Sometime after the turn of the last century, an ox that Awadh bin Laden had borrowed died during a drought.

Death threats by the owner forced him to leave the family’s ancestral home of Gharn Bashirieh.

The exiled Awadh died young, leaving two adolescent sons to their own devices.

Steve Coll’s account traces the subsequent events leading to the rise of Awadh’s son, Mohammed bin Laden. It is a remarkable story only trumped by the fame and notoriety of his son, Osama.

Coll’s book is a highly entertaining read that fills a major gap in the post 9-11 literature.

Information culled from an array of sources debunks the unchallenged conjecture that Osama received $300 million when he cashed in his share of the family’s fortune.

The actual figure, $8 million, suggests OBL is more a self-made rebel than a spoiled rich terrorist.

This and other insights generated by Coll’s bio-geopolitical approach to Saudi-American relations, in contrast to more formal analyses, leaves one with a considerably more nuanced perspective of Al Qaeda’s world-changing assault on American targets.

Other Hadhrami tycoons in East Africa have stories that parallel Mohammed bin Laden’s ascent from penniless immigrant to business magnate — but with one critical difference.

Coll tells the story of two Arabian families — any narrative tracing three generations of bin Ladens necessarily features the House of Saud in a strong supporting role.

The template is the same: Seeking one’s fortune abroad was a well-established tradition in the Hadhramaut.

But Mohammed bin Laden got off to a bad start.

He travelled to Abysinnia, where he swept floors for a dour Hadhrami merchant. He lost an eye after his boss struck him with a keyring.

Mohammed returned home, linked up with his brother Abdallah, and the two youths took a dhow to the Red Sea port of Jizan.

They barely survived the 400km trek to Jiddah, where they found employment as porters.

In the beginning, they slept in a ditch outside the town walls. The year was 1931.

Six years earlier, Abdul Aziz ibn Saud had completed his conquest of Arabia Felix by subduing the Hejaz.

The merchants of Jiddah gave him the keys of the city; the austere Bedouin warrior and his illiterate Wahhabi warriors, however, withdrew from the worldly centre of the pilgrimage industry and retired to their capital in Riyadh.

In 1932, Abdul Aziz proclaimed the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, exchanging the sword for serial polygamy to consolidate his power among the tribes inhabiting his vast desert realm.

Mohammed bin Laden started working as a bricklayer for a consortium called the Arabian American Oil Company, or Aramco, around the same time.

His “redneck” supervisor noticed Mohammed’s hard work and people skills.

Before long, he was a construction manager. Correctly assessing the building industry’s prospects for growth, Mohammed formed his own construction company.

With his employer’s blessings, he struck out on his own in 1935. “Go out and get started; we’ll give you some jobs. You can always come back here.”

His good standing with the wealthy foreigners notwithstanding, Mohammed perceived that his future prospects lay in nurturing close relations with the royals.

He travelled to Ryadh, where he attended the King’s majlis. He began building houses for the rapidly expanding family, and established a reputation for getting things done.

Over the course of several decades, Mohammed went from building palaces and royal residences to renovating religious facilities, and after oil revenues began to surge, undertaking large infrastructure projects.

Like the story of Bill Gates, who promised IBM a micro-computer operating system that he did not have, then purchased MS-Dos from a graduate student for $48,000, Mohammed accepted jobs even when he lacked the capacity to complete them at the time.

Reliability, catering to royals’ whims that contractors like Aramco and Bechtel found a nuisance, and coping with the fiscally intemperate rulers’ chronically late payments, made him an indispensable asset for the House of Saud.

Mohammed’s construction business was the nation’s largest private company as the kingdom entered the modern era.

Serving the interests of kings from Abdul Aziz to Fahd came with certain conditions.

For the House of Saud and the Nejd region’s other lineage-obsessed families, the bin Ladens were of inferior status regardless of their wealth and importance.

Their role was to court the royals, to accede to their requests, and to see contracts through, regardless of their capacity to complete them.

Mohammed delivered by maintaining a large labour force of loyal Yemeni and African immigrants and by tapping foreign partners for their technical expertise.

