by Steve Coll
As had been true of the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, Islamist violence in South Yemen advanced both the statecraft interests of the Saudi government and the looser ideology of Bin Laden and his allies. Indeed, Osama may have started his jihad project in South Yemen with encouragement or even direct support from Saudi intelligence, in the same way that he had worked in Afghanistan. Richard Clarke, who later directed counterterrorism programs in the Clinton White House, has written that Prince Turki Al-Faisal “had reportedly asked” Osama “to organize a fundamentalist religion-based resistance to the communist-style regime” in South Yemen. In the context of 1989, such a request would have been entirely consistent with Saudi foreign policy, and with the long use of the Bin Laden family in covert defense projects involving Yemen. Turki has described the matter differently than Clarke, however; he has said that Osama “came to see me with a proposal” to foment rebellion in South Yemen, and that “I advised him at the time that that was not an acceptable idea.”9
Whatever the truth, the geopolitical equation changed during the first six months of 1990 in a way that led Riyadh to renounce support for violent rebellion in Yemen. The fall of the Berlin Wall led to Yemen’s peaceful reunification and the formal end of the South Yemen state. On May 22, 1990, Ali Abdullah Saleh became president of a united Yemen; as part of the bargain, he tried to co-opt and calm Islamist groups that had previously waged jihad. Osama and other radicals, however, did not see the virtue in this deal, or in a national government that incorporated former communists, and they persisted with their preaching and organizing. According to Ahmed Badeeb, Turki’s chief of staff, Saleh eventually called King Fahd to complain. The Saudi government responded by pressuring Osama to quiet himself, and by one account, during the late spring or early summer of 1990, the government raided a Bin Laden family farm that Osama was using to support his Yemen project. Afterward, Osama reportedly wrote an angry letter of protest to Crown Prince Abdullah.10
This fracture in Osama’s alignment with Saudi foreign policy coincided with his rising irritation, during the autumn of 1990, over Fahd’s plan to employ American-led troops in a war to oust Saddam’s forces from Kuwait. Increasingly Osama conveyed a presumptuous attitude to the Saudi officials with whom he met. He employed bodyguards. He wrote a sixty-page paper laying out his idea to recruit and lead his Afghan-trained mujaheddin on a campaign to expel Saddam from Kuwait and save King Fahd from the dark conspiracies of the American occupation troops. He said it would be dangerous for Saudi Arabia to allow Christian troops to fight its wars. He sought a meeting with Fahd but was deflected to other Saudi officials, including a high-ranking prince at the defense ministry—this person has never been clearly identified, but it appears to have been either Abdul-Rahman bin Abdulaziz, a full brother of the king, or Khalid Bin Sultan, the influential son of the defense minister.11 Osama also met with Ahmed bin Abdulaziz, Salem’s longtime contact, number two at the interior ministry. Osama later described what happened:
I directed my advice straight to the deputy Minister of Defense, informing him of the great sins from which the state should desist, and of the danger of persisting with them, but to no avail. Then I met the deputy director of the ministry for security affairs, who strongly reproached me for advising the deputy Minister of Defense and began haranguing me about exactly the same sins that I had mentioned to the minister. Then he said: “This is well known—we don’t need anyone to tell us about it.”12
His proposals about the coming war in Kuwait annoyed the Saudi government, but they were inconsequential. It seems, instead, to have been his persistent preaching and contact with jihadis in Yemen that eventually led the interior ministry to seize his passport during the winter of 1990–1991. As Prince Turki put it, speaking of his conversations with Osama about jihad in Yemen: “This shy, retiring and seemingly very reticent person had changed.”13
Osama believed—and said repeatedly—that he was working for the true interests of the Saudi royal family, not against them. His older half-brothers, however, particularly Omar and Bakr, interpreted this longstanding family mandate of fealty quite differently after Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait.
Around this time, Bakr got to know Chas Freeman, the U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia; Freeman occasionally took private soundings from prominent businessmen in Jeddah. Buoyed by these contacts, in the autumn of 1990, Bakr and Omar led the Saudi Bin Laden Group (in which Osama was a shareholder) to sign contracts with the United States Army to build facilities that would support the U.S. troop presence and the coming war with Iraq. Between September 30 and November 7, the Saudi Bin Laden Group constructed a heliport at the King Abdulaziz Air Base “in support of the United States Army deployed on Operation Desert Shield,” according to a “Certificate of Achievement” later issued by Major General William G. Pagonis of the U.S. Army Central Support Command. Pagonis recognized one Bin Laden executive for his “personal contribution” to the “most successful logistical deployment in support of a combat victory in military history…We are proud of your accomplishments and humbled by your sacrifices. We salute and thank you.” Bin Laden Telecommunications installed systems for the United States Central Command and the 35th Signal Brigade of the U.S.; its executives were awarded certificates of thanks signed by General Norman Schwarzkopf. They had provided, Schwarzkopf affirmed, “outstanding support” of the American war effort. The Bin Ladens also undertook a project to improve a twelve-hundred-kilometer desert highway “so that U.S. troops could move easily and safely to and from the northern regions of Saudi Arabia,” as Omar Bin Laden put it later; Omar personally oversaw the work. Osama surely knew about these construction projects, from which he profited as a shareholder and dividend recipient; he was in the kingdom throughout this period, although he also apparently traveled back and forth to Yemen.14
As with the interest accumulating in his Swiss bank account, there is no evidence that he was burdened by pangs of conscience over the profits he earned from his family’s wartime work for the Americans, even as he lectured in the Bin Laden mosque near Kilo 7 and denounced American foreign policy. He was flirting with rebellion but was unable yet to embrace it fully. He postured as a dissenter but he avoided the most serious risks. His views were nuanced, changeable, and laced with contradictions.
