392. Road To 9/11: Bin Laden vs Saudi Arabia (Part 4)

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1:53William:In 1989, Osama bin Laden was a household name and a revered hero in Saudi Arabia. But by 1996, he was a stateless fugitive, stripped of his citizenship, disowned by his billionaire family and boarding an ageing jet into exile.

2:13Anita:By every measure, he was a finished man. Yet from this penniless exile, he would rise to become the most famous man on planet Earth.

2:22William:In this episode, we follow bin Laden's descent from the Saudi elite to a terrorist financier in Sudan and his desperate flight back to the mountains of Afghanistan. Welcome back to Empire with me, William Durimple.

2:36Anita:And me, Anita Arnand. And back with us, double Pulitzer Prize winning author of Ghost Wars, The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden and the Bin Ladens, an Arabian family in the American century, Steve Cole. Thank you very much for coming back because we have so many threads to pick up from the last time that you were on. So last time, we sort of ended with bin Laden getting onto a plane, heading towards Pakistan, making his way towards the border of the Soviet-Afghan war. And our earlier episode with Jason Burke, we have been talking about how Osama bin Laden was involved in that war.

3:13Anita:Check it out. It really is a fascinating lesson. Today though, Steve, we're going to stick to bin Laden himself. So if you would, take us back to 1989. He's fought in the Soviet-Afghan war. He has founded Al-Qaeda. And now he comes home from Afghanistan. And he comes back a genuine celebrity. That's not an exaggeration, is it? He was a public figure who lectured, who was seen as a veteran of a worthy cause, of a righteous cause in the name of Islam. And he belonged to a prestigious family. Yes, he came home because the war he had fought in had reached success by expelling the Soviets and had sort of devolved into a much more complicated civil war where there wasn't as much of a place for him.

4:02And so, he came home to talk about that and to talk about where the Muslim world should go from here.

4:09Anita:There are cassettes of his lectures, you know, that are sort of bootlegged and selling. I mean, they're the thing that young people want to get hold of. Yes. The pivotal event, though, follows in 1990 when Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait and starts a crisis that leads immediately to the deployment of tens and then hundreds of thousands of American, British, French, and other international troops to Saudi Arabia while Osama is there in order to defend the kingdom from the possibility that Saddam and his forces would continue south from Kuwait into Saudi Arabia.

4:45William:Just to remind perhaps younger listeners who don't know all this stuff, as well as our generation do, Steve. An important point to stress is that Saddam was a validly secular Ba 'athist who had a very, very different philosophy to Osama and who was not only threatening Saudi Arabia, but was torturing those who held views like bin Laden, who were connected to the Brotherhood and so on. All correct. So Osama had no sympathy for Saddam and thought that it was right to expel him from Kuwait and to essentially end his rule in Iraq as well. But he had advice for the Saudi government, which is that they should not be relying on apostate American, British, and French troops.

5:35They should be relying on people like him, who, after all, he had just expelled the Soviet Union from Afghanistan. He and brethren Mujahideen, they had defeated a superpower that looked impregnable. And now another superpower was occupying the kingdom in the name of this cause of expelling Saddam Hussein from Kuwait.

5:56William:And of course, this makes absurd the later American charge that Saddam Hussein was somehow part of the 9-11 plot or linking 9-11 to Iraq was a complete red herring. It's certainly one indicator among many that Saddam and Osama had not much to do with one another and saw the world in very different ways. And Osama literally wrote a memo of advice to the Saudi Defense Ministry, basically asking to be put in charge of the resistance against Saddam and any effort to harass his occupation of Kuwait, just as the Afghan and Arab volunteers fighting the Soviets had harassed that occupation.

6:38Anita:Yeah, I mean, he's proposing, just to really spell it out, Steve, is that, you know, those fighters, I know some really good fighters, they are veterans from the Afghan war, they are, you know, they are battle-hardened, and they are ready. So you give me money, and I will not only protect our borders, but we'll deal with Saddam as well. But the Saudis, the royal family, think he's ridiculous at this point. They have to be polite because he belongs to the bin Laden family. But you can hear their sniggering under their breath and attempt to control their mirth as he presents this idea. First of all, it's implausible.

7:15Second, the kingdom has already committed to an international defense and invited tens of thousands of troops. And King Fahd's prestige and his whole place in the international system has already invested in the decision to have Americans and other forces handle this. So, it would be humiliating for them to reverse themselves on the basis of Osama bin Laden's advice. And so, he goes away. He's sort of sent away politely, but then he gets a clear message that this is not going to happen. And that's when he starts to preach with particular ardor about the failings of the kingdom, about the error that he now sees in their ways.

