The Bin Ladens Page 15

  There is virtually no specific evidence available about which of Mohamed’s work sites Osama visited as a young boy or what he saw his father doing there, other than Osama’s own occasional oblique references to the Saudi holy cities and his detailed awareness of his father’s work in Jerusalem. Osama would have been between six and ten years of age when Mohamed was engaged in massive demolition and urban clearance work in Mecca, quite near to Jeddah; it seems virtually certain that Osama would have visited the city at this time, during the Hajj and on other occasions. Particularly after 1965, Mohamed’s other major concentration was Asir, to which he flew back and forth almost every week. His company maintained a large work camp just south of Taif, only a few hours’ drive from Jeddah, as well as other camps around Abha that could be reached only by plane. Even if Osama never saw these sites, with their lava boulders and cragged peaks, where new roads were being hewed by his father’s Yemeni and African workers, he would certainly have known of the breadth and importance of his father’s projects along the southern border. And, of course, like everyone else in his family, Osama learned in 1967, when he was about nine years old, that his father had died in a plane crash in Asir—and that he was killed because of an apparent error by his American pilot.[3]

  The evidence available about Osama’s primary-school education is also fragmentary. It seems clear that, as with all his half-brothers, his father ensured that he was enrolled in school steadily. His mother’s truncated statements suggest he probably received Koranic instruction of the sort typically given to young boys in Saudi Arabia. Yet like his half-brothers, he seems from the start to have been in schools influenced by Western curricula and culture; there is certainly no evidence that he was ever educated full time in a religious madrassa.

  By the time he reached eighth grade, he was a solid if unspectacular student. He seems likely to have received some of his primary schooling in Syria, probably in connection with his mother’s frequent sojourns in Latakia. His mother remembered him as “not an A student. He would pass exams with average grades. But he was loved and respected by his classmates and neighbors.”5

  Around age ten—the same age when a number of his half-brothers had been dispatched to boarding schools in Lebanon and Syria—Osama, too, enrolled briefly as a boarder at Brummana, the elite Quaker school north of Beirut. Five former students and administrators at the school, including the head of Brummana’s primary school, recalled in separate interviews that Osama was enrolled there during the mid-1960s but that he withdrew and went home after less than one year. None recalled, or would say, why his short experiment with living away from home had failed, but it was evidently not because of bad behavior or poor grades. Renee Bazz, who was on the school’s administrative staff, recalled that Osama had attended another primary school in Lebanon before his arrival at Brummana.

  Emile Sawaya, the head of Brummana’s primary-school section during the 1960s, remembered that Osama was about ten years old when he arrived, and that several of his half-brothers were already boarders. “He was quiet, calm, and very polite,” Sawaya said. “He was obedient. He worked hard.”6

  Osama may have been in Lebanon when his father died. Sawaya recalled that Salem arrived to visit not long after Mohamed’s passing. Sawaya asked another school administrator whether Salem was now the boys’ guardian and was told, “No, it was the king…King Faisal, who was their official guardian.” Salem met with his brothers, Sawaya remembered. “The strange thing was that he didn’t know them—we had to introduce them. When he came into the reception room, they kissed his hands.” The housemaster for the primary school “introduced Osama and his brothers.”7

  Osama’s stepbrother, Ahmed Mohamed, recalled visiting Beirut with him when Osama was about twelve. “He used to take us to the movies…Cowboy, karate movies.”8 After he became notorious, rumors circulated that Osama had enjoyed Beirut’s sybaritic nightlife as a teenager, but there is no evidence to support this. These rumors may have conflated Osama’s presence in Lebanon as a boy with the lifestyles of some of his older half-brothers during the early 1970s.

