its request on other brothers, such as Hassan or Shafiq, who had senior roles in the company and spent more time in the West.5
When Bakr learned of the FBI’s interest in the family, he took a direct interest. He held discussions in Jeddah about how to respond; ultimately, Bakr told Griffin that he should not serve as the family’s representative in these contacts with the FBI. Bakr contacted James Baker, the former secretary of state, and drew upon advice from Baker’s law firm, Baker Botts; Jim Baker’s son, a highly regarded attorney, ran the firm’s Washington office. Bakr also consulted and retained the influential Wall Street law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell, whose clients included Microsoft Corporation and the investment bank Goldman Sachs.
On April 17, 1997, Daniel Coleman arrived at the Washington offices of Sullivan & Cromwell for an interview with Shafiq and Hassan Bin Laden. They convened in a conference room. As Coleman conducted the questioning, another agent took notes. After conducting interviews for the FBI over many years, Coleman had concluded that the best approach in a situation like this one was to be as informal as possible—no stenographer typing a transcription of the interview, no legal pad on his lap with a written script of questions. He knew the Bin Ladens would feel defensive and anxious, and he wanted them to relax. He preferred to develop a “proper conversation,” one in which he would take his time to learn “what the guy’s interested in talking about,” and then try to gradually develop mutual confidence.6
The lead attorney for the Bin Laden brothers was Richard J. Urowsky, a Yale Law School graduate and a senior partner at Sullivan & Cromwell who specialized in litigation. In addition to Urowsky, two other Sullivan lawyers were present. The interview lasted about two hours and covered at least a dozen subjects—the shape and history of the Bin Laden family, Osama’s relationship with his half-siblings, the number of Bin Ladens who were in the United States, and inheritance matters. The atmosphere was subdued but not confrontational. Shafiq and Hassan were responsive but not loquacious. On the subject of Osama’s wealth, they told the FBI agents that Osama’s allowances, salaries, and inheritances ran into the millions of dollars, but did not amount to hundreds of millions; it is not clear, however, how specific the brothers were about numbers during this initial interview.
Coleman felt that Urowsky handled the meeting as if his clients were criminal suspects, which they were not. Coleman tried to explain that this was not intended as a confrontational session, but he felt that Urowsky interrupted him and prevented him from establishing the sort of rapport he valued with interview subjects of this kind.
After the Washington interview, Abdullah Bin Laden, the half-brother of Osama enrolled as a graduate student in legal affairs at Harvard University, received a call from another FBI agent who wanted an interview. Bin Ladens scattered around the United States also received interview requests from agents in local FBI field offices; these approaches were not coordinated with Coleman. Different FBI field offices were competing, in effect, to interview Bin Ladens residing in the United States now that Osama was a subject of interest.
Urowsky telephoned Coleman to report the latest request, and they scheduled a meeting with Abdullah Bin Laden in Sullivan & Cromwell’s Boston office. Two agents joined Coleman. Urowsky was there again and “was just horrible,” or so Coleman felt. At one point Urowsky accused Coleman of distorting what Shafiq and Hassan Bin Laden had said during their interview in Washington; it was all Coleman could do to restrain himself from leaping across the conference table and throttling Urowsky. “Guys like him think they can talk to everybody the way they do in court,” Coleman recalled. “Not to me, you can’t…He’s just an arrogant jerk.” Coleman knew “damn well” that the half-brothers had nothing to do with Osama anymore. “I was just trying to figure out who was in his family…I just need somebody to tell me who’s who. That’s all.” But he found it impossible to fight past the posturing by their lawyers.7
After these initial interviews, according to Scheuer, lawyers for the Bin Ladens contacted the FBI “at the senior level” and told them “you can’t talk to the Bin Ladens like that.” One reason cited, as Scheuer recalled it, was that some members of the Bin Laden family had been issued diplomatic passports by the government of Saudi Arabia, which meant that they could not be subjected to American legal proceedings of any kind—they enjoyed sweeping privileges under the doctrine of diplomatic immunity, which offers reciprocal protections to diplomats serving on accredited missions. The number of Bin Ladens who had been issued diplomatic passports is not clear— Coleman recalled that only a few members of the family had them, and that the rest carried ordinary passports. In any event, as Scheuer remembered it, the thrust of the message from FBI Director Louis Freeh, as passed through to him, was loud and clear: No more of that crap. Scheuer recalled arguing in reply: “Well, listen, these guys are related—it’s a big family, it’s a lot of money, and we have a suspicion that some of these guys support Osama.” But he was told, in effect, “No, we don’t need that kind of trouble.”8
Scheuer’s frustration accumulated steadily. He saw Osama Bin Laden emerging as a dangerous adversary of the United States and its allies, particularly Egypt, and he felt that his supervisors at the CIA and the White House were unwilling to take risks to disrupt Bin Laden’s increasingly violent ambitions. His supervisors, for their part, saw Scheuer as a career analyst, admittedly hardworking and dedicated, but one who lacked the experience and maturity to run risky field operations and who was such a combative personality that he undermined his own work by alienating many of the people he served.
