The Bin Ladens

by Steve Coll

  That August, in the name of a previously unknown front organization, Bin Laden sent a claim of responsibility by fax, through the North London fax shop, The Grapevine: “The days to come are sufficient for the U.S., God willing, to see a black fate like the one that befell the Soviet Union,” he wrote. “Blows will come down on the U.S. one after another from everywhere and new Islamic groups will emerge one after another…”26

  PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON fired cruise missiles at Osama several weeks after the Africa attack. The evidence from Osama’s monitored satellite phone, combined with admissions by detained Al Qaeda operatives, left no doubt about Bin Laden’s responsibility for the bombings. The intelligence used to target him proved faulty, however, and the missiles failed to find him. Osama realized that his satellite phone might be employed to track him as a target; he turned it off and never used it again.

  The retaliatory missile attack instantly elevated Osama’s global profile. He was now certified as worthy of the military attention of the most powerful political leader on the planet. That August, televised press conferences in Washington held by Clinton administration officials and generals responsible for the missile strike introduced Bin Laden’s name to mass audiences who had never heard of him. Muslims rallied in Pakistan to praise Osama’s leadership; his bearded face appeared on posters and T-shirts.

  In the midst of Osama’s global brand launch, Iridium was itself just weeks away from inaugurating its phone service. “It suddenly occurred to all of us that we had one of these people on our board,” General Counsel Tuttle recalled, referring to the Bin Ladens. Iridium executives hurriedly tried to research the Bin Laden family. They inquired about Osama with Hassan in a “dignified and tactful way.” He assured them that Osama had been cut off. Iridium’s executives decided to issue no formal statement; they did not want to call attention to themselves at such a crucial moment, with $5 billion in investments at stake. When reporters called, a spokeswoman said only that Osama had been cut off from his family and its businesses.27

  Iridium’s executives soon had other problems to worry about. When the company’s phones went on sale, it became clear that Iridium was destined not to change the world, but to be recorded as one of the most spectacular bankruptcies in recent business history.

  The company had misjudged the price question. It had also been so slow to bring its service to market—more than a decade had passed between conception and launch—that cellular telephone service and the World Wide Web began to overtake its initial vision. Iridium persuaded only about fifty-five thousand people and businesses to purchase handsets and subscribe to its service, about one-tenth of the number required. Motorola ultimately wrote off losses totaling more than $2.5 billion.28 Iridium filed for bankruptcy in 1999. Its gateway investors, the Bin Ladens among them, lost all of their money.

  The company’s satellites were soon in danger of falling from the sky and burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere. To prevent this, the Pentagon signed a contract to pay $3 million a month for Iridium phone service, to help keep the system operating. A Pentagon spokesman explained that a global phone network offered some unique military advantages. “Iridium provides service to some areas of the world that are very underserved,” the spokesman said. For the American armed forces, the network’s reach and security “has some operational implications,” he added.29

  They were learning, but not fast enough. Osama Bin Laden had now announced himself as a formal enemy of the United States. The American government knew remarkably little about him or his family, however, and some of the information it possessed—and circulated at the highest levels—was wrong. Investigating the Bin Ladens, however, was proving to be a daunting and complicated task, even for the CIA.

  34. LAWYERS, GUNS, AND MONEY

  DANIEL COLEMAN, an agent at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, arrived on assignment to the CIA’s Bin Laden unit in March 1996. The CIA and the FBI sought to foster cooperation; because of his prior experience with intelligence investigations, Coleman was a natural emissary. He was a bulky, plain-speaking man who had lived for most of his life in New York or New Jersey. The Bin Laden unit was then housed in a suburban office building in Northern Virginia. As Coleman settled in, he immersed himself by reading what is referred to at the CIA as a “201 file,” a kind of case history. The Bin Laden 201 ran to thirty-six volumes, although some of it included duplications and repetitions. Remarkably, Coleman noted, there was not a single written record of Osama Bin Laden’s involvement in the anti-Soviet Afghan war of the 1980s, a conflict in which the CIA had played such a prominent role.1

  CIA officers had collected intelligence about Osama from the agency’s station in Khartoum; their files, mainly accumulated between 1993 and 1995, contained detailed information about Bin Laden’s bank accounts in Sudan and Dubai, his Sudanese businesses, farms, and equipment inventories. Beginning in the summer of 1996, two informants who had worked for Bin Laden, and who volunteered to help the United States, added considerably to this portrait. One of the defectors, Jamal Al-Fadl, described the existence and history of Al Qaeda—it was the first time anyone in the U.S. government had heard the name.

