The Bin Ladens

by Steve Coll

  Richard Clarke, Clinton’s counterterrorism czar at the White House, expressed chronic dissatisfaction with intelligence reporting about Osama’s finances. In the autumn of 1998, he reorganized the National Security Council’s work on Al Qaeda. He summoned a young aide, William Wechsler, who had studied illicit financing and organized crime issues, although never Al Qaeda. Clarke told Wechsler to set up a new interagency working group devoted solely to the subject of Al Qaeda’s money. The government’s terrorism specialists had neglected the subject, Clarke said, and now they had their hands full with other matters, such as trying to find Bin Laden in Afghanistan and locating other violent cells worldwide.

  Clarke and Wechsler designated their new task force the UBL Finances Sub-Group; it would report to the larger counterterrorism group that Clarke chaired. They recruited Richard Newcomb, who ran an office at the Treasury Department in charge of identifying and freezing the wealth of terrorist and drug-trafficking groups. They also brought in an analyst from Scheuer’s Bin Laden unit; an analyst from another CIA unit that specialized in black market global finance, called the Illicit Transactions Group; a representative from the Defense Intelligence Agency; and others from the FBI, the State Department, and the National Security Agency.

  Wechsler read into the existing intelligence files, particularly those reporting on Osama’s inheritance, and he began to ask questions. As a newly assigned, relatively young White House aide, he could get away with posing some basic, even naive queries, such as where the information about Osama’s $300 million had actually come from, what efforts had been made to verify it with reliable documentation from the Bin Laden family or the Saudi government, and so on. The answers he received from the CIA were mushy. The FBI seemed to have little hard data, either, or if it did, its representatives were unable or unwilling to share it with the White House.

  “This is insane,” Wechsler told Clarke, as the latter recalled it. “FBI thinks we should just leave this to them, but they can’t tell me anything I can’t read in the newspapers. CIA has given us a data dump of everything they have ever come across on the subject, and thinks that answers the question. There are no formal assessments at all, no understanding of the whole picture of where the money is coming from…The general impression I get out there is that this is all a waste of time because, they keep saying, it doesn’t take much money to blow something up and Osama’s got all he needs from daddy.”31

  It was Richard Newcomb, the director of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, who had previously developed sanctions against nations supporting terrorism and against such complex criminal groups as the Cali cocaine trafficking cartel in Colombia, who first asked, during a subgroup meeting, one fundamental question: “What is the theory of the case that we’re working on here?” Was it one rich person—Osama—spending his own money? If so, the implication was that they should search for Osama’s big pot of money and take it away. And yet as they examined the government’s reporting, what they saw was not evidence of a unitary fortune, but continual references to Osama’s relations with Islamic charities, donors, and proselytizing networks—a complex, international web of religious and political fundraising. They also confronted the fact that they knew very little about the real state of Osama’s investments in Sudan. (The fact that he had been stripped of some of his wealth as he left that country was unknown to the U.S. government at the time.) Above all, the analysts in Wechsler’s group realized that they needed greater cooperation from Saudi Arabia.

  One problem with asking for help from the Saudis on terrorist finance issues was that the questions were usually lumped into the larger government-to-government agenda, where they had to fight for priority with other subject matter—terrorism prosecutions, regional politics, the Palestinian conflict, oil. Wechsler’s group decided to propose a special mission to the kingdom solely dedicated to the exploration of Al Qaeda and terrorist money. Vice President Al Gore agreed to contact Crown Prince Abdullah—his counterpart under diplomatic protocol—to plead for cooperation.32

  Abdullah agreed to arrange for a meeting with Saudi counterterrorist police and banking officials. Newcomb led an interagency delegation to Riyadh in early 1999. They flew out by commercial airliner. In the U.S. group, besides Newcomb and Wechsler, were representatives from State, the CIA, and Treasury. They met with their Saudi counterparts at the Ministry of Interior, in a typically ornate and heavily air-conditioned conference room. The Saudis brought senior officers from their domestic security service, the Mubahith, and specialists from the Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority, the kingdom’s central bank.

