The Committee for Advice and Reform debuted in July 1994 in London. It was Osama’s own vehicle for participating in Saudi politics as an exiled dissenter and pamphleteer. It was little more than a musty room and a fax machine, but it described itself as “an all-encompassing organization that aims at applying the teachings of God to all aspects of life.” It had four aims: to eradicate all forms of non-Islamic governance; to achieve Islamic justice; to reform the Saudi political system and “purify it from corruption and injustice”; and to revive the traditional Islamic system by which citizens had the right, guided by religious scholars, to bring charges against government officials.25
Osama’s committee was born in a period of technological prelude, on the eve of the explosion of the World Wide Web. At the time, fax machines offered the easiest way to send text documents across government borders without the risk of censorship. By the autumn of 1994, Al-Faqih, Al-Masari, and Al-Fawwaz were all blasting faxes from their allied groups to lists of numbers all around Saudi Arabia, the Gulf, and to international media outlets.
In Khartoum, released at last from any constraints of family and national loyalties, Osama sat at his several desks during late 1994 and early 1995 and wrote out lengthy essays, as frequently as once a week. He sent them to Al-Fawwaz, who put them on the blast fax. Some pieces were the length of op-ed articles; others went on for thousands of words, laced with religious quotations. Osama’s subject was not so much Islam as Saudi Arabia. His tone about the kingdom, the country his father and his family had done so much to build and legitimize, was often intemperate, impetuous, petty, sarcastic, or unreservedly angry. On September 12, 1994: “Saudi Arabia Unveils Its War on Islam and Its Scholars.” A week later: “Do not Give Inferiority To Your Religion.” On October 15, referring to the Saudi government’s Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs: “Supreme Council for Damage.” On March 9, 1995: “Saudi Arabia Continues War on Islam and Its Scholars.” On July 11: “Prince Sultan and Flight Commissions.”26
He denounced by name King Fahd and his full brothers, the so-called Sudeiris, who were now the dominant grouping in the royal family—Nayef, at the Interior Ministry; Sultan, at the Defense Ministry; and Salman, the governor of Riyadh. Osama did not write subtly about them. Nayef, with whom he had met regularly and collaboratively during the Afghan war of the 1980s, had a “shady history” and was “filled with craftiness towards Islam and hatred for its advocates and religious authorities.” These princes were unworthy of their roles as guardians of the birthplace of Islam:
How could any intelligent person who knows the facts believe that these kinsmen—who corrupt the land and wage war on Allah and His Prophet—could possibly have been brought to serve Islam and Muslims?27
Prince Salman, he later wrote, “has a shady past in which he has defrauded Islam and waged war on its people.” Prince Sultan was one of the “tricksters” who milked contracts for commissions and helped to drive the Saudi economy into the ground. And over all of this perfidy, greed, and incompetence presided King Fahd, who had impeded God’s laws, aligned himself with nonbelievers, and had proved to be “hostile to Islam and Muslims.”28
To Saudi readers, his explicit attacks on Fahd and his full brothers had an obvious corollary—Osama was silent about the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Abdullah, who was presumed by many Saudis to be estranged from the Sudeiris and who enjoyed a reputation for relative piety and financial rectitude. It was possible to imagine in 1995 that pressure from Islamist campaigners abroad and jailed religious scholars at home might create a quiet coup among the Al-Saud, favoring Abdullah, similar to that which had brought Faisal to the throne three decades earlier. Osama seemed to be developing this angle in his essays. In one tract, he explicitly listed the late years of Faisal’s reign as an exception to his criticisms of royal family rule. From Switzerland, Yeslam Bin Laden predicted that Osama would be restored to power within the Bin Laden family, and Bakr would fade, once Abdullah came to the throne, according to Carmen Bin Laden.29 Osama did probably fantasize that the Islamists might force Fahd out, and that Abdullah might then welcome him home on terms he could embrace. Who could predict the future? It was in God’s hands.
OSAMA’S EXPERIENCE as a businessman in Sudan was similar to that of his half-brother Khalil’s in Los Angeles, with America in Motion. His grandiose schemes did not pan out. His mentors took advantage of him. His employees misappropriated tens of thousands of dollars, money he could no longer afford to lose—Jamal Al-Fadl, for example, took Osama for $110,000 in a series of manipulated land and commodity deals. Osama had reorganized his personal banking at the Al-Shamal Bank in Khartoum, but his accounts gradually dried up. In the past, his personal wealth had provided him a financial cushion, but much of the money he spent on jihad came from private donors, charities, or quasi-governmental channels. Now his access to family dividends and loans had been pinched, and, simultaneously, as an enemy of the Saudi state, his charity fundraising had become complicated. As early as 1994 or 1995, “We had a crisis in Al Qaeda,” recalled L’Hossaine Kherchtou, one of his adherents. “Osama bin Laden himself said to us that he had lost all his money, and he reduced the salary of his people.” He was forced to lay off as many as two thousand workers at his sunflower farm during 1995. It was an extraordinarily fast downturn—Osama had blown through his lump sum inheritance, his dividends, and his charitable funds in just four to five years, a total of perhaps $15 million or more. In his essays, he denounced the Saudi royal family for corruption and financial malfeasance, but he had managed his own funds with all the prudence of a self-infatuated Hollywood celebrity.30
He betrayed his desperation in a blast fax he issued on February 12, 1995, titled “Prince Salman and Charity Offerings in Ramadan.” He slandered the royal government with typical bombast, denouncing them in particular for new regulations that required annual zakat, or “charity,” contributions to be routed only through officially approved charities overseen by Prince Salman. “The Saudi regime’s previous general history of managing donations has been extremely bad,” Osama wrote. “It took popular donations for the Afghani mujaheddin as a means to put pressure on them, in order to realize Western and, in particular, American policies.” As he went on, however, Osama made clear that his essay was intended less as a critique than as a solicitation. He was worried about his own continued access to the Saudi charity on which he had so long depended:
We at the Committee for Advice and Reform alert all philanthropists and givers of charity of the danger of submitting any funds or alms to these harmful institutions, bodies and associations which use them to wage war on Allah and His Prophet. We call them to submit funds directly to those who deserve them domestically and abroad. They can also submit funds to religious or custodial persons who can assure that those who legally deserve the funds will receive them without them first being tampered with by the Saudi clan…There are safe agencies that will transmit funds to those who deserve them such as charitable associations in Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan, Yemen, Sudan and others. To ensure that funds are transferred to the accounts of these associations, we alert you of the importance of transferring outside the Gulf—far from tracking by the regime’s spies.31