THE ARRIVAL OF American soldiers in the kingdom in late 1990, at a time when democratic revolutions were erupting worldwide, provoked the most vigorous and open debate about political freedom and identity in Saudi Arabia since the Nasser period. Urban liberals, particularly women, seized upon this seeming Riyadh Spring. In November, forty-seven women attracted worldwide attention—and shocked many Saudis—by staging a protest in which they climbed into automobiles in Riyadh and drove through the city in open violation of the kingdom’s ban on female drivers. In early 1991, forty-three liberal-leaning businessmen, journalists, university professors, and former government officials signed a petition to King Fahd asking for ten political reforms. It was a relatively timid list and stopped far short of demands for a democratic order, but in Saudi terms, it was bold: the petition sought new councils to widen political participation, reform of the religious police, and “greater participation of women in public life, within the scope of the sharia.”15
This modest liberal uprising confirmed the deep-seated fears of Saudi Islamists that the royal family’s alliance with America, and particularly its decision to invite American troops into the kingdom, would become a lever for a top-down push by the Al-Saud toward a more secular society. Widely circulated underground tape-recorded sermons and lectures voiced these hysterical warnings throughout that autumn and winter. Two conservative university professors, Safar Al-Hawali and Salman Al-Awda, issued particularly fiery speeches arguing that the kingdom’s real enemy was not Iraq, but the West. Another influential voice belonged to Awad Al-Qarni, author of a 1987 book titled Modernity on the Scale of Islam, which insisted the royal family and its secular allies were promoting alternative forms of national identity t
hat undermined the Koran. The conservative ferment intensified after the women’s driving protest; Islamist leaflets listed the female drivers by name, as well as the names of their husbands, and denounced the women as “communist whores.”16
The Islamists also gathered signatures for their own petition to King Fahd demanding political reforms. They shared the liberals’ desire for greater participation but crafted an agenda to direct reforms toward even stricter adherence to Islamic law.
Abdulaziz Al-Gasim, a conservative judge in the sharia courts and a leader of the Islamist petition drive, who would later go to prison, sought out Osama Bin Laden in Jeddah in early 1991 to persuade him to add his signature to the cause. As the son of a Hadhrami immigrant with no formal education in Islam, Osama was not a significant figure in the Saudi world of dissident Islamist scholarship, but his martial reputation as a mujaheddin leader in Afghanistan and his membership in a prominent merchant family made him a potentially attractive fellow traveler. “He apologized and refused to sign,” Al-Gasim recalled. “He said he was very busy with Afghanistan and Yemen. He was supporting the ideas [in the petition draft] but he didn’t want any conflict with the Saudi government and lose support for his activities. He didn’t want to start another war. He was not convinced that these goals could be achieved in a peaceful way.”17 Some Islamists in Saudi Arabia, justifying their meek resistance to corrupt governance by the royal family, had long cited their desire to avoid fomenting fitna, or Koranically undesirable internal division within the Islamic community; Osama relied upon the same rationale that winter.
One night, Osama joined a rooftop dinner meeting in Jeddah where exiled Kuwaiti guests talked about their travails and asked for support, recalled Jamal Khashoggi, who attended. When his turn came to speak, Osama voiced a fear that America had a secret plan to use its presence in Saudi Arabia to “secularize Saudi Arabia, and to make a dramatic change in its regime or the way it ruled by imposing a president and ministers who are secular,” as Khashoggi recalled it. Osama specifically named Ghazi Al-Ghosaibi, the suit-and-tie-clad Saudi ambassador to Great Britain, as a candidate for this imposed leadership. Al-Ghosaibi, Osama predicted, would reform curriculums in school to spread secular ideas, “encourage women to take off their hejab,” and “spread corruption through arts and opening up society.” By Khashoggi’s account, Osama concluded his remarks with a warning:
Be aware. Be careful. We have to be united and rally around the Saudi leadership in order not to be weak against this determined secular campaign, that is no doubt coming with American support, that already has some people and some agents—a fifth column in Saudi Arabia. There are a lot of Saudis who are ready to serve the American alienation project, which will alienate Saudis from their religion.18
In one sense, Osama’s views remained as they had been since he was fourteen: where Muslims live, they should aspire to a pure society based upon Islamic principles. He remained deeply unsettled, however, about how to chase this ideal within Saudi Arabia. The presence of American troops and presumed secular conspiracies worried him, but his faith in the Al-Saud and his own family restrained him. In communist-influenced lands, such as Syria, South Yemen, and Afghanistan, violent jihad could be embraced because it seemed the only alternative. In Saudi Arabia, the situation looked more complicated. Among other things, Osama continued to accept the essential claim of the Al-Saud that they were righteous and legitimate guardians of Islam’s birthplace—the claim from which the Bin Laden fortune was derived.
