The Bin Ladens Page 43

  OSAMA’S EXPERIENCE as a businessman in Sudan was similar to that of his half-brother Khalil’s in Los Angeles, with America in Motion. His grandiose schemes did not pan out. His mentors took advantage of him. His employees misappropriated tens of thousands of dollars, money he could no longer afford to lose—Jamal Al-Fadl, for example, took Osama for $110,000 in a series of manipulated land and commodity deals. Osama had reorganized his personal banking at the Al-Shamal Bank in Khartoum, but his accounts gradually dried up. In the past, his personal wealth had provided him a financial cushion, but much of the money he spent on jihad came from private donors, charities, or quasi-governmental channels. Now his access to family dividends and loans had been pinched, and, simultaneously, as an enemy of the Saudi state, his charity fundraising had become complicated. As early as 1994 or 1995, “We had a crisis in Al Qaeda,” recalled L’Hossaine Kherchtou, one of his adherents. “Osama bin Laden himself said to us that he had lost all his money, and he reduced the salary of his people.” He was forced to lay off as many as two thousand workers at his sunflower farm during 1995. It was an extraordinarily fast downturn—Osama had blown through his lump sum inheritance, his dividends, and his charitable funds in just four to five years, a total of perhaps $15 million or more. In his essays, he denounced the Saudi royal family for corruption and financial malfeasance, but he had managed his own funds with all the prudence of a self-infatuated Hollywood celebrity.30

  He betrayed his desperation in a blast fax he issued on February 12, 1995, titled “Prince Salman and Charity Offerings in Ramadan.” He slandered the royal government with typical bombast, denouncing them in particular for new regulations that required annual zakat, or “charity,” contributions to be routed only through officially approved charities overseen by Prince Salman. “The Saudi regime’s previous general history of managing donations has been extremely bad,” Osama wrote. “It took popular donations for the Afghani mujaheddin as a means to put pressure on them, in order to realize Western and, in particular, American policies.” As he went on, however, Osama made clear that his essay was intended less as a critique than as a solicitation. He was worried about his own continued access to the Saudi charity on which he had so long depended:

  We at the Committee for Advice and Reform alert all philanthropists and givers of charity of the danger of submitting any funds or alms to these harmful institutions, bodies and associations which use them to wage war on Allah and His Prophet. We call them to submit funds directly to those who deserve them domestically and abroad. They can also submit funds to religious or custodial persons who can assure that those who legally deserve the funds will receive them without them first being tampered with by the Saudi clan…There are safe agencies that will transmit funds to those who deserve them such as charitable associations in Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan, Yemen, Sudan and others. To ensure that funds are transferred to the accounts of these associations, we alert you of the importance of transferring outside the Gulf—far from tracking by the regime’s spies.31

  His problems at the office were compounded by his troubles at home. One of his wives, known as Om Ali, or the “Mother of Ali,” traveled back and forth between Saudi Arabia and Sudan; she grew tired of Khartoum. She asked Osama for a divorce because “she could not continue to live in an austere way, and in hardship,” according to Nasir Al-Bahri, who later served as Osama’s bodyguard.

  Osama’s eldest son, Abdullah, a teenager, also chafed at being cut off from the privileges enjoyed by a Bin Laden in good standing. He had seen enough of his cousins’ lifestyles in Jeddah—the slick cars, the Harley motorcycles, the wave runners on weekends in the Red Sea—to know what he was missing. He asked his father for permission to return to the kingdom and take up a job in the family business. He had already become engaged to one of his relatives “because my father supports early marriage,” as he later explained, and in 1995 he pressed his father to return to Saudi Arabia:

  He would ask me to be patient and wait every time. On one occasion, I went into his bedroom when we were in Sudan to wake him up to pray, and he said to me with no introductions: “Abdullah, you can go to Saudi Arabia if you want.” I started crying for joy without saying a word. My father smiled calmly and said nothing. On the next day, I called my uncles in Jeddah and they helped in speeding up my arrival there…I wanted to be independent and build my life on my own, and according to my desires.

