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A
Journalist who now heads up a research and debate center. But that's where any similarity ends. Steve has a distinguished career. He's been a correspondent and a bureau chief in Southeast Asia and then managing editor of the Washington Post, and latterly a staff writer for the New Yorker. Over the last couple of decades, he's turned out a run of some outstandingly researched books on international politics and global business, a couple of which have won Pulitzer Prizes. He's now president and chief executive officer of the independent think tank the New America foundation, which aims to bring exceptionally promising new voices and new ideas to the fore of our nation's public discourse. Tonight we're going to hear from Steve talking about his latest book about a family that's probably best known for producing one of the iconic villains, if you like, of the post Cold War world, Osama bin Laden. But as this extraordinary, detailed and extensively researched book shows, their story represents much more than that. It's about a whole range of ideas that shed light on the complex world of commerce, culture, psychologies, and politics that makes up our 21st century world. It's an epic family saga, but it's also very much a tale of our times. So over now to Steve, who's going to talk for half an hour or so, and then he'll be able to take your questions. So, Steve Cole.
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B
Thank you, Charlie, very much, and thank you all very much for coming. I will use my time to give you just a flavor of the themes in this book and then some of the narrative and the characters who inhabit it. When I was younger and getting started, I used to devour books that had titles like the Kennedys or the Roosevelts and these multi generational family narratives that offered a prism into political and economic change in the United States over a period of time. And after I had finished my last book, Ghost wars, about Afghanistan and US Foreign and intelligence policy there, I wanted to find a way to write more about Saudi Arabia, a place I'd been coming and going from for some time, but a very difficult place to work as a journalist. And I felt as I'd gotten to know it some, that there was a degree of complexity and a degree of diversity in the kingdom that had eluded many of us who tried to write about the place. And I thought that the bin Laden family story first and foremost would provide a way to write specifically and with some level of sort of authentic detail about Saudi Arabia's experience of modernization in the 20th century, and particularly the experience of the generation to which Osama belonged, which came of age in the 1970s and 1980s, and whose elite members enjoyed enormous privileges and enormous wealth, but also had to cope with very rapid change in their own society, but also globally. They had the resources to travel and really to purchase any identity as young people that they wished. And some went west and essentially invested themselves in ideas of freedom and mobility and choice. And others, like Osama, largely stayed in place and used their wealth to purchase a more radical or even revolutionary identity. And then still others tried to find a balance between such choices or changed their choice over time. And it seemed to me that that story was partly a Saudi story, but also a broader story about globalization in the Arab world, in the Middle East. And to some extent, the Bin Ladens are not just a Saudi family, but a global family in meaningful ways. First of all, they are of Yemeni origin. They belong to the diaspora that arose from the Hadramat and which has a very self conscious sense of achievement on a global scale from Indonesia to Egypt. And it's a diaspora not as well known in the west as the Chinese or Jewish diasporas, but has similar characteristics in its success, success and its cohesion and its dispersal over the centuries. I think the last of my several priorities, and perhaps the lesser of them, was to try to reinterpret Osama as a member of his own family and also as a Saudi dissident. I think for many of us who have worked in South Asia and on the subject of Al Qaeda over the years, Osama has been well enough interpreted as a creature of the international Islamist radical movements after 1979 in particular. He's certainly been well interpreted as a creature of the Afghan wars, which was the subject of Ghost wars, but he was much less well available to me anyway as a Saudi and certainly as a Bin Laden. And I hoped that in exploring this larger narrative of modernization and change and globalization, using the family's experience, that I might also come to some new views of Osama himself. So to give you a taste of what this narrative is actually about, I thought I would talk a little bit about 3 of its principal characters. Osama's father, Muhammad, his eldest son Salam, who ran the family for 20 critical years, the period of time when Osama was between 10 and about 30 years of age. And then I'll finish up with a few answers to my own question about Osama himself. Mohammad Bin Laden was essentially an orphan. He was born in a famine stricken canyon in southern Yemen. His father died when he was very young. He lost an eye as a child working on a job site in Ethiopia. Either someone threw keys at him is one version, or an iron bar fell on it and bounced up and hit him in the eye. But in any event, by age 10 or 11, he was without many options in the Hadhramat. And like many poor Hadrami men, he decided to leave and to seek his fortune elsewhere. And so, with his younger brother, he walked out of this canyon, made his way to the Red Sea, boarded a vessel, sailed around to Jeddah, and he arrived essentially in time for the Great Depression. As a teenager, he and his brother initially slept on the ground and kind of hustled their way forward. They worked as porters. And during the 1930s, Muhammad taught himself how to be a mason. With local building materials like coral, he started a small contracting business. He signed on with Aramco, the American oil consortium in the east for a while, started a small business, and gradually learned to apply what turned out to be considerable gifts of charisma and intuition to the coming opportunity of the oil age in Saudi Arabia. Many of you probably know oil was first discovered and drilled in Saudi Arabia in the early 1930s, but it really wasn't until the end of the Second World War that the Saudi royal family could enjoy the wealth that oil offered because the depression interfered. And then the Second World War essentially eliminated global shipping commerce. And so it was really only in the mid and late 1940s that the. That the oil began to flow in a meaningful way. And then Mohammad bin Laden was ready to serve the royal family as they figured out what to do with this sudden wealth. And he confronted a challenge in that the royal family had little preparation for the riches and the choices that it was about to receive. And it reacted initially. Aging King Abdulaziz, a remarkable man, but his perhaps less impressive eldest son, Saud, his crown prince, and some of his other sons, they reacted to the arrival of this oil wealth, you know, the way some of our citizens in the United States and Europe react to sudden lottery winnings. You know, they sort of became disoriented by this massive amount of money, and they. And they kind of overinterpreted the money in some sense. And in Saudi Arabia, this manifested itself initially in a building boom for palaces of all sorts. $250,000 kitchens imported from the United States, curtains from Paris. And many of these ideas of luxury were encouraged by the American oil companies that wanted to ingratiate themselves with the Saudi royals, would bring them to New York and dazzle them with images from the roof of the Empire State Building and show them what a luxury car really looked Like. And so the result was that, for instance, King Abdulaziz