THE PRINCIPAL at the school in Lebanon where Mohamed had sent many of his sons called nine of the boys into his office after he received the news. “You have to be practical and logical,” he recalled telling them. “All people die.” He flew with three of the older boys—Hassan, Yeslam, and Mahrouz—to Jeddah. Their half-brother Ali, the eldest of Mohamed’s sons then living in the kingdom, met them at the airport with a car and driver. In concert with Saudi tradition, their father had been buried quickly in an unmarked grave; the family chose Jeddah’s most prestigious site, where religious pilgrims had once worshipped the tomb attributed to the biblical Eve. Days of mourning followed. Family, employees, Jeddah merchants, and princes enveloped the boys at the Bin Laden compound. Islamic and Hejazi rituals of death and remembrance, so often required in harsh Arabia, emphasized the comforts of crowds. Each evening between the sunset prayer and the final daily prayer, the Bin Laden men gathered to receive long lines of sympathetic visitors. (Mohamed’s daughters and wives received visitors separately during the afternoon.) This grieving assembly offered a rare public display of family unity. Rhythmic chanting of Koran readers rang out in the humid night air.1
It took Salem a few days to reach Jeddah from London. After boarding school he had moved into a flat in Gloucester Place, north of Marble Arch. He had enrolled in a local college, but the friends who visited him found him less than devoted to his studies. His apartment was often filled with young men in black leather jackets, cigarette smoke, and the occasional amateur strains of Salem’s guitar.2
He boarded a commercial flight to Jeddah wearing jeans and a T-shirt, his hair falling toward his shoulders. When he stepped off the plane, his locks were shorn and he wore a white Saudi thobe and headdress. He was a little older than twenty-one, suddenly and unexpectedly heir to the largest construction firm in the kingdom. He knew little of engineering and had only a passing acquaintance with King Faisal. He had not even met all his half-brothers and half-sisters; some were introduced to him for the first time at his father’s funeral.3
Mohamed’s sudden death raised immediate fears that the Bin Laden business empire would collapse. The primary concern was that Mohamed’s many young sons and surviving brother might prove unable to forge an orderly succession. A cable to Washington dispatched by American ambassador Hermann Eilts on the day after Mohamed’s death summed up Jeddah’s anxiety:
Death of Mohammed Bin Laden, sole proprietor of largest construction company in Saudi Arabia, has caused immediate concern in both SAG [Saudi Arabian government] and local business circles. Under Islamic lawn [sic] assets could conceivably be divided among Bin Laden’s 40 [sic] sons, move which could destroy organization. However, as Saudi contractor displaying enough energy to handle major public works, Bin Laden was well established as SAG avorite [sic]: King, Finance Minister, and others aware of importance organization to Saudi economy, and reported determined it shall somehow continue.4
Eilts thought he saw an opportunity: a merger between the Bin Laden organization and a major American construction company:
One suggestion emerging in private discussions is possibility SAG will seek qualified foreign firm to provide management team to run organization. Company, which is financially sound, normally employs between 4 and 5 thousand workers… As Bin Laden operated enterprise single-handedly (to the extent even of signing all checks), need is for team not only experienced in construction operations but also competent create and impose new administrative structure. In embassy’s view, this could be excellent opportunity for American firm.5
The ambassador suggested that Morrison-Knudsen, an American construction giant that was already working with Bin Laden on a bid to build a military cantonment near the Yemen border, might be an excellent candidate. The Americans might have to move promptly, however, as Bin Laden’s technical staff was dominated by Italians and this “may encourage preference for Italian management unless other proposals advanced promptly.”6
Mohamed Bin Laden had left twenty-five sons. (The youngest, Mohamed bin Mohamed, was born after his death and was named in remembrance.) The potential for disarray or conflict was considerable.
Abdullah, his only surviving brother, no longer had any share in the company and no longer even lived in Saudi Arabia, having moved back to the Hadhramawt with his family seven years earlier. However, harassed by rival militias engaged in Yemen’s deepening civil war, he returned to Saudi Arabia not long after Mohamed’s death. The Moscow-backed government of South Yemen later confiscated his house, and Abdullah never returned—a bitter end to his nostalgic homecoming. Abdullah now had his own sons and investments to look after. He had no formal claim to leadership in the company he had founded with Mohamed thirty-six years before.
Salem and Ali were the only two sons of Mohamed who had reached adulthood. But while Ali had helped oversee some of his father’s road-building operations, he was far from qualified to manage the entire enterprise. Salem had been groomed for leadership by his father, but he had even less business training.
Islamic inheritance law, derived from passages in the Koran, is quite specific: It establishes conditional classes of heirs and lays out the exact percentages of the estate each class shall receive; these entitlements are seen as God’s mandate and cannot be altered by a will. One Koranic principle is that sons receive twice as much as daughters. Some Westerners might regard the system as unfair or inflexible, but it has girded social cohesion and family unity in the Muslim world for centuries by removing the whim and intrigue of inheritance that often sunders families in other cultures. A wealthy Muslim man has no way to disinherit sons he does not favor; he may therefore be more inclined to encourage cooperation among his children. There is also no way to change the allocations from an estate by writing a last-minute will and testament. Written wills are permitted but only to designate up to one-third of the writer’s estate for charities or other beneficiaries. There are many detailed provisions of this kind; as with prayer and the annual calendar of faith, it is an area of Islam rich with rule making and nuanced interpretation.7
Mohamed Bin Laden had a will written on his behalf before his death, according to the account of a Saudi researcher, Adel Toraifi, who said he had read a copy of the document. It was reported to be about eleven or twelve pages, by his account, and was primarily devoted to issues involving Mohamed’s religious trust, or waqf. It also reportedly contained instructions on how his heirs should carry on with his charitable construction and public works in Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem, such as those he announced in his Jerusalem speech in 1964.8
The principal asset of Mohamed’s estate, however, was the Mohamed Bin Laden Organization itself, the family company in which Mohamed was the sole shareholder. Under Islamic law, his heirs automatically received fixed percentages. His four wives at the time of his death split one-eighth of the shares. (Former wives had no entitlement to inheritance; their children were expected to take care of them.) Nearly all the remaining shares were divided on a two-to-one basis among Mohamed’s twenty-five sons and twenty-nine daughters. Each son, including Osama, inherited 2.27 percent of the company’s shares, and each daughter received just over 1 percent, according to documents later filed in an American divorce case. In rough terms, then, Mohamed’s sons wound up sharing ownership of just over 50 percent of the company; his daughters shared ownership of just under 30 percent; and his widows owned most of the rest. There is no evidence that any of these heirs received large cash distributions at the time of Mohamed’s death; it is unlikely that he kept much of his wealth in bank accounts, and even less likely that he invested in securities. His heirs would have received his houses and his land and his cars, which they seem to have managed largely as communal holdings. Salem and Ali soon went on the company’s payroll, but the great majority of his other children had not yet reached adulthood, and it would be Salem, as eldest son and head of the family, overseen by the company’s board of trustees, who would determine the siblings’ stipends.9
There is no known record of the size of Mohamed’s estate at this time, nor would it have been easy to craft an estimate that would pass muster with Western accountants. Michael Pochna, an American investment banker who became a business partner of the Bin Ladens during the mid-1970s, said family members told him the estate was worth about $150 million at the time of Mohamed’s death. Gerald Auerbach, the pilot who worked with Mohamed in his last years, said he was told the Saudi government owed the Bin Laden company more than $100 million when Mohamed died. These appear to be reliable indicators of the estate’s approximate size, but unlike a fortune invested in stocks or bonds or actively traded real estate, Mohamed’s holdings could not be easily valued. He owned a great deal of Saudi land, some of which had been given to him as payment for past contracts, but the true worth of these tracts would have been difficult to determine. His company had some hard assets, mainly tractors and bulldozers and the like, but the firm’s value at the time of his death was inseparable from the massive government contracts it had recently been awarded, particularly the road from Jeddah to the Yemen border and related defense work. If the company failed to finish these projects profitably, its finances might decline. More broadly, Bin Laden’s fortune depended almost entirely on the patronage of the Al-Saud royal family; if this support disappeared, so would most of his firm’s income.10
The king called in some of the older Bin Laden sons and told them, “I am going to be your father now.”11 Saudi Arabia was in the midst of an undeclared war, and the Mohamed Bin Laden Organization was an important part of the kingdom’s defense capability. Faisal pledged to appoint several trustees to operate the family firm. This would guarantee the company’s continued access to government contracts, and it would also assure Faisal that work on his crucial infrastructure projects in Asir would proceed.
Faisal issued a Royal Ordinance in mid-September announcing these new arrangements. Bin Laden’s fortune “was mostly in equipment and in knowing that he could get the job done, because he had the equipment there, and he had the engineers,” recalled Faisal’s son Turki. The trust Faisal established would ensure “that the companies did not dissolve or go bankrupt or something, until they grew up and started taking over.” The length of this interregnum was not spelled out; the decision to hand the company back to the family would be made by Faisal, or his successor, when the time seemed right.12
The American government continued to try to convert Bin Laden’s death into a business opportunity for a U.S. company. The Commerce Department in Washington contacted major construction firms. A vice president of Brown and Root arranged to fly to Jeddah to open negotiations about a possible merger with the Bin Laden group, but the embassy waved him off, reporting that the “legal situation [is] not completely settled.” Still, the State Department remained alert: Bin Laden had run his company “in an entirely personal and centralized manner. The management vacuum created by his death may make it necessary for the heirs to bring in foreign management in order to keep the company going.”13
King Faisal asked Anwar Ali, the Pakistani-born governor of the kingdom’s central bank, to provide financial and management advice to the Bin Laden trustees, a relationship that guaranteed that the company would not falter for lack of government funds. The king also designated Mohamed Bahareth, a Jeddah businessman who operated mainly in the food industry, as the company’s leading trustee; Bahareth was a cousin of Salem’s mother, Fatima Ahmed Bahareth. His appointment ensured the primacy of the Bahareth cluster within the larger family clan, led by the matriarch, Fatima, a senior widow of Mohamed, and her three sons, Salem, Bakr, and Ghalib.14
AS A PIPE-SMOKING erstwhile rock musician in his early twenties, Salem was hardly the prototype of a Saudi authority figure when he returned from London, but he did not lack confidence or ambition. He was appointed, along with his half-brother Ali, to the board of trustees governing the family company, and he was given a title, managing director. From the start, however, he struggled with Ali and chafed at the committee’s authority. “He wanted very much to get back and get control of the trust,” recalled Francis Hunnewell, an American banker who became a partner of Salem’s a few years later.15
In the evenings, at his house in Jeddah, Salem held court for local Bedouin, to entertain grievances and claims as his father had done before him. Some petitioners had complaints involving land. Mohamed had marked the boundaries of his various land grants as best he could, but his decisions sometimes conflicted with grazing rights or other claims by nomads. Salem found himself besieged by Bedouin bearing obscure slips of paper purporting to document their rights. Some of his friends who visited from Lebanon or London watched in amusement and admiration as Salem gradually adapted to the role of Bedouin land judge, listening patiently in his formal desert dress, trying to render decisions in the idealized manner of a fair-minded but strong-willed sheikh. One of his friends recalled that admiring petitioners nicknamed him “The Gate of Justice.” Salem had few pretensions, and he embraced Arabia’s egalitarian rituals, joining his brothers cross-legged on the floor for family meals.16
He tried to take stock of his company’s road building. His father’s shadow hung over everything; the remains of the plane in which he had died were placed on display at one of the company’s Jeddah compounds. Salem was never much for the desert fieldwork and motivational speeches at which his father excelled. He stumbled in his early attempts at deal making. The Bin Laden organization failed to win the bid on a military cantonment in Asir that it had submitted in partnership with Morrison-Knudsen; the Saudi government now seemed uncertain about whether the firm could finish the job on time. The road the company was trying to finish in the United Arab Emirates proceeded slowly. Salem claimed his father’s Hawker jet and flew off to Dubai in the spring of 1968 to inspect the work.17
He made no secret of his love of flying. Faisal, however, perhaps sensing Salem’s impetuousness, decided that he could not abide the loss of another Bin Laden in a plane crash. Around the end of 1968, the king ordered Salem to sell the Hawker and the company’s other propeller planes on the basis that they were too dangerous. The family was grounded, at least when it was in Saudi Arabia; when he was in Europe, Salem sometimes found a way to rent a plane and train as a pilot.18
Salem’s struggle for power with his half-brother Ali deepened. Ali was tall, sensitive, and without a boarding-school education. He would later become a passionate gardener and photographer. He felt entitled to more authority than either the king’s trustees or Salem would permit. Fed up, he asked the trustees to allow him to sell his share of the company and to go his own way. The trustees could not decide what to do, so Ali wrote a letter to King Faisal asking for permission to separate. Faisal granted his request and the trustees worked out a deal in which Ali was paid about $1 million for his holdings, according to the later estimates of family members. (If accurate, and if Ali received full value for his shares, the payment would suggest that the total fair market value of the company at the time was judged to be less than $50 million.) A few years later, Ali moved to Lebanon and then to Paris; he would have nothing to do with the family’s business again. Salem and his full brothers were now firmly in charge.19
Salem married Sheikha Al-Attas, the daughter of a wealthy and prominent Hadhrami family that managed a Dutch-connected bank; the match signaled Salem’s rise into the ranks of Jeddah’s international merchant class. Sheikha was about as tall as Salem, slim and impressive. She had grown up in Indonesia, and she spoke, in addition to Arabic, English, French, and Dutch. Salem struck some of his friends as too young and restless to be a reliable husband, but she was a prestigious woman, and she shared Salem’s taste for European travel and culture.20
Salem sought to prove himself to King Faisal, who would decide his future. They were far from a natural pair—one was young and irreverent, the other aging and cerebral. Whether because he doubted Salem and the viability of succession at the Bin Laden company, or because he was impatient to see his Asir projects finished, Faisal concluded within a year of Mohamed’s death that the Bin Ladens should sell a large minority share of itself to a foreign partner, preferably American.
Anwar Ali, the Saudi central bank governor, led these negotiations. He made it clear that a sale would enjoy the king’s favor. Ali felt the “management vacancy” left by Mohamed Bin Laden made such a merger imperative, even though it would change the character of the company. Increasingly, the kingdom turned to foreign contractors for major public works, partly to ensure higher quality materials and engineering; in that respect, a merger would help to draw the Bin Laden firm into the kingdom’s modernization drive. Anwar Ali and the company trustees held discussions with German, Italian, and Dutch construction companies, but their principal target was the American consortium Morrison-Knudsen, for whom the Bin Ladens acted as agents in Saudi Arabia.21
Early in 1970, Anwar Ali proposed a joint venture, in which the Bin Ladens would hold 60 percent and the American company 40 percent. Morrison-Knudsen would contribute cash—half of which, more than $2 million, would be lent by the Saudi central bank. Ali flew to the United States to meet with Morrison-Knudsen executives, and he dangled a prospective contract to build a new airport in Jeddah, which would become one of the largest construction deals ever handed out to a foreign firm. But the parties bickered over how to divide responsibility in the new venture.22
Morrison-Knudsen proposed taking majority control of the Bin Laden company, but Ali told State Department officials this would be a “difficult ownership set-up to sell” to Faisal and the royal family, as there was “opposition to joint enterprises with majority foreign ownership.” The American embassy in Jeddah, anxious to beat out European companies, wrung its hands over Morrison-Knudsen’s reservations. Twenty years earlier, Bechtel had walked away from similar royal family entreaties, clearing the way for Mohamed Bin Laden’s rise. Now another American construction giant was threatening to walk away from a chance to buy into the position Bin Laden had established as the kingdom’s leading contractor. Yet despite Faisal’s interest in the deal, Morrison-Knudsen executives felt “uneasiness over the capability to do business with somewhat unorthodox Ben Ladin organization,” as one American dispatch put it.23
Hermann Eilts, the U.S. ambassador in Jeddah during the early stages of these negotiations, recalled that the American executives were put off “first of all” by the “disarray that was in the family,” and the unwieldy system of management by its board of trustees. In addition, Eilts said, Morrison-Knudsen “was asked by some members of the Bin Laden family for bribes” to secure their agreement to a merger. “Now, it’s not that Morrison-Knudsen hadn’t been accustomed to that sort of thing,” but in the circumstances, it helped tip their decision.24
Ultimately, the merger talks failed. The Bin Laden sons would have no foreign partner to ensure the viability of the company they had inherited; they were on their own.
Increasingly they seemed determined to go their separate ways. Tareq Bin Laden, a half-brother with whom Salem was particularly close, formed his own construction company and advertised in the international business press in 1970. To prove that he could handle sizable contracting jobs and perform on time, Salem and six of his brothers and half-brothers formed a separate company, Bin Laden Brothers for Contracting and Industry, two years later. The worried forecasts that had immediately followed Mohamed’s death still seemed plausible: his business empire was splitting gradually because of the centrifugal ambitions of his many sons.25
EUROPE, Lebanon, and Jeddah were the three main venues of Bin Laden family life during the early 1970s. Mohamed’s fifty-four children ranged in age from toddlers to young adults; the majority were teenagers. In many cases, they were just getting to know one another. Salem increasingly asserted himself as the family’s new patriarch; it was he who handed out allowances, made decisions about schooling, and organized family gatherings and vacations.
