Understanding the Bin Ladens

a real pleasure to be able to have a discussion and a talk with two of our own today we have really two of the most important voices on what's going on in the Middle East on on thinking through questions of terrorism thinking about what kind of lens America should look through and looking at this region and to my right is a Pulitzer Prize winning author of course many of you know him as Washington correspondent for The New Yorker magazine former managing editor of the Washington Post he won the Pulitzer Prize for ghost wars the secret history of the CIA Afghanistan and bin Laden I'm sorry Afghanistan bin Laden the secret history of the CIA Afghanistan bin Laden from the Soviet invasion it was bin Laden in the title yeah oh I didn't realize excuse me I thought that was an error okay but ghost wars and and Steve of course is is our president and CEO here of the New America Foundation and is also co-director of our new terrorism initiative here within my program within the American strategy program to to his right we have Peter Bergen Peters of terrorism analyst for CNN the author of holy war Inc the bin Laden I know as well two very very important books on which much of Steve's new book the bin Laden's an Arabian family in the American Century which is already a best-seller and all of the big lists and Steve is happy after this to sign some books to those of you who'd like to have them we've arranged for politics and prose to have the books out there today and I think that this this book of course I'm biased and I'm saying this because my boss here also runs a good chance of winning awards right to you and huh well what we're going to do is have Steve share some thoughts about his book Peter Bergen is gonna offer some comments and then I'll help moderate a discussion in Q&A afterwards so without further ado please welcome Steve Cole thank you very much Steve and thank you all for coming on a day when it's not an obvious inside day but I'm particularly pleased to be here with Peter who has really become a good friend and also whose work was indispensable to the creation of this book as the acknowledgments and the footnotes make clear I think Peter is the preeminent biographer of Osama and knowing that he was out there working on his oral history actually shaped the way I researched this book figuring that he would cover hopefully ground and then I would derive the benefit of that work and so I do see this book as as very much rooted in in Peters own work so particularly glad to be sharing this hour with him I'll just talk for 15 or 20 minutes about where this book came from and what its purpose was as I got started and then perhaps try to give you a little bit of a flavor of the narrative in the hope that it will orient you to the book that you'll then read but as Steve said this book really followed on ghosts wars in in a sort of organic way in ghost wars I had tried to write about the antecedents of 9/11 as they were located in 20 years of u.s. foreign intelligence policy in Afghanistan and to some extent I had treated Osama bin Laden as a creature of the International Islamist radical movements after 1990s after 1979 and to some extent I had to an even greater extent I had treated him as a creature of the Afghan wars in that narrow and I had described a little bit of his relationship with Saudi intelligence and in his relations with the rest of the royal family but I really felt as I came out of that book that I had kind of bounced off Saudi Arabia even though I came and went to the kingdom I felt it was more complexity and more nuance about osama's origins there but even more broadly the generation to which he belonged that I had simply been unable to bring forward to a general readership and wanted to do more reporting about so as a younger person I had consumed a lot of books with titles like the Roosevelts or the Kennedys or the Rockefellers these kind of multi-generational family narratives that illuminated eras of political or economic history and it was only a couple of months after ghost' words that I was taking a walk one day and thought aha the bin Laden's a framework for a similar undertaking and the my goal actually from the beginning and throughout the project had not so much to do with Osama what I wanted to write about was Saudi Arabia and its experience of modernization first of all and he and to try to explore that subject through the narrative of the bin Laden family over a hundred years in all of its diversity and across all of that time and in and through that prism illuminates something fresh and specific and authentic about the Saudi royal family and the privileged elites that grew up around the royal family as particularly after the Second World War and to try secondly to describe some of the diversity of experience that the generation that Osama belonged to endured after the oil boom of the 1970s and 1980s this was a generation that experienced sudden wealth and was particularly disoriented about that wealth might purchase by way of identity and experience in a rapidly modernizing kingdom and I thought that the generation to which a sama belonged offered a way to describe and in sort of specific and accessible terms what the diversity of experiences felt like and consisted of and then finally I wanted to write about globalization in the Middle East through this family because of the bin Laden's in the end are a Saudi family only up to a point their origins in Yemen and their own purchase on global business and on the mobility of that modernization provided to elite select the bin Laden's meant that they were always a global family as much as a Saudi family and I think that is very much present you know Sambas identity as the leader of al-qaeda and as a as a terrorist and trying to describe what that experience of globalization felt like from the point of view of a generation coming of age in the kingdom but also what happened when you carried this identity out into Europe and the West or to the rest of the Arab world is part of what this story is all about so that that was the frame the narrative covers a hundred years and many characters and events and it's difficult to summarize in ten minutes but I'll try to give you a taste of three of the principal characters through whom the story is told first Osama's father Mohammed who created the fortunes second his eldest brother Salim who ran the family for twenty critical years as Osama between grew up between the ages of about ten and thirty during that period of usamos life the family was run by his eldest brother Salim and then finally I'll conclude with a couple of thoughts about Osama himself I did want by the way to reinterpret Osama in this book that was another of my purposes I would say the third in the order of priorities that I had I wanted to reinterpret him as a member of his own family and as a Saudi dissident because I just felt that as a compliment to other interpretations which I and others had offered in the past that there was a way at which his his identity as a bin Laden and his politics as a Saudi dissident particularly the 1990s filled out some of this picture that was my hypothesis certainly as I began to write so Mohammed bin Laden there's in these three characters Mohammed Salim and Osama there is I think a streak of charismatic genius that originates with the father and is in effect passed to his son Solomon who is a very westernized character and it takes expression in Solomon's life in a very peculiar and to Americans in to some extent familiar form and I think this streak of of intuition and and even genius is present in some of us honest talent as well though in a very refracted and distorted way and applied obviously two very different ends and I think that some of the narrative tracks this this this sort of energy because it is an unusually talented group not every bin Laden but these three in particular and and some others as well Mohammed bin Laden was essentially an orphan who was born in a famine stricken Canyon in southern Yemen in the HUD Rahman and who walked