They were partners, too, in the planned King Abdullah Economic City, announced in late 2005 as oil prices moved above fifty dollars a barrel. The new king commandeered undeveloped land along the Red Sea north of Jeddah and announced a city designed to rival Dubai. Abdullah said the project would cost about $27 billion. He planned a Millennium Seaport to rival the largest commercial ports in the world; high-speed rail and air links to the rest of the kingdom; an Industrial District of petrochemical and other plants; a waterside resort to attract tourists, complete with the kingdom’s first world-class 18-hole golf course; a Financial Island topped by two office towers reaching sixty or more stories into the sky; an Education Zone filled with modern universities; and, of course, more condominiums. The project, said a Bin Laden executive, “could either make or break the local economy.” For the Bin Laden companies, the construction work alone would be “absolutely huge in scope.”15
“For the Roads Ahead,” was the headline on a self-promotional advertisement purchased by the Saudi Bin Laden Group in the Washington Post late in 2005. “Construction may be at the heart of what we do. But our interests also extend into the worlds of media, retail, industrial projects and telecommunications. It’s all part of our vision to ensure Saudi Arabia remains a modern and dynamic regional center in the 21st Century.”16
There seemed to be no aspect of Saudi Arabia’s second wave of modernization projects from which the Bin Ladens would not profit handsomely. Even the sometimes shaky security environment in the kingdom offered opportunity. In May 2003, Al Qaeda cells inside Saudi Arabia launched a series of mostly ineffectual attacks against the Interior Ministry, American compounds in the oil zones, and against the U.S. consulate in Jeddah. Osama Bin Laden’s son Sa’ad, in exile in Iran, was accused of playing a role in organizing the strikes. Saudi security forces, aided by surveillance technology acquired from the United States, launched violent crackdowns against suspected Al Qaeda sympathizers. Hundreds of Islamists were rounded up and interrogated. The violence soon subsided. In April 2006, the Saudi government announced a fast-track project to build nine new prisons across the kingdom within twelve months. The construction contract was awarded to the Saudi Bin Laden Group; it was valued at $1.6 billion.17
40. IN EXILE
THE OFFICES of Fame Advertising are on the second floor of a strip mall in downtown Jeddah, on Palestine Street. The shopping center also houses a Starbucks, a Java Lounge, a Vertigo Music Café, and a Body Master, a massage and health club. Inside the Fame Advertising suite, the ambience suggests a Silicon Valley startup company. There is a juice bar with tall bar stools, and on the wall hangs a large black-and-white photograph of cable cars on an undulating San Francisco street. Impressionist paintings of European café scenes grace other rooms. The furniture is chrome, black leather, and cherry wood; the computers sport the labels of International Business Machines.1
This is the realm of Osama Bin Laden’s eldest son, Abdullah, who started Fame as an outlet for his entrepreneurial ambitions after he returned to Saudi Arabia, following his separation from his father in Sudan. As of late 2005, Fame enjoyed an association with the larger Saudi Bin Laden Group, and it had about fifteen employees. Unlike many Saudi companies, the firm did not enforce gender segregation within its offices. It produced a stylish Web site, www.fame-adv.com. Its clients included large Jeddah-based merchant groups such as the Jufallis and Western companies such as Phillips, the electronics maker.
The proprietor, now in his midtwenties, often wore blue jeans and a baseball cap. In the spring of 2002, he stunned diplomats at the nearby American consulate by turning up in such an outfit at a July 4–style celebration of U.S. independence (held a little early on the calendar because Jeddah’s weather in July is unbearable). Abdullah vacationed in Europe, and when in Jeddah, he became a fixture at the relatively freewheeling Bin Laden–owned beach club along the Red Sea.
To promote Fame’s services, Abdullah created marketing brochures, in the form of small and colorful cards, which could be handed out to prospective clients. A card entitled “Corporate Identity Management” exuded, “At FAME ADVERTISING we believe that the development of a successful corporate identity is essential to any project or business. Our creation of corporate identities is based on extensive research…with innovative methods that succeed every time.” On the back of the card was a one-word slogan: “Strong.” A second brochure was titled “Event Management.” It boasted, “FAME ADVERTISING events are novel, planned meticulously and executed with efficiency.” The slogan on the back: “Different.” If Abdullah was conscious of the way he quoted his father’s methodology, he did not extend the parallels too far: colorful balloon displays, rather than simultaneous car bomb explosions, were a typical motif of Fame events, according to the photographs posted on its Web site.2
As Osama Bin Laden’s exile lengthened after September 11, his own large family, the product of at least five marriages over two decades, scattered and drifted, much as had happened to Osama’s own generation after the death of Mohamed Bin Laden. As of 2002, Osama had fathered at least twenty-three children. The great majority of them, apart from Abdullah and a few others, lived with him in Afghanistan during the run-up to September 11. As that attack approached, however, Osama seemed to decide that he would endure the next phase of his banishment without the company of most of his current wives. In the summer of 2001, some of Osama’s older sons arranged for at least one of his wives and her children to take shelter with tribesmen along the Afghan-Pakistan border; they later turned her over to the Pakistan government, and after several months, this wife apparently returned to her native Saudi Arabia with some of her children. Two of Osama’s earlier wives had already returned to the kingdom. By December 2001, his recent, very young Yemeni wife had also returned home.3
Osama’s sons divided themselves into two camps—those who stayed to fight with him, and those who returned to Saudi Arabia, where they could enjoy some of the benefits of Bin Laden family membership. Sa’ad, Hamzah, Sayf, Mohamed, Khalid, and Ladin were among the sons who stayed with Osama or devoted themselves to his cause from separate (and ambiguous) exile in Iran. Those who returned to Saudi Arabia, in addition to Abdullah, included Osama’s sons Ali and Omar; the latter had decided to leave Afghanistan in 2000, at the age of nineteen.4
When Omar reached Jeddah, he found that he lagged behind his peers in the Bin Laden family. “Osama did not educate his children” in conventional schools, explained Jamal Khalifa, Osama’s brother-in-law, who came to know Omar after his return. In Afghanistan, he insisted that they only “memorize the Koran…So Omar, he was feeling really sorry. He saw the difference between himself and others in the family.”5 Nonetheless, he established himself as a scrap dealer in Jeddah. He married a Saudi woman, developed a muscular physique, donned blue jeans, and trimmed his beard into a fashionable goatee.
In the autumn of 2006, while riding horses near the Pyramids in Egypt, Omar, now in his midtwenties, met Jane Felix-Browne, a fifty-one-year-old grandmother from Cheshire, England, whose own well-preserved physique owed something, according to a British newspaper account, to the eighty thousand pounds she had spent over the years on plastic surgery. Omar and Jane fell in love, by her account, and quickly married. She had previously been married five times and had converted to Islam; their romance had to overcome some of the tensions that arose from his father’s notoriety. “Omar is wary of everyone,” Felix-Browne said. “He is constantly watching people who he feels might be following him. Not without reason, he is fearful of cameras…But when we are together, he forgets his life.” She said Omar had “left his father because he did not feel it was right to fight or to be in an army,” and yet “he misses his father.” When news of his union generated sensational headlines in Britain, Omar issued a statement to a Saudi newspaper defending his marriage. He explained that his first wife had agreed to this expansion of their family—“Polygamy is not strange in our Arab and Islamic society”—and he pointed out that the Prophet Mohamed had married his wife Khadjia “when he was twenty and she was forty.” There seemed to be some confusion about this issue among his two wives; Felix-Browne soon announced their divorce. She said that she and Omar feared for their lives.6