51. Bin Laden vs the CIA: The Origins of Al-Qaeda (Ep 1)

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Osama was just like many of us who became part of the Muslim Brotherhood movement in Saudi Arabia.

The only difference which set him apart from me and others, he was more religious.

More religious, more literal, more fundamentalist.

For example, he would not listen to music, he would not shake hands with a woman, he would not smoke, he would not watch television unless it is news.

He wouldn't play cards, he would not put a picture on his wall.

But more than that, there was also a harsh or radical side in his life.

I'm sure you have some people like that in your culture.

For example, even though he comes from a rich family, he lives in a very simple house.

He had no appreciation of art.

He sees art as contrary to a Muslim.

He lived a very simple, basic life.

He doesn't attach himself to extravagant or good living.

Well, welcome to the Rest is Classified.

I'm Gordon Carrera.

And I'm David McClarski.

And that was Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who will later become known...

for meeting a sadly untimely end in a consulate in Turkey.

But in this case, he is talking about Osama bin Laden, whom he knew as a young man in Jeddah in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

And David, today we're starting a series looking at Osama bin Laden through the lens of the long struggle with your former employers, the CIA, to try and take him down.

I guess it's a dramatic story.

It spans many decades, many continents, but at its heart is really one individual who I think it's fair to say is one of the most consequential individuals in the last 50 years in world history.

Yeah, I think that's right.

I mean, Gordon, as we were talking about the series, I think we were both reflecting that bin Laden probably is one of the most important

people that has lived in the past half century.

And it sounds hyperbolic, but then when you start to think

about

his impact on the world today, I'm not so sure it is.

I mean, he is the mastermind of 9-11, 2,977 killed.

I think the largest mass casualty event in American history, if you exclude things like natural disasters, the opioid epidemic, pandemics like the Spanish flu or COVID.

I mean, 9-11 is the largest mass murder in American history.

It was also, Gordon, the first major foreign attack against the continental U.S.

since you and your Brits burned the White House in 1814.

That's right.

And it punctured that sense of the American homeland being secure

and invulnerable.

Suddenly, it was vulnerable to a terrorist attack, which literally came out of the clear blue skies and then, in turn, led to this decade or so of wars, of conflicts, you know, Afghanistan, but also there is a direct line into the Iraq War of 2003, into so many things that then happened there.

And also, the kind of waves of terrorism we saw in Britain and around Europe and in so many countries.

They all really spring from this, to a large extent, I mean, maybe not purely, but from this one man, Osama bin Laden.

Without Osama bin Laden, we don't have 9-11.

And without 9-11, we don't have wars in Afghanistan, in Iraq.

We probably don't have military operations in places like Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, Yemen.

I mean, the whole U.S.

military, or frankly, allied military presence around the Middle East, some of which is still in existence today, right?

We're talking about an event that was almost 25 years ago, and we're still dealing now with the sort of repercussions of that event.

I mean, you could also just look at it in terms of the sort of human and economic cost.

We're talking about a sort of set of choices that led to the expenditure of potentially up to $8 trillion, cost 7,000 American lives in direct conflict, hundreds of thousands of others in conflict around the Islamic world.

I mean, it's one of these turning points.

It's really, I think, a hinge point in the history of the United States and, frankly, of the world.

Yeah, and it changes the kind of culture of societies in the sense of it spreads a kind of fear of terrorism, which infects, I think, societies in very complicated ways.

And it also distracts the U.S.

from the rise of China and other things, because there's a decade in which this kind of focus on terrorism and the long war that comes out of it shapes both American society and foreign policy in really profound ways.

It's unusual, isn't it?

You've got a kind of social movement and radicalization and a big conflict between jihadist groups and the west and yet at the center of it is a person and that person is quite responsible in an unusual way i think for driving that bigger conflict it's not just about the big forces one person here did actually play a big role and i think you know as we'll see in this story there were moments when perhaps there were missed opportunities when he could have been stopped or caught earlier or understood better, which might have changed the way things worked out.

And I think that's one of the interesting things about this story and to kind of chart it through from the beginning to the end is to really understand whether there were different possibilities as well along the way.

Well, and he really is the founder in many respects, or at least the popularizer, of a really violent ideological enterprise that has franchised itself worldwide.

I mean, if we rewind to the years before 9-11, we have al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, let's say.

And now, when you look at it, there are franchises in Yemen, in Syria, in Iraq, in the Maghreb, in North Africa.

There have been attacks in places from Mumbai to Paris, Nairobi, London, Bali, Oman, Jordan.

He, in some respects, is kind of the energy behind an ideological movement that I think is not as powerful or as attractive as it might have been.

10 or 15 years ago, but is still very much part of it.

Or legacy is still there.

Yeah, the legacy is still there.

And it's affecting, I mean, even now in a place like Syria, right?

Inheritors of his ideas are affecting security and political outcomes in real time right now in our world.

Yeah, and he is a very interesting character from a very interesting family.

And as we heard from that reading from Jamal Khashoggi, the journalist who knew him, a kind of complicated character.

So, shall we start by going back to his personal background?

Let's start, Gordon.

Riyadh, 1957, with young Osama when he is born.

And I think this is one of the things we're going to do throughout the series:

really set this as Osama bin Laden versus the CIA.

