he was very busy with Afghanistan and Yemen. He was supporting the ideas [in the petition draft] but he didn’t want any conflict with the Saudi government and lose support for his activities. He didn’t want to start another war. He was not convinced that these goals could be achieved in a peaceful way.”17 Some Islamists in Saudi Arabia, justifying their meek resistance to corrupt governance by the royal family, had long cited their desire to avoid fomenting
One night, Osama joined a rooftop dinner meeting in Jeddah where exiled Kuwaiti guests talked about their travails and asked for support, recalled Jamal Khashoggi, who attended. When his turn came to speak, Osama voiced a fear that America had a secret plan to use its presence in Saudi Arabia to “secularize Saudi Arabia, and to make a dramatic change in its regime or the way it ruled by imposing a president and ministers who are secular,” as Khashoggi recalled it. Osama specifically named Ghazi Al-Ghosaibi, the suit-and-tie-clad Saudi ambassador to Great Britain, as a candidate for this imposed leadership. Al-Ghosaibi, Osama predicted, would reform curriculums in school to spread secular ideas, “encourage women to take off their
Be aware. Be careful. We have to be united and rally around the Saudi leadership in order not to be weak against this determined secular campaign, that is no doubt coming with American support, that already has some people and some agents—a fifth column in Saudi Arabia. There are a lot of Saudis who are ready to serve the American alienation project, which will alienate Saudis from their religion.18
In one sense, Osama’s views remained as they had been since he was fourteen: where Muslims live, they should aspire to a pure society based upon Islamic principles. He remained deeply unsettled, however, about how to chase this ideal within Saudi Arabia. The presence of American troops and presumed secular conspiracies worried him, but his faith in the Al-Saud and his own family restrained him. In communist-influenced lands, such as Syria, South Yemen, and Afghanistan, violent jihad could be embraced because it seemed the only alternative. In Saudi Arabia, the situation looked more complicated. Among other things, Osama continued to accept the essential claim of the Al-Saud that they were righteous and legitimate guardians of Islam’s birthplace—the claim from which the Bin Laden fortune was derived.
THE SWIFT and overwhelming rout of Iraqi forces from Kuwait by American-led coalition troops infused King Fahd and the royal family with pride, relief, and confidence. Fahd exacted immediate revenge against those Arab governments and entities that had supported Saddam—particularly Jordan, the Palestinian Authority, and Yemen. Tens of thousands of Palestinian and Yemeni workers were expelled from the kingdom. On the domestic front, amid the general sense of relief that accompanied the war’s end, Fahd seemed to have a divided mind; he thought some mild political reforms might assuage his subjects, but he and his brothers also sought to ensure that wartime ferment did not lead to postwar revolution. As the weeks passed after Iraq’s surrender, petitioners on both the left and right were fired from their jobs, and some were imprisoned. To all of those who had doubted or needled Saudi Arabia in its season of crisis, the royal family offered an unmistakable message: we are back with a vengeance.
