The Bin Ladens Read online

  As the pressure on the family eased, Bakr flourished. He took as his third wife a much younger woman—she was still in her late teens when he met and married her around 2004. Bakr now wove more leisure into his schedule: he vacationed on a private island in the Maldives, visited a resort in Bali, socialized with other yacht-owning wealthy Saudi businessmen in Beirut, attended air shows in Dubai, and gossiped for hours with colleagues about the latest models of private jets. His sons took up the family passion for fast-moving machines; late in 2006, Abdulaziz Bin Bakr won the U.A.E. National Superstock Bike Trophy.11 By then, Bakr’s confidence seemed to reflect that of Saudi Arabia: The kingdom’s tormentor, Saddam Hussein, was headed to the gallows; Osama was in hiding and Al Qaeda’s attacks inside Saudi Arabia, while occasionally unnerving, had amounted to little more than a nuisance; oil prices were sky high; Saudi politics and succession plans were stable; and the Americans would surely take care of any future threats from Iran. What was there to fear?

  IN MECCA, the heart of Islam and the headwaters of the Bin Laden fortune, York International Corporation of Pennsylvania installed during 2005 a complex of industrial air-conditioning units, or water chillers, on a hilltop of volcanic rock called Jabal Al-Qala, or “Castle Mountain.” The units constituted the largest industrial air-conditioning project undertaken by York since it serviced the Prophet’s Mosque at Medina in partnership with the Bin Ladens. This time it was not a religious sanctuary that would be cooled in the desert, but a seven-tower condominium and hotel project overlooking Mecca’s Grand Mosque. According to a York executive, by the time it was completed, this Mecca condo project would overtake the Prophet’s Mosque as the largest air conditioner in the world.12

  In the latest oil boom, every Gulf businessman with real estate profits or a corporate bonus to spend seemed to covet a condo overlooking Mecca; by 2005, the real estate rush in the holy city rivaled that in Miami’s fevered South Beach. The Bin Ladens initially thought they would not bother with the time and expense required to sell individual condo units at Castle Mountain, so they sold an entire tower to Kuwaiti investors. When they learned the soaring retail prices units in the building were attracting, the Bin Ladens “were furious,” said Anwar Hassan of York International. The family’s executives decided in the future they would “retail every apartment themselves” to maximize profits.13

  With the Faqih family—another Saudi business group with a black sheep living in exile—the Bin Ladens planned for an even more ambitious condominium tower project on Omar Mountain, overlooking Mecca, a project that would require blasting off the volcanic mountain-top in order to build. This development contemplated the construction of four towers, each about thirty stories high, containing one hundred elevators and a total of more than forty-six hundred apartment units. There would be a five-star hotel, a shopping mall, and parking for two thousand cars.14 The sprawl-inducing, profit-making commercial evolution of Islam’s holiest places had reached its apotheosis, and the Bin Ladens were partners in all of the most ambitious projects.

  They were partners, too, in the planned King Abdullah Economic City, announced in late 2005 as oil prices moved above fifty dollars a barrel. The new king commandeered undeveloped land along the Red Sea north of Jeddah and announced a city designed to rival Dubai. Abdullah said the project would cost about $27 billion. He planned a Millennium Seaport to rival the largest commercial ports in the world; high-speed rail and air links to the rest of the kingdom; an Industrial District of petrochemical and other plants; a waterside resort to attract tourists, complete with the kingdom’s first world-class 18-hole golf course; a Financial Island topped by two office towers reaching sixty or more stories into the sky; an Education Zone filled with modern universities; and, of course, more condominiums. The project, said a Bin Laden executive, “could either make or break the local economy.” For the Bin Laden companies, the construction work alone would be “absolutely huge in scope.”15

  “For the Roads Ahead,” was the headline on a self-promotional advertisement purchased by the Saudi Bin Laden Group in the Washington Post late in 2005. “Construction may be at the heart of what we do. But our interests also extend into the worlds of media, retail, industrial projects and telecommunications. It’s all part of our vision to ensure Saudi Arabia remains a modern and dynamic regional center in the 21st Century.”16

