The Bin Ladens

by Steve Coll

  Dutton recalled that he “tried to throw cold water on them,” saying that he did not think this was a time when legal representation could be of any real help to the Bin Laden family. It was too early and feelings were too raw. But he agreed to explore the matter.

  Over the next day or two, Dutton called a few prestigious Washington attorneys he knew to sound them out. He was not going to put people he did not know well on the spot by making cold calls. He concluded from the conversations he held that “this just is not the right time, and it can’t be done.”9

  He called the Bin Ladens back and told them; he said he did not believe there was any merit in even holding exploratory meetings. He suggested that they pull back and “let some breathing space” develop. He also advised them to avoid working with any of the sorts of attorneys who might be willing to take them on in this atmosphere—such lawyers would be grandstanders, and would not ultimately help the family. The entire proposition, Dutton felt, was a “non-starter.”10

  Shafiq and Abdullah also met in Washington during these initial days after September 11 with Chas Freeman, the former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia who had developed an acquaintance with Bakr. After leaving government, Freeman had become president of the Middle East Policy Council in Washington, to which the Bin Ladens had made financial contributions over many years; he also negotiated business deals in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere overseas. The brothers told Freeman they were receiving a stream of terrible threats. They had found the FBI “solicitous and kind,” and had tried to be helpful themselves in answering the bureau’s questions about family history and Osama’s situation within it, but given their circumstances in the United States, those Bin Ladens still in the country felt they were now essentially under the bureau’s protection.11

  They talked with Freeman about the family’s public relations problem. After Osama declared war on the United States, the Bin Ladens had retained a former Wall Street Journal reporter, Timothy Metz, who had started his own public relations firm in New York, but Metz was mainly just a point of entry for the American media; he relayed inquiries from reporters and passed along clippings about the Bin Ladens from the American press. Freeman advised Shafiq and Abdullah to hire someone with specific experience in crisis communications. He felt that law firms were not the ideal advisers in a situation of this kind; they had a distinct orientation. The Bin Laden brothers said they would consider Freeman’s idea. Like many people during those September days, they seemed to be in something of a state of shock.12

  WHEN THE FIRST PLANE struck the World Trade Center, Yeslam Bin Laden was driving to the airport in Geneva with a friend. His cell phone rang; a second friend, an American investment banker in New York, told him the news. At first Yeslam thought it was an accident, that a plane had somehow missed its approach. His friend called back a few minutes later to report the second strike. Yeslam said later that he knew then it was not an accident, and yet it still did not occur to him to think that his half-brother might be involved. It seemed “too sophisticated” to be Osama’s work, he said later. He “never thought” even for “a second” that Osama “could have been alone behind this affair.”13

  Yeslam drove to a Geneva hotel where his mother and his brother Ibrahim were staying for a visit. They watched the news and heard Osama named as the suspected mastermind of the attacks. His mother fell ill from the strain. They had to call a doctor.

  The next morning the Swiss federal police telephoned. They asked Yeslam to come for an interview. Earlier, when Yeslam was an applicant for Swiss citizenship, Swiss investigators had interviewed him about family history and his relationship with Osama. Now they wanted to go back through the same questions in greater depth. The session lasted several hours, according to Yeslam. That same day, he decided to issue a written statement from Geneva:

  “I am shocked by this criminal attack of terrorism which killed innocent people yesterday,” it said. “I would like to express my deepest feelings of sorrow. All life is sacred and I condemn all killing and all attacks against liberty and human values. My thoughts and profound sympathy are with the victims, their families and the American people.”14

  It was the first and most expansive expression of sympathy issued by any member of the Bin Laden family about September 11. It also placed responsibility for the attacks in a generalized context—“all life…all attacks against liberty and human values”—and it made no particular reference to Osama.

  Yeslam flew to Cannes, France, to meet with Bakr and another Bin Laden brother on the first weekend after the attacks. They discussed “the possibility of bringing everybody back to Saudi Arabia” to regroup.15

  Bakr’s reaction to the attacks seemed to be infused with caution. He did not issue any statement on behalf of the family or provide any media interviews or other public remarks for an entire week. At that point Bakr’s office issued a brief written statement on behalf of the Bin Laden family, under the name of his uncle, Abdullah, Mohamed’s aged brother. The statement expressed “the strong denunciation and condemnation of this sad event, which resulted in the loss of many innocent men, women and children, and which contradicts our Islamic faith.”