  The defection of his firstborn pained Osama, according to Al-Bahri. Thereafter he “avoided mentioning Abdullah’s name…because he had been hurt by him.”32

  Osama’s mother still visited him, but now the Saudi authorities monitored her to ensure she was not ferrying cash surreptitiously. Osama reportedly continued to have contact with some of the religious wing of the family—his brother-in-law Jamal Khalifa said later that he stayed in touch. They had been fast friends during the early 1980s, and now Khalifa found himself in legal trouble over allegations that he supported violent Al Qaeda–inspired Islamic groups in the Philippines. A second brother-in-law may also have participated in Osama’s campaigns from Sudan. Yet for the senior brothers in Jeddah who led the Bin Ladens, and who managed the family’s relationships with the Saudi royals, Osama was now plainly an anathema. King Fahd’s court put the senior brothers on notice, according to a person who worked with them in Jeddah at the time; the Saudi government made it plain that the Bin Ladens would pay a steep price if they succored Osama. Nothing got the family’s attention like the prospect of losing its wealth. To ensure there could be no question about their loyalties, the family decided during this period to donate all of its zakat funds directly to the king’s charities, according to the person working with them in Jeddah.33

  Osama could probably sense the change in his family’s attitude. In 1995 one of his half-sisters died of cancer; she was the first of Mohamed Bin Laden’s daughters to pass away. Her death left the number of his surviving children at fifty-two. From Sudan, Osama telephoned Omar Bin Laden to express his condolences. “That conversation lasted only about a minute, as I purposely cut it short,” Omar said later.34

  Out of money, divorced by one of his wives, abandoned by his eldest son, estranged from his family—a hint of King Lear in the wilderness began to enter Osama’s exile. He told a Saudi visitor, “I am tired. I miss living in Medina. Only God knows how nostalgic I am.” He was so unmoored during 1995 that he explored the possibility of moving to London. There he would join his colleagues in the self-styled Saudi opposition in a more traditional, more political exile, one that would inevitably reduce his scope for participation in violence. It is easy to imagine the appeal of London: occasional press conferences attended by the international media; long afternoons at the writing desk penning poetry and unrelenting political essays on behalf of a new Saudi Arabia; visits from his son Abdullah and other family; a chance to live by principles, but also amid some of the comfort craved by the middle-aged.35

  It proved to be a passing fantasy. Saudi Arabia pressured Britain to do something about Al-Faqih and Al-Masari, and the government did initiate deportation proceedings against the latter. It would likely have been impossible politically for Osama to receive asylum by the time he considered seeking it.

  In Khartoum he remained surrounded by other wives, children, employees, and followers, and his calendar of business and conspiracy meetings mitigated his isolation. Yet there was now a self-reinforcing quality to the narrative Osama was constructing around his exile. The more pressure he faced, the more readily he compared his circumstances to those of the Prophet Mohamed, who had been driven by political opponents to Medina, where he waged a righteous war and eventually returned home. “Emigration is related to jihad, and jihad will go on until the Day of Judgment,” Osama wrote while in Sudan. It was not the sort of formulation likely to appeal to a restless wife or teenager with memories of Jeddah’s better restaurants. Yet there is no reason to doubt that Osama believed precisely what he penned.

  Moreover, the wealth and global visibi
lity of his enemies—King Fahd, and his patron, the Americans—only highlighted for him the enduring righteousness of his cause. He even seemed to regard some of the missions undertaken by his relatives as a form of outreach from the United States, the country on which Osama increasingly focused his wrath, particularly after Washington put pressure on Sudan’s government to expel him from Khartoum. At first he had regarded his family members as helpless, manipulated agents of the Al-Saud. Now he came to see his exile as a contest of will and faith between himself and the government of the most powerful country on earth. Each iteration of this contest only highlighted for him the significance of his struggle and his leadership. “I tell you that the Americans are bargaining with us in silence,” Osama would explain in late 1996. “America and some of its agents in the region have bargained with us discreetly more than ten times, I tell you: [they say] shut up and we’ll give you back your passport and possessions, we’ll give you back your i.d. card, but shut up. These people think that people live in this world for its own sake, but they have forgotten that our existence has no meaning if we do not strive for the pleasure of God.”36

