The Bin Ladens Read online

  Bakr’s view of Osama, as he explained it during this meeting and in subsequent conversations with American officials, was that his half-brother had essentially gone off the deep end. Osama’s extremism had surprised Bakr in some respects, he said, because as a younger man, Osama had always seemed relatively bookish and thoughtful, and he was certainly very shy. As a younger man, Bakr said, Osama had never really voiced strong political convictions, even when he was active in Afghanistan.

  American officials in Saudi Arabia who visited occasionally with the Bin Ladens could see that the senior brothers around Bakr were relatively conservative in cultural terms. For example, at receptions they hosted in private homes in Jeddah, the Bin Ladens did not serve alcohol to Western visitors, unlike some other Saudi merchant families, and they adhered rigorously to Islamic prayer schedules. And yet, in Bakr’s view, as he presented it to the American officials he met, there was a bright line between the religious orthodoxy of his family and the violent radicalism now being espoused by Osama. Why Osama had crossed that line remained a mystery. There were theories within the Bin Laden family: some talked about the impact of Osama’s participation in the violence of the Afghan war, or about the influence of Egyptian radicals who had ingratiated themselves with Osama over the years. But there could be no certainty or pat explanations.

  It remains unclear how much cooperation the Bin Ladens actually provided to the FBI and CIA during the months following the initial meeting with Fowler and Brennan in the late summer of 1998. One former senior American official involved described multiple “depositions” provided by Bin Laden representatives in London and Geneva to the FBI, the CIA, or both. If so, none of this information ever reached the White House’s counterterrorism office, or was referred to in public investigations such as those carried out by the 9/11 Commission. Accounts from other former officials suggest that the private cooperation from the Bin Ladens may have been limited. These officials said that while Bakr wanted to be helpful, he also sought to protect his family’s wealth and investments. After the Africa bombings, he and his American and British attorneys grew particularly concerned about a scenario in which the Bin Laden family might be formally accused by the United States of aiding Osama. They might be threatened with economic sanctions, asset seizures, forfeitures, or civil lawsuits filed by victims of Osama’s attacks. Throughout late 1998 and into 1999, the family and its attorneys proceeded at times with caution in their dealings with American government officials. At the U.S. embassy, Fowler’s primary objective was to try to identify Osama’s current bank accounts and to discover if any money was still reaching him from Saudi Arabia or elsewhere; in this endeavor, Fowler felt that he received particularly strong cooperation from senior princes in the Saudi government.13

  For their part, the Bin Ladens and their lawyers feared, Brennan recalled, that even if they provided off-the-record and confidential assistance to American investigators, “they would expose themselves, and that because of the animus to the Bin Laden name, that people in the U.S. government might take advantage of their cooperation to freeze their assets.” Considering such risks, as Brennan put it, “Why make yourself vulnerable?”14

  At the CIA’s Bin Laden unit, Michael Scheuer increasingly perceived this caution, and U.S. acceptance of it, as a form of appeasement. Scheuer detected “a decided reluctance to even ask the questions” that might make the Bin Ladens or the Saudi government uncomfortable. Partly, Scheuer believed, this reticence reflected Bakr’s skillful management of Fowler, Brennan, and others at the U.S. embassy in Riyadh. “Bakr was very good,” Scheuer said later. “He used to go into the ambassador, or he used to go into the consul general in Jeddah on the Fourth of July, or other American holidays, and say, ‘What great guys you are—we love to be in America, we love to invest there, and we’ve divorced ourselves from the black sheep’—very, very good PR work by Bakr and his brothers.”15

  “There was never a reluctance on our parts to ask questions of the Saudis,” Brennan said later, responding to Scheuer’s criticisms. Added Wyche Fowler, the ambassador: “From the moment Bakr Bin Laden agreed to my request for the family’s cooperation, they provided the Treasury Department and the FBI access to their books, family records—and their contract with the U.S. military on its base in Saudi Arabia was not terminated. Further, I never heard a complaint from our government about their lack of cooperation.”16