  The amounts of money the CIA had discovered in Osama’s bank accounts were not very large, but at least they knew where some of his funds were located. The presumption was that he had hidden larger sums in other accounts, possibly in Europe, which had not yet been identified. The CIA’s analysts took for granted that Osama Bin Laden was independently very wealthy, as a result of his inheritance. And yet, until 1996, nobody in the United States government had attempted to investigate in depth basic questions about Osama’s supposed riches: How much cash had he actually received from his father? How much income had he received from the Bin Laden businesses? Had the family truly cut him off? If he was still receiving aid from Saudi Arabia, where was it coming from? How much cash savings had he retained?2

  Anthony Lake, national security advisor to President Clinton during the first term of Clinton’s presidency, had pushed for the creation of a special Bin Laden tracking unit at the CIA; Lake was concerned about the threat of transnational terrorist financing. The unit was initially referred to as CTC-TFL, which stood for Counterterrorist Center–Terrorist-Financial Links.3 Its chief when Daniel Coleman arrived was Michael Scheuer, a blunt and aggressive CIA intelligence analyst who had followed the covert Afghan war during the 1980s.

  Scheuer was skeptical about the value of investigating terrorist finance, compared to other lines of investigation or covert action; he gradually concluded that following money trails would not reveal very much about Osama’s intentions and plans for violent attacks. Nonetheless, toward the second half of 1996, Scheuer and Coleman decided to investigate how many Bin Laden family members were in the United States, what they were doing, and how they viewed Osama. Through formal interviews, they figured, they might learn something useful about Osama’s resources and motivations. The CIA was prohibited by law from collecting intelligence inside the United States in many circumstances; that mission fell primarily to the FBI, and so Coleman took on the task of rounding up Bin Laden interviews.4

  Coleman and another agent in the FBI’s Washington field office went to visit with Philip Griffin, the former State Department diplomat who now ran the Bin Laden office in suburban Maryland. Coleman felt the session was not particularly fruitful: “We just got a lecture about how saintly the Bin Laden family was,” he recalled. Coleman returned to Rockville a second time and asked Griffin if it would be possible to arrange a meeting with Bakr Bin Laden, since he was the head of the family and would know the most about Osama’s history and finances. Griffin said that Bakr traveled to the United States rarely, if at all, and he suggested that the FBI would do better to focus its request on other brothers, such as Hassan or Shafiq, who had senior roles in the company and spent more time in the West.5

  When Bakr learned of the FBI’s interest in the family, he took a direct interest. He held discussions in Jeddah about how to r
espond; ultimately, Bakr told Griffin that he should not serve as the family’s representative in these contacts with the FBI. Bakr contacted James Baker, the former secretary of state, and drew upon advice from Baker’s law firm, Baker Botts; Jim Baker’s son, a highly regarded attorney, ran the firm’s Washington office. Bakr also consulted and retained the influential Wall Street law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell, whose clients included Microsoft Corporation and the investment bank Goldman Sachs.

