Chapter One
A Young Man from a Good Family
Osama bin Laden flew to Pakistan in January 1980, just a few days after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In answering the call to jihad in Afghanistan, bin Laden had given his life a purpose, but he had also irrevocably changed its direction. Who was this rich young Saudi, trained as an engineer, a businessman and pious Muslim, who later said, "One day in Afghanistan counted for more than a thousand days praying in a mosque"?
Osama bin Laden's father, Sheikh Mohammed bin Oud bin Laden, an engineer and architect according to some sources, a simple peasant according to others, left his native province of Hadramut in central Yemen in the early 1920s. He is thought to have settled in the Hejaz province of Saudi Arabia in 1932. There he made a fortune and a name for himself as a scrupulous and honest businessman. It is said that he began working as a laborer and porter before managing to establish, through sheer hard work, the small construction firm that would one day get the contract to build the first royal palace in the major Saudi port of Jedda.
Having become wealthy, the head of the bin Laden clan helped the monarchy financially when the Saudi Treasury encountered difficulties; it is said that he once came up with the funds to guarantee payment of the salaries of government employees. By way of thanks for his services, Mohammed bin Laden's company was given the contract to rebuild the Haram Sharif mosque in Mecca and to renovate the Masjid al-Nabawi mosque. Mohammed bin Laden, who had become a Saudi subject, was even for a time King Feisal's minister of public works, but he was also and above all his friend. The consortium of bin Laden enterprises, known as the Bin Laden Corporation, flourished on Saudi oil in the 1970s, and the king ultimately granted it exclusive rights for the construction and renovation of religious buildings. The elder bin Laden's company secured contracts in several countries in the Arab world, including a project in Jordan for which Mohammed bin Laden oddly required that his engineers submit a bid at cost. According to family legend, the head of the clan decided to reduce the price calculated by his experts even further in order to ensure that God was well served in this mosque in a friendly country.
The piety of Mohammed bin Laden, who was the father of more than fifty children, twenty-five of whom were boys (he had eleven wives in the course of his life), was of another era. For more than forty years, he awaited patiently and without losing hope the coming of the Hazrat Mahdi, a messianic figure in many Muslim traditions. Mohammed bin Laden had even established a charitable fund of about $12 million to assist the Mahdi, were he to appear during bin Laden's lifetime, in restoring the grandeur and glory of Islam throughout the world.
When bin Laden died in 1972, King Feisal was still on the throne; the bin Laden family says that the king, who had wept only twice in his life, shed a third tear at the death of his friend.
The cordial relations between the royal family and Mohammed bin Laden benefited his children. This friendship was reinforced when bin Laden's sons attended the same schools as the numerous sons of King Abdelaziz, notably Victoria College in Alexandria, Egypt. Several of bin Laden's sons were classmates of the future King Hussein of Jordan or of the Khashoggi brothers, whose father was one of the doctors of the Saudi royal family.
The elder bin Laden was not the only one in the family to enjoy the friendship of King Feisal, and later of King Fahd. Bin Laden's son Salem was also very close to the king, and it is likely that he rendered significant services to the monarchy, in particular by carrying out secret missions. According to several witnesses, his mysterious death is evidence of this. In 1988, a BAC III plane piloted by Salem crashed in Texas. His death gave rise to speculations about the exact role he played for King Fahd and the Saudi government in secret operations in the Middle East and Central America. For instance, there was an indication from American sources that he was connected to a secret meeting between Iranian and American emissaries in Paris in October 1980. Some felt that his death was not an accident.
In addition to being close to the king, the bin Ladens were also business and financial mentors to his children. Mohammed bin Fahd and Saud bin Nayef, two of the more enterprising princes in the royal family, became tycoons of finance and industry in the 1980s, under the tutelage of the bin Laden sons, often sitting together on the boards of powerful multinationals financed by petrodollars.
