An FBI analyst summed up the bureau’s assessment of the evidence in a breezy e-mail written in September 2003: There were “millions” of Bin Ladens “running around” and “99.999999% of them are of the non-evil variety.”9
FBI SCRUTINY of the Bin Ladens had at least one virtue, from the family’s point of view—it took place almost entirely in private. Far more painful were the public repudiations of the family by American universities and corporations that had courted them in the past. In the emotional climate that pervaded during the autumn of 2001, some of these institutions felt they had no choice but to end or suspend their dealings with the Bin Ladens. None explicitly declared that the family might still be aiding Osama, but this was a possibility that could be freely interpreted from their decisions to cut ties.
Harvard University, which had accepted $2 million in donations from Bakr Bin Laden, received many calls from people “who were emotional” and who “said it was murder money and we should give to the victims,” recalled Peri Bearman of the Islamic Legal Studies program. Harvard soon chose to suspend its Bin Laden fellowships.10
The University of Miami, Bakr’s alma mater, also backed away from him. Before September 11, university fundraisers had contacted the Bin Ladens, looking to coax funds from their wealthy alumni. Bakr had indicated that he might be willing to fund a research project into the health of the Red Sea’s coral reefs, which were under assault from pollution, silt, and too much fishing. John C. McManus, a University of Miami professor who specialized in coral reef management, obtained a Saudi visa and planned to leave for the kingdom to meet with Bakr and others on September 24, 2001. The trip was canceled and the project was abandoned. McManus recalled that the decision was mutuaclass="underline" “The family wasn’t pursuing it, so we didn’t either.” Bakr, however, believed that the university had shunned him because of September 11, and he felt hurt by the episode, according to a person who talked with him about it.11
Cadbury-Schweppes, the British chocolate maker, announced that it was breaking ties with a Bin Laden subsidiary. Companies that sold telecommunications equipment through the Bin Laden’s company made similar announcements. A few of the family’s more prominent corporate partners stood by them. A General Electric spokesman said that it was confident that the Saudi Bin Laden Group “is fully separated from Osama Bin Laden.” Chas Freeman, the former U.S. ambassador who now developed business projects in the kingdom, said that “Bin Laden” remains “a very honored name,” and he suggested pointedly that American companies that “had very long and profitable relationships” with the family were “now running for public relations cover.”12
Even after their American Express cards were restored, the Bin Ladens were reluctant to travel to the United States. None of the senior brothers around Bakr was willing to go. The atmosphere seemed too unsettled, too threatening. Saleha, Bakr’s half-sister, did go back from time to time with her Italian husband, but she was often detained at U.S. airports for two hours or more, which she found increasingly depressing. “I don’t know if we’re going to be able to keep this up because we just can’t travel this way,” she told Gail Freeman.
Europe seemed easier to navigate, particularly since the Bin Ladens often moved in the protective bubble of private aviation and so did not have to worry about alarming fellow passengers on a commercial airliner. Still, they had trouble. Police from Scotland Yard boarded Bakr’s private jet at Luton Airport and questioned him before allowing him on his way. A man punched Hassan Bin Laden in the face on the street outside the Inter-Continental Hotel in London in August 2002. In Germany or Austria, a local police chief surrounded a hotel where Bakr was vacationing, apparently in the belief that he was about to write himself into the history books for nabbing the world’s most wanted fugitive.13
Yasser Bin Laden was a younger half-brother of Bakr who lived in Jeddah and played squash with an English-speaking circle of friends in the city. He also belonged to a local Harley-Davidson motorcycle club. Each summer he and his Saudi friends would roar out on their Harleys on a cross-country road trip. After September 11 they biked through Europe. The other Saudi motorcyclists in the club joked with Yasser relentlessly, saying that his passport was going to cause them nothing but trouble every time they crossed a border. They were right: when Yasser presented his travel documents to British immigration at the entrance to the tunnel that runs beneath the English Channel from France, the British officer ordered Yasser aside, peered out his booth, and waved back all the rest of the motorcycle gang, which had previously been cleared. It took hours to run their names through all the relevant terrorist databases.
The Harley club members decided to bike through Syria and Lebanon on the next trip they took. When they reached the Saudi-Syrian border station, they all started joking with Yasser again, complaining about the trouble they would now endure from the Syrian border officials.
A Syrian guard combed through their passports and then came out to address the motorcyclists. “Where’s the sheikh? Where’s the sheikh?” the guard demanded.
They found Yasser, but the interest of the police turned out to be of a different sort than that to which they had grown accustomed: when Yasser Bin Laden thundered past on his Harley, the Syrian guards stood and saluted. For them, Osama had turned all Bin Ladens into heroes.14
“WHEN 20/20 RETURNS, a family name to be proud of—until September 11th. But what if your last name were Bin Laden now?”15
Barbara Walters traveled to Saudi Arabia early in 2002 to produce an ambitious report for the ABC television network’s evening news magazine program 20/20. In setting up the trip, Walters and her producers worked closely with Bandar Bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador in Washington, and Adel Al-Jubeir, then a political and media adviser in the court of Crown Prince Abdullah. Walters told both of them that she very much wanted to interview a member of the Bin Laden family for her report. Her broadcast would offer an opportunity for the family to humanize themselves before a large American television audience and to emphasize their estrangement from Osama. This in turn might salve some of the wounds in U.S.-Saudi relations, which had become increasingly constrained by the mutually hostile attitudes of the two countries’ publics. The Saudi officials Walters spoke with agreed that the program might be helpful. Adel Al-Jubeir, in particular, enlisted the support of Crown Prince Abdullah, and he met with Bakr Bin Laden and two other members of the Bin Laden family in an effort to persuade them to cooperate. But Crown Prince Abdullah had made clear that he would not order the Bin Ladens to appear on American television; the choice was theirs. Bakr proved reluctant, despite repeated entreaties from Al-Jubeir and other Saudi officials.16
The Bin Ladens had by now become a commodity in the media marketplace. According to Khaled Al-Maenna, editor of the Arab News in Jeddah and a frequent interlocutor with foreign media, an American media outlet (which he would not identify) telephoned to offer him a fifty-thousand-dollar fee if he could get a Bin Laden family member on camera. As a media strategist, Al-Maenna agreed that the Bin Ladens might have helped Saudi Arabia if a confident, English-speaking member of the family would appear on television, apologize, and try to make themselves accessible to American audiences. Yet the hostility and presumptuous attitudes of the American media offended him and many other Saudis.17 Pride, resentment, and fear predominated after September 11 in both America and Saudi Arabia. The Bin Ladens—with so much to lose, and in Bakr’s evident judgment, so little to gain from media publicity—kept their collective heads down.