Scheuer proposed a number of intelligence-collection and covert-action plans targeting Osama’s money and businesses; all were rejected or aborted. In one operation, Scheuer’s unit sought to recruit an agent in Switzerland who could obtain encryption codes necessary to break into Geneva and Zurich banks electronically, to search for Osama’s presumed accounts. The CIA’s European Division and the Treasury Department both objected, the latter on the grounds that a successful operation might undermine confidence in the global banking system. Scheuer also proposed an operation to steal the relatively small amounts of money identified in Osama’s Sudanese and Dubai accounts, but again Treasury objected, according to Scheuer. “They said, ‘Yeah, it’s evil money, it’s bad for Bin Laden to have money, but if the Europeans even found out that we had such a capability, they would not like it, and there would be repercussions in the economic system.’”9
Scheuer then tried to target Islamic banks where Bin Laden reportedly did business. He discovered, however, that these banks sometimes routed money through New York, and so Treasury argued they could not be targeted. Finally, after Bin Laden had moved to Afghanistan, Scheuer recalled, his unit proposed, “Okay, let’s do it the old- fashioned way: let’s burn the bastards down.” He proposed the use of covert-action authority to destroy by arson one of the Sudanese banks where Osama still kept money. The CIA could not guarantee, however, that there were no U.S. citizens holding accounts at the bank, and so that plan was also scuttled. Scheuer made a separate proposal to burn or sabotage all the equipment at Osama’s large farm near the Ethiopian border. That, too, was rejected, he recalled. In the end, after almost four years of “feckless, and at times, dangerous recruitment efforts and safe-house establishments,” as he put it later, he had nothing to show. Osama still had his money—and the CIA still was uncertain about how much he had.10
THE AFRICA EMBASSY bombings made it plain that Osama was more than a rich radical who authored threatening essays and poems, and occasionally provided financial grants to violent Egyptian and Central Asian jihadist allies. He had now built an organization that responded to his direct leadership, had declared war against the United States, and could carry out sophisticated attacks across oceans. Osama’s understanding of America was fragmentary and distorted, but so was America’s understanding of him. In the more urgent atmosphere that followed the Africa bombings, the United States revitalized its attempts to collect intelligence about Osama’s biography, his finances, and his relationship with the larger Bin Laden family.
The U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia in that summer of 1998 was Wyche Fowler Jr., a former Democratic senator from Georgia. He worked closely with John Brennan, then the CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia, a veteran officer with silver sideburns and a diplomat’s demeanor. By the time of the Africa attacks, Bin Laden had been a subject of cable traffic in and out of the Riyadh embassy for several years. Some of it was routine reporting— translations of Osama’s interviews on Arabic-language satellite television or in the Arabic-language press. Occasionally Fowler or Brennan would discuss Bin Laden’s case with senior princes in the royal family, but these were often general conversations in which the Saudis emphasized their complete repudiation of a man they had, after all, stripped of citizenship.11
About six weeks after the Africa attacks, Fowler and Brennan sought a meeting with Bakr Bin Laden in Saudi Arabia, and he agreed. Bakr arrived for the discussion without any lawyers. He seemed eager to reassure the American government that Osama enjoyed no favor in his family. Bakr said the Bin Ladens had nothing to do with Osama, that he had been cut off years ago, and that they were embarrassed and sorry about his recent violence.
