The Looming Tower (13 page)

By now, the bin Laden construction empire extended well beyond Saudi Arabia. One of Mohammed’s major projects outside the Kingdom was the renovation of the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, which meant that the three holiest spots in Islam all bore his mark. “He gathered his engineers and asked them to estimate the cost of the project, without profit,” Osama later stated. “Because of God’s graciousness to him, sometimes he prayed in all three mosques in one single day.”

Mohammed bin Laden had a custom of marrying off ex-wives who had borne him children to employees of his company. The wives had little or no say in the matter. They sometimes found themselves marrying below what they now considered their station—to a driver, for instance—an arrangement that influenced the future standing of their children in the family. Alia was fortunate when Mohammed decided to divorce her. He awarded her to one of his executives, Mohammed al-Attas, who was a descendant of the Prophet. Osama was four or five years old. He moved with his mother a few blocks away, to a modest two-story villa on Jabal al-Arab Street. The house was white stucco with a small courtyard and a black filigree iron gate in front of the garage. On top of the flat roof was a towering television antenna. Over one of the front entrances there was a brown-and-white-striped awning—the doorway that women used; the men entered through the gate into the courtyard.

Soon after Osama moved to the new house, Mohammed bin Laden died in a plane crash on his way to take another teenage bride. His body was so charred he could only be identified by his wristwatch. At the time of his death, Mohammed was still an active, vigorous man, not yet sixty years old, at the peak of his astonishing career. “King Faisal said upon the death of my father that today I have lost my right arm,” Osama once remarked. Mohammed’s sons were not yet old enough to take control of the family enterprise, so the king appointed three trustees who ran the company for the next ten years. One of the men, Sheikh Mohammed Saleh Bahareth, also oversaw the education of bin Laden’s children. Their inheritance was withheld until they were twenty-one—and in any case, most of the value was tied up in the ownership of the construction empire their father had created.

T
HE MARRIAGE BETWEEN ALIA
and her second husband proved to be an enduring match. Attas was kind and calm, but his relation to his stepson was somewhat compromised by the fact that Osama was the child of his employer. As for Osama, he went from being in a house full of children to one in which he was the only child. Eventually three younger half brothers and a half sister would be born, and Osama oversaw them almost as a third parent. “If his stepfather wanted something done, he would tell Osama,” remembered Khaled Batarfi, who lived across the street and became his childhood companion. “His brothers say they didn’t fear their father as much as they did Osama.” Only with his mother did Osama let down his mask of authority. “She was the only person he would talk to about the small things,” said Batarfi, “like what he had for lunch today.”

Khaled Batarfi and Osama bin Laden were from the same large tribe, the Kendah, which has as many as
100,000
members. The tribe had originated in the Najd, the heart of the Kingdom, but then had migrated into the Hadramout in Yemen. “The Kendah are known to be bright,” said Batarfi. “Usually they are fighters, well armed, and they have an air about them.” Khaled found his new playmate “calm, shy, almost girlish. He was peaceful, but when he was angry, he was frightening.”

Osama enjoyed television, especially westerns.
Bonanza
was his favorite show, and he adored
Fury,
a series about a boy and his silky black stallion. On summer mornings, after the dawn prayer, the boys would play soccer. Osama was an average player who could have been better if he had concentrated on the sport. But his mind was always somewhere else.

After the death of Mohammed bin Laden, the trustee sent most of the sons to Lebanon for their education. Only Osama remained behind, which would always mark him as the most provincial of the bin Laden boys. This was despite the fact that he enrolled in Jeddah’s best school, called al-Thagr, on the road to Mecca. King Faisal had created the school in the early fifties for the education of his own sons. It was a free public school, but the standards were extremely high and the rector reported directly to the king. Students could gain admission only by passing a highly competitive examination. The goal was to have all classes of Saudi society represented, entirely on the basis of merit. This policy was so strictly adhered to that several sons of King Khalid were booted out while he was still on the throne.

