A Fugitive's Splintered Family Tree
By Michael Dobbs and John Ward Anderson
Washington Post
Staff Writers
Sunday, September 30, 2001; Page A01
Several years ago, at a time when Saudi Arabia was awash with talk of terrorist attacks by Osama bin Laden, a large billboard appeared outside Prince Sultan Air Base, home to thousands of U.S. servicemen stationed in the kingdom, advertising "Security upgrades by Binladin Group."
Similar signs -- this time advertising construction of a new airport terminal -- greeted FBI investigators who went to the Yemeni capital, Aden, last December following the attack on the USS Cole. That suicide bombing was widely attributed to bin Laden's terrorist network, al Qaeda.
The startling juxtaposition of international terrorism and international capitalism reflects the duality of an extraordinary and very large family that amassed one of the largest fortunes in Saudi Arabia in two generations. Long before Osama bin Laden became the world's most wanted terrorist leader, other members of his family had established reputations as builders of mosques, roads, dams and entire cities throughout the Arab world and beyond.
Today, bin Ladens are on both sides of the terrorist war, building military bases and embassies and allegedly blowing them up, serving as advisers to the Saudi royal family and attempting to topple it, living in palaces and hiding out in caves. And while Osama has been disowned by his brothers and cousins, he has inherited his share of common family traits, including single-minded energy and focus, great organizational abilities and a natural charisma.
"The whole family is full of charm and presence. They all have the ability to fill up a room," said Terry Bennett, a New Hampshire physician who was befriended by several of Osama's many half-brothers when he worked as a doctor for some of the bin Ladens in Saudi Arabia in the late 1970s.
One major difference between Osama and many of his siblings, according to people who know the family well, is that the man suspected of ordering the devastating attacks on New York City and the Pentagon has spent hardly any time in the West.
Unlike his older brothers, who were educated at places such as the University of Miami and elite private schools in England, Osama studied engineering at the King Abdul Aziz University in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia.
Like his siblings, Osama revered his father, an illiterate bricklayer named Mohammed Bin-Awad bin Laden, who walked out of the Hadramawt mountains of southern Yemen in 1925 on a harrowing 1,000-mile journey to the Hijaz region of what is now Saudi Arabia. According to family tradition, Mohammed came to the notice of the future Saudi king, Abdul Aziz, while working on one of his palaces in the Hijaz, and suggesting ways to make it easier for Aziz to get around the property in his wheelchair.
Whatever the story, the bin Laden clan owes much of its phenomenal success to Saudi royal patronage and its skill in exploiting connections to win lucrative construction contracts throughout the Middle East. Most important of all were the contracts, awarded to the bin Ladens in the 1960s, to rebuild the mosques at Mecca and Medina, the holiest sites in the Arab world. This honor left a great impression on the young Osama, according to an interview he gave to an Arab journalist in 1999.
"The bin Laden family and the company they operate are among the most prominent pillars of support for the Saudi monarchy," noted Charles Freeman, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia. "You could not have a closer association with Islam and the government system in Saudi Arabia that Osama has pledged to overthrow."
Osama's rebellion has been a huge embarrassment to most of his family, which includes at least 50 brothers and sisters from Mohammed's four official wives. The rest of the family -- some of whom spell their names Binladin rather than bin Laden -- formally disassociated itself from Osama in 1994 after he was stripped of his Saudi citizenship for campaigning against the stationing of U.S. troops on Saudi soil during and after the 1991 Gulf War.
A former TWA pilot who flew Mohammed bin Laden around the Middle East and Europe in the 1950s and '60s, Gerry Auerbach, remembers the family patriarch as a highly astute businessman who made up for his inability to read or write with an extraordinary memory. "Everybody loved him," Auerbach recalled. "Maybe he didn't go to school, but he had a real feeling for engineering, and a real feel for how to hire good people."
According to Bennett, the former family physician, bin Laden senior consolidated his connections with the Saudi royal family by building a road with numerous hairpin bends from the Red Sea city of Jiddah to the mountain resort of At Taif, where the royal family had its summer residence. Before the road was built in the early 1950s, the trip required three days by camel. Afterward, it took a few hours.
While the bin Laden family was conventionally religious, it was hardly fanatical. Freeman, the former U.S. ambassador, noted that Mohammed built his business in Jiddah, which is "much more commercially oriented, tolerant, and open" to the outside world than other parts of Saudi Arabia.
Like most Saudis, Mohammed kept his wives in the background. "He would send for them when he wanted them," said Auerbach. "Once in a while, one of them would show up with an escort. They would be all covered up, and get in the back of the airplane. I would fly them wherever they wanted to go."
Mohammed was killed in 1968 when his private jet (flown by a different pilot) crashed into the mountains in southern Saudi Arabia. Osama, then 10 years old, received an inheritance estimated at $30 million to $60 million, according to U.S. officials. But while he worked in the family construction business from a young age, he had little to do with management of the company, which was firmly in the hands of his older brother, Salem.