  Among Scheuer’s particular concerns, he said later, were continuing reports he saw that the Bin Ladens’ Cairo office, overseen by Osama’s half-brother Khalid, provided work and travel visas to Egyptian Islamists who wanted to travel to Afghanistan. Other CIA officials regarded Scheuer’s fears as plausible but unproven. Their most widely shared concerns about the Bin Laden family involved Jamal Khalifa, Osama’s brother-in-law and former Afghan war comrade, who had been tried and acquitted of supporting terrorist activity by a Jordanian court. During the mid-1990s, through his wife Sheikha, Osama’s half-sister Khalifa used the Mohamed Bin Laden Company’s travel office to obtain a U.S. visa and for other family travel help. Another concern was Osama’s continuing telephone contact with his mother and stepbrothers in Jeddah. CIA officers also tried to get a grip on Osama’s own scattered offspring—the wife and sons who had returned to Saudi Arabia, another son who was reported to be living in Karachi, and other family members who reportedly traveled back and forth between the kingdom and Pakistan. The CIA pressed the Saudis informally for intelligence about all these issues but learned little.17

  There were so many sources of mutual frustration in the liaison between the two governments that it was difficult to separate one source of irritation from another. However, for those in the U.S. intelligence community assigned to the specific problem of Osama Bin Laden and his money, the case of Osama’s one-legged former London financial aide was a particular cause of aggravation. Al-Ghazi Madani Al-Tayyib had kept track of some of Al Qaeda’s money and businesses during Osama’s Sudan years. Exhausted and demoralized by exile in Britain, Al-Tayyib had turned himself into the Saudi authorities. He seemed likely to possess a wealth of knowledge about Osama’s personal accounts and, perhaps even more important, about his access to sympathetic religious charities and individual fundraisers. A succession of senior American officials, from the CIA and other U.S. agencies, asked Crown Prince Abdullah, Prince Nayef, and other Saudi officials for the opportunity to meet and question Al-Tayyib directly. The Saudis steadfastly refused.18

  The ambassador and the CIA station chief also pressed the Saudi government to curtail flights between the kingdom and Afghanistan by the Taliban-controlled airline, Afghan Ariana, which appeared, in the late 1990s, to be operating as Al Qaeda’s air-courier service, shuttling guns, money, and volunteers to Osama. On this matter they eventually won greater, if belated, cooperation.19

  THE CONNECTIONS among Saudi charities, radical Islamist networks, and members of the Bin Laden family were particularly difficult for American investigators to assess. Around 1996, for example, Scheuer and Coleman took an interest in a proselytizing group, the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, which operated an American branch out of modest quarters in Falls Church, Virginia, only a few miles from the offices of the CIA’s secret Bin Laden tracking unit. The president of the U.S. branch was listed in public incorporation documents as Abdullah Awadh Bin Laden. It took investigators some time to sort out how Abdullah fit into the Bin Laden family tree, since there were several other prominent Abdullahs in the family, such as the one at Harvard and the family’s venerated patriarch, Mohamed Bin Laden’s brother. Eventually the American investigators learned that the particular Abdullah running the World Assembly branch was the son of one of Osama Bin Laden’s half-siblings—possibly, the son of one of his half-sisters. Osama, then, was one of Abdullah’s many uncles.20

  The World Assembly of Muslim Youth had headquarters in Riyadh and advertised itself as the world’s largest Muslim youth group, dedicated to the spread of Islamic ideas, values, and sacred texts; it operat
ed more than fifty regional and local offices on five continents. Abdullah Bin Laden incorporated an American branch in 1992. In a 1997 speech in Riyadh, he described his work: He offered financial subsidies to needy American Muslims wishing to undertake the Hajj; he ran one-week summer camps for Muslim youth in Texas, New York, Florida, California, Ohio, and Washington State; he sought to visit schools, universities, and prisons. His aim, as a journalist’s account of his speech put it, was to combat “the deliberate distortion of Islam” by “certain information and media outlets” that sought to “make people hate Islam, and to give Islam the label of terrorism by exploiting certain incidents, such as the explosion at the World Trade Center in New York in 1993.” Abdullah Bin Laden was particularly proud of his “good word” project to help converted American Muslims absorb Islamic values and remain on the correct spiritual path. He said that he had created kits of proselytizing materials—a silver kit, a golden kit, and a diamond kit. All the kits contained translations of the Koran and a book by Sayed Abdullah Al-Mawdudi, an early twentieth-century Islamist radical who was one of the intellectual founders of the Muslim Brotherhood.21

