedience to Fahd, Osama’s anger was perhaps not surprising, and it was telling, as ever, that he could still not express himself directly on the subject of his family. Not all of the criticisms in his essay implicated his brothers; for instance, he argued that the Saudi government’s budgeting for Mecca and Medina had been inadequate and that the royals should be spending more money on renovations, an argument Osama’s brothers might have appreciated, if it were not coming from him. Other aspects of his critique, however, seemed to express Osama’s ambition not only to overthrow the Saudi government, but to take charge of the Bin Laden family, perhaps in partnership with a new and improved Riyadh regime:

  It has become very normal for pilgrims to the House of God to be exposed to disasters and tragedies that result in hundreds of deaths and injuries every year…If we examine the reasons for these disasters, we find that they include: narrowness of the facilities which leads to collision and trampling in the crowds…negligence in security procedures, poor response to incidents, or neglect of pilgrims by not taking the necessary security precautions.

  He turned to the question of who bore responsibility for this pattern of avoidable neglect. The royal family, as ever, was to blame. That he also meant, at the same time, to criticize Bakr and other brothers in the company leadership could hardly be mistaken:

  Preparing, maintaining and equipping the necessary facilities in a sufficient manner and at the level appropriate for the needs of the pilgrims is supposed to be the responsibility of the rulers of this country, who have massive resources and huge budgets to work with. The facilities they have built and services they have provided thus far do not vouch for them. Experiences and incidents have already proven that these facilities and services are not at the desired and sufficient level.16

  If only I were in charge. How long had he harbored this thought, behind his passive veneer? Since childhood, when he had mumbled about his ambitions inside the family on summer vacations with his cousins in Syria? Since his return from Afghanistan, when his reversion to the life of junior contracting executive, subordinate to his older brothers, had proved so frustrating? Was family leadership a possibility that he considered only occasionally, a rumination that merely reflected his rising opinion of himself as a business executive and jihad leader? Or was it deeper and enduring? No one could say with any confidence, because Osama never said, certainly not in public. Perhaps he did not know himself.

  33. ONE PHONE, ONE WORLD

  “IF YOU BELIEVE in God,” an executive of the satellite telephone company Iridium said in 1996, “Iridium is God manifesting Himself through us.”1

  At the century’s end, of all the developments in technology and culture lumped under the graceless label of globalization, none seemed to inspire more passion—or more hubris—than the familiar telephone. More than a hundred years after its invention, the phone still shined with potential—more mobility, more connectivity, more speed, and more innovation. Among other things, it would no longer be tethered to walls and floors; it would be portable, and oblivious to national borders. This mobility would mirror—and stimulate—an era of global business and society that promised, paradoxically, both greater transience and greater community.

  By 1990, particularly in America, there were competing visions—and competing business plans—describing how telephone portability might be constructed in the most practical and profitable way. There were those who believed globally linked cellular towers, erected on the earth’s surface, might offer the most efficient path. And then there was Iridium, named for a rare element with the atomic number 77, which was the number of low-earth orbiting satellites the company’s founders believed they would need to launch into space to provide worldwide telephonic connections, so that an Iridium owner might use his phone anywhere on the planet, at any time, to dial any telephone number.

  In 1945 the budding science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, then an electronics officer in Britain’s Royal Air Force, published a short article called “Extra-Terrestrial Relays” in a magazine bearing the premature title Wireless World. Clarke imagined an array of manned satellites beaming television pictures down to Earth. His was the first outline of integrated global communications enabled by orbiting machines. The launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik in 1957, the subsequent space race between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the worldwide growth of the television industry fulfilled much of Clarke’s vision. Yet the commercial satellite industry, shadowed by the Cold War, remained largely a province of government and defense, and its initial market economics favored television, not telephony.2

  Among the companies experimenting with portable telephones was Motorola Corporation, which manufactured a number of mobile radios that could connect to landline telephone systems. These devices were marketed for use on ships at sea, or by businesses with remote job sites, such as those working along the remote oil pipelines that crossed Saudi Arabia’s empty deserts.

  Salem Bin Laden’s peripatetic life and his love of gadgetry had introduced his family to global telephony long before most American consumers imagined the possibilities. He used Motorola and other radio devices while flying or traveling on the ground—not only for his continent-hopping business and pleasure trips but also for camping and hunting in the Saudi deserts. He positioned himself as an agent for Motorola as he built his own telephone company during the 1970s and 1980s. The kingdom’s vast spaces, its weak infrastructure, and its excess cash all suggested Saudi Arabia as a natural marketplace for portable telephones that could function in remote locations.

