392. Road To 9/11: Bin Laden vs Saudi Arabia (Part 4)

How did the Gulf War drive a permanent wedge between Osama bin Laden and the Saudi royal family? Why did the bin Laden family finally decide to disown him? How did he manage a global terror network from a farm in Sudan? In Episode 4 of this series, William and Anita are joined by Pulitzer Prize winner Steve Coll, author of The Bin Ladens: An Arab Family in the American Century, to follow Osama bin Laden’s descent from the Saudi establishment into international exile. Brought to you by Plaud. Use code 'EMPIRE' to get an additional 2% - on top of the 10% discount - for orders placed before 8th September at this link: https://uk.plaud.ai/pages/empire Try Attio for free at attio.com/empire For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. Email: [email protected] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Imogen Marriott Editor: Charlie Rodwell Social Producer: Charlie Johnson Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 2:16Speaker 00

  In 1989, Osama bin Laden was a household name and a revered hero in Saudi Arabia. But by 1996, he was a stateless fugitive, stripped of his citizenship, disowned by his billionaire family, and boarding an aging jet into exile.

• 2:35Speaker 03

  By every measure, he was a finished man. Yet from this penniless exile, he would rise to become the most famous man on planet Earth.

• 2:45Speaker 00

  In this episode, we follow bin Laden's descent from the Saudi elite to a terrorist financier in Sudan, and his desperate flight back to the mountains of Afghanistan. Welcome back to Empire with me, William Dalrymple.

• 2:59Speaker 03

  And me, Anita Arndt. And back with us, double Pulitzer Prize winning author of Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, and The Bin Ladens, an Arabian family in the American century, Steve Cole. Thank you very much for coming back, because we have so many threads to pick up from the last time that you were on. So last time, we sort of ended with bin Laden getting onto a plane, heading towards Pakistan, making his way towards the border of the Soviet Afghan War. And our earlier episode with Jason Burke, we have been talking about how Osama bin Laden was involved in that war. Check it out. It really is a fascinating listen. Today, though, Steve, we're going to stick to bin Laden himself. So

• 3:42Speaker 03

  if you would, take us back to 1989. He's fought in the Soviet Afghan War. He has founded al Qaeda, and now he comes home from Afghanistan. And he comes back a genuine celebrity. That's not an exaggeration, is it?

• 3:56Speaker 04

  He was a public figure who lectured, who was seen as a veteran of a worthy cause, of a righteous cause in the name of Islam. And he belonged to a prestigious family. Yes, he came home because the war he had fought in had reached success by expelling the Soviets, and had sort of devolved into a much more complicated civil war where there wasn't as much of a place for him. And so he came home to talk about that and to talk about where the Muslim world should go from here.

• 4:31Speaker 03

  There are cassettes of his lectures, you know, that are sort of bootlegged and selling. I mean, they're the thing that young people want to get hold of.

• 4:38Speaker 04

  Yes. The pivotal event, though, follows in 1990, when Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait, and starts a crisis that leads immediately to the deployment of tens and then hundreds of thousands of American, British, French, and other international troops to Saudi Arabia, while Osama is there, in order to defend the kingdom from the possibility that Saddam and his forces would continue south from Kuwait into Saudi Arabia.

• 5:08Speaker 00

  Just to remind perhaps younger listeners who don't know all this stuff, as well as our generation do, Steve, an important point to stress is that Saddam was a devoutly secular Ba'athist, who had a very, very different philosophy to Osama, and who was not only threatening Saudi Arabia, but was torturing those who held views like bin Laden, who were connected to the Brotherhood and so on.

• 5:39Speaker 04

  All correct. So Osama had no sympathy for Saddam, and thought that it was right to expel him from Kuwait and to essentially end his rule in Iraq as well. But he had advice for the Saudi government, which is that they should not be relying on apostate American, British, and French troops. They should be relying on people like him, who, after all, he had just expelled the Soviet Union from Afghanistan, he and brethren Mujahideen. They had defeated a superpower that looked impregnable. And now another superpower was occupying the kingdom in the name of this cause of expelling Saddam Hussein from Kuwait.