  After Osama withdrew from Brummana, he seems to have spent some time, immediately following his father’s death, in his mother’s hometown of Latakia. An English teacher there, Suleiman Al-Kateb, recalled that he was “affected by the death of his father; he was very solitary.” By the following September, he had moved back into his mother’s home in Jeddah. After Mohamed’s passing, “She was all that was there,” Khaled Batarfi recalled. “He was so obedient to her.” Batarfi felt that Osama grew close to his mother “maybe because he wasn’t close to his father.”9

  Alia enrolled him in an elite local private school in Jeddah, the Al-Thaghr Model School, which prided itself on its modern curriculum—it was the only school in Saudi Arabia that could even begin to compare itself to a place like Brummana. Osama entered in 1968, about one year after his father’s plane crash, when he was probably in either the fifth or sixth grade. He was on the cusp of puberty, and roiled, presumably, by his father’s loss. He enjoyed a comfortable home and a mild, reliable stepfather, but as Mohamed’s heir, he stood apart from his stepbrothers in his mother’s second household: Osama was, in both a biological and a financial sense, a special case. It seems safe to assume that he was in search of guidance. In any event, the father figure he would soon encounter at Al-Thaghr would change his life.

  AL-THAGHR sat on several dozen arid acres lined by eucalyptus trees, whose branches were twisted by winds from the Red Sea. The campus spread north from the Old Mecca Road, near downtown Jeddah. The school’s main building was a two-story rectangle constructed from concrete and fieldstone in a featureless modern style. Inside, hallways connected two wings of classrooms; there was a wing for middle-school students, where Osama began, and another for the high school. Between them was a spacious interior courtyard, and from the second floor, students could lean over balcony railings and shout at their classmates below, or pelt them with wads of paper. Like Osama, most Al-Thaghr students were commuters, but there were a few boarders; they lived on the second floor, as did some of the school’s foreign teachers.10

  The Saudi government funded and staffed Al-Thaghr, and during the 1960s and early 1970s, the school had the reputation of a private enclave for the sons of businessmen and the royal family. Mohamed Bin Laden had periodically visited the school during the mid-1960s when it was a site for fundraisers to help found Jeddah’s first university, which became King Abdulaziz University, where Osama later enrolled. Al-Thaghr offered rigorous entrance exams that any Saudi could take, and some working-class students who managed to pass attended the school along with the wealthier boys.11

  Al-Thaghr—the name means, roughly, “The Haven”—was founded in the early 1950s in Taif by Faisal, but the school came into its own when he established its large campus in Jeddah, in 1964, and began to fund it annually with several million riyals from the national budget. Faisal’s Turkish father-in-law, Kamal Adham, took an interest in the project and traveled to Britain, where he met with government officials to seek support; he told them that he thought the school should be modeled on the British-influenced Victoria College in Khartoum, Sudan. By the time Osama arrived, Al-Thaghr Model School, as it was formally called, was a showcase for Faisal’s modernization drive, and particularly for his interest in science and Western methods of education. It was the only school in Jeddah with air-conditioning during the 1960s, and it hosted some of the kingdom’s first classroom computers in later years. Students did not wear the national dress of a thobe and cloth headdress, but, rather, a uniform that imitated the styles of English and American prep schools: white button-down shirts with ties, gray slacks, black shoes and socks, and, in the winter months, charcoal blazers.12

  Each year’s graduating class numbered about sixty boys. Every morning, the students would assemble in rows for a military-style call to order; on a stool to one side sat a schoolmaster with a cane, ready to discipline boys who misbehaved by beating them on
the soles of their bare feet. The school’s curriculum included English-language instruction given by teachers from Ireland and England, and demanding courses in mathematics. At the same time, as with all institutions in Saudi Arabia, Al-Thaghr adhered to Islamic ritual and included religion as an essential aspect of instruction. At midday, students would kneel together for the zuhr, or noon prayer.13

