He seemed increasingly proud of his martial ambitions, particularly in comparison to the softer, regime-authorized foreign policy work of his brothers. A Bin Laden employee who had helped Osama during the anti-Soviet period in Afghanistan recalled meeting him at the Port Sudan airport construction site, where the employee was overseeing Bin Laden work camps. Osama seemed disappointed in him, as the employee remembered it. “I’m fighting a war here,” Osama said, “and you’re building an airport.”4
It would have been natural for Osama to visit the airport site—he was, after all, a shareholder of the Saudi Bin Laden Group, which was carrying out the contract—but whether he participated in that multimillion-dollar project to a greater extent, or profited from it, remains unclear. At some point between late 1991 and mid-1992, Osama decided to move permanently with his four wives and growing number of children to Sudan’s capital of Khartoum, which lay about seven hundred miles southwest of Port Sudan. He organized a number of new businesses in the city, with names such as Ladin International Company and Al-Hijra Construction; the latter referred to the Prophet Mohamed’s famous passage into exile, from Mecca to Medina. It was a presumptuous self-reference but one that spoke to Osama’s rising sense of himself as both righteous and persecuted, a self-image drawn in part from the experiences of his earliest mentors—his exiled prep school gymnasium teacher, who indoctrinated him, as well as the itinerant Palestinian organizer, Abdullah Azzam. As Osama now refitted, he may have imported construction equipment he had previously stored in Pakistan. His early projects in Sudan included some road building, according to Al-Fadl, particularly an eighty-three-mile road in the southwest of the country, near the border with Ethiopia.5
Several sources—although not Al-Fadl—have also mentioned Osama’s involvement with the Port Sudan airport project. Richard Clarke, the Clinton administration’s counterterrorism supervisor, has identified “a new airport” as among Bin Laden’s early Sudan projects, which Clarke said were undertaken as “a joint project” with the Islamist leader Al-Turabi. (Hassan Al-Turabi was fast becoming the latest in a succession of older religious intellectuals to mentor Osama self-interestedly, stroking his ego while reaching for his wallet.) Al-Turabi’s wife has been quoted as saying that Osama “built the Port Sudan airport.” Omar Bin Laden, however, has sworn in an affidavit that “to the best of my knowledge, Osama had no role in the performance of the Port Sudan airport construction project.” Omar also denied that the major Bin Laden family firms participated in joint construction projects of any kind with Osama or “with any other company controlled by Osama” while he was in Sudan during the 1990s.6
The Port Sudan airport was mostly finished by June 1992. That month, Prince Mohamed bin Abdullah Al-Saqeer of the Saudi Development Fund led an official delegation, including newspaper reporters, to attend a ribbon-cutting ceremony. Omar Bin Laden, dressed in a red-checked headdress, his round face sporting a neatly trimmed mustache, took the podium. He recited statistics about the new airport’s size and facilities. “This project has been accomplished by the will of God, and according to the international requirements and specifications,” Omar said. “We are happy to participate in this celebration to inaugurate this large cultural edifice and we ask God to bless this project and everyone who participated in it.”7
An account published in the London-based newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi almost a decade later reported that Osama was a “guest of honor” at this ceremony and that he sat in the front row. Omar Bin Laden has denied this, writing in an affidavit, “To the best of my recollection, Osama was not in attendance.” Omar produced contemporary Saudi newspaper stories that made no mention of Osama’s presence. “I did not see or meet with Osama on that trip or, in fact, on any other trip I made to the Sudan.”8
Bakr Bin Laden did meet with Osama in Khartoum during 1992. He traveled there “accompanied by other family members,” according to a family attorney, “to make a plea to Osama to return to his country, make amends with the Saudi government, and abandon the path of political opposition and exile from country and family on which he appeared to have set.” This was Bakr’s last meeting with Osama according to Bakr. Other family members and emissaries apparently continued to visit Osama and plead with him to come home. There were “almost nine” such missions, in Osama’s oddly phrased counting, and they appear to have lasted at least into 1994. Osama’s half-brother Tareq, for example, recalled visiting Khartoum in “late 1992 or early 1993.” His purpose, he remembered, was “to convince Osama to abandon his criticisms of the Saudi government and return to Saudi Arabia.” It was a short visit; Osama said that “he was happy in the Sudan and did not want to return to Saudi Arabia, as he was focused on building his businesses in the Sudan.” Tareq believed that Osama was engaged in legitimate business, he later told an American court. Tareq “did not see or hear anything during the visit suggesting that [Osama] was involved in terrorist or violent activities of any kind. Nor did he express any hostility to the United States.”9
