An Arabian Family in the American Century.
By Steve Coll.
Illustrated. 671 pp. The Penguin Press. $35.
Is Osama bin Laden a rebel against the Saudi Arabian ruling class or a model member of it? That question lurks behind “The Bin Ladens,” by the Pulitzer Prize-winning New Yorker writer Steve Coll. The world’s most famous terrorist owes his fortune and his standing to a family business that Coll calls “the kingdom’s Halliburton.” Like Halliburton, the Saudi Binladin Group specializes in gigantic infrastructure projects. Government connections are the key to the family’s wealth. So you would assume they would react with unmixed horror to a radical son, like the duchess in the Noël Coward song:
You could have pierced her with swords
When she discovered
Her youngest liked Lenin
And sold the Daily Worker near the House of Lords.
But Saudi Arabia, Coll shows, is a place where the interests of rulers and revolutionaries are less easy to distinguish.
Muhammad bin Laden, Osama’s father, emigrated from the canyons of the Hadhramawt, in present-day Yemen, in the 1920s. He arrived in Jidda, one-eyed and semiliterate, at a time when Saudi Arabia had hardly any paved roads and the king kept his treasury in a tin trunk. Muhammad was charismatic. His workers, with whom he prayed and sang at job sites, revered him. He was scrupulously honest, as Arabian lore holds Hadhramis to be, and his company keeps this reputation still. Most important, Muhammad would serve the greedy and capricious Saudi princes in ways that Bechtel and other foreign contractors balked at — doing humiliating jobs from digging gardens to fixing air conditioners. The grateful royals made him their main palace- and highway-builder in the boom years after the war. By the time Muhammad died in a plane crash in September 1967, his company was worth an estimated $150 million, and he had fathered 54 children by about 22 wives.
Those children, Osama included, grew up in the shadow of a court society. Royal favor was all. Since the Saud family sent its sons to Princeton and Georgetown, Muhammad educated many of his own sons in the West, too, starting with Salem, his impious and ribald successor. Coll’s account of Salem is doting. When the austere King Faisal was assassinated in 1975, the sybaritic King Fahd took power. Hedonism and consumerism became for Salem what piety had been for his father: common ground with the royal family. Knowledgeable about private planes, luxury cars and new gadgetry, Salem became, as Coll puts it, a “royal concierge.”
Salem was purposeful. Those royals he shopped for were the same ones who decided on lucrative construction contracts. Salem assigned each of his brothers a prince to cultivate, while he worked on accumulating powerful cronies in the United States. A wheeler-dealer, Jim Bath, who had served in the Texas Air National Guard with George W. Bush, was his route into the upper reaches of Texas politics — the Bushes, the Bentsens and particularly James Baker, later secretary of state, whom the bin Ladens’ lawyer called the family’s “favorite politician.” Since Salem’s own death in a plane crash in 1988, the family’s present patriarch, Bakr, has nurtured his American ties, both as an investor in the powerful Carlyle Group and as a donor to Jimmy Carter’s causes. The bin Ladens, Coll writes, came to own “an impressive share of the America upon which Osama declared war.”
Osama was timid. Coll suggests that he was haunted by the low status of his Syrian mother. An afternoon Islamic study group he joined during junior high school filled him with purpose, and eventually with anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism and an abhorrence of photography. These stances got little attention. They were just a more ardent version of what Saudi kids were taught anyway.
Politicized piety did not make Osama a black sheep. It made him an asset. In the mid-1980s, Fahd granted the bin Ladens a contract to redevelop — critics would say Americanize — the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. These projects replaced highway-building as the mainstay of the family income. They depended on the good graces of Saudi clerics and powerful princes like Prince Nayef, who later claimed the 9/11 attacks were a Zionist plot. Osama’s commitment to Muslim holy war impressed such people more than Salem’s bathroom humor. Far from hating the Saud family, Osama would fly into a fury if he heard someone question Fahd’s legitimacy. Even in 1990, Coll writes, he saw himself as “an international Islamic guerrilla leader who worked in service of his king.”
Coll shows that Osama’s efforts supporting the anti-Soviet mujahedeen in Afghanistan could never have been done on his own nickel. He inherited just 2.27 percent of his father’s fortune. What he had, though, was a court network — conservative princes, the company’s associates and the charitable funds of various elite families, including his own. He also had equipment. The bin Laden group was the largest owner of Caterpillar earthmovers in the world. Osama used them to fortify the caves that would shelter Arab and Afghan mujahedeen and, after 9/11, himself. Salem arranged shipments of anti-aircraft missiles. Khalid, a brother who worked in the company’s Cairo office, obtained Afghan visas for Egyptian radicals. The jihad was a family affair.
The question is whether it remained a family affair after Osama turned his sights on the United States. Coll did not crack the family’s inner circle, so his conclusions on the matter are provisional. But through government papers and interviews with various bin Laden associates, he gives us a judicious, painstaking and vivid picture of an exotic family pulled in two directions by world events. Occasionally, the picture is too vivid — there is more detail than most readers will need about Khaled bin Laden’s stud farm in Egypt, Khalil bin Laden’s Brazilian wife’s sister’s drug addiction and Yeslam bin Laden’s unsuccessful stock transactions.
Osama’s siblings repudiated his acts as early as 1994, but they left a door open to reconciliation. After 9/11, they seemed more interested in retaining legal counsel than in sharing information. Coll found allegations in a California custody case that there were scenes of celebration at the bin Laden compound in Saudi Arabia after the attacks. Coll does not believe any of the bin Ladens permitted to leave the United States on a chartered flight eight days after 9/11 had connections to radical Islam. He notes, though, that one who had possible connections — Omar Awadh — may not have been interrogated by the F.B.I.
Sept. 11 changed the family in two big ways: it made one of the sons into the hero of the Arab world, and it drove up the price of oil, igniting a construction boom. With oil topping $100 a barrel, the bin Laden group is thriving. It has 35,000 employees and expects to double in size in the coming decade. It is building airports in Egypt and elsewhere. In Mecca and Medina, it oversees vast real estate projects. “To please American audiences, the bin Ladens would have to seek forgiveness and denounce Osama,” Coll writes. “To please audiences in the Arab world, where the family’s financial interests predominantly lay, such a posture would be seen as craven.”
Seven years’ distance reveals a brutal reality. For both his family and his country Osama bin Laden’s attacks turned a profit.
Christopher Caldwell’s book on immigration, Islam and Europe will be published next spring.