• 6:18Speaker 00

  And of course, this makes absurd the later American charge that Saddam Hussein was somehow part of the 9/11 plot, or linking 9/11 to Iraq, was a complete red herring.

• 6:32Speaker 04

  It's certainly one indicator among many that Saddam and Osama had not much to do with one another, and saw the world in very different ways. And Osama literally wrote a memo of advice to the Saudi Defense Ministry, basically asking to be put in charge of the resistance against Saddam and any effort to harass his occupation of Kuwait, just as the Afghan and Arab volunteers fighting the Soviets had harassed that occupation.

• 7:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, he's proposing, just to really spell it out, Steve, is that, you know, those fighters, I know some really good fighters. They are veterans from the Afghan War. They are, you know, they are battle hardened and they are ready. So you give me money, and I will not only protect our borders, but, you know, we'll deal with Saddam as well. But the Saudis, you know, the royal family, think he's ridiculous at this point.

• 7:24Speaker 04

  They have to be polite because he belongs to the bin Laden family. But you can hear their sniggering under their breath and attempt to control their mirth as he presents this idea. First of all, it's implausible. Second, the kingdom has already committed to an international defense, and invited tens of thousands of troops. And King Fad's prestige and his whole place in the international system is already invested in the decision to have Americans and other forces handle this. So it would be humiliating for them to reverse themselves on the basis of Osama bin Laden's advice. And so he goes away. He's sort of sent away politely,

• 8:06Speaker 04

  but then he gets a clear message that this is not going to happen. And that's when he starts to preach with particular ardor about the failings of the kingdom, about the error that he now sees in their ways. And he sees the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia as an occupation comparable to that of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

• 8:25Speaker 00

  And Steve, George Bush is the president at this time. Just give us a little sketch, for those, again, who don't know this background, about the relationship between the Bush family and Saudi Arabia.

• 8:35Speaker 04

  George H W Bush, the father of George W Bush, who then invaded Iraq and overthrew Saddam. So just to clarify, there were two George Bushes, and this was the first. He grew up in the oil business, was a second or third generation Bush family, patrician, politician, quite an effective career, well prepared for the presidency, liked to cultivate relationships with other world leaders, and had experience of the Saudis through the oil business, and had developed relations in the kingdom, which he then spent a lot of time advancing during this war period.

• 9:14Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, he may be advancing the relationship, but for bin Laden himself, I mean, apart from the fact, you know, he's rebuffed, however politely they might have done it at the beginning, that stings. But it is actually having Americans in the Holy Land, as it were, you know, so close to the holiest of sites, that really is unacceptable. And he starts volubly denouncing it, as you say. And this is all part of, you know, siding with dissidents who are likewise saying, we don't want Americans on our soil, the so-called Awakening Shakes preaching against the US presence. I mean, tell us a bit more about the Awakening Shakes. It's fascinating.

• 9:51Speaker 04

  These were influential preachers from, mostly from the Baida area outside of Riyadh, and well known for conservative Islamist thought. And, you know, the kingdom then, and to some extent still now, was a place of Islamist discourse, debate, scholarship, writing, thinking about how the world should be ordered. And on this topic, you can reduce to a fairly simple proposition. Muslims were called by God to resist the apostate Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and they expelled and weakened a superpower. The Soviet Union was cracking up in 1990, and it was about to dissolve. So there was lots of evidence

• 10:32Speaker 04

  that the Afghan War seemed like a sort of deliverance on God's will. And here comes another superpower, also secular, also perceived as anti-Muslim, and an ally of Israel.

• 10:47Speaker 04

  Why would the kingdom, the site of the two holy places, the home of these ideas that had helped defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan, why would the kingdom accommodate the Americans? It should be doing the opposite. It should be preparing for the destruction of the second superpower. This was the essential message of the Awakening shakes and Osama's lectures that were captured on tape recordings and circulated in underground kind of stalls, sort of black market dissent at the time.

