The Americans told Bakr that Osama had now been formally charged with crimes under U.S. law. As a consequence, the United States would try to apprehend him in Afghanistan. To do this, they explained, they wanted help from the Bin Laden family. Among other things, they needed to learn more about Osama’s financial history and current resources.
“President Clinton has asked me to seek your assistance,” Fowler said pointedly.
Bakr said his family would cooperate. He referred the American officials to his half-brother Yahya, who was now functioning as chief of operations for the main Bin Laden businesses. Bakr explained that on financial matters, the family’s office in London possessed most of the important records, particularly those concerning international accounts and investments. Shafiq Bin Laden, who oversaw that office, could help answer any questions the U.S. government might have.12
Bakr’s view of Osama, as he explained it during this meeting and in subsequent conversations with American officials, was that his half-brother had essentially gone off the deep end. Osama’s extremism had surprised Bakr in some respects, he said, because as a younger man, Osama had always seemed relatively bookish and thoughtful, and he was certainly very shy. As a younger man, Bakr said, Osama had never really voiced strong political convictions, even when he was active in Afghanistan.
American officials in Saudi Arabia who visited occasionally with the Bin Ladens could see that the senior brothers around Bakr were relatively conservative in cultural terms. For example, at receptions they hosted in private homes in Jeddah, the Bin Ladens did not serve alcohol to Western visitors, unlike some other Saudi merchant families, and they adhered rigorously to Islamic prayer schedules. And yet, in Bakr’s view, as he presented it to the American officials he met, there was a bright line between the religious orthodoxy of his family and the violent radicalism now being espoused by Osama. Why Osama had crossed that line remained a mystery. There were theories within the Bin Laden family: some talked about the impact of Osama’s participation in the violence of the Afghan war, or about the influence of Egyptian radicals who had ingratiated themselves with Osama over the years. But there could be no certainty or pat explanations.
It remains unclear how much cooperation the Bin Ladens actually provided to the FBI and CIA during the months following the initial meeting with Fowler and Brennan in the late summer of 1998. One former senior American official involved described multiple “depositions” provided by Bin Laden representatives in London and Geneva to the FBI, the CIA, or both. If so, none of this information ever reached the White House’s counterterrorism office, or was referred to in public investigations such as those carried out by the 9/11 Commission. Accounts from other former officials suggest that the private cooperation from the Bin Ladens may have been limited. These officials said that while Bakr wanted to be helpful, he also sought to protect his family’s wealth and investments. After the Africa bombings, he and his American and British attorneys grew particularly concerned about a scenario in which the Bin Laden family might be formally accused by the United States of aiding Osama. They might be threatened with economic sanctions, asset seizures, forfeitures, or civil lawsuits filed by victims of Osama’s attacks. Throughout late 1998 and into 1999, the family and its attorneys proceeded at times with caution in their dealings with American government officials. At the U.S. embassy, Fowler’s primary objective was to try to identify Osama’s current bank accounts and to discover if any money was still reaching him from Saudi Arabia or elsewhere; in this endeavor, Fowler felt that he received particularly strong cooperation from senior princes in the Saudi government.13
For their part, the Bin Ladens and their lawyers feared, Brennan recalled, that even if they provided off-the- record and confidential assistance to American investigators, “they would expose themselves, and that because of the animus to the Bin Laden name, that people in the U.S. government might take advantage of their cooperation to freeze their assets.” Considering such risks, as Brennan put it, “Why make yourself vulnerable?”14
At the CIA’s Bin Laden unit, Michael Scheuer increasingly perceived this caution, and U.S. acceptance of it, as a form of appeasement. Scheuer detected “a decided reluctance to even ask the questions” that might make the Bin Ladens or the Saudi government uncomfortable. Partly, Scheuer believed, this reticence reflected Bakr’s skillful management of Fowler, Brennan, and others at the U.S. embassy in Riyadh. “Bakr was very good,” Scheuer said later. “He used to go into the ambassador, or he used to go into the consul general in Jeddah on the Fourth of July, or other American holidays, and say, ‘What great guys you are—we love to be in America, we love to invest there, and we’ve divorced ourselves from the black sheep’—very, very good PR work by Bakr and his brothers.”15
