The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [110]
Bin Laden obliquely blamed “regimes in our Arabic region” for the assaults. When his old friend Jamal Khashoggi asked him what he meant by that, bin Laden pointed to Egyptian intelligence. The CIA believed that the Saudis were behind the attempt. Turki’s chief of intelligence, Saeed Badeeb, said, “We never tried to assassinate him. We only wanted to cool him down.”
This near murder offered Zawahiri a superb opportunity to expand his influence with bin Laden. Zawahiri called in his own man, Ali Mohammed, to investigate the assassins. Mohammed learned that Khilaifi was a Libyan who had trained in Lebanon and then traveled to Peshawar in 1988. There he joined the mujahideen and met bin Laden. But he had also come under the influence of the takfiris. Khilaifi was a sociopath who used this philosophy to justify the murder of anyone he labeled an infidel. It was no different, except in the less ambitious scale of the enterprise, from what Zawahiri and bin Laden were doing. Takfir was a weapon that could blow up in anyone’s face.
Zawahiri arranged for Ali Mohammed to train bin Laden’s bodyguards, and he made sure that they were largely Egyptians—drawing even tighter the noose of influence he was casting around the Saudi. As for bin Laden, he gloomily concluded that his Sudanese idyll had come to an end. The picnics on the Nile, the meditative strolls to the mosque, the Friday horse races—all that was part of the past. He traveled in convoys now, and he always carried the Kalikov AK-74 that he had been awarded on the field of combat.
LIFE AT HOME also changed for bin Laden. As stern as he was toward his children, he was surprisingly permissive toward his career-oriented wives. Umm Hamza, the professor of child psychology, and Umm Khaled, who taught Arabic grammar, kept their university jobs and commuted to Saudi Arabia during the Sudan years. Umm Hamza lived on the ground floor of the Khartoum house, where she offered lectures to women about the teachings of Islam.
For Umm Abdullah, however, life in Khartoum was not so rewarding. Two of her sons, Abdullah and Omar, hated the deprivation and the hazards that their father imposed on them. And there was the ongoing problem of caring for Abdul Rahman, the retarded son, whose emotional outbursts were all the more difficult to deal with in the cramped household.
The fourth wife, Umm Ali, asked for a divorce. Bin Laden had expected this. “We have not been on good terms since the beginning,” he confessed to Jamal Khalifa. When Osama and Jamal decided back in their university days to become polygamists, they had made a pledge that they would never abuse their moral code by being the one to ask for a divorce. Instead of marrying scores of women, like his father had done, bin Laden intended to fulfill the Quranic injunction to treat his four wives equally. But that meant he had to wait patiently for UmmAli to make the request herself and put years of unhappiness behind them.
Under Islamic law, children younger than seven stay with their mothers; after that, the daughters go to their fathers. Sons over seven years old may choose between their parents. Eight-year-old Ali, the oldest, decided to stay with his mother. Umm Ali took her three children and returned to her family in Mecca. The daughters stayed with her, even as they grew.
Bin Laden valued loyalty; indeed, nearly all those around him had formally pledged themselves to him. He lived as feudal lord, controlling the destinies of hundreds of people. Betrayal, until now, was practically unknown in his dominion. The sudden desertion by several members of his family was a crushing loss to a man who held himself out as an exemplar of Islamic family values. The spartan virtues that he had pressed upon his children had turned some of them against him. And yet he willingly let them go.
BIN LADEN also longed for home. The only times he got to see his mother