• 11:17Speaker 00

  And for the Saudi royals and the regime, this is crossing a red line, isn't it? Because this is threatening their authority in a way that they are not prepared to accept.

• 11:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely crossing a red line, but it's awkward because the Bin Laden family is prestigious. King Fod, who is now in charge of the kingdom, is particularly close to the new leader of the Bin Laden family. Salam has, who initially took over after his father's death, has himself died in an ultralight accident in Texas in 1988, and he's exceeded by a senior brother named Bucker, and Bucker is close to King Fod. So it's a little bit awkward. They can't just go arrest Osama. He's got too much clout. And it implicates the whole family. And here you get into, you know, the realities of Saudi social and political fabrics where it's a soft autocracy at the time.

• 12:16Speaker 04

  If anyone without the name Bin Laden had said what Osama said, they would have been imprisoned immediately. But Osama is left alone.

• 12:26Speaker 03

  They don't put him in prison, but they do what they can. What they do is they restrict his passport. And they also lean on Bucker to have a word with his, you know, sort of errant little brother. And Bucker does, he sort of leans on Osama and, you know, tries to reel him in a bit. But this is not who he is anymore. He doesn't listen to older brothers anymore. He's bigger than them. He's bigger than that. So he devises a plan, Steve, to leave. If he's going to be controlled in Saudi Arabia, then he's not going to be in Saudi Arabia.

• 12:57Speaker 04

  Yes. What you describe unfolds between 1990 and 1992. And there's lots of efforts to reel Osama in. And then evidence after evidence that he's not going to listen, that he is hubristic now, that he does see himself. In fact, he starts to see himself as the righteous leader of the Bin Laden company, not just the leader of this movement that he's preaching about. In response, convinced that they can't persuade him with words, they start to try to deter him by restricting his privileges. And the first thing they do is restrict his passport. They don't expel him from the kingdom at this point. He leaves because the family

• 13:37Speaker 04

  has a construction project going on in Port Sudan. He travels there at the end of 1992 and buys a salt farm outside of Port Sudan and starts to set up shop there. I think, based on what he does, he seems to be thinking that he just needs a little distance from the kingdom in order to be able to keep saying what he wants to say. And so in Sudan, he then sets up a whole new operation that is a sort of fractured mirror of the family's operation in Saudi Arabia. It has business aspects. He's running companies. He buys farms. He buys horses. He's preaching. And he's also now communicating about these big

• 14:20Speaker 04

  ideas of resistance to the United States and jihad.

• 14:24Speaker 00

  But Steve, if he's had his passport taken or restricted, how does he get to Sudan?

• 14:29Speaker 04

  I think the Bin Ladens probably didn't need to check in at immigration in Sudan. They had more money than the municipality. But it is, it's relevant because he can't really go anywhere else, having gotten there.

• 14:42Speaker 03

  Now, he is in Sudan. We should paint a picture of what Sudan is like at the time because you have Hassan al-Turabi, who has an Islamist government in charge at the time of Sudan. So he feels, you know, he's among like-minded people. And you've got this one sort of chapter then that appears in Osama Bin Laden's life, where he is preaching fire and brimstone, but also presenting himself as quite the gentleman farmer. I mean, can you, can you just maybe bridge those two things, those two probable things for us?

• 15:17Speaker 00

  We're not talking Wellington boots here.

• 15:19Speaker 04

  Yes. When you look over the whole of his short and troubled life, the Sudan years were probably the happiest that he knew and the most capacious. He had his wives there. He had now had certainly two, maybe three by the time he'd set up in Khartoum. He moved from Port Sudan to Khartoum. He had a big housing compound where his children were growing up. He had horse farms where he could indulge his passion for riding. He had a business office where he was starting to build al-Qaeda into an international revolutionary organization, and he was funding the payroll. And, and he could communicate his ideas, both in Sudan, but also increasingly internationally, using fax machines and other techniques.