  There seemed to be no aspect of Saudi Arabia’s second wave of modernization projects from which the Bin Ladens would not profit handsomely. Even the sometimes shaky security environment in the kingdom offered opportunity. In May 2003, Al Qaeda cells inside Saudi Arabia launched a series of mostly ineffectual attacks against the Interior Ministry, American compounds in the oil zones, and against the U.S. consulate in Jeddah. Osama Bin Laden’s son Sa’ad, in exile in Iran, was accused of playing a role in organizing the strikes. Saudi security forces, aided by surveillance technology acquired from the United States, launched violent crackdowns against suspected Al Qaeda sympathizers. Hundreds of Islamists were rounded up and interrogated. The violence soon subsided. In April 2006, the Saudi government announced a fast-track project to build nine new prisons across the kingdom within twelve months. The construction contract was awarded to the Saudi Bin Laden Group; it was valued at $1.6 billion.17

  40. IN EXILE

  THE OFFICES of Fame Advertising are on the second floor of a strip mall in downtown Jeddah, on Palestine Street. The shopping center also houses a Starbucks, a Java Lounge, a Vertigo Music Café, and a Body Master, a massage and health club. Inside the Fame Advertising suite, the ambience suggests a Silicon Valley startup company. There is a juice bar with tall bar stools, and on the wall hangs a large black-and-white photograph of cable cars on an undulating San Francisco street. Impressionist paintings of European café scenes grace other rooms. The furniture is chrome, black leather, and cherry wood; the computers sport the labels of International Business Machines.1

  This is the realm of Osama Bin Laden’s eldest son, Abdullah, who started Fame as an outlet for his entrepreneurial ambitions after he returned to Saudi Arabia, following his separation from his father in Sudan. As of late 2005, Fame enjoyed an association with the larger Saudi Bin Laden Group, and it had about fifteen employees. Unlike many Saudi companies, the firm did not enforce gender segregation within its offices. It produced a stylish Web site, www.fame-adv.com. Its clients included large Jeddah-based merchant groups such as the Jufallis and Western companies such as Phillips, the electronics maker.

  The proprietor, now in his midtwenties, often wore blue jeans and a baseball cap. In the spring of 2002, he stunned diplomats at the nearby American consulate by turning up in such an outfit at a July 4–style celebration of U.S. independence (held a little early on the calendar because Jeddah’s weather in July is unbearable). Abdullah vacationed in Europe, and when in Jeddah, he became a fixture at the relatively freewheeling Bin Laden–owned beach club along the Red Sea.

  To promote Fame’s services, Abdullah created marketing brochures, in the form of small and colorful cards, which could be handed out to prospective clients. A card entitled “Corporate Identity Management” exuded, “At FAME ADVERTISING we believe that the development of a successful corporate identity is essential to any project or business. Our creation of corporate identities is based on extensive research…with innovative methods that succeed every time.” On the back of the card was a one-word slogan: “Strong.” A second brochure was titled “Event Management.” It boasted, “FAME ADVERTISING events are novel, planned meticulously and executed with efficiency.” The slogan on the back: “Different.” If Abdullah was conscious of the way he quoted his father’s methodology, he did not extend the parallels too far: colorful balloon displays, rather than simultaneous car bomb explosions, were a typical motif of Fame events, according to the photographs posted on its Web site.2

  As Osama Bin Laden’s exile lengthened after September 11, his own large family, the product of at least five marriages over two decades, scattered and drift
ed, much as had happened to Osama’s own generation after the death of Mohamed Bin Laden. As of 2002, Osama had fathered at least twenty-three children. The great majority of them, apart from Abdullah and a few others, lived with him in Afghanistan during the run-up to September 11. As that attack approached, however, Osama seemed to decide that he would endure the next phase of his banishment without the company of most of his current wives. In the summer of 2001, some of Osama’s older sons arranged for at least one of his wives and her children to take shelter with tribesmen along the Afghan-Pakistan border; they later turned her over to the Pakistan government, and after several months, this wife apparently returned to her native Saudi Arabia with some of her children. Two of Osama’s earlier wives had already returned to the kingdom. By December 2001, his recent, very young Yemeni wife had also returned home.3