7:55And he sees the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia as an occupation comparable to that of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

8:02William:And Steve, George Bush is the president at this time. Just give us a little sketch for those, again, who don't know this background about the relationship between the Bush family and Saudi Arabia. George H.W. Bush, the father of George W. Bush, who then invaded Iraq and overthrew Saddam. So just to clarify, there were two George Bushes, and this was the first. He grew up in the oil business, was a second or third generation Bush family, patrician, politician, quite an effective career, well prepared for the presidency, liked to cultivate relationships with other world leaders and had experience of the Saudis through the oil business and had developed relations in the kingdom, which he then spent a lot of time advancing during this war period.

8:51Anita:Well, I mean, he may be advancing the relationship, but for Bin Laden himself, I mean, apart from the fact, you know, he's rebuffed, however politely they might have done it at the beginning, that stings. But it is actually having Americans in the Holy Land, as it were, you know, so close to the holiest of sites that really is unacceptable. And he starts volubly denouncing it, as you say. And this is all part of, you know, siding with dissidents who are likewise saying we don't want Americans on our soil, the so-called awakening sheikhs preaching against the US presence. I mean, tell us a bit more about the awakening sheikhs.

9:27Anita:It's fascinating. These were influential preachers mostly from the Bereda area outside of Riyadh and well-known for conservative Islamist thought. And the kingdom then and to some extent still now was a place of Islamist discourse, debate, scholarship, writing, thinking about how the world should be ordered. And on this topic, you can reduce to a fairly simple proposition. Muslims were called by God to resist the apostate Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and they expelled and weakened a superpower. The Soviet Union was cracking up in 1990, and it was about to dissolve. So there was lots of evidence that the Afghan war seemed like a sort of deliverance on God's will.

10:15And here comes another superpower, also secular, also perceived as anti-Muslim and an ally of Israel. Why would the kingdom, the site of the two holy places, the home of these ideas that had helped defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan, why would the kingdom accommodate the Americans? It should be doing the opposite. It should be preparing for the destruction of the second superpower. This was the essential message of the awakening sheikhs and Osama's lectures that were captured on tape recordings and circulated in underground kind of stalls, sort of black market dissent at the time.

10:54William:And for the Saudi royals and the regime, this is crossing a red line, isn't it? Because this is threatening their authority in a way that they are not prepared to accept. Yeah, absolutely crossing a red line, but it's awkward because the bin Laden family is prestigious. King Fahd, who is now in charge of the kingdom, is particularly close to the new leader of the bin Laden family. Salamis, who initially took over after his father's death, has himself died in an ultralight accident in Texas in 1988, and he's exceeded by a senior brother named Buker. And Buker is close to King Fahd. So it's a little bit awkward.

11:36They can't just go arrest Osama. He's got too much clout. And it implicates the whole family. And here you get into the realities of Saudi social and political fabrics where it's a soft autocracy at the time. If anyone without the name Bin Laden had said what Osama said, they would have been imprisoned immediately. But Osama is left alone.

12:03Anita:They don't put him in prison, but they do what they can. What they do is they restrict his passport. They also lean on Baka to have a word with his errant little brother. Baka does. He leans on Osama and tries to reel him in a bit. But this is not who he is anymore. He doesn't listen to older brothers anymore. He's bigger than them. He's bigger than that. He devises a plan, Steve, to leave. If he's going to be controlled in Saudi Arabia, then he's not going to be in Saudi Arabia. Yes. What you describe unfolds between 1990 and 1992, and there's lots of efforts to reel Osama in, and then evidence after evidence that he's not going to listen, that he is hubristic now, that he does see himself.

12:47In fact, he starts to see himself as the righteous leader of the bin Laden company, not just the leader of this movement that he's preaching about. In response, convinced that they can't persuade him with words, they start to try to deter him by restricting his privileges. And the first thing they do is restrict his passport. They don't expel him from the kingdom at this point. He leaves because the family has a construction project going on in Port Sudan. he travels there at the end of 1992 and buys a salt farm outside of Port Sudan and starts to set up shop there. I think based on what he does, he seems to be thinking that he just needs a little distance from the kingdom in order to be able to keep saying what he wants to say.

13:37And so in Sudan, he then sets up a whole new operation that is a sort of fractured mirror of the family's operation in Saudi Arabia. It has business aspects. He's running companies. He buys farms. He buys horses. He's preaching. And he's also now communicating about these big ideas of resistance to the United States and jihad.

14:01William:But Steve, if he's had his passport taken or restricted, how does he get to Sudan? I think the bin Ladens probably didn't need to check in immigration in Sudan. They had more money than the municipality. But it's relevant because he can't really go anywhere else having gotten there.

14:20Anita:Now he is in Sudan. We should paint a picture of what Sudan is like at the time because you have Hassan al-Turabi who has an Islamist government in charge at the time of Sudan. So he feels he's among like-minded people. And you've got this one sort of chapter then that appears in Osama bin Laden's life where he is preaching fire and brimstone, but also presenting himself as quite the gentleman farmer. I mean, can you just maybe bridge those two things, the two probable things for us? Don't.

