The Bin Ladens

Prince Salman, he later wrote, “has a shady past in which he has defrauded Islam and waged war on its people.” Prince Sultan was one of the “tricksters” who milked contracts for commissions and helped to drive the Saudi economy into the ground. And over all of this perfidy, greed, and incompetence presided King Fahd, who had impeded God’s laws, aligned himself with nonbelievers, and had proved to be “hostile to Islam and Muslims.”²⁸

To Saudi readers, his explicit attacks on Fahd and his full brothers had an obvious corollary—Osama was silent about the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Abdullah, who was presumed by many Saudis to be estranged from the Sudeiris and who enjoyed a reputation for relative piety and financial rectitude. It was possible to imagine in 1995 that pressure from Islamist campaigners abroad and jailed religious scholars at home might create a quiet coup among the Al-Saud, favoring Abdullah, similar to that which had brought Faisal to the throne three decades earlier. Osama seemed to be developing this angle in his essays. In one tract, he explicitly listed the late years of Faisal’s reign as an exception to his criticisms of royal family rule. From Switzerland, Yeslam Bin Laden predicted that Osama would be restored to power within the Bin Laden family, and Bakr would fade, once Abdullah came to the throne, according to Carmen Bin Laden.²⁹ Osama did probably fantasize that the Islamists might force Fahd out, and that Abdullah might then welcome him home on terms he could embrace. Who could predict the future? It was in God’s hands.

OSAMA’S EXPERIENCE as a businessman in Sudan was similar to that of his half-brother Khalil’s in Los Angeles, with America in Motion. His grandiose schemes did not pan out. His mentors took advantage of him. His employees misappropriated tens of thousands of dollars, money he could no longer afford to lose—Jamal Al-Fadl, for example, took Osama for $110,000 in a series of manipulated land and commodity deals. Osama had reorganized his personal banking at the Al-Shamal Bank in Khartoum, but his accounts gradually dried up. In the past, his personal wealth had provided him a financial cushion, but much of the money he spent on jihad came from private donors, charities, or quasi-governmental channels. Now his access to family dividends and loans had been pinched, and, simultaneously, as an enemy of the Saudi state, his charity fundraising had become complicated. As early as 1994 or 1995, “We had a crisis in Al Qaeda,” recalled L’Hossaine Kherchtou, one of his adherents. “Osama bin Laden himself said to us that he had lost all his money, and he reduced the salary of his people.” He was forced to lay off as many as two thousand workers at his sunflower farm during 1995. It was an extraordinarily fast downturn—Osama had blown through his lump sum inheritance, his dividends, and his charitable funds in just four to five years, a total of perhaps $15 million or more. In his essays, he denounced the Saudi royal family for corruption and financial malfeasance, but he had managed his own funds with all the prudence of a self-infatuated Hollywood celebrity.³⁰

He betrayed his desperation in a blast fax he issued on February 12, 1995, titled “Prince Salman and Charity Offerings in Ramadan.” He slandered the royal government with typical bombast, denouncing them in particular for new regulations that required annual zakat, or “charity,” contributions to be routed only through officially approved charities overseen by Prince Salman. “The Saudi regime’s previous general history of managing donations has been extremely bad,” Osama wrote. “It took popular donations for the Afghani mujaheddin as a means to put pressure on them, in order to realize Western and, in particular, American policies.” As he went on, however, Osama made clear that his essay was intended less as a critique than as a solicitation. He was worried about his own continued access to the Saudi charity on which he had so long depended:

We at the Committee for Advice and Reform alert all philanthropists and givers of charity of the danger of submitting any funds or alms to these harmful institutions, bodies and associations which use them to wage war on Allah and His Prophet. We call them to submit funds directly to those who deserve them domestically and abroad. They can also submit funds to religious or custodial persons who can assure that those who legally deserve the funds will receive them without them first being tampered with by the Saudi clan…There are safe agencies that will transmit funds to those who deserve them such as charitable associations in Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan, Yemen, Sudan and others. To ensure that funds are transferred to the accounts of these associations, we alert you of the importance of transferring outside the Gulf—far from tracking by the regime’s spies.³¹

His problems at the office were compounded by his troubles at home. One of his wives, known as Om Ali, or the “Mother of Ali,” traveled back and forth between Saudi Arabia and Sudan; she grew tired of Khartoum. She asked Osama for a divorce because “she could not continue to live in an austere way, and in hardship,” according to Nasir Al-Bahri, who later served as Osama’s bodyguard.