And I think to set it up properly, though, we need to get a sense of the man and his ideas and where he comes from because so much of what he will do is a product, I think, of his life in Saudi Arabia and his family experience, right?

I mean, as we'll see here, he does not come from a quote-unquote normal family.

So he's born in March of 57 in Riyadh, but very soon thereafter, within a few months, his family moves to the Hejaz.

It's a province kind of on the Saudi coast near the Red Sea.

It contains the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

He is an only child of the marriage between a woman named Alia Ghanem, who is Syrian.

She's 15 when she marries Mohammed bin Laden, who is Osama's father, who is a construction magnate who made his fortune working as a royal contractor in the 50s and 60s for the Aus Saud, the ruling family of Saudi Arabia.

And we should say that he's just not your normal contractor in the way we think of a contractor here, a building contractor.

He's not driving a white van around filled with

tools.

No, that's right.

This is someone who's building palaces, you know, huge complexes, mosques for the royal family as Saudi Arabia is kind of building and expanding based on that oil wealth and who as a result becomes incredibly rich himself and very close, I think, to the royal family.

Yeah, he's essentially the builder for the royal family.

And the royal family in this period is flush with petrodollars and building a lot in Saudi.

But very quickly after Osama is born, the couple divorce, and Osama's mother, Alia, remarries a guy who actually worked for Mohammed bin Laden in sort of an arranged marriage.

And I think it's fair to say that Mohammed bin Laden, Osama's father, is a massive polygamist, wouldn't you say, Gordon?

How many wives?

How many kids?

This is crazy.

It's more than 12 wives.

There might have been more.

And I think in Osama's generation, there's 54 brothers and sisters.

There's 25 brothers and 29 sisters by over a dozen wives.

And we should say this isn't really common at the time in Saudi.

This sort of polygamy is probably on par with the ruling family, the Al-Saud themselves.

But in any case, Osama's father dies in a plane crash in Saudi when Osama is 10.

And Osama does have some experiences with his father.

I mean, he doesn't grow up, he grows up in really kind of a separate household, Osama does, but he's integrated enough into, you know, the sort of world of his half-brothers and half-sisters.

So he's in sort of his father's orbit, but doesn't really know him very well.

Yeah, he doesn't seem to have a particularly close relationship.

His father dies when he's 10.

As you said, he's he's the only child of this mother, so he doesn't have any kind of direct siblings, just lots of half siblings.

So, you already get a sense of someone who is in this very rich, big family, but who also is kind of maybe just slightly on the edge of it, perhaps.

Yeah, I think he's peripheral throughout his childhood, like integrated, but on the outside, is what I would say.

And interestingly enough, he's in a, I think, a bizarre psychological position because he's the connection to Muhammad bin Laden, right?

And the way that Islamic inheritance law is, which is derived from passages in the Quran, it's very, very specific and it doesn't really allow you for a whole bunch of fluidity in sort of distributing an estate.

So, Osama bin Laden, when he's 10, inherits 2.27%

of the Muhammad bin Laden company's shares.

And I should note for all you listeners that Gordon in the notes here has said he's not interested in the family's finances.

And

he's looking very sour at me as I get into this here.

But I think it's important to set up the fact that the estate maybe at this point is worth like $150 million.

It's very hard to have accurate numbers.

And we should note, and this will be a theme throughout, Osama bin Laden is rich, but he's not as rich as you think he is.

Right.

Okay.

His wealth is going to be basically derived from future cash flows from these building projects.

Shares of the company.

Shares of the company.

So a lot of it is not like liquid.

And it's very hard to get a sense of exactly what it's all worth.

But regardless, he is the sugar baby for his family because he's the connection to this fortune.

He's the connection in his household.

Oh, because his mother is remarried and otherwise.

Because his mother's remarried.

He grows up in a house with three stepbrothers and a stepsister, right?

From his mother's union with this essentially business associate of Muhammad bin Laden.

And bin Laden is the connection, right?

So he's kind of the reason why this family is able to do well and has any money.

Now, Osama is, by all accounts, very close to his mother.

And all of the early accounts of his life, and here we should say that there's some exceptional work that's been done on the young Osama by Steve Cole and by Peter Bergen, who have written biographies of kind of the family and also Osama bin Laden himself.

All these early accounts emphasize his shyness.

He's a very quiet kid, which kind of makes sense.

You think about you're part of this massive brood of half-brothers and sisters.

You're sort of on the outs.

I mean, he's not a very gregarious kid.

At primary school, he's a solid, pretty unremarkable student, average grades.

We should note here that he's not going to like religious madrasas, right, or anything like that.

He has a short stint at a boarding school in Lebanon, which is maybe curtailed because he's homesick, kind of misses his mom.

But his educational experiences are actually

pretty normal for a Saudi kid of his generation.

And when he is maybe in fifth or sixth grade, so about a year or so after his father has died, Osama is sent to a very rigorous elite school in Jeddah called Al-Tagr, which translates as the haven.

And it is a very impressionable time for him.

His father has just died.

He's probably on the threshold of puberty.

He's increasingly aware that he's very unique, right?

He's the source of his family's wealth and access, and yet he's really got no father figure.

And he is going to find one at this school, at the haven.

And Gordon, I will note that some of his teachers at the haven were from Great Britain and no doubt featured in young Osama's radicalization, right?

