The Bin Ladens

—as had been the case for centuries before the Second World War, when Arabia held no great prize but was periodically conquered nonetheless.

Fahd spoke to Abdullah in Arabic. Bandar stopped interpreting, but Chas Freeman, the Arabic-speaking U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, followed their exchange.

“Don’t you think there should be some consultation?” Abdullah asked, referring to the religious scholars and tribal leaders who would surely resent the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Christian and Jewish soldiers to defend the kingdom.

“There’s no time,” Fahd said, as Freeman recalled it. “If we delay, we may end up like Kuwait. There is no Kuwait anymore.”

“Yes, there’s a Kuwait,” Abdullah said. “There is a Kuwait.”

“Yes, and its territory consists of hotel rooms in Cairo and Paris and London,” said Fahd.

“I take your point,” said Abdullah.

Fahd turned away from his half-brother and faced Cheney. “Okay,” he said simply.²

American fighter jets and military transport planes thundered onto Dhahran’s airfields within twenty-four hours, but throughout August, American commanders later acknowledged, their intervention was something of a bluff; if Saddam had poured south from Kuwait with all his forces, he would have certainly been able to occupy some Saudi oil fields, at least temporarily. For several weeks, the kingdom’s fate seemed uncertain.

Awkwardly, Fahd tried to consult with Islamic scholars and tribal leaders, even though it was plain that his decision to rely on Washington for rescue was irreversible. On August 14, the kingdom’s blind grand mufti, Sheikh Bin Baz, issued a fatwa officially blessing the arrival of non-Muslim troops as necessary and permissible under Islamic law. It was a document no more convincing than the sheikh’s pronouncements years earlier about Earth’s place at the center of the solar system. Even Saudis who supported Fahd’s decision could see, as Osama Bin Laden put it later, that the royal family was manipulating its salaried religious leaders “to increase its legitimacy” at a moment of crisis. The Bin Baz decree was particularly offensive, not least because it “insulted the intelligence of Muslims.”³

Osama was certainly among those who were outraged, but his later ridicule of Fahd and Bin Baz belied the complexity of his actions and thinking at the time. He was a Bin Laden and still very much a creature of the Saudi government. He offered no public dissent that summer. Rather, he moved quickly with the rest of his family to protect his personal fortune against the possibility that the Al-Saud regime might collapse. Just as the Americans had been hedging for years against a crisis of this kind, so had the Bin Ladens. For them, too, it was a moment for decisive action, and Osama was a full participant in the family’s program of self-insurance.

Omar and Haider Bin Laden flew to Geneva to confer with Yeslam about how to shift more of the family’s money to the safety of the Swiss banking system. The Bin Ladens had previously established accounts in a Swiss bank for a family foundation; the purpose of this foundation, established by Mohamed Bin Laden, remains unclear, but its Swiss account may have been a hard currency vehicle for overseas charity or inheritance transfers. With Yeslam’s assistance, the brothers now decided to close and liquidate that foundation, and to open a master account at a new bank, the Swiss Bank Corporation. On August 17, Omar, Haider, and Yeslam signed documents at the bank’s offices in Geneva to create sub-accounts for virtually all of Mohamed Bin Laden’s children. As Omar put it later: “Sub-accounts were set up for the benefit of each of more than fifty heirs of Mohammad Binladin, including one sub-account on behalf of Osama, and these sub-accounts were funded…with a portion of the legal inheritance of each heir.” The accounts were created, Omar acknowledged, “in response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait.”⁴

On Osama’s behalf, Omar and Haider signed a “Declaration on opening an account or securities account,” as required by Swiss law. The two formally declared “as holder of the account” that “the beneficial owner of the assets to be deposited with the bank” was “Mr. Osama M. Binladin.” Someone handwrote Osama’s name into the appropriate blank. On the second page they chose the foreign currency to be used in Osama’s account: “U.S. $.”