imported hundreds and hundreds of Fords, Model Ts, and Packards in the late 40s and early 50s and handed them out as gifts to many of his sons and his cousins and tribal leaders. And it was only after they had driven them down through the desert a little while that they thought that it might be good to actually have some roads to drive them on. And. And there was Mohammad bin Laden ready to say, yes, your highness, I can do that for you. And that was his method. At first, the Saudis invited in international construction corporations to start to build infrastructure. And the kingdom had little. It had very few paved roads to speak of, and it had no universities, and it had very little electricity and no telephone system to speak. So it was a difficult place to work. But initially, with American encouragement, the Saudis brought in companies like Bechtel and others to do something sensible, like, say, build a road between Jeddah and Mecca so that pilgrims to the Hajj could move more easily from the port. And Bechtel would come in with their bulldozers and their graders and their managers and their accountants, and they'd get out on the road and they'd start digging. And then two days later, someone would turn up at their office from the home of a local prince and say, his Highness refrigerator is broken. And Bechtel would have to send someone over to repair it. And then someone would come by a few days later and say, we need to. His Highness would like to build a swimming pool, and he'd like to borrow your bulldozer for three weeks. And it went on and on like this. You can see it in the archives. And eventually Bechtel came to the conclusion that that life was too short to do this sort of work. And they essentially pulled out. And as they did, there was Mohammad bin Laden standing at the gate waving them goodbye and turning to the prince in question and saying that he was there to finish the job. And he had this extraordinary gift to solve complex problems of engineering and construction, despite his lack of any formal training in engineering. He had an intuition about complex problems, but his greatest gift was his charisma and his ability to manage people, both to manage the royal family, but also to manage his own company as it grew and grew and grew. And it had extraordinary characteristics in Saudi Arabia at that time. It was a company full of diversity, which was itself somewhat unusual in the Saudi context. So he had Italian Catholic engineers and American accountants. As early as the 1950s, he had an American agent on Broadway in New York shipping goods into him. He had workers from all over the Islamic and African worlds, and he led them by example in a way that seemed to inspire success in very difficult working conditions in the desert. He would go out and do things himself. He would sing with his men on the front lines. He would place the dynamite in difficult mountain passages himself. He would live on the ground. And he was a very hardworking, very ambitious character who nonetheless exuded a sense of joy and a sense of play. And I think that this is the beginning of the sort of theme of an important aspect of this family's history, which is that there was really a streak of charismatic genius in the bin Laden family that began with the father and then was passed through to some of his sons, certainly to his eldest son, Salam, who carried it off into a different direction in the West. And then also this strain of charismatic genius, I think, also reached Osama in perhaps a more refracted or distorted way. Certainly that might be our perspective in the West. But in any event, it did reach him, and I think it has explained some of his success. Now, Mohammad bin Laden left behind 54 children, 29 daughters and 25 sons. He married at least 22 times. He was inspired by the example of the marriage bed of the Saudi royal family, King Saud. Eventually, King Saud is reckoned to have had perhaps about 200 children by an uncounted number of marriages. Mohammad bin Laden had one or two senior wives who he stayed married to for fairly long periods of time, a decade or more, and they lived with him on his compound. And each of those wives had four or five or six children. But then, as to the other two wives permitted by Islamic law, he tended to marry and divorce in a serial fashion. But when one of these wives became pregnant, he recognized her and her child as fully legitimate under Islamic law, and he did enfranchise them as his heirs and as entitled to his the dividends that flowed from the profits of his company. And so there had been some speculation, for instance, I think, in the past that Osama in particular was a social outcast within his own family because his mother was of relatively low social status in comparison to the senior wives, for instance. But I think that that's not true at all. The record, I don't think, shows that, in fact, he was typical of the singleton children born to these wives who tended to come and go. Now, his own mother was 15 years old when her poor Syrian family, living on the coast in a relatively secular environment, handed her over to visiting Mohammed Bin Laden, a businessman two or three times their daughter's age. The circumstances of this betrothal are murky, but there seems to have been some sort of transactional aspect to it, at least the promise of employment for the family's sons. This was a typical aspect of Mohammed's shorter term marriages. He would go into areas in the desert where he was building and where he needed local cooperation from tribal leaders, and he would marry the daughter of a local notable and then employ lots of male relatives on the job until it was done. Then he would divorce the daughter and leave some of the maintenance work with the tribe. So in whatever way, he married this very young woman, she traveled with him to Saudi Arabia, she became pregnant with Osama, she gave birth to him, and then soon thereafter, Mohammed divorced her and arranged for her remarriage to a middle level executive in his own company. And so you can imagine Osama as a child and this teenager very far from her own home and by all accounts very devoted to this son, entering now into a new household, the step family, which is where Osama really grew up. And in that family he was a kind of golden child because it was his status as the legitimate male heir to Mohammad bin Laden that provided his mother and his stepfather and then the stepbrothers and sisters who grew up around him, because this turned out to be a monogamous union with relatively conventional suburban characteristics. A household in Jeddah, television with Bonanza playing in the living room. But in that household, Osama was a child apart and his relationship with his mother was very intense. It was through him that they received, beginning in the early 1970s, hundreds of thousands of a year in tax free dividends because he was an enfranchised male heir of Mohammed and everybody in the household depended upon him. So he was special in that sense, at least in a structural sense. In September of 1967, Mohammad bin Laden was flying to one of his job sites in southern Yemen on one of his aircraft. And let me just pause and remark upon the fact that he owned aircraft because he was, for all of these other characteristics of sort of Arabian tradition, he was a very modern and modernizing character. Though he never had any language but Arabic and probably never traveled too far outside of the Arab world, possibly to Italy, he nonetheless saw the world that was coming and he wanted his sons to be capable in that world. He wanted them to be able to do business in English and, and he wanted them to have a modern education. There were few places available to provide that in Saudi Arabia. So he sent his Sons to a Quaker boarding school in Lebanon and then others to boarding school in England. And he was also the first private Saudi to own aircraft in the kingdom. And he was also the first private Saudi to own a jet. And he