The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [111]
Saudi Arabia is an intimate nation, with large families and tribes complexly knitted together. To be expelled from the country was to be banished from these intricate relationships that are so much a part of every Saudi’s identity. Citizenship is a closely guarded property, rarely awarded to foreigners, and the fact that the bin Laden family, of Yemeni origin, were full members of Saudi society indicated the honored—but vulnerable—place they held. Immediately after the king canceled bin Laden’s citizenship, Bakr bin Laden, the eldest brother, publicly condemned Osama, turning the family’s back to him. Many of bin Laden’s countrymen date the moment of his total radicalization to the announcement of the king’s decision. An emissary traveled to Sudan to formally deliver the news and demand bin Laden’s passport. Bin Laden threw it at the man. “Take it, if having it dictates anything on my behalf!” he declared.
Bitter and reproachful, bin Laden authorized his representatives to establish an office in London. (He considered seeking asylum in Britain himself, but upon hearing that possibility, the British home secretary immediately banned him.) The office, called the Advice and Reformation Committee, was run by Khaled al-Fawwaz, a Saudi, and two Egyptian members of al-Jihad. They sent faxes by the hundreds to prominent Saudis, who were stunned by bin Laden’s open denunciations of royal corruption and the family’s under-the-table deals with the Islamic clergy. These dispatches caused a sensation at a time when the fever for reform was already blazing. Bin Laden published an open letter to Sheikh bin Baz, chief of the Saudi ulema, denouncing his fatwas authorizing the royal family to keep the American forces in the holy land and to lock up dissident Islamic scholars.
“Bring this man to heel,” the Saudi king ordered Prince Turki. Assassination plots were considered, but the Saudis were not clever killers, nor did Turki have the stomach for such risky ventures. Instead, the Interior Ministry ordered bin Laden’s family to cut him off, and it seized his share of the company—about $7 million. As predictable as such moves were, bin Laden was taken by surprise. He depended on the monthly stipend the company paid him—in fact, it was his only real source of income.
His business career was a terrible failure. He had started his life in Sudan by spreading money around, loaning the government hard currency to purchase wheat, for instance, when an acute shortage caused breadlines to form; helping to build the Sudanese radio and television facilities; and occasionally picking up the tab for the nation’s oil imports when the government was short. In such an impoverished country, bin Laden’s modest fortune almost constituted a second economy. But he cared little about running his companies or overseeing his investments. Though he had an office with a fax machine and a computer, he rarely spent much time there, preferring to tinker with his agricultural projects during the day and entertain dignitaries and mujahideen in his evening salons.
He had sunk much of his money into enterprises he knew little about. His interests now included rock-crushing machines, insecticides, soap making, leather tanning—dozens of unrelated projects. He set up accounts in banks in Khartoum, London, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Dubai, each in the names of different al-Qaeda members, which made them