The Bin Ladens

by Steve Coll

  The initial discussion unfolded like a pitch meeting for a Hollywood fireball thriller. Mohammed proposed hijacking ten airplanes in the United States. Suicide pilots would fly nine of them into landmark targets on the East and West Coast—the Pentagon, the White House, the U.S. Capitol, the World Trade Center, CIA headquarters, FBI headquarters, nuclear power plants, and skyscrapers in California and Washington State. The tenth plane, bearing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed himself, would touch down at an American airport. He would then kill all of the male passengers aboard, alert the media, and deliver a speech denouncing American foreign policy. The pitch was “theater, a spectacle of destruction,” American investigators wrote later, but it was one in which Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, not Osama Bin Laden, would be “the self-cast star—the superterrorist.”16

  Bin Laden heard Mohammed out, but he was not enthusiastic. Perhaps it was because, as Mohammed recounted later, Osama saw the first draft of the plan as a bit too ambitious, not practical enough to justify a green light. That was certainly a plausible reaction, and consistent with Osama’s history of caution and care in the planning of violent operations. Perhaps, too, Osama preferred a different approach to the casting of the star role.

  Late in 1998 or early in 1999, Osama summoned Mohammed back, and they met at the Al-Matar complex outside Kandahar. This time they discussed a scaled-back version of the plan, one with a more manageable budget and supporting cast, and one that would not involve any press conferences presided over by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Osama said he would provide the necessary money.17

  AT THE WEDDING of Osama’s second-eldest son, Mohamed, which took place in January 2001, upward of five hundred bearded guests sat cross-legged on the open ground outside Kandahar, lined up as if for prayer. They faced the groom and the groom’s father, who sat cross-legged before them, on carpets. The bride was a fourteen-year-old daughter of a former Egyptian policeman, Mohamed Atef, who was Osama’s closest military adviser—she was not in sight, of course; this was a male-only affair. The groom appeared to be about nineteen years old. He had a fuzzy, immature mustache. He wore white robes and a white Saudi headdress. Mohamed Osama Bin Laden bore a striking resemblance to his father, having inherited his thin features and flared nose. He had appeared at earlier media events with Osama; he carried an assault rifle and spoke passionately about his commitment to jihad, although he looked so young and frail that the effect was half-comical, like something from a Saturday-morning adventure cartoon. Now, on the occasion of his marriage, when Mohamed looked into the video cameras on hand, his smile seemed awkward and lacking in confidence. So, for that matter, did his father’s smile, as he sat beside Mohamed; despite appearing over many years in self-produced videos, Osama still was prone to self-consciousness when the cameras rolled.18

  After Osama’s son Abdullah had decided to abandon his father to take up a normal Saudi teenager’s life in Jeddah, Mohamed had assumed the role of faithful eldest son in exile, and so his wedding was an unusually important occasion. There were other teenagers in Osama’s Afghan brood—the Al Qaeda leader had done more than many of his half-brothers to contribute to the swelling size of the family’s third generation. His sons alone now numbered about a dozen. In addition to Mohamed, the next eldest, Sa’ad, had been groomed for future leadership. Three other younger boys—Khalid, Hamzah, and Ladin—would soon appear in war-fighting propaganda videos, posing like African or Sri Lankan child soldiers.

  Osama seemed to regard Mohamed’s wedding as an opportunity to create a video postcard that could be enjoyed by relatives unable to attend, and at the same time, as a chance to contribute a new propaganda piece for Arab television audiences. His aides telephoned the Al-Jazeera bureau chief in Pakistan, Ahmad Zaidan, and invited him to Kandahar. When he arrived, they promised him a copy of the wedding video, so he could arrange for its broadcast by satellite. Osama’s team filmed the ceremony with their own cameras, discreetly tucking them beneath robes at times so as not to offend photography-phobic Taliban guests.

  Osama was in an expansive mood. Three months earlier, Al Qaeda suicide bombers in Yemen had piloted an explosive-laden skiff into the hull of the USS Cole, an American guided-missile destroyer; when the two attackers blew themselves up, they killed seventeen sailors and wounded more than thirty others.

