391. Road To 9/11: The Rise of Osama Bin Laden (Part 3)

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0:38Anita:Welcome back to Empire with me, Anita Arnand.

0:41William:And me, William Drimple. And joining us for the next two episodes, I am very proud to say we have back one of my oldest friends and a wonderful, wonderful man, an Empire veteran, the winner of not one but two Pulitzer Prizes, Steve Cole, the author of Ghost Wars, Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden and the Bin Ladins, an Arabian family in the American century. Steve Cole, welcome back to Empire. I'm delighted to be back. Nice to see you both. These two episodes answer the question that ended the last episode. Who is Osama Bin Laden and what is the story of the family and the kingdom that made him?

1:19Anita:Yeah. So can we start, Steve, with the patriarch of the Bin Laden family? I mean, 17 kids, the bin Laden was part of it. It seems like an enormous brood. But tell us about bin Laden Senior. Mohammed bin Laden, yes. He came from the Hadramat in what's now Yemen, an area over the centuries that gave rise to lots of seafarers and globalists in a much earlier time. He grew up in a rugged part of the central Hadraman, drove down there to see their ancestral home at one point when I was researching this book, and it was just a remarkable journey.

2:00William:It's most improbable to those of us that are brought up with images of sort of flat desert. I was in the neighboring corner of Saudi just three months ago, and the proper mountains and greenery, Arabia Felix. But it's very dry, characterized by wadis, but most of the agriculture was trying to capture floods when they occasionally had downpours. A lot of young people from that area who were ambitious, the trick was to use kin networks who had already migrated out of the Hadramat to find some way forward. And as very young boys, Osama's father and his uncle, Abdullah, essentially walked from their home to seaports, hitched rides, and ended up in Jidda, the Saudi port town, the kind of gateway to Mecca.

3:00And then even in the very early part of the 20th century, a thriving kind of entropole of people who sold passage to the Hajj, people who ran hotels, who ran transportation companies, who provided food and services, who worked at the port. So they would have been about 11 years old or so, 10 to 11 years old when they arrived. They had uncles with quote marks around them who they thought were in Jeddah and who they connected with. And Mohammed bin Laden, Osama's father, did not leave an oral history, which is of shame. He died a little bit abruptly, as we'll get to. But his early days, we have the sense that he started out as a porter.

3:44Literally a porter. Yeah, pulling bags around the port. As he established himself, he acquired skills as a bricklayer. And this was all pre-oil Saudi Arabia. So the Hajj and the activities, the economy around the Hajj, and Mecca pilgrimages and Medina pilgrimages in general, that was the biggest source of economic activity in the Saudi kingdom at the time.

4:12Anita:So, I mean, what you're painting a picture is of somebody dirt poor. And, you know, the legend that has wound itself around the family is that, you know, dirt poor, but also sleeping in the dirt, that, you know, they had to sleep in ditches. Is that how he lost his eye as well? I mean, at what point does he lose his eye? It was an accident, a construction site accident. He did, at least for a couple of years, work at the margins. And while he did find relatives who he could connect with, who would keep track of him, it took several years before he was taught how to participate in the building booms that were beginning as more global travel brought more visitors.

4:55Now, this is pre-Great Depression. And I think at that point, he started to see himself as a potential young businessman and started to move from bricklaying into contracting more broadly and set up a little firm with his brother and started to at least support himself. He was far from wealthy in those first years. And then the rest of his story from when he really began to rise as a construction magnet until his death in 1967 is inseparable from the story of Saudi Arabia itself in the oil age. Because while he was in Jidda, the future king of a united Saudi Arabia conquered Jidda, imposed a harsh religious rule aligned with the Wahhabi sect that he arose from, Wahhabi Islam.

5:51So very puritanical, tempting to impose rules that would bring people into alignment with life as it was lived during the lifetime of the prophet in the 7th century. Then in the 1930s, as we discussed in an earlier episode, maybe a year or two ago, oil came to Saudi Arabia. And with oil investment and with investment building, primarily by the royal family for the royal family. We'll come to this in a second, but I just want to say one other thing about Mohammed bin Laden. I mean, he's an extraordinary entrepreneur. He builds a gigantic fortune and a gigantic family. He becomes one of the most influential people in Saudi Arabia right through to the last minute of his life.

