As had been true of the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, Islamist violence in South Yemen advanced both the statecraft interests of the Saudi government and the looser ideology of Bin Laden and his allies. Indeed, Osama may have started his jihad project in South Yemen with encouragement or even direct support from Saudi intelligence, in the same way that he had worked in Afghanistan. Richard Clarke, who later directed counterterrorism programs in the Clinton White House, has written that Prince Turki Al-Faisal “had reportedly asked” Osama “to organize a fundamentalist religion-based resistance to the communist-style regime” in South Yemen. In the context of 1989, such a request would have been entirely consistent with Saudi foreign policy, and with the long use of the Bin Laden family in covert defense projects involving Yemen. Turki has described the matter differently than Clarke, however; he has said that Osama “came to see me with a proposal” to foment rebellion in South Yemen, and that “I advised him at the time that that was not an acceptable idea.”9
Whatever the truth, the geopolitical equation changed during the first six months of 1990 in a way that led Riyadh to renounce support for violent rebellion in Yemen. The fall of the Berlin Wall led to Yemen’s peaceful reunification and the formal end of the South Yemen state. On May 22, 1990, Ali Abdullah Saleh became president of a united Yemen; as part of the bargain, he tried to co-opt and calm Islamist groups that had previously waged jihad. Osama and other radicals, however, did not see the virtue in this deal, or in a national government that incorporated former communists, and they persisted with their preaching and organizing. According to Ahmed Badeeb, Turki’s chief of staff, Saleh eventually called King Fahd to complain. The Saudi government responded by pressuring Osama to quiet himself, and by one account, during the late spring or early summer of 1990, the government raided a Bin Laden family farm that Osama was using to support his Yemen project. Afterward, Osama reportedly wrote an angry letter of protest to Crown Prince Abdullah.10
This fracture in Osama’s alignment with Saudi foreign policy coincided with his rising irritation, during the autumn of 1990, over Fahd’s plan to employ American-led troops in a war to oust Saddam’s forces from Kuwait. Increasingly Osama conveyed a presumptuous attitude to the Saudi officials with whom he met. He employed bodyguards. He wrote a sixty-page paper laying out his idea to recruit and lead his Afghan-trained
I directed my advice straight to the deputy Minister of Defense, informing him of the great sins from which the state should desist, and of the danger of persisting with them, but to no avail. Then I met the deputy director of the ministry for security affairs, who strongly reproached me for advising the deputy Minister of Defense and began haranguing me about exactly the same sins that I had mentioned to the minister. Then he said: “This is well known—we don’t need anyone to tell us about it.”12
His proposals about the coming war in Kuwait annoyed the Saudi government, but they were inconsequential. It seems, instead, to have been his persistent preaching and contact with jihadis in Yemen that eventually led the interior ministry to seize his passport during the winter of 1990–1991. As Prince Turki put it, speaking of his conversations with Osama about jihad in Yemen: “This shy, retiring and seemingly very reticent person had changed.”13
Osama believed—and said repeatedly—that he was working for the true interests of the Saudi royal family, not against them. His older half-brothers, however, particularly Omar and Bakr, interpreted this longstanding family mandate of fealty quite differently after Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait.
Around this time, Bakr got to know Chas Freeman, the U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia; Freeman occasionally took private soundings from prominent businessmen in Jeddah. Buoyed by these contacts, in the autumn of 1990, Bakr and Omar led the Saudi Bin Laden Group (in which Osama was a shareholder) to sign contracts with the United States Army to build facilities that would support the U.S. troop presence and the coming war with Iraq. Between September 30 and November 7, the Saudi Bin Laden Group constructed a heliport at the King Abdulaziz Air Base “in support of the United States Army deployed on Operation Desert Shield,” according to a “Certificate of Achievement” later issued by Major General William G. Pagonis of the U.S. Army Central Support Command. Pagonis recognized one Bin Laden executive for his “personal contribution” to the “most successful logistical deployment in support of a combat victory in military history…We are proud of your accomplishments and humbled by your sacrifices. We salute and thank you.” Bin Laden Telecommunications installed systems for the United States Central Command and the 35th Signal Brigade of the U.S.; its executives were awarded certificates of thanks signed by General Norman Schwarzkopf. They had provided, Schwarzkopf affirmed, “outstanding support” of the American war effort. The Bin Ladens also undertook a project to improve a twelve-hundred-kilometer desert highway “so that U.S. troops could move easily and safely to and from the northern regions of Saudi Arabia,” as Omar Bin Laden put it later; Omar personally oversaw the work. Osama surely knew about these construction projects, from which he profited as a shareholder and dividend recipient; he was in the kingdom throughout this period, although he also apparently traveled back and forth to Yemen.14
As with the interest accumulating in his Swiss bank account, there is no evidence that he was burdened by pangs of conscience over the profits he earned from his family’s wartime work for the Americans, even as he lectured in the Bin Laden mosque near Kilo 7 and denounced American foreign policy. He was flirting with rebellion but was unable yet to embrace it fully. He postured as a dissenter but he avoided the most serious risks. His views were nuanced, changeable, and laced with contradictions.
THE ARRIVAL OF American soldiers in the kingdom in late 1990, at a time when democratic revolutions were erupting worldwide, provoked the most vigorous and open debate about political freedom and identity in Saudi Arabia since the Nasser period. Urban liberals, particularly women, seized upon this seeming Riyadh Spring. In November, forty-seven women attracted worldwide attention—and shocked many Saudis—by staging a protest in which they climbed into automobiles in Riyadh and drove through the city in open violation of the kingdom’s ban on female drivers. In early 1991, forty-three liberal-leaning businessmen, journalists, university professors, and former government officials signed a petition to King Fahd asking for ten political reforms. It was a relatively timid list and stopped far short of demands for a democratic order, but in Saudi terms, it was bold: the petition sought new councils to widen political participation, reform of the religious police, and “greater participation of women in public life, within the scope of the
This modest liberal uprising confirmed the deep-seated fears of Saudi Islamists that the royal family’s alliance with America, and particularly its decision to invite American troops into the kingdom, would become a lever for a top-down push by the Al-Saud toward a more secular society. Widely circulated underground tape- recorded sermons and lectures voiced these hysterical warnings throughout that autumn and winter. Two conservative university professors, Safar Al-Hawali and Salman Al-Awda, issued particularly fiery speeches arguing that the kingdom’s real enemy was not Iraq, but the West. Another influential voice belonged to Awad Al-Qarni, author of a 1987 book titled
The Islamists also gathered signatures for their own petition to King Fahd demanding political reforms. They shared the liberals’ desire for greater participation but crafted an agenda to direct reforms toward even stricter adherence to Islamic law.
Abdulaziz Al-Gasim, a conservative judge in the sharia courts and a leader of the Islamist petition drive, who would later go to prison, sought out Osama Bin Laden in Jeddah in early 1991 to persuade him to add his signature to the cause. As the son of a Hadhrami immigrant with no formal education in Islam, Osama was not a significant figure in the Saudi world of dissident Islamist scholarship, but his martial reputation as a
