The Bin Ladens

by Steve Coll

  The Taliban had already become notorious for their repression of women’s education and their bizarre Islamic rule making. That summer of 1997, they also faced criticism because of the radical statements, supporting violence, which emanated from a foreign guest the Taliban’s one-eyed leader, Mullah Omar, had decided to embrace: Osama Bin Laden. There is no evidence that Osama played any role in detailing the initial license for Afghanistan. The Bin Ladens’ attorney, Timothy J. Finn, later wrote that the family believed that the initial license was obtained by Iridium before the Bin Ladens came on the scene. “In any event, Hassan did not have any involvement with this and does not know how it came about,” Finn wrote. “Indeed, Hassan does not believe he had any significant involvement at any time with Afghanistan, which was not regarded as a significant market for this high-priced service. Needless to say he never contacted Osama about any aspect of this.”

  It seems likely that Osama was at least aware of his family’s investment in Iridium. He could have offered them a testament supporting their investment gamble; he was learning himself about the powers of a global satellite telephone.

  “MOTHERS SUFFER MOST,” Osama’s mother later remarked, but it was not because her son failed to phone home from political exile. “He used to call regularly” even from Afghanistan. “He would tell me about his and his family’s well-being—mother-son talk.”14

  Osama’s fealty to his mother had become a greater technical challenge after his departure in May 1996 from Sudan, which had a shaky but functioning phone network, to Afghanistan, where communications were considerably more unreliable. He conceived his exile as an echo of the seventh-century journeys of the Prophet Mohamed; at the same time, he had become a model customer for a twenty-first-century company like Iridium.

  He did not go to Afghanistan voluntarily. Sudan’s government sought a modicum of international legitimacy; the United States made clear it could not achieve this as long as Osama Bin Laden lived and operated openly in Khartoum. Osama’s former mentor, Hassan Al-Turabi, told him he had to go, and then compounded the betrayal, along with others in the Sudanese government, by failing to pay off debts owed to Osama and by taking his businesses at fire sale prices. Osama “sold them all,” recalled his bodyguard Nasir Al-Bahri, “for a very cheap price, because he had no other option.”15

  Under financial pressure, less one wife and his eldest son, who had already returned to Saudi Arabia, Osama flew with his remaining family to Jalalabad, Afghanistan, on a chartered jet. He left behind a comfortable urban sheikh’s life of air-conditioned offices, horse farms, and business and jihad meetings. In the considerably more unplugged and violent landscape of eastern Afghanistan, he tried to make a virtue of necessity, often lecturing his children about the character-building benefits of an austere lifestyle, such as that endured by the Prophet and his companions. Yet it was plain, from the first weeks after his arrival in Afghanistan, that he did not relish his rough circumstances and that he was feeling a degree of psychological pressure. He fumed with renewed intensity at those who had forced him to endure a return to Afghanistan. Increasingly, in particular, he concentrated his anger on the government of the United States.

  While in Khartoum, in his political essays, Osama had directed his incitement and sarcasm at Riyadh. The royal family’s failures and depredations were his dominant literary obsession, but he never formally declared war on the Saudi government. His expulsion from Sudan seems to have convinced him once and for all, however, that the Al-Saud were best understood as mere puppets of Washington. In any event, soon after he arrived in Afghanistan, Osama composed a rambling declaration of war against the United States, the first document he ever published that formally and openly endorsed a violent campaign against the West.

  Its most striking passages were stanzas of poetry, particularly an autobiographical passage that suggested the anger and defiance building up within him. In these lines, Osama chose words and images associated with insanity or loss of control. He made near-explicit reference to those family members who had abandoned him, and to those he had defied in the name of Islam. He described his burning feelings about the “loss” of the Al-Quds mosque in Jerusalem, which he had never visited, so far as is known, but which he associated with his father in other public comments; perhaps this passage is best read as entirely political, but the possible complementary reading of an unconscious paternal reference is at least notable, particularly since the line is quickly followed by references to death, his mother, and her sanity. Overall, Osama’s self-portrait in verse suggested a man grappling with new extremities of personal experience—but while these feelings might be tormenting, he wrote, he retained a faith that they could ultimately be cleansed by righteous violence:

  I am willing to sacrifice self and wealth for knights who never disappointed me.

