The Bin Ladens

be selected.” Recruits “go through different stages.” Weekly meetings and religious instruction might unfold for two years before a recruit is invited to “more exclusive meetings…And they will say, ‘Do you want to be a part of the Muslim Brotherhood?’ Mostly he will say ‘Yes,’ because he will have felt that it is coming…And he will become part of the movement.” Brotherhood recruiting is often secretive, and its classes of membership have varied over time and from country to country. There is no specific evidence available about when or in what way Osama formally joined, but the Brotherhood normally takes only adults into full membership, so it seems most likely that his schoolyard activism served as a sort of apprenticeship for more formal participation in the movement after he reached university.¹⁸

The Brotherhood’s Egyptian roots and emphasis on political activity would have an influence on the course of Osama’s life once he reached adulthood. In high school, however, its precepts were probably difficult to distinguish from the general emphasis on Islamic piety that Faisal promoted in Saudi Arabia as an antidote to Nasserism. Largely because of the Saudi royal family’s repression of political organizing in the kingdom, religious scholars usually tried to avoid overt politics, preferring instead to concentrate on the theological topics of prayer, Islamic rituals, and a Muslim’s private conduct. Bin Laden’s group at Al-Thaghr, Khaled Batarfi said, was influenced to some extent by this emphasis on the search for a truly Islamic life, but it also adopted “a more activist or a political agenda” drawn from the Brotherhood. Saud Al-Faisal, a son of the king who would become foreign minister of Saudi Arabia, complained years later that Islamist teachers from Egypt and Syria had “misused” the hospitality offered them by preaching politics. “We dealt with them honestly, and they dealt with us underhandedly.”¹⁹

In June 1973, when Osama was finishing tenth grade, the British ambassador to the kingdom composed a confidential report for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office titled “The Young People of Saudi Arabia.” His findings suggested that Osama’s education, while perhaps more ideological than that of some of his peers, was hardly unusual. The ambassador wrote:

The Royal Family are alive to the dangers to their position that education could represent if modern ideas were allowed to flow so freely in schools…that they challenged traditional beliefs and customs. Thus the study of Islam features very heavily…Prominent families will admit that in choosing to send their children to school abroad, for example to the Lebanon, they are influenced not by any lack of quality in teaching of the best local private schools, but the fact that the syllabus is so taken up with religious instruction and study as not to leave enough time for the children to reach normal proficiency in other subjects.

The report described how teenagers in these local elite schools were taught to understand the place of Saudi Arabia and its holy cities in the wider world:

That God should have endowed his Holy Land with the means to finance it by the accident of oil is seen as a natural part of His plan for a world Islamic revival. Islamic maps in local classrooms show Saudi Arabia at the centre of the world, with two concentric circles drawn around Mecca. The Arab and other Islamic countries are coloured bright green, and countries with Muslim minorities…in gradually paler shades of green. Most other parts of the world are not even named.²⁰

A FEW YEARS AFTER he enrolled at Al-Thaghr, Osama moved with his family into a comfortable new suburban house in the Al-Musharifah neighborhood of Jeddah. At the time it was one of the city’s newest residential areas. The local roads were not asphalted, and patches of open desert wasteland separated the houses, where neighborhood boys played soccer and other games. The ground was slightly elevated, and it was possible on some days to see the Red Sea in the distance. The house Osama shared with his mother and her four other children by Mohamed Al-Attas was spacious but not luxurious—two full stories, with four bedrooms, one of which Osama occupied by himself on the ground floor. As is common in Saudi Arabia, walls and iron railings surrounded the house; it had a garden but no swimming pool.²¹

Osama was a fan of a professional soccer team in Jeddah, Al-‘Alim, and he played on a boys’ team captained by his neighbor Khaled Batarfi. “He was tall, and so I would put him in front to use his head,” Batarfi remembered. “Sometimes I would put him on defense.” Once, when they were playing in another area, a boy on the opposing team became angry at Bin Laden and seemed as if he was about to hit him. Batarfi pushed the boy out of the way, but Osama told him, as Batarfi recalled it, “I was going to resolve this peacefully.” Batarfi said that years later, he and Osama used to laugh about the incident’s irony—“Osama the peaceful negotiator,” as Batarfi put it.²²

