Empire: World History - 391. Road To 9/11: The Rise of Osama Bin Laden (Part 3)

Episode Date: August 30, 2026

Who were the bin Ladens, and how did they build a construction empire in Saudi Arabia?  What was Osama bin Laden’s childhood like, and how was he radicalised by a puritanical PE teacher? What did a young Osama see on his television in 1982 that inspired his plan to down America’s towers? In Episode 3 of this series, William and Anita are joined by Pulitzer Prize winner Steve Coll, author of The Bin Ladens: An Arab in Family in the American Century, to trace the rags-to-riches rise of the House of bin Laden.   Summer sale is here: get an annual Empire Club membership for an extra 20% off with code SUMMER26. That's ad-free listening, early-access, every bonus episode, and full access to our exclusive members' series. Sale ends August 31st, so grab it before summer's over.   For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. Email: [e-mail] 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

Welcome back to Empire with me, Anita Arndt. And meet William Drumple. And joining us for the next two episodes, I am very proud to say we have back, one of my oldest friends and a wonderful, wonderful man, an Empire veteran, the winner of not one but two Pulitzer Surprises. Steve Cole, the author of Ghost Wars, Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and bin Laden, and the bin Laden's an Arabian family in the American century. Steve Cole, welcome back to Empire. I'm delighted to be back. Nice to see you both. These two episodes answer the question that ended the last episode.

Who is Azama bin Laden? And what is the story of the family and the kingdom that made him? Yeah. So can we start, Steve, with the patriarch of the bin Laden family. 17 kids, the bin Laden was part of it. It seems like an enormous brood. But tell us about bin Laden senior. Mohamed bin Laden, yes.

He came from the Hudramat in what's now Yemen. an area over the centuries that gave rise to lots of seafarers and globalists in a much earlier time. He grew up in a rugged part of the central Hadramont, drove down there to see their ancestral home at one point when I was researching this book and it was just a remarkable journey. It's most improbable to those of us that are brought up with images of sort of flat desert. I was in the neighboring corner of Saudi just three months ago, and the proper mountains and greenery, Arabia Felix. But it's very dry, characterized by, you know, sort of wadis,

but most of the agriculture was trying to capture floods when they occasionally had downpours. Like a lot of young people from that area who were ambitious, the trick was to use kin networks who had already migrated out of the Hadramat to find some way forward. And as very young boys, Osama's father and his uncle, Abdullah, essentially walked from their home to sea ports, hitched rides and ended up in Jidda, the Saudi port town, the kind of gateway to Mecca. And then even in the very early part of the 20th century, a thriving kind of entropos of people who sold passage to the Hodge, people who ran hotels, who ran transportation companies, who provided food and services, who worked at the port. So they would have been about 11 years old or so, 10 to 11 years old when they arrived. they had uncles with quote marks around them, who they thought were in Jeddah and who they connected with.

And Mohammed bin Laden, Osama's father, did not leave an oral history, which is a shame. He died a little bit abruptly, as we'll get to. But his early days, we have the sense that he started out as a porter. Literally a porter. Yeah, pulling bags around the port. As he established himself, he acquired skills as a bricklayer. And this was all pre-oil Saudi Arabia. So the Hodge and the activities, the economy around the Hodge and Mecca pilgrimages and Medina pilgrimages in general, that was the biggest source of economic activity in the Saudi kingdom at the time.

So, I mean, what you're painting a picture is is of somebody dirt poor. And, you know, the legend that has wound itself around the family is that, you know, dirt poor, but also sleeping in the dirt. So they had to sleep in ditches. Is that how he lost his eye as well? I mean, at what point does he lose his eye? It was an accident, a construction site accident. He did at least for a couple of years work at the margins. And while he did find relatives who he could connect with, who would keep track of him,

it took several years before he was taught how to participate in the building booms that were beginning. as more global travel brought more visitors. Now, this is pre-Great Depression, and I think at that point, he started to see himself as a potential young businessman and started to move from bricklaying into contracting more broadly and set up a little firm with his brother and started to at least support himself. It was far from wealthy in those first years. And then the rest of his story, from when he really began to rise as a construction magnet until his death in 1967, is inseparable from the story of Saudi Arabia itself in the oil age. Because while he was in Jidda, the future king of a united Saudi Arabia conquered Jidda,