  The Americans unfolded a diverse list of agenda items. Some of their issues involved suggestions for new laws or banking rules that might improve Saudi Arabia’s capacity to detect and stop illicit transactions. Other agenda items concerned international campaigns to isolate the Taliban, particularly by shutting down Afghan Ariana flights. Finally, there was the sensitive subject of Osama Bin Laden, his money, and his relationship with his family.

  Newcomb issued a formal request to meet with members of the Bin Laden family. The Saudi Interior Ministry delegates seemed startled. They were the Saudi equivalent of senior FBI investigators, but such a meeting was not something they could promise, they said—it seemed to be above their pay grade. The Saudi officials emphasized that the Bin Ladens were a respected, law-abiding family. They had ostracized Osama, as had the Saudi government. Why would the Americans need to meet with them?

  The Saudis knew, of course, that Newcomb’s office at Treasury was in charge of identifying and administrating U.S. sanctions on foreign governments and groups involved in terrorism or other crimes. This may have explained some of their protective instinct. Here was the scenario the Bin Ladens and their lawyers feared: voluntary cooperation with U.S. investigators that might lead to a legal attack on the Bin Laden fortune.

  The Saudis told Newcomb and his colleagues that they would have to coordinate his request with Wyche Fowler, the U.S. ambassador. They did so, but members of the delegation had the sense that Fowler was not happy about their intrusion into an area that he had been handling. Nonetheless, Fowler pressed the Saudis and the Bin Ladens to cooperate with Treasury.

  Newcomb and his colleagues told their Saudi counterparts that they wanted specific information about the size and disposition of Osama’s inheritance. In the meeting, the Saudis did provide an outline of the 1994 forced sales of Osama’s shares in the Bin Laden companies, and the relatively modest $9.9 million in proceeds that had been frozen in Saudi accounts. Some of the American delegates were struck by how much smaller this amount was than U.S. intelligence reporting had led them to expect. In any event, the money was out of the Saudi banking system and was not accessible by Osama, the Saudi side asserted.

  Were there documents available to describe all this? No, the Saudis answered. How are you sure, then, the Americans asked, that it was all done properly? It’s the Bin Laden family, the Saudis answered—of course we are sure.

  The Americans mentioned their concern that Osama continued to telephone his mother in Jeddah. Did this suggest continuing relations with his family? “You can never ask an Arab mother not to speak to her son,” one of the Saudi officials replied.33

  Listening, one American in the room found himself thinking: Well, then they’re not really separated, are they? And also: We would insist that a mother stop talking to her son, if the son were a fugitive accused of mass murder.

  CONFUSION PERSISTED at the White House and the CIA about the basic facts of Osama’s wealth and inheritance until the spring of 2000. That March, Richard Newcomb’s office telephoned Richard Urowsky, the Sullivan & Cromwell partner, and requested a meeting with Bin Laden family members to discuss financial issues. Urowsky, Abdullah Bin Laden, and Shafiq Bin Laden flew to Washington to meet with Newcomb at the Treasury Department.

  Newcomb explained that he and his colleagues were struggling to evaluate reports that Osama had inherited $300 million. The Treasury
and the White House wanted to know if this was accurate, and if not, how much Osama had received and when he had received it. They wanted to understand the nature of his income, past and present.34

  The two Bin Ladens answered Newcomb’s questions. A few weeks later, Sullivan & Cromwell forwarded a formal letter to Treasury from the Saudi Bin Laden Group to confirm in writing what Abdullah and Shafiq had conveyed. This document provided—about a year and a half after the Africa embassy bombings—a specific accounting from the Bin Laden family of Osama’s inheritance and income. Over his lifetime, Osama had received a total of about $27 million, but never all at once, the letter disclosed. He had received regular dividends and salaries, beginning in the early 1970s and ending in the early 1990s. This income averaged slightly more than $1 million per year.35