out with his brother Abdullah they belong to a very self-conscious International diaspora the HUD roomies are well known in the Islamic world for their global achievements in the pre-colonial and colonial period less well known in the West but they bear characteristics similar to the overseas Chinese and the Jewish Jewish Diaspora is that our best-known in our own cultural histories but they were achievers and very self-conscious so it wasn't entirely in a vacuum that Mohammed and Abdullah at about 14 made this migration in fact they were connected through this ad Rami diaspora with support that they could rely upon through their identity but they turned up in Saudi Arabia and Jeddah just in time for the Great Depression and it took about 15 years for Muhammad to really get himself organized he hustled at first slept on the ground taught himself to be a Mason a bricklayer started a small contracting company connected with a ramco-4700 BIA because the disruptions of the depression and the disruptions to see commerce during the Second World War had deprived the royal family of their own wealth for about 15 years and when it came in it came in as a all of all of a sudden and and the the Al Saud the Saudi royal family reacted to it the way lottery winners in her own society sometimes react to sudden wealth they sort of over interpreted the significance of this money and started spending it rather garishly on themselves and so the first wave of expenditure in Saudi Arabia between 1945 and the early 1950s was dominated by palace building rather than national infrastructure development and Mohammed bin Laden had this great intuition about how to ingratiate himself with the Saudi royal family and make himself their favored palace builder the the the Al Saud encouraged by the United States invited in international contracting corporations like Bechtel and others to start to build Saudi Arabia but these companies found that the idiosyncrasies of working with the Saudi royal family were considerable so they would start out on a project building something sensible like a road between Jeddah and Mecca to spead pilgrims to the Hajj the third week on the job after they'd imported their managers and their engineers and their bulldozers and their graters somebody would come from a nearby palace with a message which was you know his His Royal Highnesses refrigerator is broken can you send someone over to repair it and then two weeks later the message would come over His Royal Highness would like to borrow your a bulldozer because he wants to dig a swimming pool behind his palace and and it went on and on like though payments were laid Bardot was a common offer from the Saudi royals trading chicken farms for palaces and at a certain point Bechtel and German and British counterparts just concluded that life was too short to work in Saudi Arabia and that they could make more money elsewhere in the region and as they packed up and left and you see this again and again in the archives describing this in great detail Muhammad bin Laden was always there at the port waving them good luck and turning to the royal family in effect to say I'm here to finish the job and it was this gift that he had for working as a kind of flexible concierge service to the Saudi royal family on the one hand and at the same time organizing around him an extraordinarily diverse workforce and a very talented company that included engineers from Italy and accountants from the United States as early as 1952 he had agents on Broadway in New York sending him the very best equipment and and all sorts of other consumer goods from the United States and gradually from this beginning he built himself up until he became by the mid-1960s the sort of halliburton of Saudi Arabia in the sense that he had won the confidence of generations of rulers in the in the in the Saudi royal family who knew that he was discreet able to work on no bid contracts on sensitive defense and intelligence projects such as building defense infrastructure along Yemen border where none had previously existed and that he was reliable he was illiterate he had a single eye he had no formal training but he had a gift for intuitively deciphering how to solve complex engineering projects and also even more a gift for leading diverse workers in harsh conditions as he built up this fortune he was also privileged from the early 1950s by the royal family as the the only authorized contractor of the three holy cities of Mecca Medina and Jerusalem in the course of this research my researcher Robin Schulman and myself discovered all of the bid documents from his work in Jerusalem from the late 1950s 1960s really remarkable trove of materials describing that the depth and sustained nature of his involvement in renovation work on the site of the the Dome of the rock and the surrounding sanctuaries and he also owned the house and his Jerusalem as it turned out which was seized by Israeli land authorities after the 1967 war and so it turned out that in a technical and legal sense at least that bin Laden family has a claim of property return that that at least puts itself into the same position as many palestinians obviously there are Saudis very wealthy in Judah but nonetheless they do they did lose property and there's much else to say about Mohammed but I want to move quickly so I'll just observe that his something about his passing which occurred in September 1967 he had inspired by the example of the Saudi royal family married often he had 54 children by about twenty two wives twenty five sons and twenty-nine daughters now this was actually a fairly modest achievement in comparison to King Saud for example who had I think two hundred children or Abdulaziz who has about 60 and 45 acknowledged sons and at about a hundred children of his own in Muhammad bin Laden's case he had two senior wives to whom he remained married for fairly long periods of time as best the records show and then two more wives as permitted by Islamic law that he married and divorced serially and but whenever one of these wives became pregnant he fully enfranchised her as a legitimate wife and the child whether son or daughter as a legitimate heir and that was the circumstances in which Osama was born I came to understand that his circumstances as a single child of a short relatively short term wife was actually a fairly common condition among the sons of Mohammed bin Laden there were at least a dozen or 15 other singleton children that I could identify and that they were all treated as fully enfranchised and fully legitimate and we can come back to the circumstances of usamos childhood later if you're interested but in September of 1967 Muhammad bin Laden was flying to one of his work sites on the Yemen border with his American pilot at the helm in a twin-engine beach aircraft he was the first private Saudi to own airplanes in outside the royal family in Saudi Arabia he had a jet as well as a number of propeller aircraft and this pilot veteran of the American air force was attempting to land at a makeshift desert strip marked by rocks in a bowl and as he came in for the approach cross wind blew and he miscalculated his angle of descent tried to pull up and go around miscalculated again stalled at about 750 feet above the desert fell crashed and burned and Mohammed bin Laden and the pilot and everyone else aboard died in the fire at the time of his death in September 1967 Muhammad's eldest son sollum was perhaps 22 or 23 years old and he was attending boarding school in England where he was playing in a rock and roll band called the echoes his bandmates included someone who would go on to marry the country lute country singer Emmylou Harris solemn had a little sports car that he kept outside his boarding school called coppered glee which he and his friends would take in to London despite the school's rules against such things and solemn home from that school to try to lead the family with no real training but with some of his father's charisma that that proved to be a source of considerable success over the next 20 years