imposed a harsh religious rule aligned with the Wahhabi sect that he arose, from Wahhabi Islam. So very puritanical, tempting to impose rules that would bring people into alignment with life as it was lived during the lifetime of the profit in the 7th century. Then in the 1930s, as we discussed in an earlier episode, maybe a year or two ago, oil came to Saudi Arabia and with oil investment and with investment building primarily by the royal family for the royal family. We'll come to this in a second. But I just want to say, one other thing about Muhammad bin Laden. I mean, he's an extraordinary entrepreneur. He builds a gigantic fortune and a gigantic family. He becomes one of the most influential people in Saudi Arabia

right through to the last minute of his life. He's at the court. He knows princes and kings on a first name basis to the extent he would dare speak that way. And this is the point, actually. He was an outsider. I tried to imagine in a say an American or a British context socially what his standing was. He was a very wealthy outsider who had no hope of ever marrying his children into the royal family or even the periphery of the royal family. It would have been like some blue blood in the northeast of America whose family traced back to the Mayflower allowing their daughter to marry the Sicilian, you know, spitting contractor who built their swimming pool. I mean, that's who he was.

And he was, though, the royal bricklayer, at least, though he wasn't the royal suitor in any sense. Yes, exactly. And so he was respected, and they needed him. Okay, so how did he become wealthy and end up with 54 children of whom Osama was the 17th son? And where does Osama get born into? What sort of stage in the family's rise is Osama born? So let's leap forward to the circumstances of his birth. What we can discern from Muhammad's children is that it was not until the Second World War

or just as it was winding down, that he was financially comfortable enough to start fathering children and marry. And he rather quickly followed the practice of having four wives at any one time. Which is normal in the Saudi elite, in the rich elite? It was a mixed picture. Very common among wealthy and powerful leaders in Yemen, where he came from, less established on the Arabian Peninsula, certainly not routine in a place like Jeddah, which was modern and globalized and diverse. in many ways. But in Riyadh, where the royal family was based, there were some princes and then later kings who followed that practice. A king that will meet in a minute, King Faisal, Al-Saud, who was a much more

modern man, was a monogamous husband, and saw that as a sign of his own modernity. It was one of the ways you were modern, was to not live this way. So would it have been a symbol to, if you were from the elite in the 50s and 60s, to have had four wives, would it be the sign that you're from the boonies? You know, King Saud had four wives. I think it's a display of privilege of wealth. Some people by the 70s and 80s would have regarded it as retro. But in the 50s and 60s, I don't think so.

But also an article of faith, maybe. I don't know. I mean, if you're sort of instilling the virtues of Wahhabism and 7th century, Islam. You know, one could argue this is the way we were meant to live. I mean, I don't know how much that holds sway. I do want to talk about Asama's mother, Steve, because, you know, this epic family that, you know, over 20 wives, never more than four at a time, it happens because he keeps divorcing and remarrying. And it's through that sort of churn that 54 children pop out into the world. The mother of Asama is a Syrian woman called Alia, Erganen.

Now, there is a story that makes me slightly queasy that when he decides he's had enough of Alia, he, you know, Asama's just a baby. He just marries her off to one of his managers. I mean, is that right? And can you tell us a bit more about that? No, it's absolutely right. So Osama was born in 1957. So that's about 13 years after Muhammad started marrying and having children. By that time, he had established two senior wives who he would remain married to throughout their. lives, his life. And I think his third wife also had a long run. I'm not entirely clear about that slot. But the fourth position among his four wives was one that he rotated serially to pursue what I think can only be described as his own sexual appetites because he had the habit of marrying and divorcing rather quickly in that fourth position. And Alia was 15 years old living in coastal Syria. And I think he became connected to her family through a business that the bin Laden group was doing in Syria at the time. And he was essentially presented to her as a by business contact in Syria,