  Even after these formal disclosures, analysts within the U.S. government remained uncertain about a number of questions. Daniel Coleman at the FBI, for example, had been told during his interviews with Osama’s half-brothers that there had been a major distribution of perhaps $8 million after Salem Bin Laden’s death, when Bakr reorganized the family’s finances and businesses. Mohamed Bin Laden’s children had the option to take their distribution in cash or to reinvest it. What, exactly, had Osama done? The answer seemed murky—he had taken out a substantial amount of cash, according to Bin Laden family accounts, but he also had remained a shareholder in good standing in both of the major family firms. There were a number of similar issues that seemed confusing; perhaps they were mere details, but there was a continuing sense among some of the American investigators that they could never quite see the picture in clear relief.36

  The myth of Osama’s $300 million inheritance had at last been punctured—that much was certain. He had enjoyed a healthy bank account, but he had never been among the extremely rich, and at this point, after years in exile, he clearly was not funding his terrorist operations from his inheritance.

  It infuriated some officials in the White House counterterrorism office that the CIA never seemed to acknowledge that it had circulated at the highest levels of government such misleading information about such an important question for so long. Rather than admitting error, CIA reporting now took the line that the entire subject was a confounding mystery: “We presently do not have the reporting to determine how much of Bin Laden’s personal wealth he has used or continues to use in financing his organization,” said an intelligence report circulated in April 2001. “We are unable to estimate with confidence the value of his assets and net worth; and we do not know the level of financial support he draws from his family and other donors sympathetic to his cause.”37

  The FBI’s reporting was no better, where it existed at all. Several years later, investigators from the bipartisan 9/11 Commission examined all the classified files on the subject of Bin Laden’s wealth and terrorist finance at the CIA and the FBI alike. They found CIA reporting on Bin Laden’s money to be beautifully written, elegantly printed, and efficiently distributed within the national security bureaucracy—but it was crafted from thin, poorly audited sources that turned out to be wrong. The FBI’s raw files, by comparison, contained accurate and specific data, but the files were scattered loosely around field offices and poorly analyzed. The bureau lacked the culture and capability to pull this information together, synthesize it in writing, and distribute it so that it might aid decision makers.38 The FBI also never conducted significant physical surveillance of Bin Ladens in the United States or launched a systematic review of their businesses and finances.39 Throughout the 1990s, any American or foreign citizen could have walked into the Los Angeles County Superior Court, ordered for free archived Bin Laden family divorce files, and read rich details about annual dividends, profits, loans, and business matters—information that would have refuted the CIA’s reporting about Osama’s $300 million inheritance. Yet this publicly accessible information was probably never examined, and it certainly was never reflected in intelligence reports circulating to decision makers in the Clinton administration as they tried to understand the threat Bin Laden posed to American lives and interests.

  The failure to unearth the truth about Osama’s finances “hampered the U.S. government’s ability to integrate potential covert action or economic disruption” into its attempts to stop Bin Laden before he could strike again, American investigators later concluded. The cost of particular terrorist attacks was low—perhaps $10,000 for the Africa attacks, and several hundred thousand dollars for the more challenging September 11 conspiracy. Yet the financial pressures on Bin Laden as he planned for September 11 were much greater than those numbers would suggest.40

  To maintain good graces with the Taliban, for example, Osama had to raise about $20 million per year for training camps, weapons, salaries, and subsidies for the families of volunteers. Operations outside Afghanistan cost approximately $10 million more, American investigators later concluded, when they had the benefit of a much richer archive of Al Qaeda documents and testimony. Some of these budgets overlapped with business and construction projects Osama engaged in to please Mullah Omar: a new palace for the Taliban leader outside of Kandahar in 1999, a new mosque in the city, and later, a new covered shopping market downtown.41 The funds came from sympathetic charities and from individuals who raised funds from rich individuals in the Persian Gulf; some of these donors might know where their money was going, but some might not. By 2000 Osama was running an international Islamist nonprofit whose fundraising and spending cycles looked similar to many other global charities, and whose rising use of the Internet was particularly innovative. He had restored himself to the position he enjoyed during the early 1980s when he first arrived in Afghanistan espousing Islamic charity, and learned how to use the media, the religious calendar, and his own charisma to raise millions year after year. Then, as later, when Osama needed money, he seemed to know how to find it.