Osama was a member of a class of sixty-eight students, only two of whom were members of the royal family. Fifty of his classmates went on to gain their doctorates. “He was a normal, not excellent, student,” said Ahmed Badeeb, who taught Osama science courses for three years. The lives of these two men, bin Laden and Badeeb, would intertwine in unexpected ways in the future, as bin Laden was drawn to jihad and Badeeb became a member of Saudi intelligence.

All of the students dressed in Western clothes—a jacket and tie during the winter, pants and shirt during the rest of the school year. Osama stood out because he was tall and gangly and physically slow to mature. As his classmates began sporting moustaches and goatees, bin Laden remained clean-shaven because his beard was so light. His teachers found him shy and fearful of making mistakes.

In Osama’s fourteenth year he experienced a religious and political awakening. Some ascribe the change to a charismatic Syrian gym teacher at the school who was a member of the Muslim Brothers. Osama stopped watching cowboy shows. Outside of school, he refused to wear Western dress. Sometimes he would sit in front of the television and weep over the news from Palestine. “In his teenage years, he was the same nice kid,” his mother later related. “But he was more concerned, sad, and frustrated about the situation in Palestine in particular, and the Arab and Muslim world in general.” He tried to explain his feelings to his friends and family, but his passion left them nonplussed. “He thought Muslims are not close enough to Allah, and Muslim youth are too busy playing and having fun,” his mother concluded. He began fasting twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays, in emulation of the Prophet. He went to bed right after
isha,
the evening prayer. In addition to the five prayers a day, he set his alarm for one in the morning and prayed alone every night. Osama became quite stern with his younger half siblings, especially about rising early to go to the mosque for the dawn prayer.

He was rarely angry except when sexual matters came up. When he thought one of his half brothers was flirting with a maid, Osama slapped him. Another time, when he was in a café in Beirut, one of his brother’s friends produced a porno magazine. Osama made it clear that neither he nor any of his brothers would ever have anything to do with the boy again. There seems never to have been a moment in his entire life when he gave way to the sins of the flesh, venal or ribald behavior, the temptations of liquor, smoking, or gambling. Food held little interest for him. He loved adventure and poetry and little else but God.

Osama’s mother watched the evolution of his religious convictions with alarm. She confided her anxiety to her younger sister, Leila Ghanem. “In the beginning of his path, being his mother, she was very concerned,” her sister later said. “When she saw that this was his conviction, something he would not budge from, she said, ‘God protect him.’”

On one occasion, Osama was riding with his family to Syria, to visit his mother’s relatives, which they did every summer. The driver put on a cassette tape of the Egyptian diva Umm Kalthoum. Her powerful vibrato was so expressive of love and longing that it often brought her listeners to tears or involuntary gasps of desire. The lyrics called up the ancient verses of the desert bards:

You are more precious than my days, more beautiful than my dreams

Take me to your sweetness, away from the universe

Far, far away

Osama flared up. He ordered the driver to turn it off. The driver refused. “We are paying you,” Osama reminded him. “If you don’t shut the music off right now, you can take us back to Jeddah!” Everyone else in the car, including his mother and his stepfather, was silent in the face of Osama’s anger. The driver relented.

His intransigent piety was unusual in his elevated social circle, but many young Saudis found refuge in intense expressions of religiosity. Exposed to so few alternative ways of thinking even about Islam, they were trapped in a two-dimensional spiritual world; they could only become more extreme or less so. Extremism had its consolations, as it always does; in Osama’s case, it obviously shielded him from his teenage sexual urges. There was also in his nature a romance with the spirituality of the desert, humble and stripped of distraction. Throughout his life, he would hunger for austerity like a vice: the desert, the cave, and his as yet unspoken desire to die anonymously in a trench in warfare. But it was difficult to hold on to this self-conception while being chauffeured around the Kingdom in the family Mercedes.