  “I will tell you one thing,” Osama told Zaidan afterward, as the latter recalled it. “We did the Cole and we wanted the United States to react. And if they reacted, they are going to invade Afghanistan and that’s what we want…Then we will start holy war against the Americans, exactly like the Soviets.”19

  He was not preoccupied only by office talk, however. Osama’s mother had flown in from Jeddah, and she had brought along at least two of Osama’s younger stepbrothers, with whom he had shared his suburban household after his mother’s remarriage. (The Saudi intelligence service, which had been informed of her decision to travel to Afghanistan, still felt that it could not interfere with a mother’s desire to see her son, even after the brazen Cole attack.) Osama, Zaidan recalled, felt bad that his position among the FBI’s Most Wanted had forced his mother to fly commercial and by an indirect route. “I am very much feeling guilty,” Osama said, as Zaidan remembered it. “If there is no embargo on the Taliban, I could bring a special plane to take from here to Saudi Arabia.” He chastised himself: “I am not so kind to my mother.”20

  The wedding ceremony itself did not take long—perhaps one hour, by Zaidan’s estimation, followed by a banquet of food and a dessert course of fruits. Osama decided against a speech honoring his son but chose instead to recite a poem he had written about the USS Cole operation. He stood before the assembled and began to recite:

  A destroyer: even the brave fear its might.

  It inspires horror in the harbor and in the open sea

  She sails into the waves…

  His performance did not go particularly well, however. He stumbled. The crowd shouted “Allah Akhbar!” to encourage him. He carried on, but afterward he called Zaidan aside.

  “I don’t think my delivery was good,” he confessed. Zaidan deduced that Osama was “very much caring about public relations—very much caring about how he would appear on the TV.”

  Osama decided to try it a second time. He went back outside, the cameras rolled, and he recited the poem again:

  …Flanked by arrogance, haughtiness and false power.

  To her doom she moves slowly…

  He went back inside and looked at the video, reviewing his performances. “No, no, the first one was better,” he concluded.21

  PART FOUR

  LEGACIES

  September 2001 to September 2007

  36. THE NAME

  ON SEPTEMBER 13, 2001, Jason Blum, a former police officer who had moved into the private security industry, received a telephone call from Airworks Inc., a New Jersey broker of charter aircraft operations. The company was arranging a charter to carry members of the Bin Laden family out of the United States, its representative said. Given the events of the previous forty-eight hours, Airworks had decided to hire a security guard to protect the airplane’s crew—the pilot, copilot, and several flight attendants. Blum, however, would not be permitted to carry a weapon on board; he would have to rely on his wits and his training in martial arts.1

  Blum asked what the Bin Laden family members would have with them. Any guns? Cash? Had they been cleared to depart by the Federal Bureau of Investigation? These issues would be resolved, the charter representative assured him. Blum agreed to take the job. He was later told to arrive at a private aviation terminal at the Los Angeles International Airport at seven in the morning on September 19.

  When the day arrived, Blum dressed in a suit and tie and drove to the airport. Several FBI agents met him; they patted him down and looked through his carry-on bag, and then they escorted him aboard a Boeing 727. The plane belonged to Ryan International, a charter company based in the Midwest. Previously, the Baltimore Orioles baseball team, and more recently, th
e Chicago Bulls basketball team, had used this particular plane to travel between games. Its cabin was large enough to hold about 180 seats if it were configured for a commercial airliner, but to accommodate the sports teams, it had been outfitted in a more luxurious style. There were about thirty comfortable blue leather chairs and a half-circle wet bar at which passengers could stand and talk.

  As Blum stepped inside, he saw there were only two people aboard, both women. One introduced herself as an FBI agent. The other, a woman in her midforties, dressed in the elegant but professional style of an American businesswoman, was Najiah Bin Laden.