His reward was the contracts to renovate the holy precincts of Medina, Mecca, and the Dome of the Rock.

The royal family saw these as investments bolstering their political legitimacy across the Islamic world. Mohammed viewed them as a direct favour from God.

Mohammed was in his late thirties when he married for the first time in 1943.

His wife was the daughter of a prominent Mecca businessman of Hadhrami origin — Fatimah Ahmed Mohsen Bahareth, who gave birth to his first son, Salim, in 1945, and his brothers Bakr and Ghalib.

Serial polygamy stretched the technical limits of Islamic law.

Although it was becoming less socially acceptable, Mohammed followed the example of his mentor, King Abdul Aziz, marrying nine wives who gave birth to some 15 sons and nine daughters over the course of the next decade.

Bin Laden built a large estate at Kilo 7 on the new road linking Jiddah to Medina to house his expanding family.

In the end, Mohammed married 22 times, producing 32 sons and 20 daughters.

His wives included women of Iranian, Palestinian, Bedouin, and Ethiopian background.

Some of the marriages were undertaken to cement business ties and local support for the larger modernisation campaign his projects were designed to promote.

Others were based on attraction. Alia, a 14-year-old from a Syrian family of modest means, appeared to fall into this category.

She gave birth to Mohammed’s 17th son, Osama, in January 1958.

Probably the first of five other bin Laden children born that year, the young Osama obviously faced competition for his father’s attention.

It was also the year Faisal succeeded his undisciplined brother, Saud, as King.

These passages of royal succession and the shifting internal alignments accompanying them posed the greatest challenge to MBL’s business.

Fortunately, like Mohammed, Faisal was a pious believer who favoured responsible management of the country’s revenues.

He also inherited a depleted Treasury, and immediately acted to reduce the $500 million deficit he inherited by unloading royal properties.

Mohammed curried his favour by buying some of these assets, including the Yamamah Hotel in Ryadh — which he was later to lease to the US Army.

Despite his expanding portfolio of projects and international partners, the down-to-earth bin Laden remained a hands-on contractor.

Americans in his employment praised him as a fair-minded manager who, unlike the norm in Saudi Arabia, honoured his business commitments and provided for his employee’s welfare indiscriminate of race, tribe, and religion.

The patriarchs of these closely intertwined Arab dynasties’ personal interest in the Western world was limited to procuring the latest machines and gadgets.

For Mohammed, the focus was aircraft and flying — a fascination that he passed on to his sons. It was to repeatedly play a negative role in the family’s fortunes.

Mohammed’s love of flying subsequently saw him acquire the kingdom’s largest private fleet of aircraft.

Expanding business commitments led him to buy his first jet in 1966 — the same year he was given the contract to build a road linking Taif to the isolated province of Asir on the border of Yemen.

The $120 million road spanning 10,000-foot high mountain ranges was part of a larger project including air force bases, garrisons, and other secret military facilities.

The project was inspired by the need to win the loyalty of the borderland’s neglected tribes after Yemeni infiltrators carried out several bomb attacks.

On September 3, 1967, Mohammed sent his jet ahead and boarded his Twin Beech plane.

Discounting the advice of his long-serving pilot, a stand-in flier attempted to land on a poorly situated airstrip in a small town called Oom.

The plane crashed and burned. A shiny watch found amid the ashes confirmed the 60-year-old bin Laden’s death.

His brother Abdullah had left the company he helped found and retired to Yemen seven years earlier.

Islamic law determined the distribution of shares in the family company: According to the formula, the sons received approximately half the shares, another 30 per cent went to the daughters, and the wives inherited the rest.

The extended family convened at Kilo 7 to mourn, his 24 sons (number 25, Mohammed was born later that year) duly anointing Salim bin Laden to head the family business.

As the bin Laden Organisation CEO, he was the de facto ward of his siblings’ finances and welfare.

Salim was in many ways the opposite of his father: Flamboyant, worldly, and an inveterate prankster.