6:35He's at the court. He knows princes and kings on a first name basis to the extent he would dare speak that way. And this is the point, actually. He was an outsider. I tried to imagine in, say, an American or a British context socially what his standing was. He was a very wealthy outsider who had no hope of ever marrying his children into the royal family or even the periphery of the royal family. It would have been like some blue blood in the northeast of America whose family traced back to the Mayflower, allowing their daughter to marry the Sicilian spitting contractor who built their swimming pool.

7:21I mean, that's who he was.

7:23William:And he was, though, the royal bricklayer, at least, though he wasn't the royal suitor in any Yes, exactly. And so he was respected, and they needed him. Okay, so how did he become wealthy and end up with 54 children, of whom Osama was the 17th son? And where does Osama get born into? What sort of stage in the family's rise is Osama born? So let's leap forward to the circumstances of his birth. What we can discern from Muhammad's children is that it was not until the Second World War, or just as it was winding down, that he was financially comfortable enough to start fathering children and marrying.

8:11And he rather quickly followed the practice of having four wives at any one time.

8:17William:Which is normal in the Saudi elite, in the rich elite? It was a mixed picture. Very common among wealthy and powerful leaders in Yemen, where he came from, less established on the Arabian Peninsula, certainly not routine in a place like Jeddah, which was modern and globalized and diverse in many ways. But in Riyadh, where the royal family was based, there were some princes and then later kings who followed that practice. A king that we'll meet in a minute, King Faisal al-Saud, who was a much more modern man, was a monogamous husband and saw that as a sign of his own modernity. It was one of the ways you were modern, was to not live this way.

9:09William:So would it have been a symbol to, if you were from the elite in the 50s and 60s, to have had four wives, would it have been a sign that you're from the boonies? You know, King Saud had four wives. I think it's a display of privilege, of wealth. Some people by the 70s and 80s would have regarded it as retro. But in the 50s and 60s, I don't think so.

9:33Anita:But also an article of faith, maybe. I don't know. I mean, if you're sort of instilling the virtues of Wahhabism and 7th century Islam, you know, one could argue this is the way we were meant to live. I mean, I don't know how much that holds sway. I do want to talk about Osama's mother, Steve, because, you know, this epic family that, you know, over 20 wives, never more than four at a time. It happens because he keeps divorcing and remarrying. And it's through that sort of churn that 54 children pop out into the world. The mother of Osama is a Syrian woman called Aliyah Erganen. Now, there is a story that makes me slightly queasy, that when he decides he's had enough of Aliyah, Osama's just a baby.

10:17Anita:He just marries her off to one of his managers. Is that right? Can you tell us a bit more about that? No, that's absolutely right. So Osama was born in 1957. So that's about 13 years after Muhammad started marrying and having children. By that time, he had established two senior wives who he would remain married to throughout their lives, his life. And I think his third wife also had a long run. I'm not entirely clear about that slot. But the fourth position among his four wives was one that he rotated serially to pursue what I think can only be described as his own sexual appetites because he had the habit of marrying and divorcing rather quickly in that fourth position.

11:01And Alia was 15 years old, living in coastal Syria. And I think he became connected to her family through a business that the bin Laden group was doing in Syria at the time. And he was essentially presented to her by a business contact in Syria who was the girl's father. And so, you know, you can imagine her being 15 years old and taken away from home and then taken to Jida. But that's what happened. She had a child, Osama, fairly quickly. And yes, about a year later, now in Jida, which was now the booming headquarters of the bin Laden organization, Other sons were coming of age into their early teens.

11:45And the father routinely then passed this, whoever was in the fourth wife position, on to someone who could provide security. And so he did. He married her to someone in the business who was a sort of mid-level manager of some sort, kind man. They formed then a conventional household in suburban Jeddah. Aliyah and the new husband had several children, but Osama was the special child because he had a share of this very wealthy business and income associated with it.

