Among Scheuer’s particular concerns, he said later, were continuing reports he saw that the Bin Ladens’ Cairo office, overseen by Osama’s half-brother Khalid, provided work and travel visas to Egyptian Islamists who wanted to travel to Afghanistan. Other CIA officials regarded Scheuer’s fears as plausible but unproven. Their most widely shared concerns about the Bin Laden family involved Jamal Khalifa, Osama’s brother-in-law and former Afghan war comrade, who had been tried and acquitted of supporting terrorist activity by a Jordanian court. During the mid-1990s, through his wife Sheikha, Osama’s half-sister Khalifa used the Mohamed Bin Laden Company’s travel office to obtain a U.S. visa and for other family travel help. Another concern was Osama’s continuing telephone contact with his mother and stepbrothers in Jeddah. CIA officers also tried to get a grip on Osama’s own scattered offspring—the wife and sons who had returned to Saudi Arabia, another son who was reported to be living in Karachi, and other family members who reportedly traveled back and forth between the kingdom and Pakistan. The CIA pressed the Saudis informally for intelligence about all these issues but learned little.17
There were so many sources of mutual frustration in the liaison between the two governments that it was difficult to separate one source of irritation from another. However, for those in the U.S. intelligence community assigned to the specific problem of Osama Bin Laden and his money, the case of Osama’s one-legged former London financial aide was a particular cause of aggravation. Al-Ghazi Madani Al-Tayyib had kept track of some of Al Qaeda’s money and businesses during Osama’s Sudan years. Exhausted and demoralized by exile in Britain, Al-Tayyib had turned himself into the Saudi authorities. He seemed likely to possess a wealth of knowledge about Osama’s personal accounts and, perhaps even more important, about his access to sympathetic religious charities and individual fundraisers. A succession of senior American officials, from the CIA and other U.S. agencies, asked Crown Prince Abdullah, Prince Nayef, and other Saudi officials for the opportunity to meet and question Al-Tayyib directly. The Saudis steadfastly refused.18
The ambassador and the CIA station chief also pressed the Saudi government to curtail flights between the kingdom and Afghanistan by the Taliban-controlled airline, Afghan Ariana, which appeared, in the late 1990s, to be operating as Al Qaeda’s air-courier service, shuttling guns, money, and volunteers to Osama. On this matter they eventually won greater, if belated, cooperation.19
THE CONNECTIONS among Saudi charities, radical Islamist networks, and members of the Bin Laden family were particularly difficult for American investigators to assess. Around 1996, for example, Scheuer and Coleman took an interest in a proselytizing group, the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, which operated an American branch out of modest quarters in Falls Church, Virginia, only a few miles from the offices of the CIA’s secret Bin Laden tracking unit. The president of the U.S. branch was listed in public incorporation documents as Abdullah Awadh Bin Laden. It took investigators some time to sort out how Abdullah fit into the Bin Laden family tree, since there were several other prominent Abdullahs in the family, such as the one at Harvard and the family’s venerated patriarch, Mohamed Bin Laden’s brother. Eventually the American investigators learned that the particular Abdullah running the World Assembly branch was the son of one of Osama Bin Laden’s half-siblings—possibly, the son of one of his half-sisters. Osama, then, was one of Abdullah’s many uncles.20
The World Assembly of Muslim Youth had headquarters in Riyadh and advertised itself as the world’s largest Muslim youth group, dedicated to the spread of Islamic ideas, values, and sacred texts; it operated more than fifty regional and local offices on five continents. Abdullah Bin Laden incorporated an American branch in 1992. In a 1997 speech in Riyadh, he described his work: He offered financial subsidies to needy American Muslims wishing to undertake the Hajj; he ran one-week summer camps for Muslim youth in Texas, New York, Florida, California, Ohio, and Washington State; he sought to visit schools, universities, and prisons. His aim, as a journalist’s account of his speech put it, was to combat “the deliberate distortion of Islam” by “certain information and media outlets” that sought to “make people hate Islam, and to give Islam the label of terrorism by exploiting certain incidents, such as the explosion at the World Trade Center in New York in 1993.” Abdullah Bin Laden was particularly proud of his “good word” project to help converted American Muslims absorb Islamic values and remain on the correct spiritual path. He said that he had created kits of proselytizing materials—a silver kit, a golden kit, and a diamond kit. All the kits contained translations of the Koran and a book by Sayed Abdullah Al-Mawdudi, an early twentieth-century Islamist radical who was one of the intellectual founders of the Muslim Brotherhood.21
