The Bin Ladens

by Steve Coll

  He seemed to particularly cherish the rhetoric of transformation in the Middle East enunciated by Bush and his cabinet. Their formulations about a “new” Arab world, anchored by a secular, democratic constitution in Iraq, confirmed Osama’s belief that he was engaged in an epochal conflict. The occupation of Iraq “shows that the struggle is an ideological and religious struggle, and that the clash is a clash of civilizations,” he wrote in May 2004. “They are keen to destroy the Islamic identity in the entire Islamic world.”13

  He mocked his Western adversaries for misunderstanding him as a premodern fanatic, a bearded loner in a faraway cave; he saw himself, instead, as a master of global technology and change. Indeed, after 2001, encouraged by Bin Laden’s embrace of digital technology, Al Qaeda—now an organization, a movement, and a franchised brand—rapidly adapted itself to the loss of physical sanctuary in Afghanistan by making greater use of the Internet for training, tactical communication, and preaching. When American officials suggested that some of Osama’s self-produced videos might contain secret codes to trigger terrorist attacks by sleeper cells, Bin Laden reacted to these fears with contempt. “The Americans have made laughable claims,” he said. “They said that there are hidden messages intended for terrorists in Bin Laden’s statements. It is as if we are living in a time of carrier pigeons, without the existence of telephones, without travelers, without the Internet, without regular mail, without faxes, without e-mail. This is just farcical; words that belittle people’s intellects.”14

  One of his most remarkable essays, published as preparations for the invasion of Iraq were under way, presented a list of grievances—numbered and subnumbered into categories—that described the fullness of his opposition to the United States, its foreign policies, and its national values. The essay suggested that Osama had been perusing American news magazines during the long hours of his exile and had grown frustrated by the typical analysis he read of his motivations. “Some American writers have published articles under the title ‘On what basis are we fighting?’…Here we wanted to outline the truth.” He posed two essential questions: “Why are we fighting and opposing you?” and “What are we calling you to, and what do we want from you?”15

  The answer to the first question, he wrote, “is very simple: 1) Because you attacked us and continue to attack us.” He listed the venues where he perceived these attacks: Palestine, Somalia, Chechnya, Kashmir, Lebanon. “You steal our wealth and oil at paltry prices because of your international influence and military threats. This theft is indeed the biggest theft ever witnessed by mankind in the history of the world.”

  As to the second question, his essential war aims, “The first thing we are calling you to is Islam.” Americans should convert to the “seal of all previous religions” in order to rescue themselves from a profound state of debauchery:

  We call you to be a people of manners, principles, honor and purity; to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling, and usury…You are a nation that permits acts of immorality, and you consider these acts to be pillars of personal freedom…Who can forget your President Clinton’s immoral acts committed in the official Oval office? After that you did not even bring him to account, other than that he “made a mistake,” after which everything passed with no punishment…You are a nation that exploits women like consumer products or advertising tools, calling upon customers to purchase them…You then rant that you support the liberation of women.16

  The more idle time Osama spent as a fugitive, the more hours he watched satellite television or perused Web sites for news of the world outside, the more he seemed to internalize and synthesize, in a characteristic fashion, diverse strands of anti-American grievance, whether they had originated with the European left, the Christian right, or the anti-globalization movement. He valued rhetorical effect over consistency of argument. His lines of poetry might be labored and archaic, but from time to time, he could turn a memorable sentence. Describing his impervious defiance in the name of Islam, he wrote: “The swimmer in the sea does not fear rain.”17 When he was not elegant, he was at least clear: “The freedom and democracy that you call for is for yourselves and for the white race only,” he wrote. “As for the rest of the world, you impose upon it your monstrous, destructive policies and governments, which you call ‘friends of America.’”18

  He often blended these secular-tinted criticisms of the United States with the millenarian and anti-Semitic creeds that had long been at the heart of his outlook. Throughout his essays and recordings, like many Arabians, Osama presumed the power and relentlessness of Zionist and Jewish conspiracies.