12:25Anita:Okay, so he's got income, but he doesn't have much access to his dad. I mean, apart from the revolving door of the fourth wife position, he's the child of a discarded wife. Talking to the other brothers that I was able to access when I was working on the book, the father was quite rigorous in trying to treat them all equally. There were continual, regular assemblies of the sons. I'm talking about the sons, the daughters not so much. They were protected by Islamic law, so they still had wealth. But he met with the sons. He would basically hold court with them. He was apparently quite a taskmaster.

13:03He expected them to, like a lot of self-made fathers expected them to live up to his hard standards of work and achievement and education as well.

13:11William:What sort of psychological effect can we imagine this having on the young Osama? Are we imposing our westernness by regarding this as a weird family structure and something that would be unstable? Or is this completely normal in that world? I think it felt like a loving household that he grew up in. I mean, you know, you work backwards from his hubris and his ambition, and you can see a couple of strands of it. I mean, I spent a fair amount of time in Jeddah, got to know, I could see where he lived, the home where he lived. I met people who played with him as a boy. He had a very stable, conventional nuclear family upbringing.

13:48By the time he was aware, his mother was already remarried to this man. The only thing that was different, but he was this golden child. So, I'm sure, You think of some very ambitious men who had very committed, doting, loving mothers who just persuaded them that they were destined to conquer the world, like Franklin Delano Roosevelt is one example I think of. That's my sense of Osama. I think his mother was very devoted to him, and he was, in a sense, weirdly, as a child, the breadwinner, because he was getting a dividend of hundreds of thousands of dollars in the 1960s and 70s, which is serious money.

14:29And his father was making presumably one twentieth of that as a salaryman in the Bin Laden organization.

14:39William:Steve, two sort of questions out of that. Any access to his dad? Is he seeing dad? Is he admitted into the kind of household or is he now part of this other family? And also just give us a picture now of the status of bin Laden senior by the time that Osama is born. He's risen right up the ranks at this point. Yes. So both things are those two answers are connected. By this time, Mohammed bin Laden owns and runs the major construction company that serves the boom undertaken by the Saudi royal family during the first oil age. And this means palace building. It means road building. It means airport and hospital construction.

15:21And so he's got a very big operation, and it's based in Jeddah where Osama lives. And the father brings the sons together at regular intervals at the company headquarters, and he basically meets with them. He reviews their pathways as budding teenagers and then college-age, university-age children. He provides them all access to excellent education. Most of them go to boarding schools in Lebanon. Some go to, as Osama did, a day school, a private day school in Jeddah that was founded by Irish and British educators. It was the place, the elite day school, the only school of its kind in the kingdom at the time.

16:06And he was, you know, his fees were all paid there. And they met the father. I think you have the sense from talking to the brothers that the father was, you know, a little overbearing. He had a lot of advice for them. It was mostly about living austerely, working hard, being successful, studying hard. He was very demanding, but he was also determined to give them the best that he had. So they had jobs. They were out on their work sites. One of the things that I found amusing, although you can't really connect it causally to who Osama would become, but one of the things that the sons saw as young teenagers was a lot of things being blown up because the main thing that Muhammad was doing during that time was demolition of kind of old buildings in Mecca and Medina, you know, these crowded old souks and such.

16:59They had no interest in architectural history. They had no interest in heritage. They were modernizing at fast pace. And so, in order to modernize Mecca and Medina, which was the big project that he had in a large sense. They had to demolish most of the old city. And so he was constantly, and I'm sure it was fun for the boys, so you place the dynamite in the building over there, then you step back, watch out, boom. And so that was the kind of experience around his father that he and other brothers described from this period. At ease with dynamite.

