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
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 attache 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