  30. HEDGE FUNDS

  DURING A LONG CAREER as an American diplomat, Philip Griffin became a specialist in the Arab world, and he acquired particular experience in the Persian Gulf region—he served in Kuwait, Abu Dhabi, and twice in Dhahran, the principal city in Saudi Arabia’s oil-producing region. He was a mild man with blue eyes and a full head of graying hair; his years in diplomacy and his extended exposure to reticent Arabia had left him with impeccable manners and a habit of speaking in cautious, deliberate, fully articulated paragraphs. In 1989 Griffin arrived in Jeddah as consul general, the State Department’s highest-ranking officer in the Hejaz and a liaison to the U.S. embassy in Riyadh.

  On his early diplomatic rounds, Griffin met Henry Sarkissian, of the Sarkissian business family, Armenian Christians who had migrated to Lebanon, established themselves in the electrical and industrial air-conditioning field, and then become important partners of the Bin Ladens in Saudi Arabia. Sarkissian introduced Griffin to Bakr Bin Laden, a connection that led to periodic discreet conversations among Bakr, Griffin, and Chas Freeman, then the U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia. The two American diplomats used Bakr as a sounding board about goings-on in the court of King Fahd and about the king’s private views on issues of the day. They found Bakr to be very careful during these conversations, which usually took place in his Jeddah office; Bakr was far from a natural gossip, and he was protective of the king, but he occasionally passed along a useful nugget or insight.1

  During the summer of 1992, Griffin’s posting neared its end, and he let it be known that he was planning to retire from the diplomatic service; he was then sixty years old. Through Sarkissian, Bakr asked to see him. He did not mention Osama, although by now, the trouble with his half-brother had begun to percolate. Bakr did mention that although the Bin Ladens had enjoyed many business connections in the United States over the years, they had no one person—no brother, no other representative—to oversee their scattered investments in the U.S., or to develop new ones. After this encounter, through Sarkissian, Bakr inquired if Griffin might be interested in opening an office for the Saudi Bin Laden Group in Washington, an office that would be supported partly by Sarkissian’s joint venture with the Bin Ladens and partly by the Saudi Bin Laden Group itself. The inquiry Bakr relayed was not specific about the office’s writ or purpose, but in follow-up discussions, Sarkissian mentioned that in addition to maintaining ties with existing partners such as General Electric and pursuing new business development in the United States, they would want someone in the capital who could give them access to the American government if it was required.

  “Well, that’s easier said than done,” Griffin responded. “Let me think about it.”2

  He returned to his home in the Washington suburbs, but he stayed in touch as he moved through the State Department’s formal retirement process. By early 1993, the Bin Ladens made clear that they wanted to go ahead with the plan, and Griffin decided to come on board. The Bin Ladens agreed to allow him to open an office near his home in Maryland so he would not have to endure a grueling daily commute into downtown Washington. He found an office building that specialized in providing packaged services, such as telephone-answering and conference facilities, to very small companies. On June 16, 1993, in the same week that the Bin Laden brothers were in the midst of their still-private legal proceedings in Jeddah to divest Osama of his shareholdings, Griffin, as “resident agent,” incorporated a company in Maryland as the Saudi Bin Laden Group’s new American outpost. The firm was initially called Cromwell Corporation, but it then formally became SBG (USA), Inc.3 Griffin moved into an office at 51 Monroe Street, in downtown Rockville, Maryland, near Rockville Pike, a cluttered six-lane avenue lined with strip malls, consumer electronics stores, and brightly lit chain restaurants. It was perhaps not the marbled outpost in imperial-tinted Washington that Bakr might initially have imagined, but it was at least a foothold, manned by an experienced American diplomat, in a country that was coming to play an increasingly complicated role in the family’s life.