But the kids at the school, they wear Western uniforms, they're wearing shirts and ties.

We'll see in the pictures of him as he gets older.

He's tall, right?

He's tall as a kid.

And around eighth or ninth grade, he gets invited to join an Islamic study group at school.

Now, it's very common for these groups in this era in Saudi to be taught by tutors that are really influenced by Islamist movements like the Muslim Brotherhood, which you had referenced in that quote up front.

And this is essentially, you know, in the 60s and 70s, it's an Islamist organization, like kind of a transnational one that has chapters and branches all over the Islamic world with a mission to, how would I say, Islamize society.

through kind of religious law, moral values, preaching, but it's also combining it with a political activism

that sees Islam as this all-encompassing sort of ordering force, not only for your private life, but also for the politics of the Islamic world, which, if you are a secular regime in Egypt, or if you're the Al Saud in Saudi Arabia, it's pretty threatening.

Yeah.

So, this is the start of his kind of Islamicization and politicization and radicalization at this point around kind of 15, 16, through these kind of study groups and where he's starting to find religion effectively.

That's right.

And the group is led by a Syrian.

Thank you to Hafez al-Assad, because there's a Muslim Brotherhood chapter in Syria that's effectively been expelled and had to go underground and is involved in sort of a violent uprising against the Syrian regime.

And so a lot of these Muslim Brotherhood sort of sympathizers have left Syria.

And there's a phys ed teacher who is

sort of an athlete, an all-around man's man, very charismatic, who is leading this Islamic study group at Osama's school.

And, you know, it's very interesting because the value proposition for the kids in this group really isn't about Islamic study, it's that they get to play soccer with this really cool guy who's older than they are and seems to be probably a version of what they all want to grow up to be.

But as the study goes on, there's less and less soccer, there's more and more Quranic memorization, and the Syrian starts to tell stories, including some stories about a young boy whose father is preventing him from studying the Quran.

And so in the story, the kid goes and actually shoots his father.

And the Syrian phys ed teacher basically says, you know, this is exactly the sort of thing that you should do, right, as a good Muslim.

You look at Osama at this point in his life.

Again,

his actual father is gone.

He's found this kind of father figure at this really formative, important point in his life.

And this person happens to be an an Islamic radical, right?

And so Osama becomes a kind of committed, I would say, schoolyard Islamic activist, and his behavior starts to change.

So he begins to fast on Mondays and Thursdays all day as the Prophet had done.

He begins to pray not just five times per day, but starts to add extra sets of prayers in the middle of the night, like a very devoted Muslim.

And I think his family in this period, including the extended family, they kind of look on this with some mixture of admiration, respect, but also, you know, it's a bit exasperating.

Yeah.

It's interesting because he doesn't have a lot of contact with the West, but he does make, it appears, one trip to Britain in the early 70s.

You know, I was looking into it a little bit and he goes when he's 14.

So that's just before he goes through this radicalization phase.

And he writes about it later.

in his notebooks and he kind of says i had to go to shakespeare's house a lot which just means he was going to stratford or fond avenue um but i think he was he was actually it looks like spending time kind of doing language training around Oxford and around that area as 14.

And he later describes himself as having found the whole place morally loose.

But actually, there are some people.

It still is.

It still is, especially Oxford.

But it's interesting.

Some of the people who knew him at the time in that early 70s, there seemed to be some people, and there's an amazing picture of him as a kind of 14-year-old, actually looking like a kind of gangly teenager.

And they remember someone who wasn't radical.

One of the people who knew him then during this kind of brief, I think, 10 weeks or something he spent in Britain said that there was a sadness about him when he told how his brothers had different mothers and his mother was a kind of concubine.

And so you get this sense that, you know, at age 14, that point where he's in Britain, he's actually a bit lost.

And then, as you said, this period around 15 or 16, he finds his meaning in life when he goes onwards.

That's exactly right.

And we should also note that here at 15, he's not all of the sudden committed to the extremely violent kind of globalist version of jihad that he is going to eventually attach himself to.

I think at this point, it's a very, I'd hesitate to say private because I think he is making sort of claims on others, but, and their morality and how they should live their lives, but he's having this very private kind of religious awakening, which is not necessarily unusual in a big family in Saudi at this point in time.

I mean, religion in Saudi Arabia in the 60s and 70s is kind of like baked into everyday life.

The state is broadcasting TV for hours every week, showing pilgrims circling circling the Kaaba in Mecca.

The call to worship is everywhere.

When it happens, business is close.

It's kind of, you know, Steve Cole has this great line from his book about how religion in Saudi in this era was sort of like gravity.

It's just there.

And as you can imagine, though, Osama is a pretty shy kid.

He's not got a lot of friends.

He's kind of lonely in this era.

He does enjoy Westerns, though.

Bruce Lee, the TV series Fury about a stallion on an American ranch.

There will be a love of horses that

continue throughout Osama's entire life.

And we should note, I mean, this will be another theme of his life.

Osama is a sexual creature.

He seems to have sought out a very early marriage as an avenue to actually start having sanctioned sex.

And so he has a marriage arranged to a Syrian cousin named Najwa when Najwa is 14 or maybe 15.

And Osama will have his first son, Abdullah, in 1976 when he is essentially graduating from high school.

So when he's about 20 or so.