  When Osama entered the school, he stood out because he was unusually tall, but he was a reticent personality. He sat by a window in a back corner of the classroom, overlooking the playground. In an intermediate-English class, recalled Brian Fyfield-Shayler, a Briton who taught at the school, “I was trying to push the spoken aspects of the language. To succeed, the student needs to be prepared to make mistakes. They need to make a bit of an exhibition of themselves, and Osama was rather shy and reserved and perhaps a little afraid of making mistakes.” He was also “extraordinarily courteous…more courteous than the average student, probably partly because he was a bit shyer than most of the other students.” Seamus O’Brien, an Irishman who taught English at Al-Thaghr, remembered Osama as “a nice fellow and a good student. There were no problems with him…He was a quiet lad. I suppose silent waters run deep.” Another teacher, Ahmed Badeeb, remembered Osama as “in the middle” academically, an assessment that accords with the account of Osama’s mother.14

  Around 1971 or 1972, when Osama was in the eighth or ninth grade, he was invited to join an after-school Islamic study group led by one of Al-Thaghr’s Syrian physical-education teachers, who lived on the second floor above the courtyard. In that period at Saudi high schools and universities, it was common to find Syrian and Egyptian teachers, many of whom had become involved with dissident Islamist political groups in their home countries. Some of these teachers were members of, or were influenced by, the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organization founded in Egypt in 1928 by a schoolteacher, Hassan Al-Banna. The Brotherhood was initially a religious-minded movement opposed to British colonial rule in Egypt; later, its leaders continued their struggle against Nasser. In his approach to the Brotherhood, Nasser alternated between periods of accommodation and brutal crackdowns. Some of the Brotherhood’s organizers were forced into exile, and they began to form new chapters across the Muslim world. Their aim was to replace secular and nationalist Arab leaders with Islamic governments, and they often operated clandestinely. The movement typically recruited its members from elite, well-educated families. Its goals included the imposition throughout Muslim societies of Koranic law and the empowerment of Islamic scholars as cultural arbiters and dispensers of justice. Over the years, the Brotherhood operated both in the open and in secret, through peaceful political campaigning and through support for violence.

  King Faisal regarded the Brotherhood with some suspicion; certainly, he and others in the royal family were wary of its penchant for political organizing across national boundaries. Still, in his campaign to outflank Nasser through appeals to Islam, Faisal found the Brotherhood’s exiled teachers a useful resource. He wished to see the Saudi population educated as rapidly as possible, and he had no indigenous teachers to rely upon. Brotherhood-influenced teachers were a significant grouping, particularly among those educators from Syria and Egypt.15

  In recruiting candidates for his after-school Islamic study group, the Syrian physical-education teacher at Al-Thaghr appealed to five or six boys, enticing them with promises of extra credit and organized sports. The teacher was “tall, young, in his late twenties, very fit,” recalled a schoolmate of Osama’s who was also a member of the study group. “He had a beard—not a long beard like a mullah, however. He didn’t look like he was religious…He walked like an athlete, upright and confident. He was very popular. He was charismatic. He used humor, but it was planned humor, very reserved. He would plan some jokes to break the ice with us.16

  “Some of us were athletes, some of us were not,” the schoolmate recalled of the group’s initial membership, which, besides Bin Laden, included the sons of several prominent Jeddah families. The Syrian “promised that if we stayed we could be part of a sports club, play soccer. I very much wanted to play soccer. So we began to stay after school with him from two o’clock until five. When it began, he explained that at the beginning of the session we would spend a little bit of time indoors at first, memorizing a few verses from the Koran each day, and then we would go play soccer. The idea was that if we memorized a few verses each day before soccer, by the time we finished high school we would have memorized the entire Koran, a special distinction.

  “Osama was an honorable student,” the schoolmate remembered. “He kept to himself, but he was honest. If you brought a sandwich to school, people would often steal it as a joke and eat it for themselves if you left it on your desk. This was a common thing. We used to leave our valuables with Osama because he never cheated. He was sober, serious. He didn’t cheat or copy from others, but he didn’t hide his paper, either, if others wanted to look over his shoulder.”

