Only one aspect of the journey made a particularly strong impression, according to Batarfi. On the way home, Osama and his wife were sitting in an airport lounge, waiting for their connecting flight. Najwa wore a black abaya, a draping gown, as well as the full head covering often referred to as hijab. Other passengers in the airport “were staring at them,” Batarfi said, “and taking pictures.” When Bin Laden returned to Jeddah, he said the experience was like “being in a show.” By Batarfi’s account, Bin Laden was not particularly bitter about all the stares and the photographs; rather, “he was joking about it.” The provenance of this account of Osama’s journey is uncertain; Batarfi is generally reliable, but in this case, his firsthand knowledge is limited. It seems clear that Osama did travel to the West to seek medical treatment for a son during the late 1970s, but he may have gone no further than Britain.17
Whatever his itineraries, the same themes prevaiclass="underline" Osama was not a stranger to the West, but he was not radicalized there. Through his own travel and that of his family, he knew something of Europe and America, but by age fifteen, he had already erected a wall against their allures. He felt implicated by the West, and by its presence in his own family, and yet, as he would demonstrate in the years ahead, he lacked a sophisticated or subtle understanding of Western society and history. He used his passport, but he never really left home.
THE AMBITION that most firmly bound Osama to his half-brothers was his interest in the family business. As his generation of Mohamed’s sons reached college, some of them drifted away from the prospect of a life in the construction trade—a few of his half-brothers managed to never work a day in their lives. Osama was among the larger group of boys who were strivers. They jockeyed for influence, salaries, and leadership roles. Osama’s religious inclinations made him a natural for management assignments involving the family’s Mecca and Medina renovation work. Assigning the most ardently religious Bin Laden brothers to work on projects in the holy cities would become a pattern as the family allocated management roles over the years.
Walid Al-Khatib, a Palestinian who supervised Osama in the Mecca office when he was still a teenager, remembered him as “serious for his age, and from the first day, I noticed his interest in small details. We operated heavy equipment, and soon this tall skinny boy was driving them all. His technical ability was impressive.”18
There were two main educational pathways for those brothers interested in a career at the company—engineering and business administration. The former was demanding academically and required a willingness to attend university abroad, as Saudi universities were not adequate. Between his religious studies and his swelling young family, the prospect of four or more years in Cairo or the West may have seemed undesirable to Osama. Whatever his reasoning, after Al-Thaghr, he enrolled as a business administration student at King Abdulaziz University, a sprawling white-walled campus built less than a decade earlier along the Mecca Road, near the Bin Laden family’s main compound at Kilo 7. It was a private university founded by Jeddah merchants who wanted a place to train their sons for business. Abdullah Suleiman, the former finance minister who had helped make Mohamed Bin Laden’s fortune, donated the land on which it stood, and had been among the Jeddah moguls who funded its creation during the 1960s.19
Years later, in an interview, Osama would boast that he balanced his academic studies with his assignments at the family company more successfully than any of his brothers. This was not only immodest, it was wrong. He apparently sought to leave university early to take a supervisory job in Mecca but may have changed his mind because of his mother’s pleadings. He implied in the interview that he had completed his university education, but according to Khalifa, he never earned a degree. A brief résumé prepared by Bin Laden or his aides in 1996 stated only that he “studied management and economics” at the university. In any event, he certainly fell well short of the achievements in academics and business management of a number of his older brothers.20
Osama was appointed as a manager in Mecca after he left university, according to Al-Khatib. The Bin Laden firms were responsible for a number of renovation projects in the area during this time. They built a new staircase at the Zamzam well, the Haram’s ancient source of sacred water; they demolished buildings to expand platforms and roads around the Mosque; and they restored walls and gates. Al-Khatib remembered Osama as stingy about distributing cash bonuses but fastidious about conserving food and handing out leftovers to the workers. Like his father, Osama prided himself on his ability to think through complex problems of demolition or engineering, even though he lacked the requisite formal training. As Al-Khatib put it: “He liked to solve technical problems by himself.”21
15. WIRED
FRANCIS HUNNEWELL grew up in a stone hilltop mansion above a lake; he belonged to a Massachusetts family who traced their line-age and landholdings to the period of America’s founding. Michael Pochna’s father had been a legal adviser to J. Paul Getty. They were both Harvard men, class of 1960. Later they moved to Paris to seek their fortunes in private finance. They made lists of contacts from family, schools, sports teams, and social clubs, and then started calling around, looking for deals—an attractive line of work if you had the right lists, spoke French, and could raise some stake money. By the early 1970s, they operated a boutique merchant bank. Headquartered in Paris but registered in the Bahamas, it was called Lansdowne Ltd.; it engaged in the kinds of financings that would later be commonly known as venture capital and private equity.1
The multiple economic upheavals of 1973 and 1974—the Arab-Israeli war, the international oil embargo, inflation, and stagnating economic growth in America and Europe—forced them to rethink. Liquidity, a banker’s synonym for ready cash, was draining rapidly out of Europe and toward the oil regions of the Arab world. Hunnewell, Pochna, and their third active partner, Jan Baily, decided to relocate to the Middle East. Beirut and Cairo seemed the most appealing places for a new headquarters; they flipped a coin, and it came up Cairo. Pochna moved there, equipped with new lists of contacts. Hunnewell’s brother-in-law was an influential banker at Credit Suisse. He suggested that they call on a young Saudi he had met, Sheikh Salem Bin Laden.
Hunnewell arranged an introductory meeting and flew into Jeddah. He was a tall, athletic man in his thirties who projected the languid confidence of old money. Salem had grown used to these solicitous bankers who wanted a piece of what they presumed to be his outlandish fortune. He judged them not by the services they offered, about which he was generally indifferent, but by whether they enjoyed his sort of fun. He hosted lunch and then suggested they all ride out to the desert to see some of the Bin Laden horses. He had just bought a new dune buggy, a motorized contraption with a Volkswagen chassis and tires that could roar through soft sand. He loaded Hunnewell and Jan Baily into the passenger seats and began speeding at sixty miles an hour through the open desert, bouncing across dunes. One of the vehicle’s wheels soon fell off. Salem stopped and rounded up Bedouins who happened to be walking nearby and forced them to search for the missing wheel. They found it and a few of its nuts and bolts. Salem had no wrench, however. Hunnewell lifted the entire buggy into the air while Salem held a Bedouin’s hand in the position of a wrench, twisting it, which Hunnewell imagined must have been very painful for the volunteer. Baily tried to put the wheel back on. It worked, sort of, and Salem was impressed. For years later he would tell the story about how Hunnewell had lifted up the car like a superhero. He seemed to decide then and there that he would do business with them. They got back in the buggy and wobbled on; Salem sped almost as fast as before. What industry they might enter, how, and by what plan—those were details for another day.2