“There was never a reluctance on our parts to ask questions of the Saudis,” Brennan said later, responding to Scheuer’s criticisms. Added Wyche Fowler, the ambassador: “From the moment Bakr Bin Laden agreed to my request for the family’s cooperation, they provided the Treasury Department and the FBI access to their books, family records—and their contract with the U.S. military on its base in Saudi Arabia was not terminated. Further, I never heard a complaint from our government about their lack of cooperation.”16
Among Scheuer’s particular concerns, he said later, were continuing reports he saw that the Bin Ladens’ Cairo office, overseen by Osama’s half-brother Khalid, provided work and travel visas to Egyptian Islamists who wanted to travel to Afghanistan. Other CIA officials regarded Scheuer’s fears as plausible but unproven. Their most widely shared concerns about the Bin Laden family involved Jamal Khalifa, Osama’s brother-in-law and former Afghan war comrade, who had been tried and acquitted of supporting terrorist activity by a Jordanian court. During the mid-1990s, through his wife Sheikha, Osama’s half-sister Khalifa used the Mohamed Bin Laden Company’s travel office to obtain a U.S. visa and for other family travel help. Another concern was Osama’s continuing telephone contact with his mother and stepbrothers in Jeddah. CIA officers also tried to get a grip on Osama’s own scattered offspring—the wife and sons who had returned to Saudi Arabia, another son who was reported to be living in Karachi, and other family members who reportedly traveled back and forth between the kingdom and Pakistan. The CIA pressed the Saudis informally for intelligence about all these issues but learned little.17
There were so many sources of mutual frustration in the liaison between the two governments that it was difficult to separate one source of irritation from another. However, for those in the U.S. intelligence community assigned to the specific problem of Osama Bin Laden and his money, the case of Osama’s one-legged former London financial aide was a particular cause of aggravation. Al-Ghazi Madani Al-Tayyib had kept track of some of Al Qaeda’s money and businesses during Osama’s Sudan years. Exhausted and demoralized by exile in Britain, Al- Tayyib had turned himself into the Saudi authorities. He seemed likely to possess a wealth of knowledge about Osama’s personal accounts and, perhaps even more important, about his access to sympathetic religious charities and individual fundraisers. A succession of senior American officials, from the CIA and other U.S. agencies, asked Crown Prince Abdullah, Prince Nayef, and other Saudi officials for the opportunity to meet and question Al-Tayyib directly. The Saudis steadfastly refused.18
The ambassador and the CIA station chief also pressed the Saudi government to curtail flights between the kingdom and Afghanistan by the Taliban-controlled airline, Afghan Ariana, which appeared, in the late 1990s, to be operating as Al Qaeda’s air-courier service, shuttling guns, money, and volunteers to Osama. On this matter they eventually won greater, if belated, cooperation.19
THE CONNECTIONS among Saudi charities, radical Islamist networks, and members of the Bin Laden family were particularly difficult for American investigators to assess. Around 1996, for example, Scheuer and Coleman took an interest in a proselytizing group, the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, which operated an American branch out of modest quarters in Falls Church, Virginia, only a few miles from the offices of the CIA’s secret Bin Laden tracking unit. The president of the U.S. branch was listed in public incorporation documents as Abdullah Awadh Bin Laden. It took investigators some time to sort out how Abdullah fit into the Bin Laden family tree, since there were several other prominent Abdullahs in the family, such as the one at Harvard and the family’s venerated patriarch, Mohamed Bin Laden’s brother. Eventually the American investigators learned that the particular Abdullah running the World Assembly branch was the son of one of Osama Bin Laden’s half-siblings—possibly, the son of one of his half-sisters. Osama, then, was one of Abdullah’s many uncles.20
The World Assembly of Muslim Youth had headquarters in Riyadh and advertised itself as the world’s largest Muslim youth group, dedicated to the spread of Islamic ideas, values, and sacred texts; it operated more than fifty regional and local offices on five continents. Abdullah Bin Laden incorporated an American branch in 1992. In a 1997 speech in Riyadh, he described his work: He offered financial subsidies to needy American Muslims wishing to undertake the Hajj; he ran one-week summer camps for Muslim youth in Texas, New York, Florida, California, Ohio, and Washington State; he sought to visit schools, universities, and prisons. His aim, as a journalist’s account of his