  The materials distributed by the World Assembly of Muslim Youth did not explicitly promote violent jihad in the style of Osama’s published essays, but they did contain the sort of vicious anti-Semitic tracts that were all too typical of the publications of Muslim Brotherhood–influenced organizations. In an Arabic-language book titled A Handy Encyclopedia of Contemporary Religions and Sects, the World Assembly’s authors listed reasons for Muslims to hate Jews, using language that echoed the extermination-promoting tracts of Germany’s Third Reich:

  The Jews are enemies of the faithful, God and the angels; the Jews are humanity’s enemies; they forment immorality in this world; The Jews are deceitful, they say something but mean the exact opposite; Who was behind the biological crisis which became like brain washing? A Jew; Who was behind the disintegration of family life and values? A Jew;…Every tragedy that inflicts the Muslims is caused by the Jews.22

  As part of his inquiries into the Bin Ladens’ presence in America, the FBI’s Daniel Coleman visited Abdullah at his Northern Virginia office with two other agents from the Washington field office. He found the young man “very friendly,” and he seemed as if he “would have been somebody interesting to talk to.” Soon after Coleman arrived, however, Abdullah presented him with a Saudi diplomatic passport. The World Assembly described itself as a nongovernmental organization, but the Saudi embassy had issued its representatives diplomatic passports, as Coleman later confirmed after requesting State Department records. Abdullah was listed as an attaché of the Saudi embassy and had been formally accredited to the United States as a Saudi diplomat. Coleman knew that this legal protection was impermeable; he left Abdullah alone.23

  In addition to his proselytizing, it later became clear, Abdullah Bin Laden invested $500,000 in U.S. business vehicles controlled by an Egyptian citizen, Soliman Biheiri, who operated a number of investment firms adhering to Islamic principles. Abdullah was joined in these investments by two of Osama’s half-sisters, Nur and Iman. These women were among a number of Osama’s more religious half-siblings who made investments in Islamic banks or investment firms with offices scattered around the world, including in bank secrecy havens, according to court records and media reports.24

  One of these entities was the Al-Taqwa Bank, which “has long acted as financial advisers to Al Qaeda,” according to an affidavit later filed in an American court by a U.S. government investigator. The bank’s chairman and an aide involved in Al-Taqwa operations provided “indirect investment services” for Al Qaeda, which included “investing funds for Bin Laden and making cash deliveries on request.” Like the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, Al-Taqwa had historical ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Its banking and investment entities operated offices in Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Italy, and the Bahamas. In 1999, according to a number of published reports, the FBI obtained a list of about seven hundred investors in Al-Taqwa. Among them were two of Osama’s half-sisters, Iman and Huda. The latter had once been a playful member of Salem Bin Laden’s European entourage, but after Salem’s death, she became more religious. Another Al-Taqwa investor was Ghalib Bin Laden, Bakr’s full brother, who had visited Osama in Peshawar in 1989 and who had been selected to receive Osama’s shares in family companies when he was forced to sell in 1994. His initial deposit of $1 million in an Al-Taqwa investment account in the Bahamas grew to just under $2.5 million by 1997; at that point, losses incurred by the bank and charged to Ghailb’s account caused him to seek the return of his money. When the bank failed to satisfy him, Ghailb sued, in 1999, “seeking to put the bank out of business,” as lawyers for the Saudi Bin Laden Group put it later. The U.S. government later designated Al-Taqwa as a terrorist entity. A Bin Laden lawyer later wrote: “Any suggestion that the [Bin Laden] family or their businesses were somehow aligned with or supportive of Osama’s terrorist activities is completely at odds with the facts.”25

  An offshore entity controlled by the Saudi Bin Laden Group invested $3 million in late 1997 in Global Diamond Resources, Inc., a California-headquartered mining company that owned diamond mines in South Africa. Through a Bin Laden executive, Global Diamond executives met Yasin Al-Qadi, a Saudi businessman in Jeddah who was a wealthy contemporary of the Bin Laden sons. In 1998 Al-Qadi also invested and became one of the mining company’s largest shareholders. Al-Qadi was later designated as a terrorist financier by the U.S. Treasury Department, a designation Al-Qadi rejected as untrue and unjust. Blessed Relief, a charity Al-Qadi cofounded, which operated in Bosnia, Sudan, Pakistan, and other countries between 1992 and 1997, was described in a Treasury citation as a “front” for Bin Laden, one that had been used to pass money to him from wealthy Saudis. Al-Qadi denied these accusations, too. He said that he had met Osama at religious gatherings in Saudi Arabia during the 1980s but that these meetings had been casual and inconsequential, and he adamantly denied providing any support to Al Qaeda or other terrorists at any time.26

