The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [92]
Bin Laden Sr. believed that Palestine belonged to the Arabs, not the Jews, and was accordingly “very, very, very anti-Israel, anti-Jewish.” In June 1967, when Israel seized East Jerusalem and King Faisal made bellicose noises, Mohamed suggested a contribution he could make. He would, he said, convert the 250 bulldozers he used in his building operations into army tanks.
Three months later, Osama’s father was dead. Ten thousand people reportedly attended the ceremonies that followed his death in an airplane crash. His myriad sons and daughters and wives, separated according to sex of course, gathered for the days of mourning. King Faisal, who said his protégé had been his “right arm,” declared that he would henceforth act as father to the bin Laden children.
This was not only because the king had held the dead man in great affection. The bin Laden companies were important to ongoing government operations, and Faisal decreed that they must continue to function. The overall value of Mohamed’s estate was in the region of $150 million, almost a billion dollars at 2010 values. His children, the sons as stipulated by law entitled to twice as much as the daughters, all instantly became millionaires.
The son named Osama, still in the care of his doting mother, was ten at the time. His most recent memory of his father was of a patriarch who—in spite of the boy’s tender age—had recently given him a car as a present. Though of course not allowed to drive it, he remained crazy about cars for years to come.
The sparse memories of Osama’s early life, however, recall a child who was “shy … aloof … gentle … polite … obedient … quiet, to the point of timidity.” Briefly, before his father’s death, he had been sent as a boarder to a Quaker school in Beirut. Not long afterward, back in his homeland, he began the first of eight years at a school for the Saudi elite founded by the king himself. An Englishman who taught there, Brian Fyfield-Shayler, remembered a pupil who was “extraordinarily courteous … not pushy in any way … pleasant, charming, ordinary, not very exceptional.”
Fyfield-Shayler thought Osama’s command of English mediocre, though a person who met him years later found him fluent enough in the language. His science teacher judged him “normal, not excellent.” In arithmetic, he had inherited his father’s flair. According to his son Omar, “No calculator could equal my father’s remarkable ability, even when presented with the most complicated figures.” Given the school’s top national ranking, Fyfield-Shayler thought, Osama was probably “one of the top fifty students” in his age group.
Away from class, he was a boy like other boys. His schoolfriend Khaled Batarfi recalled him taking part in soccer games, near the Pepsi factory. Taller than most of his pals, Osama would “play forward to use his head and put in the goals.” Off the pitch, he and his peers enjoyed watching cowboy and karate movies.
Batarfi recalled an incident when his friend was confronted by a bully. “I pushed him away from Osama, and solved the problem. But then Osama came to me and said, ‘You know, if you waited a few minutes I would have solved the problem peacefully.’ … This was the kind of guy who would always think of solving problems peacefully.”
IN SUMMER during his childhood, Osama traveled to his mother’s seaside home in Syria. There were camping trips, long hikes with a male cousin, and a special friendship with the cousin’s young sister—Najwa. To her he seemed “soft-spoken, serious … delicate but not weak … a mystery—yet we all liked him.” She had these impressions, by her account, before either child turned ten.
By the time Najwa turned thirteen, in 1972, “unanticipated emotions began to swirl” between her and Osama. He seemed