had American and Afghan and Pakistani pilots. His American pilots were often veterans of, of the U.S. air Force or the U.S. navy. And one such American veteran was flying this twin engine beach aircraft down to this job site on the Yemeni border. And he was landing at a makeshift airstrip marked by rocks. And as he came in, it was a very difficult spot. As he came in, a crosswind came up and the pilot made a series of miscalculations as he tried to pull out and go around. And he stalled and the plane fell to Earth about 500ft, crashed and burned, and Mohammed died along with everyone aboard. At the time that he died, he left behind a construction company that was worth about $150 million and that was the sole authorized renovator of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina and also Jerusalem. In fact, Mohammad Bin Laden had worked on the holy sites around the Dome of the Rock from the late 1950s right through 1967. In fact, he was a property owner in East Jerusalem. He had a house there that was confiscated by Israeli land authorities after the 1967 war. So, parenthetically, a lot of people have dismissed Osama's claims to the Palestinian cause, but in fact, the Bin Laden's, in at least a technical and legal sense, share the right of return claim that many Palestinians also have. In any event, when he died, leadership of his family and of his business passed to his eldest son, Salem, who was then at boarding school. Just out of boarding school, living in London on Gloucester Road, he was playing in a rock band called the Echoes. His bandmate went on to marry the country singer Emmylou Harris. Salim was an enthusiastic musician and performer, perhaps more enthusiastic than talented, but he was impossible to embarrass and he's difficult to describe, but he was a very charismatic character who loved to perform and he particularly loved to sing. If he were here now, he would take the stage and he would lead you all in a rousing round of On Top of Old Smoky perhaps, or Ferrero Jaco, which were two of his favorite corny folk songs. But he also liked to play, play Beatles and House. He traveled with a briefcase that usually had about $250,000 in cash in various currencies. And whenever he went to a party or a wedding and he saw a stage with a band, he would take out the briefcase and Unfold a few hundred dollars and go up and give them to the band leader to have access to the stage during a break. And he did this once at an Academy Awards party in Los Angeles, where he then sang House of the Rising sun in seven languages. He went to Oktoberfest in Germany, took out his briefcase, asked for access to the stage, and then led this rousing chorus in Munich in a whole series of German folk songs that he had only memorized while flying himself over to Germany. He was a pilot, an extraordinarily talented pilot. He collected Learjets Bach 111s Hawker Siddeley jets, flew thousands of hours all over the world. He thought nothing of getting up in the morning and on a whim, deciding to fly from Jeddah to Paris, and then the next morning, getting up and deciding to fly to New York, where he had an apartment, or to Orlando, where he had an estate outside of Disney World. He was an extraordinarily egalitarian character to an American, anyway, recognizable in this way. It's a sort of Bedouin characteristic as well. But he didn't really much like social errors. He didn't like Palm beach, for instance, in Florida. He much preferred Panama City in western Florida, which any Americans here will proudly recognize is best described as the redneck Riviera. And he was there in his tennis shoes and his jeans and his T shirts and his pilot friends. Anybody who could play an instrument in a rock band and fly was welcomed into his sort of rolling entourage. And he would pick people up for six or eight weeks at a time, and they'd go on hunting expeditions and other adventures. And he used this personality to build the business because it turned out he had his father's intuition and gifts and natural talent and business. But he was in a difficult position because he had to negotiate on equal footing with CEOs of Fortune 1000 corporations that did business with the business. Bin Laden's, you know, Volvo and General Electric and Porsche and, you know, these were experienced men in their 50s. And Salem seemed to use his personality to kind of pull them into a level negotiation. For instance, he would hardly ever have business talks except when he was in bed. And he would have these CEOs come to his hotel room while he was lying around fully clothed, watching television, talking on the phone. And they would have to sit at the foot of the bed and negotiate with him. Now, once he was in a restaurant with a CEO or businessman who he's negotiating with, and the waiter brought out a bottle of wine, and the businessman sent it back with great disdain and sort of humiliated the waiter. And Salem got up as if he was going to the restroom and he went into the kitchen and he took out a few hundred bucks and he gave them to the waiter and he said, give me that bottle of wine. Give me that bottle of wine. Empties the square second one pours the first in re corks. It says, bring this back out, serve it. So the guy comes out, serves it to the table, and of course, the businessman makes a great show of accepting it. This is what I was talking about. And Salem ended his relationship with the guy right then and there. He was a great adventurer. And what's remarkable about him when you consider his choices and his personality, that he came to collaborate with his brother Osama during the 1980s. At that time, everybody was on the same side in the Afghan war. And the Saudi government and the United States government all endorsed this project that Osama was involved in. But Salam, I'd always wondered, as someone who'd researched Osama over the years, what Americans he'd ever met. Because he didn't really deal directly with CIA officers. He benefited from their support, their money and their guns. It was provided to Afghans with whom Osama was working. So in political terms, it wasn't a very significant distinction that he didn't meet them, but he didn't, so far as anyone knows, ever meet them directly. So I wondered what Americans had he ever met besides, you know, members of his family or others who happened to have American passports or journalists that he later gave interviews to? And turns out that the answer was that Salam used to fly up to Peshawar with his shaggy haired, rock and roll drum playing, guitar playing, pilot friends and meet Osama, where he'd get out of the plane with a big video camera and go around and document Osama's work. So for fundraising purposes, and at one stage, he invited him to a London hotel to arrange the sale of missiles to Osama that Osama wanted. And. And Salem put him up in a luxury hotel on Park Lane. And he came into the meeting with a couple of his European entourage, you know, shaggy haired, chain smoking rock musicians. And they go into the meeting and Salem says, oh yeah, I forgot to tell you, my brother is really, really religious. So, you know, no fart jokes, treat me like a sheikh, we'll be out of here in 45 minutes. And that was essentially the style of their kind of collaboration. But it was a remarkable relationship, one that I think both of them valued. In May of 1988, Salaam flew to San Antonio, Texas, to attend the wedding of the son of one of his American pilots. And at the wedding he went through many of his usual performance performances. He took the stage and led everybody around On Top of Old Smokey or She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain When She Comes or whatever that song is. And he took out a long roll of paper and recited a poem and got everybody sort of sentimental about the wedding. And the next morning he woke up on a Sunday with nothing to do and called up some of his pilot friends and they said, oh, we're going out to this recreational air park where you can fly ultralights, which