The Bin Ladens

It was a dear trust your father, the founder of this great nation that has been built on the cherished principles of love, nobleness and purity, gave to our father, who felt greatly honored by it throughout his life…Our father went the way of all mortals, and your brothers followed in the footsteps of their great father. We were young and grew up in glorious and proficient hands. You, my Lord, conferred on us a great badge of honor, for we have been honored to carry out your two most magnificent projects of the Holy Mosque in Mecca and the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina…Could the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques please accept this dedication, offered with heartfelt affection and invocation, deep amity and allegiance.¹⁵

By now, in exile, Osama Bin Laden enjoyed a luxury that Bakr did not: he no longer felt a need to curry favor with the royal family, and also, free from government censors, he could write whatever he pleased. On April 16, 1996, around the same time that Bakr published his self-promoting book, Osama sent out a blast fax from London, titled “The Saudi Regime and Repeated Tragedies of the Pilgrims.” It was Hajj season, and as was typical of his essays, Osama played off recent news headlines—a massive tent fire had killed or injured a large number of pilgrims.

He aimed his venom at the Saudi royal family. He never referred to the widely known fact that his own family was responsible for the design and implementation of renovations in Mecca that were supposed to keep pilgrims safer and more comfortable. More than any single essay Osama is known to have written, this one seemed to carry an open subtext of resentment, anger, and disapproval directed at the Bin Ladens, particularly at the senior brothers in charge of the Mecca and Medina renovations. Since they had just forced him out of the family firm, in obedience to Fahd, Osama’s anger was perhaps not surprising, and it was telling, as ever, that he could still not express himself directly on the subject of his family. Not all of the criticisms in his essay implicated his brothers; for instance, he argued that the Saudi government’s budgeting for Mecca and Medina had been inadequate and that the royals should be spending more money on renovations, an argument Osama’s brothers might have appreciated, if it were not coming from him. Other aspects of his critique, however, seemed to express Osama’s ambition not only to overthrow the Saudi government, but to take charge of the Bin Laden family, perhaps in partnership with a new and improved Riyadh regime:

It has become very normal for pilgrims to the House of God to be exposed to disasters and tragedies that result in hundreds of deaths and injuries every year…If we examine the reasons for these disasters, we find that they include: narrowness of the facilities which leads to collision and trampling in the crowds…negligence in security procedures, poor response to incidents, or neglect of pilgrims by not taking the necessary security precautions.

He turned to the question of who bore responsibility for this pattern of avoidable neglect. The royal family, as ever, was to blame. That he also meant, at the same time, to criticize Bakr and other brothers in the company leadership could hardly be mistaken:

Preparing, maintaining and equipping the necessary facilities in a sufficient manner and at the level appropriate for the needs of the pilgrims is supposed to be the responsibility of the rulers of this country, who have massive resources and huge budgets to work with. The facilities they have built and services they have provided thus far do not vouch for them. Experiences and incidents have already proven that these facilities and services are not at the desired and sufficient level.¹⁶

If only I were in charge. How long had he harbored this thought, behind his passive veneer? Since childhood, when he had mumbled about his ambitions inside the family on summer vacations with his cousins in Syria? Since his return from Afghanistan, when his reversion to the life of junior contracting executive, subordinate to his older brothers, had proved so frustrating? Was family leadership a possibility that he considered only occasionally, a rumination that merely reflected his rising opinion of himself as a business executive and jihad leader? Or was it deeper and enduring? No one could say with any confidence, because Osama never said, certainly not in public. Perhaps he did not know himself.

33. ONE PHONE, ONE WORLD

“IF YOU BELIEVE in God,” an executive of the satellite telephone company Iridium said in 1996, “Iridium is God manifesting Himself through us.”¹

At the century’s end, of all the developments in technology and culture lumped under the graceless label of globalization, none seemed to inspire more passion—or more hubris—than the familiar telephone. More than a hundred years after its invention, the phone still shined with potential—more mobility, more connectivity, more speed, and more innovation. Among other things, it would no longer be tethered to walls and floors; it would be portable, and oblivious to national borders. This mobility would mirror—and stimulate—an era of global business and society that promised, paradoxically, both greater transience and greater community.

By 1990, particularly in America, there were competing visions—and competing business plans—describing how telephone portability might be constructed in the most practical and profitable way. There were those who believed globally linked cellular towers, erected on the earth’s surface, might offer the most efficient path. And then there was Iridium, named for a rare element with the atomic number 77, which was the number of low-earth orbiting satellites the company’s founders believed they would need to launch into space to provide worldwide telephonic connections, so that an Iridium owner might use his phone anywhere on the planet, at any time, to dial any telephone number.

In 1945 the budding science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, then an electronics officer in Britain’s Royal Air Force, published a short article called “Extra-Terrestrial Relays” in a magazine bearing the premature title Wireless World. Clarke imagined an array of manned satellites beaming television pictures down to Earth. His was the first outline of integrated global communications enabled by orbiting machines. The launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik in 1957, the subsequent space race between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the worldwide growth of the television industry fulfilled much of Clarke’s vision. Yet the commercial satellite industry, shadowed by the Cold War, remained largely a province of government and defense, and its initial market economics favored television, not telephony.²

Among the companies experimenting with portable telephones was Motorola Corporation, which manufactured a number of mobile radios that could connect to landline telephone systems. These devices were marketed for use on ships at sea, or by businesses with remote job sites, such as those working along the remote oil pipelines that crossed Saudi Arabia’s empty deserts.

Salem Bin Laden’s peripatetic life and his love of gadgetry had introduced his family to global telephony long before most American consumers imagined the possibilities. He used Motorola and other radio devices while flying or traveling on the ground—not only for his continent-hopping business and pleasure trips but also for camping and hunting in the Saudi deserts. He positioned himself as an agent for Motorola as he built his own telephone company during the 1970s and 1980s. The kingdom’s vast spaces, its weak infrastructure, and its excess cash all suggested Saudi Arabia as a natural marketplace for portable telephones that could function in remote locations.

Around 1987, while conducting experiments in the Arizona desert, Motorola engineers conceived the idea that would become Iridium—a network of satellites that orbited at a lower altitude than most others and that could assume the role normally played in telephony by ground-based switching and routing systems. By 1991 Motorola had developed the outlines of a business plan, one that would ultimately cost more than $5 billion to carry out. The corporation eventually spun off Iridium as a separate business, but Motorola designed and built the satellites it would use, under a fixed-price contract worth about $3.5 billion. It was a grandiose project infused with risk and uncertainty.³

Motorola’s executives approached major phone companies in Europe and Asia, seeking investors. Iridium’s founders were so convinced of the genius of their vision that when they held an initial conference in Switzerland, the legend was that they charged participants $1 million or more just to hear about their business plan—a price that kept many companies away, recalled F. Thomas Tuttle, who later served as Iridium’s general counsel. Ultimately,