The World

King Fahd, fourth of Abdulaziz’s sons to be king, reacted to the Iranian challenge – and an attack by Islamicist rebels on the Mecca shrine – by tightening religious observance in the kingdom, changing his title to Guardian of the Two Sanctuaries and funding a Wahhabi campaign across the Arab world to confront Khomeini in a battle of faith that intensified a competition of fanaticism. His brother Salman, the intelligent, wilful, irascible governor of Riyadh (later king in the 2020s),^* who often punished the impertinent with a slap across the face, took over the funding of Islamic charities – channelling the money to fund the Afghans – and the small coterie of Saudis who went to fight for them.

Osama bin Laden, now twenty-two, was one of the fifty-six children of the king’s builder, Muhammad bin Laden, a Yemenite who had started as a porter in Jeddah, then in 1930 won the favour of Abdulaziz and befriended Faisal, rebuilding Mecca and Medina for the Saudis. The family were experts at cultivating not only the royal family but also American grandees.

Muhammad bin Laden educated most of his children in Britain or the USA: his heir Salem was at a British boarding school. When his father died in a plane crash, Salem bin Laden built on his relationship with Faisal but also bought houses in Florida and became friends with a useful patrician family. In April 1979, he invested in the oil start-up of George W. Bush, the swaggering and hard-drinking son of an upper-class politician, George H. W. Bush, who was planning to run for president.

POPPY, OSAMA AND W

Tall, reedy-voiced and preppy, inarticulate and bereft of ‘the vision thing’, George senior suffered from the clash between his upper-class decency and his voracious ambition. A scion of the type of American family that owned its own ‘family compound’, the Bushes were descended from English blacksmiths, teachers and prospectors; they were radical abolitionists and supporters of female suffrage but also members of an east coast business elite. George’s grandfather Samuel, son of an Episcopalian vicar, made money by managing a steel company that manufactured parts for the Gilded Age robber baron E. H. Harriman. His son, Prescott, worked at the Harriman Brothers investment bank and married the daughter of the bank boss George Herbert Walker. From Walker the Bushes inherited their Maine compound, Kennebunkport, where like other WASPs they embraced the double hell of spartan domestic arrangements and cold outdoor sports.

Nicknamed Skin for his skinniness and Poppy after his grandfather Pop Walker, Bush followed his father to Yale and into the posh Skull and Bones drinking society, then married an indomitable daughter of a successful publisher, Barbara Pierce, descended from one of the first Massachusetts settlers. Soon after his marriage, George joined the air force and survived being shot down by the Japanese in 1944. Moving to Houston, he made money in oil while he and Barbara had six children. Heartbroken by losing a daughter to leukaemia, they indulged their eldest son, George W. – known as W – who grew up as a raffish cross between booted Texas princeling and Yalie Bonesman. It was he who got the bin Ladens to back his business.

George senior had followed his father into politics, and Nixon rewarded his loyalty with the ambassadorship in Beijing; Ford made him CIA director. More networker than meteor, Bush wrote thank-you notes to every person he met. Now he was ready to run for president. Meanwhile W was making money in oil and had invested in the Texas Rangers baseball team, but he was drinking heavily, and was arrested for Drinking under the Influence. W’s marriage to Laura Welch, a virtuous librarian, led him to change his life: he gave up alcohol and embraced God, sobriety and politics. Not only was Laura ‘elegant and beautiful, [she was] willing to put up with my rough edges’, he said. ‘And I must confess she’s smoothed them off.’ W moved from the Episcopalians to Laura’s evangelical United Methodists.