Casual visits are not encouraged. To reach the main building, you negotiate first the visitors’ center—where machines constantly sniff the air for chemical and biological toxins and guards bristling with automatic weapons direct traffic—then walk for fifteen minutes down a narrow road screened of...
—Osama bin Laden explaining the purpose of the 9/11 attacks Khaled Batarfi was bin Laden’s closest buddy when they were teenagers living in the coastal city of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. They met in 1973, when bin Laden was sixteen, three years older than Batarfi. The Musharifa district, where the two...