  Osama’s sons divided themselves into two camps—those who stayed to fight with him, and those who returned to Saudi Arabia, where they could enjoy some of the benefits of Bin Laden family membership. Sa’ad, Hamzah, Sayf, Mohamed, Khalid, and Ladin were among the sons who stayed with Osama or devoted themselves to his cause from separate (and ambiguous) exile in Iran. Those who returned to Saudi Arabia, in addition to Abdullah, included Osama’s sons Ali and Omar; the latter had decided to leave Afghanistan in 2000, at the age of nineteen.4

  When Omar reached Jeddah, he found that he lagged behind his peers in the Bin Laden family. “Osama did not educate his children” in conventional schools, explained Jamal Khalifa, Osama’s brother-in-law, who came to know Omar after his return. In Afghanistan, he insisted that they only “memorize the Koran…So Omar, he was feeling really sorry. He saw the difference between himself and others in the family.”5 Nonetheless, he established himself as a scrap dealer in Jeddah. He married a Saudi woman, developed a muscular physique, donned blue jeans, and trimmed his beard into a fashionable goatee.

  In the autumn of 2006, while riding horses near the Pyramids in Egypt, Omar, now in his midtwenties, met Jane Felix-Browne, a fifty-one-year-old grandmother from Cheshire, England, whose own well-preserved physique owed something, according to a British newspaper account, to the eighty thousand pounds she had spent over the years on plastic surgery. Omar and Jane fell in love, by her account, and quickly married. She had previously been married five times and had converted to Islam; their romance had to overcome some of the tensions that arose from his father’s notoriety. “Omar is wary of everyone,” Felix-Browne said. “He is constantly watching people who he feels might be following him. Not without reason, he is fearful of cameras…But when we are together, he forgets his life.” She said Omar had “left his father because he did not feel it was right to fight or to be in an army,” and yet “he misses his father.” When news of his union generated sensational headlines in Britain, Omar issued a statement to a Saudi newspaper defending his marriage. He explained that his first wife had agreed to this expansion of their family—“Polygamy is not strange in our Arab and Islamic society”—and he pointed out that the Prophet Mohamed had married his wife Khadjia “when he was twenty and she was forty.” There seemed to be some confusion about this issue among his two wives; Felix-Browne soon announced their divorce. She said that she and Omar feared for their lives.6

  ON DECEMBER 14, 2001, Osama Bin Laden wrote and signed his last will and testament. At Tora Bora, around this time, he had endured heavy aerial bombardment by American-led forces, and now he prepared to die. He opened his will with religious invocations, and then wrote, “Allah commended to us that when death approaches any of us that we make a bequest to parents and next of kin and to Muslims as a whole…Allah bears witness that the love of jihad and death in the cause of Allah has dominated my life and the verses of the sword permeated every cell in my heart, ‘and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together.’ How many times did I wake up to find myself reciting this holy verse!”

  His tone, reflecting the military and political setbacks his organization had suffered throughout the autumn of 2001, was thoroughly down-hearted:

  If every Muslim asks himself why has our nation reached this state of humiliation and defeat, then his obvious answer is because it rushed madly for the comforts of life and discarded the Book of Allah behind its back, though it is the only one that has its cure…The Jews and Christians have tempted us with the comforts of life and its cheap pleasures and invaded us with their materialistic values before invading us with their armies, while we stood like women doing nothing because the love of death in the cause of Allah has deserted the hearts…The principal cause of our nation’s ordeal is its fear from dying in the cause of Allah…Today, the nation has failed to support us.7

  To his wives, Osama wrote, “You were, after Allah…the best support and the best help from the first day you knew that the road was full of thorns and mines…You renounced worldly pleasures with me—renounce them more after me. Do not think of remarrying and you need only to look after our children, make sacrifices, and pray for them.”

  To his children, he wrote, “Forgive me because I have given you only a little of my time since I answered the jihad call. I have shouldered the Muslims’ concerns and the concerns of their hardships, embitterment, betrayal and treachery. If it was not for treachery, the situation would not be what it is now and the outcome would not be what it is now.”