• 16:03Speaker 03

  Okay. But he's also doing some things which, you know, many of us will sound batshit, which are, you know, he's trying to toughen up his children. And, you know, he's sort of sending them out on waterless hikes in the desert. And is this right? Even making babies sleep in hollows, dug in the cold night air, because this will toughen them up for the days to come?

• 16:23Speaker 04

  There's some accounts along those lines, but I think he was generally a doting father, kind of a softie. He spent a lot of time with his kids. He did inherit his father's idea that was, you know, the children should be brought up to endure hardship and that they should be hard workers. And, and also he combined that with this adapted Wahabi idea that one should live as if one was in the seventh century. So try to eschew, be able to eschew the comforts of modern technology. Now Osama did not live that creed. He was

• 17:03Speaker 04

  a gadget guy and he had, you know, an interest in video cameras and not just for communicating political messages, but for weddings and all kinds of things. He was, he was a guy who was, who was after his own older brother Salam, who used to come back from New York with literally a private jet full of stuff he'd bought on 47th Street, all the latest of New York, the electronics center, like all the latest gadgets, and then just hand them out to his brothers. And so that's Osama. He's living his best life. He's got his family. He's got comfortable compounds. He's got horses. And he's got freedom to say what he wants.

• 17:42Speaker 00

  The idea of horses is very much chiming in with sort of Saudi dramas about the life of the prophet, that you're out on horseback in the desert, you're the warrior, wearing austere clothing. And it's not, it's not, it's not a clash with that. It's, it's part of that.

• 18:01Speaker 04

  Yes. And he's, and he's building a following. He's attracted Egyptians, Sudanese, you know, Arab volunteers from the Maghreb, Africans. And there's a, there's a sort of group that's much bigger than an entourage. It's really more like a following. There's a payroll that he's operating. And he's starting to fund militant activity across borders. First, an attack in Yemen. And then he starts to think about smuggling weapons to Islamist radicals in Libya and in the Maghreb. And then he's building a network in East Africa to carry out attacks against American targets and other targets.

• 18:46Speaker 00

  Other agricultural projects, a sort of cover for this? Or are they happening side by side and he's enjoying both?

• 18:52Speaker 04

  All side by side. I think he's kind of, you know, he's sort of modeling his father. Here's something else, I think, to think about when you consider his life and the impact that he ultimately had on the world. One thing he learned from his father was how to lead an eclectic organization. He was, unlike some other Saudis, welcoming to volunteers from all over the world, Africans, South Asians, East Asians. And he made people feel like they belonged to something bigger than themselves. And that is not the typical Saudi vibe. And which is a very kind of Arabian, you know, Arab nationalist.

• 19:37Speaker 03

  You mentioned, Steve, that, you know, he's, he's living his best life. He's happy. He's, you know, down in the earth and all of that kind of stuff, but also building a network and funding, you know, plans to destabilize the West. And in one of these, I'm really interested to know how much of a party actually played because in December 1992, you might remember this, but bombs were exploding outside hotels, hotels in Aden, Yemen. US troops headed for Somalia were the target of this. And then there is a movie with the same title, you know, The Black Hawk Down Incident, where in October 1993, 18 Americans are killed in Mogadishu and their bodies are treated hideously in

• 20:22Speaker 03

  the streets. And again, all of this kind of stuff is televised. Now, as I understand it, he claimed quite a hand in all of this, but he may have been claiming more than he was responsible for. I mean, what was his part in all of this?

• 20:38Speaker 04

  I think in the Aden attacks, he had a role. I think in Somalia, he's claiming credit for something that was really Mohammed Al Deed was the, was the local warlord who had the militia that inflicted all that damage on the American forces who were there. I think, though, he was developing networks in that part of Africa. And there's absolutely no question that a little bit later, those networks carry out two of the most remarkable terrorist attacks in African history, the bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam and kill hundreds of Africans. But that was entirely his, his network. So

• 21:19Speaker 04

  yes, between when he arrived, let's say, 19, early 1993, and when he really burst into global view as the architect of the African embassy bombings, he was definitely sending money. He was definitely communicating with allies in these places. But I don't think he was directly running those operations the way he would from the embassy bombings onward.