In Jeddah there were three centers of family activity—the offices of Mohamed’s old company, the new downtown offices of Bin Laden Brothers for Contracting and Industry, and the suburban housing compound at Kilo 7, on the Mecca Road, where Mohamed’s widows and other family members lived. Salem moved among all these places, holding court with employees, brothers, and sisters, and paying respectful calls upon his mother on Fridays when he was in town. The minarets of a family mosque, constructed as an act of religious charity by Mohamed, loomed above the compound’s flat-roofed houses. Nearby were the whitewashed, walled enclaves of Mohamed’s other wives and some former wives; the women shared their homes with whichever of their sons and daughters were not away at school. The widows were generally relaxed in one another’s company. “What surprised me,” recalled Carmen Bin Laden, who came to live with them during the mid-1970s, “was that they were all very close to each other…I thought, there will be rivalries, they will not talk to each other.” Instead, they treated one another as sisters.26
On the outskirts of Jeddah sprawled the larger compounds of their father’s old company, with its vast yards of Caterpillar equipment and its ranks of Arab and European engineers and accountants. The trustees mainly ran the firm with the help of the executives and technicians who had been in place when the father died. The boys had relatively little to do with it in these years.27
Many of the Bin Laden boys, and some of the girls, still attended boarding school outside of Saudi Arabia. At some point after Mohamed’s death, after Faisal began to oversee the children’s educations, a large number of Bin Laden boys were enrolled in the elite Brummana High School in a Christian resort town nestled in the hills north of Beirut. Lebanon, then untouched by civil war, was the most sophisticated, modern country in the Arab world, religiously diverse and heavily influenced by Europe. Brummana had about seven hundred students. It accommodated primary school children as well as teenagers preparing for college. European Quaker missionaries founded the school during the early 1870s, and its main buildings, made from local stone and red tile, dated from that period. The school admitted girls from its beginning, and in 1902 it became one of the Arab world’s few fully integrated coeducational schools. It later found patronage from the British royal family; the Duke of Edinburgh inaugurated a new dormitory in 1967. New science labs and a health center opened a few years later. The curriculum was mainly in English; students included members of the Saudi and Jordanian royal families, but also European teenagers whose families worked in Lebanon. There was an active athletics program and a particular emphasis on volleyball and basketball, which suited two of the taller Bin Laden boys then in attendance, Saleh and Khalil.
Their volleyball coach, Joe Ashkar, a Lebanese Christian, opened a music shop down the street from the school. The Bin Ladens “liked what we called ‘underground music,’” he remembered. “The Beatles, Chicago, Jimi Hendrix, Mick Jagger.” They listened, too, to mournful Arabic pop music about separation and longing. Sometimes they drove down to Beirut and went to the movies—“Elvis, Bruce Lee. No Arabic movies.” They dated European girls. One of the brothers, Khaled, who lived in Egypt, married a young Danish woman during this period. Saleh ended up in a long relationship with an English girl who boarded at Brummana, but his conservative Syrian mother would not allow him to marry her; only a local girl would do.28
The boys were attracted to fashionable clothes, cars, and airplanes. Bakr, Salem’s full brother, kept a prized Oldsmobile in Beirut. Salem hired friends to fly to Europe and drive more new cars back to Lebanon or Saudi Arabia. “They wore really wide bell-bottoms,” remembered Saleh’s girlfriend, Shirley Bowman. “They were just outlandish. They did it to provoke comment, really. They all had Afro-style frizzy hair, which they grew very long. Shirts open to the belly button. Beirut was the place to be.” For the first time, some of them began to spend lavishly. Saleh bought expensive gifts for Bowman’s mother in England, which upset her father because he couldn’t afford such luxuries. Saleh “never quite understood the etiquette of Europeans,” she said. Still, “he had a really good heart, and he would do anything for anybody.”29
Authority in the Bin Laden family seemed diffuse. “The family dynasty hadn’t really evolved,” Bowman said. “It was the older boys who were dictating everything and keeping an eye on the sisters. Some of the sisters were allowed to study abroad, some weren’t.” Saleh, for his part, “was very proud of his sisters. They were all gorgeous, really. They spent thousands on clothes.”30
Salem organized family travel to England and Sweden. He had already taken freewheeling road trips to Sweden with boarding-school friends, and he seemed drawn to Scandinavia. In September 1971, Salem organized a family trip to Falun, Sweden. “Arab Celebrity Visit” was the headline in the local newspaper:
Salem Bin Laden visited Falun on a combined business and pleasure trip through Europe. He was accompanied by twenty-two members of his family…He has visited the Club Ophelia in Falun. The young sheikh is reportedly a big fan of discos and has visited the discos of Falun at various times in the past.31
“They were so elegantly dressed,” recalled Christina Akerblad, who ran the modest hotel where the family stayed. “We saw they used the extra bed in their rooms to lay out their clothes. They had lots of white silk shirts packaged in cellophane.”32
A photographer persuaded twenty-one members of the family to pose together, leaning against a wide-finned American sedan. The boys wore colorful bell-bottoms, low-slung belts, and brightly patterned shirts. Eleven girls or young women appeared in the picture; they looked to be in their teens or early twenties. They all wore pants, not skirts, but only one of the girls covered her hair. They laughed joyously.
Years later, one of the boys in the photograph, the second from the right, would be routinely identified in media accounts as Osama Bin Laden. There is certainly a resemblance, but Bin Laden family members said emphatically that this was a case of mistaken identity—Osama did not travel to Sweden with the group and was not in the picture. The family’s testimony seems convincing, as it comes from varied sources, including some, such as Carmen Bin Laden, who have been adversaries of the family.
In any event, by the early 1970s, Osama’s education had begun to take a very different course from that of most of his brothers and sisters. It was increasingly difficult to imagine him in bell-bottoms.
OSAMA BIN LADEN’S MOTHER, Alia Ghanem, was about fifteen at the time of his birth. Mohamed Bin Laden divorced her soon afterward, probably before she was eighteen. The boy was her only child at the time. Naturally, they clung to each other during this period of change. Later, as a teenager, Osama “would lie at her feet and caress her,” said Khaled Batarfi, a neighbor and friend of Osama’s. He “wouldn’t sleep if he knew she was upset about something.”1
Alia was handed off from one husband to another; Mohamed arranged for her to remarry a midlevel administrator who worked at his company. This was Mohamed Al-Attas, from the prestigious family of Hadhrami descendants of the Prophet Mohamed. By the account of Batarfi, who knew him well in later years, Al-Attas was a gentle man, and he became a reliable husband and father; he and Alia eventually had four other children and incorporated Osama into a conventional Saudi household. The evidence about Osama’s earliest years is thin, yet surely the inauguration of Alia’s second marriage must have been a time of some uncertainty. Alia and Osama moved out of the bustling Bin Laden family compound in Jeddah, with its many wives and factions and servants, and into a more modest household with her new husband. Osama’s place in this new suburban home was unusual. In one respect, he was the odd boy out, the only child of an absent father, a conspicuous stepbrother. Yet as Mohamed Bin Laden’s male heir, Osama was the sole source of his new family’s wealth and access to Bin Laden family privileges. The emotional complexity of his position as a young boy who was both excluded and essential, marginalized and powerful, can be readily imagined, but the truth of it is unavailable and the subject lies entirely in the realm of conjecture.
Alia remembered Osama as “a shy kid, very nice, very considerate. He has been always helpful. I tried to instill in him the fear and love of God, the respect and love for his family, neighbors and teachers.” All the available testimony about Osama’s early childhood emphasizes his shyness and placidity. Each summer, beginning in the late 1950s and continuing into the early 1970s, Alia and Osama, later accompanied by Osama’s three stepbrothers and stepsister, traveled from Jeddah to Alia’s hometown of Latakia, on the Mediterranean coast, where they stayed with Alia’s family. Relatives there remembered Osama as calm and extremely quiet, to the point of timidity. He preferred to be alone, was not particularly social with his cousins, and had trouble communicating at times. Still, he was not a cause of trouble, and he did not shutter himself inside, by their account; they recalled that he particularly enjoyed swimming, hunting, and horseback riding.2
The Ghanem family could barely make ends meet; this may have been the reason they turned young Alia over to Mohamed Bin Laden in the first place. One section of the family cultivated fruit trees in a nearby village under a grant from the Syrian government. “If there was no agricultural reform,” which provided them with this subsistence orchard, “we wouldn’t have had anything,” Hosam Aldin Ghanem said years later. By comparison, Osama’s stepfather in Jeddah enjoyed a decent salary, and Osama may have received occasional gifts and allowances from Mohamed during his boyhood. Yet he was not so wealthy that his mother could shower her Syrian relatives with money. As the years passed and his own financial circumstances improved, Osama could seem oblivious to the economic differences between himself and his mother’s less prosperous Syrian relations. There was a little island in a small lake near Latakia that Osama used to visit with his cousins. “I used to love it a lot,” one of them, Soliman Ghanem, recalled. “He asked me if he could buy it to live there.”3
Mohamed Bin Laden was a distant figure during Osama’s boyhood but apparently an inspirational one. Most of the reliable evidence about Osama’s relations with his father’s side of the family dates to the period after his father’s death, but the information available suggests that Osama was always a fully recognized member of the brood of sons that Mohamed periodically called together for inspection and religious instruction. Osama himself has spoken of knowing his father as a boy, of reciting poetry to him, of joining his work sites, and of being uplifted by his example. “He considered him as a model,” said Osama’s college-era friend Jamal Khalifa. “He was not with his father much” but he “heard a lot” about him. In particular, Osama absorbed the idea that his father “was not a person who sits down behind the desk and gives orders.” Rather, Mohamed Bin Laden worked with his own hands in the desert, offering direct leadership to his ethnically diverse employees. This, of course, would become Osama’s style of leadership as well.4
There is virtually no specific evidence available about which of Mohamed’s work sites Osama visited as a young boy or what he saw his father doing there, other than Osama’s own occasional oblique references to the Saudi holy cities and his detailed awareness of his father’s work in Jerusalem. Osama would have been between six and ten years of age when Mohamed was engaged in massive demolition and urban clearance work in Mecca, quite near to Jeddah; it seems virtually certain that Osama would have visited the city at this time, during the Hajj and on other occasions. Particularly after 1965, Mohamed’s other major concentration was Asir, to which he flew back and forth almost every week. His company maintained a large work camp just south of Taif, only a few hours’ drive from Jeddah, as well as other camps around Abha that could be reached only by plane. Even if Osama never saw these sites, with their lava boulders and cragged peaks, where new roads were being hewed by his father’s Yemeni and African workers, he would certainly have known of the breadth and importance of his father’s projects along the southern border. And, of course, like everyone else in his family, Osama learned in 1967, when he was about nine years old, that his father had died in a plane crash in Asir—and that he was killed because of an apparent error by his American pilot.[3]
The evidence available about Osama’s primary-school education is also fragmentary. It seems clear that, as with all his half-brothers, his father ensured that he was enrolled in school steadily. His mother’s truncated statements suggest he probably received Koranic instruction of the sort typically given to young boys in Saudi Arabia. Yet like his half-brothers, he seems from the start to have been in schools influenced by Western curricula and culture; there is certainly no evidence that he was ever educated full time in a religious madrassa.
By the time he reached eighth grade, he was a solid if unspectacular student. He seems likely to have received some of his primary schooling in Syria, probably in connection with his mother’s frequent sojourns in Latakia. His mother remembered him as “not an A student. He would pass exams with average grades. But he was loved and respected by his classmates and neighbors.”5
Around age ten—the same age when a number of his half-brothers had been dispatched to boarding schools in Lebanon and Syria—Osama, too, enrolled briefly as a boarder at Brummana, the elite Quaker school north of Beirut. Five former students and administrators at the school, including the head of Brummana’s primary school, recalled in separate interviews that Osama was enrolled there during the mid-1960s but that he withdrew and went home after less than one year. None recalled, or would say, why his short experiment with living away from home had failed, but it was evidently not because of bad behavior or poor grades. Renee Bazz, who was on the school’s administrative staff, recalled that Osama had attended another primary school in Lebanon before his arrival at Brummana.
Emile Sawaya, the head of Brummana’s primary-school section during the 1960s, remembered that Osama was about ten years old when he arrived, and that several of his half-brothers were already boarders. “He was quiet, calm, and very polite,” Sawaya said. “He was obedient. He worked hard.”6
Osama may have been in Lebanon when his father died. Sawaya recalled that Salem arrived to visit not long after Mohamed’s passing. Sawaya asked another school administrator whether Salem was now the boys’ guardian and was told, “No, it was the king…King Faisal, who was their official guardian.” Salem met with his brothers, Sawaya remembered. “The strange thing was that he didn’t know them—we had to introduce them. When he came into the reception room, they kissed his hands.” The housemaster for the primary school “introduced Osama and his brothers.”7
Osama’s stepbrother, Ahmed Mohamed, recalled visiting Beirut with him when Osama was about twelve. “He used to take us to the movies…Cowboy, karate movies.”8 After he became notorious, rumors circulated that Osama had enjoyed Beirut’s sybaritic nightlife as a teenager, but there is no evidence to support this. These rumors may have conflated Osama’s presence in Lebanon as a boy with the lifestyles of some of his older half-brothers during the early 1970s.
After Osama withdrew from Brummana, he seems to have spent some time, immediately following his father’s death, in his mother’s hometown of Latakia. An English teacher there, Suleiman Al-Kateb, recalled that he was “affected by the death of his father; he was very solitary.” By the following September, he had moved back into his mother’s home in Jeddah. After Mohamed’s passing, “She was all that was there,” Khaled Batarfi recalled. “He was so obedient to her.” Batarfi felt that Osama grew close to his mother “maybe because he wasn’t close to his father.”9
Alia enrolled him in an elite local private school in Jeddah, the Al-Thaghr Model School, which prided itself on its modern curriculum—it was the only school in Saudi Arabia that could even begin to compare itself to a place like Brummana. Osama entered in 1968, about one year after his father’s plane crash, when he was probably in either the fifth or sixth grade. He was on the cusp of puberty, and roiled, presumably, by his father’s loss. He enjoyed a comfortable home and a mild, reliable stepfather, but as Mohamed’s heir, he stood apart from his stepbrothers in his mother’s second household: Osama was, in both a biological and a financial sense, a special case. It seems safe to assume that he was in search of guidance. In any event, the father figure he would soon encounter at Al-Thaghr would change his life.
AL-THAGHR sat on several dozen arid acres lined by eucalyptus trees, whose branches were twisted by winds from the Red Sea. The campus spread north from the Old Mecca Road, near downtown Jeddah. The school’s main building was a two-story rectangle constructed from concrete and fieldstone in a featureless modern style. Inside, hallways connected two wings of classrooms; there was a wing for middle-school students, where Osama began, and another for the high school. Between them was a spacious interior courtyard, and from the second floor, students could lean over balcony railings and shout at their classmates below, or pelt them with wads of paper. Like Osama, most Al-Thaghr students were commuters, but there were a few boarders; they lived on the second floor, as did some of the school’s foreign teachers.10
The Saudi government funded and staffed Al-Thaghr, and during the 1960s and early 1970s, the school had the reputation of a private enclave for the sons of businessmen and the royal family. Mohamed Bin Laden had periodically visited the school during the mid-1960s when it was a site for fundraisers to help found Jeddah’s first university, which became King Abdulaziz University, where Osama later enrolled. Al-Thaghr offered rigorous entrance exams that any Saudi could take, and some working-class students who managed to pass attended the school along with the wealthier boys.11
Al-Thaghr—the name means, roughly, “The Haven”—was founded in the early 1950s in Taif by Faisal, but the school came into its own when he established its large campus in Jeddah, in 1964, and began to fund it annually with several million riyals from the national budget. Faisal’s Turkish father-in-law, Kamal Adham, took an interest in the project and traveled to Britain, where he met with government officials to seek support; he told them that he thought the school should be modeled on the British-influenced Victoria College in Khartoum, Sudan. By the time Osama arrived, Al-Thaghr Model School, as it was formally called, was a showcase for Faisal’s modernization drive, and particularly for his interest in science and Western methods of education. It was the only school in Jeddah with air-conditioning during the 1960s, and it hosted some of the kingdom’s first classroom computers in later years. Students did not wear the national dress of a thobe and cloth headdress, but, rather, a uniform that imitated the styles of English and American prep schools: white button-down shirts with ties, gray slacks, black shoes and socks, and, in the winter months, charcoal blazers.12
Each year’s graduating class numbered about sixty boys. Every morning, the students would assemble in rows for a military-style call to order; on a stool to one side sat a schoolmaster with a cane, ready to discipline boys who misbehaved by beating them on the soles of their bare feet. The school’s curriculum included English-language instruction given by teachers from Ireland and England, and demanding courses in mathematics. At the same time, as with all institutions in Saudi Arabia, Al-Thaghr adhered to Islamic ritual and included religion as an essential aspect of instruction. At midday, students would kneel together for the zuhr, or noon prayer.13
When Osama entered the school, he stood out because he was unusually tall, but he was a reticent personality. He sat by a window in a back corner of the classroom, overlooking the playground. In an intermediate-English class, recalled Brian Fyfield-Shayler, a Briton who taught at the school, “I was trying to push the spoken aspects of the language. To succeed, the student needs to be prepared to make mistakes. They need to make a bit of an exhibition of themselves, and Osama was rather shy and reserved and perhaps a little afraid of making mistakes.” He was also “extraordinarily courteous…more courteous than the average student, probably partly because he was a bit shyer than most of the other students.” Seamus O’Brien, an Irishman who taught English at Al-Thaghr, remembered Osama as “a nice fellow and a good student. There were no problems with him…He was a quiet lad. I suppose silent waters run deep.” Another teacher, Ahmed Badeeb, remembered Osama as “in the middle” academically, an assessment that accords with the account of Osama’s mother.14
Around 1971 or 1972, when Osama was in the eighth or ninth grade, he was invited to join an after-school Islamic study group led by one of Al-Thaghr’s Syrian physical-education teachers, who lived on the second floor above the courtyard. In that period at Saudi high schools and universities, it was common to find Syrian and Egyptian teachers, many of whom had become involved with dissident Islamist political groups in their home countries. Some of these teachers were members of, or were influenced by, the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organization founded in Egypt in 1928 by a schoolteacher, Hassan Al-Banna. The Brotherhood was initially a religious-minded movement opposed to British colonial rule in Egypt; later, its leaders continued their struggle against Nasser. In his approach to the Brotherhood, Nasser alternated between periods of accommodation and brutal crackdowns. Some of the Brotherhood’s organizers were forced into exile, and they began to form new chapters across the Muslim world. Their aim was to replace secular and nationalist Arab leaders with Islamic governments, and they often operated clandestinely. The movement typically recruited its members from elite, well-educated families. Its goals included the imposition throughout Muslim societies of Koranic law and the empowerment of Islamic scholars as cultural arbiters and dispensers of justice. Over the years, the Brotherhood operated both in the open and in secret, through peaceful political campaigning and through support for violence.