are light aircraft, really very small, fly about 60 miles an hour, 500,000ft. Salam was a great enthusiast of ultralights and hot air ballooning. He used to come to the United States and buy out the inventory of entire ultralight stores and have them shipped onto his Bach 111 and flown back to the kingdom. He also used America as a shopping center for just about everything else. Thousands and thousands of cases of Tabasco sauce, or he'd go to New York and shop on 47th Street. He really prided himself on getting the latest electronic gadgets and on never paying retail, which was one of his mottos. And he would then send everything out to his plan and take it home. So he knew about ultralights, and he went out to this airfield with his friends and they started horsing around on motorcycles. And then Osama took his turn on a new model of an ultralight and he went up. It was a clear day and only light winds. And he had, at this point, thousands and thousands of hours, was regarded by his colleagues in the piloting world as an extraordinarily talented pilot. Bit reckless, but very talented. And he was leveling off and flying and inexplicably flew into power lines and tilted down and fell and died in the impact that was May 1988. Salma, at the time, was in Peshawar. He came back for Salam's funeral. He went back to Afghanistan, and two months later he formed Al Qaeda. I do think that's relevant in the sense that the loss of leadership created second kind of decapitating event at the top of the bin Laden family and created space in which someone ambitious like Osama might have their own ideas about how to lead or how to build something. But in any event, he was gone. And that leads us maybe with the little bit of time that I have left before taking your questions to this subject of Osama himself and the extent to which in what way is Osama IBN Laden in any meaningful way? I mean, obviously he's a Bin Laden by birth, but what aspects of his success or his talent or his character might be traceable to the inspiration or the connections that he had with his own family? And I would suggest four things. First of all, Osama has been extraordinarily successful in building through Al Qaeda, a diverse organization. It's really distinctive among Islamist groups and for that matter among secular militant or terrorist groups that he's been able to attract and hold such a diverse following. He has followers within his organization and beyond, not just from Saudi Arabia and Yemen or from Egypt to Palestine, Yemen, Lebanon, Libya, Algeria, but also from the Philippines, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, from Africa, even occasionally smatterings of Europeans and Americans. And this ability to communicate a sense of community that is bound by Islam but not divided by discrimination on the basis of language, national origin or race is really rare. And I see it of course, partially available in the model of Mecca that he grew up around with his father's building building projects where all of Islam's diversity assembles and disperses on an annual basis, but also in the model of his father's company and the style of his father's leadership, which was surely an inspiration to all of his sons and a model that they seemed to follow in their own lives. Although Osama took it in a very different direction. I think another aspect of his Bin Laden ness is his confidence about the technologies of the global integration and his use of those technologies to innovate. I mean, his first great innovation as a terrorist tactically was to use a satellite telephone to attack two US embassies simultaneously in Africa while never leaving Afghanistan. And at the time he did this, his family was making in parallel, not in concert with him, enormous investments in Iridium, the first company that attempted to develop a single phone that you could carry anywhere in the world and dial any number from. And this comfort and sense of the possibilities of global technology wasn't limited to satellite telephony. He also was an early innovator in media and he saw, anticipated the coming of satellite television in the Arab world and really got ahead of it with his brother. He was making these YouTube style viral fundraising videos 25 years before, before YouTube was born. And aviation is another obvious way in which he understood the possibilities of border shattering technology through his connections with his own family. I think thirdly, he was a marketer. He had a business sensibility. He went to business school in Jeddah after prep school and his family he worked as A junior executive in the family company from time to time. And one of the things that the company did was to market Western brands into Saudi Arabia. And he had a sense from the beginning of how to market. And what has he really done with Al Qaeda other than build a brand? He's done it very effectively and very self consciously through his use of media and through his use of really early on understanding the viral potential of marketing himself through informal networks in the Arab world. And then finally, I think that he's a performer, just as his father was and as Salem was. He's a less bold personality, shyer, quieter. But as he grew up into middle age and as he developed these ambitions and built Al Qaeda, he became, I think, more and more of a performer, more self conscious. There's this great story about the wedding of his son in Afghanistan in early 2001, to which he invited his mother and his stepbrother. And he had a lot of Taliban guests there too. And unlike the Taliban, you know, Osama is kind of a gadget hound. He likes technology. He watches tv. Obviously he's devouring news either from the TV or from the Internet. And he's never accepted the Taliban's notion that the use of such technology is forbidden because it wasn't present during the Prophet's lifetime. So he had all these Taliban guests, but like any father, he wanted a video of his son's wedding. So he invited an Al Jazeera cameraman in and said, look, just put the camera under your robes. Just don't let the Taliban see you take some panning shots. And so they sat together and he was sort of telling him, okay, watch out for that guy over there. And then during the wedding, he stood up and he delivered, recited this poem, a rather sort of objectionable, blood curdling poem celebrating his attack on the USS Cole. But in any event, he recited this poem and then he came down off of the stage and said to this cameraman, he said, come with me. They go inside. He shuts the door, he says, let me see the viewfinder. Pulls it out, takes a look at it. He says, I really didn't deliver that very well, did I? I said, I want to go do a second take. So he goes back out and he recites the poem a second time. Now, you know, now every time when I come across these aspects of, of his performance, as when he released this recent videotape where he had dyed his beard and his white robes with gold threads were very carefully pressed, and he seemed very self conscious of the Persona that he was trying to create and delivered this great message. Now, I cannot help when I look at him in these performances, but to think of of Salem singing House of the Rising sun in seven languages. Thank you very much for your time and touching.
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A
Thanks very much, Steve. If you don't mind, I'd quite like to sort of kick off by asking a question myself, which is you give a list of, if you like, characteristics there that that Osama, if you like, shares with the bin Laden family. In a way, you're almost suggesting that he could have been highly successful in other fields, could have been a great performer or a great business person and a great innovator that he certainly was. But what do you think then was the critical factor that Menti didn't? And do you characterize that as a rejection of the other ideological strands, if you like, in his family, or was it of his own making, the aberration, if you like?