Osama Bin Laden left the kingdom on May 1, 1991, by his own account, less than two months after the end of the war. The circumstances surrounding his departure remain somewhat unclear. He was not forced out, according to Bakr Bin Laden. Through one of his half-brothers—apparently not Bakr—Osama pleaded to the interior ministry that he needed a one-time exit visa to travel to Pakistan to liquidate investments there. The best evidence suggests that he was genuinely uncertain of his plans—that he wanted to reunite with the Al Qaeda followers he had left in Afghanistan but was ambivalent about returning to the Afghan civil war. While in Jeddah during the war, Bin Laden had dispatched followers from Afghanistan to Sudan to rent farms and guesthouses there. Later, using a donation from an Egyptian lawyer, he bought a farm north of Khartoum for $250,000, according to a Sudanese aide. During the same period, according to Khalil A. Khalil, who tracked Islamists for the Saudi government, Osama “spent some time trying to find a tribe” in Yemen “where he could marry a daughter and win the tribe’s allegiance. He worked on this for about eighteen months to establish himself—first in a social context, then to bring his fighters to the south of Yemen…There was speculation that he had weapons in the United Arab Emirates and also investments and businesses there. The framework he was exploring was Yemen first, for the jihad army, and UAE as a base for media and economic activities.”19
Osama’s motivations are easier to document than his particular logistical plans. The harassment he faced from Saudi officials over his Yemeni organizing, and the humiliation he felt over their rejection of his wartime advice, left him burning with a desire to be free of the kingdom’s stifling repression, to re-create the independence and prestige he had enjoyed during his late years in Afghanistan—preferably without the constant exposure to gunfire, however. He was as exhausted in his own way by the narrowness of Saudi political culture as were the more secular members of his family who decamped periodically to Los Angeles or Orlando or Paris to enjoy some breathing space. As Osama later described his passage into exile during that spring of 1991:
The Saudi regime imposed on the people a life that does not appeal to the free believer. They wanted the people to eat and drink and sing the praise of God, but if the people wanted to encourage what is right and forbid what is wrong, they could not. Rather, the regime dismisses them from their jobs and in the event the people continue to do so, they are detained in prisons. I refused to live this submissive life, which is not befitting of man, let alone a believer. So I waited for the chance when God made it possible for me to leave Saudi Arabia.20
How did Bakr and his half-brothers regard his departure? The evidence is thin, but it nonetheless makes plain that as Osama left the kingdom, his family made no effort to exclude him from access to his own money or from participation in new family investments. In July 1991, for example, Yves Bruderlein, a Swiss lawyer with offices in Geneva, formed a Cayman Islands company called Cambridge Engineering “to make and hold investments,” particularly “in hedge fund products offered by major financial institutions, including Deutsche Bank.” According to Bruderlein, Cambridge was “indirectly owned” by the Saudi Bin Laden Group, and Bakr Bin Laden had signing power at the firm. The Saudi Bin Laden Group chose the Cayman Islands as its place of organization “based on the advice of their attorneys,” he said later. Its Swiss directors received “our instructions solely from the Saudi Bin Laden Group.” In the initial period after the formation of Cambridge Engineering, Bruderlein and other Swiss directors never had contact with Osama, but nonetheless, Bruderlein said he was aware that Osama was “part of the Saudi Bin Laden Group” and thus a participant in the hedge fund investments.21
Bakr said later that he “never intervened” with anyone in the Saudi government to help Osama leave the kingdom, “nor was I aware at that time of any involvement by Osama in terrorist activities of any kind.”22 He was, he suggests, passive and accepting of Osama’s decision. The broader credibility of his assertion may depend in part, of course, on the definition of “terrorist activities.” Al Qaeda had been founded three years earlier. Its volunteers still participated in the Afghan civil war; others fought in Yemen or evaded capture by the Egyptian security services from which they had fled. Whether some or all of this violence constituted terrorism lay to some extent in the eye of the beholder. It is also uncertain how much Bakr knew about these militias or Osama’s involvement with them.
The Bin Ladens continued to facilitate financial transfers to Osama. On October 28, 1991, a sum of $482,034.37—his original deposit, plus accrued interest, less banking fees—was transferred out of Osama’s sub- account at the Swiss Bank Corporation in Geneva to the custody of his half-brother Haider. The transfer occurred during a period when other subaccount holders among Mohamed’s children were taking full control of their own Swiss accounts, now that the war crisis had passed. Osama apparently decided to reorganize his banking within the Islamic world. What became of his dollar deposit after it reached his half-brother Haider is unknown, but there is no indication that it was withheld from Osama. The transfer marks Osama’s last known use of the Western banking system.23 With a stubborn attitude, but without a coherent plan, he passed into a new life of voluntary exile. His circumstances were more complicated than those of his grandfather Awadh, whose flight from debt almost a century earlier had ultimately birthed the family fortune, but Osama’s instinct was the same: he had no choice, he felt, but to start again.
