His problems at the office were compounded by his troubles at home. One of his wives, known as Om Ali, or the “Mother of Ali,” traveled back and forth between Saudi Arabia and Sudan; she grew tired of Khartoum. She asked Osama for a divorce because “she could not continue to live in an austere way, and in hardship,” according to Nasir Al-Bahri, who later served as Osama’s bodyguard.
Osama’s eldest son, Abdullah, a teenager, also chafed at being cut off from the privileges enjoyed by a Bin Laden in good standing. He had seen enough of his cousins’ lifestyles in Jeddah—the slick cars, the Harley motorcycles, the wave runners on weekends in the Red Sea—to know what he was missing. He asked his father for permission to return to the kingdom and take up a job in the family business. He had already become engaged to one of his relatives “because my father supports early marriage,” as he later explained, and in 1995 he pressed his father to return to Saudi Arabia:
He would ask me to be patient and wait every time. On one occasion, I went into his bedroom when we were in Sudan to wake him up to pray, and he said to me with no introductions: “Abdullah, you can go to Saudi Arabia if you want.” I started crying for joy without saying a word. My father smiled calmly and said nothing. On the next day, I called my uncles in Jeddah and they helped in speeding up my arrival there…I wanted to be independent and build my life on my own, and according to my desires.
The defection of his firstborn pained Osama, according to Al-Bahri. Thereafter he “avoided mentioning Abdullah’s name…because he had been hurt by him.”32
Osama’s mother still visited him, but now the Saudi authorities monitored her to ensure she was not ferrying cash surreptitiously. Osama reportedly continued to have contact with some of the religious wing of the family—his brother-in-law Jamal Khalifa said later that he stayed in touch. They had been fast friends during the early 1980s, and now Khalifa found himself in legal trouble over allegations that he supported violent Al Qaeda–inspired Islamic groups in the Philippines. A second brother-in-law may also have participated in Osama’s campaigns from Sudan. Yet for the senior brothers in Jeddah who led the Bin Ladens, and who managed the family’s relationships with the Saudi royals, Osama was now plainly an anathema. King Fahd’s court put the senior brothers on notice, according to a person who worked with them in Jeddah at the time; the Saudi government made it plain that the Bin Ladens would pay a steep price if they succored Osama. Nothing got the family’s attention like the prospect of losing its wealth. To ensure there could be no question about their loyalties, the family decided during this period to donate all of its zakat funds directly to the king’s charities, according to the person working with them in Jeddah.33
Osama could probably sense the change in his family’s attitude. In 1995 one of his half-sisters died of cancer; she was the first of Mohamed Bin Laden’s daughters to pass away. Her death left the number of his surviving children at fifty-two. From Sudan, Osama telephoned Omar Bin Laden to express his condolences. “That conversation lasted only about a minute, as I purposely cut it short,” Omar said later.34
Out of money, divorced by one of his wives, abandoned by his eldest son, estranged from his family—a hint of King Lear in the wilderness began to enter Osama’s exile. He told a Saudi visitor, “I am tired. I miss living in Medina. Only God knows how nostalgic I am.” He was so unmoored during 1995 that he explored the possibility of moving to London. There he would join his colleagues in the self-styled Saudi opposition in a more traditional, more political exile, one that would inevitably reduce his scope for participation in violence. It is easy to imagine the appeal of London: occasional press conferences attended by the international media; long afternoons at the writing desk penning poetry and unrelenting political essays on behalf of a new Saudi Arabia; visits from his son Abdullah and other family; a chance to live by principles, but also amid some of the comfort craved by the middle-aged.35
It proved to be a passing fantasy. Saudi Arabia pressured Britain to do something about Al-Faqih and Al-Masari, and the government did initiate deportation proceedings against the latter. It would likely have been impossible politically for Osama to receive asylum by the time he considered seeking it.
In Khartoum he remained surrounded by other wives, children, employees, and followers, and his calendar of business and conspiracy meetings mitigated his isolation. Yet there was now a self-reinforcing quality to the narrative Osama was constructing around his exile. The more pressure he faced, the more readily he compared his circumstances to those of the Prophet Mohamed, who had been driven by political opponents to Medina, where he waged a righteous war and eventually returned home. “Emigration is related to jihad, and jihad will go on until the Day of Judgment,” Osama wrote while in Sudan. It was not the sort of formulation likely to appeal to a restless wife or teenager with memories of Jeddah’s better restaurants. Yet there is no reason to doubt that Osama believed precisely what he penned.
Moreover, the wealth and global visibility of his enemies—King Fahd, and his patron, the Americans—only highlighted for him the enduring righteousness of his cause. He even seemed to regard some of the missions undertaken by his relatives as a form of outreach from the United States, the country on which Osama increasingly focused his wrath, particularly after Washington put pressure on Sudan’s government to expel him from Khartoum. At first he had regarded his family members as helpless, manipulated agents of the Al-Saud. Now he came to see his exile as a contest of will and faith between himself and the government of the most powerful country on earth. Each iteration of this contest only highlighted for him the significance of his struggle and his leadership. “I tell you that the Americans are bargaining with us in silence,” Osama would explain in late 1996. “America and some of its agents in the region have bargained with us discreetly more than ten times, I tell you: [they say] shut up and we’ll give you back your passport and possessions, we’ll give you back your i.d. card, but shut up. These people think that people live in this world for its own sake, but they have forgotten that our existence has no meaning if we do not strive for the pleasure of God.”36
30. HEDGE FUNDS
DURING A LONG CAREER as an American diplomat, Philip Griffin became a specialist in the Arab world, and he acquired particular experience in the Persian Gulf region—he served in Kuwait, Abu Dhabi, and twice in Dhahran, the principal city in Saudi Arabia’s oil-producing region. He was a mild man with blue eyes and a full head of graying hair; his years in diplomacy and his extended exposure to reticent Arabia had left him with impeccable manners and a habit of speaking in cautious, deliberate, fully articulated paragraphs. In 1989 Griffin arrived in Jeddah as consul general, the State Department’s highest-ranking officer in the Hejaz and a liaison to the U.S. embassy in Riyadh.
On his early diplomatic rounds, Griffin met Henry Sarkissian, of the Sarkissian business family, Armenian Christians who had migrated to Lebanon, established themselves in the electrical and industrial air-conditioning field, and then become important partners of the Bin Ladens in Saudi Arabia. Sarkissian introduced Griffin to Bakr Bin Laden, a connection that led to periodic discreet conversations among Bakr, Griffin, and Chas Freeman, then the U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia. The two American diplomats used Bakr as a sounding board about goings-on in the court of King Fahd and about the king’s private views on issues of the day. They found Bakr to be very careful during these conversations, which usually took place in his Jeddah office; Bakr was far from a natural gossip, and he was protective of the king, but he occasionally passed along a useful nugget or insight.1