Educated at Millfield, an exclusive private boarding school in southern England, Salem spoke fluent English and was thoroughly Westernized, "brilliant and fun-loving," according to his former lawyer, an American named Wayne Fagan. He led the life of an international jet-setter, attending to the family business on three continents.
"If you spent time with Salem, it all became a blur," said Fagan. "I remember one day that started in Geneva, then moved to England and ended in New York."
Salem was a frequent visitor to Texas, where he oversaw a $92 million contract to outfit a "head of state" Boeing 747 for the Saudi royal family. He also owned a lodge overlooking the Colorado River. An enthusiastic pilot, he was killed in San Antonio in 1988 after flying his one-man, ultra-light plane into power lines.
After Salem's death, control of the business shifted to a half-brother, Bakr, who today runs what has become an international conglomerate with annual revenues of about $5 billion and offices in dozens of countries. The family's U.S. assets include properties in Florida, Texas and New England; a $2 million stake in the Carlyle Group, a District-based investment bank that specializes in defense and aerospace companies; a 6 percent stake in Hybridon Inc., a Massachusetts biomedical company; and banking and investment ties with enterprises such as Citigroup and General Electric Co.
In 1993 and 1994, the Saudi Binladin Group gave two $1 million gifts to Harvard University for research on Islamic law and architecture, according to a university spokesman. The gifts coincided with the graduation from Harvard of one of Osama's nephews, Abdullah M. bin Laden. After Sept. 11, most of the U.S.-based members of the family flew home to Saudi Arabia aboard a private Boeing 727. A family friend said they had been advised to leave the United States temporarily by the Saudi government and the FBI because of fears of revenge attacks. Bin Laden family members living in Europe have taken similar precautions.
Intensive investigations by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies over the past two years have failed to turn up any evidence of financial ties between the Binladin Group and Osama, according to Wyche Fowler, U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia from 1996 to earlier this year. Fowler said that the bin Laden family had "cooperated fully" with U.S. efforts to trace Osama's bank accounts and other sources of funding in the wake of the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa, which were widely attributed to al Qaeda.
Although the leaders of the bin Laden clan have disowned Osama, there is little doubt that the fugitive Saudi millionaire has used his family background to promote jihad, or holy war, against the United States. Like his father and brothers, Osama made his early reputation building roads, first in Afghanistan to help the rebel mujaheddin during the Soviet occupation, and later in Sudan, where he found refuge after fleeing Saudi Arabia in 1991.
"His name is a huge asset," said Adil Najam, a professor of international relations at Boston University, who has studied the bin Laden family. "It is like someone called Rockefeller becoming a communist."
One of the younger bin Laden siblings, Osama was the only son of a Syrian woman, the last of Mohammed's four official wives. The other wives were Saudis. According to a family friend quoted in a January 2000 New Yorker profile, this made Osama "a double outsider" in "a country that is obsessed with parentage." His paternal roots were in Yemen, his maternal roots in Syria.
Osama's mother is reported to have kept in at least sporadic contact with her son since he fled to Afghanistan in 1996. According to some reports, she attended the ceremony earlier this year in Kandahar, Afghanistan, at which Osama's son married the daughter of one of his top aides.
Some experts believe that the rest of the family might have used Osama's mother as an intermediary to try to bring her son back into the fold. Osama has talked about such overtures.
In a 1997 interview with the British journalist Robert Fisk, he said he had been promised restoration of his Saudi citizenship and about $600 million if he abandoned his jihad and went back to Saudi Arabia.
U.S. officials believe that at least two of the more junior members of the family might also have maintained contact with him. Suspicion centers on two brothers-in-law -- Mohammad Jamal Khalifa and Sad al-Sharif -- who are alleged to have had financial connections with the al Qaeda network. It is difficult to establish their precise relationship with Osama, although they are most likely married to his sisters.
Khalifa, who is based in Saudi Arabia, is suspected by U.S. officials of using a charitable group known as the International Islamic Relief Organization to finance Islamic extremists in the Philippines. He has denied the charges, which he has described as "irresponsible and baseless." In 1998, he told the Arab News, an English-language Saudi newspaper, that he gave up jihad after the 1979-89 mujaheddin insurrection in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union.
According to Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA chief of counterterrorism, Khalifa may also have helped to fund the Islamic Army of Aden, which claimed responsibility for the bombing of the USS Cole. Khalifa was detained briefly in the United States in 1994 after immigration officials discovered that he had been sentenced to death in Jordan in absentia for "conspiracy to carry out terrorist acts." He was deported to Jordan, put on trial again, found not guilty and allowed to leave for Saudi Arabia.
Researcher Robert E. Thomason contributed to this report.