Yeah, exactly.

And he'll go to King Abdulaziz University and Jeddah.

And this is another theme I think we should mention that's important about Osama's early life is he's familiar with the West.

I mean, the trip to Great Britain is an example, but he's not being radicalized by the West.

There's not this journey into the West, and he sees the moral depravity of Shakespeare's homeland, and then he comes back and despises it and wants to destroy it.

You know, I don't even think he has a great understanding at this point of the West, period.

That's not the focus.

That's not the focus.

So what does begin to radicalize him, though, is that he is coming of age in an era of absolute turmoil in the Arab world.

The creation of Israel in 1948, the 1967 war in which the Israelis defeated the Arab state definitively and exposed the failures of radicals like Nasser and the Baathists in Syria.

Israel massively expands its territory.

It's this sort of deeply humiliating experience.

Yeah, frustration and humiliation in the Arab world.

And they're looking for an answer.

And they're starting to find it in this period, aren't they?

With a more kind of radical political Islam.

That's right.

That's right.

And Osama and many of the men who will lead Al-Qaeda later are going to be deeply influenced by those politics, but also by the writings and teachings of a man named Syed Qutub, who's an Islamist who was hanged in Cairo in 1966.

And Osama probably is introduced to his work at university in around 1976 or 1977.

Again, it's kind of part of this coming-of-age religious experience that he is having.

And Qutb argues essentially, and he's written extensively on all manner of topics, so I'm not quite doing him service here, but essentially argues that Islam is not simply the observation of the faith, so prayers and fasting, the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca.

but there is inherent in Islam a political expression.

And Qutb believed that most kind of supposedly Muslim governments, which could be Saudi, could be in Egypt, could be in Syria, were actually nothing of the sort.

And that jihad struggle should not merely be defensive, but had to be waged offensively to reorder, potentially topple these apostate regimes.

He's a very influential figure, isn't he, amongst lots of these people.

I mean, he is kind of influenced by his hatred of the West, but you're right, he does develop this theory, which is going to spread quite far.

And Osama bin Laden is going to be just one of the people, I guess, who's influenced by it.

But at this point, Osama doesn't really have a practical way to put any of these beliefs into practice, right?

So they're in his head at the moment.

They're in his head.

Because he's just graduated university.

I mean, he's not kind of involved politically in any way, is he?

No.

I mean, he's in the family business.

He's working in the business.

He's working for the family construction company.

He's apparently, by all accounts, very hands-on, driving the bulldozers himself, working.

He's a very hard worker, working all day.

And by the late 70s, Osama is probably earning around $200,000 a year from the business.

So again, that is an allowance that would have exceeded that given to many minor princes in Saudi.

So he's very well off.

But again, you'll see later, all of these numbers get thrown around.

When he starts to become notorious, that he's worth hundreds and hundreds of millions.

He's wealthy, but he's not nearly as wealthy as you think.

And maybe there, Gordon, with Osama bin Laden becoming a kind of rising man of the Mecca establishment.

Maybe we'll take a break and when we come back, we'll see how Russian imperialism, Gordon, it all goes back to Russia and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan will send Osama down the path of violence.

See you after the break.

Well, welcome back to the story of Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and the CIA.

And David, it's fair to say that 1979 was a really important

year across the Islamic world and specifically for Osama bin Laden.

It's also when you graduated from university, right, Gordon?

So it was a big year for you.

1979 is a marquee year.

So yes, it is, I think, a really hinge year in the Middle East and for Osama bin Laden personally.

And it's really part of this process called the Sawah, this awakening, right?

This kind of stirring.

of the Islamic faith that has been bubbling up in much of the Arab and Islamic world decades prior to this, right?

As we alluded to before the break.

But there are four big events in 1979 that I think each have a deep impact on Osama bin Laden and start to turn, I think, what had been a mental model of the world into something that he actually thinks he can take out and do practical stuff with, right?

Which is a big leap for him.

And the first one is in Saudi, and it's the Grand Mosque in Mecca is put under siege.

A group of Islamic radicals in Saudi take it over and essentially call for a political revolution in Saudi Arabia.

Now, the bin Laden company had actually helped with the renovations of that mosque.

And so they assist the Saudi government by like showing them blueprints, helping them with tunnel access, giving them access to equipment, bulldozers, and the like.

The Saudis, I think with an assist from the French, actually end up retaking the mosque in this sort of bloody fight.

And I think for Osama bin Laden personally, and this is a bit of speculation here on my part, but I think it leads to perhaps one of his first, albeit very private breaks with the ruling family, the Al-Saud, over the violent response, because he kind of looks at this and I think believes that the Saudi regime has behaved badly by committing murder, essentially, of people who I think you know, he believes at that point are a little bit on the radical side, but he's going to feel some amount of kinship with

these forces who overtook the mosque.

And so there's a private moment, I think, for bin Laden there.

But at the same time, and this is going to be critical to the decade to come in Afghanistan, the Saudi religious establishment is given much more of a free hand after

this siege, in part because the Al-Saud, the ruling family, want to sort of demonstrate domestically that they are the custodians of these holy places, places, that they have religious legitimacy.

And so there's a massive increase in sort of Saudi support, public and private, for Islamic charities that are going to export Saudis' brand of kind of Wahhabi Islam.