• 21:42Speaker 03

  We're going to take a break. But just, just hold this in your head for a second because you can't do this kind of thing and be on the evening news for these kinds of atrocities. And then, you know, sort of claim responsibility sometimes, you know, legitimately, or sometimes maybe over egging the pudding a little bit without this reaching the Saudi royal family, because all of these things will have repercussions. Join us after the break where we find out how the Saudis react to one of their own being blamed for these attacks.

• 22:16Speaker 02

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• 24:09Speaker 03

  Welcome back. So Steve, I mean, you were giving us a shopping list of attacks that take place in the early 90s, which Osama bin Laden is either funding or has some prominent part to play. So what is the message that is going from the Americans to their Saudi friends about one of their own, one of their sons?

• 24:30Speaker 04

  Well, that he's a dangerous radical and that he's funding people who are carrying out violence against all sorts of targets. This becomes acute after the first World Trade Center bombing in New York in 1993, which is carried out by a loose network of veterans of the Afghan war. In the investigation of that, Osama's role as a funder, as a financial hub and possibly a weapons supply hub becomes apparent. He attracts attention on that basis. But there's something else going on that we haven't mentioned, which is that in addition to preaching against the United States and its allies, he's preaching against the royal family with particular energy at the same time in this period.

• 25:15Speaker 04

  And he's sending cassette tapes back into the kingdom in which he denounces the royal family as illegitimate. And he really, in a way that will become familiar, there's no subtlety about his strategy. I mean, someone in his position who wanted to have an impact, say, you know, war against the United States, might find a way to keep the Saudi royal family at bay by not so explicitly offending them. That's not his way. He just, you know, he tells the truth.

• 25:44Speaker 03

  I mean, he's not a man on a mission. But, but I was sort of, you know, the Saudis sort of turned to his mum. Like, could you just get your boy in, in order?

• 25:52Speaker 04

  They tried everything because they, they really didn't have a lot of tools, but they were getting more and more angry as this went along.

• 25:59Speaker 00

  Who's in charge of this? Prince Turkey, the head of intelligence?

• 26:02Speaker 04

  Prince Turkey was primarily in charge of it. Yeah, the chief of intelligence. There was a little bit of a political transition going on. So other people got involved, but I think Turkey was probably the main guy because he had known, there were some other intelligence officers, the Badeed brothers who knew Osama as well. Everybody got on board and tried to go meet with him. They sent Bucker out there. Bucker was the person, the leader of the bin Laden company at this stage. Osama's half-brother Bucker bin Laden. He was the guy who had the most, who the Saudi royal family had the most leverage over because he had all the contracts. So they would be telling him, look, if you want to do business with us, you got to shut this guy up. And Bucker went out there and tried. He brought members of the family who he thought Osama was more sympathetic to than to himself.

• 26:47Speaker 04

  None of it worked. And Osama, again, I think the more he settled into Sudan and he built up this, this sort of ecosystem of businesses and contracts and farms and homes and family, the more he thought that he should be leading the bin Laden family. So he was resistant to his brothers, not just on ideological grounds, but I think also in some kind of personal or family sense.

• 27:10Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, I just wonder whether it came as a surprise to him then, when Bucker and indeed Saudi Arabia pushed back? Because Bucker then comes out with this public denunciation of his brother and condemnation and effectively cuts him off from the family fortune. And you've also got Saudi Arabia saying, you know what? He is no longer one of ours either. They strip him of his citizenship. Do we know what effect that has on Osama bin Laden?