A second form, signed the same day, provided “full Power of Attorney” to Yeslam over the account; here the beneficiary was handwritten as “Sheikh Osama Mohamed BINLADIN.” The bank’s account form offered a choice between a kind of authority that would require Osama and Yeslam to sign all documents jointly, or one where either Yeslam or Osama would be authorized “to act severally and by their sole signature.” This latter was the approach they chose—Yeslam would be empowered to control money in the account on his own signature, without written approval from Osama. It was a sign of the coherence and confidence that persisted within the family, even amid the strains occasionally produced by Yeslam’s withdrawal to Geneva.

On August 20, Osama’s account was funded with a deposit of $450,000—a modest portion of his inheritance, but a comfortable hedge against sudden disaster in the kingdom. That sum immediately began to earn interest at a rate of about $2,500 per month; the amount of monthly interest would vary with market rates.⁵

In his later sermons, Osama equated interest-paying banking practices with usury, and he denounced them as stark violations of Islamic law. Usury, he once observed, “has been forbidden by all the religions,” yet in the United States, “you build your economy and investments on usury. As a result of this, in all their different forms and guises, the Jews have taken control of your economy.”⁶ That summer, however, amid his family’s panic, Osama showed no reluctance to earn interest—indeed, in his Swiss Bank Corporation account, he would soon take down more interest in a year than many Americans earned in annual salaries. It was a striking instance of his capacity for hypocrisy—and telling that it involved money.

THERE ARE credible accounts that Osama predicted Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait before it occurred. His high school–era friend Khaled Batarfi recalled listening to him speak at an informal luncheon diwaniyah gathering at the home of a wealthy businessman in Mecca early in 1990, when Arab news media were full of stories about Saddam’s buildup of troops on Kuwait’s borders and his bellicose claims to Kuwaiti territory. Osama urged that Saudis begin to train themselves to fight Saddam, as he and his followers had done in Afghanistan. He told an illustrative story, the thrust of which was, as Batarfi paraphrased it:

You are sophisticated, you are an engineer, you are a doctor, and suppose you send [your children] to a good school. But it is a tough neighborhood, and there are other kids who are street smart and very tough. Then your neighbor comes to you and says, “Lend me money or I will send my kids after your kids.” You know he is never going to pay the money back. There is a limit to what you can give him. So it’s about time that you train your kids because you are going to have stand up eventually. Saddam has all these tough kids. He has these soldiers who are poor, unemployed, they are motivated and tough. I’m saying, Let us take advantage of our training in Afghanistan. We have gotten tough. But we have to get ready. We have to go to camps now. We have to get tough now. Otherwise, King Fahd won’t be ready.⁷

This was certainly Osama’s sense of himself in 1990: An international Islamic guerrilla leader who worked in service of his king—someone so loyal to the Al-Saud that he even tried to think ahead on their behalf. Nor were Iraq and Afghanistan the only frontiers where Osama imagined that he played this role.

Even before his return to Saudi Arabia in late 1989, he had provided money to support Islamist rebels fighting against the weakening communist government of South Yemen, the half of divided Yemen that controlled the Bin Laden family homeland in the Hadhramawt. The political and religious equation in Yemen as the Cold War ended was very complex. Ali Abdullah Saleh, an army officer and Sanhan tribesman who had come to power in a coup, led North Yemen; he received some support from Saudi Arabia—primarily because he was not a communist —but his relationship with the Al-Saud was not smooth. He did, however, share Saudi Arabia’s antipathy toward South Yemen’s Soviet-backed regime. As global communism teetered during 1989, confronted by democratic rebellions from China to Europe, South Yemen’s government looked vulnerable. From Afghanistan, where he had become close to a number of Yemeni volunteers to that war, Osama saw an opportunity to extend his achievements in jihad. South Yemen’s leftist government had stripped a number of previously elite families of land and privileges, particularly in the Abyan Governate, and during the 1980s, some younger members of these families had turned to international radical Islam as an ideology of resistance. One of the Abyan leaders, Tariq Hasan Al-Fadli, founded a group called Al-Jihad. Al-Fadli said later that his South Yemen group “did have external support…through the grace of Almighty God and our venerable Sheikh Osama Bin Laden, may God protect him…He funded everything.” Bin Laden supported other Yemeni Islamists as well.⁸