The Bin Ladens

Osama’s leadership by the time the campaign was called off in June.²⁰

So many casualties in such a transparently failed effort only exacerbated the factionalism and dispute that surrounded Osama. In July an Afghan faction led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who was favored by Osama, massacred the leaders of a rival faction led by Ahmed Shah Massoud, who was favored by Azzam. These two powerful Afghan militias embarked on open civil war. Behind the lines, Peshawar “became a horrible place,” recalled Jamal Khashoggi. “Arabs who don’t like each other. Takfiris. Tensions…Splinters, fanatic groups.”²¹

On November 24, 1989, Abdullah Azzam died in a car bomb attack. The crime went unsolved. Egyptian rivals of Azzam, Hekmatyar, Bin Laden, or some combination seem the most likely suspects. Osama later denied any involvement. “At that point, we were both in the same boat, and you are all aware of the numerous conspiracies there were to murder us all,” he said. He recalled telling Azzam to stay out of Peshawar. Ultimately, he said, he concluded that Israel “in collusion with some of its Arab agents” had carried out the attack. His declaration of innocence is difficult to evaluate but probably correct. He had no particular need to kill Azzam, and there is no convincing evidence that he had yet participated in any assassination plots.²²

A few weeks before Azzam’s death, Osama moved home with his family. In quick succession, he had lost the two most important mentors in his life. His sponsor in Saudi intelligence, Ahmed Badeeb, his former high school teacher, urged him to leave Pakistan. Badeeb was trying to “thin out” the number of agents and allies he supported in Peshawar, now that the Soviets had withdrawn. He offered Osama business advice. Financial developments within the Bin Laden family may also have speeded his departure. Bakr was about to oversee a major corporate reorganization and inheritance distribution to all the Bin Ladens of Osama’s generation; it would behoove Osama to be present in Saudi Arabia as this occurred. It was, in a broader sense, a time to find his bearings.²³

As he left Peshawar, Osama was driven primarily by a sense of exhaustion and even fear about the divisive course of the Afghan war. He had no coherent plan for the next phase of his life. He left behind some money and technology to keep his Al Qaeda followers going. At camps near Kandahar, they soon installed some Apple computers.²⁴

TO THE EXTENT it formally existed at all, Al Qaeda at this stage was as much a fundraising network as a militia. This was an aspect of Osama’s leadership that most easily traversed borders. It was also something that could be pursued more readily in Jeddah than in Peshawar. The evidence about the specific reach of Osama’s funding network in 1989 is fragmentary, but it suggests, unsurprisingly, that the Bin Ladens and other wealthy Saudi merchants may have been among the most generous contributors. As Azzam put it just before his death, at a 1989 conference, “Saudi is the only country which stood by the Afghani jihad as a government and people…The Saudi merchants come and establish organizations and give huge amounts—may God reward them.” Documents seized from an Islamic charity in Bosnia, which purport to describe a “Golden Chain” of donors from this period, list more than a dozen Saudi businessmen and bankers, including the “Bin Laden brothers.” American investigators and prosecutors have asserted that the documents are authentic and credible, and have been supported by witness statements. Federal Judge Richard Casey, however, later concluded that the Golden Chain was “only a list of names found in a charity’s office…The Court cannot make the logical leap that the document is a list of early Al Qaeda supporters.” For his part, in an affidavit submitted to Casey, Bakr Bin Laden did not specifically deny making contributions to charities or causes in which Osama was involved during this period, but he did assert, “I have never made any charitable contributions to any organization I understood to be associated with Al Qaeda or terrorism of any sort.” Bakr also said that he was not aware until sometime after 1991 “of any involvement by Osama in terrorist activities of any kind.”²⁵

Such assertions, of course, turn on the ambiguity, in the context of the Afghan frontier of late 1989, of such terms as “Al Qaeda” and “terrorism.” In any event, Osama returned to Jeddah as a Bin Laden family member in good standing. Jamal Khashoggi saw Osama “a number of times” with Bakr, following Salem’s death. On one occasion, he stayed with Osama at the Bin Laden villa in Riyadh. Bakr joined them one evening. “We had a casual conversation over Afghanistan and other issues,” Khashoggi recalled. “Bakr appeared distracted. He did not get into an in-depth discussion with us…They treated each other with great respect, as a younger brother and older brother would.”²⁶