as he led the family solemn is difficult to describe he is a sort of larger-than-life character as a researcher once I I thought there would be contrasts in the lifestyles of the bin laden's but I had no idea about solemn when I really began and he was from a researchers point of view the gift that just kept on giving the more I reported he was a rock and roll enthusiast a pilot and adventurer a traveller businessman he loved to perform and to sing at at his English boarding schools he had been drawn of course into the choir which he referred to as the group sing and there he had acquired an enthusiasm for performance that never left him he travelled with a briefcase with about $250,000 in cash in it and when he found himself in front of any stage at a wedding or a nightclub or Oktoberfest in Germany an Academy Awards party he would unfold the briefcase take out a few hundred dollars pay the bandleader for access to the stage during the next break get up there and typically his repertoire began with House of the Rising Sun in seven languages he also sang a lot of folk songs if you were here now he would leave everybody in on top of old smokey or she'll be coming round the mountain when she comes at Oktoberfest once in Germany he bought his way onto the stage and led 700 drunk Munich errs I don't know what you call mute occurs but people from Munich in German folk songs that he had just memorized on the flight in from Paris but he managed to get everybody singing them and he used this way of living to equalize his negotiations with chief executives of Fortune 1000 companies with whom bin Laden's were now often partners in business and these were accomplished many a Porsche General Electric Volvo many other companies and he was often negotiating business deals with men in their 50s with vast experience here he was in his 30s and so he used his personality to try to level the playing field so for instance he would only negotiate about business matters while lying in bed and he would call the CEOs to his bedroom either in the hotel or at home and he's fully clothed but lying there watching television and and then having them sit at the foot of the bed but he would also bring them into meetings such as the one attended by the CEO of Bell Canada who came to Jeddah to negotiate what was then the largest telecommunications contract that Bell Canada ever had outside of Canada and at the climactic event he invited the CEO to his house and he was expecting a business meeting and instead asalaam had organized a big party where he had the CEO lead a long session of Farakka in French and then only afterwards negotiated with him asalaam had a an estate outside of Disney World at one point fearing revolution in Saudi Arabia he bought plots of land for all of his brothers and sisters named each of them after a flower and decided that they would build a refuge for the bin Laden family next to Disney World where they could all sort of find another magical Kingdom after the one in Saudi Arabia collapsed and he had a place in Texas an apartment in Manhattan he loved to buy electronics on 47th Street in New York because he prided himself after he understood at a certain point how things worked on never paying retail and he would fill his Bach 111 with hundreds and hundreds of the latest electronic gadgets and shipped them back to Saudi Arabia to hand out to the princes that was the way he curried favor with the royal family anyway he was very successful and what's remarkable about him is that he collaborated very actively with Osama during all of this time in the 1980s he he traveled to Pakistan to provide Osama with support cache publicity made videotapes of Osama on the Afghan frontier he'd often I've with this completely shaggy entourage of his pilots and mechanics and rock and roll musicians basically if you wanted to travel with solemn you had to play an instrument and and then you had to also be able to fly a plane and if you so he had all these pilots who played drums or guitar or bass who flew around with him and he would just bring them to meet Osama on these missions to the frontier and I think like Peter I'd often wondered what Americans besides Peter or Osama had ever met and there's a clear record I think to date that he never dealt directly with CIA officers in the field for instance so he didn't have meetings with American serving officers wearing tennis shoes that his proximity to CIA support for the Afghan mujahideen was considerable so in a political military sense the fact that he didn't actually deal directly with CIA officers probably doesn't make a lot of difference but it's always been a specific question what Americans did he ever meet well it turned out that he met various ultralight aircraft salesmen and mechanics and and others from San Antonio who flew up with solemn - to meet Osama for the purposes of passing money to him or checking in with him and seeing what he needed there's this great scene where solemn invites Osama to a luxury hotel in London in 1986 in order to arrange the sale of surface-to-air missiles to him and solemn shows up at the meeting with his sort of hippyish German and Swedish friends and they're going into the suite where Osama is waiting to negotiate with the arms broker and solemn terms to his friends and says oh I forgot to tell you my brother he's really really religious so everybody you know no jokes put your cigarettes out and we'll be out of here in 45 minutes and that was the nature of the relationship it was very a very close one asalaam in 19 may 1988 attended the wedding of a son of one of his American pilots in San Antonio Texas at the Saturday wedding he sang his usual repertoire of songs and led the group in various folk singing and the next morning on Sunday after the wedding he woke up with nothing to do called his pilot friends they said oh let's go fly ultralights and kill some time have some breakfast they went out to an ultralight recreational park outside of San Antonio called Kitty Hawk field of dreams and in a freak accident solemn got into a an ultralight clear day light winds took off about 500 feet and leveled out this is a guy with thousands of hours of experience flying leer Jets Ibaka 111 s Hawker Siddeley 's all kinds of aircraft very talented pilot and he leveled off and just inexplicably fluidness and powerlines got caught up tilted down fell to the earth and died just about instantly may 1988 leadership of the family once again is decapitated and it was only a few months later that Osama Restless with his own ambitions formed al Qaeda formally at meetings in Peshawar so I'll just conclude very briefly by reflecting a little bit on Osama on this light and and particularly asked the question in what way is Osama himself an expression of his membership in the bin Laden family in other words water had the characteristics that can be attributed to his to inspiration or example or learning or or other experience that he had as a member of his own family and I think I would just list four very briefly one his ability to lead diversity I think Osama bin Laden is particularly talented and and actually al Qaeda is a distinctive success among Islamist organizations and even among terrorist organizations writ large wrink to include secular leftist organizations in its ability to attract and hold such a diverse following usamos al Qaeda's followers are not just Saudis they're not just Egyptians and Yemenis they're not just Arabs from Palestine and Lebanon and Libya and Algeria there are also Filipinos and Indonesians and Bangladeshis and Indians and Pakistanis and Afghan and Africans and Americans and Europeans and this example of diversity unified in the name of Islam in pursuit of a kind of imagined community is certainly President Chen osama's boyhood in the example of Mecca after all the Hajj is such an event where Islam's diversity is unified in an annual ritual but so was Muhammad bin Laden's company such an example Mohammed bin Laden's workforce organized in these desert camps when Osama and his brothers were boys was remarkable for its