King Faisal regarded the Brotherhood with some suspicion; certainly, he and others in the royal family were wary of its penchant for political organizing across national boundaries. Still, in his campaign to outflank Nasser through appeals to Islam, Faisal found the Brotherhood’s exiled teachers a useful resource. He wished to see the Saudi population educated as rapidly as possible, and he had no indigenous teachers to rely upon. Brotherhood-influenced teachers were a significant grouping, particularly among those educators from Syria and Egypt.15
In recruiting candidates for his after-school Islamic study group, the Syrian physical-education teacher at Al-Thaghr appealed to five or six boys, enticing them with promises of extra credit and organized sports. The teacher was “tall, young, in his late twenties, very fit,” recalled a schoolmate of Osama’s who was also a member of the study group. “He had a beard—not a long beard like a mullah, however. He didn’t look like he was religious…He walked like an athlete, upright and confident. He was very popular. He was charismatic. He used humor, but it was planned humor, very reserved. He would plan some jokes to break the ice with us.16
“Some of us were athletes, some of us were not,” the schoolmate recalled of the group’s initial membership, which, besides Bin Laden, included the sons of several prominent Jeddah families. The Syrian “promised that if we stayed we could be part of a sports club, play soccer. I very much wanted to play soccer. So we began to stay after school with him from two o’clock until five. When it began, he explained that at the beginning of the session we would spend a little bit of time indoors at first, memorizing a few verses from the Koran each day, and then we would go play soccer. The idea was that if we memorized a few verses each day before soccer, by the time we finished high school we would have memorized the entire Koran, a special distinction.
“Osama was an honorable student,” the schoolmate remembered. “He kept to himself, but he was honest. If you brought a sandwich to school, people would often steal it as a joke and eat it for themselves if you left it on your desk. This was a common thing. We used to leave our valuables with Osama because he never cheated. He was sober, serious. He didn’t cheat or copy from others, but he didn’t hide his paper, either, if others wanted to look over his shoulder.”
At first, the study group proceeded as the teacher had promised. “We’d sit down, read a few verses of the Koran, translate or discuss how it should be interpreted, and many points of view would be offered. Then he’d send us out to the field. He had the key to the goodies—the lockers where the balls and athletic equipment were kept. But it turned out that the athletic part was just disorganized, an add-on. There was no organized soccer…I ended up playing a lot of one-on-one soccer, which is not very much fun.”
As time passed, the group spent more and more time inside. After about a year, Bin Laden’s schoolmate said, he began to feel trapped and bored, but by then the group had developed a sense of camaraderie, with Bin Laden emerging as one of its committed participants. Gradually, the teenagers stopped memorizing the Koran and began to read and discuss hadiths, interpretive stories of the life of the Prophet Mohamed, of varied provenance, which are normally studied to help illuminate the ideas imparted by the Koran. The after-school study sessions took place in the Syrian gym teacher’s room; he would light a candle on a table in the middle of the room, and the boys, including Osama, would sit on the floor and listen. The stories that the Syrian told were ambiguous as to time and place, the schoolmate recalled, and they were not explicitly set in the time of the Prophet, as are traditional hadiths. Increasingly the Syrian teacher told them “stories that were really violent,” the schoolmate remembered. “It was mesmerizing.”
The schoolmate said he could remember one in particular: It was a story “about a boy who found God—exactly like us, our age. He wanted to please God and he found that his father was standing in his way. The father was pulling the rug out from under him when he went to pray.” The Syrian “told the story slowly, but he was referring to ‘this brave boy’ or ‘this righteous boy’ as he moved toward the story’s climax. He explained that the father had a gun. He went through twenty minutes of the boy’s preparation, step by step—the bullets, loading the gun, making a plan. Finally, the boy shot the father.” As he recounted this climax, the Syrian declared, “Lord be praised—Islam was released in that home.” As the schoolmate recounted it, “I watched the other boys, fourteen-year-old boys, their mouths open. By the grace of God, I said ‘No’ to myself…I had a feeling of anxiety. I began immediately to think of excuses and how I could avoid coming back.”
The next day, he stopped attending. But during the next several years, he watched as Osama and the others in his former group, who continued to study with the gym teacher, openly adopted the styles and convictions of teenage Islamic activists. They let their young beards grow, shortened their trouser legs, and declined to iron their shirts (ostensibly to imitate the style of the Prophet’s dress), and increasingly, they lectured or debated other students at Al-Thaghr about the urgent need to restore pure Islamic law across the Arab world.
By the time of Osama’s high school years, Al-Thaghr had become something of a hotbed of debate, within the limits of Saudi Arabia’s dull political culture, involving Nasser-influenced students who advocated pan-Arab nationalism, and Brotherhood-influenced students who argued for a restoration of Islam in Arab politics. Osama was clearly in the latter camp; he “joined the religious committee” at the school, recalled Ahmed Badeeb. “He was a prominent member,” remembered Khaled Batarfi. “That group was influenced by the Brotherhood. He was influenced by this philosophy.” Batarfi’s account is corroborated by Jamal Khashoggi, who knew Bin Laden during the 1980s; he said Osama “started as a Muslim Brother,” meaning that he was formally recruited into the movement during his adolescent years or soon thereafter.17
The Brotherhood, to which Khashoggi also belonged for a time, “is a membership,” he said. “Usually you will be selected.” Recruits “go through different stages.” Weekly meetings and religious instruction might unfold for two years before a recruit is invited to “more exclusive meetings…And they will say, ‘Do you want to be a part of the Muslim Brotherhood?’ Mostly he will say ‘Yes,’ because he will have felt that it is coming…And he will become part of the movement.” Brotherhood recruiting is often secretive, and its classes of membership have varied over time and from country to country. There is no specific evidence available about when or in what way Osama formally joined, but the Brotherhood normally takes only adults into full membership, so it seems most likely that his schoolyard activism served as a sort of apprenticeship for more formal participation in the movement after he reached university.18
The Brotherhood’s Egyptian roots and emphasis on political activity would have an influence on the course of Osama’s life once he reached adulthood. In high school, however, its precepts were probably difficult to distinguish from the general emphasis on Islamic piety that Faisal promoted in Saudi Arabia as an antidote to Nasserism. Largely because of the Saudi royal family’s repression of political organizing in the kingdom, religious scholars usually tried to avoid overt politics, preferring instead to concentrate on the theological topics of prayer, Islamic rituals, and a Muslim’s private conduct. Bin Laden’s group at Al-Thaghr, Khaled Batarfi said, was influenced to some extent by this emphasis on the search for a truly Islamic life, but it also adopted “a more activist or a political agenda” drawn from the Brotherhood. Saud Al-Faisal, a son of the king who would become foreign minister of Saudi Arabia, complained years later that Islamist teachers from Egypt and Syria had “misused” the hospitality offered them by preaching politics. “We dealt with them honestly, and they dealt with us underhandedly.”19
In June 1973, when Osama was finishing tenth grade, the British ambassador to the kingdom composed a confidential report for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office titled “The Young People of Saudi Arabia.” His findings suggested that Osama’s education, while perhaps more ideological than that of some of his peers, was hardly unusual. The ambassador wrote:
The Royal Family are alive to the dangers to their position that education could represent if modern ideas were allowed to flow so freely in schools…that they challenged traditional beliefs and customs. Thus the study of Islam features very heavily…Prominent families will admit that in choosing to send their children to school abroad, for example to the Lebanon, they are influenced not by any lack of quality in teaching of the best local private schools, but the fact that the syllabus is so taken up with religious instruction and study as not to leave enough time for the children to reach normal proficiency in other subjects.
The report described how teenagers in these local elite schools were taught to understand the place of Saudi Arabia and its holy cities in the wider world:
That God should have endowed his Holy Land with the means to finance it by the accident of oil is seen as a natural part of His plan for a world Islamic revival. Islamic maps in local classrooms show Saudi Arabia at the centre of the world, with two concentric circles drawn around Mecca. The Arab and other Islamic countries are coloured bright green, and countries with Muslim minorities…in gradually paler shades of green. Most other parts of the world are not even named.20
A FEW YEARS AFTER he enrolled at Al-Thaghr, Osama moved with his family into a comfortable new suburban house in the Al-Musharifah neighborhood of Jeddah. At the time it was one of the city’s newest residential areas. The local roads were not asphalted, and patches of open desert wasteland separated the houses, where neighborhood boys played soccer and other games. The ground was slightly elevated, and it was possible on some days to see the Red Sea in the distance. The house Osama shared with his mother and her four other children by Mohamed Al-Attas was spacious but not luxurious—two full stories, with four bedrooms, one of which Osama occupied by himself on the ground floor. As is common in Saudi Arabia, walls and iron railings surrounded the house; it had a garden but no swimming pool.21
Osama was a fan of a professional soccer team in Jeddah, Al-‘Alim, and he played on a boys’ team captained by his neighbor Khaled Batarfi. “He was tall, and so I would put him in front to use his head,” Batarfi remembered. “Sometimes I would put him on defense.” Once, when they were playing in another area, a boy on the opposing team became angry at Bin Laden and seemed as if he was about to hit him. Batarfi pushed the boy out of the way, but Osama told him, as Batarfi recalled it, “I was going to resolve this peacefully.” Batarfi said that years later, he and Osama used to laugh about the incident’s irony—“Osama the peaceful negotiator,” as Batarfi put it.22
After he became immersed in Al-Thaghr’s student Islamic movement, Osama could be a stickler on matters of religious conduct—quiet, usually, but insistent. He prayed five times a day, called other boys to join him, and insisted that they wear long pants on the soccer field, as Saudi religious teachers said was proper. “His younger stepsiblings respected him very much,” Batarfi said. “He was older. He was tough on them on religious issues, on not mixing with girls, on being modest around women. When a female servant came into the room, he would duck his head modestly and not look at her.”23
Batarfi said he and Osama watched television together—soccer games, both Saudi and international, but also American family fare such as Bonanza. Osama was a particular fan of action films and Westerns, especially those with prominent roles for horses. Batarfi recalled that they watched the American television series Fury, which was made between 1955 and 1960, and then was syndicated around the world, usually under the title Brave Stallion. The show was about a troubled orphaned boy named Joey who goes to live on the Broken Wheel Ranch with a man who has lost his own wife and son in an automobile accident. The boy learns to tame wild horses and becomes particularly close to Fury, a black stallion; through this relationship, the wounds of Joey’s earlier life are gradually healed. The sources of appeal in this narrative for Osama are not difficult to imagine; in any event, as he grew up, he became passionate about horses. His father had left a family farm—more of a desert ranch—outside of Jeddah, a place that was shared by his sons and daughters after his death. Osama spent weekends there with half-brothers from his father’s side of the family and learned to ride and handle horses. Later he acquired his own ranch, south of Jeddah, where he ultimately kept as many as twenty horses.24
Many years later, some members of the Bin Laden family, in seeking to distance themselves in public from Osama, emphasized that he had grown up in a separate household and did not have much contact with his half-siblings while he was in high school. It was certainly true that he lived away from the principal family compound with his stepfamily, but he seems to have had at least as much contact with his father’s children as did other similar “singleton” boys without full brothers or sisters. Batarfi remembered that Osama would “visit his Mohamed Bin Laden brothers on weekends and such.” Moreover, some of these half-brothers were enrolled with him at Al-Thaghr; the teacher Fyfield-Shayler re-called that “several” of Osama’s half-brothers were students at the school during various periods when Osama was also there. He seems clearly to have had a sense of himself as one of his father’s heirs and to have harbored ambition to work in the family construction firm; his cousins in Syria and his mother all recall his interest in the company, and one cousin remembers him speaking of his aspirations to leadership there. As Salem gradually established his grip on the family during the early 1970s, Osama was far from isolated.25
It was Salem, in his role as overseer of his siblings’ education, who first brought the family into contact with Pakistan and Afghanistan. Late in 1973, Salem decided to enroll two of his half-sisters at a boarding school in Peshawar, a Pakistani city on the Afghan frontier. At the time, Pakistan and Afghanistan were enjoying periods of relative quietude. The chief engineer at the Mohamed Bin Laden Organization, as it was still called, was a Jordanian whose wife happened to be the daughter of the governor of Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province, of which Peshawar is the capital. Salem flew to Peshawar on a private airplane with his wife, Sheikha, his two school-aged sisters, the Jordanian, and his wife. The local stores were poorly provisioned, and in those days, Kabul, the Afghan capital, was a relatively prosperous town with thriving markets. Salem decided to fly his sisters there to shop for supplies for their school year ahead—pots, pans, dishes, and the like. Once in Kabul, Salem met the Saudi ambassador to Afghanistan and disappeared on business; he sent his sisters into the city’s markets with the American pilot who had flown in with them. Later they all flew back to Peshawar and settled the girls into school. So far as is known, it was the first visit by members of the Bin Laden family to Peshawar. There would be many more.26
THE TENETS OF Osama Bin Laden’s education were inseparable from the national ideology promoted by King Faisal in the late years of his reign. Al-Thaghr was not idly named a “model” school; it was a conspicuous example of Faisal’s program of modernization without secularization. The Muslim Brotherhood’s revolutionary goals made the king uncomfortable because they challenged the authority of the Al-Saud family, yet Faisal’s own vision of a politically conscious Islam echoed the Brotherhood’s call for action against enemies of the faith. After the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, for example, Faisal spoke repeatedly of a jihad to retake Jerusalem. His speeches denouncing the Israelis as an “impudent gang” bent on the “desecration” of Islam were not just designed to pander to Arab popular opinion; they were deeply felt, voiced by the king as forcefully in private as in public. As a young and increasingly active Saudi subject at Al-Thaghr, Osama identified with Faisal’s campaign against Israel—after all, his father had been the king’s emissary to Jerusalem before the 1967 war. Osama’s radicalization during high school did not, then, carry him into a state of opposition toward the Saudi government; in some respects, it deepened his alignment with Faisal’s foreign policy.1
Faisal was a popular king because the synthesis of Islam and modernity he called for was consistent with the choices he made in his private life. There was no free press or political opposition to investigate and expose the hypocrisy of the Saudi royal family’s irreligious self-indulgence, yet through rumor, informal observation, and Western press reports that filtered in, Saudis knew well enough which princes drank or gambled or extorted commissions from business contracts. By these channels they learned, too, that Faisal was exceptional. He refused to move into a garish palace built for him in Jeddah, preferring a suburban-style compound on a busy road. He had long ago given up alcohol. Operations on his digestive tract had left him able to tolerate only a bland diet of grilled meat, boiled vegetables, and rice. He worked several hours each morning at his palace office, prayed, held a working lunch, meditated privately, and then returned to his office for a second shift. At sunset each day he drove in one of his American sedans to the edge of the desert, sometimes taking his sons along, where he prayed alone in the sand. He returned yet again to his office to work into the night.2
For years Faisal had talked about transforming Saudi Arabia into a modern country but had delivered little. That had changed by the late 1960s. Gradually the Saudi state became a pervasive force in its subjects’ lives—an employer, an issuer of identity cards and passports, and a repository of commercial records. The long and troubled national highway program slowly linked the kingdom’s disparate regions. A few schools and universities opened. The ministries of Faisal’s government were far from efficient, but they now employed large numbers of Saudis, and in contrast to previous decades, they often issued their paychecks on time.
