An offshore entity controlled by the Saudi Bin Laden Group invested $3 million in late 1997 in Global Diamond Resources, Inc., a California-headquartered mining company that owned diamond mines in South Africa. Through a Bin Laden executive, Global Diamond executives met Yasin Al-Qadi, a Saudi businessman in Jeddah who was a wealthy contemporary of the Bin Laden sons. In 1998 Al-Qadi also invested and became one of the mining company’s largest shareholders. Al-Qadi was later designated as a terrorist financier by the U.S. Treasury Department, a designation Al-Qadi rejected as untrue and unjust. Blessed Relief, a charity Al-Qadi cofounded, which operated in Bosnia, Sudan, Pakistan, and other countries between 1992 and 1997, was described in a Treasury citation as a “front” for Bin Laden, one that had been used to pass money to him from wealthy Saudis. Al-Qadi denied these accusations, too. He said that he had met Osama at religious gatherings in Saudi Arabia during the 1980s but that these meetings had been casual and inconsequential, and he adamantly denied providing any support to Al Qaeda or other terrorists at any time.26
Taken together, these offshore financial connections, while far from offering proof that some members of the Bin Laden family might have found ways to quietly pass funds to Osama after he had been forced to sell his family shareholdings, nonetheless offered fragments of intriguing evidence—strands that certainly demanded further and more rigorous investigation than the American government had yet managed to undertake, at least in the opinion of Michael Scheuer, the CIA’s lead analyst. By the end of the 1990s, Scheuer had reached the conclusion, as he wrote, that there was “every reason to believe members of Bin Laden’s extended family have ensured that he has gotten his share of family profits.”27
Osama’s relationship with his half-sisters was a particularly murky and frustrating subject. The American ambassador or CIA station chief in Riyadh might be able to meet with senior brothers such as Bakr or Yahya, and they might win limited cooperation from them, but given Saudi Arabia’s systematic segregation of women, and the general limitations placed upon American investigators in the kingdom, it was impossible to explore in any depth the finances, attitudes, investments, and travel of Osama’s half-sisters. Observations by family members such as Carmen Bin Laden suggest that Osama seemed to have more comfortable relations with some of his half-sisters than with many of his half-brothers. Dominic Simpson, who served as a British intelligence officer in charge of Saudi Arabian matters during the mid-and late-1990s, recalled “lots of talk about odd members of the Bin Laden family” who “still claim to stay in touch with him,” reports that raised the possibility of “monies being channeled in some way.” The concern within intelligence agencies at the time, Simpson recalled, focused on “particularly some of the sisters—a couple of his sisters.” For his part, Simpson saw no convincing evidence that any Bin Laden family members, including these sisters, were “covertly or discreetly funding” Osama “in any way” or that they had allowed themselves to be “used as the channel for others…But it may well be that some members of the family were in occasional contact for purely personal reasons. And again, some of the sisters have been named.”28
Simpson’s analysis was that Osama “always got on better with his sisters than his brothers,” in part because of the relatively weak status of Osama’s mother within the family. “Some of the brothers would sneer, and the sisters would feel sorry for him and pat poor little Osama…Women often like the chance to sort of mother a man, and I think that perhaps that’s how they replied to him, slightly…But I’m sure there was no institutionalized support for him.” American investigators with the 9/11 Commission, who later reviewed the evidence available to U.S. intelligence, reached a somewhat more cautious conclusion: after the Africa embassy bombings, they wrote, the Bin Laden family “generally turned away” from Osama. But these investigators, too, offered no evidence of culpable financial support for Osama.29
The U.S. intelligence community simply did not know very much about the Bin Laden family, and an important aspect of what it claimed to know was wrong: even after 1998, the CIA’s evaluation of Osama and his capabilities rested on mistaken assumptions about the scale and history of the Bin Ladens’ wealth.
ON NOVEMBER 17, 1998, the CIA circulated within the U.S. government an intelligence report stating that Osama had inherited $300 million after his father’s death. This estimate did not come from hard evidence, the report conceded; it had probably originated with rumors circulating in the Saudi business community. The FBI had learned in its interview with Shafiq and Hassan Bin Laden that Osama’s income and inheritance had been considerably smaller. Yet in its intelligence reports, the CIA affirmed the $300 million figure as a “reasonable estimate” as of the mid-1990s, based on its valuation of Osama’s business activities in Sudan and its estimate of the amounts he might have inherited from Mohamed Bin Laden. Analysts felt that Osama could have built up Al Qaeda so quickly only if he had access to a large personal fortune. Other U.S. intelligence agencies circulated similar assessments to Clinton administration decision makers after the Africa attacks. A Defense Intelligence Agency report of October 1998 passed along, without comment, a document that claimed Osama had a fortune of $150 million, with $35 million invested in Sudan.30
Richard Clarke, Clinton’s counterterrorism czar at the White House, expressed chronic dissatisfaction with intelligence reporting about Osama’s finances. In the autumn of 1998, he reorganized the National Security Council’s work on Al Qaeda. He summoned a young aide, William Wechsler, who had studied illicit financing and organized crime issues, although never Al Qaeda. Clarke told Wechsler to set up a new interagency working group devoted solely to the subject of Al Qaeda’s money. The government’s terrorism specialists had neglected the subject, Clarke said, and now they had their hands full with other matters, such as trying to find Bin Laden in Afghanistan and locating other violent cells worldwide.