diversity it wasn't just there were very few indigenous Saudi laborers so there were Yemenis and Palestinians and many from all over the Arab world also from all over Africa and then the executive ranks and the engineering ranks were from all over Europe and Mohammed had this this gift for leading and organizing such a diverse group I see his inspiration in osama's own town and also in his attitude his ability to conceal II convey no discrimination on the basis of language national origin or race I think the second aspect of Osama's talent that is traceable to his bin Laden Asst is his embrace of modernization and the technologies of globalization his innovations as a terrorist are directly connected to his recognition of the of the power of technologies that cross borders that are blitter eight obstacles erected by States his first great achievement using a satellite phone to attack two US embassies simultaneously in Africa while never leaving Afghanistan has embraced very early on of video and media his anticipation he didn't just use satellite television as it became too dominant in the Arab world he anticipated it he was making viral self-produced fundraising videos in the early 1980s 20 years before YouTube and he was a gadget hound and and this comfort with the technologies of modernization is clearly something that Solomon many others around him and his family to him third he was a marketer he had a business sense all along he was a junior executive in the bin Laden company as part of what they did was market brands in to Saudi Arabia and what is al Qaeda but sort of a brand that he's created with a very self-conscious a set of mechanisms and talents and finally I though he's much more shy than either his father or his eldest brother he's nonetheless a performer and you can see this again and again in his role as the leader of al Qaeda Peter has this amazing story which I often retell in some of in LA and I know about his the wedding that he staged for his son in Afghanistan in 2001 where he had he invited his mother and his stepbrother but he also had a whole bunch of Taliban guests and of course the Taliban's attitude towards technology is completely different from his own and but like any father he wanted the wedding video taped so he had a friend and Al Jazeera cameraman come and he basically said to the guy all right I want a video of this but but hide it under your robes don't let any of my Taliban guests see you and while the guy was videotaping he stood up and he recited this rather a sort of despicable poem celebrating his attack on the USS Cole a few months before and when he was done he comes off and he grabs his cameraman friends is coming come over here they go ahead and kind of hide from the Taliban they go inside Samet grabs the guy's video cameras flips up the viewer rewinds looks at his own performance and says I really didn't do that very well I'm gonna do a second take and then he goes back out he does he does the poem again for so that it's so that it looks better on the video and so there's there's some line I think between that and Solomon and his performance of House of the Rising Sun in seven one thank you I'm gonna talk very briefly just a few thoughts on on Steve's book the first thing to notice at michiko the New York Times book reviewer who is if she doesn't like your book your book is an incident non bestseller gave she doesn't like many books she loved Steve's book and she gave it a rave review appropriately when Steve left the Washington Post to become a full-time writer at The New Yorker I said knowing that he was the one of the most accomplished if not the most accomplished journalist of his generation in this country I I said to him I hope you don't write anything that I'm removed the interested in Steve says something very non-committal and now he produces this anyway likely we're friends and colleagues and anyway I wanted to just think of trying a couple of themes that jumped out of Steve's friends at presentation I think it's important to notice that there was a certain conjunction of things that haven't happened all the same time when Muhammad Muhammad bin Laden left Yemen for Saudi Arabia he arrives in and Steve can correct me if the dates here are off he arrives in in Saudi Arabia in 1929 1930 the bin Laden family company is founded in 1931 the kingdom itself for Saudi Arabia the third version of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is founded in thirty two and standard oil cans its first contract with the Saudi Kingdom for oil exploration two years later so all these things happen at the same time Hamad bin Laden was in a sense quite lucky he arrived in Saudi Arabia at exactly the right moment another thing that I think emerges out of Steve's book is the question of how you know there's a constant question of most academics about you know who becomes a terrorist and why well we have a controlled experiment here Osama bin Laden has fifty three sisters and brothers neither none of whom chose to go into his line of business and so making any kind of statements in a sense about who's likely to embark on a path of violence it becomes very clear in the bin Laden family this was kind of a rather unusual path I mean bin Laden certainly Osama bin Laden certainly had a number of siblings some of whom were more religious than others but but no one else took up this violent path and I think there's a quote in Steve's book from I believe somebody in the FBI who says they're millions of bin Laden's along in on the planet 99.9% of them aren't militants and just take the take the contrast between Salman bin Laden and Osama bin Laden you realize how different families the same family can produce to two very different outcomes one thing by the way this evite is I think in the crash in Mohammed behind it bin Laden's crash the pilot the course was American and one of the one of the themes of Steve's book is the extent to which aviation the death of both his brother the most important brother and also the father took place in in plane crashes and then of course you have 9/11 and it's a it's hard to make sort of it's very hard to psychologize about a sama bin Laden because we don't really know what he thinks but clearly the role of of aviation crashes have played such an important role in his life I'm glad Steve mentioned the fact that Mohammed bin Laden had a house in Jerusalem because I think it's been kind of common wisdom that the sama bin Laden grabbed onto the israeli-palestinian issue late in the game in fact sandy Berger wrote a chapter in a book to this effect I think this is completely wrong bin Laden is a very religious it was a very religious teenager and if you go back to the 96 fatwa where he first declared war against the United States he says I feel the loss of our codes in my intestines the loss of the the the mosque in in eastern Jerusalem in 1967 that's a pretty strong statement in my view and I think that and I think Steve's book confirms this this is a family with long interests in in Jerusalem and a very strong interest in this question one other point coming out of the death of Solomon bin Laden in may 1988 as Steve pointed out a few months later al Qaeda is founded if Salim is still been around I think certainly people that Noah sama that I talked to said that the one person that could have got bin Laden ought to go ahead with this al-qaeda project would have been solemn bin Laden who would have just gone over to Pakistan and dragged him back to Saudi Arabia by the scruff of his neck but with but with the death of his older brother there really wasn't anybody in the family with the the kind of authority that could stop him and one final thought there's been a debate about how organized al-qaeda has been we've got a new book by Marc Sageman who spoke here a few weeks ago called leaderless jihad Jason Birk who's written a book about al-qaeda saying al-qaeda is really something that was dreamt up by American prosecutors in the u.s. embassy trial embassy trial as a way of sort of producing an organization which they could prosecute just as