in my mind as to what to do, with friends and family divided in their recommendations. Ultimately the bureau’s offer was too tempting to pass up. The idea of being an agent appealed to my sense of adventure, as did the chance to help protect America, a country I had come to love dearly. I loved it because of the welcome it had given me and my family and because, having grown up in a country pulled apart by sectarian discord, I had come to appreciate the greatness of the United States and admire the ideals that had created the nation.
I was fascinated by the protections the U.S. Constitution provides citizens. While the Constitution and the Pledge of Allegiance may perhaps seem largely symbolic to many Americans, to those of us who have lived with alternatives, they are filled with meaning. I know that the protections offered therein are very necessary.
The idea of being part of something bigger than me prevailed. I accepted the offer, and, in November 1997, after sixteen weeks of training at the FBI Academy, in Quantico, Virginia, I joined the bureau as a special agent, assigned to the New York office.
The FBI’s New York field office, located in downtown Manhattan, in many ways resembles the city in which it is housed: it’s full of colorful characters who are not afraid to voice their opinions and for whom politeness is often an unnecessary convention that gets in the way of making a point. The bluntness, the jokes, and the camaraderie of the NYO were, to me, far more appealing than the cold and formal atmosphere of many offices.
I did have an advantage over other out-of-towners in my ability to adjust, however. While New York City was entirely different from the rural Pennsylvania that had been my home in previous years (and which I loved), the lively characters did remind me in different ways of some of the interesting figures of my childhood in Beirut, and this helped me feel at home. Before new recruits are assigned to specific squads, they rotate through different sections of the office, starting with the applicants’ squad (conducting background checks), then moving on to special operations (doing surveillance), and finishing at the command center—ensuring that newcomers gain an understanding of all the work the office does. This boosts camaraderie between squads and efficiency for the bureau as a whole, with everyone coming to know the roles and capabilities of other teams. It is also meant to help the recruits see which squads appeal to them, and it gives senior management a chance to see rookies at work before deciding where to place them.
Through the rotation period we met senior agents from different divisions who gave us advice and explained what their groups did. What most interested me was counterterrorism, and the senior people in this area whom I met were Pat D’Amuro, assistant special agent in charge (ASAC) of counterterrorism, and John O’Neill, who was Pat’s superior, running the entire National Security Division.
In college I was always interested in the effects of nonstate actors on global stability. My experience in war-torn Lebanon shaped my view that groups like the Irish Republican Army, Hezbollah, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and Hamas can be more influential than the states themselves in setting political and security agendas. My graduate research focused on the cultural approach in international relations. Most of my professors were students of the realism school, which maintains that a country’s national interest is central to how it acts, but I always believed that realism in many ways is shaped by the cultural lenses of different peoples. My research developed into a hobby, and gradually led me to follow the activities of a Saudi Arabian millionaire named Osama bin Laden.
What piqued my interest was reading newspapers from the Middle East. I kept up with them in order to stay up to speed on my Arabic and because I obviously retained an interest in the region. Bin Laden’s name often appeared; there was a fascination with him among many in the Middle East, as he had given up a life of privilege to go fight with the mujahideen against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and had then maintained the life of a fighter.
Over time I noticed bin Laden’s declarations toward the United States growing increasingly aggressive, and it became clear to me that someone with his pedigree and resources was going to be very dangerous someday. I began following him more seriously, turning him from an academic interest into part of my job: actively searching the Arab media for his name and keeping a folder of interesting articles about him.
Bin Laden was the seventeenth child (out of an estimated fifty-four) of Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden, a household name in much of the Middle East. Born to a poor family in the south of Yemen, Mohammed had moved to Saudi Arabia, working as a porter before starting his own construction business. He built a reputation as a good builder and attracted the attention of the Saudi royal family, which began using him for their projects. Commissions started with roads, then moved on to palaces, until he was given the highest honor: renovating the Grand Mosque —al-Masjid al-Haram—in Mecca.
While Mohammed had a reputation for integrity in business, in his personal life he was more lax. He married a total of twenty-two women, often “marrying” and divorcing in a single day, as Islam forbids more than four wives at a time. Osama was the product of Mohammed’s tenth marriage, to a Syrian woman named Hamida al-Attas; he was born on March 10, 1957.
True to form, Mohammed divorced Osama’s mother soon after his birth to marry someone else. Mohammed was killed on September 3, 1967, when his private plane crashed while landing in southwest Saudi Arabia. Osama was ten; his image of his father was based less on personal interaction than on the legend of his father’s building a company from scratch. The company continued to flourish after Mohammed’s death, and the young Osama grew up with a desire to emulate his father in building something great.
After a religious upbringing, a young and devout Osama bin Laden traveled to Afghanistan in 1980 to join the fight against the Soviet invaders. While bin Laden did reportedly participate in some battles, due to his Saudi contacts he developed a reputation as a financier and worked with the charismatic cleric Abdullah Azzam in operating Makhtab al-Khidmat—the innocuously named Bureau of Services, which channeled money and recruits into Afghanistan. MAK was founded by Azzam in the early 1980s in Peshawar, Pakistan, and boasted global outposts, including in the United States, where its center of activity was al-Farouq Mosque, on Altantic Avenue in the Boerum Hill section of Brooklyn.
Osama bin Laden was in many ways a product of the mixture of two extremes of 1970s Saudi Arabia: a militant version of Wahhabism and Saudi wealth. Oil had transformed the Saudi government budget from $9.2 billion (1969–1974) to $142 billion (1975–1979). Many lucrative contracts went to the Saudi Binladin Group, as the family business was called, ensuring Osama and his many siblings a steady stream of money.
The Saudi state also used its newfound wealth to spread its Wahhabi sect of Islam across the world, building mosques and madrassas (religious schools) wherever it could while at the same time allowing strict Wahhabism to dictate most domestic law. This created some problems for the luxury-loving royals, whose indulgences were often at odds with their own laws. They solved this dilemma by buying homes and yachts on the French Riviera and in other showy places and playing out their fantasies there, all the while acting like pious Muslims at home. By satisfying their desires abroad, they simply put enough distance between the exercise of these two warring impulses so that Saudi citizens and, more importantly, clerics couldn’t see them acting against their religion.
Wahhabism by itself is a peaceful version of Islam, as attested to by the millions of Muslims in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states who are practicing Wahhabis and have nothing to do with violence or extremism. The extremism and terrorism arise when Wahhabism, a puritanical form of Islam with a distrust of modernity and an emphasis on the past, is mixed with a violent form of Salafism (a strand of Islam that focuses heavily on what pious ancestors did). An even more potent combination occurs with the introduction of the idea of
The Saudi government encouraged and helped young men travel abroad to fight in the Afghani jihad. This served a dual purpose of ensuring that Wahhabism influenced the mujahideen and enabling the country to get rid of would-be religious troublemakers by sending them abroad. It also helped shape the future of Afghanistan by helping to facilitate the rise of the Taliban.
And so Osama and hundreds of others headed to Afghanistan, their mission endorsed by the government both financially and operationally.
While I was doing my initial rotation, in February 1998—I was on the applicants’ squad, performing background checks—I read in an Arabic newspaper, published in London, about the fatwa signed by bin Laden and