  Around 1987, while conducting experiments in the Arizona desert, Motorola engineers conceived the idea that would become Iridium—a network of satellites that orbited at a lower altitude than most others and that could assume the role normally played in telephony by ground-based switching and routing systems. By 1991 Motorola had developed the outlines of a business plan, one that would ultimately cost more than $5 billion to carry out. The corporation eventually spun off Iridium as a separate business, but Motorola designed and built the satellites it would use, under a fixed-price contract worth about $3.5 billion. It was a grandiose project infused with risk and uncertainty.3

  Motorola’s executives approached major phone companies in Europe and Asia, seeking investors. Iridium’s founders
were so convinced of the genius of their vision that when they held an initial conference in Switzerland, the legend was that they charged participants $1 million or more just to hear about their business plan—a price that kept many companies away, recalled F. Thomas Tuttle, who later served as Iridium’s general counsel. Ultimately, because interest in the venture was not as overwhelming as initially hoped, Motorola had to “drop down a tier or two” and form partnerships with secondary phone companies, Tuttle said. Iridium’s idea was to recruit a number of “gateway” investors scattered around the world, each of which would take responsibility for managing its global service in a particular region, such as the Middle East. Since Motorola had a prior business relationship with the Bin Ladens, they were natural targets for Iridium’s pitch.4

  Bakr was interested. He formed an offshore corporation, Trinford Investments S.A., which was later described in U.S. regulatory filings as an affiliate of the Saudi Bin Laden Group. Trinford then purchased an interest in Iridium’s gateway for much of the Arab world and Central Asia with the right to appoint two of six directors. In 1993 this company, called Iridium Middle East Corporation, put up $40 million in cash to join the parent consortium, according to a second former Iridium executive involved. The following year, Iridium Middle East put up another installment of $40 million. The Bin Ladens reduced their initial exposure by syndicating some of their investment to other Saudi backers, including members of the royal family, according to the former Iridium executive. Worldwide, Iridium raised about $3.46 billion from gateway partners like the Bin Ladens.5

  Flush with optimism and cash, the company opened its headquarters in Washington, D.C., at 1575 I Street, N.W. Bakr Bin Laden assigned the investment to his half-brother Hassan, as part of Hassan’s international portfolio. (He was already the liaison to the Saudi Bin Laden Group’s American office in suburban Maryland, and he also traveled regularly to Texas on assignment, where he helped oversee the refurbishment of Saudi Air Force planes at a U.S. facility.) Iridium Middle East opened a small office in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington. Two or three young Arabs with backgrounds in economics worked there, keeping in touch with Iridium headquarters as the satellites were built and launched, and as consumer marketing plans developed. Hassan joined the Iridium board of directors and flew to the United States for quarterly board meetings.6

  He was a clean-shaven, congenial man in his late thirties or early forties who seemed to live nocturnally. He invited some Iridium executives to join him for chain-smoking late-night bull sessions fueled by Johnny Walker. Some of these executives had long worked in Saudi Arabia, and they were accustomed to encountering split personalities among their Saudi counterparts—social drinkers in the West, stern teetotalers at home. Hassan was different: he seemed to party the same way whether he was in Jeddah, Washington, or Beirut. After 1996, one of the former executives recalled, the subject of Hassan’s half-brother Osama occasionally arose at their after-hours bull sessions. Hassan practically spit in vitriol. Osama “has been ex-communicated,” he said, as the participant remembered it. That was about all Hassan had to say on the subject. He did not talk much about Islam or the sources of grievance in the Islamic world. It would be unusual for a Saudi to expound openly about his religious views with a foreigner. In any event, Hassan, it turned out, was more interested in vintage cars and rock and roll.7

  HASSAN BIN LADEN was a major shareholder in Hard Rock Cafe Middle East, Inc., the official Hard Rock Cafe franchisee for much of the Arab world, Greece, Cyprus, and Turkey. More than satellite telephones or commercial real estate, Hard Rock’s music-themed restaurants seemed to be aligned with his personality. He had spent much of his youth in Beirut; he could speak in the local urban Lebanese slang, and he seemed to know every pinball machine in the city. He met his first wife, Layla, in Lebanon. They lived in hotel rooms, and Hassan collected cars—Ferraris, Cadillacs, a vintage Chrysler New Yorker, Rolls-Royces, and Mercedes-Benzes. He entered the import-export business as a young man, but he seemed to love soccer, music, casinos, and nightlife more. He was a committed follower of the Jeddah soccer team, Al-Ittihad (rival to the team Osama had supported as a teenager), and he was such a devoted fan of the Egyptian singer Umm Kulsum that he would fly to Cairo on weekends just to attend her concerts. When civil war broke out in Lebanon during the 1970s, Hassan moved his base to Jeddah, but he returned to Beirut as soon as the city began to revive, in the mid-1990s. It was a period of great longing among Beirutis for a return to cosmopolitan normalcy, and so even an event like the grand opening of a local Hard Rock Cafe franchise could seem special.8

  Fireworks, not shells, burst brightly above the Beirut Corniche, alongside the Mediterranean, on opening night in December 1996. The Gipsy Kings, a pop-flamenco band from France, headlined on the restaurant’s main stage. Hassan roped off a special seating section for Bin Laden family members—about two dozen flew in for the occasion, including a number of Hassan’s half-brothers, such as Shafiq and Tareq. It was the sort of night that Salem had once lived for—it was easy to imagine him seizing the stage and singing off-key with the Gipsy Kings’ rhythm section.