  35. BIN LADEN ISLAND

  BY THE LATE 1990S, it was common within Bin Laden corporate culture to refer respectfully to each of the sons of Mohamed Bin Laden by the honorific “Sheikh.” Its usage was similar to “General” or “Colonel” within the American military—a routine prefix. One day, as Bakr Bin Laden received a rundown of management items, his briefer kept referring to his younger half-brothers in this manner, as in, “Sheikh Shafiq called from London with a question,” or “Sheikh Hassan is flying in from Lebanon tomorrow.” A person who was present recalled that Bakr waited for a suitable pause and then remarked wryly: “There’s only one sheikh in this family.”1

  Osama might wish it otherwise, but Bakr had a point. By the time the Bin Laden name became globally infamous—or celebrated, depending upon the audience—Bakr had freed himself from much of the strain and awkwardness that had accompanied his unexpected transition to family leadership after Salem’s death. He was still a very hard worker, and he still did not always seem comfortable in his own skin, but by now, in his early fifties, as the chairman of a diversified business empire, there could be no doubt about his success. The Saudi Bin Laden Group and the Mohamed Bin Laden Company employed many thousands between them. They had expanded their geographical reach: Their international construction contracts at the decade’s end included the Cairo International Airport, the Kuala Lumpur International Airport, and the Amman Grand Hyatt Hotel. They had become substantial players in new fields such as the medical industry; the United Medical Group, founded by the Saudi Bin Laden Group in 1990, was growing into a global company with $120 million in annual revenue, more than two thousand employees, and offices in London, Australia, and across the Middle East. Bakr and the brothers closest to him, particularly Yahya, had created this growth despite a series of risky political and business episodes after Salem’s death: Osama’s excommunication, falling oil prices, King Fahd’s stroke, and Crown Prince Abdullah’s attempts to exert greater control over the kingdom’s contracting system. Any one of these challenges might have set them back, but Bakr had finessed them, and in part because of his stra
tegy of business modernization and diversity, he had emerged with greater wealth and financial independence than either Salem or his father had enjoyed.2

  He was twice divorced, but his children remained under his roof. He hired guardians and tutors, and if the boys were perhaps more interested in the latest Sony PlayStation games than in their father’s ponderous Islamic verses, the generation gap between them seemed of normal expanse. Bakr sent his talented eldest son, Nawaf, an American passport holder, to the United States for schooling, and in the Arabian tradition, he cultivated the boy for a leadership role in the next generation.

  When Bakr was at home in Jeddah, his world revolved around his palace near the Red Sea, a campus with a main home, a guesthouse, buildings that served as offices for executive staff, and his majlis, where he received executives and visitors in the afternoons and evenings. He attended banquets and receptions hosted by the Al-Saud, but these soirees often had more to do with attending to his royal clients than with the pursuit of pleasure. He retained a passion for aircraft, and he built out his private fleet of jets; when traveling, he moved in the privileged and luxurious bubble of private aviation—a subculture of exclusive lounges, limousines, and white-glove service far removed from the bus station ambience of commercial aviation. He commissioned a Swedish Egyptian boat builder to construct a 190-foot aluminum yacht with a landing pad for helicopters on its deck, but the project proceeded slowly, so in the meanwhile, Bakr motored back and forth across the Red Sea, between Jeddah and the Egyptian resort at Sharm El Sheikh, on one of several smaller yachts. Once out of Saudi Arabia, his lifestyle was active but restrained. His idea of a night out was ogling jets at the Dubai Air Show or taking in the Ice Capades in Paris. He could be generous, particularly to charitable or educational causes to which he had a personal or family connection, but he generally preferred to act discreetly, all the more so after Osama declared war on the United States.