The materials distributed by the World Assembly of Muslim Youth did not explicitly promote violent jihad in the style of Osama’s published essays, but they did contain the sort of vicious anti-Semitic tracts that were all too typical of the publications of Muslim Brotherhood–influenced organizations. In an Arabic-language book titled A Handy Encyclopedia of Contemporary Religions and Sects, the World Assembly’s authors listed reasons for Muslims to hate Jews, using language that echoed the extermination-promoting tracts of Germany’s Third Reich:
The Jews are enemies of the faithful, God and the angels; the Jews are humanity’s enemies; they forment immorality in this world; The Jews are deceitful, they say something but mean the exact opposite; Who was behind the biological crisis which became like brain washing? A Jew; Who was behind the disintegration of family life and values? A Jew;…Every tragedy that inflicts the Muslims is caused by the Jews.22
As part of his inquiries into the Bin Ladens’ presence in America, the FBI’s Daniel Coleman visited Abdullah at his Northern Virginia office with two other agents from the Washington field office. He found the young man “very friendly,” and he seemed as if he “would have been somebody interesting to talk to.” Soon after Coleman arrived, however, Abdullah presented him with a Saudi diplomatic passport. The World Assembly described itself as a nongovernmental organization, but the Saudi embassy had issued its representatives diplomatic passports, as Coleman later confirmed after requesting State Department records. Abdullah was listed as an attaché of the Saudi embassy and had been formally accredited to the United States as a Saudi diplomat. Coleman knew that this legal protection was impermeable; he left Abdullah alone.23
In addition to his proselytizing, it later became clear, Abdullah Bin Laden invested $500,000 in U.S. business vehicles controlled by an Egyptian citizen, Soliman Biheiri, who operated a number of investment firms adhering to Islamic principles. Abdullah was joined in these investments by two of Osama’s half-sisters, Nur and Iman. These women were among a number of Osama’s more religious half-siblings who made investments in Islamic banks or investment firms with offices scattered around the world, including in bank secrecy havens, according to court records and media reports.24
One of these entities was the Al-Taqwa Bank, which “has long acted as financial advisers to Al Qaeda,” according to an affidavit later filed in an American court by a U.S. government investigator. The bank’s chairman and an aide involved in Al-Taqwa operations provided “indirect investment services” for Al Qaeda, which included “investing funds for Bin Laden and making cash deliveries on request.” Like the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, Al-Taqwa had historical ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Its banking and investment entities operated offices in Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Italy, and the Bahamas. In 1999, according to a number of published reports, the FBI obtained a list of about seven hundred investors in Al-Taqwa. Among them were two of Osama’s half-sisters, Iman and Huda. The latter had once been a playful member of Salem Bin Laden’s European entourage, but after Salem’s death, she became more religious. Another Al-Taqwa investor was Ghalib Bin Laden, Bakr’s full brother, who had visited Osama in Peshawar in 1989 and who had been selected to receive Osama’s shares in family companies when he was forced to sell in 1994. His initial deposit of $1 million in an Al-Taqwa investment account in the Bahamas grew to just under $2.5 million by 1997; at that point, losses incurred by the bank and charged to Ghailb’s account caused him to seek the return of his money. When the bank failed to satisfy him, Ghailb sued, in 1999, “seeking to put the bank out of business,” as lawyers for the Saudi Bin Laden Group put it later. The U.S. government later designated Al-Taqwa as a terrorist entity. A Bin Laden lawyer later wrote: “Any suggestion that the [Bin Laden] family or their businesses were somehow aligned with or supportive of Osama’s terrorist activities is completely at odds with the facts.”25