  He explicitly advised his children not to work with Al Qaeda. He cited the story of a Muslim leader, Omar Bin Al-Khattab, who forbid his son from becoming caliph, telling him, “If it is good, then we have had our share; if it is bad, then it is enough…”8

  During his years in Sudan, as his family gradually disowned him, Osama’s writings sometimes rang with anger and frustration, but never before had a document attributed to him conveyed such despair and exhaustion. He had apparently assumed that the American military would quickly fall victim to a popular uprising by ordinary Afghans, as had occurred to the Soviet army after its invasion in 1979; instead, his allies in the Taliban had collapsed as the United States and its allies swept into every major Afghan city and town, and a number of his trusted compatriots in Al Qaeda had been killed or captured. If Osama imagined himself as the triumphant leader of a guerrilla vanguard, he now confronted the humiliating prospect of retreat, and the serious possibility that he would be killed or imprisoned.

  The winter passed, however, and none of these fears materialized. By June 2002, Osama remained safe, and he had established a network of personal protection stable enough to allow him to return cautiously to jihad publishing and video production. His initial work that spring still expressed an unusual degree of self-pity; a jihadi Web site published a poetic exchange with his son Hamzah, evoking the conditions and causes of their shared exile:

  “Oh father!” Hamzah wrote. “Where is the escape and when will we have a home? Oh father! I see spheres of danger everywhere I look. How come our home has vanished without a trace?…Why have they showered us with bombs like rain, having no mercy for a child?…Tell me, father, something useful about what I see.”

  “Oh son!” Osama answered. “Suffice to say that I am full of grief and sighs. What can I say if we are living in a world of laziness and discontent…Pardon me, my son, but I can only see a very steep path ahead. A decade has gone by in vagrancy and travel, and here we are in our tragedy. Security has gone, but danger remains. It is a world of crimes in which children are slaughtered like cows. For how long will real men be in short supply?”9

  NOT FOR LONG, as it happened. As the months passed, and still he remained free, Osama’s courage and confidence returned. The particular circumstances of his life as a fugitive are, as of this writing, unknown, but the open record of his published statements and recordings from exile during this period—more than a dozen altogether—makes plain the general trajectory of Osama’s experience: an initial period of giddy celebration immediately after the attacks on New York and Washington, followed by a rapid descent into desperation, and then a gradual recovery and a re
awakened sense of purpose, producing a return to the ambition and boastfulness of his past. Osama’s statements make clear, too, that by 2003, at least, he enjoyed regular access to satellite television and the Internet.

  Planning for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, more than any other event, seemed to draw Osama back to himself; judging by what he said and wrote, the war arrived as a kind of spiritual and political elixir, just when he required it most. The buildup to combat early in 2003 brought forth a burst of lengthy and ambitious writing, essays that harkened to his prolific period of pamphleteering from Sudan. After a period of quietude and anguish, suddenly Osama seemed to have much that he wished to say.

  “I am rejoicing in the fact that America has become embroiled in the quagmires of the Tigris and Euphrates,” he wrote in October 2003. “Bush thought that Iraq and its oil would be easy prey, and now here he is, stuck in dire straits, by the grace of God Almighty. Here is America today, screaming at the top of its voice as it falls apart in front of the whole world.”10

  Osama saw the Iraq war as “a rare and essentially valuable chance in every sense of the word to mobilize the ummah’s potential and unchain it.” He urged young volunteers to “take off to the battlefields in Iraq to cut off the head of world infidelity.”11 Many answered his call, particularly from Saudi Arabia.

  Osama made no secret of his disdain for Saddam Hussein, but this, of course, could not justify the American occupation, he said: “It is true that Saddam is a thief and an apostate, but the solution is not to be found in moving the government of Iraq from a local thief to a foreign one.” When the United States announced increases in the reward money available for his capture or death, Osama retaliated by announcing his own reward schedule, in units of gold, for the murder of Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, as well as for the deaths of other Americans.12