The Bin Ladens

by Steve Coll

  On October 20, 2001, he sat down with the Syrian-born, Spanish national Taysir Allouni, a reporter for Al-Jazeera. In the first part of their interview discussion, Osama performed in a familiar manner, and he sounded some of his stock themes: America was a paper tiger; its economy and political system would collapse in the face of determined jihad, as had happened to the Soviet Union. He reeled off a series of calculations based on the reported figures of Wall Street stock market losses after September 11. He sounded as if he had recently been sitting in front of his television or his computer, furiously scribbling down numerical estimates:

  According to their own admission, the share of the losses on Wall Street market reached sixteen percent. They said that this number is a record…The gross amount that is traded in that market reaches $4 trillion. So if we multiply 16 percent by $4 trillion…it reaches $640 billion of losses from stocks, with God’s grace, an amount that is equivalent to the budget of Sudan for 640 years…The daily income of the American nation is $20 billion. The first week they didn’t work at all as a result of the psychological shock…So if you multiply $20 billion by one week, it comes to $140 billion…If you add it to the $640 billion, we’ve reached how much? Approximately $800 billion…28

  On he went, swerving between accountancy and the poetical rhetoric of a typical tenor. Then the interview took a striking turn.

  “What about the killing of innocent civilians?” Allouni asked.

  “It is very strange for Americans and other educated people to talk about the killing of innocent civilians,” Osama answered.

  “I mean,” he continued, “Who said that our children and civilians are not innocents, and that the shedding of their blood is permissible. Whenever we kill their civilians, the whole world yells at us from East to West, and America starts putting pressure on its allies and puppets…There is a strong instinct in humans to lean towards the powerful without knowing it, so when they talk about us, they know we will not answer them…”

  “So you say that it is an eye for an eye? They kill our innocents, so we kill theirs?”

  “Yes, so we kill their innocents—this is valid both religiously and logically. But some of the people who talk about this issue, discuss it from a religious point of view…They say that the killing of innocents is wrong and invalid, and for proof, they say that the Prophet forbade the killing of children and women, and that is true…”

  “This is precisely what I’m talking about!” Allouni interrupted. “This is exactly what I’m asking you about!”

  “…But this forbidding of killing children and innocents is not set in stone, and there are other writings that uphold it.”

  Now Osama embarked on a different justification, one that seemed to contradict his own argument: He defended himself by saying that he hadn’t actually intended to kill people who should be classified as innocents. “[We] didn’t set out to kill children,” he said, “but rather attacked the biggest center of military power in the world, the Pentagon, which contains more than 64,000 workers, a military base which has a big concentration of army and intelligence.”

  “What about the World Trade Center?”

  “As for the World Trade Center, the ones who were attacked who died in it were part of a financial power. It wasn’t a children’s school! Neither was it a residence. And the general consensus is that most of the people who were in the towers were men that backed the biggest financial force in the world…And those individuals should stand before God, and rethink and redo their calculations.”

  Immediately, however, Osama returned to his first argument: Even if they were innocent, his attack was justified on the basis of retribution: “We treat others like they treat us. Those who kill our women and our innocent, we kill their women and innocent, until they stop doing so.” These were the evasions of a man who had apparently not expected to be criticized or questioned on the issue.

  A little later, Osama assessed Bush’s ill-considered use of the word “Crusade” to describe America’s response to September 11: “So Bush has declared in his own words: ‘Crusade attack.’ The odd thing about this is that he has taken the word right out of our mouth…People make apologies for him and they say that he didn’t mean to say that this war is a Crusade, even though he himself said that it was! So the world today is split into two parts, as Bush said: Either you are with us, or you are with terrorism. Either you are with the Crusade, or you are with Islam. Bush’s image today is of him being in the front of the line, yelling and carrying his big cross.”29

  There was something striking and authentic in this entire exchange—perhaps it was the absence of Osama’s self-mystifying verses, and the absence, too, of archaic language, Koranic justification, or reference to ancient maps. Here was a well-informed, up-to-date media consumer and amateur political analyst defending the violence he sponsored through straightforward argument, as if he were appearing at a mosque debate or on a televised current-affairs program.