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B
Yeah, it's an important question. I think it's a process. I think that it begins when he's in prep school in middle school. A few years after his father died, he was enrolled in the only school in Jeddah that worked to an international standard, a day school, prep school, some boarders, some day students, where the students wore blue blazers and gray flannel slacks. And they had English and Irish teachers, and they also had Syrian and Egyptian teachers, some of whom were exiled members of the Muslim Brotherhood. And so at about age 13, he was recruited into the Brothers in After School Studies center in a way that's quite familiar to families in the Gulf. And he became part of this Islamist stream at his school and as a brother volunteered in Afghanistan, where he was also an authorized representative of his family and of his company and of the Saudi government. But this Brotherhood ideology had a particularly political tint to it because the Brothers began as an anti colonial movement and they have a vision of political change that is, I think, distinct from the more conservative Salafi orthodoxy, Wahhabi orthodoxy in Saudi Arabia, which doesn't emphasize politics because such politics is discouraged in Saudi Arabia. So I think from this beginning, you could say that he never really deviated from the ideology that he was taught by these mentors from an early age. However, I think he did reach a turning point, but it wasn't in the 1980s. I mean, the war in Afghanistan clearly fired his imagination and distorted his experience in a meaningful way. But it's also important, I think, to recall that in Afghanistan he was an entirely orthodox figure in Saudi terms. I mean, he was an authorized figure. We tend to see his role in the war in the 1980s as a radical act. It wasn't. It was an orthodox act. But when he came home, his imagination was fired with new ideas. And he entered then into a narrative of dissent that began in about 1990 and really culminated in about 1996. I think that was really the point of no return. That had a very political characteristic because he joined the dissenting movement of Islamist in Saudi Arabia Arabia. But it also, I think, had personal characteristics by then. I think he had built up ambition, ego, a sense of entitlement. And to the extent, to answer the second part of your important question, sorry, going on so long, but he. These personal resentments, I think, did include some sense of entitlement to rule within the family company. If you read his pamphlets from Sudan and the 1990s, he's very careful not to criticize his family very often, but at the same time, occasionally it leaks through. And what he's really focused on is criticism of the Sedari secular wing of the Saudi royal family. And he's trying to calibrate praise for then Crown Prince Abdullah and embedded it in. This seems to be a fantasy that if Abdullah comes to power, he'll sort of invite Osama home, and Osama will then have his own kind of clothes claim to leadership as a partner of the royal family. And in any event, there's a lot less of this available than you would wish for. But there's enough of it available, I think, to make clear that he did have resentments after Salem's death about leadership within the family and that this imprisoned him a little bit as he considered his choices from exile and Sudan.
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A
Fascinating. Staff, Sorry, questions from the audience, please. Take a couple to start with. Good evening. Iver, would you like to start? And then, gentlemen, there, just take a couple of questions for us. Do you want to wait for a microphone? Iva, just. Sorry. Well, thanks very much. I found this fascinating. I was just wondering, sort of on the bigger scale, really following up Charlie's question, but broadening it. Obviously, Osama didn't invent radical, violent Islam, but given its role in the global village today as perhaps the single most important phenomenon, would that have happened without Osama? Would there have been somebody else who would have been seen as the iconic leader of the movement? Or is it, you know, the ultimate demonstration of the importance of one man affecting history? Let's pause there. And then there's, sorry, the gentleman just there in the couple of seats. To extend one of your themes a little bit further to what extent.
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B
Do you see the reaction of various.
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A
Bin Ladens to what Osama bin Laden has gone on to do as a window onto or a cross section of the reactions on the part of the elite Saudi Arabian society?
- [41:07]
B
Yeah, these are both good and difficult questions, I think. As to the first one, I would recognize and respect lots of legitimate opinion about that question, because I don't think it's a scientific matter. But my own view is that as to the global visibility and the global characteristics of Al Qaeda, and what is Al Qaeda really? It's an organization yet. Yes, but it's also a network, it's a movement, it's a brand. And those characteristics and its global reach, I think, are a distinctive product of Osama's leadership and would not likely have been replicated by any other leader, certainly not the Egyptians around him, who had an entirely provincial view about their campaign throughout. And so. And also this vision that Osama had, you know, he has weaknesses as a political analyst, and his arguments are not very coherent, but his intuition about his own goals has proven to be very strong. And his own goals were to act as a vanguard in a broader Islamic uprising. He never imagined that he was going to build a particular political organization and close out his days as emir for life over a particular political territory. Instead, he wanted to stimulate others. And this explains some of the diversity and the sort of eclecticism of his own leadership approach. And so as a vanguard with a talent for media and global technology, I think he's a distinctive figure who would not have easily been imitated by someone else. And then the family's reaction. I mean, the bin Ladens divested Osama of his shares in the family's companies in 1994. They say that they broke contact with him then, perhaps trivial phone calls here and there, but nothing of any great significance. I see no evidence to contradict that claim. But Osama's family is much larger, even still, than the generation of 54 to which he originally belonged, because he had a step family. And of course, his mother and his stepbrother attended his wedding as recently as 2001. And then he has his own family, at least 20 children, then four or five wives, many of whom now return. So the reaction of the bin Ladens to him is a kind of complicated proposition. But if you just take the core generations that he came of age with, the 54, then it's a little bit hard, frankly, for me to tell, because I can see two principal characteristics in their reaction from the evidence that's available to me. One is revulsion and the other is fear. And it's possible that there were also elements of the family that reacted with some quiet pride or sympathy for what he did. But if so, they did so out of my eyesight.
- [44:13]
A
Great. Any other questions? Where are we? Sorry, let's take the. Let's do another double header. So the lady there and then there's a gentleman in the checks shirt just there. My question has to do with you speaking about Osama bin Laden as a vanguard and the creator of Al Qaeda.
- [44:32]
B
Due to his charisma and whatnot.
- [44:33]
A
What do you think would happen to Al Qaeda now if bin Laden were to be captured or die?
- [44:39]
B
Well, I think it would matter a lot less now than it would have 10 years ago. Al Qaeda is, I think, still best understood as a synthesis of these qualities that I referred to earlier. Organization, network, brand, movement. And these days, the organizational aspect of Al Qaeda, though reconstituting along the Afghan Pakistan border, is less significant as a proportion of the whole than it used to be. So the loss of his particular operational role or his planning role, and certainly the loss of his wealth, which is now insignificant to Al Qaeda, and I don't think he has any wealth left personally, that wouldn't be very mean, meaningful. But as to the movement and the brand, I think it would have some significance because he continues to be able to narrate the war that he believes that he's fighting. And that narration has some significance. It has significance to the sort of definitional sense of his followers. What are we in who remind us who's the enemy? Why are they the enemy? How should we react to tactical opportunities like the invasion of Iraq? What is our. What. What are we involved in there? And his narration and that of Zawahiri is significant. They're not the only voices, but they're two symbolically important voices. And I think the other aspect of his potential disappearance from Al Qaeda is that this is an organization that's 20 years old now. It's never been tested by a succession struggle. I mean, they've had the same emir and deputy emir for 20 continuous years. And you can speculate about how they would perform in a succession crisis, but they've never been tested. And it is a relatively decentralized organization. You could make the case both ways about what succession would mean, but I think testing that strength through a succession challenge would be a potential opportunity for Al Qaeda's adversaries. And so, anyway, I'll leave it there.
- [46:41]
A
Sorry, could you talk a bit about.
