The Bin Ladens

Even before his return to Saudi Arabia in late 1989, he had provided money to support Islamist rebels fighting against the weakening communist government of South Yemen, the half of divided Yemen that controlled the Bin Laden family homeland in the Hadhramawt. The political and religious equation in Yemen as the Cold War ended was very complex. Ali Abdullah Saleh, an army officer and Sanhan tribesman who had come to power in a coup, led North Yemen; he received some support from Saudi Arabia—primarily because he was not a communist—but his relationship with the Al-Saud was not smooth. He did, however, share Saudi Arabia’s antipathy toward South Yemen’s Soviet-backed regime. As global communism teetered during 1989, confronted by democratic rebellions from China to Europe, South Yemen’s government looked vulnerable. From Afghanistan, where he had become close to a number of Yemeni volunteers to that war, Osama saw an opportunity to extend his achievements in jihad. South Yemen’s leftist government had stripped a number of previously elite families of land and privileges, particularly in the Abyan Governate, and during the 1980s, some younger members of these families had turned to international radical Islam as an ideology of resistance. One of the Abyan leaders, Tariq Hasan Al-Fadli, founded a group called Al-Jihad. Al-Fadli said later that his South Yemen group “did have external support…through the grace of Almighty God and our venerable Sheikh Osama Bin Laden, may God protect him…He funded everything.” Bin Laden supported other Yemeni Islamists as well.⁸

As had been true of the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, Islamist violence in South Yemen advanced both the statecraft interests of the Saudi government and the looser ideology of Bin Laden and his allies. Indeed, Osama may have started his jihad project in South Yemen with encouragement or even direct support from Saudi intelligence, in the same way that he had worked in Afghanistan. Richard Clarke, who later directed counterterrorism programs in the Clinton White House, has written that Prince Turki Al-Faisal “had reportedly asked” Osama “to organize a fundamentalist religion-based resistance to the communist-style regime” in South Yemen. In the context of 1989, such a request would have been entirely consistent with Saudi foreign policy, and with the long use of the Bin Laden family in covert defense projects involving Yemen. Turki has described the matter differently than Clarke, however; he has said that Osama “came to see me with a proposal” to foment rebellion in South Yemen, and that “I advised him at the time that that was not an acceptable idea.”⁹

Whatever the truth, the geopolitical equation changed during the first six months of 1990 in a way that led Riyadh to renounce support for violent rebellion in Yemen. The fall of the Berlin Wall led to Yemen’s peaceful reunification and the formal end of the South Yemen state. On May 22, 1990, Ali Abdullah Saleh became president of a united Yemen; as part of the bargain, he tried to co-opt and calm Islamist groups that had previously waged jihad. Osama and other radicals, however, did not see the virtue in this deal, or in a national government that incorporated former communists, and they persisted with their preaching and organizing. According to Ahmed Badeeb, Turki’s chief of staff, Saleh eventually called King Fahd to complain. The Saudi government responded by pressuring Osama to quiet himself, and by one account, during the late spring or early summer of 1990, the government raided a Bin Laden family farm that Osama was using to support his Yemen project. Afterward, Osama reportedly wrote an angry letter of protest to Crown Prince Abdullah.¹⁰

This fracture in Osama’s alignment with Saudi foreign policy coincided with his rising irritation, during the autumn of 1990, over Fahd’s plan to employ American-led troops in a war to oust Saddam’s forces from Kuwait. Increasingly Osama conveyed a presumptuous attitude to the Saudi officials with whom he met. He employed bodyguards. He wrote a sixty-page paper laying out his idea to recruit and lead his Afghan-trained mujaheddin on a campaign to expel Saddam from Kuwait and save King Fahd from the dark conspiracies of the American occupation troops. He said it would be dangerous for Saudi Arabia to allow Christian troops to fight its wars. He sought a meeting with Fahd but was deflected to other Saudi officials, including a high-ranking prince at the defense ministry—this person has never been clearly identified, but it appears to have been either Abdul-Rahman bin Abdulaziz, a full brother of the king, or Khalid Bin Sultan, the influential son of the defense minister.¹¹ Osama also met with Ahmed bin Abdulaziz, Salem’s longtime contact, number two at the interior ministry. Osama later described what happened:

I directed my advice straight to the deputy Minister of Defense, informing him of the great sins from which the state should desist, and of the danger of persisting with them, but to no avail. Then I met the deputy director of the ministry for security affairs, who strongly reproached me for advising the deputy Minister of Defense and began haranguing me about exactly the same sins that I had mentioned to the minister. Then he said: “This is well known—we don’t need anyone to tell us about it.”¹²

His proposals about the coming war in Kuwait annoyed the Saudi government, but they were inconsequential. It seems, instead, to have been his persistent preaching and contact with jihadis in Yemen that eventually led the interior ministry to seize his passport during the winter of 1990–1991. As Prince Turki put it, speaking of his conversations with Osama about jihad in Yemen: “This shy, retiring and seemingly very reticent person had changed.”¹³

Osama believed—and said repeatedly—that he was working for the true interests of the Saudi royal family, not against them. His older half-brothers, however, particularly Omar and Bakr, interpreted this longstanding family mandate of fealty quite differently after Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait.

Around this time, Bakr got to know Chas Freeman, the U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia; Freeman occasionally took private soundings from prominent businessmen in Jeddah. Buoyed by these contacts, in the autumn of 1990, Bakr and Omar led the Saudi Bin Laden Group (in which Osama was a shareholder) to sign contracts with the United States Army to build facilities that would support the U.S. troop presence and the coming war with Iraq. Between September 30 and November 7, the Saudi Bin Laden Group constructed a heliport at the King Abdulaziz Air Base “in support of the United States Army deployed on Operation Desert Shield,” according to a “Certificate of Achievement” later issued by Major General William G. Pagonis of the U.S. Army Central Support Command. Pagonis recognized one Bin Laden executive for his “personal contribution” to the “most successful logistical deployment in support of a combat victory in military history…We are proud of your accomplishments and humbled by your sacrifices. We salute and thank you.” Bin Laden Telecommunications installed systems for the United States Central Command and the 35th Signal Brigade of the U.S.; its executives were awarded certificates of thanks signed by General Norman Schwarzkopf. They had provided, Schwarzkopf affirmed, “outstanding support” of the American war effort. The Bin Ladens also undertook a project to improve a twelve-hundred-kilometer desert highway “so that U.S. troops could move easily and safely to and from the northern regions of Saudi Arabia,” as Omar Bin Laden put it later; Omar personally oversaw the work. Osama surely knew about these construction projects, from which he profited as a shareholder and dividend recipient; he was in the kingdom throughout this period, although he also apparently traveled back and forth to Yemen.¹⁴