  At first, the study group proceeded as the teacher had promised. “We’d sit down, read a few verses of the Koran, translate or discuss how it should be interpreted, and many points of view would be offered. Then he’d send us out to the field. He had the key to the goodies—the lockers where the balls and athletic equipment were kept. But it turned out that the athletic part was just disorganized, an add-on. There was no organized soccer…I ended up playing a lot of one-on-one soccer, which is not very much fun.”

  As time passed, the group spent more and more time inside. After about a year, Bin Laden’s schoolmate said, he began to feel trapped and bored, but by then the group had developed a sense of camaraderie, with Bin Laden emerging as one of its committed participants. Gradually, the teenagers stopped memorizing the Koran and began to read and discuss hadiths, interpretive stories of the life of the Prophet Mohamed, of varied provenance, which are normally studied to help illuminate the ideas imparted by the Koran. The after-school study sessions took place in the Syrian gym teacher’s room; he would light a candle on a table in the middle of the room, and the boys, including Osama, would sit on the floor and listen. The stories that the Syrian told were ambiguous as to time and place, the schoolmate recalled, and they were not explicitly set in the time of the Prophet, as are traditional hadiths. Increasingly the Syrian teacher told them “stories that were really violent,” the schoolmate remembered. “It was mesmerizing.”

  The schoolmate said he could remember one in particular: It was a story “about a boy who found God—exactly like us, our age. He wanted to please God and he found that his father was standing in his way. The father was pulling the rug out from under him when he went to pray.” The Syrian “told the story slowly, but he was referring to ‘this brave boy’ or ‘this righteous boy’ as he moved toward the story’s climax. He explained that the father had a gun. He went through twenty minutes of the boy’s preparation, step by step—the bullets, loading the gun, making a plan. Finally, the boy shot the father.” As he recounted this climax, the Syrian declared, “Lord be praised—Islam was released in that home.” As the schoolmate recounted it, “I watched the other boys, fourteen-year-old boys, their mouths open. By the grace of God, I said ‘No’ to myself…I had a feeling of anxiety. I began immediately to think of excuses and how I could avoid coming back.”

  The next day, he stopped attending. But during the next several years, he watched as Osama and the others in his former group, who continued to study with the gym teacher, openly adopted the styles and convictions of teenage Islamic activists. They let their young beards grow, shortened their trouser legs, and declined to iron their shirts (ostensibly to imitate the style of the Prophet’s dress), and increasingly, they lectured or debated other students at Al-Thaghr about the urgent need to restore pure Islamic law across the Arab world.

  By the time of Osama’s high school years, Al-Thaghr had become something of a hotbed of debate, within the limits of Saudi Arabia’s dull political culture, involving Nasser-influenced
students who advocated pan-Arab nationalism, and Brotherhood-influenced students who argued for a restoration of Islam in Arab politics. Osama was clearly in the latter camp; he “joined the religious committee” at the school, recalled Ahmed Badeeb. “He was a prominent member,” remembered Khaled Batarfi. “That group was influenced by the Brotherhood. He was influenced by this philosophy.” Batarfi’s account is corroborated by Jamal Khashoggi, who knew Bin Laden during the 1980s; he said Osama “started as a Muslim Brother,” meaning that he was formally recruited into the movement during his adolescent years or soon thereafter.17

  The Brotherhood, to which Khashoggi also belonged for a time, “is a membership,” he said. “Usually you will be selected.” Recruits “go through different stages.” Weekly meetings and religious instruction might unfold for two years before a recruit is invited to “more exclusive meetings…And they will say, ‘Do you want to be a part of the Muslim Brotherhood?’ Mostly he will say ‘Yes,’ because he will have felt that it is coming…And he will become part of the movement.” Brotherhood recruiting is often secretive, and its classes of membership have varied over time and from country to country. There is no specific evidence available about when or in what way Osama formally joined, but the Brotherhood normally takes only adults into full membership, so it seems most likely that his schoolyard activism served as a sort of apprenticeship for more formal participation in the movement after he reached university.18