The Bin Ladens

Arabic-speaking Afghan commanders, Burhanuddin Rabbani and Abdurrab Rahul Sayyaf; his trip lasted about a month.⁹

This initial travel signaled a pattern of Osama’s relationship with the Afghan war between 1980 and 1983: he was a commuter who did little more than carry cash and hold meetings. He made his contacts in Pakistan through several overlapping networks: his Brotherhood network of religious activists, the charitable circles of Jeddah merchants inhabited by his family, and the Saudi intelligence operation run by Badeeb. “The arrangement” during the early years of the Afghan war, recalled Jamal Khashoggi, was that the Saudi government, through its foreign intelligence service, would “support the military part,” while private philanthropists and religious activists would “support the humanitarian and relief work” along with the United States and Pakistani intelligence. These spheres overlapped, however. The donors Osama helped to organize for the Afghan cause included “members of the government,” recalled Khalil A. Khalil, a Saudi who tracked Islamic activists for the royal family. Also, Badeeb used humanitarian offices on the Afghan frontier as cover and infrastructure for intelligence operations. Because of Badeeb, Osama developed cordial relations with Prince Turki Al-Faisal, whom he met during Faisal’s periodic visits to Pakistan. He also won audiences with the powerful full brothers of Fahd—Nayef and Ahmed, with whom Salem had hunted in the Iraqi desert. Nayef and Ahmed ran the Saudi Interior Ministry, overseeing the kingdom’s domestic security.¹⁰

Because of his rising visibility and contacts with important princes, Osama began for the first time to create value for the Bin Laden family. Nothing was more important to the Bin Ladens than building and revitalizing royal connections. In this new era of Islamic awakening, Osama’s role as a courier and religious philanthropist complemented the concierge services Salem provided for Fahd and other secular-minded princes in Europe and America. Osama’s work also provided the Bin Ladens with renewed credibility among the religious leaders who influenced contracting in Mecca and Medina. Osama “was a very lovely figure in the family,” said Bassim Alim, a relative by marriage who knew him during these years and who traveled occasionally to Pakistan to support the Afghans. “They liked him.”¹¹

In 1982 Salem appointed Osama as an executive overseeing a new round of renovation at the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina—a visible role, and another step in “the training or internship program that his elder brother gives to a younger brother,” as Khashoggi put it. Salem also ordered one of his aides to build a vault in Jeddah where Osama could temporarily store gold jewelry and cash donated for Afghans by businessmen and their wealthy wives. These rich Saudis had come to believe “that the Afghans were angels…the holy people,” recalled Ahmed Badeeb. “Women used to give their jewelry—huge amounts, you could not measure it.” The Bin Laden vault was twenty meters by twenty meters, fireproofed, and bombproofed, recalled the aide who built it.¹²

Osama later conceded that he worked during these years in cooperative alignment with clandestine Saudi policy; one of his assignments was to not get caught. “Due to my arrival in Afghanistan,” he recalled, “and due to my family’s closeness to the Saudi governmental system, a letter arrived commanding Osama not to enter Afghanistan, and to stay with the immigrants in Peshawar, because if the Russians were to capture or imprison him, it would be construed as proof of Saudi backing for the mujaheddin against the Soviet Empire.”¹³

His ego and his ambitions were swelling, yet he remained a reticent, almost painfully shy man in conversation. Sabry Ghoneim, a Bin Laden executive in Cairo, recalled Osama’s arrival in Egypt during this period for a meeting with construction engineers involved in a project Osama was supervising in Jubail, a coastal industrial city in Saudi Arabia. Ghoneim remembered him as “a young man with the attitude of a shy girl. He was always looking at his feet.” Nor was he a particularly effective executive. He said little during the interviews with the engineers. Ultimately, according to Ghoneim, the project Osama supervised lost more than $15 million.¹⁴

He was shy, but he now had several important mentors who decidedly were not: his elder half-brother, his former teacher Badeeb—and increasingly, a Muslim Brotherhood scholar and fundraiser fired by the Afghan war, Abdullah Azzam.