who was the girl's father. And so, you know, you can imagine her being 15 years old and taken away from home and then taken to Jidda. But that's what happened. She had a child, Osama, fairly quickly. And yes, about a year later, now in Jeda, which was now the booming headquarters of the bin Laden organization, other sons were coming of age into their early teens. And the father routinely then passed this whoever was in the fourth wife position onto someone who could provide security. And so he did. He married her to someone in the business who was a sort of mid-level manager of some sort, kind man. They formed then a conventional household in suburban Jeda. Alia and the new husband had several children, but Osama was the special child because he had a share

of this very wealthy business and income associated with it. Okay, so he's got income, but he doesn't have much access to his dad. I mean, you know, apart from the revolving door of the fourth wife position. You know, he's a child of a discarded wife. Talking to the other brothers that I was able to access when I was working on the book, the father was quite rigorous in trying to treat them all equally. And there were continual regular assemblies of the sons. I'm talking about the sons. The daughters, not so much. They were protected by Islamic law, so they still had wealth. But he met with the sons. He would basically hold with them. He was apparently quite a taskmaster. He expected them to, like a lot of self-made

fathers, expected them to live up to his hard standards of work and achievement and education as well. What sort of psychological effect can we imagine this having on the young Azama? Are we imposing our westernness by regarding this as a weird family structure and something that would be unstable, or is this completely normal in that world? I think it felt like a loving household that he grew up in. I mean, you know, you work backwards from his hubris and his ambition, and you can see a couple of strands of it. I mean, I spent a fair amount of time and Jedda got to know, I could see where he lived, the home where he lived. I met people who played with him as a boy. He had a very stable, conventional nuclear family upbringing. By the time he was aware,

his mother was already remarried to this man. The only thing that was different, but he was the golden child. So I'm sure, you know, you think of some Some very ambitious men who had very committed, doting, loving mothers who just persuaded them that they were destined to conquer the world, like Franklin Delano or Roosevelt is one example, I think of. That's my sense of Osama. I think his mother was very devoted to him, and he was, in a sense, weirdly, as a child, the breadwinner, because he was getting a dividend of hundreds of thousands of dollars in the

1960s and 70s, which is serious money. And his father was making presumably, you know, one-twentieth of that as a salary man in his, in the Bin Laden organization. Steve, two sort of questions out of that. Any access to his dad? Is he seeing dad? Is he admitted into the kind of household? Or is he now part of this other family? And also just just gives a picture now of the status of bin Laden senior by the time that Azama is and he's risen right up the ranks at this point. Yes, so both things are, those two answers are connected. By this time, Mohammed bin Laden owns and runs the major construction company that serves

the boom undertaken by the Saudi royal family during the first oil age. And this means palace building. It means road building. It means airport and hospital construction. And so he's got a very big operation. And it's based in Jeddah where, oh, Asama lives. And the father brings the sons together at regular intervals at the company headquarters, and he basically meets with them. He reviews their pathways as budding teenagers and then college-age,

university-age children. He provides them all access to excellent education. Most of them go to boarding schools in Lebanon. Some go to, as Osama did, a day school, private day school, in Jetta that was founded by Irish and British educators. It was the place, the elite day school, the only school of its kind in the kingdom at the time. And he was, you know, his fees were all paid there. And they met the father. I think you have the sense from talking to the brothers that the father was, you know, a little overbearing. He had a lot of advice for them. It was mostly about living austerely, working hard, being successful, studying hard. He was very demanding. But he was also determined to give them the best that he had. So they had jobs. They were out on their work sites.

One of the things that I found amusing, although you can't really connect it causally to who Osama would become. But one of the things that the sun saw as young teenagers was a lot of things being blown up because the main thing that Muhammad was doing during that time was demolition of kind of old buildings in Mecca and Medina, you know, these crowds. outed old sooks and such. They had no interest in architectural history. They had no interest in heritage.

They were modernizing at fast pace. And so in order to modernize Mecca and Medina, which was the big project that he had in a large sense, they had to demolish most of the old city. And so he was constantly, I'm sure it was fun for the boys. So you place the dynamite in the building over there, then you step back, watch out, boom. And so that was the kind of experienced around his father that he and other brothers

described from this period. At ease with dynamite. Yes. Well, at ease with dynamite, but also at ease with their father. I mean, he sort of seems to be, you know, a cuddlier Logan Roy kind of, if you watch succession, you'll know what I mean, sort of charismatic, but indulge him rather than cruel. In 1967, though, you know, they lose their father. Muhammad's plane crashes into a hillside.

