Music paraphernalia draped the restaurant walls: a red shirt with glass stones sewn into the fabric that had once been worn by Michael Jackson; an embroidered silk shirt that had belonged to Elvis Presley; a crêpe de chine shirt worn by John Lennon of the Beatles; a 1958 Fender Stratocaster used by members of the Cars; another Stratocaster, signed by Eric Clapton; the playing surface of a Rolling Stones pinball machine, signed by members of the band; and an Oberheim electronic keyboard used and signed by Billy Joel. Most impressive of all was a sheet of lined paper on which John Lennon, using a black ballpoint pen, had written out the lyrics to his song “Imagine.”9
A night in late 1996: one son of Mohamed Bin Laden lives in exile, seeking utopia in Islamic revolution, while several others launch a restaurant and bar in an Arab capital promoting reified utopian rock lyrics. Perhaps more striking than the competing content of their dreams was the shared stage: a world in which jihad and emotion-laden Western popular music spoke to young and overlapping global audiences.
IRIDIUM’S BUSINESS PLAN relied on an expansive forecast of the coming wireless world. The company’s gateway investors included phone companies that already possessed about 14 million wireless customers, to whom the new phones could be marketed. In its regulatory filings, Iridium estimated that the world’s “traveling professional market”—by which it meant employed adults with wireless phones who left their local phone service area at least four times per year—would grow to about 42 million people by 2002. This forecast, if even approximately accurate, suggested that signing up the 500,000 or so customers that Iridium needed to break even would not be very difficult. There were clear challenges, nonetheless. The most obvious was price: Iridium’s initial handsets would cost about three thousand dollars each, and international calls would be billed at rates as high as seven dollars per minute. Even in this pre-cellular era when consumers did not know what kinds of prices to expect for portable phone service, those numbers looked steep.10
The sheer romanticism of Iridium’s plan sometimes seemed to quiet skeptics, however. As if to emphasize its groundbreaking character, the company turned to China to launch its satellites into space, and by early 1997, Long March Rockets, named for the events surrounding the birth of Chinese communism, were blasting into the sky every few months, lifting Iridium’s decidedly capitalist machines into position. Al Gore, America’s futurist vice president, invited Iridium executives to the White House Rose Garden to celebrate their vision. Gore placed a ceremonial call to a great-grandson of the telephone’s nineteenth-century inventor, Alexander Graham Bell. Satellite systems like Iridium’s “complete the telephone coverage of the Earth’s surface that Alexander Graham Bell began more than a century ago,” Gore said when his call went through. “Your great-grandfather would be very proud.”11
Iridium burned its bankroll at a breathtaking pace as it raced toward its service launch. Its greatest challenge was to win timely government permissions to sell and operate its telephones within the borders of more than 150 different countries. The company had chosen Washington for its headquarters, in part to facilitate this licensing drive through embassies in the capital, and by seeking diplomatic support from the U.S. government. The final responsibility for winning licenses fell to each Iridium gateway operator, however. Iridium Middle East had to secure permission from more than twenty governments in the Arab world and Central Asia—many of these governments possessed corrupt, serpentine bureaucracies, or they barely functioned at all. Lawyers at Iridium headquarters rendered the final judgment about when “permission” from a particular country had actually been obtained. The forms of acceptable permission varied greatly—some governments simply issued a ministerial announcement, while others negotiated a more traditional legal agreement. “I had a Mongolian license on a napkin,” recalled one Iridium executive. In some cases, recalled Tuttle, the general counsel, “What we had was basically the country saying, ‘Just tell us what you’re doing. We don’t need an approval.’”12
The campaign proved to be slow going, particularly in the Middle East. Hassan Bin Laden and other gateway executives came under intense pressure to secure permissions in their areas of operation. As of July 1997, about a year before the service was supposed to begin operation, Iridium had secured a conditional license to operate in only one country within Iridium Middle East’s region, according to regulatory filings. That country was Afghanistan.13
Three former Iridium executives involved in the licensing effort, including Tuttle, said they could not recall how permission from Afghanistan was secured, when it was received, what form it took, or what Afghan authority granted it. As of July 1997, the Taliban, a radical Islamist militia, controlled the country’s government. At the same time, however, a competing faction manned the country’s embassy in Washington; it is possible the initial permission was obtained there. According to a Bin Laden attorney, Iridium never acquired a final Afghan license or a single Afghan customer.
The Taliban had already become notorious for their repression of women’s education and their bizarre Islamic rule making. That summer of 1997, they also faced criticism because of the radical statements, supporting violence, which emanated from a foreign guest the Taliban’s one-eyed leader, Mullah Omar, had decided to embrace: Osama Bin Laden. There is no evidence that Osama played any role in detailing the initial license for Afghanistan. The Bin Ladens’ attorney, Timothy J. Finn, later wrote that the family believed that the initial license was obtained by Iridium before the Bin Ladens came on the scene. “In any event, Hassan did not have any involvement with this and does not know how it came about,” Finn wrote. “Indeed, Hassan does not believe he had any significant involvement at any time with Afghanistan, which was not regarded as a significant market for this high-priced service. Needless to say he never contacted Osama about any aspect of this.”
It seems likely that Osama was at least aware of his family’s investment in Iridium. He could have offered them a testament supporting their investment gamble; he was learning himself about the powers of a global satellite telephone.
“MOTHERS SUFFER MOST,” Osama’s mother later remarked, but it was not because her son failed to phone home from political exile. “He used to call regularly” even from Afghanistan. “He would tell me about his and his family’s well-being—mother-son talk.”14
Osama’s fealty to his mother had become a greater technical challenge after his departure in May 1996 from Sudan, which had a shaky but functioning phone network, to Afghanistan, where communications were considerably more unreliable. He conceived his exile as an echo of the seventh-century journeys of the Prophet Mohamed; at the same time, he had become a model customer for a twenty-first-century company like Iridium.
He did not go to Afghanistan voluntarily. Sudan’s government sought a modicum of international legitimacy; the United States made clear it could not achieve this as long as Osama Bin Laden lived and operated openly in Khartoum. Osama’s former mentor, Hassan Al-Turabi, told him he had to go, and then compounded the betrayal, along with others in the Sudanese government, by failing to pay off debts owed to Osama and by taking his businesses at fire sale prices. Osama “sold them all,” recalled his bodyguard Nasir Al-Bahri, “for a very cheap price, because he had no other option.”15