  Knights who are never fed up or deterred by death, even if the mill of war turns.

  In the heat of battle they do not care, and cure the insanity of the enemy by their “insane” courage…

  I rejected all the critics, who chose the wrong way;

  I rejected those who enjoy fireplaces in clubs, discussing eternally;

  I rejected those who, despite being lost, think they are at the goal;

  I respect those who carried on, not asking or bothering about the difficulties;

  Never letting up from their goals, despite all hardships on the road;

  Whose blood is oil for the flame guiding in the darkness of confusion;

  I still feel the pain of the loss of Al-Quds in my internal organs;

  That loss is like a burning fire in my intestines;…

  Death is truth and ultimate destiny, and life will end anyway. If I do not fight you, then my mother must be insane!…

  The walls of oppression and humiliation cannot be demolished except in a rain of bullets.

  The free man does not surrender leadership to infidels and sinners.

  Without shedding blood, no degradation and branding can be removed from the forehead…16

  Some of Osama’s agitation may have been caused by the insecurity of his situation immediately upon arrival with his family near Jalalabad that summer of 1996. Eastern Afghanistan was then in violent flux, and Osama’s old Afghan contacts were in disarray as the Taliban swept to power. With a reputation for wealth and little political protection, he was fortunate during these initial weeks not to have become one more collateral victim of the ever-shifting Afghan civil war.

  By the end of the year, however, his circumstances had improved dramatically. Bin Laden won an introduction to Mullah Omar and established cordial relations. Omar offered him hospitality in the poor but entirely peaceful southern Afghan city of Kandahar. Osama moved there with much of his large family—at least eleven sons by this point, three wives, and a brood of daughters whom none of his aides could or would try to count.

  Even after his world calmed, he remained preoccupied by the United States. He collected and read an odd assortment of books about America, according to Al-Bahri, who later joined him as a bodyguard. These included accounts of former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger’s discussions about the seizure of Saudi oil fields during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war; a book by an American military commander about the use of rapid-deployment forces; and a book of undetermined origin that described a supposed plan by former U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt to control the world.17 Osama’s public comments during this period make clear that, like many Saudis, he subscribed to hoary anti-Semitic screeds such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an invented text about supposed global Jewish conspiracies that had been one of Adolf Hitler’s preferred “historical” sources. In Osama’s spare library, these sorts of tracts lay interspersed with traditional Koranic texts, faxed essays from radical Islamic scholars in Saudi Arabia, and bits and pieces from Western media reports. Sitting cross-legged on wool carpets, sharing meals of bread and yogurt, as the electricity flickered on and off, the line between history and fantasy would ha
ve been difficult to discern, even if Osama had been interested in locating it.

  Osama and his colleagues asked, as Al-Bahri recalled it: “What is America?” If they had succeeded in jihad against the Russians in Afghanistan and Chechnya, and against the Serbs in Bosnia, then “America will not be something new.” They heard oral reports from veterans returning from participating in combat against American troops in Somalia. They heard about the confessions of the bombers who had struck American targets in Saudi Arabia. The United States, they concluded, “has become a target for all and sundry.”18

  The broad political-military equation they perceived was sadly familiar, particularly in its fundamental view of Judaism as a fountain-head of evil global conspiracy: Jews and Christians, or “Zionists” and “Crusaders,” sought to destroy Islam and seize its lands. This war had been described and forecasted in the Koran, which called upon Allah’s followers to resist in His name, to hasten Islam’s ultimate victory and the arrival of Judgment Day. Possession of oil was one contemporary object of this contest because God had placed vast oil reserves in Saudi Arabia in order to strengthen those who resided in Islam’s birthplace; fearing this, the Jews and Crusaders had conspired to take the oil for themselves, preying on the weakness and infidelity of local Arab rulers. In this light, American manipulations in Saudi Arabia constituted the worst crimes by infidels in more than a thousand years of struggle, Osama wrote in his August 1996 declaration. He included himself among the victims:

