a total valuation of about $500 million for the two main Bin Laden companies combined. After consultations with the Saudi government, the funds generated by the sale of Osama’s shares were placed in some kind of special trust and eventually frozen, under court supervision. According to Abdulaziz Al-Gasim, a Saudi attorney who was jailed during the 1990s because of his Islamist activism, a Saudi judge ruled that the government could “take this money, seize it” but that it should not permit it to be distributed “to the other relatives.” Under Islamic law, Al-Gasim said, the money should be protected for the possibility of Osama’s reconciliation with the kingdom or, after his death, for his heirs. A number of aspects of Osama’s shareholding divestment remain unclear, however. For example, it is uncertain whether Ghalib paid cash for Osama’s shares, and if so, where he raised the money from. Is there a bank account in Saudi Arabia that has held the $9.9 million in trust ever since the sale was completed? How do Saudi courts assert control over such an account, if it exists? If the sale did not involve a cash payment, but rather a credit of some sort, how was this organized and who has kept track of the proceeds since then? The Bin Laden family has provided little clarity about these details. In any event, Osama was cut off from all dividend and loan payments, according to Bakr Bin Laden. “Osama has not received a penny” from any Bin Laden companies “since, at the latest, June 1993,” Bakr wrote in a later affidavit. Moreover, “I have not authorized and, indeed, have forbidden any person” acting on behalf of any Bin Laden firms “to make any payments, do any business with, or otherwise provide any support directly or indirectly to Osama or any of his companies since June 1993.”20
In February 1994—for the first time—the Bin Laden family publicly repudiated Osama in a press statement. Bakr authorized a short release, which appeared in a Saudi newspaper under the headline “Bakr Bin Laden: All Family Members Condemn Osama Bin Laden’s Behavior.” The story referred to “reports by the media” about Osama and then offered two sentences from Bakr “to clarify his family’s position towards him.” Bakr announced:
I myself, and all members of the family, whose number exceeds fifty persons, express our strong condemnation and denunciation of all the behavior of Osama, which behavior we do not accept or approve of. As said Osama has been residing outside the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for more than two years despite our attempts to convince him to return to the right path, we, therefore, consider him to be alone responsible for his statements, actions, and behavior, if truly emanating from him.21
It was a careful formulation, focused on Osama’s conduct, not his character, and expressing a whiff of doubt about the reliability of media reporting about him. Two months later, in April, an equally terse statement from the Ministry of Interior announced that Osama Bin Laden had been formally stripped of his Saudi citizenship. The release cited Article 29 of the “Saudi nationality regulation”; it declared that Osama had refused to obey instructions, and that his actions “contradict the Kingdom’s national interest.” A Saudi government freeze on the proceeds of Osama’s divested shareholdings also took effect that month. According to attorneys for the Saudi Bin Laden Group, Osama “never had access to these funds” although they were not placed “in trust outside [his] control” until 1994, about nine months after the divestment proceedings began.22
Osama issued no formal statement of his own on any of these occasions. Instead, beginning in the summer of 1994, he began to behave like a man who felt, so far as the Saudi royal family was concerned, that he no longer had anything to lose.
BY EARLY 1994, Osama had already secretly dispatched groups of jihad fighters, arms smugglers, and organizers to Somalia, Kenya, Yemen, Bosnia, Egypt, Libya, and Tajikistan, among other places, according to letters and testimony by his followers and allies. Some of these fighters arrived at their destinations and found that local conditions were not ripe for warfare. Others, like the Egyptian exiles around Ayman Al-Zawahiri, organized violent and ambitious conspiracies, such as an attempt to assassinate Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak—the plot went forward in 1995, when Mubarak was visiting Ethiopia, but it failed.
Al Qaeda persisted as a formal organization during these years; in Khartoum, steering committees wrestled with drafts of a wordy constitution. Its mission was to seed jihad in Muslim lands seen as under occupation or ruled by apostates. Still, it was a group more characterized by diversity than discipline. Partly this was because Osama himself remained unsettled about how he would define and organize his own participation in the international jihad—with his loss of citizenship and family shareholdings, he was in a renewed state of flux. His gifts of foresight and political analysis had always been limited; he now entered a period of groping and searching. Yet he made one explicit, forthright decision during the summer of 1994: he openly joined the opposition to the Saudi royal family.
