CHAPTER 19
The pardon and return of the Shia provided an unexpected dividend for Mansour Al-Nogaidan and his fellow video-store bombers—an early release from jail. King Fahd’s blanket pardon of the long-imprisoned Shia rafada (rejectionists) offended many of the Kingdom’s hard-line ulema and sheikhs. So the king ordered that a comparable batch of Salafi prisoners should be freed. It was the classic Al-Saud balancing act. At the end of September 1993 Mansour found himself at liberty, having served less than two of his sixteen years.
Ever questioning and reflecting, the young Salafi, still only twenty-two, had started to change his opinions inside prison—though this was no thanks to the efforts of the prison authorities to “reeducate” their charges.
“One day they brought us together to listen to a lecture from Faleh Al-Harbi—he was a [Prince] Nayef guy. We just laughed at him in front of all the officers. None of us would accept being ‘fed’ with any government ideas. Before they took us to court, we spent days preparing our arguments, because a lot of the hard-liners refused to accept the court’s jurisdiction. One of them—his name was Ali, I remember—said, ‘I want to declare that King Fahd is kafir, an infidel—and may God bless his soul.’ ”
Mansour knew it was unsafe to admit his personal softening to his hard-line fellow prisoners, who, in the pious Islamic tradition of “advice,” were busy encouraging the good and discouraging the bad. They had taken it on themselves to go through and censor the newspapers being read by their fellow prisoners.
“They tore out every single picture and photograph of any sort—which didn’t leave very much to read. They believed that the newspaper images would kick out the angels who were looking after all the godly ones in their cells.”
Gradually Mansour identified two friends who shared his growing moderation—though none of the trio would admit their personal uncertainty as to whether an angel was actually keeping them company in their cell. The three “freethinkers” would talk together in the exercise yard, exchanging uncensored newspapers and cautiously swapping opinions derived from non-Salafi books.
“We knew that we were wandering outside the ‘red lines,’ but we did not want to risk admitting it.”
The process continued when Mansour got out of jail.
“I went to visit a half brother in Buraydah who was quite an intellectual. ‘I have a book for you,’ he said. It was by Mohammed Abid Al-Jabiri, Construction of the Arab Mind, a work of philosophy, which I would not normally have touched. But my brother told me that Al-Jabiri was a scholar at Al-Azhar [the ancient religious university] in Cairo, so I decided to find out what he said.”
This was not an action to be taken lightly. Since philosophy does not accept the overriding authority of a God and his law, the entire process of open-ended philosophic reasoning is haram (forbidden) to pious Muslims.
“Shame on you,” said one of Mansour’s friends when he caught him reading Al-Jabiri. “That man is the root of secularism.”
But by this time Mansour was hooked on the wide-ranging vision of Al-Jabiri, with his comparisons between the Koran and the big ideas of Hellenic, Christian, and Persian cultures.
“I can take what I want,” he told his conservative friend, “and I can leave the rest.”
One book led to another. Mansour found himself reading more philosophy, some works on European thinking, and even Egyptian novels. Early in 1995 he attended a discussion group in Mecca, where he tentatively aired some of his developing ideas—and aroused general hostility. One of his friends reached out and squeezed his hand sharply to get him to stop. Orthodoxy was still very much the order of the day. A few months earlier the eloquent Sahwah sheikhs Safar Al-Hawali and Salman Al-Awdah had been arrested, having refused to sign letters promising to tone down their sermons, while Saad Al-Faqih and Mohammed Al-Masari, the exiled dissidents in London, were stepping up their anti-Saudi rhetoric.
In November 1995, a huge bomb tore apart the National Guard training center in Riyadh, killing five Americans and two Indian officials. The Mabahith hurried to round up the usual suspects—and Mansour Al-Nogaidan was one of them. He was a convicted firebomber, after all.
“I’ve changed my opinions,” he told his interrogating officer.
“We have evidence,” came the reply, “that in a Mecca discussion group earlier this year you told people to stand up and criticize the government when it does wrong.”
“Perhaps I did,” replied Mansour. “That’s what I believe. But I certainly did not tell people to try to change things with bombs.”
The distinction was lost on his interrogators, and Mansour went back to jail again—this time for more than two years.
The 1995 bombing of Riyadh’s National Guard center was the first act of terrorism in Saudi Arabia since Juhayman’s seizing of the Grand Mosque, and Osama Bin Laden praised it loudly from his base in the Sudan. It was evidence, he told a Pakistani interviewer, of a movement that would soon eliminate the House of Saud from the Arabian Peninsula. He also endorsed the still more lethal truck bombing of the Khobar Towers residential complex near Dhahran that came eight months later. The entire front of the building was torn away in a massive explosion whose shock was felt in Bahrain, across the water, more than twenty miles away. Nineteen U.S. Air Force personnel were killed, with 372 wounded.
Bin Laden had no direct connection with either atrocity. The four Saudis who were tried and executed for the Riyadh bombing were jihadis who had fought in Afghanistan, but they listed Bin Laden as only one of several opposition figures whose ideas had influenced them. The Khobar Towers attack bore clear hallmarks of Iranian involvement, and after five years of investigations the FBI issued indictments against thirteen members of a pro-Iranian organization that went by the name of Saudi Hizballah (“Party of God”). Osama was not yet a serious terrorist, but his strident declamations showed how his move across the Red Sea to the Sudan had helped him develop a new role. He had appointed himself chief tormentor and nemesis to the House of Saud.
