Now we all know what makes him tick (bin Laden)

The designer watch on bin Laden's wrist tells more than the time. The smile is awkward; the stance uncertain. While his brothers pose, like a Saudi version of the Osmonds, as close as possible to the miniskirted Spanish girls, the 14-year-old Osama bin Laden in flares stands slightly apart, gangly arms dangling by his sides, a picture of adolescent uncertainty, clearly enjoying the proximity of the Western women but slightly paralysed by it.

The photograph was taken in the summer of 1971, when bin Laden and his family were visiting Oxford, and it is one of several that have recently emerged to shed light on the character and past of the Islamic terrorist.

There are just two types of photograph in the bin Laden photograph album as it currently exists: those that portray him as he wants to be seen now, and those that depict an earlier man and boy, images over which he has no control. Both are peculiarly revealing about the nature of the world’s most wanted man.

The Oxford photographs were discovered in an old album by the Spanish woman who, as a teenage tourist, punted and picnicked in the University Parks with the three bin Laden boys three decades ago. Osama, the youngest of the three, was very different, she noted. While his brothers were into pop music and clothes, he was well-mannered, old for his age, and peculiarly anxious to talk about his mother, whom he described as a “concubine”. “He told us that his mother was very beautiful and that this was why she caught the attention of his father,” she recalled. “He complimented my friend saying she was as beautiful as his mother.” He made much of the fact that his brothers all had different mothers, and that his own was “not a wife of the Koran”.

Was this evidence of some kind of maternal hang-up, a sense of inadequacy about her status and his compared to the other wives and children? Or was it merely the chat-up line of a gauche teenager trying to impress the foreign chicks? If so, it didn’t work. Alongside the photograph, the Spanish girl wrote that the 14-year-old had a “maternal-platonic” relationship with her friend, which would tend to suggest that while at least one of his brothers got a snog with a Spanish girl, Osama didn’t.

The same summer, bin Laden was pictured on holiday with 21 of his siblings in Sweden, posing alongside a Cadillac — which The Mail on Sunday felt obliged to colour pink, in obedience to the precise iconography.

These are the only known images of the man before he joined the Afghan Mujahidin, and while they cannot tell us why he turned into a killer, they explain something crucial about the revolution he thinks he is mounting.

Bin Laden is often described as a throwback to the Middle Ages, a pure representative of some ancient primitive religious tribalism. This is the image of Islamic purity intended to be conveyed by the “official” photographs of bin Laden, in turban and flowing robes, toting Kalashnikov, with greying beard and thousand-mile stare. Kneeling in his cave, wagging his finger at the camera, flanked by gunmen masked with the kefiyeh, or draped in white at his son’s wedding, he is meant to seem a figure from deepest history, the soldier mumbling his call to arms in the manner of the mullah. Which is why the sudden appearance of the Sesame Street character Bert at his right shoulder in propaganda posters seems so bizarre, and refreshingly ridiculous.

What the earlier photographs demonstrate, however, is just how modern and Westernised bin Laden was and is. Like most revolutionaries, from Marx to Hitler to Gandhi, he is rebelling not against a foreign, alien culture, but against a world that he knows very well indeed, the wealthy, materialist, Americanised, secular nature of his upbringing.

He is in revolt against part of himself. The man now waging war with the West has seen the architectural glories of Oxford and punted the Cherwell, worn flares, leant on Cadillacs and flirted with pretty Western girls. He speaks our language, actually and metaphorically, for he knows our world far better than most of us understand the one he now inhabits. This means he knows how to hurt us. Only one who had seen Western films and absorbed American culture could stage the Hollywood spectacular of September 11.

Bin Laden rages against the presence of foreign troops on holy Saudi Arabian soil, but, as the photographs show, part of his own personality and past is colonised by the West. It is this part he has renounced, this part he is fighting, but it is part of him still.

As bin Laden spilt his poison into the microphone last week, like some deranged karaoke singer, the eye was immediately drawn to his wristwatch. This was not just any watch, but a Timex Ironman Triathlon, just the sort of sporty designer status symbol favoured by the New York traders whose world centre bin Laden has just destroyed.

Bin Laden would like to be imagined by his supporters as a figure of instant legend emerging from the Islamic desert, but the watch gives him away. Behind the pure warrior-priest is a spoilt little rich boy scraping a key down Daddy’s Cadillac, who still likes expensive toys and wants to be on television, who tried and failed to get off with a Spanish girl in the Oxford Parks and feels weird and defensive about his mother’s “concubinage”.

Having seen the gawkiness of the boy bin Laden and the pretentious wristwatch of the man, we know a little better what makes bin Laden tick: no longer is he just a bearded bogeyman, every additional image makes him a little more human, a little more frail, and a little more beatable.

It's not 100% determinative, but there's a lot of truth in the saying "You can survive a bad father - but nobody survives a bad mother!" Look at X42, if you dare...

I consider both of them (X42 and OBL) to be cut from the same cloth.

How in the world could Osama's daddy determine O's mother was beautiful through all the layers of clothes, or do concubines get to wear less?

Where is the birth mother now?

His mother is Syrian whose current whereabouts are unknown. It has been reported that an intelligence agency intercepted a cell phone call from bin Laden to his mother on Sep. 9. He supposedly told her to go into hiding.

The woman he called was his step-mother, one of his father's wives. She is the one who raised him, not his birth mother. I would assume she was given Osama because she could not bear him a son, only daughters (just guessing).

I wonder where his actual birth mother is.

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