At the same time, Osama made an effort not to be too much of a prig. Although he was opposed to the playing of musical instruments, he organized some of his friends into an a cappella singing group. They even recorded some of their tunes about jihad, which for them meant the internal struggle to improve themselves, not holy war. Osama would make copies and give them each a tape. When they played soccer, Osama would bring along tuna and cheese sandwiches for the other players, even on days when he was fasting. His commitment and composure commanded respect. Out of modesty, he stopped wearing regular soccer shorts and took to playing in long pants. In deference to his beliefs, the other players followed suit.

They would often go to play in the poorer districts of Jeddah. During lunch, even if he was fasting, Osama would divide his teammates into different groups, named after companions of the Prophet, and quiz them on the Quran. “The Abu Bakr group wins!” he would exclaim. “Now, let’s have cakes.”

He had an adventurous adolescence—mountain climbing in Turkey and big-game hunting in Kenya. On his family farm south of Jeddah, Osama kept a stable of horses, having as many as twenty at one time, including his favorite, a mare named al-Balqa. He liked to ride and shoot, just like the cowboys on his favorite television shows.

Osama began driving early, and he drove fast. In the mid-seventies, when he was sixteen or seventeen, he had a big white Chrysler that he accidentally ran into a culvert and destroyed. Amazingly, he was unhurt. After that, however, he made an effort to slow down. He began driving a Toyota jeep and a Mercedes 280S—the kind of car a respectable Saudi businessman would drive. But he still had trouble keeping his foot off the gas.

His science teacher, Ahmed Badeeb, noticed the change in his strong-willed young student. “At this time, Osama was trying to prove himself within the company,” said Badeeb. “There is a law in the bin Laden family that if you prove yourself as a man, you can inherit.” The Saudi Binladin Group had a contract for a large project in Jizan, near the Yemen border, and Osama badly wanted to be a part of it. “I decided to drop out of school to achieve my goals and dreams,” bin Laden later related. “I was surprised at the major opposition to this idea, especially from my mother, who cried and begged me to change my mind. In the end, there was no way out. I couldn’t resist my mother’s tears. I had to go back and finish my education.”

In 1974, while he was still in high school, Osama married for the first time. He was seventeen, she was fourteen—Najwa Ghanem, his cousin from his mother’s village in Syria. She was unusually tall and quite beautiful. There was a small wedding party for the men in Osama’s house, who never got to see the bride. Bin Laden’s future sister-in-law, Carmen, described Najwa as meek and “constantly pregnant.”

It was also during this time, in high school, that bin Laden joined the Muslim Brothers. The organization was very much an underground movement in Saudi Arabia in the 1970s. “Only nerds were in it,” a fellow member recalled. The members were highly religious teenagers like bin Laden, and although they were not actively conspiring against the government, their meetings were secret and took place in private homes. The group sometimes went together on pilgrimages to Mecca, or on outings to the beach, where they would proselytize and pray. “We were hoping to establish an Islamic state anywhere,” said Jamal Khashoggi, a friend of bin Laden’s who joined the Brotherhood at about the same time. “We believed that the first one would lead to another, and that would have a domino effect which could reverse the history of mankind.”

Bin Laden entered King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah in 1976. He studied economics, but he was more involved in campus religious affairs. “I formed a religious charity at school, and we devoted a lot of time to interpreting the Quran and jihad,” he later said.

In his first year in the university, bin Laden met Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, another member of the Brotherhood, who would become his closest friend. Jamal Khalifa was a year older than bin Laden. A gregarious young man with an easy smile, Khalifa came from a family of modest means, although he was able to trace his lineage back to the Prophet, which gave him a standing in Islamic society quite apart from his financial status. He and Osama played soccer together. Bin Laden, being tall and fast, was the striker, always in front. The two young men soon became inseparable.

On weekends, they would head out into the desert between Jeddah and Mecca, usually staying at the bin Ladens’ family farm, an oasis called al-Barood. To keep the Bedouins from homesteading on his property, bin Laden erected a small cabin, little more than a kitchen and a toilet, and began farming. He kept a small herd of sheep and a stable of horses. Even in the summer he would cast off his shoes as soon as he arrived and walk barefoot through the scorching sand.