Bin Laden had arrived in Khartoum early in 1992, and he got started at a fast clip, buying up several small farms by the Blue Nile to create for himself a mini-estate. On the weekends he would go down to the river to ride his horses, the very model of the successful businessman relaxing on his country acres. Transferring assets from Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, he set himself up in a nine-room office in the Sudanese capital, from which he ran a trucking company, a leather-tanning factory, a bakery, a honey and sweets-producing company, a furniture-making venture, and an import-export trading business. American investigators later discovered that many of these enterprises were registered in Luxembourg and Switzerland. Osama was still operating in the style of his brothers on the other side of the Red Sea—at the heart of his little conglomerate was a heavy-construction company.
The British journalist Robert Fisk came across the entrepreneur late the following year in a remote area that Bin Laden company bulldozers had connected to the highway running from Khartoum to Port Sudan. Dressed in a white thobe and gold-trimmed cloak, with the local children dancing in front of him and the grateful villagers slaughtering chicken, goats, and sheep, Bin Laden looked for all the world like a philanthropic Saudi sheikh.
“We have been waiting for this road through all the revolutions in Sudan,” declared one of the elders. “We had waited till we had given up on everybody—and then Osama Bin Laden came along!”
Osama enjoyed playing bountiful magnate in the land to which his father had come as a penniless Yemeni laborer in the 1920s. Sudan was where Mohammed the Builder had lost his eye playing soccer. Now his son was filling the role that his father had enjoyed with Ibn Saud, serving as constructor-in-residence at the court of Hassan Al-Turabi. Osama built highways and developed other business projects, not all of them successful, while secretly contributing to Al-Turabi’s plans for international jihad. For several years he was doing everything in Sudan that he might have hoped to accomplish in a properly directed Islamist Arabia.
Then in April 1994 the Saudi government publicly stripped Osama of his Saudi citizenship. All his bank accounts and Saudi assets were frozen, and Fahd also put pressure on his family. The Bin Ladens could not go on garnering the cream of government construction contracts while they included—and effectively provided shelter to—the government’s number one critic. They would have to decide. Within days of the government announcement, the brothers gathered in a solemn family conclave in Jeddah to issue a statement of “regret, denunciation, and condemnation of all acts that Osama Bin Laden may have committed.” They formally renounced him as a member of the family, and confiscated his share of the family fortune, which they placed in a supervised trust for his children.
In his subsequent accounts of his life, Osama Bin Laden would frequently refer to 1994 as a turning point, focusing on the arrests in Saudi Arabia that September of the Sahwah preachers Safar Al-Hawali and Salman Al-Awdah. It was the imprisoning of these two good and religious men, he would say, that convinced him of the Al-Saud’s perfidy. He made no public reference to the removal of his citizenship, nor to the statement by his brothers, but the renunciation must have hurt. For one thing, it cut him off from the source of his funds. Osama was compelled to scale back his businesses severely, firing dozens of his brightest young workers.
His thoughts began to turn homeward, encouraged by visits from a succession of family members, including his mother—and by the pious young journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who had been asked by the Bin Ladens to see what he could do to get Osama back.
“One of his cousins rang me,” recalls Khashoggi. “He told me ‘Osama’s changed, he wants to come back.’ ”
Khashoggi’s task was to coax Bin Laden to give an interview in which he expressed some remorse and, ideally, renounced any commitment to violence. The family would then show that to the government in hopes it might prepare the way for a reconciliation.
“On the first evening, he started talking about Medina,” recalls Khashoggi, “saying how much he’d like to go back and settle there. He had a wife who came from Medina.”
The two Saudis were sitting around a sheet of plastic laid on the ground, leaning forward to pull chunks of lamb from a pile of rice, nostalgically enjoying kabsa, the Saudi national dish.
“We got onto the subject of the recent bombings,” says Khashoggi, “and this time Osama said he disapproved of them. I got out my tape recorder at once. ‘Shall I start taping?’ I asked. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Let’s talk tomorrow.’ ”
The next day Osama was in a negotiating mood.
“What will I get in return,” he asked Khashoggi, “if I give an interview?”
“I’m not here on behalf of the government,” replied Khashoggi. “I’m here to break the ice.”
During their time together, Khashoggi decided that Osama had become rather odd. He had forbidden his wives to do any ironing.
“ ‘Irons consume electricity,’ he told me, ‘and we must train ourselves to live without electricity. If the Israelis come and bomb the power plant here, we’ll be without water and power.’ ”
The eccentricity reminded Khashoggi of Osama’s home on Macarona Street, where the jihadi had once wanted to connect two rooms together.
“He just knocked a huge hole in the wall with a sledgehammer,” remembers Khashoggi. “He took away the debris, but he left the hole all unfinished and jagged.”
On the night before he was due to leave, Khashoggi tried to focus Osama’s attention on the mission.
“ ‘My flight is at eight tomorrow evening,’ I told him. ‘And I’ll be leaving for the airport at six. You can contact me anytime tomorrow and I’ll come over—right up until six. If you want to do the interview, I’ll forget about the flight and spend as much time with you as you want.’ ”
Khashoggi waited all the next day at the hotel. But the call never came.