The British Library recently balked at acquiring an archive of Taliban documents, fearing that researchers might be tempted to rehearse terrorist outrages. American universities have fewer scruples. In 2002 US special forces scooped up a cache of 1,500 cassette tapes from a house in Kandahar that Osama bin Laden had occupied. The damp and dusty archive – a mind-numbing repository of rants, anthems and theological diatribes, with conspiratorial mutterings and sessions of military roistering mixed in – was vetted by the FBI and then released to CNN, which soon passed it on to Williams College in Massachusetts; later it was consigned to Yale. As the tapes bounced between institutions, no one seems to have bothered to listen to them. Now, selectively transcribed and interpreted by the linguistic anthropologist Flagg Miller, they allow us to eavesdrop on Bin Laden during the 1990s as he rallied his followers, first to upbraid Islamic renegades in Saudi Arabia, then to prepare an assault on infidel America.
The result, oddly, is to leave al-Qaida’s evil genius looking less demonic than he seemed in the aftermath of 9/11. Bin Laden worked hard to mythologise himself. He posed as an ascetic Bedouin, an abstemious desert-dweller who only allowed his children to smile if they didn’t bare their teeth while doing so; he cultivated a ravenous appearance that he hoped would terrorise the pampered, over-fed Christian enemy. In Flagg Miller’s book, however, he turns out to be not unlike Jeb or George W Bush: he was a child of privilege, the son of a millionaire who owed his fortune to business deals with American oil companies in the Gulf. He even has a likeness to the egregious Donald Trump, since he possessed a “lust for screen time” that angered his more covert colleagues.
Related: 10 things we learned from the Osama bin Laden report
He raged against American apples, yet he treated himself to desert boots custom-made in Mayfair
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