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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
From Saudi rich boy to the world's most wanted man: A British newspaper painstakingly retraces the development of a terrorist mastermind.
Nov 1, 2001 | At every corner in the darkened village, guards stood with their Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers at the ready. Sitting on rugs spread on the dirt floor of a mud-brick and wood house, two men ate a meal of rice, grilled mutton and vegetables. High above, the warplanes of America could be heard growling in the night.
The men, both in their mid-forties, bearded and dressed in the local traditional baggy long shirt and trousers, washed, ate, prayed and then talked.
Osama bin Laden, the world's most wanted man, and Mullah Mohammed Omar, supreme leader of the Taliban regime, had a lot to discuss. A few days earlier, at 8:45 p.m. on Sept. 30, U.S. and British cruise missiles had started hitting targets across Afghanistan in retribution for the terrorist attacks that had killed 5,000 people in New York and Washington nearly three weeks earlier. Now death and destruction had come to villages, cities and military camps throughout Afghanistan. Several missiles had landed near the village where the two men were meeting. Many more had landed on the southern city of Kandahar, the spiritual and administrative base of the Taliban. The two men were there to decide their response to the war they had suddenly found themselves fighting.
The meeting, revealed to The Observer by sources in a Gulf intelligence agency, did not last long. That was partly due to security concerns: a well-placed Tomahawk cruise missile could have wiped out both of the Pentagon's main targets. Partly it was because the two were in agreement on almost everything. Mullah Omar reaffirmed his support, affection and respect for his Saudi-born friend. Bin Laden replied in kind. The two swiftly reached a decision on tactics. They would jointly resist any aggression, they would work to create and exploit divisions in the coalition ranged against them, and they would exploit the humanitarian crisis -- and any civilian casualties -- to create global anger against the bombing campaign. Then the two embraced and went their separate ways. They are not thought to have met since.
In 1930, a powerfully built dockside laborer, six feet tall and with one eye, decided there was more to life than loading ships in the ports of his poverty-stricken native province of Hadramaut in Yemen. He packed a bag, bought a place on a camel caravan heading to the newly created kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and set off on a thousand-mile trek to seek his fortune.
The man, who would go on to father a terrorist sought by the military might of the Western world, got his first job as a bricklayer with Aramco -- the Arabian-American oil company -- earning a single Saudi riyal, about 15 cents, a day. He lived frugally, saved hard, invested well and went into business himself. By the early 1950s, Mohammed bin Laden was employed in building palaces for the House of Saud in Riyadh. He won the contracts by heavily undercutting local firms. It was a gamble that paid off.
Bin Laden's big break came when a foreign contractor withdrew from a deal to build the Medina-Jedda highway and he took on the job. By the early 1960s he was a rich man -- and an extraordinary one.
"He couldn't read or write and signed his name with a cross all his life, but he had an extraordinary intelligence," said a French engineer who worked with him in the '60s. The engineer remembered that the former laborer never forgot his roots, always leaving home "with a wad of notes to give to the poor."
Such alms-giving is one of the fundamentals of Islam. Bin Laden senior was a devout man, raised in the strict and conservative Wahhabi strand of Sunni Islam. Later he was to boast that, using his private helicopter, he could pray in the three holiest locations of Islam -- Mecca, Medina and the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem -- in a single day. Visiting the former two sites must have been especially satisfying, for it was the contract to restore and expand the facilities serving pilgrims and worshippers there that established the reputation of his company, confirmed its status as the in-house builders of the Saudi ruling clan and made him stupendously wealthy. Though at one stage he was rich enough to bail out the royal family when they fell on hard times, the tatty bag he had carried when he left Yemen remained on display in the palatial family home. He was killed when his helicopter crashed in 1968.
Mohammed bin Laden had, in the words of the French engineer, "changed wives like you or I change cars." He had three Saudi wives, Wahhabis like their husband, who were more or less permanent. The fourth, however, was changed on a regular basis.
The magnate would send his private pilot all over the Middle East to pick up yet another bride. "Some were as young as 15 and were completely covered from head to toe," the pilot's widow recently recalled. "But they were all exceptionally beautiful."
Bin Laden's mother, Hamida, was not a Saudi or a Wahhabi, but a stunningly beautiful, cosmopolitan, educated 22-year-old daughter of a Syrian trader. She shunned the traditional Saudi veil in favor of Chanel trouser suits and this, coupled with the fact that she was foreign, diminished her status within the family. She was Mohammed bin Laden's tenth or eleventh spouse, and was known as the "the slave wife."