And there's an American pilot who is responsible for this. He misjudges a landing. And all of a sudden, with Osama bin Laden being only 10 years old, the father is gone. You know, the linchpin of this entire family is missing. And this is a big deal. I mean, I read that the king himself wept at the news that Osama's father had been killed. Is that right, Steve? The king was quite close to the family.

And to some extent, the royal family were debtors of the Boulin organization. So I think his tears were genuine and maybe complicated, but because this was going to be a very disruptive transition for the royal family and all their building projects to lose him. I've actually been to the place where the plane crashed in Assia province, last April. And it's now a place people go and look at. It's a tourist attraction, really? That's interesting. The person who does, you know, is going to have to deal with the royal family now.

they're going to have to wrap their heads around the fact that Salem is going to take over. So, I mean, tell us about Salem bin Laden. So he's the eldest son. So from a young age, he's been marked out as the heir to authority in the family. And, you know, Mohammed bin Laden didn't expect to depart at the age that he did. But he was preparing Salem for leadership by sending him to London for education. He was the only one of the sons to be sent to the west. Muhammad did travel internationally, mostly in the Levant and the Gulf, to Jerusalem, where he had a building project.

But he did go to New York a couple of times and set up a kind of correspondence office there to import materials. So he knew the world a little bit. So Salam was not the austere, hardworking, self. made character that his father might have wished him to be. He likes the Beatles. He liked the Beatles. He was a gift to me as a researcher and a writer because, you know, Osama is quite austere and a bit dull and puritanical and maybe not the most original thinker, even in his own sphere of Islamist radicalism. So it was a little bit hard to spend so much time trying to understand Osama. But Salam is charismatic adventurer, enormously talented, a pilot who was most at home in the air at the controls

of a jet. He lived life to the fullest. He loved to play the harmonica. Playboy and practical Joker. Playboy and practical Joker. He basically traveled from one place to another in his private jet, kind of rolling global party that would end up at ski resorts and then to Dubai, to go hot air ballooning and then to Karachi to go trekking and hunting. He spent his money joyfully and he brought a lot of other people and he had this strange entourage. I eventually tracked down one, this airplane mechanic who I found living on a houseboat in northern Sweden who had amazing memories. He had a Turkish friend from boarding school who was his best friend. And he just brought people in and was constantly on the move. He's in London playing in a

rock and roll band with some pretty talented young British musicians who have their own lives later. Any we'd have heard of? One of them ended up married to Emmy Lou Harris, the well-known singer. And so, yeah, they were not without talent or futures, but Salims lay in a different direction after 1967 when he got word that his father was dead. And the story is whether this is metaphorical or literal that he got on his private jet to fly home wearing bell bottoms and with long hair. And he got off in a proper robe and his hair short and very humbly now took over these new responsibilities. He was in his early 20s and barely

prepared for it. There was, of course, an infrastructure at the company of engineers, often European engineers or Western engineers who could carry the projects forward. But now, Every decision fell to him as it had fallen to his father. And that included Osama's future. Where would Osama go to school? What would he be permitted to do? Anyone who wanted to get married had to ask Solomon for permission. But you had to track him down because as soon as he got settled, he picked up his life.

He had even more money to spend and who started buying private jets and other things and flying around the world. Steve, just before we go to the break, update us now on the status of the bin Laden company, Salam. So, firstly, he's inherited this crucial construction project to redo the holy places, to rejig the Great Mosque at Mecca and Medina. And this is one of the most important and prestigious construction projects in the entire Islamic world. But also, he globalizes the company, doesn't he? He does. And his father had started to do this. But yes, you were right. The prestige of the company in the kingdom rested with their exclusive permission to renovate and improve the facilities in Mecca, Medina, and then Jerusalem. The kingdom funded a project to improve the Dome of the

