2008 Biography Finalist The Bin Ladens, by Steve Coll

by Art Winslow | Mar-05-2009

Each day leading up to the March 12 announcement of the 2008 NBCC awards, we highlight one of the thirty finalists. Today, NBCC board member Art Winslow discusses Steve Coll’s The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century (Penguin Press)

It is retrospectively somewhat eerie to learn, as we do in Steve Coll’s group biography The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century, that it was a September day in 1967 when the patriarch of the family, Mohamed, father to Osama and fifty-three other children, was killed in the crash of a small plane in Saudi Arabia piloted by an American.

Coll opens his stunning collective portrait—which traces the intertwining of two families, the Bin Ladens and the Al-Sauds, the royal family of Saudi Arabia, on whose favor the Bin Ladens have depended heavily—with a cameo introduction to Mohamed Bin Laden’s charismatic eldest son, Salem, on whose shoulders leadership of the family fell in the aftermath of the crash.

Salem, a London-educated, jet-setting free spender, was one of only two sons to have reached adulthood at the time of Mohamed’s death. He had a winning way, like his father (who had been a teenage migrant to the kingdom from what is today Yemen), and Salem successfully maintained the Bin Ladens’ close and supplicant relationship with the king and Al-Saud princes, controllers of the giant construction projects that were the source of the Bin Ladens’ wealth. (Those included roads, royal palaces, mosques and other structures at holy sites in Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem.) Salem was a pilot himself, sometimes given to stunt-flying, and was killed when he crashed an ultralight aircraft near a small airfield outside San Antonio, Texas, in 1988.

Salem was enamored of the United States, had “led a family migration to America during the 1970s,” and even bought property for a sizable Bin Laden compound near Orlando. More than a quarter of his siblings studied in this country over time, primarily during the 1970s and early 1980s, but Salem’s death “cut the main artery connecting the United States to the Bin Laden family,” Coll writes. A tantalizing question, forever to remain unanswered, is whether Salem’s efforts would have had a tempering effect on Osama and his later path. The Bin Laden family formally broke with Osama and publicly repudiated him in 1994.

In the largest sense, the story that Coll develops centers on the push and pull of influences on both the Bin Ladens and the kingdom they hail from, where at the family and national level, Westernizing impulses and traditional Islamic conservatism contend in uneasy balance. This extends The Bin Ladens into cultural and political biography as well as constituting a multigenerational family tale. Salem’s pro-Western orientation and Osama’s radical jihadism represent opposite ends of the spectrum, between which the Al-Saud leadership has wavered over time, fully embracing neither one, although at several points it has cracked down on militant Islamicists as an internal threat. As Coll reports, though, much of Osama’s early activity, helping the mujahedeen in Afghanistan fight the Soviet-backed government, was in accord with Saudi national policy (and U.S. policy) at the time.

Coll’s juxtaposition of the historical record and various claims made by Osama, in writing or in interviews, explode some of the myths about him and Al Qaeda, one of the signal qualities of The Bin Ladens. Where Bin Laden contends that, in Coll’s paraphrase, “even as a young man he had been fired by anger over America and its conspiracies with Jews and Christians to destroy Islam,” Coll points out that prior to 1979, “there is not much evidence that Osama was especially political.” (Osama was, however, given religious tutelage during his adolescence by a Syrian instructor who was a member of the Egyptian-founded Muslim Brotherhood, whose aim was to replace secular Arab leaderships with Islamic governments.)

“Of all the myths that would come to swirl around Al Qaeda, none was greater than the fable of Osama Bin Laden’s wealth,” Coll observes, and reports that “the CIA’s evaluation of Osama and his capabilities rested on mistaken assumptions” about his financial means. While a 1998 Defense Intelligence Agency report claimed Bin Laden had a personal wealth of $150 million, other figures suggest he had some $27 million of inheritance and income over time, and the 9/11 Commission report concluded that he had received some $24 million from family wealth between 1970 and 1993 or 1994. The scarcity of information on Bin Laden is pointed out time and again throughout Coll’s book. When the CIA formed a unit to track him in 1996, the Saudi government refused “even to provide us the minimal information,” according to Michael Scheuer, the head of the unit.

The meetings that gave rise to Al Qaeda took place in Peshawar, Pakistan, in August 1988 (“three months after Salem’s funeral,” Coll points out), in which Bin Laden made clear his intent to train a separatist Arab militia, with facilities “open-ended” to the wider cause of jihad, a model he has never abandoned. And yet the thinking was hardly radical, other than ratcheting up the violence: “The broad political-military equation they perceived was sadly familiar, particularly in its fundamental view of Judaism as a fountainhead of evil global conspiracy: Jews and Christians, or ‘Zionists’ and ‘Crusaders,’ sought to destroy Islam and seize its lands,” concludes Coll.