17:36Anita:But also at ease with their father. I mean, he sort of seems to be, you know, a cuddlier Logan Roy kind of, if you watch Succession, you'll know what I mean, sort of charismatic, but indulgent rather than cruel. In 1967, though, you know, they lose their father. Muhammad's plane crashes into a hillside. And there's an American pilot who is responsible for this. He misjudges a landing. And all of a sudden, with Osama bin Laden being only 10 years old, the father is gone. You know, the linchpin of this entire family is missing. And this is a big deal. I mean, I read that the king himself wept at the news that Osama's father had been killed.

18:19Anita:Is that right, Steve? The king was quite close to the family. And to some extent, the royal family were debtors of the bin Laden organization. So I think his tears were genuine and maybe complicated, because this was going to be a very disruptive transition for the royal family and all their building projects to lose him.

18:38William:I've actually been to the place where the plane crashed in Asir province last April. And it's now a place people go and look at.

18:46Anita:It's a tourist attraction, really. That's interesting. The person who does, you know, is going to have to deal with the royal family now. They're going to have to wrap their heads around the fact that Salem is going to take over. So, I mean, tell us about Salem bin Laden. Right. So he's the eldest son. So from a young age, he's been marked out as the heir to authority in the family. And, you know, Mohammed bin Laden didn't expect to depart at the age that he did. But he was preparing Salem for leadership by sending him to London for education. He was the only one of the sons to be sent to the West.

19:26Muhammad did travel internationally, mostly in the Levant and the Gulf to Jerusalem where he had a building project. But he did go to New York a couple of times and set up a kind of correspondence office there to import materials. So he knew the world a little bit. So Salam was not the austere, hardworking, self-made character that his father might have wished him to be. He likes the Beatles. He liked the Beatles. He was a gift to me as a researcher and a writer because Osama is quite austere and a bit dull and puritanical and maybe not the most original thinker even in his own sphere of Islamist radicalism.

20:16So it was a little bit hard to spend so much time trying to understand Osama. But Salam is a charismatic adventurer, enormously talented, a pilot who was most at home in the air at the controls of a jet. He lived life to the fullest. He loved to play the harmonica. Playboy and Practical Joker. Playboy and Practical Joker. He basically traveled from one place to another in his private jet, kind of rolling global party that would end up at ski resorts and then to Dubai to go hot air ballooning and then to Karachi to go trekking and hunting. He spent his money joyfully and he brought a lot of other people and he had this strange entourage.

21:02I eventually tracked down one, this airplane mechanic who I found living on a houseboat in northern Sweden who had amazing memories. He had a Turkish friend from boarding school who was his best friend. And he just brought people in and was constantly on the move. He's in London playing in a rock and roll band with some pretty talented young British musicians who have their own lives later. Any we'd have heard of? One of them ended up married to Emmylou Harris, the well-known singer. And so, yeah, they were not without talent or futures. But Solemns lay in a different direction after 1967 when he got word that his father was dead.

21:45And the story is, whether this is metaphorical or literal, that he got on his private jet to fly home wearing bell bottoms and with long hair. And he got off in a proper robe and his hair short and very humbly now took over these new responsibilities. He was in his early 20s and barely prepared for it. There was, of course, an infrastructure at the company of engineers, often European engineers or Western engineers, who could carry the projects forward. But now every decision fell to him as it had fallen to his father. And that included Osama's future. Where would Osama go to school? What would he be permitted to do?

22:28Anyone who wanted to get married had to ask Salim for permission. But you had to track him down because as soon as he got settled, he picked up his life. He had even more money to spend. and who started buying private jets and other things and flying around the world.

22:42William:Steve, just before we go to the break, update us now on the status of the bin Laden company under Salim. So firstly, he's inherited this crucial construction project to redo the holy places, to rejig the Great Mosque at Mecca and Medina. And this is one of the most important and prestigious construction projects in the entire Islamic world. But also, he globalizes the company, doesn't he? He does. And his father had started to do this. But yes, you were right. The prestige of the company in the kingdom rested with their exclusive permission to renovate and improve the facilities in Mecca, Medina, and then Jerusalem.

23:27The kingdom funded a project to improve the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque there that Muhammad carried out for several years.