Rock and the Alaksa Mosque there that Muhammad carried out for several years. To this day, you can find tiles in odd places like the Islamic Art Museum in Malaysia taken off the Dome of the rock and discarded at this time that are now in museums. Well, he even had a Muhammad, Muhammad Osama's father even had a home in Jerusalem that was later confiscated by Israel after the 67 war. But in any event, the company had basically trumped a lot of major Western contractors, well-known, well-resourced, because it was willing to deal with the idiosyncrasies of the Saudi royal family, one of which was not.

to pay for things. And so they ended up being creditors of the royal family. And it was a very complicated set of arrangements in which personal ties to the king and the influential princes were absolutely critical to the business. So that's what the business was, as Salam took it over and as Osama came of age as a teenager. We're going to take a break. But join us after the great, where we find out what happens where you have this jet-setting CEO, um, would-be playboy who's running his father's company. What happens to Asama and how does this affect Osama bin Laden? Hey, this is Michael and Hannah from Gollhangers. The Rest is Science.

This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. When we talk about beating cancer, we often focus a lot on survival. And that can mean overlooking impacts that that last long after treatment. ends. Yeah, for example, take cancers in children and young people. The treatments themselves can be incredibly harsh. They can cause lifelong side effects like infertility or hearing loss. And Cancer Research UK is working to change that because young people, they should be able to grow up hearing the voices of the people that they love and living their lives to the fullest. That's right. And one clinical trial led by Cancer Research UK showed that giving another drug

alongside chemotherapy nearly halved the number of children losing their hearing. And today, the treatment combination is being used by doctors across the world. For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research and breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancer researchukuk.org slash rest is science. Welcome back. So, Steve, I mean, you painted such a, you know, vivid picture of a joie de vivre about Salem, you know, the man who takes over the company, who makes it global, who has all these huge, reaching ambitions. Does that rub off on Osama? Because he's still at school in Jeddah, isn't he? Very different kind of life he's leading to Salam. He's in school in Jeddah, and while he's at what you might think of as a relatively secular, privileged day school, where there are teachers from abroad, including from Ireland and England, he falls under the

influence of a Syrian teacher at this school who is a Muslim brother who, who acolyte. It's a PE teacher. Yeah, a PE teacher. And he holds these after-school kind of club sessions or study sessions with elite children who are willing to attend or whose parents don't quite understand what's going on. And it's an indoctrination session characteristic of the Muslim Brotherhood, which sees its strength as through the recruitment and education of elites.

So this is an ideal place to have to develop influence in the kingdom because by definition, the boys who are there are going to have futures of influence. And so he becomes more and more caught up in the beliefs. And what's, of course, interesting, as you've already reviewed about the Muslim Brotherhood compared to some other strands of radical Islam, including those dominant in the kingdom, is that it has a political aspect. It has a goal for the here and now of trying to change. political structures. And so that's what he's learning. And the after-school group is a kind of mixture of PE and football and sort of Quran learning sessions. Yes, and Quran learning sessions, but with a little bit of an edge of, you know, political ambition. This is not the only model of trying to persuade young boys to adopt a religious outlook. I mean, what you see, I guess, is that, you know, a boy who, by all accounts, is, you know, like many other boys. You know, he loved cowboy films, loved horses and, you know, very close to his mother, suddenly morphing into somebody who was praying, who was fasting, who was finding music,

her arm, didn't want to listen to music anymore, was against having photographs, taken that kind of sort of imagery. And he marries his first wife at the age of 17, so, I mean, just still really a boy. But he is in this heart and soul. Yes, I mean, it happens gradually, but you're right. By the time he's 17, 18, 19, he is known within his own family as the Puritan among Puritans. So if you think of a family of half-brothers and sisters who do see one another, most of whom are in Jeddah, so 54 of them, it's almost like a parliament with different factions and parties. You can divide them into rough groupings.

And in the bin Laden's, the dividing line was modernity and tradition. And there were important numbers, I would say, a great majority of the children of Muhammad bin Laden were globalists. And when they were abroad from the kingdom, they lived a reasonably secular lifestyle. They owned property in the United States and Europe. They danced at clubs. Some of them started companies in selling perfume in Geneva. One of them owned a hard rock cafe in Beirut. So that's the majority flavor of the 54.