- [46:46]
B
How and where you did your research Yeah, I had sort of three principal ways to research this book. The central bin Laden family and Jeddah declined to provide significant interviews to me, although toward the end of the project they did engage and written correspondence through their attorneys about aspects of the book. And that correspondence, while limited, was helpful. But mostly I had to work from the outside in. And there were three ways to do that. One was through interviews. The other was through archives, government archives mostly, and that pertained primarily to the life of Mohammed, though not exclusively. And then finally court records and business records, records and land records and lawsuits and the like. And so the interviews were everywhere. This is truly a global family, and it has left behind many friends and business partners and ex wives and girlfriends and rock and roll musicians and lots of other people who, many of whom were remarkably loyal to the family and also at the same time anxious to have it be understood, at least to the extent that they had perspective to share when they shared it. It was mostly out of a desire to remember the family in fuller terms than it was generally reckoned by in the United States. And I was struck by the number of loyal friends that many of the bin Ladens had developed over the years and the relative dearth of business enemies or disgruntled employees. There really weren't very many of those. You don't know about that until you go out and start interviewing. But many of these people were not public figures. They were not government officials. They were not elite investment bankers. They were ordinary Americans or Europeans or Brits or Europeans or Lebanese or citizens of the UAE or Egypt who happened to interact with the family in one way or another as employees or as partners or such. There were sections of the family where it was possible to enter and do some interviewing in Yemen and elsewhere, in little bits and pieces of people who would choose to cooperate in a limited way. But mostly I had to work from the outside. And I would say the records, the court records in the United States proved to be extraordinarily helpful in at least laying down a reliable baseline of documentary evidence about some issues. For instance, family finances. Two US Presidents between Clinton and Bush were given by their intelligence community reports that Osama's personal fortune totaled $300 million and that he was in a position to essentially self finance Al Qaeda. Well, this was wrong by many orders of magnitude, it turned out. But while I was doing the research, I was down in the basement of the Los Angeles County Superior Court looking through old civil cases on microfilm, and I came across a divorce case involving one of Osama's brothers. Whose ex wife in Los Angeles had decided that she didn't trust what she was being told about his income. So she hired a forensic accountant in 1991, and the accountant went to Saudi Arabia and looked through the whole family finances, came back and gave the court what turned out to be an extremely accurate report about how the system worked and what the scale of monies available to brothers like Osama was. And it would have completely contradicted this reporting that two presidents received. It was sitting in an open file in a courthouse in Los Angeles county for 10 years, never looked at by anybody. And, you know, as a taxpayer, I sort of found that kind of depressing. But as a journalist, as a journalist, I was, you know, galvanized to come across these things.
- [50:30]
A
And.
- [50:30]
B
And there were business records in Britain and elsewhere that proved helpful. But I think the core of the narrative ultimately comes from people and about people. And so while I was able in the end to document a pretty rich life of Mohammed from government archives, the lack of access to contemporary interviews because, of course, the time of his life was admitted now receded. I did find a few people who remembered him, but not many and not especially intimately. I think that was. It meant that I could document his life, but I really didn't try to empathize with his experience very much because I just didn't have that material. Whereas with Salem, I felt in the end that I could really live with him as a researcher and a writer and tried to bring that across in my account of his life.
- [51:23]
A
Other questions, please? No answer. Let's go right to the back there. Gentleman there in the brown jumper. Thanks. I wanted to ask you about the bin Laden family now in Saudi Arabia. Is the corporation still a kind of major player? Are these other members of the family kind of important public figures? Do they pop up in Saudi talk shows and things, or what's the status of the family now?
- [51:51]
B
They're doing quite well. They are a very successful business. They've not been punished at all by the Saudi government for Osama's actions. If anything, they've prospered since September 11th because oil prices have risen and led the Saudi government to engage in massive infrastructure investments which the bin Ladens are well positioned to work on. And the family is led by Salam's former brother Bucker, who is an engineering graduate of the University of Miami, A guy now in his, I think, probably his early 60s. He's also a pilot. And I would think of Bucker as sort of a centrist in the family circles. If you have sort of salem in the 1970s and 80s, living out on the edge in the United States and Europe. And you have Osama going off in a completely different direction. Bucker is one of several brothers who tried to sort of hold down the Irish Arabian center and kind of live a more balanced life. He's a less Westernized character than Salam, yet he's comfortable in the west, and he's a more Arabian character than Salam was, But he's not. While he's pious, he's not sort of politically religious. And I think that the family isn't sort of prominent in politics in Saudi Arabia. That's not the way Saudi Arabia works. And they do keep a very low profile so that they do not appear on Al Jazeer offering political commentary, to my knowledge.
- [53:08]
A
Or even singing, particularly.
- [53:10]
B
Yeah, or even singing.
- [53:11]
A
Yeah, sorry. It's steam. The other side, gentleman there. In the end, I was just curious. You were talking about how in the 80s, Osama bin Laden is fighting this war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Well, after the fall of the Soviet Union, what do you think were some factors that caused Osama bin Laden to shift his campaign towards the West?
- [53:36]
B
Well, from the beginning of Al Qaeda, as we see from the minutes of their first meetings In August of 1988, they talked about the need to move on after the Soviet Union. But Osama's sort of process by which he came to identify the United States as his principal enemy and as the appropriate target for his concentrated attacks, that process really begins. After he returns to Saudi Arabia, Saddam invades Kuwait. Hundreds of thousands of American and coalition troops come into the kingdom, and Osama begins to question the royal family's decision to rely upon Western troops. He doesn't immediately break with the royal family or start saying or writing things that are completely out of bounds. But he emerges as part of a broader movement of dissent in the kingdom after the Gulf War, questioning the royal family on a number of grounds. He questions this enough so that he's kind of forced or encouraged into a voluntary exile. He ends up in Sudan. And there he starts sitting down at his typewriter and writing out a series of dissenting pamphlets that are very interesting to read. More and more of them have become available. And I think what you see in there is not so much the emergence of a focus on the United States, but rather, in the 1990s, a concentration on the Saudi government. And eventually he concludes that the Saudi government's failings are considerably due to its reliance upon the United States. But my own interpretation is that his anger at the United States doesn't fully crystallize, though it's always present. It doesn't become his defining priority that until in 1996, he is forced out of Sudan under American pressure. And he knows that the Americans are behind this because it's explicit in what the Sudanese tell him. And he has to give up a pretty comfortable situation. In Sudan, he had offices and employees and farms and horses. He had his family with him. And now he's leaving this place where he's, you know, he's sort of a man of all worlds. He's a family, family man. He's a sheikh who gives speeches on Fridays. He's a farmer. He's, you know, he's a jihadi. And now he's going to have to go to Afghanistan, which is engulfed in civil war, ruled by the Taliban, and doesn't have any of the infrastructure that he's enjoyed in Sudan. And so he sees the Americans, correctly, as responsible for this new chapter. In his exile, one or two of his wives leaves him. His eldest son returns home, his family kind of partially breaks up, and he ends up on a hillside in Jalalabad in the summer of 1996. And what's the first thing he does? He sits down, he writes a declaration of war against the United States.
