The Bin Ladens

That police encounter plunged the Orlando outpost of the extended Bin Laden family into the debilitating world of American family court, with its custody struggles, social worker reports, and judicial hearings. A report filed in July 1999 by a county social worker quoted one of the Frisaura girls saying that Regina used drugs, including crack cocaine, and “that the mother would disappear for days when they lived in Saudi Arabia, and the father once found the mother in a crack house.” This was only the beginning, it turned out, of a disturbing series of reports filed in an Orange County, Florida, courthouse after 1999, which described abusive behavior by Khalil Bin Laden’s sister-in-law toward her own children. Khalil appeared occasionally at Orlando court hearings called to evaluate the best interests of Regina’s children. It was a sad and prolonged ordeal; Regina sometimes disappeared in the night and left her children alone, according to reports filed with the court. Much of her violence appeared to be related to her abuse of crack cocaine, which continued into the spring of 2001, according to a home study filed by the Department of Children and Families.¹³

Addictive drugs ruined lives in Jeddah just as they did in Orlando, and it was hardly surprising that a family as large as the Bin Ladens would be affected. The timing and geography of this particular case was awkward, but the Bin Ladens were fortunate: there was no publicity.

BY EARLY 2001, the biggest change occurring in the Bin Laden family was the rise of a large third generation. The older children of Mohamed’s fifty-four sons and daughters were reaching their twenties, and a phalanx of teenagers stood right behind them. The sheer numbers were staggering: well over one hundred direct descendants of Mohamed, plus the collateral branch descending from his brother Abdullah Bin Laden’s many children, plus dozens more incorporated into the family through marriage. The children of Mohamed still tried to assemble together as a family, particularly in the summer. A number of them gathered each year at a modern, gated seaside resort in Egypt called the Marina, an archipelago of islands fashioned from reclaimed land along a palm-draped shore of the Mediterranean. The Bin Ladens had helped to develop the resort, and they had claimed an island for themselves—Bin Laden Island, as locals called it—where the family had built a ring of stone vacation homes side by side. It was an Egyptian version of the Oaktree family village in Florida that Salem had once envisioned. On their Marina island, the Bin Ladens laid themselves out on the seashore in all of their diversity—women who were fully covered, and women who were not; men who were bearded and prayed conspicuously, and others who strapped on earphones and jogged to contemporary music.¹⁴

The Bin Laden women were by now just as striking in their diversity as the men; the difference was that they were much better hidden from view. Among Mohamed’s daughters, Randa remained an impressive figure, at least to the family’s American and European friends. She had retired from medical practice and raised her family in Jeddah. Bakr occasionally drew upon her unconventional life and comfort with the United States by inviting her as a guest at dinner when he hosted visiting American dignitaries, such as the U.S. consul general in Jeddah. One summer, Randa and her husband insisted that their teenaged son take a summer job at a Pizza Hut in Jeddah, so he would know something of ordinary life. In the family’s Westernized caucus, in addition to her, there was also Saleha, still married to her Italian designer and living on the Riviera. There was Najiah, who spent much of her time in Los Angeles, where she had taken up piloting lessons at the Santa Monica Airport. That such unconventional Arabian women shared membership in a family—and occasionally, a summer seashore—with much more traditional sisters, draped in their black abayas, was perhaps no more or less striking than the fact that Osama and Shafiq Bin Laden had been born in the same month and had now fashioned such different worlds. Indeed, without Osama, by the year 2001, the Bin Ladens might have seemed no more remarkable than thousands of other Muslim melting-pot families in an age of cultural integration.

As Hadhramis, they came from a long line of confident global travelers. As Mohamed’s children, they had inherited a spark of creative genius. As Saudis, they had learned to accommodate contradictions. These qualities described and complimented them; unfortunately, they also described and complimented Osama.

THE “PLANES OPERATION,” as it was then being called among the few around Osama who were authorized to know about it, was apparently conceived as a media event.¹⁵

Its origins are not entirely understood; the only full narrative available is one that was related under American interrogation by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. He was a Pakistani raised in Kuwait, educated in North Carolina, and radicalized on the Afghan frontier during the anti-Soviet war of the 1980s. He was not particularly close to Osama in those years, but he was an uncle of Ramzi Yousef, who had led the first attack on the World Trade Center. By Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s account, he and Yousef first conceived of using hijacked airliners as weapons while they were in exile in the Philippines during the early 1990s. His nephew was then arrested in Pakistan by a team that included FBI agents and CIA officers. At some point afterward, Mohammed met with Osama to discuss an idea that would offer a spectacular reply.

The initial discussion unfolded like a pitch meeting for a Hollywood fireball thriller. Mohammed proposed hijacking ten airplanes in the United States. Suicide pilots would fly nine of them into landmark targets on the East and West Coast—the Pentagon, the White House, the U.S. Capitol, the World Trade Center, CIA headquarters, FBI headquarters, nuclear power plants, and skyscrapers in California and Washington State. The tenth plane, bearing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed himself, would touch down at an American airport. He would then kill all of the male passengers aboard, alert the media, and deliver a speech denouncing American foreign policy. The pitch was “theater, a spectacle of destruction,” American investigators wrote later, but it was one in which Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, not Osama Bin Laden, would be “the self-cast star—the superterrorist.”¹⁶

Bin Laden heard Mohammed out, but he was not enthusiastic. Perhaps it was because, as Mohammed recounted later, Osama saw the first draft of the plan as a bit too ambitious, not practical enough to justify a green light. That was certainly a plausible reaction, and consistent with Osama’s history of caution and care in the planning of violent operations. Perhaps, too, Osama preferred a different approach to the casting of the star role.

Late in 1998 or early in 1999, Osama summoned Mohammed back, and they met at the Al-Matar complex outside Kandahar. This time they discussed a scaled-back version of the plan, one with a more manageable budget and supporting cast, and one that would not involve any press conferences presided over by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Osama said he would provide the necessary money.¹⁷

AT THE WEDDING of Osama’s second-eldest son, Mohamed, which took place in January 2001, upward of five hundred bearded guests sat cross-legged on the open ground outside Kandahar, lined up as if for prayer. They faced the groom and the groom’s father, who sat cross-legged before them, on carpets. The bride was a fourteen-year-old daughter of a former Egyptian policeman, Mohamed Atef, who was Osama’s closest military adviser—she was not in sight, of course; this was a male-only affair. The groom appeared to be about nineteen years old. He had a fuzzy, immature mustache. He wore white robes and a white Saudi headdress. Mohamed Osama Bin Laden bore a striking resemblance to his father, having inherited his thin features and flared nose. He had appeared at earlier media events with Osama; he carried an assault rifle and spoke passionately about his commitment to jihad, although he looked so young and frail that the effect was half-comical, like something from a Saturday-morning adventure cartoon. Now, on the occasion of his marriage, when Mohamed looked into the video cameras on hand, his smile seemed awkward and lacking in confidence. So, for that matter, did his father’s smile, as he sat beside Mohamed; despite appearing over many years in self-produced videos, Osama still was prone to self-consciousness when the cameras rolled.¹⁸