But there were others in the middle who tried to balance Saudi conservatism with occasional trips abroad. And then there was Osama. And Osama was on what you might think of as the right wing of the family. And he had a couple of brothers and a few sisters who were equally devout. But among them, he became the leader and the advocate for these austere choices in personal life. not even using a modern plastic toothbrush, but only a stick the way one would have in the days of the profit and so forth. So he becomes known as a bit of a nudge, and he's often reprimanding his brothers and sisters about their conduct a little bit, and he becomes a little self-isolating that way. And then as you point out, he marries at 17, and so he isolates himself further by building his own family. And he goes to business school in Jetta after he finishes this day school. and he's starting there to study, to prepare for a job in the company. Right.

But he's gone there as a married man. You know, he's unlike, I'm guessing, I don't know what the students of Jeddah were like in 1976. But he's sort of almost fully formed. He knows who he wants to be. He knows what he's, you know, what he believes in and what he cares about. Does he find like-minded people at the university, King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah? I mean, he gets caught up. I think there's a continuity of acquaintances and ambition that traces back to that PE teacher and the introduction to Muslim Brotherhood thinking. He's still more or less affiliated with Muslim Brotherhood groupings in Jida. And that's what takes him to Afghanistan, to Pakistan, on these kind of voluntary trips. I think an important aspect of Osama's development. and the way to think about him is to recognize that a lot of what he did,

both in the kingdom and as a volunteer in Pakistan and on the Afghan frontier, was utterly conventional in a Saudi context. I mean, it would have been like having a child in a family of six, one child becomes more religious than their brothers and sisters and through their church or their synagogue or their temple, they go abroad when there's a natural disaster to help build houses for people who are stricken. How does the family feel about that person? They're proud of them.

I mean, they may not share their religiosity. They may be slightly worried about where this is going to go for them, but they're proud of their service. And that's what Osama was doing. That's how he was seen, even by solemn, the most secular, the least, uh, sort of political of the, except in the Saudi royal family sense. So they were proud of him. And he was given support to go off on these Muslim Brotherhood affiliated pilgrimages to Pakistan, and he was given money, access to money. And Salam chipped in. It's not until later when he

turns against his own family and he turns against the kingdom that he crosses a line. But throughout the 80s, he's an utterly conventional and supported radical in our eyes. We've done a whole series about this. So I think our listeners are very familiar with the whole earthquake of February 1979, the Islamic Revolution in Iran, which begins a massive change to the whole region. How does it affect Osama? Well, he's 22 years old in 1979, so a very impressionable period. He's already been kind of indoctrinated into Muslim Brotherhood thinking.

You know, the siege in the kingdom is a huge. event for the family because it was their blueprints that were required by the counter and terrorism forces that attacked the great mosque to root out the, you know, the band of people who had taken refuge there. The revolution in Iran, although Shia and origins swept all across the Sunni world, including in Saudi Arabia, offering a sense of possibility of rapid political change in the name of Islam. And these guys, the Midnardins, just before we leave the siege. The siege involved the bin Laden's because the radicals who took over the mosque were in the basements and the people that had the maps of the basements was the bin Laden's

who were building the mosque. Exactly. They were required to help the basically the special forces that went in to chase these people out. We all to say how long. I mean the siege is not a you know, it was serious. It ran on for two weeks. It involved hundreds of militants. They've been smuggling weapons inside for a while, inside coffins, and basically had taken the holiest Islamic hostage. So, I mean, it was a massive deal at the time. And watching this is, you know, on the telly, is a very young, still very young, just 22-year-old, Osama bin Laden. You certainly can see how a small group of people thinking ambitiously and creatively about public symbolic spaces can disrupt an entire society and attract the attention

of the world. I think that's probably the lesson of it. I'm not sure that he was inspired by the particular methodology and ambitions of this group. You know, this person who had persuaded himself that he was the mod, he returned to Earth. I doubt that Osama was inspired by that. If you listen to Osama about what influenced him during this period, he doesn't mention the siege, but that's family business and kingdom business that he was always reticent about. What he does mention is the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which was a televised event. He had a television at home and talking to people. And yes, you know, you can always, there's a sort of habit in Saudi Arabia of externalizing their own dissents by constantly emphasizing Israeli aggression as the cause of their