  The latest and greatest of these aggressions incurred by the Muslims since the death of the Prophet is the occupation of the land of the two Holy Places. By orders from the U.S.A. they also arrested a large number of scholars in the land of the two Holy Places…Myself and my group have suffered some of this injustice. We have been pursued in Pakistan, Sudan and Afghanistan…19

  When at home with his family, away from his fax-writing offices, Osama remained in many ways the same puritan, quirky, middle-aged father he had become in Sudan: he was an insistent scold about the requirements of prayer and self-reliance, but he could also be kind and forgiving, and playful, particularly on outings to the desert. He refused to allow his children to put ice in their water on the grounds that it would soften them, and he banned such indulgences as Tabasco sauce as part of his relentless boycott of American goods. Yet he organized relaxing volleyball games, horseback-riding adventures, shooting expeditions, and family picnics. Armed bodyguards wove constantly among him and his wives; there was no mistaking Osama’s importance now, particularly in relief against the poverty and isolation of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. Even so, there remained something distant, soft, and inscrutable about Osama. He had a flaccid handshake; greeting him was “like sort of shaking hands with a fish,” recalled Peter Jouvenal, an English journalist. One of his former wives recalled that after his return to Afghanistan, there were periods when he “did not like anybody to talk to him,” and that “he used to sit and think for a long time and sleep very late.”20

  Like many of his half-brothers, Osama preferred to be surrounded by family and followers, he liked to move from place to place, and he craved connections to the wider world. He continued to rely upon his London office. There his colleague Fawwaz stayed in touch with him in Kandahar by trundling down to a small international telephone and fax shop in North London called The Grapevine, where he could exchange written messages with his boss.21 Yet fax machines were becoming a relatively frustrating and declining technology.

  Osama understood the rising influence of global satellite television networks. He saw them as a crucial mechanism for marketing and fundraising. The loss of his personal inheritance, family dividends, and his business assets and savings in Sudan meant that, upon his return to Afghanistan, he needed a strong media profile, primarily to attract donors and volunteers. This had been his essential strategy during the anti-Soviet Afghan war; now, through global television networks, he could update and extend it, by speaking to worldwide audiences previously unavailable. The technology-phobic Taliban generally regarded media as a tool of the Devil, but it was not only crucial to Osama’s conception of his jihad operations; it was also something he loved to consume: during his long days in exile, he seems to have evolved into something of a global news junkie.

  He granted a series of interviews inside Afghanistan during 1997 and 1998—he gave an early and significant interview to CNN, another a year later to ABC, and he also made himself available to several Arabic language print reporters whose work he respected. He saw early on the power of Al-Jazeera, an independent Arabic-language satellite broadcaster, and in late 1998, he sat for an influential interview that allowed him to speak more directly and more thoroughly to Saudi and other Arab audiences than ever before. He became self-conscious about visual staging: the books that appeared behind him; the assault rifle he propped beside him; the tracer bullets that flew into the sky like fireworks upon his arrival for an interview.

  Early in 1998, after a period of separation, Bin Laden reunited with the Egyptian Al-Jihad faction led by Ayman Al-Zawahiri; they announced their new coalition, the International Islamic Front for Jihad Against the Crusaders and the Jews, at a press conference attended by television cameramen and print journalists. Bin Laden and Al-Zawahiri sat a table draped by a banner—they looked like a pair of dubious marketing executives at a small Islamic pharmaceutical firm, announcing their debut of a new product line. The imagery harkened back to Osama’s self-produced videos during his late Afghan period.

