over to Mohamed Bin Laden in the first place. One section of the family cultivated fruit trees in a nearby village under a grant from the Syrian government. “If there was no agricultural reform,” which provided them with this subsistence orchard, “we wouldn’t have had anything,” Hosam Aldin Ghanem said years later. By comparison, Osama’s stepfather in Jeddah enjoyed a decent salary, and Osama may have received occasional gifts and allowances from Mohamed during his boyhood. Yet he was not so wealthy that his mother could shower her Syrian relatives with money. As the years passed and his own financial circumstances improved, Osama could seem oblivious to the economic differences between himself and his mother’s less prosperous Syrian relations. There was a little island in a small lake near Latakia that Osama used to visit with his cousins. “I used to love it a lot,” one of them, Soliman Ghanem, recalled. “He asked me if he could buy it to live there.”3
Mohamed Bin Laden was a distant figure during Osama’s boyhood but apparently an inspirational one. Most of the reliable evidence about Osama’s relations with his father’s side of the family dates to the period after his father’s death, but the information available suggests that Osama was always a fully recognized member of the brood of sons that Mohamed periodically called together for inspection and religious instruction. Osama himself has spoken of knowing his father as a boy, of reciting poetry to him, of joining his work sites, and of being uplifted by his example. “He considered him as a model,” said Osama’s college-era friend Jamal Khalifa. “He was not with his father much” but he “heard a lot” about him. In particular, Osama absorbed the idea that his father “was not a person who sits down behind the desk and gives orders.” Rather, Mohamed Bin Laden worked with his own hands in the desert, offering direct leadership to his ethnically diverse employees. This, of course, would become Osama’s style of leadership as well.4
There is virtually no specific evidence available about which of Mohamed’s work sites Osama visited as a young boy or what he saw his father doing there, other than Osama’s own occasional oblique references to the Saudi holy cities and his detailed awareness of his father’s work in Jerusalem. Osama would have been between six and ten years of age when Mohamed was engaged in massive demolition and urban clearance work in Mecca, quite near to Jeddah; it seems virtually certain that Osama would have visited the city at this time, during the Hajj and on other occasions. Particularly after 1965, Mohamed’s other major concentration was Asir, to which he flew back and forth almost every week. His company maintained a large work camp just south of Taif, only a few hours’ drive from Jeddah, as well as other camps around Abha that could be reached only by plane. Even if Osama never saw these sites, with their lava boulders and cragged peaks, where new roads were being hewed by his father’s Yemeni and African workers, he would certainly have known of the breadth and importance of his father’s projects along the southern border. And, of course, like everyone else in his family, Osama learned in 1967, when he was about nine years old, that his father had died in a plane crash in Asir—and that he was killed because of an apparent error by his American pilot.[3]
The evidence available about Osama’s primary-school education is also fragmentary. It seems clear that, as with all his half-brothers, his father ensured that he was enrolled in school steadily. His mother’s truncated statements suggest he probably received Koranic instruction of the sort typically given to young boys in Saudi Arabia. Yet like his half-brothers, he seems from the start to have been in schools influenced by Western curricula and culture; there is certainly no evidence that he was ever educated full time in a religious madrassa.
By the time he reached eighth grade, he was a solid if unspectacular student. He seems likely to have received some of his primary schooling in Syria, probably in connection with his mother’s frequent sojourns in Latakia. His mother remembered him as “not an A student. He would pass exams with average grades. But he was loved and respected by his classmates and neighbors.”5
Around age ten—the same age when a number of his half-brothers had been dispatched to boarding schools in Lebanon and Syria—Osama, too, enrolled briefly as a boarder at Brummana, the elite Quaker school north of Beirut. Five former students and administrators at the school, including the head of Brummana’s primary school, recalled in separate interviews that Osama was enrolled there during the mid-1960s but that he withdrew and went home after less than one year. None recalled, or would say, why his short experiment with living away from home had failed, but it was evidently not because of bad behavior or poor grades. Renee Bazz, who was on the school’s administrative staff, recalled that Osama had attended another primary school in Lebanon before his arrival at Brummana.
