“Osama, don’t you realize that people are afraid to be associated with you?” Khashoggi asked. Osama did not answer. He only smiled, Khashoggi recalled, “as if he were happy he was so important.”12
ON FEBRUARY 26, 1993, in New York, a car bomb detonated in a parking garage of the World Trade Center, killing six people and injuring just over one thousand. Investigators soon identified a fugitive, Ramzi Yousef, a Pakistani raised in Kuwait, educated in Wales, and trained at camps in Afghanistan, as the leader of the conspiracy. Although Osama Bin Laden was not identified as Yousef ’s direct patron, then or later, in the broader media coverage of transnational jihad that followed the first World Trade Center attack, some journalists and commentators did note Osama’s presence in Sudan and described his reported financial handouts to multinational volunteer fighters. For the Saudi royal family, this attention transformed Osama, for the first time, from a discreet domestic problem into a public embarrassment.13
Less than three months after the New York bombing, on May 3, 1993, in Riyadh, Mohammed Al-Masari, a professor of physics, and Saad Al-Faqih, a medical doctor, announced the formation of the Committee for the Defense of Legitimate Rights, an organization seeking reform of the Saudi political system. Al-Masari and Al-Faqih were both Islamists; the Muslim Brotherhood, in particular, had influenced Al-Faqih, who came from a well-known Saudi family of doctors who attended to the royals. Al-Masari, for his part, had shown unusual facility as a media spokesman and organizer at a time when unlicensed satellite television dishes and fax machines were proliferating in Saudi households. Both men had been involved in political petition drives and underground sermon distribution after the Gulf war. After two years of organizing, Al-Faqih said later, “Everything appeared to be in place: charismatic preachers, thousands of enthusiastic followers, and a religious public. What was missing was an effective organization to channel this energy and pose a serious challenge to the regime.” They prepared carefully for their committee’s formal launch. Al-Masari met with diplomats at the U.S. embassy and solicited their support. The BBC, Voice of America, and other global media covered the organization’s debut.14
King Fahd struck back decisively. Perhaps he felt he had allowed these currents of dissent to drift along for too long. On May 12, the kingdom’s official Council of Higher ‘Ulema, its supreme body of religious scholars, denounced the upstart reformers, pronouncing officially and pointedly that they had violated Islamic law. Police arrested Al-Masari, Al-Faqih, and other known troublemakers. A broader attack on Islamist dissenters followed.
Osama now became a target; it is not entirely clear why. He is not known to have signed any of the important documents associated with the Al-Faqih–led dissident group, which posed a much more visible threat to the Saudi regime. It is possible that Osama issued tape-recorded or other underground sermons denouncing the Al-Saud during this period, and that the Interior Ministry discovered them. “We were there, working secretly,” Khalid Al-Fawwaz, who later served as Osama’s spokesman in London, once boasted.15 It is equally possible, however, that the Saudi government simply decided to include Osama’s case in its broader crackdown, given that he had now acquired an international profile in Sudan and that the government’s previous efforts to reel him in, through Bakr and other family channels, had failed.
On June 16, 1993, in Jeddah, Bakr undertook proceedings within the Bin Laden family to expel Osama as a shareholder of the Mohamed Bin Laden Company and the Saudi Bin Laden Group. In a later affidavit, Bakr implied that the family took this initiative, but it is likely that pressure from the Saudi government was a substantial cause. Bakr acted, he explained, “because Osama’s increasingly vocal criticisms of the Saudi government were harmful to the companies’ reputations in the Kingdom and elsewhere in the Middle East, and because Osama had refused to comply with the Saudi government’s demand that he return to the Kingdom.”16
“In the Name of Allah, Most Merciful, Most Compassionate,” began the text of one resolution setting forth “the Exit of One Shareholder.” The document suggests the family negotiated with Osama before it went forward. For example, Osama designated a “lawful attorney” from Jeddah, Muhamad Salem Al-Yaf ’ei, to represent him. Also, Osama specifically assigned all his divested shares to Ghalib Bin Laden, the younger full brother of Bakr and Salem. It was Ghalib who had visited Peshawar, Pakistan, during Ramadan in 1989, at a time when Osama was fighting in the battle for Jalalabad. There is evidence that Ghalib retained an interest in Islamic financial institutions at the time he agreed to accept Osama’s divested shares: in late 1993, Ghalib transferred $1 million to a new investment account at Bank Al-Taqwa, in the Bahamas, an offshore bank founded in 1988 with backing from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Al-Taqwa funded HAMAS in Israel and other Brotherhood-influenced radical groups in Algeria and Tunisia, according to a written assessment by the U.S. Treasury Department. What involvement Bakr Bin Laden had in the Al-Taqwa investment is not known, but Bakr did have signature authority over Ghalib’s account, which remained active until at least the late 1990s, according to bank documents filed in a U.S. court. Ghalib later sought to withdraw his investment from Al-Taqwa and filed suit against the bank. Through family attorneys, Ghalib said that he had never provided financial or other support for terrorism of any kind.17
The June 1993 shareholder resolutions initiated a process that lasted until the end of the year, leading to the final disposition of Osama’s assets. Its purpose, according to a family attorney, was “to deprive Osama of access to any funds derived from his interests in the family-owned companies.” Bakr and other family shareholders “were firmly opposed to any direct or indirect financial support from the family companies.” Tareq Bin Laden, a director of Mohamed Bin Laden’s flagship construction firm, felt that “Osama’s vocal criticisms of the Saudi government were harming the companies’ reputations in the Middle East.” There were also consultations during this time between the family and the Saudi Ministry of Commerce. The pace apparently allowed additional family delegations to visit Khartoum and plead with Osama to reconsider his position. His mother was among those dispatched. At least one younger brother met with him, according to Jamal Khashoggi, who was present in Sudan during that particular visit. (It was a “brother-to-brother” conversation, said Khashoggi, and he did not join in.) The most prestigious visitor throughout this period was Abdullah Bin Awadh Bin Laden, the legendary brother of Osama’s father, who was now near eighty years old. Bakr might be the head of the Bin Laden family for all practical and financial matters, but Abdullah, eldest of the male elders, remained a spiritual and moral leader. That a man of his age would fly to rough Khartoum to plead with Osama signaled the seriousness of the situation. Osama dug in. “With God’s grace,” as he described it later, “this regime did not get its wish fulfilled. I refused to go back.”18