  Taken together, these offshore financial connections, while far from offering proof that some members of the Bin Laden family might have found ways to quietly pass funds to Osama after he had been forced to sell his family shareholdings, nonetheless offered fragments of intriguing evidence—strands that certainly demanded further and more rigorous investigation than the American government had yet managed to undertake, at least in the opinion of Michael Scheuer, the CIA’s lead analyst. By the end of the 1990s, Scheuer had reached the conclusion, as he wrote, that there was “every reason to believe members of Bin Laden’s extended family have ensured that he has gotten his share of family profits.”27

  Osama’s relationship with his half-sisters was a particularly murky and frustrating subject. The American ambassador or CIA station chief in Riyadh might be able to meet with senior brothers such as Bakr or Yahya, and they might win limited cooperation from them, but given Saudi Arabia’s systematic segregation of women, and the general limitations placed upon American investigators in the kingdom, it was impossible to explore in any depth the finances, attitudes, investments, and travel of Osama’s half-sisters. Observations by family members such as Carmen Bin Laden suggest that Osama seemed to have more comfortable relations with some of his half-sisters than with many of his half-brothers. Dominic Simpson, who served as a British intelligence officer in charge of Saudi Arabian matters during the mid-and late-1990s, recalled “lots of talk about odd members of the Bin Laden family” who “still claim to stay in touch with him,” reports that raised the possibility of “monies being channeled in some way.” The concern within intelligence agencies at the time, Simpson recalled, focused on “particularly some of the sisters—a couple of his sisters.” For his part, Simpson saw no convincing evidence that any Bin Laden family members, including these sisters, were “covertly or discreetly funding” Osama “in any way” or that they had allowed themselves to be “used as the channel for others…But it
may well be that some members of the family were in occasional contact for purely personal reasons. And again, some of the sisters have been named.”28

  Simpson’s analysis was that Osama “always got on better with his sisters than his brothers,” in part because of the relatively weak status of Osama’s mother within the family. “Some of the brothers would sneer, and the sisters would feel sorry for him and pat poor little Osama…Women often like the chance to sort of mother a man, and I think that perhaps that’s how they replied to him, slightly…But I’m sure there was no institutionalized support for him.” American investigators with the 9/11 Commission, who later reviewed the evidence available to U.S. intelligence, reached a somewhat more cautious conclusion: after the Africa embassy bombings, they wrote, the Bin Laden family “generally turned away” from Osama. But these investigators, too, offered no evidence of culpable financial support for Osama.29

  The U.S. intelligence community simply did not know very much about the Bin Laden family, and an important aspect of what it claimed to know was wrong: even after 1998, the CIA’s evaluation of Osama and his capabilities rested on mistaken assumptions about the scale and history of the Bin Ladens’ wealth.

  ON NOVEMBER 17, 1998, the CIA circulated within the U.S. government an intelligence report stating that Osama had inherited $300 million after his father’s death. This estimate did not come from hard evidence, the report conceded; it had probably originated with rumors circulating in the Saudi business community. The FBI had learned in its interview with Shafiq and Hassan Bin Laden that Osama’s income and inheritance had been considerably smaller. Yet in its intelligence reports, the CIA affirmed the $300 million figure as a “reasonable estimate” as of the mid-1990s, based on its valuation of Osama’s business activities in Sudan and its estimate of the amounts he might have inherited from Mohamed Bin Laden. Analysts felt that Osama could have built up Al Qaeda so quickly only if he had access to a large personal fortune. Other U.S. intelligence agencies circulated similar assessments to Clinton administration decision makers after the Africa attacks. A Defense Intelligence Agency report of October 1998 passed along, without comment, a document that claimed Osama had a fortune of $150 million, with $35 million invested in Sudan.30