  “America didn’t start by taking my money and didn’t hurt me personally at all,” he conceded, “but it made claims about me as a result of our incitement against the Jews and the Americans…The government will take the American people and the West in general into a choking life, into an unsupportable hell, because of the fact that it has very strong ties with and are under the payroll of the Zionist lobby.” He described Jews in dehumanizing terms, “the idiots of the age,” who, when confronted by righteous Palestinian youth, “have become like agitated wild asses fleeing from a lion.”19

  He rejected the borders of many nation-states as illegitimate lines drawn by pagan colonialists, yet he retained an emotional identification with the particular country of his youth—no longer as a “Saudi,” a word that honored the hated Al-Saud family, but rather as a “Hejazi,” a son of the land of Mecca and Medina. “I miss my country greatly, and have long been absent from it; but this is easy to endure because it is for the sake of God,” he wrote in late 2004. “Love for the Hejaz is deep in my heart, but its rulers are wolves.”20

  By now he forswore almost all his earlier sympathy for Crown Prince Abdullah, soon to become king, although he suggested that Abdullah was a victim, to some extent, of American blackmail. Many had believed, Osama wrote, “that when Prince Abdullah…took over management of the country, he would save it from the mires of religious disobedience, and administrative, financial and media corruption…and that he would save it from subservience to America. But although people were expecting good to come from him, he brought them evil.”21

  As yet more months passed and he still remained at large, and as Al Qaeda steadily revitalized itself and supported prominent attacks in London and elsewhere, Osama expressed open pride in what he had achieved since 2001. He had long thought of himself not as the general of an Islamic army or the self-anointed ruler of a prospective caliphate, but as the vanguard of a much broader and looser Islamic political resistance, in which his own band of violent operators would play no more than a galvanizing role. The September 11 attacks, he now concluded, had served to “demonstrate the enormous hostility that the Crusaders feel towards us” and had “revealed the American wolf in its true ugliness.”22

  For the future, he promised a patient, long-term guerrilla strategy in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, punctuated by occasional “raids,” or terrorism, on Western territory: “The balance of terror has evened out.” He wanted to “underline the importance of dragging the enemy forces into a protracted, exhausting, close combat, making the most of camouflaged defense positions…Further, we emphasize the importance of martyrdom operations which have inflicted unprecedented harm on America and Israel, thanks to God Almighty.” He retained a considerable interest in nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, which he had once referred to as “war winners.”23

  In January 2006, apparently provoked once again by watching Bush on satellite television, Osama issued an audiotaped statement, which would be his last communiqué for a prolonged period.

  “I had not intended to speak to you about this issue,” he began. “However, what prompted me to speak are the repeated fallacies of your President Bush, in his comment on the outcome of the U.S. opinion polls, which indicated that the overwhelming majority of you want the withdrawal of the forces from Iraq—but he objected to this desire, and said that the wi
thdrawal of troops would send a wrong message to the enemy. Bush said: It is better to fight them on their ground than they fighting us on our ground.” This rhetoric, although mainly intended for domestic political audiences in the United States, plainly infuriated Osama:

  Reality testifies that the war against America and its allies has not remained confined to Iraq, as he claims. In fact, Iraq has become a point of attraction and recruitment of qualified resources. On the other hand, the mujaheddin, praise be to God, have managed to breach all the security measures adopted by the unjust nations of the coalition time and again. The evidence of this is the bombings you have seen in the most important European countries of this aggressive coalition.

  Osama then issued a warning:

  As for the delay in carrying out similar operations in America, this was not due to failure to breach your security measures. Operations are under preparation, and you will see them on your own ground once they are finished, God willing.

  As for himself, he said, “I swear not to die but a free man.”24

  He fell into a long silence. On the sixth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, Al Qaeda’s revived media operation, Al-Sahab, or “The Clouds,” delivered a new videotape in which Osama donned a gold formal robe and read out a political essay to a single fixed camera. The images were blurry, but his eyes appeared a little baggy—hardly surprising for a man now almost fifty years old living under conditions that presumably carried some stress. The most striking aspects of his appearance reflected his unembarrassed middle-aged vanity: Since his last video, he had trimmed his long beard to a rounded shape and dyed its gray streaks black.

