The Bin Ladens

current-affairs program.

And yet as his exchange with Allouni continued, Osama spoke just as fluidly in the vernacular of a religious cultist—with the seeming flick of a switch, he could find the voice in which he recounted dreams, spoke in Koranic riddles, or expressed his conviction that he and his followers were engaged in a preordained war that would continue until the climax of earthly time—a war that was not a means to a political end, but was rather an expression of God’s will, and as such, could offer no peace to the enemies of His true religion.

“What is your opinion,” Allouni asked him, “about what is being said concerning your analogies and the ‘Clash of Civilizations’? Your constant use and repetition of the word ‘Crusade’ and ‘Crusader’ shows that you uphold the saying, the ‘Clash of Civilizations.’”

“I say there is no doubt about this,” Osama answered. “This [clash of civilizations] is a very clear matter, proven in the Koran…The Jews and America have come up with a fairytale that they transmit to the Muslims, and they’ve unfortunately been followed by the local rulers and a lot of people who are close to them, by using ‘world peace’ as an excuse. That is a fairytale that has no substance whatsoever!”

“Peace?”

“The peace that they foist on Muslims in order to ready and prepare them to be slaughtered…Whoever claims that there is permanent peace between us and the Jews has disbelieved what has been sent down through Mohamed; the battle is between us and the enemies of Islam, and it will go on until the Hour.”³⁰

Several weeks after this interview, a Saudi religious scholar, Ali Al-Ghandi, arrived in Afghanistan on a tour. Near Kandahar, he was granted an audience with Osama. The transcript of their informal conversation is peppered with risible passages, particularly as Al-Ghandi tries awkwardly to flatter Osama: “We don’t want to take much of your time…Everybody praises what you did, the great action that you did…Hundreds of people used to doubt you and few only would follow you until this huge event happened. Now hundreds of people are coming out to join you.”

Osama explained how the planes operation had exceeded his expectations, and he referred to his own background in civil engineering and demolition: “We calculated that the floors that would be hit would be three or four floors. I was the most optimistic of them all…due to my experience in this field. I was thinking that the fire from the gas in the plane would melt the iron structure of the building and collapse the area where the plane hit, and all the floors above it only. This is all that we hoped for.” Osama said he was pleased and surprised when both buildings collapsed entirely.

“By God,” Al-Ghandi said obsequiously, “it is a great work.”³¹

OSAMA’S SUDDEN POPULARITY among ordinary Saudis redoubled the complexity of the Bin Laden family’s position: Had they brought shame and disrepute upon the kingdom, or had they nurtured a new Arab folk hero? It did not require professional expertise in public relations to see the contours of this dilemma as the Bin Ladens searched for a legal and communications strategy. To please American audiences, the Bin Ladens would have to seek forgiveness and denounce Osama. To please audiences in the Arab world, where the family’s financial interests predominantly lay, such a posture would be seen as craven.

It was perhaps unrealistic to expect Abdullah, in Boston, with his diffident personality and his very junior standing in the family, to manage these questions on his own.

Abdullah joined Andrew Hess for dinner one evening that autumn at the Helmand Restaurant, run by the Karzai family, whose own exiled scion would soon be restored to power in their native country, displacing Osama’s influence there. Hess was the Tufts professor whose academic program the Bin Ladens had supported during the 1990s. From his many years spent in Saudi Arabia, Hess had come to think that there was “a certain posture that Arabs take in cases of tragedy” and that Abdullah Bin Laden, over dinner, now exuded this posture, which Hess saw as a sort of burdened fatalism: What can one do?

“He regarded this as a huge tragedy for the family,” Hess recalled. Abdullah took pains to convince him that the Bin Ladens were “hugely hostile” to what Osama had done, and that they had “no interest whatsoever in supporting anything he’s doing…that he’s receiving no money from the corporation.” Abdullah made this last point more than once.³²

In December, after flying over to London, Abdullah agreed to meet with Charlotte Edwardes, a British journalist with the Telegraph. Bakr had tentatively given Abdullah some scope to humanize his section of the family through occasional contact with the media. Edwardes found Abdullah a sympathetic figure—a “tall, slight foreigner dressed in an expensively cut black overcoat,” who worried about his many allergies, and walked somberly through the Mayfair streets, oblivious to Christmas shoppers. Abdullah could barely speak of Osama; he referred to his half-brother as “Mr. O.”³³

He talked to Edwardes about his new life in America and Britain. He used cash as much as possible, to avoid that awkward moment when a clerk might stare down at the raised letters on his credit card. At home in Boston, he had stopped jogging out of doors and had given up private piloting. Flying, he said, “is like nothing else. When I am up there in the plane I feel free,” and none of his family’s history with tragic aviation events had diminished his passion. And yet, he understood that “it would be an insult for me to pilot a plane in America now.”

During one of several meetings, Abdullah sat down with Edwardes at the Four Seasons Hotel in Knightsbridge. Abdullah paid for his Evian water (it was Ramadan, and he was fasting during the daytime) from a wad of fifty-pound notes. As they prepared to leave for dinner, Abdullah asked the hotel waiter if it might be possible to book a table at Nobu, then the most sought-after restaurant in London.

“Sorry, no, not unless you are a name,” the waiter said.

For a moment, Edwardes thought, Abdullah Bin Laden “allowed himself the shadow of a smile.”³⁴

37. PUBLIC RELATIONS

RICHARD NEWCOMB, the attorney who ran the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, led a delegation to Saudi Arabia in December 2001 to speak with businessmen in the kingdom about the problem of terrorist financing. The delegation’s purpose—although its members did not put it quite so bluntly as this during meetings—was to shake up the attitudes of wealthy Saudis about their charitable giving and other financial dealings in the Islamic world. Newcomb and colleagues from the State Department and other agencies hoped to accomplish this by enumerating for audiences of Saudi businessmen the penalties that individuals and companies could incur under American law if they passed money to the wrong people. The Bush administration had identified the disruption of terrorist financing as an important priority after September 11, and Treasury had already designated several dozen individuals, charities, and businesses as supporters of terrorism, which meant their U.S.- held assets could be frozen. Newcomb and his colleagues scheduled roundtable meetings with the Jeddah Chamber of Commerce and other businessmen in Riyadh and Jeddah. The Treasury team also asked for a private meeting with the Bin Laden family, and somewhat to their surprise, they learned that Bakr Bin Laden would meet with them.¹

The meeting took place in the elegant offices of the Saudi Bin Laden Group. Shafiq and Abdullah, who had met with Newcomb at Treasury prior to September 11 to outline the history of Bin Laden inheritances, joined Bakr in his office. This time, instead of the business suits they had worn to the Treasury Annex in Washington, the two brothers appeared in traditional Saudi robes and headdresses. No one from Treasury had met Bakr before; they were struck by his relatively modest stature, at least in comparison to Osama.

Bakr apologized to the Americans about the September 11 attacks. He said that Osama was no longer considered a part of the Bin Laden family, and that he had been cut off for years. Bakr added that he had no idea where Osama was hiding. He offered the cooperation of his family and his company.

Newcomb and his colleagues walked through their presentation about American terrorist-financing laws. They tried to speak in a diplomatic, nonthreatening tone. They did not go into depth with Bakr about specific Bin Laden family or inheritance issues; Newcomb’s office believed the letter sent to Treasury by Sullivan & Cromwell in 2000 had adequately addressed these questions.

The Bin Laden brothers were cordial. Shafiq suggested to one member of the delegation that he come back