The relationship of trust between the two families was resilient despite a few serious crises. The most important was the seizure of the Great Mosque in Mecca on November 20, 1979. The bin Laden construction company had the exclusive contract for repairs to the Holy Places, and its trucks thus had the privilege of entering and leaving Mecca without inspection. It was precisely by using these trucks that the terrorists succeeded in smuggling arms into the mosque. The assault was traumatizing for the Saudis, as more than 50,000 pilgrims were caught inside the Great Mosque by a commando group. The terrorists were led by a man of about thirty, Juhayman al-Otaibi. Just as prayers had barely begun, he deployed nearly 200 armed "brothers" on the seven minarets of the mosque and, using a microphone he had seized, demanded of the faithful at prayer that they recognize one of his associates, Mohammed al-Qahtani, as the Mahdi. Unable to control 50,000 people, the commando group decided to hold only 130 of them hostage, during a siege lasting two weeks. The French police of the GIGN (Intervention Group of the National Gendarmes) brought about a resolution of the situation on December 5, which required some instant conversions to enable the elite gendarmes to enter precincts reserved for Muslims. However, it was by enlisting the bin Ladens, who were then the only ones to have precise plans of the Holy Places, that the Saudi police and the GIGN were able to find their way in the cellars and put down the rebellion.
At the time of this crisis, one of the bin Laden sons, Mahrous, was arrested because of his ties with the Islamists involved in the assault but was later released. The terrorists had established contact with Mahrous several years earlier, when he was a student in London and when he counted among his friends the son of a Southern Yemeni dignitary, the leader of a very active fundamentalist group. Following this university connection, Mahrous bin Laden became involved with a group of Syrian Muslim Brotherhood activists exiled to Saudi Arabia. The Saudi secret service investigation ultimately declared Mahrous innocent. The investigation stated that by exploiting networks of the young Mahrous's former friendships, the terrorists had gained access to the bin Laden group's trucks to organize their attack without the young man's knowledge. Mahrous now heads the bin Laden group's subsidiary in Medina.
This tragic episode did not undermine the close ties of the bin Laden clan with the royal family, which consistently showed understanding when members of the bin Laden clan were involved in complex or shady affairs.
Osama bin Laden, born in the year 1377 of the Hegira (1957), in the al-Malazz neighborhood of Riyadh, is one of the youngest sons of the clan. His mother is said not to have been Mohammed's favorite wife, and Osama is said not to have been one of the favorite sons of the patriarch. Nonetheless, Osama grew up in the company of about fifty cousins—his uncles' children—and a few dozen aunts. He received a traditional education and finished his secondary education in a Jedda high school in 1973.
Like many well-off young Arabs, Osama bin Laden had the opportunity to travel and, according to reports, some of which come from American "profilers" of international criminals, he was in Beirut from 1968 to 1970 along with his brothers Omar, Khaleb, and Bakri, enrolled in a school frequented primarily by students from Persian Gulf countries. There is some debate about Osama's character and behavior at this time. Some claim that, along with Bakri, Osama gave no evidence of exemplary piety, in contrast to his two other brothers, Omar and Khaleb, who were studious and serious, never missed a prayer, and finally alerted their father to the misdemeanors of Osama and Bakri. The stories of Osama's escapades are challenged by one of the older brothers, Abdelaziz; according to him, Osama was devout, self-effacing, and very attached to the values of Islam. According to relatives, moreover, Osama speaks neither English nor French, two languages that would have been indispensable in Beirut at the time for anyone wanting to live a life of pleasure. And if one were to judge by physical appearance, his ascetic figure and his meditative gaze do not argue in favor of a debauched history.
According to other sources, through an arranged marriage in about 1975, Osama bin Laden took as a first wife a young Syrian to whom he was distantly related. At about the same time he entered King Abdelaziz University.
Bin Laden's degree completed his formal education and prepared him for an upper-management position in the Bin Laden Corporation. This professional training was supplemented by a "moral rearmament." It hardly matters whether the piety was put on at the time for opportunistic reasons or whether it was sincere; from the time he graduated Osama bin Laden's religious commitment was vivid and explicit. His father, Sheikh Mohammed, was proud of his pious outlook and entrusted him with the contract for the enlargement of the Masjid al-Nabawi mosque.
On the death of Sheikh Mohammed in 1972, his children inherited an industrial and financial empire, but there were fifty-four of them. As a further complication in the division of the inheritance, the bin Laden brothers had different mothers and were of different nationalities (something they made use of to develop the family interests abroad). Bakr and Yehia represented the Syrian line of the family; Yeslam the Lebanese group; Abdelaziz was the standard bearer of the Egyptian circle and the largest employer of the family, with forty thousand employees. There was also a Jordanian branch, as well as the Saudi branch, of which Osama was the single representative. The clan was frequently in danger of exploding into conflict. What was at stake in these internecine battles was of course money, but also, and primarily, power in the financial empire.