  On April 17, 1997, Daniel Coleman arrived at the Washington offices of Sullivan & Cromwell for an interview with Shafiq and Hassan Bin Laden. They convened in a conference room. As Coleman conducted the questioning, another agent took notes. After conducting interviews for the FBI over many years, Coleman had concluded that the best approach in a situation like this one was to be as informal as possible—no stenographer typing a transcription of the interview, no legal pad on his lap with a written script of questions. He knew the Bin Ladens would feel defensive and anxious, and he wanted them to relax. He preferred to develop a “proper conversation,” one in which he would take his time to learn “what the guy’s interested in talking about,” and then try to gradually develop mutual confidence.6

  The lead attorney for the Bin Laden brothers was Richard J. Urowsky, a Yale Law School graduate and a senior partner at Sullivan & Cromwell who specialized in litigation. In addition to Urowsky, two other Sullivan lawyers were present. The interview lasted about two hours and covered at least a dozen subjects—the shape and history of the Bin Laden family, Osama’s relationship with his half-siblings, the number of Bin Ladens who were in the United States, and inheritance matters. The atmosphere was subdued but not confrontational. Shafiq and Hassan were responsive but not loquacious. On the subject of Osama’s wealth, they told the FBI agents that Osama’s allowances, salaries, and inheritances ran into the millions of dollars, but did not amount to hundreds of millions; it is not clear, however, how specific the brothers were about numbers during this initial interview.

  Coleman felt that Urowsky handled the meeting as if his clients were criminal suspects, which they were not. Coleman tried to explain that this was not intended as a confrontational session, but he felt that Urowsky interrupted him and prevented him from establishing the sort of rapport he valued with interview subjects of this kind.

  After the Washington interview, Abdullah Bin Laden, the half-brother of Osama enrolled as a graduate student in legal affairs at Harvard University, received a call from another FBI agent who wanted an interview. Bin Ladens scattered around the United States also received interview requests from agents in local FBI field offices; these approaches were not coordinated with Coleman. Different FBI field offices were competing, in effect, to interview Bin Ladens residing in the United States now that Osama was a subject of interest.

  Urowsky telephoned Coleman to report the latest request, and they scheduled a meeting with Abdullah Bin Laden in Sullivan & Cromwell’s Boston office. Two agents joined Coleman. Urowsky was there again and “was just horrible,” or so Coleman felt. At one point Urowsky accused Coleman of distorting what Shafiq and Hassan Bin Laden had said during their interview in Washington; it was all Coleman could do to restrain himself from leaping across the conference table and throttling Urowsky. “Guys like him think they can talk to everybody the way they do in court,” Coleman recalled. “Not to me, you can’t…He’s just an arrogant jerk.” Coleman knew “damn well” that the half-brothers had nothing to do with Osama anymore. “I was just trying to figure out who was in his family…I just need somebody to tell me who’s who. That’s all.” But he found it impossible to fight past the posturing by their lawyers.7

  After these initial interviews, according to Scheuer, lawyers for the Bin Ladens contacted the FBI “at the senior level” and told them “you can’t talk to the Bin Ladens like that.” One reason cited, as Scheuer recalled it, was that some members of the Bin Laden family had been issued diplomatic passports by the government of Saudi Arabia, which meant that they could not be subjected to American legal proceedings of any kind—they enjoyed sweeping privileges under the doctrine of diplomatic immunity, which offers reciprocal protections to diplomats serving on accredited missions. The number of Bin Ladens who had been issued diplomatic passports is not clear—Coleman recalled that only a few members of the family had them, and that the rest carried ordinary passports. In any event, as Scheuer remembered it, the thrust of the message from FBI Director Louis Freeh, as passed through to him, was loud and clear: No more of that crap. Scheuer recalled arguing in reply: “Well, listen, these guys are related—it’s a big family, it’s a lot of money, and we have a suspicion that some of these guys support Osama.” But he was told, in effect, “No, we don’t need that kind of trouble.”8

  Scheuer’s frustration accumulated steadily. He saw Osama Bin Laden emerging as a dangerous adversary of the United States and its allies, particularly Egypt, and he felt that his supervisors at the CIA and the White House were unwilling to take risks to disrupt Bin Laden’s increasingly violent ambitions. His supervisors, for their part, saw Scheuer as a career analyst, admittedly hardworking and dedicated, but one who lacked the experience and maturity to run risky field operations and who was such a combative personality that he undermined his own work by alienating many of the people he served.

