families in an age of cultural integration.
As Hadhramis, they came from a long line of confident global travelers. As Mohamed’s children, they had inherited a spark of creative genius. As Saudis, they had learned to accommodate contradictions. These qualities described and complimented them; unfortunately, they also described and complimented Osama.
THE “PLANES OPERATION,” as it was then being called among the few around Osama who were authorized to know about it, was apparently conceived as a media event.15
Its origins are not entirely understood; the only full narrative available is one that was related under American interrogation by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. He was a Pakistani raised in Kuwait, educated in North Carolina, and radicalized on the Afghan frontier during the anti-Soviet war of the 1980s. He was not particularly close to Osama in those years, but he was an uncle of Ramzi Yousef, who had led the first attack on the World Trade Center. By Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s account, he and Yousef first conceived of using hijacked airliners as weapons while they were in exile in the Philippines during the early 1990s. His nephew was then arrested in Pakistan by a team that included FBI agents and CIA officers. At some point afterward, Mohammed met with Osama to discuss an idea that would offer a spectacular reply.
The initial discussion unfolded like a pitch meeting for a Hollywood fireball thriller. Mohammed proposed hijacking ten airplanes in the United States. Suicide pilots would fly nine of them into landmark targets on the East and West Coast—the Pentagon, the White House, the U.S. Capitol, the World Trade Center, CIA headquarters, FBI headquarters, nuclear power plants, and skyscrapers in California and Washington State. The tenth plane, bearing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed himself, would touch down at an American airport. He would then kill all of the male passengers aboard, alert the media, and deliver a speech denouncing American foreign policy. The pitch was “theater, a spectacle of destruction,” American investigators wrote later, but it was one in which Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, not Osama Bin Laden, would be “the self-cast star—the superterrorist.”16
Bin Laden heard Mohammed out, but he was not enthusiastic. Perhaps it was because, as Mohammed recounted later, Osama saw the first draft of the plan as a bit too ambitious, not practical enough to justify a green light. That was certainly a plausible reaction, and consistent with Osama’s history of caution and care in the planning of violent operations. Perhaps, too, Osama preferred a different approach to the casting of the star role.
Late in 1998 or early in 1999, Osama summoned Mohammed back, and they met at the Al-Matar complex outside Kandahar. This time they discussed a scaled-back version of the plan, one with a more manageable budget and supporting cast, and one that would not involve any press conferences presided over by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Osama said he would provide the necessary money.17
AT THE WEDDING of Osama’s second-eldest son, Mohamed, which took place in January 2001, upward of five hundred bearded guests sat cross-legged on the open ground outside Kandahar, lined up as if for prayer. They faced the groom and the groom’s father, who sat cross-legged before them, on carpets. The bride was a fourteen- year-old daughter of a former Egyptian policeman, Mohamed Atef, who was Osama’s closest military adviser—she was not in sight, of course; this was a male-only affair. The groom appeared to be about nineteen years old. He had a fuzzy, immature mustache. He wore white robes and a white Saudi headdress. Mohamed Osama Bin Laden bore a striking resemblance to his father, having inherited his thin features and flared nose. He had appeared at earlier media events with Osama; he carried an assault rifle and spoke passionately about his commitment to jihad, although he looked so young and frail that the effect was half-comical, like something from a Saturday-morning adventure cartoon. Now, on the occasion of his marriage, when Mohamed looked into the video cameras on hand, his smile seemed awkward and lacking in confidence. So, for that matter, did his father’s smile, as he sat beside Mohamed; despite appearing over many years in self-produced videos, Osama still was prone to self-consciousness when the cameras rolled.18
After Osama’s son Abdullah had decided to abandon his father to take up a normal Saudi teenager’s life in Jeddah, Mohamed had assumed the role of faithful eldest son in exile, and so his wedding was an unusually important occasion. There were other teenagers in Osama’s Afghan brood—the Al Qaeda leader had done more than many of his half-brothers to contribute to the swelling size of the family’s third generation. His sons alone now numbered about a dozen. In addition to Mohamed, the next eldest, Sa’ad, had been groomed for future leadership. Three other younger boys—Khalid, Hamzah, and Ladin—would soon appear in war-fighting propaganda videos, posing like African or Sri Lankan child soldiers.
Osama seemed to regard Mohamed’s wedding as an opportunity to create a video postcard that could be enjoyed by relatives unable to attend, and at the same time, as a chance to contribute a new propaganda piece for Arab television audiences. His aides telephoned the Al-Jazeera bureau chief in Pakistan, Ahmad Zaidan, and invited him to Kandahar. When he arrived, they promised him a copy of the wedding video, so he could arrange for its broadcast by satellite. Osama’s team filmed the ceremony with their own cameras, discreetly tucking them beneath robes at times so as not to offend photography-phobic Taliban guests.
Osama was in an expansive mood. Three months earlier, Al Qaeda suicide bombers in Yemen had piloted an explosive-laden skiff into the hull of the USS
“I will tell you one thing,” Osama told Zaidan afterward, as the latter recalled it. “We did the
He was not preoccupied only by office talk, however. Osama’s mother had flown in from Jeddah, and she had brought along at least two of Osama’s younger stepbrothers, with whom he had shared his suburban household after his mother’s remarriage. (The Saudi intelligence service, which had been informed of her decision to travel to Afghanistan, still felt that it could not interfere with a mother’s desire to see her son, even after the brazen
The wedding ceremony itself did not take long—perhaps one hour, by Zaidan’s estimation, followed by a banquet of food and a dessert course of fruits. Osama decided against a speech honoring his son but chose instead to recite a poem he had written about the USS
His performance did not go particularly well, however. He stumbled. The crowd shouted
“I don’t think my delivery was good,” he confessed. Zaidan deduced that Osama was “very much caring about public relations—very much caring about how he would appear on the TV.”
Osama decided to try it a second time. He went back outside, the cameras rolled, and he recited the poem again:
He went back inside and looked at the video, reviewing his performances. “No, no, the first one was better,”