These missions to Khartoum began when it “became clear to us that he had a hand in one way or another in some of these things, such as terrorist operations in Egypt and Libya,” according to Ahmed Badeeb, then chief of staff to the head of Saudi intelligence, Prince Turki. “The King ordered that Osama Bin Laden be called into the Kingdom. He was asked to return in order to discuss some of the things that needed to be discussed, and other things that were harming the Kingdom, but he refused to. He was sent a few messages, and his family was contacted; he continued to refuse to return.”10
King Fahd ordered Bakr to see Osama and persuade him to come home for consultations, according to two people who have discussed the matter with Bakr. He found Osama stubborn and arrogant. In his own account, Osama has emphasized that he did not blame any of his relatives for their entreaties—he regarded them as victims of King Fahd’s pressure, and he believed that his family’s dependency on the Al-Saud for construction contracts made them vulnerable to a form of extortion by the Saudi government. “I apologized to my family kindly,” Osama said, “because I know that they were driven by force to come to talk to me. This regime wants to create a problem between me and my family in order to take some measures against them.”11
Some people in and around the Bin Laden family wondered if Bakr was really an adequate match for Osama. Bakr could come across as a less than commanding presence; one person who knew him well said he could seem like the boy on the playground who is often picked last for team games. As the family’s Osama problem accumulated during 1992 and early 1993, even some who respected and admired Bakr wondered how Salem might have handled things differently. Salem had been such a forceful whirlwind—he was physical, insistent, and difficult to stop. If he had been alive to undertake these early missions to Khartoum, Osama might have been returned to the kingdom in a burlap sack, tossed into the cabin of a private jet with a pile of Salem’s designer-brand luggage. But Salem was gone; Osama seemed to exploit the void.
He seemed also to revel in the attention that came with his family’s pleading. “He was out of touch in Sudan,” recalled his friend Jamal Khashoggi, who visited him there several times. Bodyguards, acolytes, employees, and volunteer fighters encased him as he moved around Khartoum; the nationalities and occupations of his followers varied, but they all depended on his money and his patronage. He shuffled between comfortable offices on King Leopard Street and a shaded home-office compound in posh Riyadh City. He attended horse races and stabled his own horses on his farms. His grandest business project involved an enormous tract of agricultural land in the southwest granted to him by the Sudanese government, where seasonal Sudanese laborers in his employ harvested oil and seeds from sunflowers; Osama showed off his largest flowers with the pride of a passionate gardener. He was tossing money by the bucketful into new and questionable Sudanese businesses, but in 1992 and early 1993, he nonetheless had plenty of cash to go around—enough to spend $480,000 on the purchase and renovation of a used airplane ferried in from the United States, and enough to meet payroll for several hundred Arab jihadis flown in from Pakistan, as well as the many hundreds of Sudanese laborers at his sunflower farm. Osama seemed to believe during this period that he could have it all in Sudan—wives, children, business, horticulture, horse breeding, leisure, pious devotion, and jihad—all of it buoyed by the deference and public reputation due a proper sheikh. He did not yet seem to grasp that his enterprise, particularly in its support for violence against governments friendly to or dependent upon the Al-Saud, might prove difficult to reconcile with the interests of his family in Jeddah. He could seem oblivious to the fissures opening up around him. When Jamal Khashoggi visited, Osama even spoke at length about his desire to organize an investment drive that would draw prominent Saudi businesses to Sudan, in order to strengthen this important new Islamist-leaning country.