STEVE COLL

Steve Coll's The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century is the groundbreaking history of a family and its fortune. It chronicles a young illiterate Yemeni bricklayer, Mohamed Bin Laden, who went to the new, oil-rich country of Saudi Arabia and quickly became a vital figure in its development, building great mosques and highways and making himself and many of his children millionaires. It is also a story of the Saudi royal family, whom the Bin Ladens served loyally and without whose capricious favor they would have been nothing. And it is a story of tensions and contradictions in a country founded on extreme religious purity, which then became awash in oil money and dazzled by the temptations of the West. In only two generations the Bin Ladens moved from a famine-stricken desert canyon to luxury jets, yachts, and private compounds around the world, even going into business with Hollywood celebrities. These religious and cultural gyrations resulted in everything from enthusiasm for America—exemplified by Osama's free-living pilot brother Salem—to an overwhelming determination to destroy it.

¿Bin Laden es sólo el terrorista más buscado del planeta? ¿Qué sabemos de su familia? Los lazos familiares del terrorista más buscado y los negocios distribuidos por el mundo por el clan Bin Laden es el objeto de investigación del norteamericano Steve Coll, que documenta con todo lujo de detalles sus componentes y la variada trama de empresas, no pocas de ellas norteamericanas, que ha creado en todo el planeta.El autor muestra con claridad el paralelismo entre la evolución de la familia Bin Laden y de Arabia Saudí así como una investigación impecable y de gran rigor . Dirigido a estudiosos y estudiantes de historia, investigadores y periodistas especializados como al público en general. Se lee como una novela: intrigas palaciegas, luchas por el poder...

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.

To a much greater extent than has been previously understood, the Bin Laden family owned an impressive share of the America upon which Osama ultimately declared war-shopping centers, apartment complexes, luxury estates, privatized prisons in Massachusetts, corporate stocks, an airport, and much more. They financed Hollywood movies and negotiated over real estate with Donald Trump. They came to regard George H. W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, and Prince Charles as friends of their family. And yet, as was true of the larger relationship between the Saudi and American governments, when tested by Osama's violence, the family's involvement in the United States proved to be narrow and brittle. Among the many memorable figures that cross these pages is Osama's older brother, Salem-a free-living, chainsmoking, guitar-strumming pilot, adventurer, and businessman who cavorted across America and Europe and once proposed marriage to four American and European girlfriends simultaneously, attempting to win a bet with the king of Saudi Arabia. Osama and Salem's father, Mohamed bin Laden, is another force in the narrative-an illiterate bricklayer who created the family fortune through perspicacity and wit, until his sudden death in an airplane crash in 1967, an accident caused by an error by his American pilot. At the story's heart lies an immigrant family's attempt to adapt simultaneously to Saudi Arabia's puritanism and America's myriad temptations. The family generation to which Osama belonged-twenty-five brothers and twenty-nine sisters-had to cope with intense change. Most of them were born into a poor society where religion dominated public life. Yet by the time they became young adults, these Bin Ladens found themselves bombarded by Western-influenced ideas about individual choice, by gleaming new shopping malls and international fashion brands, by Hollywood movies and changing sexual mores-a dizzying world that was theirs for the taking, because they each received annual dividends that started in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. How they navigated these demands is an authentic, humanizing story of Saudi Arabia, America, and the sources of attraction and repulsion still present in the countries' awkward embrace.