After Sheikh Mohammed's death, continuity was in question. Management of the bin Laden group was taken over temporarily by Mohammed Baharath, brother of patriarch Mohammed bin Laden's first wife and the oldest of the uncles. Soon thereafter, the oldest son, Sheikh Salem bin Laden, took over the controls with the assistance of several of his brothers. After Salem's death in 1988, another brother, Bakr, with thirteen of his brothers, headed up the family group's board and took up the succession. Tensions began to appear. Ali bin Laden, Bakr's older brother, who had been dividing his time among Beirut, Damascus, and Paris, moved away from the others. He apparently felt stifled inside the family empire, but, in order not to quarrel with the clan, he claimed private reasons for his departure. This kind of discretion is the norm for the bin Ladens, who maintain a facade of solidarity despite any internal disputes.
The division of the group's dividends soon became a bone of contention, and Ali had great difficulty in securing his share from his brothers. Mahrous, marked for life by the tragic episode at the Mecca mosque, remained discreetly in the background. Another brother, Yeslam, also distanced himself, but without conflict; he manages the group's international activities between Geneva and Paris. He is the most Westernized of the bin Laden sons, perhaps because of his marriage to a Francophone Iranian princess. He travels frequently and, like his brother Salem, flies his own business planes. Within this prosperous and diversified group, Osama bin Laden could choose how to occupy himself and earn money.
In 1976, four years after the death of the father, the group modernized itself in order to deal with the new requirements of business it had secured in almost every sector, diversifying from construction through imports to industry. The company adopted the name Bin Laden Brothers for Contracting and Industry. Its headquarters was in Jedda. The bin Laden group ranked thirty-second for revenues in Saudi Arabia at the time. It built several tens of thousands of housing units; it constructed roads, such as a major thoroughfare between Mecca and Medina; it developed farms and undertook irrigation work. The group also represented major European companies in Saudi Arabia, including Audi and Porsche automobiles. The brothers were associated with distributors of luxury products, such as the Dutch company Pander Projects, but also with the British enterprise Hunting Surveys Ltd. for the construction of prefabricated buildings.
The bin Laden family was known around the world not only for its financial and industrial power but also for its good reputation. At a lunch given by President Jacques Chirac on July 7, 1996, in the course of his official visit to Saudi Arabia, Yahya bin Laden, number two in the family hierarchy, was among the guests.
Through its financial investments, the activities of the bin Laden group extend well beyond what is publicly known. As a purely family enterprise without external or institutional shareholders, the group is very discreet about its investments and its policy of diversification; in light of its privileged relations with the king, no one has taken the risk of expressing unhealthy curiosity. Bin Laden contracts are never awarded in cabinet meetings or through a public bidding process; they are negotiated directly with the royal house and its head chamberlain, Ali bin Mussalem. The bin Ladens, who dislike media exposure, often withdraw without warning from financial or commercial projects when their partners are too talkative. The bin Laden group and its subsidiaries never advertise in the press, and it is impossible for an analyst to gain advance knowledge of its strategy. One motivation for this secretive strategy is that some of the group's enterprises have served as intermediaries in official arms contracts between Riyadh and the Western powers.
The bin Laden clan carried out several major projects in the Saudi kingdom in the 1980s and 1990s: a $296 million contract for the construction of a ring road around Riyadh; the construction of housing for security forces in Jedda and Mecca; the construction of the reception hall for the royal divan, or palace, in Mecca; the enlargement of the Holy Places in Medina; and the construction and furnishing of one of the terminals at the Riyadh airport. The bin Ladens were even subcontractors for the construction of hangars during the Saudi-American Desert Shield operation at the time of the conflict with Iraq.