Osama continued to embrace media projects that promoted him and his followers to Arab audiences; he imagined himself as a writer-director-producer of jihad. He continued to finance the Egyptian filmmaker Essam Deraz, who had followed him onto the Jalalabad battlefield. As warfare, Jalalabad had been a calamity; as propaganda, it could be salvaged. During the battle, Osama had cast himself not only as an Islamic warrior but also as an actor in a movie about Islamic warriors. Back in Saudi Arabia, he experimented as a producer, screening the director’s cut for friends who could help him evaluate the film’s progress. He invited Khashoggi to a Bin Laden company auditorium at a conference facility in Jeddah and arranged for employees to screen a print of the 16- millimeter film; the audience consisted only of Osama, Khashoggi, and one or two other people. “He wanted my critique of the film, as his journalist friend,” Khashoggi recalled. Osama had left his following in Peshawar, but he remained a star of his own narrative, and his return to the kingdom had not left him isolated. Among other things, said Khashoggi, “He had access to whatever the company had.”²⁷

25. LUMP SUMS

BAKR BIN LADEN had reached his early forties. He had grown into a serious, hardworking businessman. He was about the same height as Salem, and he shared many of his features, particularly the soft brown eyes and the smooth, boyish face. The timbre of his voice and the lilt of his accent so closely resembled Salem’s that it could be startling, particularly on the telephone; it was as if Bakr’s voice could summon Salem’s spirit back among the living. In person, however, he did not exude the same irrepressible charm. Bakr kept a mustache, which was not particularly thick, and it added to the slight air of officiousness that he sometimes projected. He was dignified and intelligent, responsible and polite, but he could also be stiff.

His time as a student at the University of Miami had influenced him but it had not shaped him; he had become a much more thoroughly Arabian man than Salem had ever been. Bakr received his five sons in a formal diwan, or drawing room, setting at his Jeddah home; they bent to kiss him on the hand or on the forehead. Speaking to the boys, he might drop an edifying quotation from the Koran or make passing reference to a story from the Prophet’s lifetime. Bakr had memorized a substantial portion of the Koran during his own religious studies, and when he was in Saudi Arabia, he maintained a rigorous prayer schedule. He did not drink, according to his friends, and after a time he gave up cigarettes. At Hajj he summoned religious teachers to enhance his family’s experience and Islamic education. Still, along the Bin Laden family’s cultural and religious spectrum, and in the context of puritan Saudi Arabia, Bakr was better described as a centrist than as a conservative. In his dedication to civil engineering and in the time he devoted to construction projects in Mecca and Medina, he had come to model his life on that of his father. He even hired, as his driver in Saudi Arabia, a son of the driver who had been waiting for Mohamed at the desert airstrip where his plane crashed and burned. Bakr reared his children as his father had done, with an emphasis on discipline and self-reliance—he would not let his children fly on private jets and insisted that they take care of their own travel documents, tickets, and baggage. And as Mohamed had been, Bakr was at ease in a business climate of ethnic and religious plurality. He worked in close partnership with Middle Eastern Christians, such as the Sarkissian family, with whom he formed a joint venture for major construction projects in Saudi Arabia. He also relied upon Fuad Rihani, an American citizen of Jordanian origin, a Protestant actively involved with Jordanian churches, who served as an important Bin Laden adviser after Bakr took charge.¹

Bakr remained something of a workaholic. On visits to Cairo, he would check into the royal suite at the Marriott and work around the clock, napping for a few hours on sofas. “All his life was hard,” according to his Egyptian employee Sabry Ghoneim. “He didn’t eat much, because he was afraid of getting fat and developing health problems. He would work all the time, but he didn’t eat well or sleep well…Believe me, he paid for his work with his happiness.” Not long after Salem’s death, Bakr divorced his first wife, Haifa, an event that Ghoneim blamed on his work habits. “Even when he came back home, he was working—he would sleep in the reception area of his