Looming large in the minds of the American people since the devastation of September 11, 2001 - and perplexing their political analysts, media, and elected leaders - are two unsettling questions: To what extent did America's best intelligence analysts grasp the rising threat of Islamist radicalism? And, Who tried to stop bin Laden and why did they fail? Later this month, and for the first time, Steve Coll, managing editor of The Washington Post, provides answers in a news-breaking account of the CIA's involvement in the covert wars in Afghanistan that fueled Islamic militancy and gave rise to bin Laden's al Qaeda. For nearly the past quarter century, while most Americans were unaware, Afghanistan has been the playing field for intense covert operations by U.S. and foreign intelligence agencies-invisible wars that sowed the seeds of the September 11 attacks and that provide its context. From the Soviet invasion in 1979 through the summer of 2001, the CIA, KGB, Pakistan's IST, and Saudi Arabia's General Intelligence Department all operated directly and secretly in Afghanistan. They primed Afghan factions with cash and weapons, secretly trained guerrilla forces, funded propaganda, and manipulated politics. In the midst of these struggles bin Laden conceived and then built his global organization. Pulitzer Prize-winner Coll provides the only comprehensive account to date of the secret history of the CIA's role in Afghanistan, including its covert program against Soviet troops from 1979 to 1989, and examines the rise of the Taliban, the emergence of bin Laden, and the secret efforts by CIA officers and their agents to capture or kill bin Laden in Afghanistan after 1998. Based on extensive firsthand accounts, Ghost Wars is the inside story that goes well beyond anything previously published on U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, chronicling the roles of midlevel CIA officers, their Afghan allies, and such top spy masters as Bill Casey, Saudi Arabia's Prince Turki al Faisal, and George Tenet; heated debates within the American government; and the often poisonous, mistrustful relations between the CIA and foreign intelligence agencies.

Steve Coll's The Bin Ladens is the history of a family and its fortune: of how a one-eyed illiterate, Mohammed Bin Laden, from a harsh region of Yemen, went as a young man to the new, oil-rich country of Saudi Arabia and with remarkable speed became a vital figure in its development, building great mosques and highways and making himself and his many children into millionaires. It is the story of the Saudi royal family, who the Bin Ladens served so loyally, and without whose capricious favour they would have been nothing. And it is the story of the revolutions in a modern Islam awash with oil money: of a country founded on extreme religious purity becoming mired in the temptations of the West. In only two generations the men and women of the Bin Laden family moved from a desert canyon in Yemen to luxury jets, yachts and private compounds around the world. The religious and cultural pressures could not have been greater. This resulted in everything from enthusiasm for the West, exemplified by Osama's brother Salem, a free-living pilot and adventurer, to an overwhelming determination to destroy it.

The news-breaking book that has sent shockwaves through the White House, Ghost Wars is the most accurate and revealing account yet of the CIA's secret involvement in al-Qaeada's evolution. Prize-winning journalist Steve Coll has spent years reporting from the Middle East, accessed previously classified government files and interviewed senior US officials and foreign spymasters. Here he gives the full inside story of the CIA's covert funding of an Islamic jihad against Soviet forces in Afghanistan, explores how this sowed the seeds of bin Laden's rise, traces how he built his global network and brings to life the dramatic battles within the US government over national security. Above all, he lays bare American intelligence's continual failure to grasp the rising threat of terrrorism in the years leading to 9/11 - and its devastating consequences.

From twice-Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Steve Coll comes "Private Empire", winner of the Ft/Goldman Sachs business book of the year award 2012. The oil giant ExxonMobil makes more money annually than the GDP of most countries; has greater sway than US embassies abroad; and spends more on lobbying than any other corporation. Yet to outsiders it is a mystery. In "Private Empire", award-winning reporter Steve Coll tells the truth about the world's most powerful and shadowy company. From the Exxon Valdez accident in 1989 to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, via Moscow, the swamps of the Niger Delta and the halls of Congress, he reveals a story of dictators, oligarchs, civil war, blackmail, secrecy and ruthlessness. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and newly declassified documents, this is a chilling portrait of unchecked power. Reviews: "Magisterial ...a revealing history of our time". ("New York Review of Books"). "Meticulous, multi-angled and valuable...Coll's prose sweeps the earth like an Imax camera". (Dwight Garner, "The New York Times"). "Jaw-dropping reading". ("Kirkus Reviews"). "The definitive work on its subject ...at every stop there are vivid anecdotes, sharp insights and telling details". (Ed Crooks, "Financial Times"). About the author: Steve Coll is the author of the "New York Times" bestseller "The Bin Ladens". He is president of the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan public policy institute headquartered in Washington, D.C., and a staff writer for "The New Yorker". He won a Pulitzer prize for explanatory journalism while working at the "Washingon Post". He is the author of six other books, including the bestseller "Ghost Wars", which won him a second Pulitzer prize. He lives in Washington and New York.