The Bin Ladens are shrouded in secrecy, living in one of the most closed, unaccountable countries on earth. Little has been known about the world that created Osama - until now.

In this gripping account prizewinning journalist Steve Coll has interviewed those closest to the family who rose from Yemeni peasants to jetsetting millionaires in two generations. In doing so, he reveals a Saudi Arabia torn between religious purity and the temptations of the West, telling a story of oil, money, power, patronage and dangerous cultural extremes.

1. IN EXILE

The trouble started when an ox died.

The ox belonged to Awadh Aboud Bin Laden. Around the turn of the twentieth century, he lived in the desert village of Gharn Bashireih, in a deep canyon called Wadi Rakiyah. The gorge cut a path of fifty miles through a region of southern Arabia, in modern Yemen, called the Hadhramawt, which means “Death Is Among Us.” It was an accurate name; the land was mostly sand and rocks, baked by cyclical droughts. Barren clay bluffs rose on each side of Rakiyah’s chasm. Camels, donkeys, and goats strayed among thornbushes and scrub trees. There were perhaps forty villages scattered in the canyon’s depths; its population was no greater than ten thousand people.

Awadh’s house and the small patch of ground he farmed lay near a four-story rectangular turret built from mud bricks by two Bin Laden brothers, Ali and Ahmed, who probably lived during the early nineteenth century, judging by the genealogies kept by their descendants. This Bin Laden family fort rose from the highest point in Gharn Bashireih, shadowed by the canyon’s western wall. By Awadh’s lifetime, the turret, which had been used as a home by the two brothers, was eroding into a ruin; it looked like a sand castle washed over by the tide. Clusters of newer mudbrick homes encircled the hillside below the tower, forming a defensive apron. Around the village spread ten or twenty acres of flat farmland, divided into tiny plots of about ten yards by fifty yards, which various Bin Ladens owned. Farming was a precarious vocation dependent upon brief seasonal rains. After each storm, villagers rushed out to capture floodwaters and channel them into their fields. If they succeeded, they might grow wheat or other staple crops for a few months. If they failed, they might face famine.

Awadh Bin Laden made his fateful decision to borrow a plow ox from an Obeid tribesman after one of these cyclical rains. The Obeidis were a powerful clan who patrolled the empty plateaus above Rakiyah’s canyon and also farmed in the valley. There was, of course, no system of insurance or collateral associated with such an ox loan. When the animal died suddenly under Awadh’s yoke, his creditor, whose name was Bilawal, made what the Bin Laden family’s oral history holds to be an outrageous demand: forty silver riyals. This smacked of extortion, but while there were perhaps several hundred Bin Ladens in the village, “they were so poor they could not stand by” Awadh, said Syed Bin Laden, who still lives in Gharn Bashireih.

The Bin Ladens belonged to the Kenda tribe, which traced its origins to pre-Islamic Arabia and became a powerful federation in southern Hadhramawt by the seventeenth century. It had been known then as a tribe of rulers and sheikhs, but perpetual warfare gradually dissipated its strength and scattered its members. By Awadh’s time, the Kenda no longer functioned as an organized group with recognized leaders and armed militias. The Bin Ladens had become merely a family clan of perhaps four to five hundred people, clustered defensively in an ancestral fortressvillage, struggling for survival. They were in no position to sustain warfare against rival groups.

The Bin Ladens divided themselves into four branches, each of which traced itself to the generation of the turret builders, Ahmed and Ali, who were two of four brothers, the others being Mansour and Zaid. Each of these brothers fathered a line of descendants who, by Awadh’s lifetime, acted together as an extended family within the wider Bin Laden clan.

Awadh decided to abandon his ancestral village. He was a bachelor, free to travel. The drought had deepened steadily since the ox’s demise. Emigration was a common survival strategy in the Hadhramawt, even without the spur of a tribal death threat. Awadh packed his belongings and set out across the high plateau for a neighboring canyon known as Wadi Doan, about a day and a half ’s ride by camel or donkey. There he would begin again.