Osama bin Laden, the Fanatical Terrorist and the Devoted Family Man

Of the raft of books that are marking the 20th anniversary of 9/11 and its aftermath, few are likely to be as meticulously documented, as fluidly written or as replete with riveting detail as Peter Bergen’s “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden.” It is a page-turner that weaves back and forth between the man and the terrorist, providing poignant glimpses of key figures and carefully chronicling all the missed opportunities, ignored warnings and strategic blunders of the United States.

Bergen, who has been covering jihadis for three decades and has written extensively on bin Laden himself, draws effortlessly on all his previous work. And thanks to the bravery of the SEAL team that delayed their departure from Abbottabad to retrieve computers and documents from bin Laden’s lair after assassinating him, we now have a vast trove of information not previously available. Along with other primary sources, Bergen had access to the 470,000 files taken during the raid, and he uses this material lightly, writing with the lucidity of an experienced journalist.

The broad outlines of bin Laden’s early life are well known: One of 55 children of the many wives of his father, he was a rich young millionaire who went to Afghanistan to bankroll the struggle against the Soviets. Yet Bergen tells us that he saw his father only a few times in his life, that as a young teenager he was sent, like other children of the global elite, to summer school in Oxford. There he befriended two Spanish girls, went rowing on the Thames and visited Stratford-on-Avon. Nonetheless, he found the British “morally degenerate.” By the age of 16 he was fiercely religious. At 17 he married a 15-year-old cousin. Bergen provides a family tree with the names of his five wives and 24 children. At the time of his death in 2011, his wives ranged in age from 28 to 62 and his children from 3 to 35.

When it came to his family, bin Laden was a man of contradictions. On the one hand, he required his daughters from the age of 3 to be separated from males and insisted that females leave the room when men appeared, even on satellite television. Yet two of his older wives were highly educated, with doctorates in Koranic grammar and child psychology. They helped write his public statements and curate his public image; they engaged in discussions with him on strategy.

Bin Laden permitted his second wife to divorce him in 1993, after 10 years of marriage, and his first wife to leave him in 2001. His fifth wife was an ill-educated 16-year-old Yemeni when he married her in 2000. Before bringing her home, he told his other wives that she was 30 and highly educated but, ever the plotter, he wanted a Yemeni wife, Bergen explains, to improve the chances that Yemen would give him sanctuary in case he had to flee Afghanistan. It appears to have been a happy marriage and the two were in bed together the night of the raid, with two other wives in the bedroom downstairs. Apparently bin Laden was fond of natural aphrodisiacs to help keep his three wives happy while they were all in hiding together. He also used Just for Men hair dye.

In Abbottabad he followed the life of a devoted paterfamilias, taking a keen interest in the education of his offspring and presiding over family meetings. Three wives and their 12 children and grandchildren lived with him there. Yet he exposed them to mortal danger by keeping them in his hide-out.

In the years before he was driven into hiding, he went to pains to ensure his sons were tough, taking them on arduous hikes in blistering heat and limiting their food and water. He refused to allow the use of any refrigeration or air-conditioning. While the family was in Sudan, the eldest son got fed up and left, never seeing his father again. Overall, his family did not fare well. Three sons were killed by the United States, and one daughter died in childbirth while on the run. The three wives with him when he was killed were imprisoned in Pakistan for a year after his death, and one wife and seven children were held in detention in Iran for a decade.

In the will that he drew up as he fled Tora Bora in December 2001, bin Laden thanked his wives for their support and begged forgiveness from his children for giving them so little of his time. He added: “I advise you not to work with Al Qaeda.”

Two of bin Laden’s attributes that shine through in Bergen’s account are his extraordinary self-belief and the ways in which he modeled his life on that of the Prophet Muhammad. Rather than try to explain where bin Laden’s self-confidence came from, Bergen simply describes it. It is all the more fascinating as a result.

Bin Laden got his chance to fight infidels — as Muhammad did — when Islamic forces took on the Russians in Afghanistan at the Battle of Jaji in 1987. He called the confrontation “one of the great battles of contemporary Islamic times,” and it made bin Laden a war hero in the Arab press. But Bergen explains that it was Afghans, not bin Laden’s men, who did most of the fighting and incurred the heaviest losses. Al Qaeda lost only 13 men. Still, bin Laden saw this as his great victory against a superpower, his version of Muhammad’s Battle of Badr in 624. And like Muhammad, at Tora Bora he had his 300 followers dig trenches to echo the Prophet’s Battle of the Ditch in 627. By now he was seeing himself as a world-historical figure, and genuinely believed that he and his ragtag followers could drive the United States from the Middle East.

Along with his reporting on Jaji, Bergen painstakingly explodes other myths that have grown up around bin Laden. That he had weapons of mass destruction; that Pakistan provided protection in Abbottabad; that there was a link between bin Laden and Iran and, most calamitously of all, that there was a link between Saddam Hussein and bin Laden. Bergen demonstrates too that, far from hiding away watching videos of himself while in Pakistan, bin Laden was managing, even micromanaging, his organization from his hiding place.

Bergen is equally revealing about the Americans. While the C.I.A. believed torture was essential to finding bin Laden, Bergen argues that it was not. Key members of Al Qaeda held by the C.I.A. and subjected to coercive interrogation consistently provided unreliable information. Drones, on the other hand, seriously curtailed Al Qaeda’s ability to operate.

Similarly, Bergen demonstrates how the allied forces missed their best opportunity to capture bin Laden at Tora Bora in the months after 9/11. American and British ground forces were at one point outnumbered by journalists, he observes, and highly trained units available nearby were never deployed, out of a misplaced fear of repeating the mistakes of the Soviets. Meanwhile, as bin Laden was escaping Tora Bora, the Pentagon under Donald Rumsfeld was busy planning a war against Saddam Hussein, who had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. Bergen rightly says: “It was one of the most spectacular misjudgments in U.S. military history.”

In the end, Bergen’s narrative illustrates some of the iron laws of terrorism and counterterrorism. In all of his speeches and papers, bin Laden, like most revolutionaries, never articulated a positive vision of the new world he wished to create. The American counterrevolutionaries, for their part, invariably stretched the emergency powers they were accorded. Both failed. Far from expelling the United States from the Middle East, bin Laden ensured America’s deep involvement. And Washington, by waging war on Iraq, saved Al Qaeda from oblivion