  Privately, Bakr was more forthright. Sabry Ghoneim, the family’s communications adviser in Egypt, recalled that Bakr told him, “This is a criminal act. If America seeks revenge, it’s their right, because that’s the price of the people who died.” This was not unusual language for Bakr to use about Al Qaeda when there was no public audience listening in. Once, after an Al Qaeda–inspired bombing, he telephoned a British friend from his private jet to denounce the “bloody Arabs” and their destructive terrorism. But he never offered such strong language in public.16

  Instead, the belated statement Bakr authorized followed what had become Saudi government policy. In the initial days and weeks following September 11, Saudi princes and spokesmen denounced the terrible violence of that day, expressed sympathy for the victims, and said that the attacks contradicted the tenets of Islam. But Saudi statements usually made no specific reference to Osama, Al Qaeda, or the Saudi nationalities of nineteen of the September 11 hijackers. Indeed, as late as December 2002, Prince Nayef, the interior minister, who had such a long history with Osama and the Bin Ladens, still refused to acknowledge that the hijackers were Saudis at all; he suggested that September 11 was a Zionist conspiracy concocted to discredit Muslims. Nayef ’s comments shocked many Americans. Of course, his opinions about September 11—and his beliefs about Zionists and Jews—were quite commonplace in the kingdom. It was just that Americans previously had little occasion to hear such opinions, and certainly not at a transforming moment of national shock and grief. Nayef ’s words wafted through American political and media circles like a toxic gas released from a long-buried cavern.

  There were certainly some Saudis who celebrated the September 11 attacks. Saad Al-Faqih, the exiled dissident, claimed that text messages ricocheted on mobile phones around the kingdom, declaring, “Congratulations” or “Our prayers to Bin Laden,” and that sheep and camels were slaughtered for celebratory feasts. Al-Faqih’s credibility is questionable—he wasn’t in the kingdom—but others who were there acknowledge that celebration was at least an element of initial popular reaction. This joy mingled with fear of retaliation against Arabs and Muslims, and confusion about how such an ambitious conspiracy could have been carried off by a loose band of individuals based in Afghanistan—the improbability of the attacks was widely taken as empirical proof of Zionist involvement. At the heart of the reaction lay the sense of grievance toward the United States and Israel nurtured by many Arabians, even though most of them had little or no meaningful contact with either country. Arab media and governments cultivated this discourse in part because it deflected anger from local failures. September 11 amplified all these perceptions at least temporarily.

  Bassim Alim, an attorney in Jeddah who was related by marriage to the Bin Laden family, summed up the typical Saudi attitude: “Even if I do not condone what
Osama has done, I’m not going to cry for the broken hearts of American mothers and American daughters and American fathers…Maybe what he did is wrong but it’s God’s justice, God’s way of helping us. Sometimes we have a criminal kill another criminal—it’s God’s way of having his own justice.” After the attacks in New York and Washington, Alim said, he attended “many social events and social gatherings” in Jeddah with “people from different stratas of life and different stratas of society, whether they’re extreme liberals or the extreme religious, and you can see this commonality: ‘Osama has destroyed our image…But you know, at the end of the day, the Americans deserve it.’”17

  KHALIL BIN LADEN had been vacationing at Desert Bear outside Orlando on the morning of September 11; he and members of his family had watched the attacks unfold on the television news. An FBI agent telephoned Khalil at his estate on September 12; the agent said that the local FBI office had received reports, apparently from neighbors of Desert Bear, of “a large amount of activity” at the estate. Khalil denied that there was anything unusual going on at his home. He said his main concern was “the safety of his family,” and he asked the agent if the FBI was aware of specific threats against them. The agent told Khalil to call the Orange County Sheriff ’s Department if he or his family ever felt threatened.18

  Khalil called the FBI agent back three days later and asked if it would be possible for him and his family to fly by commercial airliner to Washington, D.C., so they could connect with a charter flight home that was being arranged by the Saudi embassy. FBI agents drove out to Desert Bear to talk it over; ultimately, the charter plane was routed through Orlando.

  On September 19, as the plane carrying Najiah and Jason Blum flew toward Orlando from Los Angeles, FBI agents escorted Khalil and his family to the Orlando International Airport. The traveling party included Khalil’s wife, Isabel, and their son Sultan. FBI agents interviewed the embarking passengers and looked through their luggage.

  Khalil wandered out to the tarmac. There he met Jason Blum and learned of the charter flight crew’s revolt.

  As they waited, Khalil mentioned that he and his family had started to receive death threats at Desert Bear. Cars were driving by the estate very slowly, checking them out.19

  Blum wore down his cell phone batteries talking to Bob Bernstein, the Ryan Air executive in charge of the charter flight, as they tried to resolve the crew’s demands for extra money. Blum and Bernstein joked on the phone that they were just two Jews trying to get the Bin Laden family out of the country. Finally they resolved the money issue, essentially by giving into the crew’s demands, according to Blum.20

  The pilot and copilot climbed back aboard, the Bin Ladens took their seats, and they lifted off for Washington’s Dulles International Airport. At a private aviation terminal they met Shafiq and his London-based financial executive, Akber Moawalla, who had accompanied Shafiq to the United States to attend the September 11 Carlyle Group meeting.