they prosecuted mafia organizations in the past one thing that I think emerges very clearly from Steve's book is is the question of the organizational skills of the family and of course bin Laden one of the man's aliases was the director he started economics of public administration at the University of King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah he founded al Qaeda with multiple business committees a mountain with multiple committees military business media and religion and we know since the fall of the Taliban that al Qaeda had application forms to join the to join the group they had vacation policies slightly more generous in the vacation policy I enjoy in CNN and this was a highly organized group and I don't think that's an accident as Steve as Steve has pointed out this is somebody who came from one of the largest businesses in the Middle East who spent a fair amount of time working in this business and the fact that he organized al Qaeda in quite an organized manner I don't think is particularly surprising so with that we'll open it to Q&A take questions to both but let me let me sort of propose both a reaction and a question to Steve call if I may I just got back a number of us from the new recommendation went to Saudi Arabia and Steve's book came out literally three or four days before a departure and so the the book itself is going to be in prison yeah I was worried about about this and didn't quite understand there was a lot of excitement in Saudi you in some quarters of Saudi Arabia in the book about the book and some trepidation but since no one had read it they asked me what I thought and I've decided not to read it before I went to keep myself you know in case of you know when questioned when it I mean the really interesting question is to what degree is it legitimate and I think it is legitimate but to look at a prism to look at Saudi Arabia through the prism of bin Laden I think Steve has pulled off a very interesting trick a good trick in this because we as Americans have been forced to think about Saudi Arabia because of bin Laden in 9/11 we should have been thinking about it more broadly before it and they ask we may need to ask the question of why weren't we I was in a dinner last night with this the chairman and CEO of Saudi Aramco and I was told in no uncertain terms at this dinner for 400 people at the Library of Congress was off the record it's impossible to do that at the library but it gave one a sense that this magnificent dinner and frankly a very impressive speech that there's a lack of interest in being known at some level in Saudi Arabia that made to some degree the prism of looking at Saudi Arabia through the eye through the prism of terrorism and thus through the bin Laden bin Laden but then Steve brings it around to look at this tremendous diversity and modernity expressed in this family which also is a very vital part of the Saudi society and I saw that in Saudi Arabia I saw a lot more modernity and a lot more liberalism than I had anticipated or expected and I'm interested in to conceive is that how you sort of thought you were telling the story that we have had a distorted view of Saudi Arabia misunderstood Saudi Arabia or didn't look in neglected Saudi Arabia and in fact we've been forced to look at it look at bin Laden and terrorism because of the shock of 9/11 and what you've tried to do is leaven that out somewhat and show the diversity in scope and its really the sort of a broader you know Saudi expose and and just one last piece I think this is important the other thing that came up when I was over there when I asked people specifically about bin Laden is the number of Saudis who to blame Egypt for him they said he of course is a Saudi Arabians isn't but he doesn't the DNA that sent him off on the course was an Egyptian derivative not derivative of any of the battle between modernity and terrorism and whatnot inside of you I'm interested in how the Egypt peace of this fits if at all well I didn't enter into this project for the purposes of demonstrating one thing or another I wanted to just try to to break through some of the barriers to to research and writing about Saudi Arabia that the Saudis themselves erect as your dinner ground full suggests this is a the hardest place in the world I've ever worked and I've worked a lot of places and and and it's it's a place apart because it doesn't have the points of entry that a researcher an honest minded empirical researcher normally relies upon so you don't have really a free press in Saudi Arabia you have some journalists some of whom are have various degrees of independent mindedness but we're really very constrained you don't have a political opposition you don't have political discourse you don't have free scholarship you don't have human rights groups to speak of you have people who are attempting to create these things now but but in a very pressured environment and so I think that it's it is a difficult environment to to try to humanize and to make authentic and specific and and my objective was to try to be specific because so many of the ways in which we see Saudi Arabia have been shaped by cliches you know that political cartoons dating back to the 1970s of the long chins you know sort of man pouring gasoline into our Pig offend American cars and of course Saudi Arabia is full of diversity and full of interest but but as a researcher being able to describe that as a challenge and that I guess that was one of my objectives was just to try to be more sort of specific about Saudi experience through as Peter put at the controlled experiment experiment of a particular generation of a particular family that happened to include somebody who changed the course of history but but who also was surrounded by others who made who followed very different paths simultaneously and yet where they were bound together by a great sense of belonging for all of their diversity they were always been waters in a very powerful way and of course the family is the most important unit of politics and in the Arabian Peninsula you know as to the Egyptians I think there's both truth and Saudi defensiveness in this line of argument Saudi defensiveness of course because it would be very convenient if the world would just recognize that they weren't responsible at all for any of the theological and political views that somea holds but truth because from the very beginning at his prep school was where asama was radicalized he attended a day school in Jeddah the only one at the time shortly after his father's death he enrolled there the only one at the time that that aspired to international standards the curriculum was set up by Brits the boys assembled within blue blazers and gray flannel slacks each morning and the teachers included Englishman and Irishmen as well as Syrian and Syrians and Egyptians and the teachers from Syria and Egypt were members of the Muslim Brotherhood by and large and that that was an anti colonial Egyptian rooted is an anti colonial Egyptian rooted international Islamist movement with both proselytizing and violent aspects Hamas is essentially the Brotherhood today in Palestine for example and his samus physical education teacher Assyrian who is a exiled member of the Brotherhood indoctrinated him and a few other elite boys into a study group but essentially led Osama to become a brother and so he was not a he was not politicized by the Saudi religious establishment exclusively though that was also an influence upon him but he was politicized to a considerable extent by these exiled members of the Brotherhood and then once he got to Afghanistan he connected to other members of Egyptian Brotherhood derived Radical factions with similar kinds of teachings so that's that's the basis for the Saudi argument it's rooted in truth but it's not it does it by no means an exclusive explanation of the course of usamos radicalization over the over the whole of the twenty let me let me open the floor now yes sir if you can identify yourself what do you count for us not having brought bin Laden to justice