when he was in town. The minarets of a family mosque, constructed as an act of religious charity by Mohamed, loomed above the compound’s flat-roofed houses. Nearby were the whitewashed, walled enclaves of Mohamed’s other wives and some former wives; the women shared their homes with whichever of their sons and daughters were not away at school. The widows were generally relaxed in one another’s company. “What surprised me,” recalled Carmen Bin Laden, who came to live with them during the mid-1970s, “was that they were all very close to each other…I thought, there will be rivalries, they will not talk to each other.” Instead, they treated one another as sisters.26
On the outskirts of Jeddah sprawled the larger compounds of their father’s old company, with its vast yards of Caterpillar equipment and its ranks of Arab and European engineers and accountants. The trustees mainly ran the firm with the help of the executives and technicians who had been in place when the father died. The boys had relatively little to do with it in these years.27
Many of the Bin Laden boys, and some of the girls, still attended boarding school outside of Saudi Arabia. At some point after Mohamed’s death, after Faisal began to oversee the children’s educations, a large number of Bin Laden boys were enrolled in the elite Brummana High School in a Christian resort town nestled in the hills north of Beirut. Lebanon, then untouched by civil war, was the most sophisticated, modern country in the Arab world, religiously diverse and heavily influenced by Europe. Brummana had about seven hundred students. It accommodated primary school children as well as teenagers preparing for college. European Quaker missionaries founded the school during the early 1870s, and its main buildings, made from local stone and red tile, dated from that period. The school admitted girls from its beginning, and in 1902 it became one of the Arab world’s few fully integrated coeducational schools. It later found patronage from the British royal family; the Duke of Edinburgh inaugurated a new dormitory in 1967. New science labs and a health center opened a few years later. The curriculum was mainly in English; students included members of the Saudi and Jordanian royal families, but also European teenagers whose families worked in Lebanon. There was an active athletics program and a particular emphasis on volleyball and basketball, which suited two of the taller Bin Laden boys then in attendance, Saleh and Khalil.
Their volleyball coach, Joe Ashkar, a Lebanese Christian, opened a music shop down the street from the school. The Bin Ladens “liked what we called ‘underground music,’” he remembered. “The Beatles, Chicago, Jimi Hendrix, Mick Jagger.” They listened, too, to mournful Arabic pop music about separation and longing. Sometimes they drove down to Beirut and went to the movies—“Elvis, Bruce Lee. No Arabic movies.” They dated European girls. One of the brothers, Khaled, who lived in Egypt, married a young Danish woman during this period. Saleh ended up in a long relationship with an English girl who boarded at Brummana, but his conservative Syrian mother would not allow him to marry her; only a local girl would do.28
The boys were attracted to fashionable clothes, cars, and airplanes. Bakr, Salem’s full brother, kept a prized Oldsmobile in Beirut. Salem hired friends to fly to Europe and drive more new cars back to Lebanon or Saudi Arabia. “They wore really wide bell-bottoms,” remembered Saleh’s girlfriend, Shirley Bowman. “They were just outlandish. They did it to provoke comment, really. They all had Afro-style frizzy hair, which they grew very long. Shirts open to the belly button. Beirut was the place to be.” For the first time, some of them began to spend lavishly. Saleh bought expensive gifts for Bowman’s mother in England, which upset her father because he couldn’t afford such luxuries. Saleh “never quite understood the etiquette of Europeans,” she said. Still, “he had a really good heart, and he would do anything for anybody.”29
Authority in the Bin Laden family seemed diffuse. “The family dynasty hadn’t really evolved,” Bowman said. “It was the older boys who were dictating everything and keeping an eye on the sisters. Some of the sisters were allowed to study abroad, some weren’t.” Saleh, for his part, “was very proud of his sisters. They were all gorgeous, really. They spent thousands on clothes.”30
Salem organized family travel to England and Sweden. He had already taken freewheeling road trips to Sweden with boarding-school friends, and he seemed drawn to Scandinavia. In September 1971, Salem organized a family trip to Falun, Sweden. “Arab Celebrity Visit” was the headline in the local newspaper:
Salem Bin Laden visited Falun on a combined business and pleasure trip through Europe. He was accompanied by twenty-two members of his family…He has visited the Club Ophelia in Falun. The young sheikh is reportedly a big fan of discos and has visited the discos of Falun at various times in the past.31
“They were so elegantly dressed,” recalled Christina Akerblad, who ran the modest hotel where the family stayed. “We saw they used the extra bed in their rooms to lay out their clothes. They had lots of white silk shirts packaged in cellophane.”32
A photographer persuaded twenty-one members of the family to pose together, leaning against a wide- finned American sedan. The boys wore colorful bell-bottoms, low-slung belts, and brightly patterned shirts. Eleven girls or young women appeared in the picture; they looked to be in their teens or early twenties. They all wore pants, not skirts, but only one of the girls covered her hair. They laughed joyously.