  Also boarding the plane in Washington was Omar Awadh Bin Laden. He had apparently once shared an address with the Abdullah Bin Laden who ran the local office of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth. (The office had previously been a subject of FBI inquiries, which had been aborted in part because of the issue of diplomatic immunity.) Of all the passengers on the Bin Laden flight, Omar is the only one known to have even a possible connection to Islamist preaching or organizing. And yet, oddly, Omar may have been one of the few passengers on the charter who was not interviewed by the FBI.21

  As the number of Bin Ladens aboard the 727 swelled with each successive stop, there was a growing atmosphere inside the cabin of a mournful family reunion, Blum recalled. Some of the Bin Ladens aboard had not seen each other for a long while, and they greeted each other with excitement. Others were crying and visibly upset. Some stood at the bar and sipped tea or soft drinks. Almost everybody smoked cigarettes nervously, it seemed, and the passenger lounge filled up with thick clouds of blue smoke.22

  As the plane flew toward its final departure from American airspace, there was a sense that the Bin Ladens might now be leaving the United States behind for good, or at least for a very long time. Najiah and Khalil talked with Blum about how they might have to change their name if they ever returned.

  In Boston a number of college students from the family’s third generation came aboard. One was Nawaf, Bakr’s eldest son. Salem’s son Salman, the student at Tufts University, was another. Altogether, about a dozen younger Bin Ladens joined the plane in Boston, and many of them looked and sounded American. One of the male students mentioned that he was just starting his sophomore year in college and had finally managed to obtain a fake ID of some quality, so that he could go out to clubs and bars with his friends—this was not going to be of much use in Saudi Arabia, he told Blum ruefully.23

  The FBI made one last pass through the plane at Logan International Airport in Boston, checking luggage and talking to the passengers. The original pilot and co-pilot disembarked and a new crew took over. Blum was supposed to leave the plane in Boston, too, but Najiah and Khalil asked him to stay all the way to Paris, and he agreed. Finally they lifted off and cleared American airspace. Because of the 727’s limited range, they would refuel in Nova Scotia and again in Iceland before they reached France. But the United States was at last behind them.

  The younger Bin Ladens chatted and smoked with Blum and a second security guard who had joined them in Boston, Ric Pascetta, who, like Blum, was a martial arts specialist, and two other private security officers who had come aboard. The Bin Laden kids asked the two of them about police work; the students said they were particularly devastated that so many policemen and firemen had died in New York while trying to rescue others. “I was explaining to them that that’s what we do,” Blum remembered. “It’s like a mental defect that we have—instead of running away, we go after it.”24

  Also in Boston, Sanaa Bin Laden, a half-sister of Osama’s who spent much of her time in New England, had joined the flight. She had worked on children’s cultural exhibitions in Boston. She was about forty years old, one of several middle-aged Bin Laden mothers now on the plane. Blum noticed that the older women tended to dress more conservatively—usually headscarves or something similar. Even more striking, as they neared Paris, all the Bin Laden women, young or old, in Western designer clothes or not, prepared to cover themselves in full black abayas. Blum learned that they would transfer in Paris to a Saudi government plane for the last leg home. When they stepped onto that Saudi aircraft, they would effectively reenter the kingdom; some of the women waited as long as possible, as they crossed the Atlantic, to transform themselves appropriately.

  ONE BIN LADEN stayed behind: Abdullah, the longtime Harvard law student who lived in Boston. He was thirty-five years old and had now spent the majority of his adult life in the United States. He retained some faith in the resilience and tolerance of American society. After the attacks, he told his younger nieces and nephews, the ones who had been pulled out of college in Boston, “Believe me, if any society is going to understand your case, is going to differentiate between good and evil, it is here.” He later told a reporter, “I’m here, a member of my family is being accused, and still I’m being treated as a human being.” In the weeks following the evacuation flight, Abdullah traveled between Boston, New York, Washington, and London, searching for a public relations strategy that might salvage some of their standing in the United States and Europe.25

  He contacted Steven Goldstein, a communications strategist in New York who happened to be Jewish. They met at a café in New York City. The Bin Ladens had no previous connections with his firm. Abdullah said the family was looking for a way to publicize the fact that they had previously renounced Osama, Goldstein recalled.26

  He did not know where his half-brother was hiding, Abdullah said. Goldstein asked if Osama had always been “a madman.” Abdullah said that while Osama had never loved America, something in the mid-1990s had made him snap.

  Abdullah
said he regarded Goldstein’s Jewish heritage as “a plus.” He also asked, according to Goldstein, “Do you know any Jewish lawyers?” Goldstein bristled and tried to keep his composure. Abdullah seemed oblivious to the possibility that his preference for Jewish representation might be offensive. At best Abdullah’s approach was naive—an insensitive attempt to associate the Bin Ladens with American diversity and values. Perhaps he harbored less attractive thoughts—that Jews were always for hire at the right price, or that he could leverage their supposedly hidden powers in America to aid his family. In any event, Goldstein turned Abdullah down.27

  IN AFGHANISTAN, Osama Bin Laden held two lengthy and reflective conversations with sympathetic visitors during the first two months after the September 11 attacks. Both conversations were recorded, although neither was broadcast immediately.

  The full transcripts suggest that like his adversaries in America, Osama had spent many hours after the attacks glued to a television, watching news report after news report, commentary after commentary. Osama seemed particularly vulnerable to feelings of aggravation about President Bush’s language and attitude. He also apparently was infused by feelings of defensiveness about the accusation, so often repeated in American and some Arab news broadcasts, that whatever the merits of Al Qaeda’s political grievances, Osama had discredited himself by taking the lives of so many innocents.