Strange as it might seem given Osama bin Laden's notoriety by then, in September 1998, the bin Laden family secured a new contract, for the construction of barracks housing 4,257 American soldiers stationed in the Gulf. This barracks, situated on a Saudi air force base in the desert some 170 kilometers from Riyadh, is a modern building, well designed from the point of view of security; the promoters of the project were well aware that the American expeditionary force had been badly damaged in 1996 by an attack against the al-Khobar Towers, which the Saudi government had provided to house the Americans. Two years later, the new housing for the American military (a large number of whom had been living since the attack in tent villages like the Bedouins of their host country) was constructed by the bin Ladens for $150 million, entirely paid by the Saudi government. The security services of the U.S. Central Command went through the building with a fine-tooth comb before installing the airmen who provide support for the air force unit of the Prince Sultan base.
The projects awarded to the bin Laden group are no longer limited to the Saudi kingdom: in Lebanon, Yehia bin Laden is involved in the reconstruction of downtown Beirut devastated by the civil war; in London the group has a branch office, Binexport; in Geneva Sico, the Saudi Investment Company, is involved in many international deals. This company, established by the bin Ladens in 1980, is the flagship for the group's activities in Europe. It is headed by Yeslam bin Laden, and the board of directors is made up almost exclusively of members of the family clan, except for a Swiss citizen, Baudoin Dunant. This well-known lawyer from French-speaking Switzerland, who is on the boards of several dozen companies, came to public notice in 1983 when he agreed to represent the Swiss banker François Genoud, a controversial figure who had been a disciple of Hitler and sole heir of Goebbels's copyrights before becoming one of the financiers of the FLN during the Algerian War. The friendships of the bin Ladens sometimes seem surprising, but they are logical: François Genoud has always been pro-Arab.
Sico, as the parent company of the group's foreign interests, also has offices in London and in Curaçao in the Dutch Antilles. The latter outpost, established in 1984, manages among other things the relations of the bin Laden group with an American company, the Daniels Realty Corporation, a subsidiary of the Fluor Corporation, which, through the influence of the bin Ladens, was awarded many reconstruction contracts in Kuwait after the Gulf War. In France at the time, the bin Ladens were on the board of the Al-Saudi Bank, which was partially taken over by the Indosuez Bank, becoming the Banque Française pour l'Orient, before merging with the Méditerranée group of Rafiq Hariri, the Lebanese prime minister. The Al-Saudi Bank facilitated many arms deals in the Middle East beginning in the 1980s.
At present, the group, which remains secretive, still has extraordinary financial resources. The bin Ladens are said to use at least three planes to carry on their business: a King Air 90 Beechcraft registered in the United States belonging to the Saudi Investment Company S.A.; another plane of the same kind based in Zurich; and a Challenger III jet, owned by Bin Laden Aviation, registered in the Cayman Islands, the tax haven in the Antilles.
Once the name of Osama bin Laden began to spread through the Western press and intelligence reports, these planes were put under surveillance in various European airports. It turned out that the planes were often used for trips to France via the Cannes-Mandelieu airport. According to airport authorities, this point of entry would allow passengers on the planes to pass through less rigorous inspection than commercial passengers. Investigation revealed that the most frequent flight path for one of the two King Air planes was from Geneva to Cannes and back, and that Yeslam bin Laden often piloted the plane himself. In some years the intelligence services counted as many as two hundred round trips. The Challenger jet, on the other hand, seems to have been used almost exclusively for London-Geneva-Malaga-Lugano circuits. At least seven other twin-engine jets of the BAC III or Learjet type used by the bin Laden group are said to have been registered in Switzerland for a time and subsequently to have changed registration and nation of ownership.
The frequency of these private flights also led European intelligence services to take an interest in representatives of the bin Laden family in France and Monaco, revealing that at least ten members of the clan regularly circulate among a residential neighborhood in Cannes, the rue Vernet, and the avenue Bosquet in Paris, the posh little town of Chatou in the Paris suburbs, and the boulevard de Suisse in Monaco. Various Western agents involved in this surveillance in Europe suspect that some members of the bin Laden family have not completely broken ties with Osama, particularly with respect to the management of his business affairs. According to some reports, Osama bin Laden has remained very close to his mother and to one of his brothers who have periodically urged him to give himself up to the Saudi government.
Continues...
Excerpted from In the Name of Osamabinladen-C by Roland Jacquard Copyright © 2002 by Roland Jacquard. Excerpted by permission.
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