THE SWIFT and overwhelming rout of Iraqi forces from Kuwait by American-led coalition troops infused King Fahd and the royal family with pride, relief, and confidence. Fahd exacted immediate revenge against those Arab governments and entities that had supported Saddam—particularly Jordan, the Palestinian Authority, and Yemen. Tens of thousands of Palestinian and Yemeni workers were expelled from the kingdom. On the domestic front, amid the general sense of relief that accompanied the war’s end, Fahd seemed to have a divided mind; he thought some mild political reforms might assuage his subjects, but he and his brothers also sought to ensure that wartime ferment did not lead to postwar revolution. As the weeks passed after Iraq’s surrender, petitioners on both the left and right were fired from their jobs, and some were imprisoned. To all of those who had doubted or needled Saudi Arabia in its season of crisis, the royal family offered an unmistakable message: we are back with a vengeance.
Osama Bin Laden left the kingdom on May 1, 1991, by his own account, less than two months after the end of the war. The circumstances surrounding his departure remain somewhat unclear. He was not forced out, according to Bakr Bin Laden. Through one of his half-brothers—apparently not Bakr—Osama pleaded to the interior ministry that he needed a one-time exit visa to travel to Pakistan to liquidate investments there. The best evidence suggests that he was genuinely uncertain of his plans—that he wanted to reunite with the Al Qaeda followers he had left in Afghanistan but was ambivalent about returning to the Afghan civil war. While in Jeddah during the war, Bin Laden had dispatched followers from Afghanistan to Sudan to rent farms and guesthouses there. Later, using a donation from an Egyptian lawyer, he bought a farm north of Khartoum for $250,000, according to a Sudanese aide. During the same period, according to Khalil A. Khalil, who tracked Islamists for the Saudi government, Osama “spent some time trying to find a tribe” in Yemen “where he could marry a daughter and win the tribe’s allegiance. He worked on this for about eighteen months to establish himself—first in a social context, then to bring his fighters to the south of Yemen…There was speculation that he had weapons in the United Arab Emirates and also investments and businesses there. The framework he was exploring was Yemen first, for the jihad army, and UAE as a base for media and economic activities.”19
Osama’s motivations are easier to document than his particular logistical plans. The harassment he faced from Saudi officials over his Yemeni organizing, and the humiliation he felt over their rejection of his wartime advice, left him burning with a desire to be free of the kingdom’s stifling repression, to re-create the independence and prestige he had enjoyed during his late years in Afghanistan—preferably without the constant exposure to gunfire, however. He was as exhausted in his own way by the narrowness of Saudi political culture as were the more secular members of his family who decamped periodically to Los Angeles or Orlando or Paris to enjoy some breathing space. As Osama later described his passage into exile during that spring of 1991:
The Saudi regime imposed on the people a life that does not appeal to the free believer. They wanted the people to eat and drink and sing the praise of God, but if the people wanted to encourage what is right and forbid what is wrong, they could not. Rather, the regime dismisses them from their jobs and in the event the people continue to do so, they are detained in prisons. I refused to live this submissive life, which is not befitting of man, let alone a believer. So I waited for the chance when God made it possible for me to leave Saudi Arabia.20
How did Bakr and his half-brothers regard his departure? The evidence is thin, but it nonetheless makes plain that as Osama left the kingdom, his family made no effort to exclude him from access to his own money or from participation in new family investments. In July 1991, for example, Yves Bruderlein, a Swiss lawyer with offices in Geneva, formed a Cayman Islands company called Cambridge Engineering “to make and hold investments,” particularly “in hedge fund products offered by major financial institutions, including Deutsche Bank.” According to Bruderlein, Cambridge was “indirectly owned” by the Saudi Bin Laden Group, and Bakr Bin Laden had signing power at the firm. The Saudi Bin Laden Group chose the Cayman Islands as its place of organization “based on the advice of their attorneys,” he said later. Its Swiss directors received “our instructions solely from the Saudi Bin Laden Group.” In the initial period after the formation of Cambridge Engineering, Bruderlein and other Swiss directors never had contact with Osama, but nonetheless, Bruderlein said he was aware that Osama was “p
art of the Saudi Bin Laden Group” and thus a participant in the hedge fund investments.21
Bakr said later that he “never intervened” with anyone in the Saudi government to help Osama leave the kingdom, “nor was I aware at that time of any involvement by Osama in terrorist activities of any kind.”22 He was, he suggests, passive and accepting of Osama’s decision. The broader credibility of his assertion may depend in part, of course, on the definition of “terrorist activities.” Al Qaeda had been founded three years earlier. Its volunteers still participated in the Afghan civil war; others fought in Yemen or evaded capture by the Egyptian security services from which they had fled. Whether some or all of this violence constituted terrorism lay to some extent in the eye of the beholder. It is also uncertain how much Bakr knew about these militias or Osama’s involvement with them.