His chief aide in this project was Khalid Al-Fawwaz, who was then in his early thirties. He had been born in Kuwait and studied engineering at King Fahd University in Saudi Arabia; he spoke English well. He had moved to Nairobi, where he dealt in automobiles and was in contact with other Al Qaeda adherents in the country to plan for a violent attack against Western targets. In early 1994, Al-Fawwaz was arrested; afterward he decided to escape from Kenya with his family. He made his way to London.23
Al-Faqih and Al-Masari, the Saudi activists arrested the previous spring after unveiling their Committee for the Defense of Legitimate Rights, had escaped to London as well, with help from the Islamist underground. Osama had initially doubted the credibility of Al-Faqih’s reform group: “We thought at first that this may be a ploy by the regime to take the wind out of the sail of our movement, but by the time we realized that these were our brothers, they were taken into custody,” Al-Fawwaz later explained.24 Now they were all united in London exile, protected by Britain’s asylum laws, which were among the most liberal in Europe. Working from ramshackle houses in North London, Al-Faqih and Al-Masari relaunched their opposition group, which represented the most serious political challenge to Al-Saud rule in Arabia since the Nasser period. Al-Fawwaz shared office space with them. Osama, however, did not wish to formally join. He wanted an organization of his own.
The Committee for Advice and Reform debuted in July 1994 in London. It was Osama’s own vehicle for participating in Saudi politics as an exiled dissenter and pamphleteer. It was little more than a musty room and a fax machine, but it described itself as “an all-encompassing organization that aims at applying the teachings of God to all aspects of life.” It had four aims: to eradicate all forms of non-Islamic governance; to achieve Islamic justice; to reform the Saudi political system and “purify it from corruption and injustice”; and to revive the traditional Islamic system by which citizens had the right, guided by religious scholars, to bring charges against government officials.25
Osama’s committee was born in a period of technological prelude, on the eve of the explosion of the World Wide Web. At the time, fax machines offered the easiest way to send text documents across government borders without the risk of censorship. By the autumn of 1994, Al-Faqih, Al-Masari, and Al-Fawwaz were all blasting faxes from their allied groups to lists of numbers all around Saudi Arabia, the Gulf, and to international media outlets.
In Khartoum, released at last from any constraints of family and national loyalties, Osama sat at his several desks during late 1994 and early 1995 and wrote out lengthy essays, as frequently as once a week. He sent them to Al-Fawwaz, who put them on the blast fax. Some pieces were the length of op-ed articles; others went on for thousands of words, laced with religious quotations. Osama’s subject was not so much Islam as Saudi Arabia. His tone about the kingdom, the country his father and his family had done so much to build and legitimize, was often intemperate, impetuous, petty, sarcastic, or unreservedly angry. On September 12, 1994: “Saudi Arabia Unveils Its War on Islam and Its Scholars.” A week later: “Do not Give Inferiority To Your Religion.” On October 15, referring to the Saudi government’s Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs: “Supreme Council for Damage.” On March 9, 1995: “Saudi Arabia Continues War on Islam and Its Scholars.” On July 11: “Prince Sultan and Flight Commissions.”26
He denounced by name King Fahd and his full brothers, the so-called Sudeiris, who were now the dominant grouping in the royal family—Nayef, at the Interior Ministry; Sultan, at the Defense Ministry; and Salman, the governor of Riyadh. Osama did not write subtly about them. Nayef, with whom he had met regularly and collaboratively during the Afghan war of the 1980s, had a “shady history” and was “filled with craftiness towards Islam and hatred for its advocates and religious authorities.” These princes were unworthy of their roles as guardians of the birthplace of Islam:
How could any intelligent person who knows the facts believe that these kinsmen—who corrupt the land and wage war on Allah and His Prophet—could possibly have been brought to serve Islam and Muslims? 27
