searching minutes before he answered. He smoked cigarettes from a long plastic holder and had slightly bulging eyes, which created an exaggerated effect when he stared out during these long, contemplative pauses. In a top hat, he would have resembled Penguin from the
This engineering coterie spent most of their days concentrating on their work as young construction executives, but as they approached middle age, and as the Islamic awakening spread in Saudi Arabia, their lifestyles became, in some cases, more overtly pious. Non-Muslim partners and friends noted this more explicit religiosity, but they saw, too, that it fell very much within the kingdom’s mainstream, which was becoming more conservative. Yahya’s wife, who had not previously covered herself, took the veil. Ghalib’s did, too. Charity and the Hajj became even more important to family routines. By the mid-1980s, at least one of the Bin Ladens’ business partners felt that some of the more traditional engineering coterie—Yahya, in particular—had begun to push Salem to ensure that Osama received all the support he needed as he became involved with the Afghan war. In this partner’s analysis, while these brothers did not share Osama’s radicalism, they had become very proud, nonetheless, of Osama’s charitable work on behalf of suffering Afghans, and they appreciated his ardent commitment to a defining Islamic cause. According to a senior Saudi government official, Bakr accompanied Osama to Pakistan on one of his early visits there.8
These were also the brothers who took the lead on construction and renovation work in Mecca and Medina. After he became king, Fahd took a number of steps to enhance his credentials as the regent and guardian of Islam’s birthplace. In 1985 he inaugurated an eight-year, multibillion-dollar project to expand, once more, the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, so that it could accommodate almost a half million additional worshippers. The massive spending in Medina helped Fahd to ingratiate himself with the Saudi religious authorities who mistrusted his secular lifestyle, and it increased his visibility across the Islamic world. As Saudi kings had done for four decades, Fahd handed the work to the Bin Ladens—without competitive bidding. The king’s decision was consistent with his method for allocating spheres of commissions in government contracting, according to the senior Saudi government official. Fahd identified reliable agents or business families—some Saudi, and some, such as the Lebanese developer Rafik Hariri, who were not—and gave them sole control of a particular sector, such as arms sales, roadwork, or palace construction. In this way Fahd could direct how contracts and commissions would be distributed, and who would benefit from extra payments. The system reinforced loyalty and secrecy. The Bin Ladens had once been dominant in highway construction, but after 1985 their major windfalls came through the huge, exclusive contracts Fahd awarded them in the holy cities—first the Prophet’s Mosque renovation in Medina, and then a similar project in Mecca.
The expansion of the Prophet’s Mosque contemplated by Fahd was mind-boggling in its scale—a new building of eighty-two thousand square meters, a new plaza and pedestrian spaces of more than two hundred thousand square meters, new and taller minarets, eighteen new staircases, six new escalators, sixty-four new doors and gates. For the Bin Ladens, Bakr played the key role in creating the detailed plans and executing them after approval by Fahd.
The work spoke to Bakr as an engineer, a businessman, a Bin Laden, a Saudi, and a Muslim; the projects became the overriding source of his professional identity and his pride. The work offered a rare and privileged opportunity to leave an authorial mark on the holiest places in his faith. European and Arab architects, designers, and suppliers all contributed to the project over time, but from the beginning, Bakr played a decisive role. He delivered the detailed presentations of designs to Fahd and answered the king’s questions, and he drove the golf cart when Fahd visited Medina for an inspection tour. “Many a time he would require us to repeat the plans and the designs, to improve on this side, or develop that side,” Bakr later wrote of Fahd. “He used to visit the two projects at various phases and choose the best and most suitable materials with no regard for financial cost.” The king even issued “a standing order to establish an open-ended account” to fund the work.9
Osama was an executive in the Bin Laden’s Medina office at the time this enormous undertaking took shape. He was still commuting from Saudi Arabia back and forth to the Afghan war. He had deepened his involvement after his brief visit to the fighting front in 1984, but he had not moved his family to Pakistan. He typically stayed in Pakistan for only three or four months at a time.
