a formal letter to Treasury from the Saudi Bin Laden Group to confirm in writing what Abdullah and Shafiq had conveyed. This document provided—about a year and a half after the Africa embassy bombings—a specific accounting from the Bin Laden family of Osama’s inheritance and income. Over his lifetime, Osama had received a total of about $27 million, but never all at once, the letter disclosed. He had received regular dividends and salaries, beginning in the early 1970s and ending in the early 1990s. This income averaged slightly more than $1 million per year.35
Even after these formal disclosures, analysts within the U.S. government remained uncertain about a number of questions. Daniel Coleman at the FBI, for example, had been told during his interviews with Osama’s half- brothers that there had been a major distribution of perhaps $8 million after Salem Bin Laden’s death, when Bakr reorganized the family’s finances and businesses. Mohamed Bin Laden’s children had the option to take their distribution in cash or to reinvest it. What, exactly, had Osama done? The answer seemed murky—he had taken out a substantial amount of cash, according to Bin Laden family accounts, but he also had remained a shareholder in good standing in both of the major family firms. There were a number of similar issues that seemed confusing; perhaps they were mere details, but there was a continuing sense among some of the American investigators that they could never quite see the picture in clear relief.36
The myth of Osama’s $300 million inheritance had at last been punctured—that much was certain. He had enjoyed a healthy bank account, but he had never been among the extremely rich, and at this point, after years in exile, he clearly was not funding his terrorist operations from his inheritance.
It infuriated some officials in the White House counterterrorism office that the CIA never seemed to acknowledge that it had circulated at the highest levels of government such misleading information about such an important question for so long. Rather than admitting error, CIA reporting now took the line that the entire subject was a confounding mystery: “We presently do not have the reporting to determine how much of Bin Laden’s personal wealth he has used or continues to use in financing his organization,” said an intelligence report circulated in April 2001. “We are unable to estimate with confidence the value of his assets and net worth; and we do not know the level of financial support he draws from his family and other donors sympathetic to his cause.”37
The FBI’s reporting was no better, where it existed at all. Several years later, investigators from the bipartisan 9/11 Commission examined all the classified files on the subject of Bin Laden’s wealth and terrorist finance at the CIA and the FBI alike. They found CIA reporting on Bin Laden’s money to be beautifully written, elegantly printed, and efficiently distributed within the national security bureaucracy—but it was crafted from thin, poorly audited sources that turned out to be wrong. The FBI’s raw files, by comparison, contained accurate and specific data, but the files were scattered loosely around field offices and poorly analyzed. The bureau lacked the culture and capability to pull this information together, synthesize it in writing, and distribute it so that it might aid decision makers.38 The FBI also never conducted significant physical surveillance of Bin Ladens in the United States or launched a systematic review of their businesses and finances.39 Throughout the 1990s, any American or foreign citizen could have walked into the Los Angeles County Superior Court, ordered for free archived Bin Laden family divorce files, and read rich details about annual dividends, profits, loans, and business matters—information that would have refuted the CIA’s reporting about Osama’s $300 million inheritance. Yet this publicly accessible information was probably never examined, and it certainly was never reflected in intelligence reports circulating to decision makers in the Clinton administration as they tried to understand the threat Bin Laden posed to American lives and interests.
The failure to unearth the truth about Osama’s finances “hampered the U.S. government’s ability to integrate potential covert action or economic disruption” into its attempts to stop Bin Laden before he could strike again, American investigators later concluded. The cost of particular terrorist attacks was low—perhaps $10,000 for the Africa attacks, and several hundred thousand dollars for the more challenging September 11 conspiracy. Yet the financial pressures on Bin Laden as he planned for September 11 were much greater than those numbers would suggest.40
To maintain good graces with the Taliban, for example, Osama had to raise about $20 million per year for training camps, weapons, salaries, and subsidies for the families of volunteers. Operations outside Afghanistan cost approximately $10 million more, American investigators later concluded, when they had the benefit of a much richer archive of Al Qaeda documents and testimony. Some of these budgets overlapped with business and construction projects Osama engaged in to please Mullah Omar: a new palace for the Taliban leader outside of Kandahar in 1999, a new mosque in the city, and later, a new covered shopping market downtown.41 The funds came from sympathetic charities and from individuals who raised funds from rich individuals in the Persian Gulf; some of these donors might know where their money was going, but some might not. By 2000 Osama was running an international Islamist nonprofit whose fundraising and spending cycles looked similar to many other global charities, and whose rising use of the Internet was particularly innovative. He had restored himself to the position he enjoyed during the early 1980s when he first arrived in Afghanistan espousing Islamic charity, and learned how to use the media, the religious calendar, and his own charisma to raise millions year after year. Then, as later, when Osama needed money, he seemed to know how to find it.
35. BIN LADEN ISLAND
BY THE LATE 1990S, it was common within Bin Laden corporate culture to refer respectfully to each of the sons of Mohamed Bin Laden by the honorific “Sheikh.” Its usage was similar to “General” or “Colonel” within the American military—a routine prefix. One day, as Bakr Bin Laden received a rundown of management items, his briefer kept referring to his younger half-brothers in this manner, as in, “Sheikh Shafiq called from London with a question,” or “Sheikh Hassan is flying in from Lebanon tomorrow.” A person who was present recalled that Bakr waited for a suitable pause and then remarked wryly: “There’s only one sheikh in this family.”1
Osama might wish it otherwise, but Bakr had a point. By the time the Bin Laden name became globally infamous—or celebrated, depending upon the audience—Bakr had freed himself from much of the strain and awkwardness that had accompanied his unexpected transition to family leadership after Salem’s death. He was still a very hard worker, and he still did not always seem comfortable in his own skin, but by now, in his early fifties, as the chairman of a diversified business empire, there could be no doubt about his success. The Saudi Bin Laden Group and the Mohamed Bin Laden Company employed many thousands between them. They had expanded their geographical reach: Their international construction contracts at the decade’s end included the Cairo International Airport, the Kuala Lumpur International Airport, and the Amman Grand Hyatt Hotel. They had become substantial players in new fields such as the medical industry; the United Medical Group, founded by the Saudi Bin Laden Group in 1990, was growing into a global company with $120 million in annual revenue, more than two thousand employees, and offices in London, Australia, and across the Middle East. Bakr and the brothers closest to him, particularly Yahya, had created this growth despite a series of risky political and business episodes after Salem’s death: Osama’s excommunication, falling oil prices, King Fahd’s stroke, and Crown Prince Abdullah’s attempts to exert greater control over the kingdom’s contracting system. Any one of these challenges might have set them back, but Bakr had finessed them, and in part because of his strategy of business modernization and diversity, he had emerged with greater wealth and financial independence than either Salem or his father had enjoyed.2
He was twice divorced, but his children remained under his roof. He hired guardians and tutors, and if the boys were perhaps more interested in the latest Sony PlayStation games than in their father’s ponderous Islamic verses, the generation gap between them seemed of normal expanse. Bakr sent his talented eldest son, Nawaf, an American passport holder, to the United States for schooling, and in the Arabian tradition, he cultivated the boy for a leadership role in the next generation.
When Bakr was at home in Jeddah, his world revolved around his palace near the Red Sea, a campus with a main home, a guesthouse, buildings that served as offices for executive staff, and his majlis, where he received executives and visitors in the afternoons and evenings. He attended banquets and receptions hosted by the Al-Saud, but these soirees often had more to do with attending to his royal clients than with the pursuit of pleasure. He retained a passion for aircraft, and he built out his private fleet of jets; when traveling, he moved in the privileged