After he became immersed in Al-Thaghr’s student Islamic movement, Osama could be a stickler on matters of religious conduct—quiet, usually, but insistent. He prayed five times a day, called other boys to join him, and insisted that they wear long pants on the soccer field, as Saudi religious teachers said was proper. “His younger stepsiblings respected him very much,” Batarfi said. “He was older. He was tough on them on religious issues, on not mixing with girls, on being modest around women. When a female servant came into the room, he would duck his head modestly and not look at her.”²³

Batarfi said he and Osama watched television together—soccer games, both Saudi and international, but also American family fare such as Bonanza. Osama was a particular fan of action films and Westerns, especially those with prominent roles for horses. Batarfi recalled that they watched the American television series Fury, which was made between 1955 and 1960, and then was syndicated around the world, usually under the title Brave Stallion. The show was about a troubled orphaned boy named Joey who goes to live on the Broken Wheel Ranch with a man who has lost his own wife and son in an automobile accident. The boy learns to tame wild horses and becomes particularly close to Fury, a black stallion; through this relationship, the wounds of Joey’s earlier life are gradually healed. The sources of appeal in this narrative for Osama are not difficult to imagine; in any event, as he grew up, he became passionate about horses. His father had left a family farm—more of a desert ranch—outside of Jeddah, a place that was shared by his sons and daughters after his death. Osama spent weekends there with half-brothers from his father’s side of the family and learned to ride and handle horses. Later he acquired his own ranch, south of Jeddah, where he ultimately kept as many as twenty horses.²⁴

Many years later, some members of the Bin Laden family, in seeking to distance themselves in public from Osama, emphasized that he had grown up in a separate household and did not have much contact with his half- siblings while he was in high school. It was certainly true that he lived away from the principal family compound with his stepfamily, but he seems to have had at least as much contact with his father’s children as did other similar “singleton” boys without full brothers or sisters. Batarfi remembered that Osama would “visit his Mohamed Bin Laden brothers on weekends and such.” Moreover, some of these half-brothers were enrolled with him at Al- Thaghr; the teacher Fyfield-Shayler re-called that “several” of Osama’s half-brothers were students at the school during various periods when Osama was also there. He seems clearly to have had a sense of himself as one of his father’s heirs and to have harbored ambition to work in the family construction firm; his cousins in Syria and his mother all recall his interest in the company, and one cousin remembers him speaking of his aspirations to leadership there. As Salem gradually established his grip on the family during the early 1970s, Osama was far from isolated.²⁵

It was Salem, in his role as overseer of his siblings’ education, who first brought the family into contact with Pakistan and Afghanistan. Late in 1973, Salem decided to enroll two of his half-sisters at a boarding school in Peshawar, a Pakistani city on the Afghan frontier. At the time, Pakistan and Afghanistan were enjoying periods of relative quietude. The chief engineer at the Mohamed Bin Laden Organization, as it was still called, was a Jordanian whose wife happened to be the daughter of the governor of Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province, of which Peshawar is the capital. Salem flew to Peshawar on a private airplane with his wife, Sheikha, his two school-aged sisters, the Jordanian, and his wife. The local stores were poorly provisioned, and in those days, Kabul, the Afghan capital, was a relatively prosperous town with thriving markets. Salem decided to fly his sisters there to shop for supplies for their school year ahead—pots, pans, dishes, and the like. Once in Kabul, Salem met the Saudi ambassador to Afghanistan and disappeared on business; he sent his sisters into the city’s markets with the American pilot who had flown in with them. Later they all flew back to Peshawar and settled the girls into school. So far as is known, it was the first visit by members of the Bin Laden family to Peshawar. There would be many