Yeah.

We should explain that because this phrase Wahhabism, which is a particular interpretation of the Islamic faith, it feels like the Saudi royal family allow that to be exported increasingly around the world and will back its export partly as a way of keeping a more radical religious establishment on board with them.

That's the kind of almost the deal they cut, isn't it?

Is we'll give you free rein to go evangelize, you know, Islamize around the world to build mosques, to do things.

But you give your support at home to us.

And that's going to play an important role in the coming decades, isn't it?

And a bunch of that cash is going to end up in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan, which will be critical to the formation of Osama bin Laden's life and career.

So that's one is this siege of the Grand Mosque in Saudi and then the subsequent funding or sort of increased support for these Wahhabi projects?

The second one is that in Syria, and it leads back to Syria, Gordon, the Muslim Brotherhood is going to begin a revolt that's going to go on for much of the next five or so years.

So you have this kind of violent brand of political Islam that is attempting to overthrow what it would see as an apostate government in Syria.

Three, we have the Iranian revolution.

And even though that's led by what Osama probably would have seen as heretical Shia, it shows that a theocratic political movement could succeed.

Yeah, so different branch of Islam, but the point being, the sense of political Islam being on the march is there, isn't it?

That it's on the rise.

It's a rising force.

And even the Saudi state is trying to work out how to deal with that.

And then finally, fourth, also in 79, the Soviet Union invades Afghanistan.

And so I think from Osama's standpoint, it is infidels, non-Muslims have invaded a Muslim country.

And in fact, it's the first time since the Second World War that a non-Muslim country has invaded a Muslim one.

Yeah, it's another whole story about why the Soviet Union does that.

I mean, it's nothing to do with Islam.

No.

It's to do with them fearing that somehow Afghanistan is falling into the American orbit and they have some kind of wild ideas about the Afghan leader.

But it's one of those events where the reverberations of that single decision to invade Afghanistan are going to spill out in amazing ways.

You know, it's going to lead to this insurgency, which is going to be one of the contributing factors to the end of the Soviet Union, but it is also going to create a generation of radical Islamists who go there to fight the Soviet Union because they see a Muslim country being invaded in their minds by the kind of Soviet atheistic communist power.

This is exactly what Osama bin Laden starts to think, right?

Pretty much immediately after the invasion.

And this is an absolute turning point for him because all of these thoughts and beliefs that he had stored up in his head all of a sudden have an outlet in Afghanistan.

Osama is gathering donations for the Afghans, and he begins to travel to Pakistan to give the donations to organizations that help support resistance against the Soviets and also, frankly, just a lot of humanitarian relief and kind of charity work, right?

I mean, so I think in this kind of span of a few years from 1980 to about 1983, Osama is essentially a bag man for money from Saudi Arabia going to Pakistan to hold meetings, to organize a relief effort, right?

It's not really militarized at this point.

And we should also note that this is, I think, from his family's standpoint, the standpoint of a well-established family in Saudi.

Osama is kind of an asset in this era because he begins to come into contact with senior Saudi royals who are supporting the resistance against the Soviet Union.

Osama becomes a kind of node for private Saudi support to the Mujahideen.

Who are the group fighting the Soviets?

I mean, even at one point, one of Osama's older brothers has a vault built in Jeddah for Osama to manage private gold and jewelry donations offered by wealthy Saudis.

And apparently, it's like 20 meters by 20 meters in size.

So

he's becoming an important figure in this support for these kind of downtrodden Afghans who are under the Russian boot.

Yeah, which is the great cause of the time.

As you said, it's drawing in money, it's drawing in some people to fight as well, along with the local Afghan and Mujahideen resistance.

You're starting to get others come to, if you like, join the jihad to go there and fight.

And I guess that's what brings Osama bin Laden into contact with a new group of people who have a more violent intent rather than just charity work, if you like, or financial support for that jihad.

Yeah, on these trips to Pakistan, he is going to be put in contact with a man named abdullah azam who's going to become one of osama's mentors now azam's a palestinian from jenin which is occupied by the israelis in 1967 so again you can kind of see this there's a personal this isn't you know the idea of of israel occupying Arab land is not something that's distant or conceptual to Osama.

I mean, the guy who's going to mentor him literally grew up in a town that's being occupied by the Israelis.

Azam joins a group of fighters who conduct raids into Israel.

He becomes a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan.

And critically, he has a doctorate in Islamic jurisprudence from Al-Azhar in Cairo, which is essentially the Sunni Arab world's version of the Vatican.

And so this is important.

He's got status.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We should note for all of the different pronouncements that Osama bin Laden will make on the religious duties of Muslims to do X, Y, or Z.

He has no formal religious education.

And in Abdullah Azam, he finds a mentor who does and who has not just street cred, but actual, you know, he's got the piece of paper from Al-Azhar to signify him as a man of religious importance, right?

So by 1980, Azam is also teaching in Jeddah.

He's becoming this kind of father figure in some ways to Osama.

And, you know, Azam, it's also important to know him.

He's 15 years older than Osama bin Laden.

So by 1981, Azam has moved to Pakistan to get close to the jihad, and he's collecting donations.

He's this very charismatic, by all accounts, recruiter.

He stands up something called the Services Office to coordinate the work of Arab volunteers who are arriving to help.

