America's most wanted fugitive is wearing flares and a skinny-rib jumper, and smiling broadly, craning his neck so the camera will not miss him in a 1971 family photo. Judging by his smile, and those of his 21 brothers and sisters, he grasps the absurdity of the situation. An improbably large group of fashionable Saudi siblings, sitting on a gas-guzzling American car in the middle of a faded mining town in central Sweden on a bright day in 1971. The photographer from the local daily would hardly have been doing his job had he not requested a group shot.
Osama bin Laden and his older brother Salem had first visited Falun the year before, arriving in Copenhagen in a private jet carrying a Rolls-Royce, in which they completed their journey. They were millionaires by then, but they stayed at the cut-price Astoria Hotel, where the owner, Christina Akerblad, recalled them spending the days out "on business" and the evenings eating dinner in their rooms.
"I remember them as two beautiful boys - the girls in Falun were very fond of them," she said. "Osama played with my two sons, Anders and Gerk, who were seven and five." They kept themselves to themselves. They bought silk shirts. They provided excitement for bored policeman who thought they might be drug dealers. They liked it so much they came back the next year, with brothers and sisters in tow. The biggest alleged murderer in modern peacetime history was 14.
Afterwards, they might have shopped for souvenirs, or tried to book a table for 20 in the Grand Hotel restaurant opposite the Astoria. But we don't know that, or very much else. There have been countless accounts of bin Laden's life, but there is precious little information about his early years. The handful of interviews he has given to Western journalists are endlessly quoted, sources citing sources citing yet more sources in interminable spirals of cross-reference.
A US state department factsheet released in 1997 makes no mention of his childhood. These gaps have been useful to bin Laden, an inveterate self-mythologiser, and they are helpful to the West's portrayal of him as a worthy opponent in war. But they are an obstacle to understanding. Like the FBI's photo of the adult bin Laden - smiling sweetly, apparently incapable of a minor act of malice - the Swedish shot stands decontextualised, invested with a retrospective meaning that the creased slacks and big collars can hardly bear. This is what we do know. Osama bin Muhammad bin Awad bin Laden was born in Saudi Arabia in 1957. His father, Muhammad bin Laden, had 20 sons at the time; eventually he would have 52 children by four wives. His mother - the fourth - was from Syria, and perhaps the style-consciousness evident in the Falun photo came from her. But there are reasons to believe it was his father who exerted the greatest influence on the future course of Osama's life.
Muhammad bin Laden was an outsider to the wealthy upper echelons of Saudi society: he was neither wealthy nor a Saudi. He came from Yemen, one of a stream of merchants and money-changers who migrated north as Saudi independence loomed. Starting out as a bricklayer for the Arabian-American Oil Company, he earned a little under 21 US cents a day. But within years he was self-employed, undertaking minor building work while fervently practising his religion and learning how to network with the royal house of Saud.
Both activities were to prove fruitful. Eventually, the bin Laden construction firm found itself with lucrative contracts for Saud palaces and the Medina-to-Jeddah highway, as well as the renovation and maintenance of the mosques at Mecca and Medina.
The foundations of the Bin Laden Group - and the family fortune of $5 billion - had been laid. By the time Osama was growing up, the bin Ladens were very rich. It was now that they began to develop the close US contacts, according to political scientist John Cooley, which the CIA would later exploit to fund the jihad against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. (Salem, for his part, would become a partner in the young George W Bush's failed oil firm.) We know more about Muhammad's personality than we do about his son - thanks, primarily, to a document provided to producers from the ABC series Frontline in 1998. It comes, they say, from "a source close to bin Laden who would like to remain anonymous", and it offers unprecedented, if awkwardly phrased insights into the world in which Osama grew up.
"The father had very dominating personality. He insisted to keep all his children in one premises," it reads. "He had a tough discipline and all the children observed a strict religious and social code. He maintained a special daily programme and obliged his children to follow." But it was not all unremitting devotion. "At the same time, the father was entertaining, with trips to the sea and desert," the document goes on. "He dealt with his children as big men and demanded them to show confidence at young age." Yet of the young Osama there is almost nothing. Repeatedly, Saudi sources are cited describing him as "normal", "unexceptional", "quiet", "intense". Three years ago, the staff of one American magazine clearly struggled to dream up a subhead for the section of a bin Laden profile dealing with his youth, but ended up inadvertently crystallising the state of our knowledge in six words. They were: "Ordinary young man - then joined jihad." Then, abruptly, in 1966 - or 1968, according to some accounts - Muhammad bin Laden died when the aircraft he was piloting crashed. Osama inherited $80 million. He has briefly mentioned that he sees himself as carrying on "the devotion of my father", but is quick to divert the conversation to aggressive anti-Americanism and putrid anti-Semitism. ("Due to its subordination to the Jews, the arrogance and haughtiness of the US regime has reached to the extent that they occupied the qibla [the direction of Mecca] of the Muslims," he told CNN.) With the downing of Muhammad's aircraft, Osama seems to vanish. He attends schools in Jeddah and, at 19, enrols on a civil engineering course, but accounts are sketchy.
One contemporary, quoted in the Mideast Mirror, remembers "a heavy drinker who often ended up embroiled in shouting matches and fistfights with other young men over an attractive nightclub dancer or barmaid". It is an incongruous image.
When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, a more recognisable bin Laden began to emerge. Journalists in the field, such as the New Yorker's Mary Ann Weaver, started to hear about a mysterious "Saudi prince" who would arrive unannounced at Arab military hospitals to dispense food, kind words, and cheques - and another who "arrived in an unmarked military transport plane, and brought in bulldozers and other pieces of heavy equipment, which he deployed to design and construct defensive tunnels and storage depots ". Both were bin Laden.
His sudden politicisation remains a mystery. "I was enraged, and went there at once," he told British journalist Robert Fisk in 1996. "When the holy war called, thousands of young men from the Arab peninsula answered the call, and they came from wealthy backgrounds," he told John Miller of ABC. It hardly constitutes an explanation, but it is the only explanation he has given. The few who have interviewed him have not probed the subject further - partly, in Miller's and other cases, because they were banned from having the conversation simultaneously translated, so could not ask follow-up questions. By the time he returned to Saudi Arabia in 1989 - he would be expelled two years afterwards, for attacking the government as insufficiently Islamic - he was on the way to becoming the leading financier of fringe Islamic terrorism.
Perhaps, somewhere in the Afghan mountains, he had hesitated on the edge of a rubicon, with the Swedish town of Fulan on one side and the ruins of the World Trade Centre on the other. But by the time he got back to Jeddah, he had crossed it.