I was drowning my nerves in an airport lounge a few years back when the public address system paged a “Mr. Jihad” to make his way to my flight. Oh God, I thought, please tell me he’s bought a round-trip ticket.

Many of us get a bit jittery about Middle Eastern passengers, so one can only imagine how the crew on board a chartered airliner felt back on Sept. 13, 2001, when they asked the man organizing the flight for the passenger roster only to be given a list with two dozen people all called bin Laden.

“The guy turned white, absolutely ghost white,” recalled Jason Blum, the police officer in charge of spiriting the bin Laden clan out of the United States. The other passengers felt little better. Perhaps it is hard to pity Osama’s sister Najiah for having to use cash while shopping because of raised eyebrows about her name. A little more sympathy, though, is due to her American-raised nephew Salman, who had just obtained his first fake ID—obviously of limited use in his new home in Saudi Arabia.

Airplanes and the black gold that powers them are themes running through Steve Coll’s biography of the bin Laden clan. The fortunes of Saudi Arabia and of its most famous nouveau riche family have been closely connected with flying.

In 1902, the year before the Wright brothers made the first powered flight at Kitty Hawk, Abdulaziz ibn Saud rode out of the desert with a few followers and their camels to reclaim Riyadh, a city that his family had ruled on and off for 200 years. Ibn Saud lived by a peculiarly Arabian form of machismo, loving “women, scent and prayer.” Wahhabism, the puritanical strain of Islam that the Sauds had followed for two centuries, did not much go in for wine or song.

Saud’s new kingdom was a barren feudal state, yet the people were as snobbish about bloodlines as any Eurotrash aristocracy. They viewed the Hadhrami immigrants, from what is now Yemen, as vulgar though enterprising parvenus. Their attitude, Coll explains, was similar to “that which a 1950s-era WASP bank executive in New England might hold toward a dark-skinned, grade-school-educated entrepreneurial Sicilian who built his lakeside summer cottage—charming fellow, but keep him away from the girls.”

One such fellow was Mohammed bin Laden (1908-67), an illiterate, one-eyed mathematical genius who rose from dockside navvy to mogul through a mixture of hard work and relentless accommodation with the whims of the royal family, which included letting the wilder Sauds borrow his airplanes. Saudi Arabia was a country built on petro-dollars and petro-capitalism. Bin Laden also had something that no CEO would sniff at—charm. 

He certainly had no trouble with the ladies, often marrying in the morning and divorcing in the afternoon. Wives were taken, impregnated, then passed on to underlings to marry. The bin Laden family tree must look like an Einstein equation.

Mohammed bin Laden’s tenth wife, Hamida al-Attas, was a Syrian Alawite, an à la carte form of Islam viewed with murderous disfavor by fundamentalists. She bore bin Laden a boy, Osama, who could have been anywhere between son number 19 and 23, March 1957 being an especially prolific month for Mr. B.L.

By 1961, Mohammed bin Laden had become a controversial figure on account of his ability to win royal contracts, notably those for the rebuilding of Mecca, which included the creation of the world’s largest air-conditioning system. Religiously, he seems to have been no more devout than was necessary; at all events, he employed and befriended Christians. His passion was reserved for women and airplanes, both of which he preferred in large numbers.

It was a measure of how close Mohammed bin Laden had become to the Sauds that, even when the government was rounding up Yemenis after a terrorist campaign in 1966, King Faisal entrusted him with the construction of defenses to protect his country.

By the standards of 20th-cum-7th-century Arabia, the king was a liberal, abolishing slavery and introducing television. One of the first programs to be broadcast showed the forced confessions of tortured Yemenis.

King Faisal also gave out copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as gifts to visitors, and he once told Richard Nixon that Zionists were behind even Palestinian terrorism as part of some devious plan.

It was television, though, that did him in. Faisal bin Musaid, a failed political-science graduate who had been thrown out of Colorado and Berkeley for selling LSD, swore revenge after his brother was shot dead by police in 1965 during a protest against the kingdom’s television studio. Ten years later, in a scene straight from “Austin Powers,” bin Musaid sneaked into the royal presence behind the vast girth of the Kuwaiti oil minister and killed King Faisal with a .38-caliber pistol. The assassin’s beheading was not televised—his brother would have been pleased to know—though the execution nevertheless commanded an audience of 20,000.