- [56:17]
A
Ambitious, if nothing else. Let's keep going around this space. Obviously, the subject of the lecture is.
- [56:27]
B
Bin Laden's, but I just wanted to.
- [56:30]
A
To ask a little bit of a question about his father or his stepfather.
- [56:34]
B
I should say, and the role that.
- [56:37]
A
The step family played.
- [56:40]
B
In Osama bin Laden's raising and whether that contributed towards his particular move away from the more centrist bin Laden family. Yeah, I think his stepfather, by all accounts, and really the available testimony about all these subjects, I think an honest researcher has to acknowledge, is limited. But there's enough voices that are reliable and accumulating so you can at least get a picture. His stepfather was by all accounts, a very gentle man, very reliable character. He ended up having, as far as his neighbors and others could tell from the outside, a fairly ordinary suburban household. As I say, I think I said he was monogamous with Osama's mother after their marriage. And as far as I know, he continued to work steadily in the bin Laden company right through his retirement, I think. And so what effect that family had on Osama, I think, you know, I've heard members of his own family, I mean, of the bin Laden family, privately speculate about the psychological equation that Osama might have experienced in that household growing up as the, you know, both the kind of specialness and the intensity around his status, but also perhaps the complicated feelings he might have had about his father's death, his stepfather's role and so forth. But I think even for his own brothers and sisters, these are speculative questions about which you can perhaps offer reasonable inference, but no certainty. I think his mother remained very, very close to him throughout his life and into his adolescence and into his adulthood. And that relationship seemed to be very powerfully important to him. Now, you can speculate about a very close attachment to his mother in the context of a stepfather. But again, I think it's only speculation.
- [58:41]
A
In the middle there. Please. The fact that the bin Laden family in the US were allowed to leave the country right after 911 at a time when everybody else was kind of grounded, does that speak to you about the clout of the family itself or of the Saudi royal family and their ability to organize that? And related to that, I wonder whether you would have any thoughts or speculation on what might have transpired in the discussion, the prime minister private discussion between President Bush and Prince Bandar that famously happened straight afterwards. Why aren't there more conspiracies in the book, is what we're saying?
- [59:12]
B
Yes. Why aren't there more conspiracies? Well, I'm always open to evidence is my attitude about conspiracies. But the evacuation was a product of Bandar bin Sultan's influence in the Bush administration. No doubt about that. He was able to make folks that other ambassadors wouldn't have been able to make in the throes of that crisis. He had relationships in the White House. He had relationships at the FBI. And he was motivated to evacuate three groups of elite Saudis who were in the country on 911 for whom he feared that they might be subjected to vigilante attacks or revenge violence. There were two groups of royals in the family, one on vacation in California, in Las Vegas, and another one buying thoroughbred horses in Kentucky. And then there were members of the bin Laden family scattered around the country. It's a myth that the flight went out while all other planes were grounded. That's just not true. The flight was organized while all other planes were grounded, but it flew after airspace opened. It's a remarkable scene. I have some aspects of it in the book. I'm tempted to tell you just to read it, but I'll actually say that there was a revolt. The plane started in Los Angeles where one of Usama's sisters, remarkable woman who was a pilot and had her own life out there in LA picks her up, she's the only passenger. Goes from LA to Orlando, Orlando to dc, dc, Boston, Boston, Paris, Paris. In Paris they transfer onto a Saudi government plant, go to Jeddah. And so they pick up this sister in la and they put bodyguards on the plane out of, I guess the charter company's sort of habit of operations. And it's a plane that's been outfitted for sports teams with first class seats and that sort of thing. And she's sitting there by herself and they're flying all the way across the country to Orlando to the second stop. And the security guard goes up to the cockpit, starts chattering with the pilot and co pilot and he realizes that they don't know that this is a flight for the bin Laden family, that they actually, they've been told that it's just a bunch of college students. And he decides that this is unwise, that they should probably know who is actually going to be on the plane. So he tells them and they revolt. And they say, you know, they're very angry at their employer, you know, how could they withhold this information from us? And they then land in Orlando and go on strike and say we're not going to fly. Then they say, well, we're only going to fly if you double our pay. And so the security guard is down on the tarmac talking to the charter, trying to negotiate this. And Khalil bin Laden, who spent summers in Orlando, comes up to the plane and sort of sidles up to the security guard and he's dressed very well and he says, I'm really sorry that this has to be going on, sorry you have to be involved, but can we please get moving? Whatever you have to. They explain the pilots are on strike. He says, look, you know, whatever it takes, let's get going. And eventually they get everybody organized again. But it's a remarkable scene aboard as the family gathers, a kind of a mournful family reunion. Some people are in tears, a lot of chain smoking of cigarettes. People are nervous. College students get on. One of them goes up, gets on in Boston, one of the younger ones, it goes up to the security security guard and says, you know, I just got my fake ID two nights ago. Not going to do me any good in Saudi Arabia. And so.
- [62:39]
A
We'Ve only got about 10 minutes or so left, so let's just. There's a couple at the back there. Can we take the two at the back together? So the gentleman there and then the lady in the yellow. Thanks. I was just wondering if your research has shed Any light on the relationship between Osama and his deputy? Zawahiri, who were sometimes told is the brains behind Al Qaeda. Okay.
- [63:07]
B
I'm just wondering if, because we're hearing.
- [63:10]
A
So many rumors coming from everywhere whether.
- [63:13]
B
You know, if Osama bin Laden is still alive and whether he lives in America like they say, or not. Whether he was.
- [63:24]
A
Whether he's in America. Yeah, basically. Is he in a. Which cave is he in? Or is he in the Hilton? Yeah. So, Suhari.
