THE AFRICA EMBASSY bombings made it plain that Osama was more than a rich radical who authored threatening essays and poems, and occasionally provided financial grants to violent Egyptian and Central Asian jihadist allies. He had now built an organization that responded to his direct leadership, had declared war against the United States, and could carry out sophisticated attacks across oceans. Osama’s understanding of America was fragmentary and distorted, but so was America’s understanding of him. In the more urgent atmosphere that followed the Africa bombings, the United States revitalized its attempts to collect intelligence about Osama’s biography, his finances, and his relationship with the larger Bin Laden family.
The U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia in that summer of 1998 was Wyche Fowler Jr., a former Democratic senator from Georgia. He worked closely with John Brennan, then the CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia, a veteran officer with silver sideburns and a diplomat’s demeanor. By the time of the Africa attacks, Bin Laden had been a subject of cable traffic in and out of the Riyadh embassy for several years. Some of it was routine reporting—translations of Osama’s interviews on Arabic-language satellite television or in the Arabic-language press. Occasionally Fowler or Brennan would discuss Bin Laden’s case with senior princes in the royal family, but these were often general conversations in which the Saudis emphasized their complete repudiation of a man they had, after all, stripped of citizenship.11
About six weeks after the Africa attacks, Fowler and Brennan sought a meeting with Bakr Bin Laden in Saudi Arabia, and he agreed. Bakr arrived for the discussion without any lawyers. He seemed eager to reassure the American government that Osama enjoyed no favor in his family. Bakr said the Bin Ladens had nothing to do with Osama, that he had been cut off years ago, and that they were embarrassed and sorry about his recent violence.
The Americans told Bakr that Osama had now been formally charged with crimes under U.S. law. As a consequence, the United States would try to apprehend him in Afghanistan. To do this, they explained, they wanted help from the Bin Laden family. Among other things, they needed to learn more about Osama’s financial history and current resources.
“President Clinton has asked me to seek your assistance,” Fowler said pointedly.
Bakr said his family would cooperate. He referred the American officials to his half-brother Yahya, who was now functioning as chief of operations for the main Bin Laden businesses. Bakr explained that on financial matters, the family’s office in London possessed most of the important records, particularly those concerning international accounts and investments. Shafiq Bin Laden, who oversaw that office, could help answer any questions the U.S. government might have.12
Bakr’s view of Osama, as he explained it during this meeting and in subsequent conversations with American officials, was that his half-brother had essentially gone off the deep end. Osama’s extremism had surprised Bakr in some respects, he said, because as a younger man, Osama had always seemed relatively bookish and thoughtful, and he was certainly very shy. As a younger man, Bakr said, Osama had never really voiced strong political convictions, even when he was active in Afghanistan.
American officials in Saudi Arabia who visited occasionally with the Bin Ladens could see that the senior brothers around Bakr were relatively conservative in cultural terms. For example, at receptions they hosted in private homes in Jeddah, the Bin Ladens did not serve alcohol to Western visitors, unlike some other Saudi merchant families, and they adhered rigorously to Islamic prayer schedules. And yet, in Bakr’s view, as he presented it to the American officials he met, there was a bright line between the religious orthodoxy of his family and the violent radicalism now being espoused by Osama. Why Osama had crossed that line remained a mystery. There were theories within the Bin Laden family: some talked about the impact of Osama’s participation in the violence of the Afghan war, or about the influence of Egyptian radicals who had ingratiated themselves with Osama over the years. But there could be no certainty or pat explanations.
It remains unclear how much cooperation the Bin Ladens actually provided to the FBI and CIA during the months following the initial meeting with Fowler and Brennan in the late summer of 1998. One former senior American official involved described multiple “depositions” provided by Bin Laden representatives in London and Geneva to the FBI, the CIA, or both. If so, none of this information ever reached the White House’s counterterrorism office, or was referred to in public investigations such as those carried out by the 9/11 Commission. Accounts from other former officials suggest that the private cooperation from the Bin Ladens may have been limited. These officials said that while Bakr wanted to be helpful, he also sought to protect his family’s wealth and investments. After the Africa bombings, he and his American and British attorneys grew particularly concerned about a scenario in which the Bin Laden family might be formally accused by the United States of aiding Osama. They might be threatened with economic sanctions, asset seizures, forfeitures, or civil lawsuits filed by victims of Osama’s attacks. Throughout late 1998 and into 1999, the family and its attorneys proceeded at times with caution in their dealings with American government officials. At the U.S. embassy, Fowler’s primary objective was to try to identify Osama’s current bank accounts and to discover if any money was still reaching him from Saudi Arabia or elsewhere; in this endeavor, Fowler felt that he received particularly strong cooperation from senior princes in the Saudi government.13
For their part, the Bin Ladens and their lawyers feared, Brennan recalled, that even if they provided off-the-record and confidential assistance to American investigators, “they would expose themselves, and that because of the animus to the Bin Laden name, that people in the U.S. government might take advantage of their cooperation to freeze their assets.” Considering such risks, as Brennan put it, “Why make yourself vulnerable?”14
At the CIA’s Bin Laden unit, Michael Scheuer increasingly perceived this caution, and U.S. acceptance of it, as a form of appeasement. Scheuer detected “a decided reluctance to even ask the questions” that might make the Bin Ladens or the Saudi government uncomfortable. Partly, Scheuer believed, this reticence reflected Bakr’s skillful management of Fowler, Brennan, and others at the U.S. embassy in Riyadh. “Bakr was very good,” Scheuer said later. “He used to go into the ambassador, or he used to go into the consul general in Jeddah on the Fourth of July, or other American holidays, and say, ‘What great guys you are—we love to be in America, we love to invest there, and we’ve divorced ourselves from the black sheep’—very, very good PR work by Bakr and his brothers.”15
“There was never a reluctance on our parts to ask questions of the Saudis,” Brennan said later, responding to Scheuer’s criticisms. Added Wyche Fowler, the ambassador: “From the moment Bakr Bin Laden agreed to my request for the family’s cooperation, they provided the Treasury Department and the FBI access to their books, family records—and their contract with the U.S. military on its base in Saudi Arabia was not terminated. Further, I never heard a complaint from our government about their lack of cooperation.”16