Like Osama, Azzam had been recruited into the Brotherhood as a young man. He was born in a village near Jenin, in the West Bank, and went into exile after Israel occupied the region during the 1967 war. He studied and taught Islamic politics in Egypt and Jordan before his subversive views led him to refuge in Saudi Arabia, where he won an appointment on the faculty of King Abdulaziz University; he lectured at the university when Osama was a student there. Azzam became an elder, charismatic, international figure in the Hejaz circles of the Brotherhood, in which Osama also moved. He was the author of a book about jihad, Signs of the Merciful, and he was developing the thesis for what would become an even more influential tract, Defense of Muslim Lands.

Like many subversive professors before him, Azzam was burdened by financial debts accumulated during his itinerant and poorly compensated career. Saudi Arabia—and Osama in particular—offered the prospect of financial liberation. There is more than a hint of opportunism in the way Azzam flattered and gradually befriended the high school–educated Osama during the first years of the 1980s, promoting the young philanthropist as a saintly patron of a righteous, assertive Islam. Azzam’s wife developed a friendship in Jeddah with Osama’s wives. They socialized at Bin Laden farms in the desert. By 1984 their acquaintanceship had deepened into partnership. It was “a meeting of money, will and youth, represented by Osama Bin Laden, and knowledge, direction and experience, represented by Abdullah Azzam,” observed Nasir Al-Bahri, Osama’s later bodyguard.¹⁵

Osama Bin Laden “was a soft person, and Abdullah Azzam was empowering him to become a symbol of the Saudi wing of the cause,” recalled Khalil A. Khalil. “Azzam saw Osama as a bridge to Saudi Arabia.”¹⁶

Sheltered Saudi teenagers and college students drilled in Islamic ideology but living far from any battlefield embraced the Afghan war as a romantic cause, a weekends-and-holidays rite of youthful passage. Religious students flew on direct Saudia Airlines flights to Peshawar to spend the last ten days of the holy month of Ramadan doing volunteer work or shooting off guns in the hills. Their commitment to the Afghans resembled that of American students who spend a few days a year hammering houses together for the poor. They might be moved by altruism, but they also sought a touch of cool. “When we used to look at the Afghan suits that the mujaheddin who returned from Afghanistan wore as they walked the streets of Jeddah, Mecca, or Medina, we used to feel we were living with the generation of the triumphant companions of the Prophet,” Al-Bahri remembered.¹⁷ For young Saudis during the early 1980s, the Afghan war was fashion, ideology, a fundraising opportunity, a touchstone of religious revival, a bonding experience—everything but the brutal combat known by the Afghans who actually fought it.

The Saudi religious establishment viewed Azzam as its bridge to Pakistan, which held one of the world’s largest Muslim populations and had long been a target of Wahhabi proselytizing. In late 1981, King Abdulaziz University dispatched Azzam to oversee the curriculum at the Islamic University in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital; the campus had been founded recently with $35 million in Saudi funds.¹⁸ Azzam also consulted for the Muslim World League, an arm of official Saudi charity. Peshawar, the frontier city that served as the principal base for the Afghan mujaheddin, lay less than two or three hours away by road. Azzam’s move to Islamabad created an Arabic-speaking, Jeddah-connected wing of the Muslim Brotherhood through which Osama could channel donations.

THE AFGHAN COMMANDER with the deepest connections in Saudi Arabia was Sayyaf, a white-bearded Arabic speaker schooled in Islamic law who embodied the religious romanticism many Saudis saw in the war. Sayyaf toured Saudi mosques in royal limousines during his periodic fundraising tours in the kingdom; the Saudi government permitted him to open permanent offices to raise money. Badeeb cultivated him on behalf of Saudi intelligence. Increasingly, however, commanders like Sayyaf had to weigh the lure of Saudi money against the headache of hosting teenaged Saudi volunteers on their Ramadan holidays. It was a hassle to provide them guns, light training, and a tour of the battlefield about which they could boast when they went home, but Sayyaf and a few other commanders came to accept their roles as jihad camp counselors—it was a necessary cost of their fundraising operations. In 1984, with Badeeb’s support, Sayyaf opened the first formal training camp for Arab volunteers, called Sada, or “Echo.” It was an appropriate name—it was a reverberation from the real war. The camp was near the Pakistan border, an easy day trip for Saudi and other wealthy Gulf Arab visitors. “They would watch some militant-inspired plays that would end with the guests donating all the money they had in their pockets,” according to one Arab history of the camps. “They would also write down lists of items that must be purchased