I want to start off by sharing with TMP café readers a sample of Peter's oral history methodology.

Peter's opening post discusses both his method and his sources of inspiration for choosing that method. Nothing else, however,  can convey what the book is and how it works as well as a sampling directly from the author's text which I will provide at the end of this post.

Oral history is an interesting and often controversial historical form.  Peter has a style of his own, but he uses the method to good effect.

Classically, oral history has been understood as a series of self-conscious, disciplined conversations between the historian and witnesses to history about some aspect of the past considered by them to be of historical significance and intentionally recorded for the record.

Although the oral historian's string of such conversations usually takes the form of interviews, in which one person--the interviewer--asks questions of another person--variously referred to as the interviewee or narrator--oral history is, at its heart, a dialogue.  

In Peter's bok he tries to leave himself out of the reportage as much as possible, although his questions sometimes shape the comments and his selection of interview text  necessarily derives from a particular frame of reference or historical interest.

Many of the oral excerpts are from official documents such as court proceedings and printed interviews.   In keeping with the  high oral history tradition, the entire book is made up of oral reports from people who have known Osama personally or had direct dealings with him.

It is supplemented with some excellent timelines, a detailed dramatis personae, and useful breakdowns of the Bin Laden family and business structures.

[Note to the reader: My copy of "The Osama Bin Laden I Know" just reached me on Friday night.  I am on page 282 of 444.  But I promise that my later posts will reflect my having read all 444 pages.]

Below is a sample of Peter Bergen's method (which was earlier printed in the UK  by The Times).

Khaled Batarfi, three years younger than Bin Laden, met him when Osama was in his teens and they lived next door to each other in Jidda: I was the soccer captain even though Osama was older than me. Because he was tall, he used to play forward to use his head and put in the goals. I was a tough guy then and Osama was the peaceful one. He was very shy, very observant. He liked western movies, and he liked karate movies. Bruce Lee. He liked to go climbing mountains in the area between Syria and Turkey. He loved horse riding.

He would fast every Monday and Thursday. [Such] fasting is an extra thing, it's what the Prophet used to do, but you don't have to do it. [Osama's mother, Alia Ghanem, a Syrian] is a moderate Muslim. She watches TV. She [has] never been very conservative, and her [current] husband's like that; their kids are like that.

So Osama was different, but in a quiet way. He would bother his brothers sometimes for looking at the maid or things like that. Of course, he woke them for prayers in the morning, and that was good -- nobody complained. But sometimes he was kind of upset if something is not done in an Islamic way. "Don't wear short sleeves, don't do this, don't do that."

At 17 he married his cousin in Latakia [in Syria] -- a beautiful resort, I hear -- the daughter of his uncle, the brother of his mother. And then he went to the university and I saw less of him.

Jamal Khalifa recalls his years with Bin Laden at Jidda's King Abdul Aziz University: In 1976 I met Osama. He was in a different college, in economics. I was in science, but our activities were the same. I was almost 20, and he was 19. At that time we were religious and very conservative. Of course, no girls -- don't even talk about it -- and no photographs. That's why I don't have any pictures with Osama. I was photographed in high school, but when I became religious I threw everything away.

We [discussed] polygamy, and we recalled our fathers. We found that they were practising it in a wrong way, where they married and divorced, married and divorced -- a lot of wives. Some of those practising polygamy will, if they marry the second one, neglect the first one -- not the Islamic way at all. We look at polygamy as solving a social problem, especially when it's confirmed that there are more women than men in the society. It's not fun, it's not a matter of just having women to sleep with -- it's a solution for a problem. So that's how [Osama and I] looked at it, and we decided to practise [polygamy] and to be a model.

Khaled Batarfi: Did you know he went to America? He took his [first] son Abdallah, because Abdallah has problems with his head -- it was deformed -- so he took him for a medical trip.

Even after his marriage, for a year or so he was still living in his mother's house. Later on, after he got his first child, it seems like it was too tight a place for him, especially since he was planning to marry another woman. So they moved to a building in the Al-Aziziyah district [in Jidda]. He gave each wife an apartment. I visited him once and I saw they were bare apartments. I mean, I wouldn't live there myself. Very humble.