Faisal’s marriage to Iffat bint Ahmed Al-Thunayan, who became known as Queen Iffat, offered the most inspiring example—at least for women—of the king’s modernizing impulses. He had not always lived monogamously, but Iffat had been his only wife since about 1940, and by the 1960s, she had become an archetype of progressive womanhood, in a Saudi style. She had been raised in Istanbul to a Saudi father and a Hungarian or Circassian mother, and she was influenced by Turkish secularism as she came of age. She and Faisal had nine children. Iffat adhered to Wahhabi rules, never accompanying her husband on state visits or appearing unveiled before the Saudi public, yet she managed nonetheless to campaign on women’s issues. As early as 1955, she founded a school for orphaned girls, and supported girls’ education even in the kingdom’s most conservative regions.
She also traveled widely, shopped for modern clothes in Paris and San Francisco (only her husband and other women would see her wear them in Saudi Arabia), and promoted the business endeavors of her half-brother Kamal Adham, who became conspicuously wealthy. Adham served as one of Faisal’s most trusted emissaries, delivering cash subsidies to favored Arab leaders. In the early 1970s, Faisal appointed him as the first director of Saudi intelligence.3
The king did need someone to watch his back. Nasser had been weakened by his failure in the 1967 war against Israel, yet his pan-Arab nationalist movement, and its offshoots, such as Baathism, still threatened the Al-Saud. In 1969 the Saudi government arrested several hundred Saudis, including sixty to seventy military officers, whom Faisal suspected of plotting to kill him or overthrow his regime. The detentions quelled dissent, reported the bureau of intelligence and research at the U.S. Department of State, and yet “the basic causes of dissatisfaction remain. The process of modernization is creating a new middle-class elite in the military, bureaucratic and commercial fields. Many of the new elite are antagonized by the concentration of power in the Saudi royal family [and] they chafe at the narrow limits on social freedom and political expression.”4
Nasser died in 1970, succeeded by Anwar Sadat, with whom Faisal developed an alliance and a friendship. They were both cautious men, yet they shared a desire to avenge past losses to Israel. Faisal was profoundly anti-Semitic. From boyhood he had been instructed in a school of Islamic scholarship that cast Arabia’s Jews as treacherous betrayers in the narrative of war that culminated in the birth of the Prophet Mohamed’s new religion. As king, Faisal subscribed wholeheartedly to conspiracy theories about secret Jewish power. He regarded communism as a clever plot by Jews in their quest for world domination. During meetings with foreign visitors, he would often turn to his chief of protocol and ask, “Have they got the book?” The king was referring to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious forgery about Jewish plotting, copies of which Faisal kept in a bookshelf outside his reception room, so they could be handed out as gifts.5
A pointed British memo summed up the tensions eating at the Saudi king during these years:
He is formidable if over-bearing in argument…The effect of sickness and advancing years has been to make him tetchy, opinionated and impatient of contradiction…He has in his recent years been almost obsessed by an apocalyptic vision of the forces of religion and morality (conveniently identified with his regime) being sapped by atheism, communism and Zionism. He has made his choice between the political west and east, but he is disenchanted with the west for its lack of support for him and his causes.6
Richard Nixon, better qualified than some world leaders to recognize a man with paranoid and anti-Semitic tendencies, remembered that Faisal “even put forward what must be the ultimate conspiratorialist notion: that the Zionists were behind the Palestinian terrorists.” Nixon’s Jewish national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, endured several of Faisal’s long harangues on the “dual conspiracy of Jews and communists,” which tested the diplomat’s patience considerably.7
Faisal’s theories might disappoint London and Washington, but ultimately, in an indirect fashion, his convictions helped to enrich Saudi Arabia beyond the king’s imagining. When Sadat told him early in October 1973 that Egypt and Syria had prepared a surprise attack against Israel, Faisal unhesitatingly pledged his support. The war that followed, although it proved another disappointment for Arab forces, led to a prolonged international oil embargo imposed by Arab producers, of which Saudi Arabia was the largest. The embargo was designed in part to punish the United States for its airlift of military supplies to Israel. For a time, the Nixon administration was so infuriated that it developed contingency plans for an invasion of Saudi oil fields. Faisal, however, sensed just how far he could go, and he bent just enough to keep the Americans at bay—he secretly allowed oil sales to support American forces fighting communists in Vietnam, for example, and he also agreed to pour billions of dollars from the embargo’s cash windfall into U.S. Treasury bonds.
The embargo was not a Saudi initiative, but it did more to transform the kingdom than any event since the discovery of oil itself. Faisal was arguably the 1973 war’s biggest winner.
The price of Saudi crude soared sixfold by early 1974 and kept rising. The kingdom’s gross domestic product quadrupled between 1973 and 1975. Its oil revenue had been about $4.3 billion in 1973; it now zigzagged upward each year, to a peak of $102 billion by 1981. This gusher of cash stimulated a new boom in construction and luxury imports that exploded so quickly it choked Jeddah’s ports; ships lined up for weeks to unload or pick up goods. Hotel lobbies teemed with frustrated salesmen unable to find a vacant room. In Jeddah a new Safeway opened, its shelves stocked with Jell-O and Campbell’s soups. Queen Elizabeth flew in for a visit and commented, “I’ve never seen so many cranes in my life.” Faisal’s grandson Amr remembered that “you’d go away for a summer holiday, and you’d come back, and you’d get lost…Things that would normally have taken twenty years to do were done in a few months. And it made people a little bit crazy.”8
The boom seemed only to deepen the frugal Faisal’s dour mood. He particularly deplored the cultural styles of his kingdom’s nouveaux riches. “In one generation we went from riding camels to driving Cadillacs,” he commented. “The way we are spending money today, I fear we will soon be riding camels again.”9
Faisal bin Musaid, a nephew of King Faisal, was a failed graduate student in political science who had pleaded guilty to conspiring to sell LSD while at the University of Colorado and then had been sent home from the University of California at Berkeley. In 1965 his brother had been shot dead by Saudi police during a protest against the kingdom’s television studio in Riyadh; the protestors feared that television would undermine Islam. Musaid, who apparently lived in a chronic state of intoxication, decided to avenge his brother’s death.10
King Faisal held open majlis receptions about twice weekly, and on March 25, 1975, Musaid followed an old acquaintance, the Kuwaiti oil minister, into the palace hall, shielding himself behind the minister’s girth. He pulled out a .38-caliber pistol and fired three shots at Faisal, striking him in the throat. Guards wrestled Musaid to the floor as aides rushed the king to the Central Hospital in Riyadh, one of the monuments to Faisal’s development campaigns. A blood transfusion and heart massage failed, however, and Faisal died that afternoon. The king was sixty-nine years old. Mourners hoisted his body, wrapped in brown cloth, onto a gurney and carried it through the streets of Riyadh to the royal family’s burial ground. Three months later, twenty thousand Saudis watched an executioner behead Musaid in a public square.
Faisal’s murder deprived the Bin Laden family of its patron and protector, and it marked the end of a long and extraordinary partnership between the king and the family, in pursuit of Saudi modernization. If the alliance was to continue, it would require a new understanding among the next generation of leaders—for the Bin Ladens, Salem, now about thirty years old, and for the Al-Saud, Crown Prince Fahd, who took the reins of government after Faisal’s death.
Faisal and Mohamed Bin Laden had forged a bond because they had compatible values and work habits. Salem and Fahd would prove compatible as well. The values and habits they shared, however, were notably less pious.
FAHD BIN ABDULAZIZ had reached his early fifties at the time of Faisal’s assassination. He was a tall man whose body seemed to spread out around him a little more as each year passed. He sported a thin goatee on his round, double-chinned face, which had a placid aspect. His dark, hooded eyes could seem sad and withdrawn. Fahd had been raised along with many of his brothers and half-brothers in the informal schools of the premodern Riyadh court. He was distinguished from an early age, in the judgment of his family, by his interest in affairs of state. He watched attentively his father’s decision making and he seemed naturally intelligent. For these reasons he was promoted early on as a candidate to run ministries and to join the royal line of succession. He served first as education minister and then as interior minister, an important security post, and began to travel abroad during the 1960s. He was attracted to the West but showed little capacity for self-discipline when confronted with its entertainments and temptations. Beginning in the mid-1960s, he began to spend several months each year in Europe and America, drifting with his entourage from luxury hotel to luxury hotel. He gambled conspicuously and rotated his wives whenever the whim struck him, which seemed to be quite often. Among his more notorious mistresses was a Palestinian Christian woman known as “Miss Arabia,” so called because that was the name of the fashion boutique she ran in Jeddah.11
Fahd was the eldest of a group of seven full brothers within the royal family who possessed unusual influence because of the sheer size of their clan, their relative seniority, and the competence in office several of them displayed. They were sometimes referred to as the “Sudayri Seven” because their mother came from the Sudayri family. Fahd appointed or reaffirmed several of his full brothers in key security positions—Sultan, as defense minister; Nayef, as interior minister; and Ahmed, as deputy interior minister. In addition, his full brother Salman served as governor of Riyadh. Their personalities and political outlooks varied, but the seven brothers were, overall, a relatively liberal group with a taste for wealth and luxury that was notable even by Al-Saud standards. This was particularly true of Sultan and Fahd.
As Fahd became obese, his sojourns in the West were increasingly taken up by visits to hospitals, where he was treated for heart and other disorders aggravated by his weight. Eventually he found it difficult to climb stairs or to walk more than a short distance. He found that Western governments were eager to ensure that he received the very best care available. The United States, in particular, pegged Fahd as an up-and-comer in the Saudi royal family, a man whose extravagant habits and accommodating personality seemed to promise a more pliant partnership than had proved possible with Faisal.
In 1969 the United States invited Fahd on the first of a series of private visits, during which he was flattered by a personal audience with President Nixon and flown by the Pentagon to Cape Kennedy, where the National Aeronautics and Space Administration laid on a private tour. In private conversations with American and British officials, Fahd did not hesitate to repudiate Faisal’s anti-Zionism, and he hinted that when he attained power, he would be willing to recognize Israel if a broader peace were agreed. He felt that only the United States could guarantee that no rival power would steal Saudi Arabia’s wealth, and so he was willing to go further than some of his brothers to win American military protection. Unlike Faisal, however, Fahd did not have a particularly activist or global vision of his own or his kingdom’s role in the world. He wanted as a general matter to be left alone, so that he could enjoy himself, and he wanted Saudi Arabia to be somewhat more influenced by European culture. He announced plans to build the Riyadh Opera House—its acoustics were superb, and it would probably have been the finest concert hall in the Middle East, though it never opened due to objections from religious scholars. The episode was typical of Fahd—he was at once bold and timid, but under pressure, he usually reacted more as a caretaker than a leader.12
He strained against Wahhabi convention. Faisal rebuked Fahd over some of his more outrageous behavior, such as his loss of millions of dollars in casinos in the south of France in 1974. Perhaps it was Fahd’s irritation with his older half-brother’s holier-than-thou attitude that led him to think about how he might carve a little breathing space and variety into Saudi culture. In a private meeting with an American official in the summer of 1972, during one of his long respites abroad, Fahd described Islam as
a stable but flexible framework within which and under whose guidance the needs of the future can be met. But there is no requirement for growing Islamic societies to abide indefinitely by the strictest Islamic tenets. Prevailing views of 80-year-old religious leaders need not be meticulously observed…Somehow a more progressive outlook needed to be imparted to judges and religious lecturers who do so much to determine the characteristics the Saudi hierarchy represents to its own people.13
Fahd did not immediately become king upon Faisal’s death. The crown fell instead to Khalid bin Abdulaziz, who was ten years older than Fahd and came from a different branch of the royal family. Faisal had chosen Khalid as his heir in 1965; his rectitude and unassuming manner made him a natural choice after the traumas inflicted by King Saud. Khalid was a lightly educated, pleasant man who displayed no interest in government, politics, or foreign affairs. He dropped out of public life from time to time to devote himself to farming and ranching; he was one of the first princes to establish country estates in the deserts surrounding Riyadh, and he prided himself on the dairy cows and other animals he kept there. To fund his bucolic leisure, he started a number of businesses. “He has been described as a known percentage maker on governmental contracts,” a classified American biographical sketch noted.14 This was not a notable source of distinction among Saudi princes, but it indicated where Khalid’s priorities lay after he became king. By his own inclination and with consensus support from the family’s senior brothers, Khalid turned management of the Saudi government over to Fahd and retired to enjoy the pleasures of being a figurehead farmer-king.
Fahd’s sudden rise to power within the royal family in the summer of 1975 coincided with Salem Bin Laden’s restlessness. His family’s main company was still overseen by the trustees appointed by Faisal eight years earlier. The post-embargo oil boom had created rich opportunities for Saudi construction companies, yet the Bin Ladens, with their dissipated leadership, were in danger of missing out on many of the larger contracts. They required Fahd’s patronage, and to attain it, they had to build deeper personal connections with the new crown prince and his six full brothers. This became Salem Bin Laden’s mission. He would woo Fahd and the Sudayris as his father had charmed their predecessors.
SALEM BIN LADEN had a guileless quality, a giddy and childlike joyousness that allowed him, even as he reached his thirties, to get away with outrageous stunts and pronouncements. The Saudi royal family enforced an acute culture of decorum; like the fool in a Shakespearean court drama, Salem entertained them by violating their etiquette without giving profound offense. He had a particular habit, remembered by many of his friends and employees, of speaking frankly about the gas he passed. Once, in the company of the august governor of Riyadh, Salman bin Abdulaziz, Salem noisily let himself go. This was as taboo in Bedouin culture as in a French drawing room. Prince Salman asked Salem what had happened. “I just farted, Prince,” he answered. “Don’t you fart sometimes?” He once offended a minister by turning up late and poorly dressed to an important meeting. “I thought you were a man,” the minister said angrily. “Who told you I am a man?” Salem replied. “I am a kid!”1
His father had cultivated the royal family by attending religious ceremonies in Mecca and Medina, or by leading tours of his construction sites. Salem took other approaches. Many of the younger royals were contemporaries who had traveled abroad and shared his appetite for adventure and experimentation during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Other important princes, like Fahd, were older, yet they delighted in Salem’s enthusiasm for Europe, women, fast cars, and private planes. Salem’s challenge was to develop genuine friendships with these royal decision makers even while assuring them, too, that he knew his rank. Speaking of Fahd, Salem once told a friend, “He can break me or he can make me—one word out of his mouth.”2
Each winter many of the senior Al-Saud princes drove out in convoys from Riyadh or Jeddah to camp for several weeks in the desert. The weather was cool and it rained occasionally. Flowers and green grasses blossomed amid the cacti and thornbushes. The trips offered a chance for a prince to return to the land, reaffirm his Bedouin identity, and relive memories of his youth. The expeditions were also good politics, the equivalent of a Western politician’s bus or railroad tour through the heartland. Bedouin gathered for feasts with the royal campers, and they would line up to receive cash gifts or to petition for local development projects.
One February afternoon during the mid-1970s, a German pilot and writer named Wolf Heckmann landed a novelty glider at an airstrip in the northern Saudi desert, near the pipeline that transported Saudi crude west from the Persian Gulf to Jordan and Syria. Heckmann was attempting to set an informal world record by flying his plane, OSKAR, which had a small sixty-horsepower engine, about ten thousand miles from Dachau to Australia. As he was refueling, a “thin man, looking like a teenager, in Arabic clothing, dagger and pistol in his belt,” approached him. This was Salem Bin Laden. When Salem learned about Heckmann’s adventure, he could barely contain himself. He dragged the German into his room in a guesthouse. “Until three in the morning, we talked about adventures in the sky,” Heckmann recalled.3
Salem said he would be visiting two princes, Nayef and Ahmed, who were full brothers of Fahd, at their winter desert hunting camp the next morning, and he invited Heckmann to join him. The princes had pitched their tents across the border in Iraq, then ruled by Saddam Hussein, but Salem said they would have no trouble crossing into Iraq’s police state, since they were guests of Saudi royalty.
Salem climbed into an American-made Jeep the next morning with several aides and six hooded hunting falcons. Heckmann took the wheel of a second vehicle. “The Sheikh drove with hell-like speed,” he later wrote:
Sometimes we followed the traces of other cars, but in most cases, Sheikh Salem would just drive cross-country like a maniac. The area was full of biblical thornbushes, which had strong roots in the sandy soil. In front of each of these, the ever-blowing wind had created little dunes. The Sheikh’s soft-spring mounted Jeep drove over those like a ship in a storm…Sometimes we would shoot over waves like ski jumpers—only the landing wasn’t as elegant.4
The Arab passengers in Heckmann’s vehicle shook his hand in admiration when they stopped. “A brutal iron foot on the accelerator was apparently seen as the highest driving skill,” he noted correctly. He and Salem joined Nayef and Ahmed in a tent heated by a fire pit fueled with smoky wood from thornbushes. Prince Ahmed coughed and commented acidly, “Central heating wouldn’t hurt.”