And Osama becomes a big donor and organizer of this services office.

In 1984, Azam issues a fatwa, which is a ruling on Islamic law, basically stating that Muslims around the world have an individual obligation to fight in the Afghan holy war, which in Osama's mind, you're starting to see this very kind of step-by-step drift to a man who's going to become committed to his own particular brand of jihad.

But Azam and Osama in this period are kind of, I'd say they're fanboys for each other, right?

There's sort of a mutual respect and admiration.

Azam is very much in the foreground, though.

Osama in this period is kind of the student.

But probably quite useful, given he's got the money and the contacts.

That's where he's able to funnel that money in.

So you can see why it's useful as Azam is kind of becoming the focal point for the link into Afghanistan.

And it's not just money, isn't it?

People are going out there to fight.

People are volunteering to go and get involved in the jihad rather than just give some money to it.

That's right.

And, you know, interestingly, though, in those first four or so years of the war, Osama is doing all of this through Pakistan.

He has not actually been inside Afghanistan itself.

And that changes in 1984 when he he goes inside at Azam's sort of beck and call.

I mean, Azam thinks you need to go in and kind of see what's going on.

And one of Azam's sons remembered that when Osama went in, he was very frightened of the explosions, which I guess makes sense.

He's not been in combat before.

He's going into an actual war zone.

And Osama is appalled by the terrible state of the Afghans and, by his own account, says that he felt ashamed that it had taken him that long to reach the front lines.

So Osama, after that trip, he returns to Saudi, raises maybe $5 million from private donors, including collecting $2 million from one of his half-sisters, and he starts to bankroll the services office at an even higher rate of about $300,000 per year.

So we're getting this sort of drift into this mix of kind of he's still a big financial donor, right?

But he's starting to maybe get this taste of the militant military aspect of the cause as well.

And what is he?

He's mid to late 20s now so he's becoming he's finding his his place in the world i guess through this conflict yeah and he starts to think about getting married again gordon now i will also note to our listeners that gordon told me that he was not interested in talking about osama bin laden's polygamy his many wives but i am and okay and so tell me why i should care we're gonna do it because i think it sets up an important piece of him I mean, other than I like to talk about polygamy, which I guess is the real, the real reason here.

Is there some reason for that?

So he starts, but again, in the mid-80s, to your point, mid to late 20s, he starts to think about taking another wife.

Now, his views on polygamy are rooted in the idea that this isn't just about fun and games.

It's about solving a social problem since apparently there are more women in the world than men.

And I don't know what numbers he was using to build that case.

He believed that...

Islam sanctioned having four wives.

They have to be treated fairly, but you can have four.

His father obviously had many, many wives.

Osama does not think that his father did this appropriately because his father, Muhammad bin Laden, was always divorcing the third and fourth wife to make room for more.

He wasn't treating the wives fairly.

I think Osama probably would have thought of his mother as being in that camp.

I mean, essentially treated as a concubine by Muhammad bin Laden.

And Osama raises this subject.

with his wife Najwa when she's pregnant with their fifth child, which seems like a bad time to bring it up, if I'm being honest.

She, of course, does not love the idea initially, but he wears her down.

He says, you know, there'll be more children for Islam and told her once, if you are contented in your heart for me to take a second wife, you will gain in heaven.

It is certain that your life will end in paradise, which sounds like something a cult leader would say.

And in 1983, he eventually does wear her down.

Osama marries a woman named Khadijah, who's a very educated woman.

She taught at a girls' school in Jeddah.

She's a direct descendant of the Prophet.

Osama actually does buy a home in Jeddah in this era, kind of becoming the family man.

He's, of course, not a whole lot of fun.

And as you read in that quote up front, he's not a big fan of pictures or anything that's, you know, particularly colorful.

So his home is largely undecorated.

There's no pictures.

The carpet's cheap.

It's kind of all in grayscale.

He apparently won't let family members turn on the air conditioning and does not believe that they should be using refrigeration, which in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, is pretty tough.

He also, in this period, enlists his first wife, Najwa, to find him a third wife, which she does.

Osama marries her in 1985 and adds a fourth wife in 1987.

The 80s were wild for Osama.

I was going to say, like, he's a busy man, as well as finding his fourth wife.

He is also funding and starting a jihad in Afghanistan and getting involved in that.

So it's a busy period for him, I think it's fair to say.

It is.

And by the mid-80s, I think he's starting to acquire something of a mystique, right?

He's 6'4.

He's very tall.

He is handsome.

So So if your mind is going to the later videos of bin Laden,

that's not what he looks like in this era.

And in fact, Muhammad bin Laden, his father obviously chose the wives for their physical beauty and youth and things like that.

So basically all of the bin Laden children, I would say, are quite attractive or handsome.

But you could also see he is kind of this charismatic figure, isn't he?

He comes from this family.

He's the, to some extent, the outlier of the family who's suddenly taken on this great cause.

You can see why he is somehow building up a reputation in Saudi society as this quite charismatic, interesting figure at this point.

And he's becoming more assertive.

So by 1986, he's moved to Peshawar, Pakistan, so he can oversee the services office and be really close to the action.

He starts giving speeches in mosques.

He's lecturing on Palestine, long in a sort of private obsession for him.

It starts to become public.