Mohammed bin Laden was also now dead, killed in September 1967, when his American pilot, Jim Harrington, crashed their Twin Beech in a crosswind. The tycoon’s body was identifiable only by his shiny watch.

The Saud-bin Laden relationship continued to flourish, however, through the friendship of King Fahd and Mohammed’s son Salem bin Laden, a millionaire court jester who once took pictures of his backside after hemorrhoid surgery and presented a slideshow at a party hosted by Crown Prince Saud. 

On another occasion, Salem bin Laden left Robert Freeman, an American investment banker, and an Italian associate stranded in the middle of the desert as a joke. They had to hitchhike back to Jeddah, where they found Salem giddy with laughter. A year later, in New York, Freeman drove a walletless Salem to Harlem, forced him out of his car, and sped away. Shortly afterward, Salem walked into a hotel with two new African-American friends.

Salem shared his father’s twin passions. He loved aviation, although the king banned him from flying in Saudi for his own safety. And he collected girlfriends, at one point proposing to four Western mistresses at the same time. The bait was that he would build a new compound in Jeddah with separate houses, each of which would fly the flag of its resident’s nation. He also promised them all cars from their own countries. The Englishwoman alone took up the offer, plumping for a Rolls-Royce rather than a Rover.

Back on planet Earth, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. By this stage Osama, now 22, was already fairly fanatical. He had grown up with his mother and stepfather and had not received the international education of the others. At 12, he visited London to have his eyes treated; otherwise there is no evidence that he explored the West. The famous family picture from the 1970s of the clan in Sweden dressed in flares does not in fact include Osama.

Osama’s adventures in central Asia were not as heroic as he later claimed. His Arab fighters played a minimal part in the war against the Soviets, and Afghans felt contempt for the rich Saudis who came over to fire guns in the air while expressing their wish to become martyrs. In fact, they were often brought home by their parents. By the time the Soviets withdrew, the Arab Afghans had become a slightly shambolic bunch.

In 1988, Salem shared his father’s fate, crashing his light aircraft in Texas. A business partner recalled that Salem had told him, “This brother of mine in Afghanistan is going to be our family’s big problem.”

After the Sauds had turned down Osama’s offer to raise a rag-tag force to defend the country against Iraq’s two-million-strong army, the radical sheikh sulked off to Sudan, where initially he spent his time sending angry faxes and writing poetry of the teenage angst sort. (“Death is truth and ultimate destiny, and life will end anyway. If I do not fight you, then my mother must be insane.”)

Despite his notoriety, one gets the impression that Osama, with his limp handshake—“like a fish”—was not entirely revered. The tougher jihadis, veterans of Egypt’s torture archipelago, leeched off his money and fame, and he was repeatedly ripped off in Sudan. One follower swindled him out of $110,000 in a series of manipulated commodity deals. 

Osama could have been a kind of jihad Kennedy, save that his money went to Sudanese land schemes rather than convertibles and girls. Although his wealth was not nearly as large as has been rumored, he did blow his $15 million inheritance in four or five years.

All of which gives a fresh perspective on a man we fear and hate. This book is not an account of the dark heart of Saudi Arabia, of sinister oil profiteering—Bush hardly gets a mention—or of the rise of fundamentalism. Coll offers a straight dynastic biography that succeeds in telling the story of a rather strange family with honesty, fairness, and an eye for anecdote.

The characters are all brought to life—Mohammed, Salem, the perfumer Yeslam who tastelessly tried to make “bin Laden” brand jeans after 9/11, and the Americanized Abdullah, who approached a PR firm in New York after the attacks with the strange question “Do you know any Jewish lawyers?” The dullest member, oddly enough, is Osama.

On the whole, the bin Ladens seem to be a sympathetic bunch—charming fellows, mostly. One has to come to the same conclusion as the FBI: there are millions of bin Ladens running around, and “99.999999% of them are of the non-evil variety.”
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Ed West is a journalist living in London. He has written for the Daily Telegraph, the London Times, Nuts, and The Catholic Herald.