  Bakr assigned Griffin’s office to his half-brother Hassan, who had been appointed to oversee international business development under Bakr’s new management regime. This sounded fairly clear-cut, but the inner workings of the Bin Laden companies remained idiosyncratic. Once, when a non-Saudi executive complained to Henry Sarkissian that he was puzzled about what the Saudi Bin Laden Group actually wanted him to do, Sarkissian quipped, “You’ll never learn,” by which he meant that vagueness and mystery were permanent features of the corporate culture. Under Bakr, in comparison to Salem’s reign, there was a new veneer of professional organization charts, yet Bakr himself made many of his most important decisions not in boardrooms, but while sitting in his afternoon majlis in Jeddah, in the manner of an Arabian sheikh, or while flying from place to place in his private jets. The corporate culture he oversaw remained utterly dependent on the boss, habitually secretive, compartmented, and at times confusing, particularly for outsiders who joined as executives or partners.4

  During the mid-1990s, Bakr signed a number of lucrative contracts in partnership with General Electric to develop power stations in Saudi Arabia, and he even hosted a celebratory party in the kingdom for GE’s famous chief executive, Jack Welch—but none of this U.S.-connected work was routed through or coordinated with the new U.S. office. Also, at the time Griffin set up shop, elements of the family were invested in a number of commercial real estate partnerships in the United States—those developed by the Daniel Corporation of Alabama, whose project money was channeled by Yeslam Bin Laden; those purchased by Yeslam’s full brother Khalil, through America in Motion; and another suite of projects overseen by the Sarkissians from an office in New Jersey. These latter developments included commercial properties in the Dallas area; some of those partnerships were named in reference to iconic places or events of the American Revolutionary War period, such as Concord or Bunker Hill. None of these projects was assigned directly to the new American office opened by Griffin, either. If anything, Griffin would be subordinate to the family’s real estate partners: listed as directors of SBG (USA) in the official corporate records were Kourken Sarkissian, in Canada, who helped oversee some family investments in North America, and Robert McBride, of Spicewood, Texas, who worked in a similar vein.5

  The Bin Ladens’ business and advisory network in the United States also included an additional outpost, in the person of Fuad Rihani, a businessman who had run a European company that supplied lighting equipment to the two holy mosques in Mecca and Medina. Rihani was originally from Jordan; he was a Christian who was active in that country’s Protestant Church circles. By the time SBG (USA) opened outside Washington, Rihani had become a senior and respected adviser to the Bin Ladens; he eventually purchased a home in North Carolina, carried the title of Director of Research and Development for the Saudi Bin Laden Group,
and served on the board of a Washington think tank, the Middle East Policy Council, to which the Bin Ladens made donations. Its later chairman was Chas Freeman, the former U.S. ambassador in Riyadh.6

  These contributions and connections offered the Bin Ladens a way to distinguish themselves from Osama, to deepen their contacts with American and British elites—to construct, subtly but unmistakably, an alternative basis to evaluate the family’s attitude toward the West. The more trouble Osama caused, the more Bakr seemed to search for ways to make offsetting donations and financial investments.

  ALL OF THE BIN LADEN companies, whether in Saudi Arabia or abroad, operated as privately held entities, so the family was not legally required to disclose its spider’s web of global holdings to stock market regulators or public investors or even to their own executives. There was a random and whimsical nature to some of the family’s investments. A brother might go on vacation in Eastern Europe, meet an enterprising local man, invest in a travel agency, and then neglect it, until the company’s very existence was forgotten. Family firms sold casual wear in London’s Covent Garden and in shopping malls in Cairo and Beirut (“tank tops, jogging shorts, jeans, denims…”); produced television programming and commercials in a Jeddah photo lab; published children’s books in London; and licensed intellectual property in Dubai. The lines between the hobbies of family members and serious businesses were not always easy to discern. Offshore companies would open, fall dormant, and then sit on the books for years, earning fees for the lawyers and accountants who renewed their registrations, but doing little else. By the early 1990s, there were so many small companies and affiliates scattered around the world that at one point, around the time Griffin opened the Rockville office, executives at headquarters retained an American firm just to inventory the family’s holdings, according to a person familiar with the study.7