number one what do you count for the staggering silence about this and what prospects justice Rumsfeld was asked the same question some years back he said the world is a big place and that's actually true I mean we know where bin Laden is we probable most certainly in the Northwest Frontier performance of Pakistan that's like no it's saying I know somebody's in Virginia it's not a particular set of directions to find somebody so forty thousand square miles some of the most in this bit of all terrain in the world bin Laden you usually had cash people three ways one is signals intelligence bin Laden isn't talking on her cell phone or Sat phone somebody drops a diamond on on you to catch it to get a reward the people in his circle aren't motivated by money or you make mistake human beings make mistake is inevitable bin Laden will make a mistake and he's in an interest in cash twenty two you can say nothing can become an historical figure or he can continue continues to say something and he opens themselves to detection because every time a tape is released a courier has to take it somewhere whether it's on this yearís Bureau or whether it's an internet website what are the likelihood that we'll find him in the next several years I think the likelihood is actually extremely low will we find him in the next 20 years it's plausible bin Laden is 50 this year now that I'm 45 I think about as being a relative young man he's got he's not gonna die of natural causes anytime soon and unfortunately he's going to be around influencing what happens in the world you had this movement for the foreseeable future questions yes Diane thank you um first of all I just Diane Pearlman I just realized it's 20 years since his brothers that may have a v8 so I heard that his mother was sort of humiliated or in a lesser position and exiled and as we learned from Reverend Wright last week you know you don't say nothin bad about my mama or like the dozens so I wonder you know what you know about that and if any like the humiliation might have had an effect yeah yeah it's I don't think so but it's but there was a cycle psychological environment surrounding his childhood that was intense and interesting but maybe in a different way his mother was a child 14 or 15 years old member of a very poor family in coastal Syria when her family for reasons that are not entirely clear but appear to be influenced by transactional factors of some sort perhaps the promise of employment for sons and brothers perhaps other considerations handed her at 15 as a prospective wife to the traveling businessman Mohammed bin Laden who was perhaps three times her age when they when they were joined she followed him became pregnant with Osama and then was divorced by him about a year or so after Osama was birth now as I said this was not an unusual narrative in Mohammed bin Laden's life and he did recognize her as a legitimate wife and he and franchised a sum as a fully legitimate son in fact he was even more enfranchised in the family businesses it turned out than some of his brothers I assume by choice that he made as he grew up but after the divorce Mohammed bin Laden arranged for her remarriage to a mid-level executive in his own company and she then entered into what became a monogamous Union with this new husband Osama stepfather and Osama moved with his mother into this step family and this monogamous Union produced three or four children four children I think three brothers and sister at least maybe another sister and they lived in a fairly suburban ordinary in a Saudi context step family but nuclear household with the television playing bonanza and family serials from the United States and so but what's a stahma status in this family he enters with this teenaged bride who has been essentially passed from one man to another with her son as essentially the source of all of her wealth and privilege because it was a psalmist status as the legitimate heir of Muhammad that was the source of income in this new step family he received hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in dividends beginning in his teens and he was the source of access to the bin Laden fortune and so he had this kind of insider outsider status in his own family the golden child very intense special relationship with his mother an accommodating relationship with his very sweet tempered passive stepfather by all accounts but one that was also distant so it's a very interesting portrait but but one that's not that of an outcast other questions yes in a recent trip doing research on the tricorder area I just until for the pursue and see that elastic and he's becoming part of the Lord of the trap of the TVA there are some other not in visited to market our mosque in 40 pursue shortly before 9/11 I have not believed that for a moment have you found any record of this that he was in Latin America try to sanitize particularly important so the question for the cameras is there any evidence that Osama bin Laden was in Latin America across the thighs in a mosque before 9/11 thank you no other questions comments yes feel free to use your lungs more loudly and alive we don't have a microphone right don't you speak to the natural talents of other main bin Laden figures to what extent is the u.s. interested in the affairs of Muhammad's grandchildren interesting so the question is really to what degree is the United States interested in the Orions of the grant us administration what happened well samus sons are of interest because several of them remain in exile and seemed to be affiliated with his cause though he he wrote this will in the dark hours of December 2001 when he thought he was going to die or be captured advising his children that they did not that they should not follow him into a life of exile in Jihad nonetheless in the period of recovery that he's enjoyed since then it seems that several of his sons have remained committed in some respect to his cause though in some cases it's not clear where they are but some are out there presumably in the pack Afghan border areas at least two or three as to the rest of the bin Laden's no I think actually the younger generation which numbers well up over a hundred of course 54 children now all in their 50s and 60s virtually all of them have had families of their own now many of those children some of those children were more in the United States when their parents were college students have u.s. passports they're generally more comfortable coming and going from the states some as brothers and sisters it pretty much stayed away since 9/11 but the younger ones come around them and when I was lecturing on this book tour in London some of them even turned up at LSE audience oh they're you know they're there all over the place and I think comfortable in a global environment any questions yes writers are there any of them in lobbies you would consider their religious devotion equating osama's and their interpretation of Islam taking did any family members of Osama bin Laden sticking well none of them entered into violence but many of them were quite devoted to their faith and lived a creed of sort of Puritan interpretation of an Islamic life that was similar to a psalmist during his teenage years one of his sisters married his friend Jamal Khalifa at a time when they were both involved in the anti-soviet phase of the Afghan war a couple of his sisters are reckoned to be the ones who remained closest to him during the 80s at least and into the 90s some of his brothers are also very devoted to Islam in their lifestyles and of course like in the West over the course of a lifetime people's relationship with their faith changes so some started out with very secular choices and then ended up coming back to a to an equally ardent devotion to Islam living in Mecca and Medina and and so yes it's in that 54 it's it's like there's a spectrum and on a sama side of the spectrum he's not alone okay I'm gonna put the coats just a follow-up question I think is there a mistake in sort of a myth that among not bin Laden but bin Laden's followers that that