In 1986 Bin Laden established a base next to a Soviet military post at Jaji, in eastern Afghanistan. Jamal Khalifa was angry about what he regarded as his friend's foolhardy plan to set up his own military operation: I decided to go myself [to Jaji] to see what's going on there. I stayed three days. I started to ask people how it's going. They said [that] every day, we have plenty of shaheeds [martyrs] -- people dying. I said, "Why? They are not trained and they are very young. They don't have experience and they are facing the Soviets. It's not a joke."

So I sat down with Osama in his tent underground. I told him, "Everybody is against this idea. Why are you here? Don't you know that this is very dangerous?" He said, "We came to be in the front." I said, "No, we did not come to be in the front. We came to [support the] Afghans."

Khaled Batarfi, who remained in touch with Bin Laden's mother during the Soviet-Afghan war, noted her growing concerns about her son: He decided to become a fighter, and his mother -- oh God, it went from bad to worse. She heard about the chemical gas Russians used against mujaheddin, and her son was affected. She was [watching] TV, waiting for bad news.

On May 29, 1988, Bin Laden's brother Salem crashed a plane in San Antonio, Texas, and died on impact. Although Salem did not see much of Osama, because Salem was running the family business and was far more fun-loving and westernised than his austere younger half-brother, his death was a blow to Osama.



A Bin Laden relative: If Salem had still been around, nobody would be writing books about Osama Bin Laden. Salem had a volcanic temper and no problem about rocking the boat. He would have personally flown to Sudan [where Osama lived in the mid-1990s]. Salem would have grabbed Osama by the lapels and taken him back to Saudi Arabia.

Bin Laden left Afghanistan for Sudan after having helped to drive out the Russians. His family socialised with that of Hassan Turabi.

Wisal al Turabi, Hassan's wife:

I met [one of Bin Laden's wives], Umm Ali, in her house. I didn't see her children, but she said the children were in another room trying to learn the Koran. She was a university lecturer. She was very knowledgeable, because she studied in Saudi Arabia. Three of his (four)wives are university lecturers. He married the other three because they were spinsters. They were going to go without marrying in this world. So he married them for the Word of God. If you have a spinster, if you marry her, you will be rewarded for this in the afterworld.

Noman Benotman, a Libyan former jihadist: He's living a normal life, the life of poor people. I saw him many times. You see his kids -- you will never, ever in your life think those kids are Bin Laden's kids; they are people from the poorest family in the world. You wouldn't believe it -- kids running around in old clothes. He always tells his followers, "You should learn to sacrifice everything from modern life, like electricity, air-conditioning, refrigerators, gasoline. If you are living the luxury life, it's very hard to go to the mountains to fight."

Abdel Bari Atwan, the Palestinian editor of the London-based Arabic newspaper Al-Quds al-Arabi, met bin Laden in 1996: Dinner was really awful. There were about 12 people in that cave. The dinner was rotten cheese, this Egyptian cheese. It's salty cheese -- really very bad. And then there were potatoes soaked in cottonseed oil. And also there were about five or six fried eggs, and bread, which was really caked with sand. So I think this is their typical food. They eat very little. It's Bin Laden who actually loves to live such a harsh life with his followers.

Abu Jandal, Bin Laden's former chief bodyguard, in an interview in 2004 with Al-Quds al-Arabi: Umm Ali asked Sheikh Osama for a divorce when they still lived in Sudan. She said that she could not continue to live in an austere way and in hardship. He respected her wish and divorced her. Sheikh Osama gave me a pistol and made me his personal bodyguard. The pistol had only two bullets, for me to kill Sheikh Osama with in case we were surrounded or he was about to fall into the enemy's hands, so that he would not be caught alive.



John Stuart Blackton is a retired Senior Foreign Service officer and a veteran of four years' Army service in Indochina. After leaving the Foreign Service he joined the faculty of the National War College as professor of National Security Policy. He currently works as an international consultant on security and governance issues, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan.