Steve Coll’s riveting new book not only gives us the most psychologically detailed portrait of the brutal 9/11 mastermind yet, but in telling the epic story of Osama bin Laden’s extended family, it also reveals the crucial role that his relatives and their relationship with the royal house of Saud played in shaping his thinking, his ambitions, his technological expertise and his tactics.
“The Bin Ladens” uses the prism of one family to examine the mind-boggling, culture-rocking effects that sudden oil wealth had on Saudi Arabia, while shedding new light on the “troubled, compulsive, greed-inflected, secret-burdened” relationship that developed between that desert nation and the United States, and the conflicts many Saudis felt, pulled between the traditional pieties of their ancestors and the glittering temptations of the West.
It is a book that possesses the novelistic energy of a rags-to-riches family epic, following its sprawling cast of characters as they travel from Mecca and Medina to Las Vegas and Disney World, and yet, at the same time, it is a book that, in tracing the connections between the public and the private, the political and the personal, stands as a substantive bookend to Mr. Coll’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning 2004 book, “Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the C.I.A., Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to Sept. 10, 2001.”
That earlier work focused on the rise of Islamic extremism during the anti-Soviet jihad in the 1980s in Afghanistan, where Mr. bin Laden first emerged as a leader, while this volume looks at the familial, cultural and political forces that shaped him as he came of age in Saudi Arabia.
Parts of Mr. Coll’s narrative are heavily indebted to other reporters’ pioneering work on this subject — most notably, Peter Bergen’s two books on Mr. bin Laden, and “The Looming Tower,” Lawrence Wright’s searing book about Al Qaeda and the road to 9/11. But by focusing on Mr. bin Laden’s conflicted relationship with his family and that family’s complicated relationship with the West, Mr. Coll, a staff writer for The New Yorker who also worked for many years at The Washington Post, has added fascinating new details to our understanding of how Mr. bin Laden evolved from a loyal family adjutant into an angry black sheep, intent on lashing out at the very people — the Saudi royal family and the United States of America — that his father and brothers had cultivated in their business dealings for years.
Just as recent books like Jacob Weisberg’s “Bush Tragedy” have underscored the role Oedipal rivalries may have played in George W. Bush’s presidency and his decision to go to war against Iraq, so this volume underscores the role that Freudian family dynamics may have played in Mr. bin Laden’s radicalization and his declaration of war against America.
Mr. Coll traces how Osama — who was still a boy when his father, Muhammad, was killed in an airplane accident in 1967 — found a succession of father figures in a series of radical mentors, including a high school gym teacher who involved him in an after-school Islamic study group and Abdullah Azzam, a charismatic scholar who introduced the young Osama to “the concept of transnational jihad.”
Mr. Coll’s book also traces a host of bizarre connections among its dramatis personae, suggesting that there are often less than six degrees of separation when it comes to the new globalized world of international finance. We learn, for instance, that Muhammad bin Laden began his rise by working as a bricklayer and mason for Aramco, the Arabian American Oil Company, which had been formed to manage the oil rights of the Standard Oil Company of California, and that the huge international company that the bin Ladens built would come to do business with well-known American firms like General Electric, and draw on advice from the law firm Baker Botts, headed by James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state and Bush family adviser.
We also learn that Jim Bath, a former reserve pilot with the Texas Air National Guard who used to carouse with George W. Bush, later became a business partner in Houston with Salem bin Laden, Osama’s half-brother.
The ultimate self-made man, the family patriarch Muhammad bin Laden left an impoverished and deeply religious canyon village to seek his fortune (during an early interlude in the pilgrim city of Jeddah, he was so poor that he reportedly slept in a ditch he dug in the sand) and through a combination of skill, acumen and the assiduous cultivation of the royal family, became the king’s principal builder, overseeing renovations of sacred sites in Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem. He would bequeath to his children not just a fortune, but also what Mr. Coll calls a “transforming vision of ambition and religious faith in a borderless world.” His British-educated son, Salem, who took over the company after his death, would expand its international reach, and he would also embrace a Westernized, jet-set existence that allowed him to indulge his eccentricities to the fullest.
In fact, Salem emerges from this volume as a compelling, larger-than-life figure, a picaresque playboy, at once guileless, brilliant and self-indulgent, who held together the increasingly fractious bin Laden clan through sheer force of will and charisma. Salem, who dressed in jeans, loved airplanes and liked to play the harmonica, reportedly “paid a bandleader at an Academy Awards party in Los Angeles hundreds of dollars to let him sing ‘House of the Rising Sun’ in seven languages.”
Mr. Coll reports that Salem organized family expeditions to Las Vegas, shipped thousands of cases of Tabasco sauce back to Saudi Arabia and dreamed of marrying four women from four Western nations: his estate, he imagined, would resemble the United Nations, with four houses, one flying an American flag, one a German flag, one a French flag and one the Union Jack. Salem died in 1988 in a plane accident in Texas.
As for Osama bin Laden, Mr. Coll, like Mr. Wright in “The Looming Tower,” suggests that the Qaeda founder’s turn to international war against the United States was not inevitable. Mr. Coll writes that when the Saudi royal family agreed in the summer of 1990 to the arrival of American troops in response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, Mr. bin Laden “offered no public dissent” at the time, but “moved quickly with the rest of his family to protect his personal fortune against the possibility that the Al-Saud regime might collapse.” Although he had come to see himself as an “international Islamic guerrilla leader,” his views at the time, Mr. Coll writes, were still “nuanced, changeable and laced with contradictions.”
Increasingly at odds with the Saudi royal family, Mr. bin Laden left the kingdom in 1991 for the Sudan, where he bought a farm and raised horses and sunflowers while training jihadis (whom he sent to places like Bosnia). “Osama seemed to believe during this period,” Mr. Coll writes, “that he could have it all in Sudan — wives, children, business, horticulture, horse breeding, leisure, pious devotion and jihad — all of it buoyed by the deference and public reputation due a proper sheikh. He did not yet seem to grasp that his enterprise, particularly in its support for violence against governments friendly to or dependent upon the Al-Saud, might prove difficult to reconcile with the interests of his family in Jeddah.”
In June 1993, Mr. Coll reports, the family, most likely under pressure from the Saudi government, moved to expel Osama as a shareholder of the Muhammad bin Laden Company and the Saudi bin Laden Group. The following year the family publicly repudiated him, the Ministry of Interior announced that he had been formally stripped of his Saudi citizenship, and Mr. bin Laden began writing lengthy essays denouncing the royal family, which he circulated by fax.
By 1995, Mr. Coll writes, there was “a hint of King Lear in the wilderness” to his exile: he was out of money, one of his wives had divorced him, and his eldest son had left him to return to Saudi Arabia. Isolation fueled Mr. bin Laden’s self-righteousness, however, and his wrath increasingly focused on the United States, particularly after Washington put pressure on Sudan’s government to expel him from Khartoum, leading to his exile in 1996 back to the harsh lands of Afghanistan.
While he careered toward violence, other members of his family moved to strengthen their ties with the West. There were family investments in enterprises ranging from Iridium, a satellite communications network, to the Hard Rock Cafe franchise in the Middle East.
In the days after 9/11 Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador in Washington — who met with President Bush on the evening of September 13 — helped arrange (with F.B.I. permission) a special chartered plane flight to carry more than a dozen bin Ladens, some of whom had been living in the United States for years, back home to Saudi Arabia. Subsequent F.B.I. investigations “turned up no evidence of complicity by the bin Laden family in terrorist violence,” Mr. Coll writes, and a decision seems to have been made at the White House sometime early in 2002 that, barring the emergence of new evidence, “the U.S. government would not sanction the bin Laden family in any way because of its history with Osama.”
One F.B.I. analyst summed up the bureau’s assessment this way: there were “millions” of bin Ladens “running around” and “99.999999 percent of them are of the non-evil variety.”