  And yet as his exchange with Allouni continued, Osama spoke just as fluidly in the vernacular of a religious cultist—with the seeming flick of a switch, he could find the voice in which he recounted dreams, spoke in Koranic riddles, or expressed his conviction that he and his followers were engaged in a preordained war that would continue until the climax of earthly time—a war that was not a means to a political end, but was rather an expression of God’s will, and as such, could offer no peace to the enemies of His true religion.

  “What is your opinion,” Allouni asked him, “about what is being said concerning your analogies and the ‘Clash of Civilizations’? Your constant use and repetition of the word ‘Crusade’ and ‘Crusader’ shows that you uphold the saying, the ‘Clash of Civilizations.’”

  “I say there is no doubt about this,” Osama answered. “This [clash of civilizations] is a very clear matter, proven in the Koran…The Jews and America have come up with a fairytale that they transmit to the Muslims, and they’ve unfortunately been followed by the local rulers and a lot of people who are close to them, by using ‘world peace’ as an excuse. That is a fairytale that has no substance whatsoever!”

  “Peace?”

  “The peace that they foist on Muslims in order to ready and prepare them to be slaughtered…Whoever claims that there is permanent peace between us and the Jews has disbelieved what has been sent down through Mohamed; the battle is between us and the enemies of Islam, and it will go on until the Hour.”30

  Several weeks after this interview, a Saudi religious scholar, Ali Al-Ghandi, arrived in Afghanistan on a tour. Near Kandahar, he was granted an audience with Osama. The transcript of their informal conversation is peppered with risible passages, particularly as Al-Ghandi tries awkwardly to flatter Osama: “We don’t want to take much of your time…Everybody praises what you did, the great action that you did…Hundreds of people used to doubt you and few only would follow you until this huge event happened. Now hundreds of people are coming out to join you.”

  Osama explained how the planes operation had exceeded his expectations, and he referred to his own background in civil engineering and demolition: “We calculated that the floors that would be hit would be three or four floors. I was the most optimistic of them all…due to my experience in this field. I was thinking that the fire from the gas in the plane would melt the iron structure of the building and collapse the area where the plane hit, and all the floors above it only. This is all that we hoped for.” Osama said he was pleased and surprised when both buildings collapsed entirely.

  “By God,” Al-Ghandi said obsequiously, “it is a great work.”31

  OSAMA’S SUDDEN POPULARITY among ordinary Saudis redoubled the complexity of the Bin Laden family’s position: Had they brought shame and disrepute upon the kingdom, or had they nurtured a new Arab folk hero? It did not require professional expertise in public relations to see the contours of this dilemma as the Bin Ladens searched for a legal and communications strategy. To please American audiences, the Bin Ladens would have
to seek forgiveness and denounce Osama. To please audiences in the Arab world, where the family’s financial interests predominantly lay, such a posture would be seen as craven.

  It was perhaps unrealistic to expect Abdullah, in Boston, with his diffident personality and his very junior standing in the family, to manage these questions on his own.

  Abdullah joined Andrew Hess for dinner one evening that autumn at the Helmand Restaurant, run by the Karzai family, whose own exiled scion would soon be restored to power in their native country, displacing Osama’s influence there. Hess was the Tufts professor whose academic program the Bin Ladens had supported during the 1990s. From his many years spent in Saudi Arabia, Hess had come to think that there was “a certain posture that Arabs take in cases of tragedy” and that Abdullah Bin Laden, over dinner, now exuded this posture, which Hess saw as a sort of burdened fatalism: What can one do?