Emile Sawaya, the head of Brummana’s primary-school section during the 1960s, remembered that Osama was about ten years old when he arrived, and that several of his half-brothers were already boarders. “He was quiet, calm, and very polite,” Sawaya said. “He was obedient. He worked hard.”6
Osama may have been in Lebanon when his father died. Sawaya recalled that Salem arrived to visit not long after Mohamed’s passing. Sawaya asked another school administrator whether Salem was now the boys’ guardian and was told, “No, it was the king…King Faisal, who was their official guardian.” Salem met with his brothers, Sawaya remembered. “The strange thing was that he didn’t know them—we had to introduce them. When he came into the reception room, they kissed his hands.” The housemaster for the primary school “introduced Osama and his brothers.”7
Osama’s stepbrother, Ahmed Mohamed, recalled visiting Beirut with him when Osama was about twelve. “He used to take us to the movies…Cowboy, karate movies.”8 After he became notorious, rumors circulated that Osama had enjoyed Beirut’s sybaritic nightlife as a teenager, but there is no evidence to support this. These rumors may have conflated Osama’s presence in Lebanon as a boy with the lifestyles of some of his older half-brothers during the early 1970s.
After Osama withdrew from Brummana, he seems to have spent some time, immediately following his father’s death, in his mother’s hometown of Latakia. An English teacher there, Suleiman Al-Kateb, recalled that he was “affected by the death of his father; he was very solitary.” By the following September, he had moved back into his mother’s home in Jeddah. After Mohamed’s passing, “She was all that was there,” Khaled Batarfi recalled. “He was so obedient to her.” Batarfi felt that Osama grew close to his mother “maybe because he wasn’t close to his father.”9
Alia enrolled him in an elite local private school in Jeddah, the Al-Thaghr Model School, which prided itself on its modern curriculum—it was the only school in Saudi Arabia that could even begin to compare itself to a place like Brummana. Osama entered in 1968, about one year after his father’s plane crash, when he was probably in either the fifth or sixth grade. He was on the cusp of puberty, and roiled, presumably, by his father’s loss. He enjoyed a comfortable home and a mild, reliable stepfather, but as Mohamed’s heir, he stood apart from his stepbrothers in his mother’s second household: Osama was, in both a biological and a financial sense, a special case. It seems safe to assume that he was in search of guidance. In any event, the father figure he would soon encounter at Al-Thaghr would change his life.
AL-THAGHR sat on several dozen arid acres lined by eucalyptus trees, whose branches were twisted by winds from the Red Sea. The campus spread north from the Old Mecca Road, near downtown Jeddah. The school’s main building was a two-story rectangle constructed from concrete and fieldstone in a featureless modern style. Inside, hallways connected two wings of classrooms; there was a wing for middle-school students, where Osama began, and another for the high school. Between them was a spacious interior courtyard, and from the second floor, students could lean over balcony railings and shout at their classmates below, or pelt them with wads of paper. Like Osama, most Al-Thaghr students were commuters, but there were a few boarders; they lived on the second floor, as did some of the school’s foreign teachers.10
The Saudi government funded and staffed Al-Thaghr, and during the 1960s and early 1970s, the school had the reputation of a private enclave for the sons of businessmen and the royal family. Mohamed Bin Laden had periodically visited the school during the mid-1960s when it was a site for fundraisers to help found Jeddah’s first university, which became King Abdulaziz University, where Osama later enrolled. Al-Thaghr offered rigorous entrance exams that any Saudi could take, and some working-class students who managed to pass attended the school along with the wealthier boys.11
Al-Thaghr—the name means, roughly, “The Haven”—was founded in the early 1950s in Taif by Faisal, but the school came into its own when he established its large campus in Jeddah, in 1964, and began to fund it annually with several million riyals from the national budget. Faisal’s Turkish father-in-law, Kamal Adham, took an interest in the project and traveled to Britain, where he met with government officials to seek support; he told them that he thought the school should be modeled on the British-influenced Victoria College in Khartoum, Sudan. By the time Osama arrived, Al-Thaghr Model School, as it was formally called, was a showcase for Faisal’s modernization drive, and particularly for his interest in science and Western methods of education. It was the only school in Jeddah with