Osama’s eldest son, Abdullah, a teenager, also chafed at being cut off from the privileges enjoyed by a Bin Laden in good standing. He had seen enough of his cousins’ lifestyles in Jeddah—the slick cars, the Harley motorcycles, the wave runners on weekends in the Red Sea—to know what he was missing. He asked his father for permission to return to the kingdom and take up a job in the family business. He had already become engaged to one of his relatives “because my father supports early marriage,” as he later explained, and in 1995 he pressed his father to return to Saudi Arabia:

He would ask me to be patient and wait every time. On one occasion, I went into his bedroom when we were in Sudan to wake him up to pray, and he said to me with no introductions: “Abdullah, you can go to Saudi Arabia if you want.” I started crying for joy without saying a word. My father smiled calmly and said nothing. On the next day, I called my uncles in Jeddah and they helped in speeding up my arrival there…I wanted to be independent and build my life on my own, and according to my desires.

The defection of his firstborn pained Osama, according to Al-Bahri. Thereafter he “avoided mentioning Abdullah’s name…because he had been hurt by him.”³²

Osama’s mother still visited him, but now the Saudi authorities monitored her to ensure she was not ferrying cash surreptitiously. Osama reportedly continued to have contact with some of the religious wing of the family—his brother-in-law Jamal Khalifa said later that he stayed in touch. They had been fast friends during the early 1980s, and now Khalifa found himself in legal trouble over allegations that he supported violent Al Qaeda–inspired Islamic groups in the Philippines. A second brother-in-law may also have participated in Osama’s campaigns from Sudan. Yet for the senior brothers in Jeddah who led the Bin Ladens, and who managed the family’s relationships with the Saudi royals, Osama was now plainly an anathema. King Fahd’s court put the senior brothers on notice, according to a person who worked with them in Jeddah at the time; the Saudi government made it plain that the Bin Ladens would pay a steep price if they succored Osama. Nothing got the family’s attention like the prospect of losing its wealth. To ensure there could be no question about their loyalties, the family decided during this period to donate all of its zakat funds directly to the king’s charities, according to the person working with them in Jeddah.³³

Osama could probably sense the change in his family’s attitude. In 1995 one of his half-sisters died of cancer; she was the first of Mohamed Bin Laden’s daughters to pass away. Her death left the number of his surviving children at fifty-two. From Sudan, Osama telephoned Omar Bin Laden to express his condolences. “That conversation lasted only about a minute, as I purposely cut it short,” Omar said later.³⁴

Out of money, divorced by one of his wives, abandoned by his eldest son, estranged from his family—a hint of King Lear in the wilderness began to enter Osama’s exile. He told a Saudi visitor, “I am tired. I miss living in Medina. Only God knows how nostalgic I am.” He was so unmoored during 1995 that he explored the possibility of moving to London. There he would join his colleagues in the self-styled Saudi opposition in a more traditional, more political exile, one that would inevitably reduce his scope for participation in violence. It is easy to imagine the appeal of London: occasional press conferences attended by the international media; long afternoons at the writing desk penning poetry and unrelenting political essays on behalf of a new Saudi Arabia; visits from his son Abdullah and other family; a chance to live by principles, but also amid some of the comfort craved by the middle- aged.³⁵

It proved to be a passing fantasy. Saudi Arabia pressured Britain to do something about Al-Faqih and Al- Masari, and the government did initiate deportation proceedings against the latter. It would likely have been impossible politically for Osama to receive asylum by the time he considered seeking it.