  “He regarded this as a huge tragedy for the family,” Hess recalled. Abdullah took pains to convince him that the Bin Ladens were “hugely hostile” to what Osama had done, and that they had “no interest whatsoever in supporting anything he’s doing…that he’s receiving no money from the corporation.” Abdullah made this last point more than once.32

  In December, after flying over to London, Abdullah agreed to meet with Charlotte Edwardes, a British journalist with the Telegraph. Bakr had tentatively given Abdullah some scope to humanize his section of the family through occasional contact with the media. Edwardes found Abdullah a sympathetic figure—a “tall, slight foreigner dressed in an expensively cut black overcoat,” who worried about his many allergies, and walked somberly through the Mayfair streets, oblivious to Christmas shoppers. Abdullah could barely speak of Osama; he referred to his half-brother as “Mr. O.”33

  He talked to Edwardes about his new life in America and Britain. He used cash as much as possible, to avoid that awkward moment when a clerk might stare down at the raised letters on his credit card. At home in Boston, he had stopped jogging out of doors and had given up private piloting. Flying, he said, “is like nothing else. When I am up there in the plane I feel free,” and none of his family’s history with tragic aviation events had diminished his passion. And yet, he understood that “it would be an insult for me to pilot a plane in America now.”

  During one of several meetings, Abdullah sat down with Edwardes at the Four Seasons Hotel in Knightsbridge. Abdullah paid for his Evian water (it was Ramadan, and he was fasting during the daytime) from a wad of fifty-pound notes. As they prepared to leave for dinner, Abdullah asked the hotel waiter if it might be possible to book a table at Nobu, then the most sought-after restaurant in London.

  “Sorry, no, not unless you are a name,” the waiter said.

  For a moment, Edwardes thought, Abdullah Bin Laden “allowed himself the shadow of a smile.”34

  37. PUBLIC RELATIONS

  RICHARD NEWCOMB, the attorney who ran the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, led a delegation to Saudi Arabia in December 2001 to speak with businessmen in the kingdom about the problem of terrorist financing. The delegation’s purpose—although its members did not put it quite so bluntly as this during meetings—was to shake up the attitudes of wealthy Saudis about their charitable giving and other financial dealings in the Islamic world. Newcomb and colleagues from the State Department and other agencies hoped to accomplish this by enumerating for audiences of Saudi businessmen the penalties that individuals and companies could incur under American law if they passed money to the wrong people. The Bush administration had identified the disruption of terrorist financing as an important priority after September 11, and Treasury had already designated several dozen individuals, charities, and businesses as supporters of terrorism, which meant their U.S.-held assets could be frozen. Newcomb and his colleagues scheduled roundtable meetings with the Jeddah Chamber of Commerce and other businessmen in Riyadh and Jeddah. The Treasury team also asked for a private meeting with the Bin Laden family, and somewhat to their surprise, they learned that Bakr Bin Laden would meet with them.1

  The meeting took place in the elegant offices of the Saudi Bin Laden Group. Shafiq and Abdullah, who had met with Newcomb at Treasury prior to September 11 to outline the history of Bin Laden inheritances, joined Bakr in his office. This time, instead of the business suits they had worn to the Treasury Annex in Washington, the two brothers appeared in traditional Saudi robes and headdresses. No one from Treasury had met Bakr before; they were struck by his relatively modest stature, at least in comparison to Osama.

  Bakr apologized to the Americans about the September 11 attacks. He said that Osama was no longer considered a part of the Bin Laden family, and that he had been cut off for years. Bakr added that he had no idea where Osama was hiding. He offered the cooperation of his family and his company.

  Newcomb and his colleagues walked through their presentation about American terrorist-financing laws. They tried to speak in a diplomatic, nonthreatening tone. They did not go into depth with Bakr about specific Bin Laden family or inheritance issues; Newcomb’s office believed the letter sent to Treasury by Sullivan & Cromwell in 2000 had adequately addressed these questions.

  The Bin Laden brothers were cordial. Shafiq suggested to one member of the delegation that he come back when he wasn’t so busy so they could go fishing together in the Red Sea. In a more serious vein, one of the brothers mentioned that his American Express card had been blocked after September 11—he presumed this was because of the family name on the card. He wanted to go back to America, he said, but he could not do so without a working American Express card. One of the American officials joked that this was a pretty good advertisement for the credit card company.