But after a mentally unstable nephew murdered Faisal, who had pledged to act in place of their father, Salim managed to renew the relationship so critical to the family company’s income.

While Salim was unsuited to the role of a patient courtier willing to spend weeks in the desert camps where the king attended to his Bedouin constituents, he used his disdain for royal decorum and irreverent humour to charm Faisal’s successor, the intelligent and conspicuously less pious King Fahd.

Saudi oil revenues begin to rocket after 1973, the bin Laden-Al Saud beat went on, and Salim ran both business and family enterprises with a firm hand.

Coll Chronicles the family's expanding and diverse affairs between 1967 and 1988 in Part II of his book.

If Osama had to compete for his father’s attention, the same appears to apply for his treatment in Coll’s book.

Salim features prominently in the introductory chapter, and he emerges as the star actor. The often-capricious rock-star wannabe was also a shrewd manager.

Salim became friends with interesting and wealthy people, held big parties and feted Saudi princes, sneaked Western friends into sacred precincts, and used his knowledge of his father’s architectural works to help the rattled royal family squash home-grown rebels who occupied the mosque at Mecca in 1977.

Though prone to outrageous social escapades, he inherited his father’s insight into people.

An avid and accomplished pilot, Salim parlayed his interest in aviation — he was an agent of the royals and other wealthy Saudi purchasers of aircraft — into an entry point for other business investments.

The rich and powerful individuals who saw Salim as their ticket to petrodollar windfalls were not allowed to get the upper hand.

Educated abroad, Salim reversed his father’s policy of educating most of his children close to home, using his position as decision maker-in chief to steer many of his brothers and sisters to study in the US and Europe.

Some returned to take up positions with the family companies, no one cashed in their shares, many reinvested their earnings, and their investments tended towards real estate.

Salim’s property included exclusive residences in Florida and California; these and other properties in Europe became the foci of the bin Laden family members’ itinerant lives.

A number of the brothers and several of the sisters married abroad. Osama and a few of his brothers stayed at home.

Over time, the second-generation bin Ladens evolved into a cosmopolitan and multicultural family.

Although Mosque and Hard Rock Café branches of the family emerged, Mohammed bin Laden’s children pursued their individual and group interests without generating serious internal friction back home.

This remained the case after Salim’s accidental death while piloting an ultra-light aircraft in Texas on May 24, 1988.

His workaholic brother, Bakr, assumed control of the two family companies.

We have learned much about Osama by this point in the book.

Quiet, polite, and sincere according to all reports, Osama grew up as a devout Muslim committed to a lifestyle inspired by the life of the Prophet.

He enjoyed a comfortable upbringing under a mild-mannered Saudi stepfather.

He attended the Al Thaghr Model Secondary School in Jiddah, where an exiled Egyptian became his first mentor.

He liked football, but abandoned sport for an after-school study group formed by this teacher and like-minded colleagues who exposed their students to the teachings of the banned Muslim Brotherhood.

Young Osama spent his vacations in Syria, where he hiked in the hills and developed a close relationship with nature.

He continued to participate in study groups at King Faisal University.

Where direct exposure to the West prompted the radicalising gestalt of a Syed Kutb, Saudi Arabia’s encroaching materialism reinforced Osama’s deepening commitment to the fundament principles associated with the Salafi movement.

For a beneficiary of the wealth so negatively impacting on his environment, reverting to the most basic interpretation of Islamic sources no doubt represented the most elegant method for curbing its corrupting influence.

Osama’s mild criticism of the violent liberation of the Kaaba can be seen as rejection of proactive jihad: He only noted that starving the rebels would have limited the damage.

Afghanistan, in contrast, provided an alternative outlet. Saudis saw the Afghans as “angels,” a reflection of Salafi ideals.

The Mujahideen were a fashionable cause.

A Palestinian professor from King Abdul Aziz University, Abdullah Azzam, was dispatched to Peshawar to set up a branch.

Once there, he used the Arab press to recruit volunteers for the resistance.

Airlines started ferrying wealthy Arabs to the war.