And I think under his mentor, Abdullah Azam's tutelage, Osama in this period of the late 80s, is starting to become a proponent of a much more transnational version of the jihad.

Yeah, and I guess the point we should make here is that most of the fighting being done by the Mujahideen against the Soviet occupation is done by Afghans, but there are these Arab volunteers.

They've come over from across the Islamic world, Saudi Arabia included.

I mean, some of them are there almost for jihadi holiday, aren't they?

Yeah.

You know, you read it, and there are people who come from well-off families in Saudi or elsewhere.

They basically want to fire a gun and go back home and tell people, hey, I've been in the jihad in Afghanistan.

I fired a gun at the Soviets.

That was, to some extent, the reputation of the Arabs who were going over there to fight in the 80s.

It wasn't always as being the best fighters, but to some extent, almost like tourists.

Jihadi camp counselors was another quote I came across.

They were called the Afghan Arabs, these small groups of Arabs fighting the jihad in Afghanistan.

One Algerian recruit remembered the volunteers as men whose minds were, quote, full of Sylvester Stallone and visions of paradise.

There's a bit of a, I think, the vibes, right?

I mean, it was kind of cool to go do this, and it was very much sanctioned by friends and family back home.

Critically important to the story to come because it's going to form the backbone of so much of what will become al-Qaeda.

Yeah, it's a different ideology.

It's not the same motivation, but it is a bit like the people who flocked to the Spanish Civil War from the left in the 30s.

You know, there's a kind of international brigade sense of it of people who want to fight and who Osama bin Laden, I guess, is now organizing.

Now, here we get to a key question, I think, and maybe the point at which the CIA should come into the picture, because the CIA was at this time

funding and backing the Mujahideen, wasn't it, against the Soviet Union.

This was this huge covert operation that the CIA was undertaking, funneling weapons and money, famously stinger missiles, anti-aircraft missiles, through Pakistan into the groups fighting the Soviet Union.

A really important and significant campaign.

And so the question has always been:

what was the relationship between the CIA and Osama bin Laden as part of that?

Yeah, and it's a very simple answer, which is there's no evidence whatsoever that Osama ever received support from the CIA or met an American intelligence officer.

Full stop.

I think the idea that

Osama is somehow a creation in some part of the CIA springs from, I think, maybe two misunderstandings about the way the CIA supported the Afghans, right?

The first one is the CIA was routing everything through Pakistan, really.

And the Pakistanis were trying to bleed the Soviets.

These Afghan Arabs were having basically no battlefield impact whatsoever and would not have been chosen by the Pakistanis to receive

funding or weapons.

And the other piece, piece, though, which I think leads to misunderstanding, is there is a reality that what Osama bin Laden wanted, which was to push the Russians out of Afghanistan, is exactly what the CIA wanted too.

Yeah, they're on the same side.

We're on the same side.

We share the same objective, the end goal.

But again, there's no evidence at all that Osama ever had any connection whatsoever to the CIA or received any funding or support.

But I think here in the late 80s, Gordon, is when Osama starts to

think about being more directly involved in the conflict.

Because I think up until this point, he's been really running a more kind of bureaucratic, logistical piece of the support through the services office.

And I think the movement is really focused on other people's martyrdom, other people fighting, right?

And this is where we see, I think, the first bit of conflict, really, or maybe a difference of opinion between Osama and his mentor, Abdullah Azam, because Azam does not think that these Afghan Arabs should really be fighting directly.

He really thinks the Arabs should be in a support role for the Mujahideen, helping to funnel really money and logistical support in so that the Afghans can fight.

Now, Osama, though, he wants a militia, right?

And it's kind of insane because there are hundreds of thousands of Afghans fighting.

And there's maybe a few hundred Arab fighters.

It's It's not going to make any battlefield impact.

And I think maybe that's some of the point here for Osama, because

he is starting to think of this as a holy war for him.

And as part of that, he or the men around him might be sacrificed.

So

he wants weapons, and he'll go and actually ask his elder half-brother if he can help collect weapons and send weapons to Osama's group in Afghanistan, you know, he's probably inspired by seeing some of those CIA-supplied stingers actually have an effect on the battlefield.

His brother seems to have tried to help, but wasn't able to actually get missiles.

And this gives you a sense of Osama at this point is not some pariah, either from Saudi or his family.

He's kind of, you know, an asset to the family still.

So the family helps him get light weapons, ammunition.

They actually bring in construction equipment like bulldozers and loaders.

And Osama sets up an area in the eastern mountains of Afghanistan near a place called Jaji to build a new base.

It overlooks Soviet positions.

Osama bin Laden and his men call the place the Lion's Den.

And it is a bit of a, I guess, maybe jihadist man cave.

And there is seemingly zero military logic to building this area up.

The Afghans had not set up a base there because it's blocked in by snow and ice in the winter.

It's very difficult to resupply.

They're also, they being the Afghans, are running a kind of guerrilla-style hit and run campaign that's not so reliant on just kind of sitting in forts.

But Osama does not really listen to this, doesn't care.

It feeds some sense in my head that maybe martyrdom for him or some of his men was the point of this base.

And he and 16 Saudis live in tents and freezing conditions as they build it.

And Osama calls it one of the most beautiful periods of his life.

It's a sense in which he's building his brand as well through this, isn't it?