14:54William:We're not talking Wellington boots here. Yes. When you look over the whole of his short and troubled life, the Sudan years were probably the happiest that he knew and the most capacious. He had his wives there. He now had certainly two, maybe three by the time he'd set up in Khartoum. He moved from Port Sudan to Khartoum. He had a big housing compound where his children were growing up. He had horse farms where he could indulge his passion for riding. He had a business office where he was starting to build Al-Qaeda into an international revolutionary organization, and he was funding the payroll.

15:33And he could communicate his ideas both in Sudan, but also increasingly internationally using fax machines and other techniques.

15:41Anita:Okay. But he's also doing some things, which to many of us will sound batshit, which are, you know, he's trying to toughen up his children. And, you know, he's sort of sending them out on waterless hikes in the desert. And is this right? Even making babies sleep in hollows dug in the cold night air because this will toughen them up for the days to come. There are some accounts along those lines, but I think he was generally a doting father, kind of a softy. He spent a lot of time with his kids. He did inherit his father's idea that the children should be brought up to endure hardship and that they should be um hard workers and and also he combined that with this uh adapted wahabi idea that one should live as if one was in the seventh century so i tried to eschew uh be able to eschew the comforts of modern technology now osama did not live that creed he was a gadget guy and he had um you know an interest in video cameras and not just for communicating political messages, but for weddings and all kinds of things.

16:52He was a guy who was after his own older brother, Salomon, used to come back from New York with literally a private jet full of stuff he bought on 47th Street, all the latest of New York, the electronic center, like all the latest gadgets, and then just hand them out to his brothers. And so that's Osama. He's living his best life. He's got his family. He's got comfortable compounds. He's got horses. And he's got freedom to say what he wants.

17:20William:The idea of horses is very much chiming in with sort of Saudi dramas about the life of the prophet, that you're out on horseback in the desert. You're the warrior wearing austere clothing. And it's not a clash with that. It's part of that. Yes. And he's building a following. He's attracted Egyptians, Sudanese, Arab volunteers from the Maghreb, Africans. And there's a sort of group that's much bigger than an entourage. It's really more like a following. There's a payroll that he's operating, and he's starting to fund militant activity across borders. First, an attack in Yemen, and then he starts to think about smuggling weapons to Islamist radicals in Libya and in the Maghreb.

18:16And then he's building a network in East Africa to carry out attacks against American targets and other targets.

18:23William:Are the agricultural projects a sort of cover for this, or are they happening side by side, and he's enjoying both? All side by side. I think he's kind of, you know, he's sort of modeling his father. Here's something else, I think, to think about when you consider his life and the impact that he ultimately had on the world. One thing he learned from his father was how to lead an eclectic organization. He was, unlike some other Saudis, welcoming to volunteers from all over the world, Africans, South Asians, East Asians, and he made people feel like they belong to something bigger than themselves.

19:06And that is not the typical Saudi vibe, which is a very kind of Arab nationalist.

19:14Anita:You mentioned, Steve, that he's living his best life, he's happy, he's down, in the earth and all of that kind of stuff, but also building a network and funding plans to destabilize the West. And in one of these, I'm really interested to know how much of a party actually played because in December 1992, you might remember this, but bombs were exploding outside hotels in Aden, Yemen, US troops headed for Somalia were the target of this. And then And there is a movie with the same title, you know, the Black Hawk Down incident, where in October 1993, 18 Americans are killed in Mogadishu and their bodies are treated hideously in the streets.

20:00Anita:And again, all of this kind of stuff is televised. Now, as I understand it, he claimed quite a hand in all of this, but he may have been claiming more than he was responsible for. I mean, what was his part in all of this? I think in the Aden attacks, he had a role. I think in Somalia, he's claiming credit for something that was really Muhammad Adid, was the local warlord who had the militia that inflicted all that damage on the American forces who were there. I think, though, he was developing networks in that part of Africa. And there's absolutely no question that a little bit later, those networks carry out two of the most remarkable terrorist attacks in African history, the bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam and kill hundreds of Africans.

20:52But that was entirely his network. So, yes, between when he arrived, let's say early 1993, and when he really burst into global view as the architect of the African embassy bombings, he was definitely sending money. He was definitely communicating with allies in these places. But I don't think he was directly running those operations the way he would from the embassy bombings onward.

21:19Anita:We're going to take a break, but just hold this in your head for a second because you can't do this kind of thing and be on the evening news for these kinds of atrocities and then claim responsibility, sometimes legitimately or sometimes maybe over-egging the pudding a little bit, without this reaching the Saudi royal family because all of these things will have repercussions. Join us after the break where we find out how the Saudis react to one of their own being blamed for these attacks.

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