Many were dilettantes, a nuisance for the Afghan commanders, tolerated because of the money they brought.

For the more dedicated like Osama, Afghanistan became the crucible for their transformative experience.

Coll faithfully details the different strands contributing to his transition from courier of funds to active participant and an undeclared leader of the Afghan-Arab network.

He describes the mentoring role of Abdullah Azzam, relates how Osama utilised his knowledge of construction to build up border camp fortifications, debunks the myth of direct CIA links, and traces his efforts to establish autonomy from Azzam after Afghan-Arab volunteers perished in large numbers during the prolonged Battle of Jawr.

Osama entered Afghanistan as a cog in the US-supported Saudi-Pakistani anti-Soviet machine. Salim, who had raised the family from domestic instrument to foreign policy asset, facilitated Osama’s connections to the wealthy Saudis contributing to the war.

Salim, as we learn in Chapter One, turned up unannounced in Afghanistan with cash in a suitcase and a video camera in hand.

The inspiration struck somewhere between Orlando and Switzerland — why not boost his bona fides in Washington by documenting his family’s personal commitment to the cause?

Not surprisingly, much of the American and Saudi money sloshing around was not reaching those who really needed it.

Osama managed to gain control of funds feeding the Pakistani Inter Services Intelligence and other intermediaries over time, redirecting it to the Afghan-Arabs and their warlord allies. The equitable distribution of funds earned him the respect of the rank and file.

The Osama who returned to Saudi Arabia was a hardened jihadist and an important link in the jihadi network of charities and individual financiers.

The Gulf War completed the metamorphosis. Osama blamed the royal family for not summoning his Afghan Arabs to repulse the invaders of Iraq.

They confiscated his passport; he took his $8 million share in the company, and a few million more in dividends. On the invitation of Hassan Al Turabi, he decamped to Sudan in 1992.

Osama had become the bin Ladens’ worst nightmare. Their attempts to reel him in while in Sudan failed, as did his grandiose schemes.

Sudanese friends exploited him, employees ripped him off, deals went awry, his lieutenant Jamal Al Fadl swindled $110,000 and defected.

The inheritance was squandered and access to backers in Saudia denied.

One of his wives petitioned for divorce. His first son, Abdallah, requested permission to return. Permission granted; Osama’s mother left with him.

Osama went through a period of self-doubt. He reminisced about the time Salim hired him to help renovate the prophet’s mosque in Medina.

He wrote poetry and faxed polemical essays to the Saudi opposition in London.

And when the US pressured Sudan to expel the exiled jihadi, Sheikh Turabi facilitated his departure by purchasing his assets — for a pittance — then refused to pay up on several IOUs.

He returned to Afghanistan in May 1996.

At this point, all of Osama’s disappointment and angst, rancour towards the House of Saud, bitterness over estrangement from family, the anger induced by betrayal, and frustrated ambition, became focused on a single point: The planet’s most powerful government.

Watching the falling buildings and death incurred by the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 prompted Osama to envision the impact of Israel’s sponsor experiencing the same.

The collapse of the Twin Towers many years later fulfilled that vision.

This is not just a tale of the rich and famous.

Coll sets out to set the record straight in respect to the relationship of the bin Ladens (and Saudia Arabia’s elite capitalists) to the rise of Al Qaeda.

The brothers, the sisters, their spouses, and their diverse careers and business ventures provide a window into the family’s secretive and compartmentalised finances. Depositions of bin Laden business associates after 9-11 helped Coll to fill in the gaps.

Is there a larger moral to the story?

The Prophet’s wife, Aisha, is reported as saying, “When the Prophet of Allah was among us, we were poor but all was harmonious. After his death the world descended on us like a torrent.”

If this Hadith captures the dilemma facing both the bin Ladens and the House of Saud, the young Osama emerges as the individual most committed to addressing the implications.

His quest, however, turns violent. The irony of his success is that it serves the interest of his sworn enemy, the Bush family dynasty.

Author: Steve Coll
The Penguin Press, New York, 2008

Next Week: The Bushes of America