I mean, I think that's one of the feelings I get about Osama bin Laden at this time is he's someone who does understand the value of public relations and the image of himself as someone who is creating a militia and who is willing to die and who is the person who's come from this rich family and is willing to fight.

And, you know, he's now building up this base.

And as you said, not necessarily with any military value, but a kind of PR value.

That is going to be a theme throughout this story, which is that I think Osama bin Laden is quite good at PR and quite good at marketing himself and also a terrible military planner and leader.

And we'll tell one story here on that front, which is, of course, as Osama and his Afghan Arabs build up that base,

the Soviets take notice.

And there's a battle in the spring of 1987 with three weeks of attacks and counterattacks back and forth.

It's apparently quite brutal at times.

The Russians shell the area for a while, advance with tanks and air support.

They drop napalm, apparently, to clear the forested area around the base.

Osama during the battle is quite sick, but he does not rest or withdraw.

And there is a key moment in the battle when a Soviet plane is downed on the 27th day of Ramadan, which Osama would have undoubtedly sort of seen this as a divine sign because the 27th day of Ramadan is a sacred moment in the Muslim calendar, and it's called the night of power, which is the day when the gates of heaven are supposedly open.

And so I I think in his mind,

he's kind of styling his image, his brand, his vibes off of the prophet, right?

He is fighting an infidel army.

He's commanding an Arab army in battle.

The fighting is intense.

It has absolutely no impact on the broader war.

13 of his Arabs die, but they don't retreat.

And this battle at Jaji becomes part of Osama bin Laden's myth, right?

It's a big marketing opportunity opportunity for him.

So he brings in afterward an Egyptian filmmaker to follow him and his men around.

And this kind of legend begins to form, right?

So he's a rich guy who's living in this war zone, sort of like a pauper, right?

He's very well connected.

He's sacrificed for the jihad.

He's sacrificing everything.

And he's a fighter, right?

Which I think was part of the cred that he didn't have before that battle.

And those exploits help raise a lot of money in the Gulf.

And so Osama, I think, becomes sort of infamous in this era.

Now, by 1987 and 1988, the Soviets have announced that this war isn't going so well and they're going to be withdrawing soon from Afghanistan.

And so for Osama bin Laden, I guess this is the next pivotal point, isn't it?

Because here he is.

He's a war hero.

He's got the money.

He's got the background.

He's got the personal story.

He's got the brand.

He's also got the ideology.

He clearly does believe in this kind of jihadist ideology.

So the question is, with Afghanistan widing down, what's he going to do?

Where does he take that?

This jihad might be over, but he doesn't want to go back into Saudi society and just live a normal life, kind of go into the family business, do you?

After you've done that and after you've built that?

That's exactly right.

And so in the summer of 88, I think he begins to create an organization.

in a series of meetings that are held with some of his friends and followers in Peshawar, in Pakistan.

And they write down a, what I would argue is a very loose mission statement or vision statement, which is this organization will, quote, lift the word of God to make his religion victorious.

And they do list out a run of membership requirements.

There's an oath of allegiance to God, not to Osama bin Laden at this point.

And really at this stage, I don't think Osama knows yet what he wants this organization practically to do, but he does see it as a means to incite and inspire jihad around the Islamic world.

And from a founder standpoint, he's in a very interesting position because he does have some startup capital of sorts.

Because in 1988, his eldest half-brother, who had been kind of running the family, has also died in a plane crash on American soil, no less.

There's going to be a plane theme in this story.

I mean, his father dies in a crash, his brother dies in a crash.

Interesting.

And by 89, the family's new emir leader, another half-brother, has overseen a distribution of the estate's assets under Islamic law.

And the members of the family could choose either cash disbursements or they could reinvest some of it in shares in the family's companies.

And Osama chooses both.

So he takes off the table about $8 million in cash.

And then he also owns shares in some of the family's new partnerships, which are probably worth around $10 million.

But it's not liquid, right?

I mean, that's a lot of money in those.

It's a lot of money.

He gets $18 million, something around there, all at once.

So he's got the funding to back the vision, basically.

That's right.

So he's wealthy to kind of capitalize this new venture, but not insanely so.

And when they set this group up, what do they call it?

Well, when they had run these kind of camps in Afghanistan in the mid to late 80s, they had nicknamed them Al-Qaeda, the base in Arabic.

And the name of that organization, Al-Qaeda, is going to stick.

stick.

And so maybe there, David, let's stop this time with Al-Qaeda formed with Bin Laden with all this money behind him and a kind of ragtag group.

And next time, we'll look at how he takes that ragtag group and turns it into an organization which is going to carry out the most deadly terrorist attack in American history.

But, Gordon, we should say that you don't have to wait, people.

Okay.

So right now, if you want to get access to the rest of this series, which is going to cover bin Laden in the 90s and the run-up to 9-11, it's going to cover the 9-11 attacks themselves, the hunt for bin Laden, and go in detail on the raid and feature Gordon, a conversation with a very interesting special guest intimately involved in the hunt for bin Laden.

If you want all of that right now, if you are not the kind of person who likes to sort of push the tension out and you need it right now, go and join the Declassified Club at the restisclassified.com and you can listen to the entire series binge it at this very moment.

We do know how the story ends, but trust me,

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That's right.

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But otherwise, we will see you next time.

We'll see you next time.