• 27:36Speaker 04

  Throughout his life, he never really denounced his brothers. He blamed the Saudi royal family for putting them in an impossible position. They were doing what the Saudi royal family required them to do. He didn't make it personal in any of his public statements or any of the private statements that I was able to come across. I don't think he was a great pal of Bucker's. He, he thought he would be, he would do a better job. But family first for the bin Ladens, like a lot of other Saudis. And he wasn't going to expose, he wasn't going to fall into the trap of having the Saudi royal family split him from his brothers. And in fact, when he's stripped of his holdings in the company, his share,

• 28:18Speaker 04

  he sells it to a brother, half-brother, who is sympathetic to his ideology, Caleb. And, and there's this whole opaque transaction that ends up in a Saudi court where his, his shareholding is put into trust for the possible future in which he reconciles with the royal family. So like, nothing is ever kind of hard and fast in that Saudi Arabia. Today's Saudi Arabia is another, another podcast. But in that Saudi Arabia, everything was always a little bit porous. Where he gets into trouble is when the Americans start to put pressure on the Sudanese government. That's, that's what starts to, to change his circumstances.

• 29:01Speaker 04

  I think he finessed the pressure from the Saudi kingdom and even the loss of his citizenship and the loss of his, the notional loss of his shareholding. There was a lot of cash flowing through these construction projects in Sudan. I don't think the family wanted him to starve. In any event, he had his own income streams in Sudan.

• 29:22Speaker 00

  He had businesses that were, were providing cash for his activities separate from the family?

• 29:27Speaker 04

  Yes, he had businesses, he had fundraising. You know, he wasn't just a source of funds. He was also a magnet for people who wanted to make charitable donations in causes that he espoused. And, and so, you know, he had developed that fundraising network during the Afghan war, which was a righteous and politically approved cause. But he still had other people who supported him.

• 29:53Speaker 00

  And the Americans have got sources now, haven't they, on what he's up to? There's one aide, Jamal Al Fadl, who embezzles $110,000, flees and then walks into the US embassy in Eritrea, offering information on the group. So there are people now with files open on him in, in Washington.

• 30:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, now we're sort of 95-ish, 1995 or so. Fadl defects, becomes a source of authentic inside information. And what he knows is how the office works. And he knows about the Egyptians who are there and he knows about the payroll and he knows about all of these networks in different regions. And then there's a CIA station in Khartoum that has him on their radar as well. They're following him around, they're surveying him. There's, you know, CIA officers dressing up with fake heads, looking like Africans, driving around in cars behind Osama's car. I mean, it's, some of it's Keystone Cops, but they're, they have him under surveillance as well.

• 30:53Speaker 03

  It's not a surprise because, you know, there's an attack. I mean, you're talking about 1995, where you've got, you know, these, these poor, poor shadows, you know, following him around and easily detected surveillance. But there's a reason because in 1993, in February 1993, you have the attack on the World Trade Center. And, you know, the, the name that comes up as the man who stumped up the money for this is Osama bin Laden. And just to remind people what that attack was, because, you know, you talk about World Trade Center, it means something very different now, also connected to bin Laden. But this particular 93 attack is a rented van, which is packed with half a ton of explosives.

• 31:35Speaker 03

  It's driven into the basement car park of the World Trade Center and it's detonated. And six people are killed, over a thousand people are injured and the tower shudders. So just, I mean, that is why everybody is, you know, the, the kind of intel that somebody walks into an embassy and says, I have, in the case of Jamal Al Fadl, is priceless. And which is why now they're keeping a very close eye on him.

• 31:58Speaker 04

  I was an international investigative reporter for the Washington Post in London when the first World Trade Center attack occurred. My desk called me up and said, you're supposed to be our investigative reporter. Who did this? And with a couple of other reporters, I spent nine months traveling around, mostly in the Middle East. Sometimes in Bosnia, where there was a war going on. And we encountered everywhere the name Osama bin Laden. His network, his reputation among militants was quite high. And, and we went to Khartoum, knocked on his door. Would you give us an interview? No, not available. But, but his, you know, bodyguard was there. But he was described at the time as primarily a source of finance.

• 32:41Speaker 04

  I think, in fact, he was more than that, but that was his reputation. And so the Americans wanted him out of Sudan, thinking that if they broke up this node, they would break some of the financing resources that a lot of these groups, including the very loose network that had carried out the World Trade Center bombing, relied upon.