  The FBI agents all departed, the plane doors closed, and Blum sat down to talk with Najiah. She was “visibly upset,” and “just shaking,” as Blum remembered it. She described the novel experience of being patted down by the female FBI agent before she came aboard; he told her he had just been through the same procedure, and they chuckled about it.2

  Najiah said that she had been living in Los Angeles, in the Westwood neighborhood, for years, and that she loved Southern California. She rode horses, played polo, and took piloting lessons, she said, and she did not want to return to Saudi Arabia. She talked about “how horrible this was, and how horrible this was for the name of her family,” Blum recalled.

  A few days after the attacks in New York and Washington, Najiah continued, she had gone into a large department store in west Los Angeles to purchase some clothing. The cashier looked at her credit card and made derogatory comments, as Blum recalled her account. Afterward, she had begun to fear for her life. FBI agents had visited her at her home on September 17; she told them that she was deeply upset by the suicide attacks because “violence is not the way of Islam.”3

  Najiah told Blum that she had not talked to Osama in thirty years. She could not believe a member of her family had done this.

  Maybe it will turn out to be someone else who was responsible, Blum said. He mentioned how after the Oklahoma City terrorist attack in 1995, much of the initial speculation had centered on Muslim extremists, but then it had turned out to be a homegrown terrorist plot.

  No, Najiah replied, this is Osama’s work.

  She held a Koran. As the airplane accelerated down the runway and lifted into the air, she opened its pages and read.4

  SOMEWHERE OVER ARIZONA, Blum ducked into the cockpit to speak with the pilot, who was in his late forties or early fifties. His copilot was a woman who said that she had previously flown for Southwest Airlines. The captain asked Blum who he was, who he worked for, and why he was on the flight.

  Blum explained that he used to be a cop, but that he was now working as a security guard, to protect the airplane’s crew.

  Why do I need security? the pilot asked. They were just picking up some college students in Florida, he said, and some other college kids in Washington, and then taking them to Boston. Then he asked: Do you have a passenger manifest?

  Blum paused. He had one, but it was full of Bin Laden names—obviously, the captain had not been told. He felt it was a bad idea to lie to airplane pilots, however, particularly while they were in the air, so he handed the paper over.

  “The guy turned white,” Blum recalled, “just absolutely ghost white.” He was visibly angry as he handed the manifest to his copilot. They all passed it around. Then they pulled out cigarettes and started chain-smoking. Blum found his Marlboros and joined them.

  The pilot and copilot contacted their charter company and issued a series of profane complaints. The crew told Blum that, no offense, but they were a little worried about his ability to control things on his own once the rest of the Bin Ladens came aboard—should something go wrong.

  “You’ve got one woman in her midforties in the center of the plane,” Blum said. There was nothing to be anxious about.

  Now the flight attendants also picked up on who was on their passenger list. “They started going berserk,” Blum recalled. The attendants paced back and forth to the cockpit.

  Finally they landed in Orlando. It was late afternoon East Coast time. The charter crew had decided upon their demands: because they were concerned about their safety and also felt they had been deceived, they were not going to fly any farther than Orlando unless they were each paid an additional $10,000.

  Blum learned that a TV channel was reporting that a flight related to September 11—the report was sketchy about the nature of the connection—was preparing to take off from Orlando. Great, Blum thought. He started to worry about some nut turning up with a rifle to take pot shots at them on the tarmac or to try to shoot them out of the sky.

  He went back out to the 727 to monitor who and what went aboard. Their flight plan was now on indefinite hold because of the crew’s demands. Three FBI agents patrolled the tarmac and the terminal.

  Blum talked on his cell phone with a manager at Ryan Air: the longer we sit on the tarmac, Blum pleaded, the bigger target we become.

  Blum spotted a tall man, perhaps six feet four inches tall, and handsome. He wore a thin mustache. He looked exactly like Osama Bin Laden, Blum thought, except that he wore designer sunglasses and a five-thousand-dollar Bijan suit.

  Khalil Bin Laden introduced himself and apologized to Blum; he said he was sorry that Blum even had to be there.