  Music paraphernalia draped the restaurant walls: a red shirt with glass stones sewn into the fabric that had once been worn by Michael Jackson; an embroidered silk shirt that had belonged to Elvis Presley; a crêpe de chine shirt worn by John Lennon of the Beatles; a 1958 Fender Stratocaster used by members of the Cars; another Stratocaster, signed by Eric Clapton; the playing surface of a Rolling Stones pinball machine, signed by members of the band; and an Oberheim electronic keyboard used and signed by Billy Joel. Most impressive of all was a sheet of lined paper on which John Lennon, using a black ballpoint pen, had written out the lyrics to his song “Imagine.”9

  A night in late 1996: one son of Mohamed Bin Laden lives in exile, seeking utopia in Islamic revolution, while several others launch a restaurant and bar in an Arab capital promoting reified utopian rock lyrics. Perhaps more striking than the competing content of their dreams was the shared stage: a world in which jihad and emotion-laden Western popular music spoke to young and overlapping global audiences.

  IRIDIUM’S BUSINESS PLAN relied on an expansive forecast of the coming wireless world. The company’s gateway investors included phone companies that already possessed about 14 million wireless customers, to whom the new phones could be marketed. In its regulatory filings, Iridium estimated that the world’s “traveling professional market”—by which it meant employed adults with wireless phones who left their local phone service area at least four times per year—would grow to about 42 million people by 2002. This forecast, if even approximately accurate, suggested that signing up the 500,000 or so customers that Iridium needed to break even would not be very difficult. There were clear challenges, nonetheless. The most obvious was price: Iridium’s initial handsets would cost about three thousand dollars each, and international calls would be billed at rates as high as seven dollars per minute. Even in this pre-cellular era when consumers did not know what kinds of prices to expect for portable phone service, those numbers looked steep.10

  The sheer romanticism of Iridium’s plan sometimes seemed to quiet skeptics, however. As if to emphasize its groundbreaking character, the company turned to China to launch its satellites into space, and by early 1997, Long March Rockets, named for the events surrounding the birth of Chinese communism, were blasting into the sky every few months, lifting Iridium’s decidedly capitalist machines into position. Al Gore, America’s futurist vice president, invited Iridium executives to the White House Rose Garden to celebrate their vision. Gore placed a ceremonial call to a great-grandson of the telephone’s nineteenth-century inventor, Alexander Graham Bell. Satellite systems like Iridium’s “complete the telephone coverage of the Earth’s surface that Alexander Graham Bell began more than a century ago,” Gore said when his call went through. “Your great-grandfather would be very proud.”11

  Iridium burned its bankroll at a breathtaking pace as it raced tow
ard its service launch. Its greatest challenge was to win timely government permissions to sell and operate its telephones within the borders of more than 150 different countries. The company had chosen Washington for its headquarters, in part to facilitate this licensing drive through embassies in the capital, and by seeking diplomatic support from the U.S. government. The final responsibility for winning licenses fell to each Iridium gateway operator, however. Iridium Middle East had to secure permission from more than twenty governments in the Arab world and Central Asia—many of these governments possessed corrupt, serpentine bureaucracies, or they barely functioned at all. Lawyers at Iridium headquarters rendered the final judgment about when “permission” from a particular country had actually been obtained. The forms of acceptable permission varied greatly—some governments simply issued a ministerial announcement, while others negotiated a more traditional legal agreement. “I had a Mongolian license on a napkin,” recalled one Iridium executive. In some cases, recalled Tuttle, the general counsel, “What we had was basically the country saying, ‘Just tell us what you’re doing. We don’t need an approval.’”12

  The campaign proved to be slow going, particularly in the Middle East. Hassan Bin Laden and other gateway executives came under intense pressure to secure permissions in their areas of operation. As of July 1997, about a year before the service was supposed to begin operation, Iridium had secured a conditional license to operate in only one country within Iridium Middle East’s region, according to regulatory filings. That country was Afghanistan.13

  Three former Iridium executives involved in the licensing effort, including Tuttle, said they could not recall how permission from Afghanistan was secured, when it was received, what form it took, or what Afghan authority granted it. As of July 1997, the Taliban, a radical Islamist militia, controlled the country’s government. At the same time, however, a competing faction manned the country’s embassy in Washington; it is possible the initial permission was obtained there. According to a Bin Laden attorney, Iridium never acquired a final Afghan license or a single Afghan customer.