• 33:04Speaker 00

  And what's his links at this point to Pakistan and Peshawar? Ramzi Yusuf has a link there, doesn't he?

• 33:11Speaker 04

  He has history, obviously, in Pakistan and Afghanistan, but a lot of things have changed. So remember, this is 1995, 1996. This is in the middle of the 1990s Afghanistan civil war. The people he knew in the Mujahideen are on the outs by, by and large. The Taliban have risen out of Kandahar. They've swept by the spring of 95. They've taken Herat, they're marching on Kabul. But a couple of the groups that he used to know from the good old days of fighting the Soviets are still independent of the Taliban, control Jalalabad. So when he starts thinking about where could I go if I get kicked out of Sudan? He can't fly into Kabul.

• 33:52Speaker 04

  He can't fly back to Kandahar, which was his base in the good old days, because that is now controlled by the Taliban, who he hasn't, he's never met, doesn't know who they are or how they think of him.

• 34:02Speaker 00

  He must think that they're his kind of guys, though.

• 34:04Speaker 04

  He will, but he doesn't have a phone number. They don't use phones. So, but yes, he doesn't have a lot of choices. I, I don't know that he explored going back to Pakistan at that time. He ultimately, obviously, seeks refuge there. But what develops is that the Americans put pressure on the Sudanese government, which is now sort of attempting to establish political legitimacy to access loans and, and international finance. Reluctantly, they come to the conclusion that the Americans are going to make this so painful if they don't act against bin Laden, that they tell him, we're going to have to expel you, you're going to have to go. And they give him notice, basically. A lot of bad things happened to him at that point.

• 34:47Speaker 04

  His family breaks up. Some of his wives and some of his sons informed that the next stop is Afghanistan in Jalalabad with uncertain headquarters, say, I'm sorry, I mean, you know, we love you, Dad. You're, you're the best, but I'm not going to Afghanistan. And they went back to Jeddah and some of those sons rejoined the family business.

• 35:12Speaker 00

  Why is that, Steve? Because again, you wouldn't to our eyes, you know, Khartoum and Jalalabad are a million miles apart.

• 35:19Speaker 04

  It's all relative, but in Khartoum, they had money, they had horses, they had air conditioning, they had their own bedrooms, they were in charge of their own daily destiny. They had businesses that the boys could work in. They had schools of a traditional type. And Jalalabad was in a war. And the Taliban were fighting and shooting against the people who controlled Jalalabad. And it wasn't clear where they would live.

• 35:47Speaker 00

  So it's not the same thing at all? It's, it's definitely, Jalalabad is one stage much wilder.

• 35:52Speaker 04

  It's back to the jihad, basically. And, and, but right on the front lines of it.

• 35:56Speaker 03

  Steve, you know, you've got now increasing diplomatic pressure. You've got the Americans certainly taking note of who he is and what his money is doing. And the Sudanese regime is getting quite the reputation of caving to international, especially American pressure, because in 1994, they quietly hand over their most celebrated foreign guest, Carlos the Jackal, to French agents. And, you know, there's a, there's a whole thing, look it up, it's, it's extraordinary. You know, they bundle him out of the country.

• 36:28Speaker 00

  He is up in a Parisian prison, yeah.

• 36:30Speaker 03

  Parisian prison, you know, sort of coats on the top of him and, you know, he's sort of spirited away. But, but the message is to bin Laden that, you know what? It's, you're not secure here anymore. But, you know, rather than thinking, okay, I need to dial it down a bit because I might get thrown out by the Sudanese at any minute, he actually sort of doubles down. And you've got the attacks in Riyadh, where, you know, in 1995, there's a car bomb that destroys a National Guard training office in Riyadh. It kills five Americans. Of course, you can see for the Saudis, that's going to be a huge deal because the Americans are not going to be happy about this. And they are an important ally for the Saudi royal family.

