The Bin Ladens

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

Richard Clarke, Clinton’s counterterrorism czar at the White House, expressed chronic dissatisfaction with intelligence reporting about Osama’s finances. In the autumn of 1998, he reorganized the National Security Council’s work on Al Qaeda. He summoned a young aide, William Wechsler, who had studied illicit financing and organized crime issues, although never Al Qaeda. Clarke told Wechsler to set up a new interagency working group devoted solely to the subject of Al Qaeda’s money. The government’s terrorism specialists had neglected the subject, Clarke said, and now they had their hands full with other matters, such as trying to find Bin Laden in Afghanistan and locating other violent cells worldwide.

Clarke and Wechsler designated their new task force the UBL Finances Sub-Group; it would report to the larger counterterrorism group that Clarke chaired. They recruited Richard Newcomb, who ran an office at the Treasury Department in charge of identifying and freezing the wealth of terrorist and drug-trafficking groups. They also brought in an analyst from Scheuer’s Bin Laden unit; an analyst from another CIA unit that specialized in black market global finance, called the Illicit Transactions Group; a representative from the Defense Intelligence Agency; and others from the FBI, the State Department, and the National Security Agency.

Wechsler read into the existing intelligence files, particularly those reporting on Osama’s inheritance, and he began to ask questions. As a newly assigned, relatively young White House aide, he could get away with posing some basic, even naive queries, such as where the information about Osama’s $300 million had actually come from, what efforts had been made to verify it with reliable documentation from the Bin Laden family or the Saudi government, and so on. The answers he received from the CIA were mushy. The FBI seemed to have little hard data, either, or if it did, its representatives were unable or unwilling to share it with the White House.

“This is insane,” Wechsler told Clarke, as the latter recalled it. “FBI thinks we should just leave this to them, but they can’t tell me anything I can’t read in the newspapers. CIA has given us a data dump of everything they have ever come across on the subject, and thinks that answers the question. There are no formal assessments at all, no understanding of the whole picture of where the money is coming from…The general impression I get out there is that this is all a waste of time because, they keep saying, it doesn’t take much money to blow something up and Osama’s got all he needs from daddy.”³¹

It was Richard Newcomb, the director of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, who had previously developed sanctions against nations supporting terrorism and against such complex criminal groups as the Cali cocaine trafficking cartel in Colombia, who first asked, during a subgroup meeting, one fundamental question: “What is the theory of the case that we’re working on here?” Was it one rich person—Osama—spending his own money? If so, the implication was that they should search for Osama’s big pot of money and take it away. And yet as they examined the government’s reporting, what they saw was not evidence of a unitary fortune, but continual references to Osama’s relations with Islamic charities, donors, and proselytizing networks—a complex, international web of religious and political fundraising. They also confronted the fact that they knew very little about the real state of Osama’s investments in Sudan. (The fact that he had been stripped of some of his wealth as he left that country was unknown to the U.S. government at the time.) Above all, the analysts in Wechsler’s group realized that they needed greater cooperation from Saudi Arabia.

One problem with asking for help from the Saudis on terrorist finance issues was that the questions were usually lumped into the larger government-to-government agenda, where they had to fight for priority with other subject matter—terrorism prosecutions, regional politics, the Palestinian conflict, oil. Wechsler’s group decided to propose a special mission to the kingdom solely dedicated to the exploration of Al Qaeda and terrorist money. Vice President Al Gore agreed to contact Crown Prince Abdullah—his counterpart under diplomatic protocol—to plead for cooperation.³²

Abdullah agreed to arrange for a meeting with Saudi counterterrorist police and banking officials. Newcomb led an interagency delegation to Riyadh in early 1999. They flew out by commercial airliner. In the U.S. group, besides Newcomb and Wechsler, were representatives from State, the CIA, and Treasury. They met with their Saudi counterparts at the Ministry of Interior, in a typically ornate and heavily air-conditioned conference room. The Saudis brought senior officers from their domestic security service, the Mubahith, and specialists from the Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority, the kingdom’s central bank.

The Americans unfolded a diverse list of agenda items. Some of their issues involved suggestions for new laws or banking rules that might improve Saudi Arabia’s capacity to detect and stop illicit transactions. Other agenda items concerned international campaigns to isolate the Taliban, particularly by shutting down Afghan Ariana flights. Finally, there was the sensitive subject of Osama Bin Laden, his money, and his relationship with his family.

Newcomb issued a formal request to meet with members of the Bin Laden family. The Saudi Interior Ministry delegates seemed startled. They were the Saudi equivalent of senior FBI investigators, but such a meeting was not something they could promise, they said—it seemed to be above their pay grade. The Saudi officials emphasized that the Bin Ladens were a respected, law-abiding family. They had ostracized Osama, as had the Saudi government. Why would the Americans need to meet with them?

The Saudis knew, of course, that Newcomb’s office at Treasury was in charge of identifying and administrating U.S. sanctions on foreign governments and groups involved in terrorism or other crimes. This may have explained some of their protective instinct. Here was the scenario the Bin Ladens and their lawyers feared: voluntary cooperation with U.S. investigators that might lead to a legal attack on the Bin Laden fortune.

The Saudis told Newcomb and his colleagues that they would have to coordinate his request with Wyche Fowler, the U.S. ambassador. They did so, but members of the delegation had the sense that Fowler was not happy about their intrusion into an area that he had been handling. Nonetheless, Fowler pressed the Saudis and the Bin Ladens to cooperate with Treasury.

Newcomb and his colleagues told their Saudi counterparts that they wanted specific information about the size and disposition of Osama’s inheritance. In the meeting, the Saudis did provide an outline of the 1994 forced sales of Osama’s shares in the Bin Laden companies, and the relatively modest $9.9 million in proceeds that had been frozen in Saudi accounts. Some of the American delegates were struck by how much smaller this amount was than U.S. intelligence reporting had led them to expect. In any event, the money was out of the Saudi banking system and was not accessible by Osama, the Saudi side asserted.

Were there documents available to describe all this? No, the Saudis answered. How are you sure, then, the Americans asked, that it was all done properly? It’s the Bin Laden family, the Saudis answered—of course we are sure.

The Americans mentioned their concern that Osama continued to telephone his mother in Jeddah. Did this suggest continuing relations with his family? “You can never ask an Arab mother not to speak to her son,” one of the Saudi officials replied.³³

Listening, one American in the room found himself thinking: Well, then they’re not really separated, are they? And also: We would insist that a mother stop talking to her son, if the son were a fugitive accused of mass murder.

CONFUSION PERSISTED at the White House and the CIA about the basic facts of Osama’s wealth and inheritance until the spring of 2000. That March, Richard Newcomb’s office telephoned Richard Urowsky, the Sullivan & Cromwell partner, and requested a meeting with Bin Laden family members to discuss financial issues. Urowsky, Abdullah Bin Laden, and Shafiq Bin Laden flew to Washington to meet with Newcomb at the Treasury Department.

Newcomb explained that he and his colleagues were struggling to evaluate reports that Osama had inherited $300 million. The Treasury and the White House wanted to know if this was accurate, and if not, how much Osama had received and when he had received it. They wanted to understand the nature of his income, past and present.³⁴

The two Bin Ladens answered Newcomb’s questions. A few weeks later, Sullivan & Cromwell forwarded