Salem unpacked his falcons and hunted with the two senior Sudayri princes, one of whom, Nayef, was about to become the kingdom’s powerful interior minister, with Ahmed serving as his chief deputy. Heckmann observed the ease with which Salem crossed from one world to another: “There Sheikh Salem was sitting, his long legs crossed as if he had spent his whole life sitting around a fire basin in a desert hunting camp, when, in fact, he also had completed all-round studies in London, was leading a construction empire, and was able to develop intelligent and even inventive thoughts about economic and political subjects.”5
Crown Prince Fahd’s camps, by comparison, were not plagued by wood smoke. He typically drove out four or five hours from Riyadh in a convoy of fifty or sixty Mercedes trucks and well-appointed trailers; his winter camp came to include a mobile hospital suite staffed by rotating American doctors. Fahd seemed to enjoy being away from Riyadh and the pressures of office; he would sometimes remain in the desert for five or six weeks. The sojourns attracted a swarm of camp followers who pitched their own tents nearby and tried to spend as much time in His Majesty’s presence as possible. Salem was often a part of Fahd’s invited entourage, and he set up his own site of four or five tents about ten miles from his patron. He brought with him a camp manager, often one of his European employees, plus a mechanic and a cook. He would stay for two or three weeks at a time, riding over to Fahd’s camp each day in a dune buggy or some other adventure vehicle that had recently caught his eye. In the evenings he would join a hundred or more male guests at the feasts Fahd hosted. These were egalitarian affairs undertaken in the efficient Bedouin style—the food was spread out on the ground and consumed as quickly as possible, with no time wasted on toasts, speeches, or, for that matter, digestion.6
Salem behaved outrageously around Fahd. Once, he arrived back at his own camp in the company of security guards who seemed to be escorting him away from the ruler’s section, one of his camp guests recalled. Salem said he had been sitting around in the royal tent when Fahd complained, “W’allah, Salem, I am so tired of these Bedouins. They come to me, and I don’t mind giving money, but then there are hundreds of them, kissing my hand, giving money, kissing my hand, giving money. It tires me—and I come to rest here in the desert.”
“I can solve this problem,” Salem replied. “You let me know one day before, and all day long I’ll eat food. Some dark beans. You put me in the front of the queue, and I’ll start farting, and all the Bedouins will disappear.”
Fahd laughed so hard that his doctor feared he might have a heart attack, so Salem was hauled away. “Everybody was always bowing down” to Fahd, the guest recalled. “But Salem was like a friend. He would crack jokes.” Fahd, for his part, “loved that casual way of Salem. Of course, he was a lunatic. If a normal person would do this, they would chop his hand off. But because Salem was a bit on the loony side, it was accepted.”7
Salem finally won permission to buy a private plane. He began to replace his father’s fleet, which had been sold off after Faisal’s earlier order that no more Bin Ladens should fly. As his first purchase, rather than a fancy jet, he chose a Mitsubishi MU-2 turboprop, a six-passenger propeller plane that could land on short runways. During the late 1970s, Salem began to fly the MU-2 into the desert to join Fahd’s encampments. His aides would build a makeshift runway marked by strobe lights and burning tires. Salem could not resist the temptation to buzz Fahd’s tent. Versions of this incident vary from teller to teller; in some, Fahd’s bodyguards raise their weapons at Salem’s plane, while in others, Salem brazenly puts the plane down on a road near where the king is staying. In any event, Jack Hinson, a pilot who worked with Salem during this period, recalled that Salem often recited what Fahd had told him afterward: “You are crazy, and you are going to get killed one of these days.”8
Salem’s zest was genuine, of course, but he also mustered it cannily to ingratiate himself with Fahd and his brothers on business matters. Like a sales manager, Salem assigned each senior Saudi prince to one of his brothers or half-brothers; each Bin Laden’s mission was to cultivate a personal relationship with his prince and win contracts. “The question was, ‘Who is your prince?’” recalled Rupert Armitage, who ran a business division for Salem in Jeddah during this period. Salem took on Fahd himself; he assigned his full brother Bakr to cultivate Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, who was in line for the throne after Fahd. Salem’s strategy was to sniff out upcoming contracts through contacts with civil servants inside key government ministries, and then to seal the deals with the princes. “Some of these were just enormous carve-ups and so you were part of the carve-up as long as you could do the job” and were in the good graces of the royal family, Armitage said.9
The desert camping trips also offered a chance to collect on past-due bills. Salem would sit at Fahd’s side day after day, gently mentioning what he was owed, until a royal accountant finally arrived with a check. Bengt Johansson, who worked as Salem’s chief airplane mechanic for at least fifteen years, remembered him returning from Fahd’s tent on one occasion, waving a check in the air. “We’ve gotten paid, guys! Let’s go!” They packed up their tents and departed immediately.10
By the late 1970s, Salem had won enough contracts to begin to add Learjet and other luxury business aircraft to his private fleet. He used these planes for his own leisure travel overseas but also to cultivate ties with the royal family. If a prince called and asked to “borrow” one of Salem’s Lears, he often felt he had no choice but to turn the plane and its crew over for a weeks-long shopping spree to Europe. This was part of his unwritten bargain with the royal family. Johansson remembered Salem dodging telephone calls from certain princes who were particularly active plane borrowers. “He tried to avoid that, but if they get in touch with him and they put the question directly to him, he has to say yes.”11
Such favors, combined with the royal family’s unreliable accounts payable departments, as well as the normal purchasing and payroll demands of the contracting industry, put heavy pressure on Salem’s cash flow. Salem’s father had managed his own version of this problem through the support of his great Hadhrami banking friend Salem Bin Mahfouz, after whom Salem had been named. Salem Bin Laden developed a similar friendship and business partnership with Khalid Bin Mahfouz, an heir to his own father’s fortune who had been sent to school in England as Salem had, and who, by the mid-1970s, had begun to play an increasingly important role at his family’s National Commercial Bank. Khalid was a much quieter personality than Salem, but they became fast friends and close business partners. During the 1970s, they were both still trying to establish themselves as young executives in their own right.
Salem and Khalid each acquired a small fleet of private planes in the first years of the oil boom. They hired American, Pakistani, Afghan, Egyptian, and other pilots, and opened an aviation department at Jeddah’s airport. One of the department’s missions was to move cash around. Banking in Saudi Arabia remained in a relatively primitive state, with few reliable electronic or computer systems. Cash reigned. Salem often used his private planes to transport bags of money between NCB branches. In his pilots’ logbooks, these flights were sometimes listed simply as “money runs.” A run would typically begin at NCB headquarters in Jeddah, where trusted expatriate Yemeni workers would load five-foot-tall burlap sacks bulging with riyals and topped with lead seals into a convoy of Honda pickup trucks. Without guards or gunmen, the couriers would roll to the airport and hoist the cash into Learjets, filling all the passenger seats. Two pilots then flew the planes to Dhahran or Riyadh or Hail or some other Saudi city, where the money would be unloaded and transferred to a local NCB branch to fill up its vaults. On other trips they flew cash to Bin Laden desert campsites and doled it out to migrant construction workers. Once in a while, without explanation, the Yemeni couriers loaded a plane with bars of gold bullion, which were then flown to Bahrain, London, or Switzerland. As the years passed, the American pilots who flew on these money runs found the cargo and destinations increasingly intriguing.12
AT SOME POINT during the mid-1970s, Salem decided that he wanted to become a medical doctor. According to his friend Mohamed Ashmawi, he asked Fahd for permission to study in Cairo; the crown prince looked up at him and said, “Salem, grow up.”13
Undeterred, Salem asked his family doctor in Jeddah, an American named Terry Bennett, if he would write reference letters. “It was the scheme of the month,” Bennett recalled. “He had the attention span of a flea.”14 Salem was a quick study, however. He had become an excellent pilot without rigorous formal training, sometimes by asking more experienced fliers to accompany him to a few required classes. He seemed to believe he could pick up medicine by the same method. In any event, he was absolutely determined, in the manner of patriarchs throughout time, that someone in his family should become a doctor.
He spent increasing amounts of time in Cairo. It lay a relatively short distance from Jeddah, close enough for a weekend commute by air, and its culture was much more vibrant and open than anything in Saudi Arabia. Salem’s father had married at least two Egyptian women, and the offspring of those unions lived in and around Cairo. Mohamed had left three children from one marriage to an Egyptian—two sons, Khalid and Abdulaziz, and a daughter, Mona—as well as a singleton daughter from a second marriage, Randa.
Randa was twelve or thirteen years old when Mohamed Bin Laden died, and she first met Salem at the memorial service. Salem told her, “Don’t worry, don’t worry. I will always take care of you.” There was “an immediate bond” between them, recalled an American friend, Gail Freeman. Salem discovered that Randa and her mother, who had remarried, were living in far from comfortable circumstances. He gave them money and bought them a three-story town house near Cairo’s colonial-era Shooting Club. Salem stayed on the ground floor when he was in town, Randa had an apartment above him, and her mother lived with her new husband on the highest floor. By the mid-1970s, Randa was becoming known to everyone in Salem’s entourage as his favorite sister. She was a slim, coffee-colored, dark-haired woman with an open personality. He doted on her, spoke to her frequently on the telephone, took her shopping in Europe, and traveled regularly to visit her in Cairo. The connection between them grew so intense that it seemed to approach romantic love. None of Salem’s close entourage ever thought that anything inappropriate passed between him and his half-sister; nonetheless, they marveled at the open passion in their relationship.15
Salem decided that Randa should also become a doctor, and he announced that he would study alongside her at Cairo University. “He pushed Randa to do it,” recalled Sabry Ghoneim, a family employee in Cairo.16 She studied hard. Salem paid for professors to come to her apartment and tutor her privately. He tried to attend these lessons, too, flying back and forth from Jeddah. He ordered his pilots to help Randa shop for supplies, and on at least one occasion, he flew in skeletons from Saudi Arabia in one of his private planes to aid their cram sessions.17
Inside Saudi Arabia, it was no longer unheard of for a woman to go to college or even to medical school, although if a woman studied in the kingdom, she did so in an environment of strict gender segregation. Salem encouraged many of his sisters and half-sisters to attend school. He enrolled his full sister Hoda in art school in Paris at the same time that he underwrote Randa’s medical education in Cairo. He placed two of his half-sisters in boarding school in Pakistan. Others applied to universities and design academies in the United States; several became interested in interior decorating, a profession they could profit from in turnkey palace-building projects for the family firm. Many of Salem’s half-sisters wore Western fashions and traveled without covering when they were outside Saudi Arabia. At the same time, Salem seemed fiercely determined to protect what he imagined to be his sisters’ honor. He discouraged any of the younger pilots who flew for him from even speaking with any of his sisters or half-sisters. Only the fatherly Gerald Auerbach was trusted as an escort.18
Salem did not live extravagantly when he visited Egypt. There were cooks and servants in the town house he shared with Randa, but it was not a palace. He wore blue jeans and T-shirts, and he drove an old Spanish car or a motorcycle. He opened an office at 14 Al-Thawra Street, hired a few Egyptian aides, and began to explore ambitious land and development deals in Cairo. “Salem dreamed of building residential towers and malls along the Nile,” Ghoneim recalled.19
By the late 1970s, he knew Cairo’s landscape better than most developers because he spent hours swooping above it in the air. Salem might fantasize about becoming a doctor, but he already was a pilot. It was the one passion in his life that never seemed to bore him.
SALEM PURCHASED a Cessna-172 single-engine propeller plane in the United States during this time and had it flown into Cairo. He kept it at a small airport on the city’s outskirts, Imbaba, which had been built in 1947 and was mainly used by recreational pilots. Among other things, he used the Cessna to tow his two-seat, German-made glider up to five thousand feet or so, from where it could be released for a meandering flight back to Imbaba—twisting down the Nile, out to the Pyramids, across dusty slums and arid parks, with only the sound of wind rushing across the wings. He reveled in the romance of these flights above the Pyramids. When he courted a new girlfriend (he was still married to Sheikha, but they were drifting apart), he often flew the woman to Cairo and took her aloft in his glider at sunset. With fellow pilots, he trained in acrobatics—loops, rolls, and flying upside down above Imbaba. Later he purchased a pair of ultralights. If there were enough pilots around, he would arrange an evening expedition to the Pyramids; his friends flew behind him in formation, creating a phalanx of toy aircraft.20
Wayne Fagan, an American lawyer who visited Salem in Cairo, remembered being invited into the back of one of these planes as Salem gunned the engine and roared down the runway while trying to light a tobacco pipe, all the while “pulling back on the throttles with his elbows.” They flew out over the desert in the evening light and circled the Pyramids. Salem had promised Fagan a flight in the glider, but it wasn’t available, so on the way back, he shut down his plane’s engines and drifted on the currents. “And he says, ‘Look, Wayne, we’re gliding.’ And I said, ‘That’s great, Salem, thanks a lot. You can start up any time now.’”21
On one courtship glider flight with an English girlfriend, Caroline Carey, he miscalculated wind and altitude, and seemed headed for a crash. Caroline became so frightened as they plummeted that she promised to convert to Islam if they somehow survived. Salem steered hurriedly toward a field at the Shooting Club, near Randa’s apartment, slipped the plane over high trees, and pulled up in time to stop before striking the club’s wall. “When I saw what Salem did, I said, ‘My God, any other pilot would crash it,’” recalled Anwar Khan, a Pakistani pilot who flew for him. Club security rushed up; Salem climbed out, helped his girlfriend to her feet, and joked: “Sorry, I’m not a member of the club—but my brother is a member.” Caroline kept her promise and became a Muslim.22
He employed his acrobatic skills to shake money from his debtors. “People were forever owing him money, so he would offer them rides,” recalled Rupert Armitage. Once in the air, “he’d say, ‘Look, you owe me two hundred thousand dollars. I want you to write out a check now.’” If they declined, he would threaten to take the plane’s controls and roll it upside down. If they still refused, “he’d start doing it…and then, ‘Okay, okay, I’ll sign it!’”23
Under Salem’s enthusiastic guidance, the Bin Ladens gradually became a family of pilots. Flight logs show no fewer than seven of Salem’s brothers and half-brothers taking lessons on his private planes during the 1970s. Several of his half-sisters also trained to fly. Osama, however, was apparently not among this group; he did later acquire private airplanes of his own, and may have taken some informal instruction, but he does not seem to have flown often during the 1970s. His relative youth appears to have been one factor; the brothers who took lessons were older, while Osama remained in high school, increasingly concerned with religious issues.
Flying lessons reinforced the boundaries of an inner circle of Bin Laden brothers around Salem, led by his full brothers Ghalib and Bakr, and including some older half-brothers, such as Omar, Issa, Yahya, Tareq, and Yeslam. They were an eclectic group—some devout, some more secular—tied together by their dependency on Salem’s leadership. To taste the pleasures Salem expounded upon, and to win his favor, they followed him into the sky.
The American, Egyptian, and Pakistani pilots who flew with Salem, many of whom were veterans of their respective air forces, genuinely admired his skill. He had excellent reflexes, a natural feel for an aircraft in flight, and a strong enough mind to recall the subtle differences in the control panels of the various models of aircraft he accumulated. He was weak on technical issues and not the most meticulous of checklist followers, but he usually kept a skilled copilot on board to watch after such details. On a typical flight, he would take off and land but let his copilot handle the long cruise at altitude while he snoozed in the back or canoodled with one of his girlfriends. He reveled in “the sensation of speed, man over machine,” said one of his instructors, Don Sowell. His skills were “excellent” and he was “never reckless,” and yet, “Sheikh Salem was one who lived on the edge, bordered on the edge.” He never seemed to be concentrating because he always seemed to be doing more than one thing at a time—patching through phone calls to girlfriends on his high-frequency airplane radio, joking with control towers, and yet, all the while, recalled Anwar Khan, he would be “making a perfect, perfect approach” using only his instruments.24
He was not much interested in formal licensing or aviation rules. If a trained copilot was unavailable for a particular flight on a plane that required two pilots, he would ask one of his untrained school buddies or business partners to sit in the jump seat and sign the flight plan so that he could take off. His friends learned to behave nonchalantly in these situations, because if Salem smelled fear in a passenger or putative copilot, he would mercilessly roll or spin the plane to exacerbate their discomfort, laughing all the while. On a long flight to Cairo, he drafted as his copilot Robert Freeman, an American business partner who had not a single hour of flight training. Freeman asked what he should do if Salem fell ill or blacked out. “That would be the end for both of us,” he answered matter-of-factly.25
Despite Mohamed Bin Laden’s fatal accident, Salem ensured that the risks of private aviation became an increasingly pervasive part of the Bin Ladens’ family life and conversation. His unconventional habits led to a succession of crashes and near misses from the mid-1970s onward, each of which was circulated and discussed within the family. Salem’s full brother Ghalib wrecked a Piper airplane by spinning it out during a landing. A family Learjet returning from Medina fell mysteriously out of the sky, killing the two expatriate pilots. Salem himself skated near disaster. He had trouble managing his MU-2’s de-icing equipment when he flew to Europe in winter; if the system was mishandled, the plane would stall. Once, climbing out after takeoff, his engines died at a dangerously low altitude. “I was telling God, ‘You can have all my airplanes. You can have all my money. Just give me one little engine,’” he recounted, according to Bengt Johansson. His plea was answered.26
By the late 1970s, he was buying more planes than he was wrecking. He purchased a Fokker-27 turboprop, mainly to fly to construction work sites in the desert. He bought a Learjet 25-D and took an interest in more advanced models; he loved the Lears, and he often wore blue jeans with a little Learjet sewn into them. He also bought a Hawker-125, the same model jet that his father had purchased before his death. His friend and banker Khalid Bin Mahfouz added even more extravagant aircraft to their Jeddah department, including a Boeing 707 with a customized interior. Each plane had a unique tail number, and Salem often chose initials drawn from family names.
