intelligence, eventually became chairman of the board. Badeeb had retired and now operated international companies from Paris and Lebanon. Arnaud de Borchgrave, who served for a time as UPI’s editor, struggled with him over the company’s perpetual financial problems. At one point, de Borchgrave recalled, Badeeb sent him a resentful message: “I don’t appreciate your criticism of my business procedure. I’ll have you know I’ve made over $500 million in over thirty-one years of government service.”15
At the quarterly board meetings, Shafiq sat silently. He seemed to Borchgrave to be “clearly a man who had never done anything with his life—spoiled.” The Saudis on the board struggled with one another and tried to forestall bankruptcy; they sold out eventually to business interests controlled by the controversial South Korean church of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon.16
AT THE TIME Osama began to publish his first faxes attacking King Fahd’s dependence on America, a number of his half-siblings continued to spend lengthy periods of time in the United States. Khalil Bin Laden now summered with his wife, Isabel, and their children at Desert Bear, outside Orlando. They turned the estate, at least initially, into a considerably quieter place than it had been during its earlier heyday as Salem’s princely vacation resort. Khalil sat out by the swimming pool in the evenings, overlooking the willow trees and the lake, and puffed tobacco from a tangled Arabian water pipe. He invited the neighbors over for July 4 barbecues, and he occasionally set off fireworks to punctuate his celebrations of American independence. Gaggles of American-accented children belonging to Khalil and Isabel, as well as nieces and nephews visiting from Saudi Arabia or attending preparatory school in the States, occasionally passed through the compound. So did Khalil’s half-sister Rajia, who visited from Los Angeles, where she lived for significant periods of time. She was a pilot and a particularly fast driver of automobiles—so fast that some members of Khalil’s circle joked that they were frightened to ride as a passenger if Rajia was at the wheel.17
The family member with the most embedded life in America was Abdullah Bin Laden, the second youngest of Mohamed’s sons. Some of his friends joked that he was a student for life, and there was some literal truth in this assessment. He had attended college in San Diego, studied law in Saudi Arabia, took courses in business and finance, and then applied to Harvard Law School—not to enroll in its rigorous, spirit-breaking program that churned out lawyers qualified to take American bar exams, but rather to earn first a master’s degree and then a doctoral degree in the academic study of law or legal theories. This was a track at Harvard Law School that attracted a number of international students. Ultimately, Abdullah Bin Laden would remain at Harvard Law for about eight years, not quite a record for the school, but not too far from one, either, his professors said. His enrollment was not continuous, however. He maintained a small office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he worked on his theses and on various family business projects. (In the early 1990s, two of his half-sisters spent time in Boston, and his younger half-brother, Mohamed, whose mother had been pregnant with him when Mohamed Bin Laden died in 1967, also lived in the city.) Among other endeavors, he invested in condominiums along Boston Harbor. Between these siblings and various nieces and nephews, Abdullah found himself acting occasionally as the Bin Ladens’ all-purpose guardian in New England. Throughout these years he kept an apartment near Beacon Street, where he lived alone. By the mid-1990s, he had reached his late twenties. He was a man of medium height, slim, with traces of his father’s distinctive nose and cheekbones. Like a number of his half-brothers, he exuded rectitude to the point of pathological shyness, yet he could also project an air of regal dignity, and he could be a genial and intelligent companion. He drove a Range Rover, and he favored an Italian restaurant, Papa Razzi, near his flat.18
He befriended other students from Arab and Islamic countries at Harvard and occasionally invited them over for dinner; he impressed some by cooking many of the dishes himself, which they knew was an unusual hobby for a Saudi man, particularly a wealthy one. He had no maids or servants on display during these evenings, and he ladled out his Middle Eastern vegetable dishes on plastic plates. He was so reserved and polite that he was a natural target for teasing. One of his most audacious tormentors was Lama Abu-Odeh, a young Jordanian woman with a considerably more exuberant style than Abdullah’s. She liked and admired him unreservedly, but “I would tease him a lot about being conservative—make him laugh and blush, laugh and blush,” she recalled. “I would try to push him to his edge.” The elites in her native Jordan prided themselves on their relatively secular sophistication, and she enjoyed ranting about “how conservative his country was, how Saudis appear to be socially conservative. I would say, ‘Behind every plain Saudi is a whiskey addict.’ Just to make him laugh.” She particularly liked to get on Abdullah about how he was handsome and rich, yet he never seemed to date. In fact, Abdullah deflected friends who tried to fix him up with women by describing himself as someone who was not interested in Western-style dating.