  His speech again synthesized disparate and not particularly religious anti-American critiques. He managed to praise both Noam Chomsky, the linguist and ardently left-wing intellectual, and Michael Scheuer, the former CIA analyst whose professional life had once been devoted to killing him, because both men denounced in books they had recently published the business-influenced imperial strains in American foreign policy. Osama seemed clearly to be hiding in or near Pakistan, or somewhere else where English books were readily available, as he appeared to be using the considerable time on his hands to read in English, advancing the linguistic training he had first acquired from Irish and British instructors at the Al-Thaghr school. He also seemed, as before, to be watching and reading English-language news. Western media aggravated him: they were often worse “than the condition of the media of the dictatorial regimes which march in the caravan of the single leader,” a view that also placed him in the company of many Western leftists.

  Yet when Osama watched American or British television, sequestered in his hideaway, he now gazed into a flattering mirror—the media might distort his image, but they also depicted him as one of the most pervasive and powerful political figures on earth. Through the events of September 11, and their cascading aftermath, he now considered himself the author of this singular achievement, as an instrument of Allah. America might be “the greatest economic power” and “the major state influencing the policies of the world,” and yet by recruiting nineteen young men to fly as suicide pilots and bodyguards, Osama had achieved the improbable: He had “changed the direction of its compass.”25

  This was Osama in his later exile: A man who, although relatively young, lived continuously close to death, and who worried, considering the short time he might have left, about how he might be remembered. His speeches were political and religious oratory of a now familiar type, but his lines also seemed intended to draft or at least influence the themes of his own posthumous reputation. Osama lacked a valid passport. He spoke in a Saudi accent but had been stripped—and had stripped himself—of conventional Saudi identity, and he was almost certainly living, at least some of the time, in an area of western Pakistan that lacked a recognizable government. In this denationalized condition, he chose wardrobes and props for his video statements that suggested three overlapping strands of self-imagining: the formal gowns of a religious scholar; the assault rifle of a modern jihadi warrior; and the traditional dagger of his Hadhrami origins.

  A century before, British colonial officers had struggled to understand the global Hadhrami diaspora from which the Bin Laden family and its wayward son later arose; the Hadhramis’ mobile and independent networks eluded or surprised the empire’s census takers because they spilled across diverse political territory, often indifferent to the border posts of imperial mapmakers. Osama constructed his life as a political fugitive after September 11 in territory of just this character—a mountainous moonscape inhabited by tribally organized Pashtuns whom neither British colonial armies nor their Pakistani and American successors could penetrate or subdue. The history of similar exiles in Pashtun territory suggested he would probably face betrayal, eventually, by one of his local hosts. In the meanwhile, each time his audio-or videotapes reached Al-Jazeera or CNN, Osama reemphasized, like a Barbary pirate with a marketing degree, the impunity that he still enjoyed, as well as his continuing capacity to plan and inspire mass violence by exploiting the channels and the ethos of global integration.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A large number of collaborators, friends, and generous strangers enabled the research for this book. I am grateful first and foremost to the many individuals who agreed to participate in interviews and reinterviews.

  In Saudi Arabia, I owe special thanks to Faiza Ambah, Hatem Mohamed, and Adel Toraifi. The Faisaliyah Center for Research and Islamic Studies generously received me as an unpaid fellow during early 2005; thanks to Dr. Yahya Mahmoud Ibn Juniad, Syed Jameel, and Awadh Al-Badi. Prince Turki Al-Faisal graciously arranged my access to the center. Paul Dresch and Engseng Ho inspired me with their observations about the history of the Hadhrami diaspora and its relations with global empires. Fahd Al-Semmari at the King Abdulaziz Foundation provided valuable access to newspaper archives and research specialists. Erin L. Eddy in Jeddah was exceptionally helpful.

  In Yemen, the governor of the Hadhramawt, Abdelqader Ali Al-Hilal, proved a gracious and an invaluable host. I owe thanks as well to Alawi Bin Sumait, Ali Mandanij, Megan Goodfellow, and Thomas Krajeski for supporting my research there.