  Najiah came out and asked Khalil what the long delay was all about. Blum explained: The flight crew was not made aware of your identities. One problem, he continued, is that they are terrified to fly with you. The other is they want more money.

  Give them whatever they want, Khalil said, exasperated. “Let’s just get out of here.”5

  ON THE EVENING of September 13, the same day Jason Blum was first contacted about the Bin Laden flight, Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador in Washington, met with President George W. Bush at the White House. They smoked cigars on the Truman Balcony, overlooking the South Lawn. The number of dead was still uncounted—in the thousands, certainly. The televised imagery of the attacks and their aftermath—the helpless office workers leaping to their deaths from the twin towers; the tear-streaked, dust-covered faces of the wounded; the shards of paper and debris; the impromptu bulletin boards covered by photos of the missing—still pulsed through the country like a crackling current. What the events would mean ultimately for the U.S.-Saudi governmental alliance was difficult to predict, but there would obviously be a rethinking on both sides.

  Bandar insisted later that he did not trouble Bush that evening with the plans he had been working on at the Saudi embassy to evacuate the Bin Laden family, as well as the several dozen members of the Saudi royal family and their entourages who were scattered around the United States. (One group of royals had come to the country before September 11 to purchase Thoroughbred horses in Kentucky; another had come to vacation in California and Las Vegas.) According to Bandar, he called the FBI directly to obtain permission for the charter flights he organized and to ensure that Saudi nationals were adequately protected from vigilante revenge attacks. “Those people were scattered all over America and with tempers high at that time, rightly so, we were worried that someone getting emotional would hurt them,” Bandar said later. He did not say whom he telephoned at the FBI, but he had an excellent relationship with the director, Louis Freeh. After settling things with the bureau, Bandar telephoned Richard Clarke, the counterterrorism director at the White House, who told him, “I have no problem if the FBI has no problem.”6

  About three or four days after September 11, Bandar also called Fred Dutton, a Washington lawyer who had served as a legal and political adviser to the Saudi royal family for many years. Bandar explained that some of Osama’s half-brothers happened to be in the United States and wanted to retain legal counsel. “Talk to them and see if you can be of any help,” Bandar said. Dutton was reluctant, but he agreed.7

  Dutton was a white-haired doyen of the Washington bar, now in his seventies, a man who was protective of his reputation and who spoke with precision and care. He drove to the Four Seasons Hotel on the edge of Georgetown
and rode the elevator to a two-room suite. There he introduced himself to Shafiq Bin Laden and Abdullah Bin Laden, the Harvard law graduate. The brothers both wore business suits. They all sat down to talk in the living room area of the suite.

  Shafiq Bin Laden had been attending a Carlyle Group investors’ conference at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Washington, near Dupont Circle, when American Airlines Flight 77 smashed into the Pentagon across the Potomac River. Abdullah Bin Laden had been buying a latte at a Starbucks in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when news of the attacks flashed on the television. He had then made his way to Washington to join his half-brother, to assist with the efforts to evacuate his family, and to assess how to manage their legal position.

  The brothers asked Dutton for advice on “what to do, how to handle what was obviously a very embarrassing, messy situation for most of the rest of the Bin Laden family,” as Dutton recalled it. They said they were estranged from Osama, hadn’t seen him in a very long time, and thought he was “a bad apple,” as Dutton put it later.8

  The brothers did not propose retaining Dutton himself, but they asked him if he could recommend the names of some lawyers who might be willing to take the Bin Ladens on as clients. They wanted a law firm that could provide general advice, but that could also assist them on specific legal issues that might arise for the family in the United States in the aftermath of the suicide attacks. Civil lawsuits filed on behalf of the victims were one obvious possibility. The U.S. government would certainly renew its investigations of family finances and related issues. Dutton knew that the Bin Laden family had previously worked with Sullivan & Cromwell, but the brothers did not say whether they had also contacted Sullivan—whose New York headquarters was near the World Trade Center—or what had come of their inquiry if they had made one.