  Scheuer proposed a number of intelligence-collection and covert-action plans targeting Osama’s money and businesses; all were rejected or aborted. In one operation, Scheuer’s unit sought to recruit an agent in Switzerland who could obtain encryption codes necessary to break into Geneva and Zurich banks electronically, to search for Osama’s presumed accounts. The CIA’s European Division and the Treasury Department both objected, the latter on the grounds that a successful operation might undermine confidence in the global banking system. Scheuer also proposed an operation to steal the relatively small amounts of money identified in Osama’s Sudanese and Dubai accounts, but again Treasury objected, according to Scheuer. “They said, ‘Yeah, it’s evil money, it’s bad for Bin Laden to have money, but if the Europeans even found out that we had such a capability, they would not like it, and there would be repercussions in the economic system.’”9

  Scheuer then tried to target Islamic banks where Bin Laden reportedly did business. He discovered, however, that these banks sometimes routed money through New York, and so Treasury argued they could not be targeted. Finally, after Bin Laden had moved to Afghanistan, Scheuer recalled, his unit proposed, “Okay, let’s do it the old-fashioned way: let’s burn the bastards down.” He proposed the use of covert-action authority to destroy by arson one of the Sudanese banks where Osama still kept money. The CIA could not guarantee, however, that there were no U.S. citizens holding accounts at the bank, and so that plan was also scuttled. Scheuer made a separate proposal to burn or sabotage all the equipment at Osama’s large farm near the Ethiopian border. That, too, was rejected, he recalled. In the end, after almost four years of “feckless, and at times, dangerous recruitment efforts and safe-house establishments,” as he put it later, he had nothing to show. Osama still had his money—and the CIA still was uncertain about how much he had.10

  THE AFRICA EMBASSY bombings made it plain that Osama was more than a rich radical who authored threatening essays and poems, and occasionally provided financial grants to violent Egyptian and Central Asian jihadist allies. He had now built an organization that responded to his direct leadership, had declared war against the United States, and could carry out sophisticated attacks across oceans. Osama’s understanding of America was fragmentary and distorted, but so was America’s understanding of him. In the more urgent atmosphere that followed the Africa bombings, the United States revitalized its attempts to collect intelligence about Osama’s biography, his finances, and his relationship with the larger Bin Laden family.

  The U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia in that summer of 1998 was Wyche Fowler Jr., a former Democratic senator from Georgia. He worked closely with John Brennan, then th
e CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia, a veteran officer with silver sideburns and a diplomat’s demeanor. By the time of the Africa attacks, Bin Laden had been a subject of cable traffic in and out of the Riyadh embassy for several years. Some of it was routine reporting—translations of Osama’s interviews on Arabic-language satellite television or in the Arabic-language press. Occasionally Fowler or Brennan would discuss Bin Laden’s case with senior princes in the royal family, but these were often general conversations in which the Saudis emphasized their complete repudiation of a man they had, after all, stripped of citizenship.11

  About six weeks after the Africa attacks, Fowler and Brennan sought a meeting with Bakr Bin Laden in Saudi Arabia, and he agreed. Bakr arrived for the discussion without any lawyers. He seemed eager to reassure the American government that Osama enjoyed no favor in his family. Bakr said the Bin Ladens had nothing to do with Osama, that he had been cut off years ago, and that they were embarrassed and sorry about his recent violence.

  The Americans told Bakr that Osama had now been formally charged with crimes under U.S. law. As a consequence, the United States would try to apprehend him in Afghanistan. To do this, they explained, they wanted help from the Bin Laden family. Among other things, they needed to learn more about Osama’s financial history and current resources.

  “President Clinton has asked me to seek your assistance,” Fowler said pointedly.

  Bakr said his family would cooperate. He referred the American officials to his half-brother Yahya, who was now functioning as chief of operations for the main Bin Laden businesses. Bakr explained that on financial matters, the family’s office in London possessed most of the important records, particularly those concerning international accounts and investments. Shafiq Bin Laden, who oversaw that office, could help answer any questions the U.S. government might have.12