Transcript
A (0:00)
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.
B (1:52)
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.