He played his harmonica over the radio to entertain air traffic controllers. In his Lear, he only had to announce himself on approach—“Hotel Zulu Bravo Lima One”—and controllers in Cairo or Beirut would call out in welcome, “Ahlan, Sheikh Salem!” Above all, his planes gave him freedom—to live as he wished, to go where he pleased. As one of his Lebanese friends summed it up: “Salem believed in his Learjet and his MU-2 and his jeans and guitar and harmonica.”27
IT WAS AN APPEALING CREED, but an expensive one. To live this way, Salem needed to adapt his family’s strategy to better profit from the new economy of the oil boom. European and American corporations swarmed into Saudi Arabia during the 1970s. They hawked televisions, telephones, fancy cars, air conditioners, and dishwashers—all the badges of modern consumerism. Saudi law required these firms to sell through local agents. Saudi merchant families competed to sign up agencies with the most desirable brands, a pathway to instant profits. Like his father, Salem had mixed feelings about this approach; he preferred to act as a principal, and where it was desirable to work with foreign companies, to form partnerships, rather than to simply rake off commissions from overseas agencies. He did sign up some agency deals, such as those with the German automakers Volkswagen and Porsche, but he preferred joint ventures involving big construction contracts, and he preferred to concentrate on industries where his family had already built up credibility and expertise. Either way, during the oil boom of the 1970s, the Bin Ladens required, as they never had during Mohamed’s lifetime, a spokesman and deal maker who could represent the family successfully in Europe and the United States. This became Salem’s role. He was an ideal intermediary—fluent in English, fun to be around, energetic, mobile, and equally at home in Jeddah and London.
He used his uninhibited personality to disarm and manipulate Western executives during negotiations. Flying into Stockholm for a meeting with officials at AVB, one of Sweden’s largest construction companies, he asked his Swedish mechanic Johansson to meet him at the airport. Johansson drove down from his home on the coast in a corroded old Volkswagen Golf, while Salem flew in from Cairo. When Johansson arrived at the private aviation terminal, he saw AVB executives in business suits lined up in stiff formation beside a convoy of limousines, waiting for the sheikh. Salem landed, descended from his jet, shook hands with the lead AVB executive, walked past the limousines, and insisted that the Swedish executive cram into the backseat of the Golf, so they could ride into town with Salem’s disheveled friend Bengt. Salem wore his usual uniform for trips to Europe—jeans, a T-shirt, a leather jacket, and a ten-dollar plastic Casio watch.28
Salem worked most of his overseas deals through Bin Laden Brothers, the company he and some of his brothers had started to prove themselves and to escape the control of the older Saudi trustees, appointed by King Faisal, who still ran the sprawling Mohamed Bin Laden Organization. Salem opened a shabby office off an alley near the old souk in downtown Jeddah; the suite was crowded with clerks and accountants who labored amid blue clouds of cigarette smoke. In the style of a palace diwan, sofas and chairs ran around the outer edge of the reception room, where businessmen pitching deals or younger Bin Laden boys seeking an allowance payment would sit for hours waiting for an audience with Salem or a senior brother. Inside, the older brothers who were partners in the company—Salem, Bakr, Yahya, Hassan, Ghalib, Omar, and perhaps two or three others—had private offices. Salem rarely used his, preferring to work out of his bedroom at home, but most of the other brothers kept regular hours. A visitor would stride in with a bulging armload of traveler’s checks, and a boy at the reception desk would size him up and say simply, “Come in the back.” There were “loose ends all over the place,” recalled Armitage, who worked there. There always seemed to be a scramble under way to get some signature on a document. “It was constant chaos…of a small, needling nature.” Still, the larger problems were managed well, Armitage thought, and his overall impression was that the Bin Laden brothers were learning in these years to work successfully “as a family, together.”29
There was no question about who was in charge, however. Salem presided over his younger brothers and half-brothers in the manner of an Arabian patriarch. They responded with obedience. They called him “Sheikh” and they were “very subservient to him, very respectful of him as an elder. He was like the king,” recalled his pilot Jack Hinson. Bedouin servants brought him tea and coffee. His brothers would ask Salem’s European friends and pilots if they would please arrange audiences for them with the boss; they were very reluctant to walk in on him unannounced. Salem alone decided how much money the brothers received in allowances, what schools they attended, what projects they might work on, and how much salary they would earn. He made these decisions confidently, with an air of entitlement to authority, and he did not hesitate to slap or strike a younger brother lightly if he was particularly displeased. He rewarded the engineers and hard workers, such as Bakr, Ghalib, Yahya, and Omar: among other things, they could relieve Salem of day-to-day responsibilities on construction contracts. Not even they enjoyed much autonomy, however. “No one did anything without Salem’s approval,” said David Grey, another of his pilots. On the phone or in business meetings, Salem would announce forcefully, “I will determine who will get what money, and no one will get anything until I decide,” as Grey recalled. “I’ve heard him use those words time and time again.”30
His new business was becoming steadily more complex. A profile of Bin Laden Brothers prepared by Aramco’s political office in 1979 lists more than a dozen partnerships or companies Salem had organized with foreign firms. These included joint ventures with large American and European building companies, such as Lozinger in Switzerland and Kaiser in the United States, as well as companies that made windows, pre-stress concrete, air-conditioning systems, kitchens, doors, and accessories for highway construction. Salem could pick and choose as he pleased from the scores of unsolicited proposals he received from visiting Europeans and Americans seeking to cash in on the Saudi boom. The ideas submitted to him by Western suitors had a random, comical diversity—plastic bag manufacturing one day, aeronautical lubricants the next. For the most part, Salem stuck to industries he knew, and he sought out prestigious corporations. He formed a shareholding partnership with General Electric during this time, one that would allow him to develop deals in Saudi Arabia across all GE’s lines of business, from medical technology to power generation. Particularly with American businessmen, who were relatively informal, “He was perfect with people,” said the investment banker Francis Hunnewell, a partner of Salem’s during this period.31
Bin Laden Brothers continued to work as a subcontractor for his father’s former company. By the late 1970s, Salem had become chairman of the old family firm, and he gradually wrested complete control from the trustees—they formally stepped aside at some point around 1978 or 1979. The Mohamed Bin Laden Organization still drew much of its revenue from big defense and infrastructure projects. It continued to build roads and other facilities in Asir; it worked on a military garrison project in northern Al-Jouf, alongside the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; and in the vast Empty Quarter, the desert along the kingdom’s southern frontier, the company built roads and an airstrip. Salem occasionally flew out for inspections as his father had so often done, but he was not a hands-on engineer who walked the roads or argued over decisions about tunnels or grading. Indeed, he seemed increasingly to avoid that sort of responsibility. He ordered his two younger full brothers, Bakr and Ghalib, to enroll in civil engineering courses in the United States, and he told his half-brothers Yahya and Omar to do the same. He knew the Bin Ladens would require civil engineering expertise over the long run, but he had no interest in acquiring such knowledge himself.
He spent more and more time in Britain and Europe. On May 18, 1975, Salem’s wife Sheikha gave birth in London to their first child, a daughter, Sara. A little more than two years later, also in London, she had a son, Salman.32
During these sojourns, Salem met Ian Munro, a tall, elegant, white-haired Scotsman who had served in Britain’s famous Black Watch regiment; he had fought with the regiment to put down the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya during the 1950s, and later he served with the Air Wing of British security forces in Kenya. After leaving the military, Munro went into business in London. He had a sonorous voice and an accent that betrayed little of his Scottish heritage. He was a member of the Naval & Military Club, a flag-draped bastion of fireplaces and leather chairs in Piccadilly. Munro was a reliable, fatherly figure whom Salem decided he could trust to help organize his affairs outside Saudi Arabia. The two registered a company in London for aviation-related ventures named Salian International, a combination of their first names, as well as a British division of Bin Laden Brothers, which later evolved into Bin Laden London. Munro opened a small office in Park Lane.33
Salem decided to buy a proper English mansion near London, but he could not be bothered with real estate shopping. He told Munro that he was sure that whatever Ian liked, he would like, too. Munro chose a manor estate built in the early 1920s in a village called Offley Chase, a short drive from the Luton airport, north of London, which was often used by private pilots. The estate conformed to some of the expectations that foreigners bring to English country homes—it was heavily bricked and somewhat gloomy. On a rainy night, it seemed like an ideal setting for a parlor murder. In the years ahead, Offley Chase would be the scene of some of the most dramatic events in Salem’s eccentric life.34
THE SOWELL FAMILY ran a flight school in Panama City, Florida, a town of about thirty-five thousand in the state’s western panhandle, where the pace hued to the milky rhythms of the Deep South rather than to the samba beat of distant Miami. Downtown held a brick courthouse and a jail, and along the nearby streets, there were Baptist churches, bait shops, and gun stores. White beaches stretched out to the west on sandbars in the Gulf of Mexico. There was an air force base nearby. Weathered roadhouse bars and a few tattoo parlors lined the beach road. Sowell Aviation occupied several hundred acres to the north of downtown. During the 1970s, Don Sowell was preparing to take over the business from his father. Their school offered piloting lessons, aircraft maintenance, charters, sales, and leasing—a typical array of private aviation services. The Sowells had gotten to know the former California governor Ronald Reagan a little, through friends and by attending fundraising events. They attracted international students to their school from Asia, Europe, and South America, so it was not a surprise when one of Don Sowell’s pilot contacts from Texas, Jim Bath, invited him to dinner with a Saudi client who was buying up Learjets in the States and who said he might be interested in lessons, for himself and perhaps also for one of his sisters. “I have a baby sister,” Salem Bin Laden explained, “and she would like to learn to fly.”1
Without boasting, exactly, Salem made it clear over dinner that he had a great deal of money and that he was looking for partners in America who could provide a wide variety of services—not only piloting lessons but also business services, particularly the acquisition of cars and consumer goods for the royal family in Saudi Arabia. Afterward, Don Sowell told Jim Bath, “It’s either an Alice-in-Wonderland thing, or it may be the biggest opportunity of a lifetime.”2
The oil embargo transformed America into a shopping mall and vacation resort for many wealthy Saudis. Europe might be fine for skiing, yachting, jewelry shopping, and haute couture, but if you wanted to play in open spaces and find the latest in electronics and toys, there was no substitute for America. Salem, of course, did not initially know—and as the years passed he would never seem to care—that Panama City was not a particularly fashionable destination. If anything, he seemed drawn to its lack of pretension. After his dinner with Sowell, he flew into town regularly. He leased houses at Bay Point, then the region’s only luxury resort, located on a peninsula of pine trees and sand along the intercoastal waterway. About a year later he brought Randa from Cairo and installed her in a Bay Point home. He told Sowell that he wanted his sister to take flight lessons until she was certified on a Cessna. He said she would require a cook, a female chaperone, a driver, and a car. Sowell usually sent a Lincoln.
They all adapted to Salem’s demands and to his nocturnal schedule. He rarely turned up for flight lessons before late afternoon, and by the time he figured out what he wanted to do for fun each evening, most of Panama City’s restaurants and stores had already closed. The city had but one enclosed shopping mall—a modest place downtown at the corner of 23rd Street and Highway 231, anchored by JCPenney, Sears, and Dillard’s department stores. Sowell paid store owners to remain open after hours. It was, he reflected, the sort of thing “you would hear about with Elvis Presley.” Each Monday, Randa went shopping. On one occasion, Sowell watched Salem hand her twenty-two thousand dollars in traveler’s checks for a trip to the mall.3
Salem found at the mall a piano and organ store that particularly attracted him. Jack Pizza managed the place along with his wife, Anita Pizza, who was an accomplished pianist. Jack called Don Sowell one night, reporting breathlessly that there was a Saudi in his store who was using Sowell as a reference. The customer wanted to buy thousands of dollars’ worth of pianos and other musical instruments, and he wanted them shipped immediately to a home at Bay Point. Pizza asked if there was a dollar limit on how much he should agree to sell. “No, there isn’t,” Sowell recalled telling him. “Whatever he wants, you send it.”4
It was the beginning of a long and unlikely friendship between the Pizzas of Panama City and the Bin Laden family of Jeddah. Jack Pizza dabbled in computers and tried to sell the latest models to Salem. Anita proved to be a graceful accompanist for Salem’s singing ventures, as well as a faithful companion to Randa.
They hosted dinner and song parties at Bay Point, where royal visitors from Saudi Arabia sometimes mingled with wisecracking pilots from Panama City and Houston. Salem was not a heavy drinker, but he developed a sipping taste for Dom Pérignon champagne, which he insisted should be served chilled about two minutes after opening—not too bubbly, not too flat. For one party, Sowell bought up all the Dom Pérignon in the Panama City region but ran out nonetheless. Salem “sent myself, and my Lear, and my pilot, and we flew to Columbus, Georgia, and loaded the airplane with cases of Dom Pérignon, and flew it back,” he recalled. Soon Salem insisted that Sowell and the Pizzas fly with him around the world, particularly so that he and Anita could perform together in restaurants and at parties.5
Salem learned in these years that he could buy his way onto just about any stage where he wanted to sing. He paid a bandleader at an Academy Awards party in Los Angeles hundreds of dollars to let him sing “House of the Rising Sun” in seven languages. At an Oktoberfest in Germany, he handed audience members occupying a table in front of the stage two thousand German marks to make room, bought a video camera from another audience member, and spent more still to persuade the bandleader to let him take the stage and belt out a Bavarian folk song; its title, roughly translated, was “On the Green Meadow, the Rabbits Eat the Grass.”
There was an undercurrent of mutual contempt in these episodes—Salem’s contempt for normal protocol and his insistence on purchasing entry, matched by the growing contempt among some Westerners during the 1970s toward showy Saudis who had become rich from rising gasoline prices. And yet, between Salem and his European and American friends, this taint, while an occasional source of discomfort, was almost always washed away by Salem’s innocent exuberance and his transparent need to be adored.