• 37:12Speaker 03

  And what happens is you've got four Saudis who are arrested, who confess that they are behind the bombing, and they are beheaded. And that is televised. And when they are, you know, just before they're executed, they are asked, you know, why did you do this? And they say they were inspired by, among others, Osama bin Laden. So the Americans are being rattled. This name keeps coming up. He's no longer now, you know, the man behind the money. He is a direct threat to American interests and American lives.

• 37:46Speaker 00

  Steve, there's a, there's a whole unit now, Alex Station, that is, that is on to bin Laden. There's, there's a dedicated CIA unit.

• 37:55Speaker 04

  Yes, it's based in Langley at CIA headquarters. And it's formed in recognition that he is a kind of global problem, not just a country problem. And for younger listeners, they may not think of the 1990s as, as a disconnected age, but it, it's really the beginning of globalization in technology and in terrorism. And Osama's an innovator. He's using fax machines to communicate underground to, to Saudi Arabia. He's, he's early into satellite television communication. And the CIA trying to track him and trying to figure out where all of his nodes are

• 38:36Speaker 04

  and where his, how his network works, they, they form Alex Station not only to target him, but to try to figure out how he's connecting to other militant groups in far-fetched places using communications technology and other means.

• 38:50Speaker 03

  So with this, this increasing pressure, Steve, it's a case of he jumps before he's pushed from Sudan. He leaves in May 1996 and he heads to Afghanistan. What is he hoping is going to happen when he reaches Afghanistan?

• 39:06Speaker 04

  Well, I think, you know, he's, he's trying to make the best of it by accounts of his family members who were around when he made this journey from Khartoum to Jalalabad in a chartered jet with that portion of his family that chose to go with him. Two of his wives and a number of his sons and daughters flew with him. And you can imagine them just kind of packing this airplane with limited weight allowances with all of their possessions that they're going to take to a, to a broken city, Jalalabad, that's in the middle of a civil conflict involving the Taliban and other Mujahideen forces. They don't, they, they know that they'll be welcomed at the airport, but beyond that,

• 39:51Speaker 04

  I don't think they have much sense of how they're going to get along and where they're going to hunker down and how he's going to organize things. And in fact, I think those first six months after they arrived in 1996, you know, were challenging. He basically went up the mountain to the Tora Bora area, the areas of eastern Afghanistan that he was familiar with and where he had built bases during the anti-soviet war. But Anita, as you forecasted, he made the wise call to try to get an introduction to the new power in Afghanistan, who is Mullah Mohammed Omar, the leader of the Taliban. He's down in Kandahar.

• 40:32Speaker 04

  And at some point, late in 1996, he and Mullah Mohammed Omar connect. And then a new world is opened up to him. He's welcomed by the Taliban as a great international jihad hero, and he's given access to Kandahar. And by the end of 96, he's moved his family down there. And they've tried to replicate something like what they had in Sudan. It's very difficult. It's not as comfortable, but at least they have stability.

• 41:02Speaker 03

  Well, we are, we are going to pick this up on our next podcast. We are delighted to say we have got the man who climbed the mountain to meet him and actually saw what this domestic situation was in, in the mountains. Peter Bergen, who produced bin Laden's first ever television interview with the Western Press, is going to be with us and is going to tell us all about that chapter. It's been absolutely brilliant, speaking to you, Steve. Really, really appreciate it so much.

• 41:28Speaker 00

  You're amazing, Steve. Thank you so, so much. This trumps even your founding of the Saudi state, which, incidentally, if you haven't heard, go back to our archive and dig it out. And if you want to access all that right now, ad-free, then head to empirepoduk.com. That is empirepoduk.com to become a member now.

• 41:48Speaker 03

  Till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arndt.

• 41:52Speaker 00

  And goodbye from me, William Derumpel.

• 42:00Speaker 05

  Where some see heroes and others see egos. Bloomberg sees the era of billionaire athletes. While others follow the noise, we follow the money. Learn more at Bloomberg.com.

• 42:15Speaker 06

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