religion is a driver when I was in Saudi Arabia we were given access in a presentation on on some fascinating empirical assistant assessments and studies of terrorists al-qaeda terrorists and others that essentially the Saudi establishment had rolled out there were two primary studies one which looked at essentially followers you know the troops in the in the process and others who were sort of ringleaders and and really involved and you could see very distinctive differences in everything from their house and you know how he what what family circumstances they had their education levels but it became very and their religious devotion and it was very clear that the jihadist crowd were those that were more religiously inspired then you look at the others and it looks like any kind of complex social myths misfit that are more largely complex brilliant thugs that are thug would be thugs in any system and so one of the questions that I have in terms you know and maybe this is as much to Peter as well is is that I I think that this material is very true yeah it was accurate was true but but that must mean that that bin Laden and Zawahiri in the management of what they were doing were bringing together with people who were not religious zealots in terms of the management and structure of what they're doing and there were particularly sixty people in this various study I I think none of whom are alive any longer but nonetheless that you know the outcomes the research that they did on these people are quite fascinating so what kind of deals personal deals did Osama is our here II and others have to do to sort of animate I mean these are the top-tier bad guys in al Qaeda are who aren't religiously motivated well the the Saudi data the Saudis like a lot of other governments are looking at this question in a very kind of rigorous way and they're seeing in the second generation of al Qaeda recruits in the kingdom but they're much less religious they're much more criminal they're not really reading religious texts they're reading detective novels and these kinds of things so that is true and that is also phenomena of course we've seen in the West which agreed was a small-time hood Jose but the years a small-time you know so at the lower levels yes the followers maybe no that is in a different context they would have joined you know The Weather Underground or some other organization but bin Laden Ayman al-zawahri themselves I mean to say you know people talk about the root causes of terrorism this is not ethically PC things to say but it needs to be said which is you can't if bin Laden was here he would you were asked him what's this about he would say it's about the defense of true Islam myself and my friend Ayman al-zawahri are part of thank are actually fighting for the future of Islam and they see themselves exclusively in religious terms and when you know when they released these statements with all the squiggly bits that we don't read well the squiggly bits which was a quote from the Koran are actually what are the most important bits for bin Laden this is a religious war and for the upper reaches of this organization I think its general principle they see themselves as doing God's will and if they didn't do this that God would punish them that was actually Jamal Khalifa who Steve mentioned mask Jamal Khalife of what is the sama really doing here because Jamal Khalifa who's now dead he was killed in Madagascar last year the key question this is Jamal Khalifa was a psalmist best friend at university he married the psalmist closes sister I was him what is it about us on what is he really doing he's and Jamal Khalifa said it he feels like he is doing God's will and if he doesn't do what what God is asking him to do that he will be punished in the next life and I thought that was the most accurate explanation of what a psalm word is driving a summer I think you very hard to explain him otherwise yeah I I agree with that and I think it's president in osama's own writings and statements again and again and again I mean when he when he speaks to the West he sometimes speaks about ripped from the headlines political subjects and can sound for a paragraph or two like a reassuringly familiar political dissident and I think there's a tendency to overemphasize that aspect of his discourse because it is the most comprehensive but to his Western listeners but the fullness of his text emphasizes his millenarian ideas to an equal or greater extent and it's it's not he's a very specific calling that he describes himself drawn to and it's a it has a narrative arc that ends at the end of human time with with Judgment Day where we're all of true Islam will be called and that that he believes that his motivation is to draw his followers and as many Muslims to that righteous hour as he can and and that's the purpose of his Vanguard it's not to create a particular government that he wants to be prime minister of it is it has this very consistent millenarian narrative and that's a kind of difficult thing for for his Western audience sometimes to listen to her grasp and you can mock him as in his last video statement when he essentially went through a whole litany of here-and-now political grievances and then calmly explained that the best response that American voters could undertake would not be to support this candidate or that but for everyone simply to convert to Islam I mean you know that that's really where he's coming from in his own in his own narrative and I mean why I ask the question is more he has no problem realizing that the character profile of those who are animating his agenda are essentially criminals now but he's he sees himself as a teacher and and a religious teacher and a moral teacher and of course from the very beginning not only in the second generation he's had lots of people who are more politically motivated than religiously motivated people who are thugs who are more drawn to the glamour of violence and the summer camp atmosphere of a jihadi exercise and he's always it's been the role of Al Qaeda to offer religious and moral instructions in these people and to draw them in thank you Cuneo Kikuchi it's about the statute physical stature as a short guy getting sore they're all snow it is about six foot six 1299 centimeters and that would make him stand out I think the Africans are not very tall people sorry what is your take on isn't it doesn't it make him easier to be found one and are there other brothers and so did hack height matter I think he's not as tall as six six I think our friend Larry Wright made a big point about insisting that he was 6 1 or 6 - I don't know I mean I think that he's not he's you know he's over six feet but maybe not six six but the there are many bin Laden brothers who are notably tall though his father wasn't particularly yes so if he had access to a nuclear bomb would he use it I know the answer is yeah of course I mean I mean they've made it the doctrine that we're oh there were four million deaths including children two million children because of our sposa crimes in the Muslim world so you know luckily the likelihood of al-qaeda have getting a nuclear device anytime in the next several decades I think is pretty low gilligan osama do we know yeah they they well the depends on what Brotherhood you're talking about but generally I mean because now they're sort of you know there's the Egyptians the Egyptians have broken with E I J that Islamic Egyptian Islamic Jihad which is Zawahiri and company's faction and they have such a parochial sort of deathmatch struggle that I think you know it's not so much purely ideological as it is also personal and historical but you know the big difference between the Brotherhood generally and al-qaeda is that first the Brotherhood has at least a substantial proselytizing evolutionary idea of its political goals and and then secondly its members tend even when they are interested in expedient revolutionary objectives they're they're interested in particular territory to a much greater extent than them certainly the al-qaeda that evolved