He liked the Beatles, but also traditional sing-alongs, such as “On Top of Old Smokey,” or its children’s parody, “On Top of Spaghetti.” No setting was too august for him, no audience too prestigious. In Cairo, he forced his friend Rupert Armitage to play the guitar while he sang badly at the wedding of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s daughter. However mortified they might feel, his friends learned to go along, because, as was true with his piloting antics, any expression of resistance or fear only encouraged Salem to go further. His voice never improved, but after he met Anita Pizza in Panama City, her skill at the piano elevated his recitals to a greater level of tolerability.6
America became a place for singing, flying, and, above all, shopping. Salem ordered Cadillacs for the Saudi royal family and had them fitted with armor so that they could repel machine-gun fire. With Sowell’s help, he also ordered about a dozen Lincolns and shipped them over to the kingdom from New Orleans. He ordered five thousand cases of Tabasco sauce and flew it to Saudi Arabia—he said he liked the taste. Coca-Cola was subject to the Arab boycott against Israel, so Salem discovered an alternative soft drink called Mello Yello and had it shipped home in vast quantities. He found a small plastic airplane toy that tickled him and he bought thousands to take home as gifts. To decorate the desert gardens of a palace his family firm was building for Crown Prince Fahd, he shipped home in refrigerated containers what seemed like a substantial portion of the vegetation of the American Southwest: 481 large American cacti, 360 small cacti, 485 mixed cacti, 100 yucca trees, 625 orchids, and more than 5,000 other desert plants, bushes, and trees.7
Salem invited Fahd himself to Panama City, according to Sowell. The crown prince landed his customized Boeing 707 at the city airport; at the time, it was the largest plane ever to have touched down there. Sowell leased extra houses at Bay Point for Fahd’s armed bodyguards. It was an “interesting ordeal,” he remembered. Fahd’s entourage “played bumper cars with the golf carts,” and they damaged about half a dozen of them so badly that Sowell had to pay for replacements. Robert Freeman, another of Salem’s American partners, remembered that the cost of the broken golf carts was about fifty thousand dollars. Sowell said he sent the bill to Jim Bath, Salem’s business partner in Houston, since it involved Salem’s relationship with Fahd and the crown prince’s private travel in the United States. Bath, Sowell said, “handled all those arrangements.”8
JIM BATH had grown up in Louisiana. He studied journalism and then became an air force fighter pilot; later he joined the Texas Air National Guard as a reserve pilot. When he was still a young man, he and his wife, Sandra, loaded their belongings into a car and moved to Houston, where Bath went into business as an airplane broker and, eventually, a real estate developer and eclectic international entrepreneur. He was a tall, slim man with a rich southwestern accent, who seemed determined to live by a certain male Texas creed—think big, take risks, seek riches, live freely, and do some hunting and fishing along the way. He undertook some of his early carousing with George W. Bush, whom he befriended around 1970 when they were both pilots in the Texas Air National Guard. This was before the future president attended business school, a period when Bush was drinking and, by his own indirect admission, may have indulged in illegal drugs. In any event, Bush would remember Bath as “a lot of fun,” although eventually the relentless questions about their relationship would drain the subject of mirth. By the mid-1970s, partly through Bush, Bath had gotten to know a number of significant figures in Texas politics, such as Bush’s father, George H. W. Bush, who became director of the Central Intelligence Agency in 1976; Lan Bentsen, a son of the longtime Democratic U.S. senator and eventual vice presidential candidate Lloyd Bentsen; and James A. Baker, a Houston lawyer who would later become U.S. secretary of state.9
At this time, Bath’s principal business was JB&A Associates, his aircraft brokerage. In 1975 he was trying to sell a Fokker-27 propeller plane owned by a tobacco company in North Carolina; the plane was outfitted with a small bedroom in the cabin. Salem Bin Laden was looking for a plane to support his company’s road-building work in the Saudi deserts. They made a deal, and Bath accompanied the plane to Jeddah. Like just about every American entrepreneur who could find the Middle East on a map, Bath seemed determined to cash in on the Saudi oil boom. He didn’t just want to make a few commissions from airplane sales; he wanted to develop deeper partnerships with the rising younger generation of Saudi sheikhs, to help them invest their money profitably in the United States. “He talked a mile a minute,” remembered Rupert Armitage, who was working in the Bin Laden Brothers office when Bath turned up. Still, Salem found Bath entertaining. Salem “loved larger-than-life people,” said the Houston lawyer Charles Schwartz. Jim Bath “was a wheeler-dealer, and Salem just loved that kind of stuff.”10
American promoters and deal makers besieged Salem; he learned to be cautious. He rarely committed large sums of money to their care, unless it was to buy something concrete, such as an airplane or a house. Yet, at the same time, for work and play, Salem began to acquire offices, residences, and agents in more and more cities around the world. In each place, he chose a primary representative or partner—someone who could help him confidentially entertain visiting Saudi royalty, host Bin Laden family members when they traveled for school or vacation, and assist in business deals. Bath became Salem’s agent and partner in Houston. In a sense, Bath opened a service bureau for Salem in Texas, so that Salem, in turn, could extend his global service bureau for the Saudi royal family, particularly in the field of aviation, where Salem was now establishing himself as an in-house expert for the Al-Saud by helping them make smart decisions as they spent more and more of their windfall on private jets.
Bath made his money from airplane commissions and by channeling Saudi investors like Salem into real estate or other business deals, where Bath took a 5 percent piece of the action for his efforts. He operated out of offices in the Fannin Bank Building in Houston, and he registered Salem Bin Laden’s new Texas businesses at that address. He created a vehicle called MBO Investments, Inc., named after the Bin Laden family firm in Jeddah. Bath’s authority was established in a “trust agreement” signed by Salem on July 8, 1976, and filed with the Texas secretary of state. Salem provided Bath “full and absolute authority to act on my behalf in all matters relating to the business and operation of Bin Laden-Houston offices,” which included “full authority to disburse funds for Company, or Bin Laden family expenses.” Bath maintained a revolving line of credit for the Bin Laden family that amounted at one stage to about $6 or $7 million, according to Bill White, who was a business partner of Bath’s after 1978.11
As his Saudi contacts grew, Bath moved into international aircraft leasing. This was a complex business in which, at the time, American tax and export laws made it particularly attractive to finance aircraft sales to overseas customers. Bath opened offshore corporations in Caribbean tax havens to facilitate such deals. He established a Cayman Islands corporation called Skyway Aircraft Leasing, Ltd., whose ownership was Saudi, according to White and other accounts.12
Bath also opened offshore companies for Salem. On July 5, 1977, he incorporated Binco Investments, N.V., in the Netherlands Antilles. Its parent company was SMB Investments, apparently in reference to Salem’s initials; it was also located in the Netherlands Antilles. Documents Bath filed with the state of Texas reported that the main purpose of these companies was to hold real estate. Binco Investments, for example, became a vehicle for Bath’s purchase around this time, on Salem’s behalf, of Houston Gulf Airport, a small field outside the city that Bath hoped would grow into a profitable feeder airport—a hope that was never realized.13
Bath’s deals with the Bin Ladens appear to have involved smaller amounts of money than those he developed with other Saudis, particularly Salem’s friend and banker Khalid Bin Mahfouz. In 1977, for example, Bath invested in the Main Bank in Houston; his partners included Bin Mahfouz, the wealthy Saudi businessman Gaith Pharaon, and former Texas governor John Connally. Salem invested with Bin Mahfouz in the Saudi Bank of Paris but apparently did not join his Texas banking deals.14
Bath’s Saudi clients, his politically connected friends in Texas, his offshore corporations, his freewheeling lifestyle, and his forays into international aviation all contributed to a growing air of mystery. Bath himself seemed to relish the intrigue. He flew back and forth to Caribbean tax havens, sometimes with hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash aboard the planes; he told his wife, Sandra, that the cash was needed to pay for fuel and contingencies. Sometimes the Saudis who traveled with Bath carried diplomatic passports, which allowed them to bring their briefcases through U.S. Customs without being inspected; on some occasions, according to a pilot who worked with Bath, the cases contained very large sums of cash.15
SALEM LED a family migration to America during the 1970s. As his brothers and sisters finished secondary school in Lebanon, Egypt, and Jeddah, he encouraged many of them to enroll in college in the United States. Like many Saudis, they gravitated toward Florida and California, where the weather felt like home. Salem’s youngest full brother, Ghalib, studied civil engineering at the University of California at Berkeley. His half-brother Abdulaziz, from Cairo, enrolled at the University of San Francisco, where he earned a master’s degree in business administration in 1978. Two other half-brothers, Shafiq and Saleh, and a half-sister, Raja, also enrolled at USF. Yeslam, Khalil, and Ibrahim, a cluster of full brothers by an Iranian-born wife of Mohamed Bin Laden, studied at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Other family members enrolled in colleges or design academies in Miami and Houston. School records and interviews show that more than a quarter of Mohamed Bin Laden’s fifty-four children studied in the United States at some point, primarily during the 1970s and early 1980s.16
Osama, of course, was part of the larger group that enrolled in Saudi or other Arab universities. Salem traveled frequently back and forth between Jeddah and the United States, zipping from city to city in his jets, organizing vacations, and handing out allowances. He was the family leader who kept track of everybody, no matter where they went to school. He carried one of the first portable phones, a bulky model as big as a brick, so that his brothers and sisters could reach him at any time. Mohamed’s children were now mainly teenagers or in their twenties, and they constantly had decisions to make about school, jobs, and even marriages. All came to Salem for consultation or permission.
His half-brother Yeslam and his stunning Iranian-born wife, Carmen, provided one harbor for the family in Los Angeles. Yeslam had drifted through Europe after high school. He took race-car driving lessons in Sweden, considered a plan to breed Doberman pinscher dogs in Saudi Arabia, and lodged for a time in the Royal Hotel in Geneva, Switzerland. While leasing an apartment in Geneva with his family in the summer of 1973, he met Carmen, the daughter of the apartment’s owner. Her father was Swiss; her mother Iranian. She spoke French and Persian, was twenty-two, extraordinarily beautiful, and fiercely ambitious. Yeslam, also twenty-two, found himself swept away by Carmen. He was a mild, reticent, sensitive young man prone to anxiety attacks. She felt that Yeslam nonetheless had the intelligence to lead his family’s international business one day, to bring it into the modern era. “Carmen was very anxious for Yeslam to do well,” recalled Mary Martha Barkley, who befriended the couple through her husband, who oversaw international students at USC, where Yeslam enrolled to study business in late 1973. “She had great ambitions for him.”17
They married the following summer and bought a house on Amalfi Drive in Pacific Palisades, a wealthy neighborhood near the ocean. Yeslam took flying lessons and purchased a twin-engine propeller plane for weekend trips to Santa Barbara and Arizona; his wife drove a Pontiac Firebird. Yeslam’s great passion, apart from Carmen, was his rather unfriendly Doberman, Khalif.18
Salem flew into Los Angeles periodically and organized family expeditions to Las Vegas, where the Bin Ladens stayed at Caesars Palace. He gambled the way he drank—lightly, and to pass the time. He once wandered over to a Vegas blackjack table while waiting for his traveling party to organize themselves in the hotel lobby. Soon he built up a pile of chips worth more than a thousand dollars. He joked with the female card dealer, and when it was time to go, simply shoved all his winnings over to her with a shrug. He reveled in the thrill that ordinary Americans and Europeans, particularly women, would express when he unexpectedly handed them large amounts of cash; he seemed to enjoy those exchanges more than some of the luxuries his money could buy.19
Salem never seemed to doubt himself or to question his identity as a Saudi who traveled widely in America. Some of his brothers and half-brothers, however, found themselves unsettled by the adventures he led them on.
The older boys, in particular, had all known their father in his prime. They had been instilled, naturally, with pride in the family’s achievements as Muslims, Arabs, Yemenis, and Saudis. This pride was not only a matter of family honor or some vague sense of national or religious belonging; it was inseparable from the detailed Koranic instruction the boys had received from an early age—the verses memorized and recited, the laws listed and observed. It was part and parcel, too, of the scenes they had enjoyed and the prayers they had offered on frequent visits to Mecca and Medina. Their father’s religion was not that of an ardent proselytizer; among other things, in his long association with American, Italian, and Lebanese Christians, he displayed little of the xenophobia sometimes exhibited by Saudi clerics. Yet his devotion lay at the core of his own identity and that which he hoped his sons and daughters would embrace. His adherence to Islamic ritual and values, the prayers he gave five times each day, the many Hajj pilgrimages he hosted in his carpeted tent, the fasts he adhered to during Ramadan—it would be difficult for any son of Mohamed’s to blithely set all this aside, even if Salem seemed at times to provide an example of how it might be done.
During Ramadan’s long afternoons, when he was supposed to be fasting and abstaining from tobacco, Salem chain-smoked and asked his younger brothers to serve him food and coffee. He rarely prayed when traveling in Europe or America, and he ate pork without hesitation—he thought it was delicious. In Saudi Arabia, he did attend mosques, but he was more likely to poke his friends in the belly while standing in a prayer line than to prostrate himself in humble supplication to God. He had a spiritual side—he talked about time travel, and infinity and the shape of the universe, questions that seemed to encroach upon him during his long hours in the sky. Islam did not seem to press upon him, nor he upon it. His more religious brothers would gently encourage him to find his way a little closer to God’s well-marked path, but the culture of deference to the family leader within an Arabian clan like the Bin Ladens was so strong that not even the most devoted of Salem’s younger siblings dared to challenge him severely about his lapses. Perhaps more important, their faith, as they understood it, taught that judging sinners was God’s business, not mortal man’s, as long as the sinner in question did not renounce Islam altogether. “No sin besides that of unbelief makes a believer step outside his faith, even if it is a serious sin, like murder or drinking alcohol,” Osama Bin Laden would say years later. “Even if the culprit died without repenting of his sins, his fate is with God, whether He wishes to forgive him or to punish him.”20
America during the 1970s, roiled by its recent cultural and sexual revolutions—not to mention its garish hairstyles and clothing—continuously demanded an answer of each young Bin Laden who lived there: Are you a Muslim, and if so, how will you practice your faith? Many of Salem’s siblings found that they could not shrug off the question, as he seemed to do, and they tacked back and forth, searching for a comfortable answer. Carmen, who lived as a secular European, saw this when Yeslam’s brothers came to visit from San Francisco or Jeddah. “You never knew which brother would turn very religious,” she recalled. “Even if you had seen them very young, and being very open…The men, they used to go out. They go to the movies. They go to bars. And you think they are Westernized. And suddenly small things make you realize: No.” Her own husband, she gradually came to realize, “was not as Westernized as I thought he was. They cannot cut that bond that is embedded in them.”21
An American businessman recalled visiting Yeslam’s brother Khalil in Los Angeles on the day Khalil decided to dump out all the alcohol in his house. “That’s it,” Khalil declared, as this person recalled it. “We’re not doing this anymore.” Afterward, Khalil still joined his brothers and university friends at the private clubs in Beverly Hills where they often went on Fridays and Saturday nights to dance and search for girls. Khalil would pay the maître d’ for a table but preferred to sit soberly and watch. Some of his brothers danced and caroused, but others let their beards grow and ensured they made time for evening prayers. For many of them, this was not a search for religious or personal identity that had a fixed destination; it was a journey of continuous motion, changeable at any time and place. One of the most striking examples involved Salem’s half-brother Mahrouz. He initially married a Frenchwoman; at his home, recalled a business partner of the family who visited him, he kept a globe that opened up to serve alcoholic drinks. Rupert Armitage remembered him as “kind of a party animal.” But suddenly, during the 1970s, “he turned.” Mahrouz rededicated himself to Islam. He eventually took four wives, grew a long beard, moved to Medina, and began to wear clothes thought typical of the Prophet’s lifetime. He built a large housing complex with a home for himself and his mother at the center, and homes for each of his four wives at equal distance, around the points of a square.22
These questions and struggles involving Islam and identity were hardly unique to the young Bin Ladens. When they traveled or attended school in the West, young Saudis often had a sophisticated, self-conscious sense of their own dilemma. They did not carry themselves around America as disoriented victims, but rather as experimenters in accommodation. Gradually, wrote Peter Theroux, who lived in Riyadh during this period, this kind of private bargaining drove many Saudis back toward Islam, even those who were not necessarily prepared to live fully by its precepts:
It was common in Saudi Arabia to look down on Europeans and Americans for selling sacreligious pleasures, then making illogical laws against drugs, drunk driving, and roughing up women. They could not keep track of that pesky line between what was licit and what was not. They often thought that the Manichean, if hypocritical situation imposed by Islamic law, which they so often violated, was saner than the West’s compromise with vices, regulating and tolerating them within limits.23
THE BIN LADEN WOMEN encountered contrasts in America that were even more extreme than those known by their brothers. Salem urged them to broaden their horizons—literally, in some cases, by learning to fly—yet he remained acutely conscious of Arabian decorum. It did not bother him in the slightest if his sisters wore jeans and let their hair flow freely outside the kingdom; indeed, he preferred it. When it came to dating and marriage, however, he enforced a transparent double standard. Salem had many American and European girlfriends, particularly after his divorce from Sheikha in the late 1970s. One of his half-brothers married an American, Mahrouz married a Frenchwoman, and a third married a Danish woman—unions that all ended in divorce. Yet when one of his half-sisters, Salah, fell in love with an older Italian man, it created a firestorm within the family; the episode seemed to stretch the limits of Salem’s tolerance, although he did finally bless the marriage, which turned out to be a long-lasting success.24
He presided over these issues as an Arabian patriarch—authoritarian, but eager to maintain balance and consensus. “It was just a really hard, really tough job,” recalled Gail Freeman, an American who befriended and worked with some of Salem’s sisters on palace design projects in Saudi Arabia. “The phone was always ringing.” Salem would cradle the phone under his chin and issue a stream of advice about love and marriage, recalled Peter Blum, a German who traveled as Salem’s personal valet for several years. “You have a wife,” he would say, or “You have enough headaches,” or “Listen, wait for a half year and then we can talk about this again.” He was not harsh in his judgments, Blum said, but “always like a diplomat.” Salem sometimes seemed to spend more time on “the family problems,” as Freeman put it, than he did on business deals.25
Salem often hid his American and European girlfriends from his sisters and half-sisters, fearing their disapproval. He applauded when his sisters drove fast on American freeways or flew airplanes around California, but he did not want them running about unsupervised with American or European men. His attitudes reflected an uncomplicated sexism, but also a strain of male Saudi pride; Western women might be conquests, but Arab women never would. In the spring of 1978, while at home in Saudi Arabia, Salem punched one of his American pilots after the man spoke to one of his sisters without his permission. The pilot quit immediately. That night, he called Salem in Riyadh to ask for his paycheck and an exit visa, which was required if an American employee wished to leave Saudi Arabia. This maelstrom involving male honor and the virtue of Bin Laden women seemed to draw out Salem’s dark side. He launched into a tirade on the telephone, recalled Francis Hunnewell, an American banker who was with him; Salem said he would not allow the pilot to leave the kingdom until he publicly apologized, and if he refused to work, Salem promised to “have him thrown in jail.”26
Salem himself preferred intelligent women. His main American girlfriend during the late 1970s was a young doctor serving in the U.S. military, Patty Deckard, who practiced at a hospital in San Antonio. Salem visited her parents in California and talked seriously about their relationship. “He always said, ‘I love myself,’…but he probably came as close to really, really caring for somebody with her,” said his pilot Jack Hinson. “But she wouldn’t marry him.” She concluded that she could not convert to Islam or endure the role expected of her in Saudi Arabia, said a second employee of Salem’s who spent considerable time with the couple during these years. The pair traveled periodically around America and overseas for several years before the affair ended and Deckard married another man.27
It was difficult for any woman, including Salem’s former wife, Sheikha, to compete with his relationship with Randa. “It was just always ‘Randa, Randa, Randa, Randa,’” said Gail Freeman. In the same period when Salem installed Randa in Panama City for flight lessons, he also helped her enroll in medical school in Canada, and he would fly up to visit and deliver supplies. “I think most of the sisters were jealous of Randa.”28
To win her pilot’s license, Randa had to complete a cross-country solo flight, navigating on her own in a Cessna hundreds of miles across Florida to a designated airport, in this case, one near Palm Beach. The day of her big flight arrived in late September 1978, but Salem was very nervous. He called Don Sowell at the flight school and told him, as Sowell recalled, “I really don’t want her to go by herself. If something should happen, I really don’t want her by herself.” There was no legal way for Sowell to certify Randa as a pilot, however, if he allowed an instructor into the cockpit with her for the cross-country flight. So they agreed that Salem would pay for an instructor to fly behind her in a chase plane, just in case.29
Salem’s prescience was extraordinary: somewhere over central Florida, smoke billowed into Randa’s cockpit from some sort of engine or electrical malfunction. Fortunately, she had a trusted pilot nearby to speak with on the radio. But the smoke was so bad that it quickly became clear to both of them that she was not going to be able to reach an airport. The instructor told her to prepare to crash-land in a field.