  Rahimullah Yusufzai, a Pakistani journalist who attended, asked Osama about his family’s decision to disown him.

  “Blood is thicker than water,” he answered wryly.

  “Are you still a billionaire?” Yusufzai asked. Osama clearly enjoyed the wordplay; he had grown comfortable with the media. “My heart is rich and generous,” he said.22

  Fax machines could distribute his essays, satellite television could convey his presence and his speechmaking, but Osama needed a telephone for more private operations.

  On November 1, 1996, just as he was securing his new sanctuary with the Taliban, Osama purchased, through his London office, an Inmarsat Mini-M satellite telephone, a device about the size of a laptop computer. It had a retail price of about fifteen thousand dollars. His office also purchased several thousand prepaid minutes. Inmarsat had begun as a government consortium, but it had more recently been privatized. Its Mini-Ms had beaten Iridium to market, but unlike Iridium, Inmarsat did not target the general consumer. Its phones were intended primarily for businesses with remote job sites. Al Qaeda might not be a conventional company in its market set, but its geography—headquarters in remote Afghanistan, regional offices in Africa and the Arab world—fit the Mini-M niche.23

  Calling records from Osama’s phone suggest that he was something of a chatterbox. The numbers he and his aides dialed between late 1996 and the autumn of 1998 conjure the image of Osama checking in regularly with far-flung publicists, financial aides, and terrorist-cell leaders, then suddenly remembering that he owed his mother a hello. He called his liaisons in Britain most often—260 times, to 27 different numbers. He or his aides placed more than 200 calls to Yemen, 131 calls to Sudan, 106 to Iran, 67 to Azerbaijan, 59 to Pakistan, 57 to Saudi Arabia, 13 to a ship sailing on the Indian Ocean, and 6 to the United States.24

  From early 1997, the American government listened in. A CIA officer in Europe discovered in January or February that listening systems run by the National Security Agency (America’s principal intelligence agency for intercepting communications) were picking up Inmarsat phone calls emanating from Afghanistan. The phone, upon investigation, appeared to belong to Osama Bin Laden, who was by now a formally designated target of CIA intelligence collection. A reports officer in the CIA station tracking Bin Laden from suburban Virginia drew up link diagrams showing the telephone numbers Bin Laden was calling, and in some cases, what numbers those phones dialed in turn. But according to Michael Scheuer, who then ran the Bin Laden tracking unit, th
e CIA could not persuade the NSA to deliver regular transcripts of the intercepted satellite calls. Frustrated, Scheuer managed to deploy his own interception equipment to the region, but this system could pick up only one side of Bin Laden’s conversations—the side emanating from Afghanistan, as Scheuer remembered it. Nonetheless, even with this limitation, throughout 1997 and early 1998, Bin Laden’s satellite phone calls generated for the CIA the first truly reliable global map of Al Qaeda’s spreading reach.25

  Bin Laden seemed to be using vague code words during some of his conversations, but the analysts could not sort out his meanings. In the end, so far as is known (the partial transcripts of the calls have never been declassified), the intelligence collected from his phone was not specific enough to save the lives taken by Osama’s first spectacular terrorist attack.

  For years, dating back to his time in Sudan, Bin Laden had been nurturing a plan to bomb American embassies in East Africa. On August 7, 1998, after a last round of phone conversations with Afghan headquarters, two of Al Qaeda’s clandestine African cells struck. Suicide truck bombers tried to ram themselves into American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. They detonated near the buildings; they killed more than 225 people and wounded several thousand more.

  Osama had used his satellite phone to cross the Indian Ocean and strike American targets by remote control. It was an innovation in global terrorism derived from his instincts and experiences as a Bin Laden: as his half-brothers invested in satellite telephony in Washington, Osama used the same technology to attack Washington’s embassies abroad. It was not the last time that he would use technologies of global mobility familiar to his family as a means of brilliant tactical innovation.