NewsHour | New Book Examines the Bin Laden Family

MARGARET WARNER, NewsHour: Osama bin Laden is known worldwide as founder of al-Qaida and mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. But much less is known of his sprawling Saudi family and their multiple ties to the United States.

Now, Steve Coll, author of the prize-winning "Ghost Wars," has pulled back the curtain on Osama and his billionaire clan. His new book is "The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century."

And, Steve, welcome back to the program. What was it about the bin Laden family that so intrigued you that you devoted not only all the time but writing an entire book about them?

STEVE COLL, New Yorker Magazine: Well, I've been studying Osama in one way or another for 15 years. And I always felt that I bounced off of the Saudi and family context from which he arose and always felt that there was more complexity and more subtlety there than at least I had been able to penetrate.

So I kept going back to it and finally saw the family as a vehicle to write more specifically about the broader narrative of modernization in Saudi Arabia, all the contradictions and complexity it created.

STEVE COLL: Well, he was genius, in many respects, and a charismatic man, but I think a model for Osama in two important ways.MARGARET WARNER: Well, there's so much in this book, both political and personal, but let's focus on the personal and in terms of Osama bin Laden's life and the influences on him. Let's start from the family. Let's start with his father, Mohammed, the self-made construction magnate. Now, you describe him as distant, yet a model for young Osama. How?

One, he was an extraordinarily inspirational leader of diverse followers. And Osama's own success as a terrorist militia leader has arisen in a lot of ways because of his ability to unify Islamists from diverse cultures, diverse language groups, diverse sects.

And he learned that from his father, I think, at these work camps in the desert, where African and Yemeni, and Palestinian and Lebanese, and Pakistani laborers all worked side-by-side in camps that resembled nothing so much as what we saw Osama lead in Afghanistan in the late '90s.

I think the other influence his father had on him was his role as a modernizer and someone who embraced the technologies of globalization and the possibilities of modernization at a time in Saudi Arabia where very few people were looking to the future that way.

And Osama, again, succeeded as a terrorist leader because of the way he adopted technology, the satellite telephone, the airplane, and his vision of a border-crossing movement. And I think he inherited that or was inspired to some extent by his father in that way. . .

Steve Coll is CEO and President of the New America Foundation.