He was approaching his midtwenties, married to three wives, with a brood of small children scampering across the floor of the partitioned Jeddah apartment building where his expanding family lived. At his office in Medina he was the boss; he roared around in a desert-beige Land Cruiser and drove bulldozers at job sites, as his father had done. On visits to Pakistan he was a sheikh, deferred to obsequiously because of the cash he carried. On religious holidays at Mecca, he possessed a new aura in the Bin Laden hospitality tents—a righteous activist, a rising son in a respected family. In clandestine meetings of Brotherhood activists in the Hejaz, he may also have joined the movement’s planning sessions for violent, secret campaigns in Syria and Yemen; he later said that he was involved, but because these campaigns operated outside the boundaries of Saudi policy, he seems to have participated only quietly and cautiously.
Osama’s connections to the Afghan frontier ran through the Muslim Brotherhood, which had recruited him as a teenager. In Pakistan, the Brotherhood affiliate was a political party named Jamaat Islami. When Osama flew to Pakistan for the first time carrying donations for the Afghan rebels, he traveled not to the Afghan border, but to the eastern city of Lahore, where many of Jamaat’s senior political leaders were based. Osama “was not trusting ISI,” Badeeb recalled. “He doesn’t want to give the money to ISI or directly to the mujaheddin because he thinks Jamaat Islami in Lahore can get that money in the hands of the real mujaheddin,” or those who were truest to the Brotherhood’s aims. Bin Laden met two Arabic-speaking Afghan commanders, Burhanuddin Rabbani and Abdurrab Rahul Sayyaf; his trip lasted about a month.9
This initial travel signaled a pattern of Osama’s relationship with the Afghan war between 1980 and 1983: he was a commuter who did little more than carry cash and hold meetings. He made his contacts in Pakistan through several overlapping networks: his Brotherhood network of religious activists, the charitable circles of Jeddah merchants inhabited by his family, and the Saudi intelligence operation run by Badeeb. “The arrangement” during the early years of the Afghan war, recalled Jamal Khashoggi, was that the Saudi government, through its foreign intelligence service, would “support the military part,” while private philanthropists and religious activists would “support the humanitarian and relief work” along with the United States and Pakistani intelligence. These spheres overlapped, however. The donors Osama helped to organize for the Afghan cause included “members of the government,” recalled Khalil A. Khalil, a Saudi who tracked Islamic activists for the royal family. Also, Badeeb used humanitarian offices on the Afghan frontier as cover and infrastructure for intelligence operations. Because of Badeeb, Osama developed cordial relations with Prince Turki Al-Faisal, whom he met during Faisal’s periodic visits to Pakistan. He also won audiences with the powerful full brothers of Fahd—Nayef and Ahmed, with whom Salem had hunted in the Iraqi desert. Nayef and Ahmed ran the Saudi Interior Ministry, overseeing the kingdom’s domestic security.10
Because of his rising visibility and contacts with important princes, Osama began for the first time to create value for the Bin Laden family. Nothing was more important to the Bin Ladens than building and revitalizing royal connections. In this new era of Islamic awakening, Osama’s role as a courier and religious philanthropist complemented the concierge services Salem provided for Fahd and other secular-minded princes in Europe and America. Osama’s work also provided the Bin Ladens with renewed credibility among the religious leaders who influenced contracting in Mecca and Medina. Osama “was a very lovely figure in the family,” said Bassim Alim, a relative by marriage who knew him during these years and who traveled occasionally to Pakistan to support the Afghans. “They liked him.”11
In 1982 Salem appointed Osama as an executive overseeing a new round of renovation at the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina—a visible role, and another step in “the training or internship program that his elder brother gives to a younger brother,” as Khashoggi put it. Salem also ordered one of his aides to build a vault in Jeddah where Osama could temporarily store gold jewelry and cash donated for Afghans by businessmen and their wealthy wives. These rich Saudis had come to believe “that the Afghans were angels…the holy people,” recalled Ahmed Badeeb. “Women used to give their jewelry—huge amounts, you could not measure it.” The Bin Laden vault was twenty meters by twenty meters, fireproofed, and bombproofed, recalled the aide who built it.12
Osama later conceded that he worked during these years in cooperative alignment with clandestine Saudi policy; one of his assignments was to not get caught. “Due to my arrival in Afghanistan,” he recalled, “and due to my family’s closeness to the Saudi governmental system, a letter arrived commanding Osama not to enter Afghanistan, and to stay with the immigrants in Peshawar, because if the Russians were to capture or imprison him, it would be construed as proof of Saudi backing for the mujaheddin against the Soviet Empire.”13
His ego and his ambitions were swelling, yet he remained a reticent, almost painfully shy man in conversation. Sabry Ghoneim, a Bin Laden executive in Cairo, recalled Osama’s arrival in Egypt during this period for a meeting with construction engineers involved in a project Osama was supervising in Jubail, a coastal industrial city in Saudi Arabia. Ghoneim remembered him as “a young man with the attitude of a shy girl. He was always looking at his feet.” Nor was he a particularly effective executive. He said little during the interviews with the engineers. Ultimately, according to Ghoneim, the project Osama supervised lost more than $15 million.14
He was shy, but he now had several important mentors who decidedly were not: his elder half-brother, his former teacher Badeeb—and increasingly, a Muslim Brotherhood scholar and fundraiser fired by the Afghan war, Abdullah Azzam.
Like Osama, Azzam had been recruited into the Brotherhood as a young man. He was born in a village near Jenin, in the West Bank, and went into exile after Israel occupied the region during the 1967 war. He studied and taught Islamic politics in Egypt and Jordan before his subversive views led him to refuge in Saudi Arabia, where he won an appointment on the faculty of King Abdulaziz University; he lectured at the university when Osama was a student there. Azzam became an elder, charismatic, international figure in the Hejaz circles of the Brotherhood, in which Osama also moved. He was the author of a book about jihad, Signs of the Merciful, and he was developing the thesis for what would become an even more influential tract, Defense of Muslim Lands.
Like many subversive professors before him, Azzam was burdened by financial debts accumulated during his itinerant and poorly compensated career. Saudi Arabia—and Osama in particular—offered the prospect of financial liberation. There is more than a hint of opportunism in the way Azzam flattered and gradually befriended the high school–educated Osama during the first years of the 1980s, promoting the young philanthropist as a saintly patron of a righteous, assertive Islam. Azzam’s wife developed a friendship in Jeddah with Osama’s wives. They socialized at Bin Laden farms in the desert. By 1984 their acquaintanceship had deepened into partnership. It was “a meeting of money, will and youth, represented by Osama Bin Laden, and knowledge, direction and experience, represented by Abdullah Azzam,” observed Nasir Al-Bahri, Osama’s later bodyguard.15