after 1988 became much more of what interested in what the anthropologist Benedict Anderson labels the imagined community although a faithful Muslim wouldn't regard it as imagined but the imagined space global space of Islamic lands and it's the extraterritorial yes sir you're gonna speak loudly name's Colin Baker mr. Bergin man I've heard this story about how the security service really wants to get some they're gonna get unless he is back you another which organizations outside of all kind of helping which security service would be helping well look it goes back to I mean I'll give you three examples of why that that doesn't necessarily make sense how do Escobar it was well-known that Pablo Escobar lived in Medellin and it took two years for a massive Colombian military and CIA help to find him similarly we knew that Mohamed Aidid was in Mogadishu he there were 20,000 American troops looking for him and 20,000 troops from other countries and they never found him so it's very hard to find somebody if they're not making mistakes he's been on being helped by some security service I don't think so is the Pakistani government unwilling or uncapable incapable of going after him possibly you know but it's a hard target yeah I think that there are a whole complicated set of incentives and motivations that have built up inside the Pakistani security services in since 9/11 that have led to open admissions such as that by President Musharraf a couple of years ago they stopped looking and I don't and I there are some in the European security services who believe that even the for a while there there was a kind of informal sense among both the Saudi and Pakistani governments that stability in and a kind of slow death of the hunt was better than a sudden disruptive capture or kill and that may also have been a man factor but it wasn't in any sense a conspiracy more than just a set of attitudes and incentives that ran away from from actually finding him yes my name is Thomas read one of his last statements been that and get a couple of surprising things in Korea no I'm Chomsky that was a speech depression he said the Holocaust wouldn't have happened in these numbers things like that it sounded basically basically like the globalization quit now why is he well I I think he's got a lot of time on his hands he's reading a lot of books globalization is a big subject in the books that he's reading I my own reading of him as someone who like Peter has spent way too many hours reading his own essays and pamphlets and and statements is that this is not particularly where his talent lies international political analysis he he he has talents I've tried to suggest some of them and I don't mean to diss him by by observing that this is perhaps not his strength so he basically one of his patterns is that he's very opportunistic about argument so whatever is in the in the sort of water he'll pick up and try to sort of pick up that vernacular and use it in his own pamphleteering yeah but I but yes this was notable his picking up on kind of critic criticisms of globalization and trying to adapt them to his own yes ma'am essays me of the West had bin Laden company is it business as usual for the bin Laden company and what it doesn't have a public standing of it so the question is what impact has been Osama bin Laden had on the bin Laden family's fortunes inside Saudi Arabia well I mean you know obviously their their name has acquired notoriety in Europe in the United States where many of them previously had many relationships and connections but in Saudi Arabia they have not suffered for Osama's actions they've not been punished by the Saudi royal family indeed they've joined many other business families in prospering from the big infrastructure investments that the Saudi government is making off of $100 barrel oil their most of these contracts that I came across fairly recently was after al Qaeda launched an aborted uprising in Saudi Arabia and the Saudi government cracked down they let a very fast-paced fast turnaround billion dollar plus contract to build more prisons in the kingdom and the bin Laden's won that contract so they were working both sides of the of the Revolution in a sense and but as to the kind of cultural environment that they've had to live in you know obviously one in which fear has been a dominant experience of being a bin Laden after 9/11 fear of American a reaction fear of when there was those who were in the United States a vigilante attacks but also fear of becoming a target of al Qaeda of just kind of getting in the wrong crosshairs and I think they've been caught between competing attitudes towards Osama at least initially after 9/11 and much of Saudi Arabia Osama was not reviled the way he was reviled by his victims and so in the first couple of years he was seen as a kind of folk folk hero figure in sections of the kingdom and bin Laden's were wary about alienating his supporters as much as they were wary about dealing with the reaction of his I want to bring this fascinating form to a close so that Steve has time to sign some books for those who would like to get them but I want to ask one final question in in your book you highlight that the social contract between bin Laden and the Taliban was in part based upon bin Laden's ability to deliver money to keep the camps and keep training and about 20 million dollars a year as I read it and and so there was a financial aspect to this when you look at the the turf today you see Iran for instance playing both sides of Afghanistan helping to support the Taliban on one side also funding Karzai's government and Karzai's needs and and it raises the question two parts one is bin Laden having any would you imagine it what's that what's the nature of bin Laden's contract now with the Taliban and secondly can you penetrate that relationship can the Iranians penetrate that relationship with creating alternative or conflicting dependencies because I wouldn't imagine that Iran and bin Laden would be great allies well I think the best estimate of the relationship between al Qaeda leadership and Taliban leadership on the Pakistan side of the afghan-pakistan border is one of distinct but accommodating leadership groups where aims sometimes overlap and sometimes diverge that has been a pattern broadly speaking in the al-qaeda Taliban relationship my sense from talking to you know interlocutors with the militants in Pakistan is that both organizations jealously guard the independence of their of their leadership groups and their decision-making but they certainly are cooperating operationally in many ways you know I the Iranians are alone you know that because of the sectarian divide in Pakistan the Iranians have a very complicated hand to play in the area wherein Laden presumably is hiding their you know their access to Afghanistan is considerably greater but I think there is a potential in the next couple or three years for the divergence of the Pakistani government's interests visa vie the Taliban and al-qaeda to create a lever that makes al-qaeda vulnerable because the Pakistan government's interests now in the pact Afghan equation are to make as many portions of the Taliban pacified and politically legitimate as possible and for as long as the Taliban are collaborating with al-qaeda that is going to be a difficult project so I do see Pakistani motivations now finally shifting in pragmatic ways towards seeing rewards for tearing down al-qaeda in a way that they didn't see rewards for a few years ago well I want to thank both of you we've had a I mean this is a fascinating discussion with two of the most important chroniclers of bin Laden and al-qaeda terrorism and this and this region and I want to thank Steve I want to thank Peter for sharing the time with us and working through the book so let's give them all around

Channel: New America

Views: 16,022

Rating: 4.7857141 out of 5

Keywords: Osama, bin, Laden, Family, Saudi, Arabia, Al, Qaeda, Life, Upbringing, Youth, Wahabi, Islam

Id: qF9B9KmDXNo

Length: 73min 36sec (4416 seconds)

Published: Fri May 02 2008