“Abdullah, if you’re gay, you can tell me,” Lama would announce. He only laughed some more, and then returned to his reserved mannerisms.19
By the mid-1990s, many of his fellow Arab students at Harvard—much more so than fellow American students—were becoming aware of Osama’s dissident activity and particularly his open defiance of the Saudi government. If Lama was in an especially feisty mood, she would start praising Osama in front of Abdullah and other students. “At least there’s somebody who’s gutsy in that family,” she would pronounce. “You all just want to make money—at least there’s someone who’s said ‘No!’”
Abdullah’s reply was succinct, as Lama recalled it: “Shut up,” he said.20
His academic adviser was Frank E. Vogel, who had conducted his own scholarly research in Saudi Arabia, visiting its Islamic courts and analyzing its approach to legal and religious doctrines. Vogel took an appreciative academic interest in the Saudi system, and he found that Abdullah was interested in questions related to his own research. In May 1992, Abdullah completed a 101-page master’s thesis under Vogel’s supervision titled “Western Banking Practices and
In pursuit of his doctoral degree, Abdullah embarked on a much more detailed elaboration on the same themes—his thesis would ultimately run to 327 pages, bearing the distinctly unglamorous title “Negotiability of Financial Instruments in Contemporary Financial Markets: An Islamic Legal Analysis.” Here Abdullah wrestled with how certain instruments of the global markets—such as warrants bonds and profit-sharing contracts—might be accommodated in an Islamic financial system. It was a lucid and richly footnoted thesis, if often arcane, and when it was eventually completed, it marked at least two milestones in the centuries-long history of the Bin Laden family: Abdullah became the family’s first academic doctor (alongside his half-sister Randa, the family’s first medical doctor) and the holder of the Bin Ladens’ first Harvard degree. Intellectually, Abdullah strived to reconcile the two worlds, Arabian and Western, in which the Bin Ladens lived and worked. Vogel respected “the academic seriousness” of his doctoral thesis, “that he really put himself to difficult research, and quite difficult or abstruse text.” As for the subject matter, and what it indicated about the Bin Ladens or Abdullah, in Vogel’s judgment, “For a Saudi to work on a topic related to Islamic law is not saying very much about whether he’s preoccupied with religion.” In the kingdom, there simply was no other way to approach economics, he believed.22
The fundraising opportunity represented by the presence of a young Bin Laden at Harvard was not lost on the law school’s professors. Around 1993—the same year Philip Griffin opened the Bin Laden office outside Washington—the Bin Ladens entered into discussions with the dean of Harvard Law School. “They were interested in the study of Islam, in lots of places,” Vogel recalled. The discussions were “extraordinarily sort of low-key.” Abdullah indicated to Harvard that Bakr would be interested in making a $1 million donation to the university to support the study of Islamic design, one of Bakr’s personal interests, plus an additional $1 million to support visiting scholarships and stipends for students from Arab League countries who wished to follow Abdullah’s footsteps and study at Harvard Law. Vogel and the law school dean traveled to Saudi Arabia; they were received by Bakr at the headquarters of the Saudi Bin Laden Group, where they admired the display models of the family’s work on the holy mosques in Mecca and Medina. Vogel explained to the family, “One of the purposes of our program is to build links with the Middle East.” There was, of course, no discussion of Osama; he was little known outside the Arab world.23
During this same period, Salem Bin Laden’s oldest son, Salman, enrolled as an undergraduate student at Tufts University, just outside Boston. Abdullah helped to keep an eye on him; Salman struggled at times to manage