Fahd’s Medina project led to conflicts within the Bin Laden family that may have influenced Osama’s priorities, according to a former senior American government official who has discussed the episode with Bakr. The details are unclear, but according to this official, the Medina contract and its many pressures produced a “sort of realignment in the family,” which left Osama unhappy about his role. The essential issues were control and authority. “He just basically made a giant pest of himself and everybody wanted him gone,” according to the former official. By this account, Bakr and Salem stood on one side of the quarrel, and Osama and some of his more religious half-sisters tried to oppose them. “Salem told me, ‘This brother of mine in Afghanistan is going to be our family’s big problem,’” said a second business partner who worked very closely with the Bin Ladens during this period. Osama “didn’t bother Salem, he bothered all his family.” Whatever the nature and extent of this disagreement, it did not result in a full rupture between Osama and his half-brothers, however. Indeed, Salem’s risk taking on Osama’s behalf would soon increase. But the episode may have led both Osama and his half-brothers to see Pakistan, rather than Medina, as the best outlet for Osama’s energies.10
EARLY IN 1986, Abdullah Azzam wrote to Osama from Peshawar, urging him to move there. He told his protege that administrative and financial problems had accumulated at the Services Office, the support service they had founded more than a year earlier for Arab volunteers in Afghanistan. Azzam urged Osama to help put the place in order. Here, at least, was an enterprise that wanted and appreciated Osama fully.
Later that year, Osama moved with his family to a pine-shaded house in the Hyatabad section of Peshawar. In the ensuing months, he would act like an ambitious young man who felt a need to prove himself. He threw himself more actively into the war, and for the first time, he independently sought publicity for his work, to extend his reputation in Saudi Arabia and the Muslim world. Was undeclared competition with Bakr and Salem, now themselves celebrated in Saudi media as the renovators of Medina, one strand in Osama’s web of motivations after he moved his family to Pakistan? Even if it was, one constant remained: to achieve his goals on the Afghan frontier, he needed the Bin Ladens.11
20. THE ARMS BAZAAR
AROUND THE TIME he moved with his family to Peshawar, Osama made a new request of Salem. This time it wasn’t money; he told his brother that he needed weapons, and he specifically asked for portable anti-aircraft missiles.1
Osama entered the international arms market because he had decided, for the first time, to create his own jihadist militia. He found the Arab volunteer movement in some disarray early in 1986. Azzam’s Services Office, which Osama had funded with about a half million U.S. dollars to this point, was fracturing over petty disputes and prideful slights. As more Arabs arrived, Azzam’s inclusive governing system of committees and consultative councils fell under strain. Bin Laden’s aide, Abu Haji Al-Iraqi, recalled “an increase of complaints” that led to a decision to “change the administrative staff.” Increasingly, leading figures in the group irritated one another and engaged in tedious debates about money and theology. Ayman Al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian doctor who had been tortured in Cairo prisons for his involvement in violent conspiracies, arrived in Peshawar with other radical Egyptian exiles. Zawahiri cultivated a relationship with Osama, motivated as Azzam had been earlier—the doctor was ambitious but poor, and he needed Osama’s financial patronage. He stirred bitter disputes in Peshawar salons over jihad strategy. He found Arab allies ripe with grievance. Azzam had promoted the Afghan war as a province of miracles and beautiful sacrifice; the volunteers summoned up this stairway to heaven found the reality of the war to be cold, brutal, disputatious, and poorly organized.
In April some Arab volunteers participated in a brutal four-week battle at Jawr, a fortified rear base located in high, sandy ridges near the Pakistan border, in an area controlled by a fierce Afghan commander named Jalaladin Haqqani. The fight went badly. Bin Laden decided that the Arabs needed to strengthen themselves in these border areas. He moved away from Peshawar’s debilitating office culture and began to build his own brigade of Arab jihadis up in the mountains along the Afghan-Pakistan border. His aim was to participate directly in the war; it was for this that he required his own portable missiles, to challenge Soviet helicopter-borne assault teams.2