  Back in Washington, in the first weeks of 2002, Treasury officials discussed the credit card matter at the White House, where several interagency working groups convened on a weekly or biweekly basis to review global counterterrorism operations. The Taliban had fallen by now, intelligence operations against Al Qaeda were unfolding in dozens of countries, and preparations had quietly begun for an invasion of Iraq. In this interregnum the Bush administration was also focusing intently on terrorist-financing matters, and its interagency groups on terrorism reviewed many detailed case files. After the mission to Saudi Arabia, a sensitive question arose: Was the Bush administration prepared, at least provisionally, to clear Bin Laden family bank accounts and credit cards, so that members of the family resident in Saudi Arabia and Europe could travel more freely?2

  U.S. government investigators had learned a great deal about the Bin Laden family in the several months since September 11, particularly about its business history in America. The Federal Bureau of Investigation had carried out much of this work after the attacks in Washington and New York. Dennis Lormel, an agent with a background in financial crime investigations, had been appointed on September 13 to lead a team at FBI headquarters assigned to concentrate on the financial aspects of the September 11 plot, and more generally on Al Qaeda’s money trail. The FBI’s fifty-six field offices scattered around the United States also carried out investigations into the Bin Laden family, some in cooperation with Lormel’s group, others on a more ad hoc basis. On the evening of September 11 itself, for example, agents from the Boston field office turned up at the local condominium where Abdullah and his half-brother Mohamed had owned apartments; the FBI agents started what would become weeks of shoe-leather police work in the Boston area. They interviewed neighbors, investigated nightclubs and bars where younger Bin Ladens were said to appear on occasion, and dug for evidence about family money. Similar investigations, none of them announced to the public, took place in New York, Washington, Los Angeles, Florida, Texas, and elsewhere. Through the autumn, FBI agents gathered an enormous sheaf of files and interview reports about the Bin Ladens, although as ever, the bureau struggled to pull its data together and deliver it in a way that policy makers outside the FBI could use.3

  FBI agents and investigators from the nascent Departm
ent of Homeland Security spent long hours with some of the Bin Ladens’ key American business partners after September 11, talking through the minutia of each long-ago business transaction involving Salem, Khalil, Yeslam, and other brothers active in the United States. The agents examined where and how the money had flowed in these deals. The investigators also took flight logs from family pilots and interviewed some pilots at length about Bin Laden family travel history, reaching as far back as the 1970s. The FBI learned, for example, about the flight to Peshawar, Pakistan, by Gerald Auerbach and Ghalib Bin Laden early in 1989.4

  These investigations amounted to intelligence collection; there were no grand juries convened to consider criminal charges. Some of the work fell inevitably into the gray area between the mandate of the FBI and that of the Central Intelligence Agency. Charles Tickle, who had directed commercial real estate investments in Richmond, Virginia, and elsewhere for Yeslam Bin Laden, telephoned the CIA switchboard on his own after the attacks. He volunteered to the operator, “We had business dealings with the Bin Laden family.” They asked a few questions and later called back to say, in effect, “No, everything’s good.”5

  All this digging on American soil turned up no evidence of complicity by the Bin Laden family in terrorist violence. Dale Watson, the FBI’s chief of counterterrorism in the fall of 2001, concluded that the Bin Laden family “couldn’t help us and they were not a threat,” as he put it later. Dennis Lormel and his terrorist-finance team reached a similar judgment, although they felt there were a few areas of family activity where it was difficult to be conclusive.6

  Because he was new to the subject, it took Lormel a while to unravel and move beyond the misleading U.S. intelligence reports he inherited, originating at the CIA, which described Osama’s supposedly vast personal fortune. Lormel and his team felt they could not simply accept at face value the Bin Laden family’s report, through Sullivan & Cromwell, about the size and timing of Osama’s inheritance and dividend payments—that account might well be correct, and the FBI had no specific reason to doubt it, but a letter from a family lawyer hardly counted as definitive evidence in a matter as important as Osama’s wealth. Where were the original documents? Where was the evidence that could hold up in a courtroom?