- [63:34]
B
So, yeah, Zawahiri, I don't really treat much in this book. I treated him in Ghost War Some. And Larry Wright in the Looming Tower probably has the best account of Zuahiri's life. And he has a certain take on the relationship with Osama that. I mean, Larry is brilliant and, you know, has my unqualified admiration, but I'm not sure that I would entirely endorse his interpretation. It comes from a sort of, in my estimation, a sort of Egyptian centric perspective. And it tends to, I think, sort of overemphasize Zawahiri's talent and control over Osama. I think I see the relationship as slightly more complicated and a little more balanced. But in any event, certainly Zawahiri came to Al Qaeda with a very different perspective from Osama in the sense that he had been tortured in prison, he had been a member of clandestine cells. He had street cred and street experience. He'd been imprisoned, he'd been put on trial in a cage. He had an experience of bad governance that was very palpable and personal. Whereas Osama kind of came to the war in Afghanistan from a position of privilege, had never really suffered in any meaningful way. And so his abstractness and his sense of optimism, his talent and his vision of the future, I think was an essential ingredient. Even though Zawahiri came with a lot of sort of war fighting techniques and technical and political ambition that absent his presence, Osama might never have gotten anywhere near as far down the road as he did as a jihadi. But I think they did have a sort of mutually useful and sort of balanced relationship as to where is Osama now.
- [65:26]
A
Just coordinates will do.
- [65:27]
B
Coordinates will.
- [65:28]
A
There.
- [65:31]
B
I was doing what you're doing at a meeting once with a senior member of the Afghan intelligence service. And of course, I asked him that question. What is your, you know, what do your interrogations show? What does your reporting show? He said, looked at me and said, if I knew the answer to that question, I'd be $25 million richer. But, you know, look, it's possible that Osama has pulled off the greatest deception operation in world history and that he's pulled in, you know, living in suburban Paris or in some place that nobody expects. I don't rule anything out, but I think all of the evidence that is available and all reasonable interpretation, I think, takes you to Pakistan. It's conceivable that he's in an urban area. A number of senior Al Qaeda folks have been caught in unexpectedly urban settings in the Punjab and El Q where. But more likely he's up on the border. He has a lot of friends and a lot of history in some of these areas. And the state's writ just doesn't run up there. And these compounds, you know, big walled compounds, very well defended in fairly remote areas, but still with more resources than you would guess. A place where you could watch satellite telescopes, television, or maybe even pull together some kind of news connection. So there's a lot of people who, you know, you end up in discussions about this question. So I've developed this sort of parlor game for Osama nerds, which is, suppose somebody comes in right now and says he's been caught or captured or killed, but you say, don't tell me where. And then you put a map up on the wall and you get everybody, put your pin on the map, and whoever is closest, you know, wins the bottle of. Or the ham or the. So where would you put your pin? I think I would probably put it in north with zero stone, probably around Mirin Shah. I mean, that's a big bit of a heavily trafficked area. Might be a little bit risky for him to be there. But aspects of areas of North Waziristan, he has really rich networks and a lot of history. Other people I know who I think would know how to put a good guess together, put it in Bajur, which is a federally administered tribal area just to the north of Waziristan, a little less, well trafficked, maybe a little bit safer to hunker down.
- [68:01]
A
You don't find it remarkable that there's some such a lack of. Never mind where he is, but such a lack of, you know, traffic about him. You know, there's, there's.
- [68:12]
B
Well, I mean, he's been putting him, you know, he feels secure enough to go back on the airwaves now. I don't know why he hunkered down for the year that he went off the air. But, you know, now in the last few months, he's put out two or three tapes. One video, two. Two audio. So he's Back in that mode where he feels his courier networks are good and his operational security is good. And so he's back on the airwaves. And I think there is evidence that suggests he's in the frontier area. The courier networks, as I understand it, they're very deep. I mean, there's like 10. It's like the old 19th century kind of runner networks. And so, you know, A passes to B, C, D, E, and by the time it ends up at the Al Jazeera office in Islamabad, it's, you know, the 11th person to handle the tape. And you. And even if you push it back a little bit, you manage to figure out how far to go back. At a certain point, you run out of string, but it's like a trail of bread crumbs that ends outside of a shower pointing up into the misty mountains. So it's sort of a sense that basically that part seems established. The deception operation could be. If I'm him and I'm living in Paris, then I want every tape delivered out of Waziristan, figure out somehow to DHL it in, get it up into the. The Territories, and then bring it out as if that's where I'm living. But I tend to think he's not that good.
- [69:27]
A
No, My personal guess is that he's a baggage handler in Terminal 5. Sorry, there's one lady at the. Back there. And then actually, the quickest way is to. If you give that chap a microphone there. Let's take a couple of really quick questions because we're running out of time.
- [69:45]
B
I just wonder whether you think he'd.
- [69:47]
A
Like to meet you once he reads your book. Okay. You spoke about bin Laden forming a brand in marketing Al Qaeda. Can you talk about what that brand is and why it's gained some support? Okay.
- [70:04]
B
You know, I think that I've probably gotten a bit personal for Osama's taste, but I do wish to hear more from him as a sort of biographer. I think that he has. There's big silences in his own account of himself. None of us is the best source about ourselves, but we're a valid source. And it would be useful if he would lay down a little bit more of a baseline about his own narrative, because people are going to be interested long after he's gone, long after I'm gone. And there's only one opportunity to kind of create a record of his own narrative. And so I would make that argument to him. Let me turn on the tape recorder. But as to what is the characteristics of this brand. You know, I think it's dynamic. I don't think it's static. And a brand is a position that a product has in the mind of its consumers. And so it's a sort of a dialogue between those who consume and those who present. And I, I think that in its most idealized form, from Al Qaeda's point of view, the brand is one of unity, of global unity, and also one of courage and accomplishment that is distinct from the lesser brands. And I think in the consumer's mind, to the extent it has had traction, it's because, because of its cool. I mean, if you're going to be a jihadi and at a certain level of risk taking, you know, why not go all the way and, you know, and affiliate with the most notorious, the most dangerous of brands. And so you see, like the North African group recently, I always confuse the order of their English translated combating call essentially is what they usually characterized as Algerian, Moroccan and with expatriate networks in Europe. And they just rebranded as Al Qaeda in North Africa. Now, I presume that you don't do that unless you think it's good for fundraising and recruitment.
- [72:14]
A
Excellent. Well, I think I'm going to have to wrap it there, but I believe Steve. Steve is going to be kind enough to go and sign some books immediately afterwards, so you may be able to grab another word with him and coax out exactly where OBL is. But it's been a fascinating evening. Thanks very much for your excellent questions, but above all, thanks very much to Steve for spending the time with us tonight. Thanks a lot.