own radicalism. But I think in Osama's case, I'm persuaded that he really did just sit there and watch it on television. And it was in the early era of kind of that sort of experience in Saudi Arabian and it made an impression on him. And it's what he talked about the most in the years later when he didn't have any particular reason to emphasize it. This was a very controversial matter, wasn't it, when after 9-11, because people went to his speeches and there was this stuff talking about the towers coming down. And there was a lot of pushback saying it's nothing to do with Israel at all.

But you were convinced that the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the humiliation of the Arab world that was televised around the region did play a role. Because the towers that you're talking about, Willey, are the towers in Lebanon that were brought down by explosions. Yeah, the tower blocks, and he draws that parallel. He says, I saw the towers coming down and determined to do the same to America. It was the saturation televised accounts, I think, that I think there's just no question influenced him. And look, he was already politicized because of the teachings that he had gotten caught up in.

And I think by 1982 he had been to Pakistan once. And so there was another war front that he had visited, however briefly, however much as a humanitarian volunteer at that point. So it's part of his political awakening. I mean, this is a year of awakening because, you know, at the end of December, 1979, you have Soviet paratroopers landing in Kabul. You've got the tanks rolling across Amudara. You know, you've got for the first time since the Second World War,

you've got a superpower, in this case, you know, Russia invading and occupying a Muslim country. And this too must, I mean, I don't know how many people you've spoken to about this, must have had an impact on Osama bin Laden. I mean, what was he thinking is he was indeed watching these pictures too on his TV? Again, he was a conventional Saudi privileged young man with access to wealth, thinking about how to deploy charity and wealth in the world, thinking about politics. And so the invasion of Afghanistan and the suffering of Afghan people and the sudden emergence of hundreds of thousands, then millions of refugees living in camps in Pakistan, this galvanized the entire kingdom. Every, you know, the royal family, every business family that had a charitable impulse or a political impulse was galvanized by the invasion of Lebanon, by the suffering of Afghans after the Soviet invasion. Asian. And so they mobilized. They mobilized responses, charitable responses, financial responses, eventually the Saudi intelligence service mobilized guns and money to help the Afghan refugees

fight back. But Osama was swept up in that and he was motivated himself by the things that we've just discussed. And he actually gets on a plane and goes to Pakistan to help, age 22. I mean, he's still a very young man. He does. And he does. And, And again, his point of entry is the Muslim Brotherhood. He initially goes to Lahore through a Brotherhood kind of network, and then he ends up eventually meeting Abdullah-Azah, who has his own history with the Brotherhood. And that's how he becomes involved. Now, you know, that particular affiliation kind of melts away. At the end of your last episode, I think you can see that he's going his own way.

as incipient al-Qaeda comes into being. But that's the path that got him to the point where you ended your last episode. The path is so interesting. I'm really also fascinated with that, you know, the drop-off where, you know, from sort of carried on a slipstream of anger and saying, you know, these are my people and they're being treated so badly to I will lead the comeback. I will lead the pushback. When does that happen? Across the 80s, he's a reticent man. He's not a natural leader.

He's not an orator, at least initially. People consistently describe him as shy, don't they, at this period? He's shy and soft-spoken. What becomes important, I think, to reflect on about the origins during this point is that he grew up in a business family that was globalized and that had access to electronics, cutting-edge communications technology and media. He was training to be a marketer. His own sons went into the marketing business in Jeddah. He was aware of communication and how to think about getting messages across. And that was the thing that he was ahead of his time on. And that was

developed during the 1980s, both as a consumer of media and kind of business ideas. But then later, as a communicator on his own. And we'll see this when he decides to turn against his family and his kingdom and he starts to communicate his own vision. He's extremely effective because he knows he's ahead of his time in using the tools of the day. Well, look, I mean, you're going to come back because we have a lot more to talk about. So where we're leaving is, you know, the dutiful 17 son of the kingdom's master builder is revving up to go to war.

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