After Osama’s son Abdullah had decided to abandon his father to take up a normal Saudi teenager’s life in Jeddah, Mohamed had assumed the role of faithful eldest son in exile, and so his wedding was an unusually important occasion. There were other teenagers in Osama’s Afghan brood—the Al Qaeda leader had done more than many of his half-brothers to contribute to the swelling size of the family’s third generation. His sons alone now numbered about a dozen. In addition to Mohamed, the next eldest, Sa’ad, had been groomed for future leadership. Three other younger boys—Khalid, Hamzah, and Ladin—would soon appear in war-fighting propaganda videos, posing like African or Sri Lankan child soldiers.
Osama seemed to regard Mohamed’s wedding as an opportunity to create a video postcard that could be enjoyed by relatives unable to attend, and at the same time, as a chance to contribute a new propaganda piece for Arab television audiences. His aides telephoned the Al-Jazeera bureau chief in Pakistan, Ahmad Zaidan, and invited him to Kandahar. When he arrived, they promised him a copy of the wedding video, so he could arrange for its broadcast by satellite. Osama’s team filmed the ceremony with their own cameras, discreetly tucking them beneath robes at times so as not to offend photography-phobic Taliban guests.
Osama was in an expansive mood. Three months earlier, Al Qaeda suicide bombers in Yemen had piloted an explosive-laden skiff into the hull of the USS Cole, an American guided-missile destroyer; when the two attackers blew themselves up, they killed seventeen sailors and wounded more than thirty others.
“I will tell you one thing,” Osama told Zaidan afterward, as the latter recalled it. “We did the Cole and we wanted the United States to react. And if they reacted, they are going to invade Afghanistan and that’s what we want…Then we will start holy war against the Americans, exactly like the Soviets.”19
He was not preoccupied only by office talk, however. Osama’s mother had flown in from Jeddah, and she had brought along at least two of Osama’s younger stepbrothers, with whom he had shared his suburban household after his mother’s remarriage. (The Saudi intelligence service, which had been informed of her decision to travel to Afghanistan, still felt that it could not interfere with a mother’s desire to see her son, even after the brazen Cole attack.) Osama, Zaidan recalled, felt bad that his position among the FBI’s Most Wanted had forced his mother to fly commercial and by an indirect route. “I am very much feeling guilty,” Osama said, as Zaidan remembered it. “If there is no embargo on the Taliban, I could bring a special plane to take from here to Saudi Arabia.” He chastised himself: “I am not so kind to my mother.”20
The wedding ceremony itself did not take long—perhaps one hour, by Zaidan’s estimation, followed by a banquet of food and a dessert course of fruits. Osama decided against a speech honoring his son but chose instead to recite a poem he had written about the USS Cole operation. He stood before the assembled and began to recite:
His performance did not go particularly well, however. He stumbled. The crowd shouted “Allah Akhbar!” to encourage him. He carried on, but afterward he called Zaidan aside.
“I don’t think my delivery was good,” he confessed. Zaidan deduced that Osama was “very much caring about public relations—very much caring about how he would appear on the TV.”
Osama decided to try it a second time. He went back outside, the cameras rolled, and he recited the poem again:
He went back inside and looked at the video, reviewing his performances. “No, no, the first one was better,” he concluded.21
PART FOUR
LEGACIES
September 2001 to September 2007
36. THE NAME
ON SEPTEMBER 13, 2001, Jason Blum, a former police officer who had moved into the private security industry, received a telephone call from Airworks Inc., a New Jersey broker of charter aircraft operations. The company was arranging a charter to carry members of the Bin Laden family out of the United States, its representative said. Given the events of the previous forty-eight hours, Airworks had decided to hire a security guard to protect the airplane’s crew—the pilot, copilot, and several flight attendants. Blum, however, would not be permitted to carry a weapon on board; he would have to rely on his wits and his training in martial arts.1
Blum asked what the Bin Laden family members would have with them. Any guns? Cash? Had they been cleared to depart by the Federal Bureau of Investigation? These issues would be resolved, the charter representative assured him. Blum agreed to take the job. He was later told to arrive at a private aviation terminal at the Los Angeles International Airport at seven in the morning on September 19.
When the day arrived, Blum dressed in a suit and tie and drove to the airport. Several FBI agents met him; they patted him down and looked through his carry-on bag, and then they escorted him aboard a Boeing 727. The plane belonged to Ryan International, a charter company based in the Midwest. Previously, the Baltimore Orioles baseball team, and more recently, the Chicago Bulls basketball team, had used this particular plane to travel between games. Its cabin was large enough to hold about 180 seats if it were configured for a commercial airliner, but to accommodate the sports teams, it had been outfitted in a more luxurious style. There were about thirty comfortable blue leather chairs and a half-circle wet bar at which passengers could stand and talk.
As Blum stepped inside, he saw there were only two people aboard, both women. One introduced herself as an FBI agent. The other, a woman in her midforties, dressed in the elegant but professional style of an American businesswoman, was Najiah Bin Laden.
The FBI agents all departed, the plane doors closed, and Blum sat down to talk with Najiah. She was “visibly upset,” and “just shaking,” as Blum remembered it. She described the novel experience of being patted down by the female FBI agent before she came aboard; he told her he had just been through the same procedure, and they chuckled about it.2
Najiah said that she had been living in Los Angeles, in the Westwood neighborhood, for years, and that she loved Southern California. She rode horses, played polo, and took piloting lessons, she said, and she did not want to return to Saudi Arabia. She talked about “how horrible this was, and how horrible this was for the name of her family,” Blum recalled.
A few days after the attacks in New York and Washington, Najiah continued, she had gone into a large department store in west Los Angeles to purchase some clothing. The cashier looked at her credit card and made derogatory comments, as Blum recalled her account. Afterward, she had begun to fear for her life. FBI agents had visited her at her home on September 17; she told them that she was deeply upset by the suicide attacks because “violence is not the way of Islam.”3