  In addition to Robin Shulman and Julie Tate, four part-time researchers made important contributions during the three-year life of this project. In Germany, Petra Krischok’s persistence at the Foreign Ministry archives unearthed valuable records. In London, Gita Daneshjoo reinterviewed overseas sources and provided other careful research. In the United States, Keach Hagey patiently developed and conducted interviews for chapter 36. Mohamed Elmenshawy provided elegant translations and acquired valuable materials during his travels to Egypt.

  Thanks also to Sunlen Miller, Sami Sockol, Emily Eckland, Alexandra Coll, Emma Coll, Cynthia Zeiss, and Victoria Green for their research and organizing skills

  Bruce Hoffman, Kim Cragin, Daniel Byman, Martha Crenshaw, Rohan Gunaratna, Nadia Oweidat, Sara Daly, Heather Gregg, and Anna Kasupski of the Rand Corporation’s Early Al Qaeda History Working Group, where I was an ad hoc participant, provided generous support and inspiring scholarship. Anna Kasupski’s work on financial issues proved particularly valuable. In other research forums, Dan Benjamin and Steven Simon made serious discourse unusually enjoyable.

  As the source notes reflect, Peter Bergen’s journalism and scholarship have been a core resource for this work; his many writings and his oral history, The Osama Bin Laden I Know, provide a foundation for any credible work on Al Qaeda’s development and Osama’s biography. I am even more grateful for his generous friendship. My New Yorker colleague Lawrence Wright’s brilliant work, The Looming Tower, was another core resource, as it will be for many other writers. Peter and Larry graciously read a draft manuscript and offered helpful corrections and observations.

  Michael Dobbs transformed my research by guiding me through the National Archives II at College Park. The archives’ exceptional professional staff made my weeks there highly productive.

  Glenn Frankel
took time to read an early draft and provided insightful comment and editing. Other former Washington Post colleagues—Phil Bennett, David Hoffman, Len Downie, Bob Kaiser, and Anthony Shadid—helped to steer me ahead. To David Finkel, my unqualified thanks, affection, and admiration.

  David Remnick, Jeff Frank, Dorothy Wickenden, Pam McCarthy, Jeffrey Goldberg, Jane Mayer, Alexander Dryer, Annie Lowrey, Virginia Cannon, Raffi Khatchadourian, Nandi Rodrigo, Scott Staton, Tim Farrington, Allison Hoffman, Mike Peed, and Lila Byock have made my work at the New Yorker a rewarding privilege.

  Jim Fallows, Ted Halstead, Steve Clemons, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Bernard Schwartz, Eric Schmidt, Sherle Schwenninger, Ray Boshara, Simone Frank, Rachel White, Maya MacGuinness, Len Nichols, Michael Dannenberg, David Gray, and Troy Schneider are among those who have welcomed and inspired me at the New America Foundation.

  I am very fortunate to be published by the superb Ann Godoff. Thanks, too, to Tracy Locke, Liza Darnton, Lindsay Whalen, and Hal Fessenden at Penguin Press. Simon Winder at Penguin U.K. was exceptionally helpful. Thanks also to copy editor John Jusino. Melanie Jackson has been my literary agent for more than two decades; I can’t imagine my professional life without her.

  One of the rewards of this research was the chance to reflect upon the universal grammar of families; in this, I enjoyed the support and teachings of all the Colls, and above all, Susan.

  NOTES

  THE PRECEDING NARRATIVE is based on more than 150 interviews conducted in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, the United States, Great Britain, Switzerland, Germany, Israel, Egypt, Lebanon, and seven other countries. It also draws upon government and private archives in Saudi Arabia, the United States, Britain, Germany, and Israel, including original correspondence and bid documents that describe Mohamed Bin Laden’s work in Jerusalem during the 1950s and 1960s. State Department and British Foreign Office correspondence from Jeddah from the 1940s through the late 1960s also proved to be particularly valuable for penetrating some of the myths and generalities that have surrounded Mohamed’s life and work, and for describing with greater specificity the world his children grew up in. For more recent periods, in addition to interviews, the narrative relies extensively upon court and regulatory records, primarily from civil lawsuits in the United States and corporate filings there and in Great Britain. I am also indebted in many important ways to previously published work by journalists and historians, as the notes below describe.