Mohammed bin Laden gave even his former wives a home at his palaces in Jedda and Hijaz. Hamida was still married to the millionaire when he died and so, amid a huge family and the solid gold statues, the ancient tapestries and the Venetian chandeliers, this is where Osama bin Laden, Mohammed's seventh son, "the son of the slave," grew up.
Born in 1957 -- the year 1377 of the Islamic calendar -- he was 11 when his father died. He never saw much of him. A flavor of the bin Laden household comes from a document provided to the American ABC TV network in 1998 by "an anonymous source close to bin Laden." It offers unprecedented insights into Osama's childhood.
"The father had very dominating personality. He insisted to keep all his children in one premises," it reads. "He had a tough discipline and observed all the children with strict religious and social code. At the same time, the father was entertaining with trips to the sea and desert," the document goes on. "He dealt with his children as big men and demanded them to show confidence at young age."
Brian Fyfield-Shayler, 69, gave the then 13-year-old bin Laden and 30 other privileged classmates attending al-Thagh school, an ilite Western-style Saudi school in Jedda, four one-hour English lessons a week during 1968 and 1969. He described bin Laden as a "shy, retiring and courteous" boy who was unfailingly polite.
"He was very courteous -- more so than any of the others in his class. Physically, he was outstanding because he was taller, more handsome and fairer than most of the other boys. He also stood out as he was singularly gracious and polite, and had a great deal of inner confidence," said Fyfield-Shayler.
Bin Laden was "very neat, precise and conscientious" in his work. "He wasn't pushy at all. Many students wanted to show you how clever they were. But if he knew the answer to something he wouldn't parade the fact. He would only reveal it if you asked him."
In bin Laden's early teens there was little sign of the fanatic he would become. In 1971 the family went on holiday en masse to the small Swedish copper mining town of Falun. A smiling Osama -- or "Sammy" as he sometimes called himself -- was pictured, wearing a lime-green top and blue flares, leaning on a Cadillac.
Osama, then 14, and his older brother Salem had first visited Falun a year before, driving from Copenhagen in a Rolls-Royce flown in from Saudi Arabia. Oddly, they stayed at the cheap Astoria Hotel, where the owner, Christina Akerblad, recalled them spending the days out "on business" and the evenings eating dinner in their rooms. "I remember them as two beautiful boys -- the girls in Falun were very fond of them," she said. "Osama played with my two [young] sons."
Akerblad remembered the wealth she found on display when cleaning the boys' rooms. "At the weekends we saw they used the extra bed in their rooms to lay out their clothes. They had lots of white silk shirts packaged in cellophane. I think they had a new one for every day -- I never saw the dirty ones. They also had a big bag for their jewelry. They had emeralds and rubies and diamond rings and tie pins."
Nor was there any sign of incipient fervor in a bucolic summer at an Oxford language school in the same year. Bin Laden and his brothers befriended a group of Spanish girls and went punting on the Thames.
Last month one woman showed a Spanish newspaper photos of herself and girlfriends -- one in hot pants -- with three bin Laden boys. Bin Laden, wearing flares, a short-sleeved shirt and a bracelet, looks like any other awkward teenager. His two older brothers look more assured. The young Saudi even once stayed on London's Park Lane. He had forgotten the name of the hotel his Saudi parents had checked into, he told a reporter several years ago, but he recalled "the trees of the park and the red buses."
Quite how much of a personal fortune bin Laden had inherited is uncertain. It may well be a lot less than the huge sums (up to $250 million) often cited. The young bin Laden was never interested in money for its own sake. In fact, the very things that had made the father huge riches had begun to trouble the son. The early seventies were a time of huge cultural change in the Middle East. Oil revenue, the wars with Israel and, above all, increasing contact with the West forced a profound re-examining of old certainties. For most of Mohammed bin Laden's numerous progeny, the answer lay in greater Westernization, and the elder members of the family set off for Victoria College in Alexandria in Egypt, Harvard, London or Miami. But not Osama bin Laden. Like tens of thousands of other young men in the region at the time, Osama had become increasingly drawn to the cool, clear, uncluttered certainties of extremist Islamist ideology.