Years later, one of the boys in the photograph, the second from the right, would be routinely identified in media accounts as Osama Bin Laden. There is certainly a resemblance, but Bin Laden family members said emphatically that this was a case of mistaken identity—Osama did not travel to Sweden with the group and was not in the picture. The family’s testimony seems convincing, as it comes from varied sources, including some, such as Carmen Bin Laden, who have been adversaries of the family.
In any event, by the early 1970s, Osama’s education had begun to take a very different course from that of most of his brothers and sisters. It was increasingly difficult to imagine him in bell-bottoms.
10. YOUNG OSAMA
OSAMA BIN LADEN’S MOTHER, Alia Ghanem, was about fifteen at the time of his birth. Mohamed Bin Laden divorced her soon afterward, probably before she was eighteen. The boy was her only child at the time. Naturally, they clung to each other during this period of change. Later, as a teenager, Osama “would lie at her feet and caress her,” said Khaled Batarfi, a neighbor and friend of Osama’s. He “wouldn’t sleep if he knew she was upset about something.”1
Alia was handed off from one husband to another; Mohamed arranged for her to remarry a midlevel administrator who worked at his company. This was Mohamed Al-Attas, from the prestigious family of Hadhrami descendants of the Prophet Mohamed. By the account of Batarfi, who knew him well in later years, Al-Attas was a gentle man, and he became a reliable husband and father; he and Alia eventually had four other children and incorporated Osama into a conventional Saudi household. The evidence about Osama’s earliest years is thin, yet surely the inauguration of Alia’s second marriage must have been a time of some uncertainty. Alia and Osama moved out of the bustling Bin Laden family compound in Jeddah, with its many wives and factions and servants, and into a more modest household with her new husband. Osama’s place in this new suburban home was unusual. In one respect, he was the odd boy out, the only child of an absent father, a conspicuous stepbrother. Yet as Mohamed Bin Laden’s male heir, Osama was the sole source of his new family’s wealth and access to Bin Laden family privileges. The emotional complexity of his position as a young boy who was both excluded and essential, marginalized and powerful, can be readily imagined, but the truth of it is unavailable and the subject lies entirely in the realm of conjecture.
Alia remembered Osama as “a shy kid, very nice, very considerate. He has been always helpful. I tried to instill in him the fear and love of God, the respect and love for his family, neighbors and teachers.” All the available testimony about Osama’s early childhood emphasizes his shyness and placidity. Each summer, beginning in the late 1950s and continuing into the early 1970s, Alia and Osama, later accompanied by Osama’s three stepbrothers and stepsister, traveled from Jeddah to Alia’s hometown of Latakia, on the Mediterranean coast, where they stayed with Alia’s family. Relatives there remembered Osama as calm and extremely quiet, to the point of timidity. He preferred to be alone, was not particularly social with his cousins, and had trouble communicating at times. Still, he was not a cause of trouble, and he did not shutter himself inside, by their account; they recalled that he particularly enjoyed swimming, hunting, and horseback riding.2
The Ghanem family could barely make ends meet; this may have been the reason they turned young Alia