Salem’s mobile phone rang at the Palm Beach airport, where he was waiting for Randa. “She’s gone off the radar—we can’t find her,” the caller said, according to Gail and Robert Freeman, who were with him. Salem “went berserk,” Gail remembered. “He went crazy running around the airport, screaming.” He cried out again and again that his sister was dead. “She crashed! She crashed!” Don Sowell had flown to Palm Beach to receive Randa at her moment of piloting triumph, and the family’s longtime pilot Gerald Auerbach, the air force veteran, was also present. They tried to calm Salem down, but he lashed out at them angrily, almost to the point of striking blows, and demanded that they do something. Salem and the two pilots took off in his Hawker jet for the area where Randa had apparently gone down. They found an airport nearby, but its runway was much too small for Salem’s plane. Salem insisted he would land anyway. “Over my dead body,” Sowell told Auerbach, as he recalled it, because, as Sowell put it, “I felt that was a possibility.” Finally, he appealed to Salem’s common sense; no matter what had happened to Randa, he pleaded, it was not going to help if Salem got himself killed trying to rescue her.30
They landed safely at a larger airport and at last they got Randa on the phone. She was crying—but she was fine. She had fought through the smoke, and with the help of Sowell’s instructor, she had found a field where she could put the Cessna down. She landed roughly but did no significant damage to the plane and none at all to herself. It was a remarkable feat for a student pilot. “She had plenty of guts,” Sowell said.
Now Salem was as ecstatic as he had been distraught. He asked the Freemans to help him organize a grand party at the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach, to celebrate Randa’s heroism and survival. “Call up everybody you know!” he said. “Call up your friends in a fifty-mile radius!” In the end, some of the guests flew in all the way from New York and Houston. Once more, aviation and its perils had been the source of great drama for the Bin Ladens. That night at the Breakers, Salem hired a band, and his guests danced and sang. The next day, they all went to Disney World.31
OSAMA BIN LADEN moved freely as a teenager through overlapping worlds. He joined the Bin Laden family on outings and was a visible presence at its two main companies, Bin Laden Brothers and the larger Mohamed Bin Laden Organization. He played soccer and rode horses with local boys from his suburban Jeddah neighborhood. Each summer, until about 1976, he traveled to the more secular Syrian sphere of his mother’s family, on the Mediterranean coast, where he hiked in the mountains and apparently fell for a younger cousin, whom he had known as an unveiled girl since childhood. All the while, he immersed himself in Islamic study groups—at Al-Thaghr, his elite high school, and also at a special religious school in Mecca, Thafiz Al-Koran Al-Kareem; he continued this study after he matriculated at Jeddah’s King Abdulaziz University in 1976. In all, between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one, Osama managed to integrate his deepening religious faith with his enthusiasm for business administration and the outdoors, as well as his desire for sexual companionship. He accomplished this, after 1973, in a posture of ardent Islamic devotion from which he would never deviate.
Salem, with his rather different synthesis of enthusiasms, was nonetheless “like a father” to Osama in this period, according to Osama’s mother.1 Their relationship was typical of those between Salem and the group of his younger half-brothers who spent their early adulthoods mainly in the Arab world. When he was in Jeddah, Salem shed his jeans and donned his thobe and headdress. He chain-smoked cigarettes and was not noted for his leadership at prayer time, but he conducted himself nonetheless as a Saudi. He maintained some distance from his brothers and half-brothers. There were a few half-brothers, such as Tareq and Shafiq, with whom Salem seemed to share a genuine friendship. Mainly, however, Salem drew his friends and international entourage from outside the Bin Laden family—from Lebanese, Turkish, European, and American schoolmates, or from pilots and musicians he met on the road. These foreigners were playmates or aides-de-camp who depended on Salem financially or simply enjoyed his company. With them, he was free from censure and complications. With his family, he tried to be a judicious ruler.
Salem had no qualms about smuggling some of his non-Muslim friends or girlfriends into sacred Mecca or Medina, a practice that annoyed Osama when he learned about it. For their part, some of Salem’s friends learned to be wary of Osama’s piety. An Arab friend who was not particularly religious recalled meeting Osama in Medina: The muezzin sang out a call to the first of Islam’s two evening prayers, which usually take place about one and one half hours apart, and Osama insisted on leading his visitors into the Prophet’s Mosque. Salem’s friend waited in the car, and he wound up stuck there for much of the evening—Osama insisted, the friend recalled, that the entourage “pray and pray and pray.” The others in his group eventually returned shaking their heads. “They were complaining very much. I said, ‘Thank God I didn’t go inside with you. At least I’m in the fresh air outside, smoking.’”2
Osama was “perfectly integrated” into the family during this time, recalled Carmen Bin Laden. Beginning around 1974, while he was still in high school, he received enough money from his allowances, as well as from his work at the family companies, to buy a succession of fancy cars—a Lincoln or a Chrysler, and later, a gray Mercedes sedan, according to his neighbor and friend, Khaled Batarfi. He drove his cars very fast and wrecked at least one of them, in Batarfi’s recollection. He also had access to four-wheel-drive Jeeps and trucks from the family firms, which he drove to work sites and into the desert for weekend relaxation with his friends and his beloved horses. Riding horses, he would say years later, was his “favorite hobby,” and he prided himself on his ability to ride for forty or more miles at a time. He favored modest outdoor clothing, yellow work boots, and a Swiss Army watch.3
He turned up periodically in the smoke-filled reception room of Bin Laden Brothers, where, sometimes in the company of other younger brothers, he would wait patiently for his allowance or for some check or document to be signed. “I remember him only as a sort of supplicant, presumably for some extra cash,” Rupert Armitage recalled. Salem’s longtime mechanic and friend Bengt Johansson remembered him as “just another kid brother.” He had grown into a tall, thin young man, and as he let his beard come in, it sprouted at first in light tufts, and later to a full, dark thickness. He remained quiet and deferential. Many of his half-brothers possessed a similarly restrained demeanor; Salem’s continual displays of raucous energy were exceptional. The younger sons of Mohamed “floated” into the Bin Laden Brothers offices during school breaks, Armitage remembered, and quietly lined the chairs around the outer edges of the office. They usually needed something, but they learned to be patient. Every action in their lives, it seemed, required a “bloody signature,” which often proved complicated to obtain.4
During Ramadan, on weekends, and other holidays, the Bin Ladens entertained themselves at communal properties in Jeddah and its environs. There was a barren desert “farm” in Al-Bahra, between Jeddah and Mecca, where Osama fenced off a small ranch for about twenty horses. There was a large bland summerhouse in Taif, constructed during the 1950s or 1960s, where family members sometimes retreated during the hot season. Along the Red Sea there were family “beach houses,” which were little more than concrete sheds where a person might change into swimming trunks or find a little shade. By the standards of the day in Jeddah, these vacation properties were symbols of the family’s wealth and privilege, but they were not particularly opulent. Osama seems to have enjoyed all of them, although as he became more and more of a believer, he could be a pain, particularly at the beach.
He was self-conscious about his own conversion experience, aware that in some sense he was special or separate because he had been born again. In later years, he referred to 1973 as the year his “interaction” with Islamic groups began, when he was fifteen. He seemed to interpret—or was taught to interpret—his own conversion or recruitment into the Muslim Brotherhood at that age as the natural passage of a true Muslim: “As is known,” he once said, “from birth to fifteen years of age people do not look after themselves, nor are they really aware of great events…If we’re really honest, we find that this section, between the ages of fifteen to twenty-five, is when people are able to wage jihad.”5
The intensity of Osama’s conversion experience in his after-school study group had been unusual, but it was not so unusual that it marked him as some sort of cultish outsider. No young man devoted to Islam in Saudi Arabia would feel that way, or would be seen as such by his family and peers—and certainly not a young Bin Laden, whose father had been a steward of Mecca and Medina, and an emissary to Jerusalem. For many hours each week, state television broadcast scenes of thousands of pilgrims clad in white cloth circling slowly en masse around the Holy Ka’ba in Mecca; it was like having an entire network devoted to perpetual scenes from a religious aquarium. At prayer time, loudspeakers rang out in every town and city with the call to worship; shops and supermarkets closed immediately and mutawawa, or “religious police,” patrolled the streets with sticks to enforce compliance. The art hanging on Jeddah’s office walls, the books on living room shelves, the buildings on every other street corner, the calendar of public life, the speeches of public figures, the rituals of birth, seasons, and death—all of these drew heavily, if not exclusively, upon the idioms of Islam. Religion in Saudi Arabia was like gravity; it explained the order of objects and the trajectory of lives. The Koran was the kingdom’s constitution and the basis of all its laws. The kingdom had evolved into the most devout society on earth, not only in its constitutional and legal systems but also in the rhythms of its households, schools, and circles of friendship. The influx of European and American businessmen and advisers during the 1970s, and the widespread introduction of consumer technologies, did not alter Islam’s central place in the daily lives of the great majority of the kingdom’s subjects. Nasir Al-Bahri, a Yemeni who grew up in Jeddah and later served as Osama Bin Laden’s bodyguard, recalled that particularly for those teenagers, like Osama, who were attracted to religious teaching
[t]he Islamic climate was everywhere in Saudi Arabia, and the Islamic spirit was in everything: in the councils of scholars and in religious gatherings…The entire society there was one fabric. It was impossible to find a house without the fragrance of Islamic trends, in any form. Thus if a household did not have a young man who observed the faith, it had a young woman who observed the faith. If it did not have a young woman who observed the faith, the household perhaps had an Islamic tape or an Islamic book.6
Osama offered one such touchstone of religious devotion to the extended Bin Laden family. His family saw him—some with skeptical tolerance, others with unequivocal admiration—as their clan’s remarkably committed young preacher and prayer leader. Just as European aristocratic families of past eras considered it a matter of course for one or two sons to join the priesthood, while others became officers in the military or advisers at court, so did the Bin Ladens regard it as unremarkable for some of their sons and daughters to answer Islam’s call. This choice did not in itself make Osama a particularly prestigious Bin Laden son—certainly not under Salem’s leadership. Business, aviation, engineering, interior design, and Salem’s desire for someone in the family to become a medical doctor all competed with Koranic education in the family’s informal honors lists during the 1970s. And yet, of course, the Bin Ladens regarded themselves as an Islamic family, and so Osama’s idealism and commitment were respected, even when he grated.
Carmen Bin Laden saw Osama, with his gangly height and insistent religiosity, as a “minor figure” hovering censoriously on the family’s periphery. He was “more literal, more fundamentalist” than even some of his colleagues in the Muslim Brotherhood, said his friend and fellow adherent Jamal Khashoggi. He seemed particularly drawn to teachings that a righteous Muslim should imitate the dress and customs that prevailed during the Prophet’s lifetime. Osama scolded his friend Khaled Batarfi for wearing shorts to soccer games, which violated an obscure tenet of theological rule making. He seemed bent on finding a personal state of purity, and to achieve this, he insisted upon introducing Islamic precepts into even the most casual everyday encounters. As his Syrian brother-in-law Najim put it: “He often used to tell us what he had learned about religion.”7
Osama’s early involvement with the Muslim Brotherhood meant that from the very beginning, his understanding of Islam was inflected by messages of political dissent. The Brotherhood’s Islam was not passive; its members advocated a journey toward a righteous Islamic government. Lectures by its members were informed, too, by the Brotherhood’s recent history of anti-colonial violence in Egypt and the exile to Saudi Arabia of many of its activists. Scholars and writers influenced by the Brotherhood offered varying ideas about how a righteous Islamic government should be pursued, and when, for instance, violence or open political organizing might be justified. They were unified, however, in the view that preaching and teaching should be a bulwark of their campaign. A good Muslim should not only seek out his own state of grace; he should teach others. Brotherhood political precepts might make the Saudi royal family nervous, but this proselytizing vein fitted with the Salafi school of thought that dominated the kingdom. The term “Salafi” refers to the Prophet’s earliest companions, whom Salafi believers are taught to imitate. Mohamed Abdul Wahhab, an influential source of this doctrine in Arabia, emphasized that a man should literally model his life on that of the Prophet and his companions. In this school of thought, the purpose of studying the Koran and the hadiths involved a search for literal truths—facts and laws—which had been made available during the seventh century with the Prophet’s revelations; these pieces of a righteous life could then be adopted and assembled by any Muslim who wished to please God on Judgment Day.
Years later, after he had declared war against the United States, Osama said that even as a young man, he had been fired by anger over America and its conspiracies with Jews and Christians to destroy Islam. “Every Muslim,” he said, “from the moment they realize the distinction in their hearts, hates Americans, hates Jews, and hates Christians. This is a part of our belief and our religion. For as long as I can remember, I have felt tormented and at war, and have felt hatred and animosity for Americans.” In fact, prior to 1979, there is not much evidence that Osama was especially political. He seems to have concentrated in these years mainly on learning how to define and live an Islamic life, as outlined by the mentors and scholars he followed in Jeddah and Mecca. He certainly listened to speeches and read books containing anti-colonial and revolutionary political views, particularly the influential works of the hanged Egyptian Islamist Sayid Qutb, whose exiled brother, Mohamed, lectured at Osama’s university in Jeddah. According to his friend and university classmate Jamal Khalifa, Osama read Qutb’s Signposts and In the Shade of the Koran for the first time around 1976 or 1977; the books expounded on provocative theories for offensive action, including violence, to protect Islam from imperialists and nonbelievers. In later years, Osama often cited approvingly the works of Taqi Al-Din Ibn Taymiyya, a thirteenth-century theorist of violent jihad against apostate “occupiers,” and he cited a particular book by Mohamed Qutb, Concepts That Should Be Corrected, which had helped him understand that impious rulers of Islamic countries were “incapable and treacherous, and they have not followed the right path of Islam, but have followed their wishes and lusts—[and] this is the reason for the setbacks in the nation’s march during the past decades.” When he first heard these lectures and read these texts in the late 1970s, however, he had no practical way to consider their calls to political action, and no evident desire to take the political risks they urged upon him.8
He talked with his friends during this time about the problem of Palestine, according to Batarfi, but his views were unexceptional. In the aftermath of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, in which American military support for Israel figured prominently, Osama would have heard many anti-American and anti-Semitic harangues in Jeddah’s mosques, classrooms, and salons. These themes would also have been an aspect of his formal religious study. The Koranic narrative of Islam’s birth and spread is one of territory and warfare, a story in which the supposed treachery of Arabian Jews figures significantly. In later years, Osama would connect his anti-Semitism, which he attributed to Koranic teaching, with his outrage over American support for Israel:
It appears to us, from the writing of the Prophet, that we will have to fight the Jews under his name and on this land [Palestine]…And the United States has involved itself and its people again and again…and dispatched a general air supply line in 1973 during the days of Nixon, from America to Tel Aviv, with weapons, aid, and men, which affected the outcome of the battle, so how could we not fight it?…Any nation that joins the Jewish trenches has only itself to blame.9
It would be a mistake to attribute statements Osama made in his late forties to his state of mind three decades before, yet there is continuity in his opinions. His repeated references to 1973 as a turning point in his own life and as a touchstone of his anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic viewpoints suggest that year’s resonance in his life. Still, in Saudi Arabia during the mid-1970s, for an eighteen-year-old to describe Americans and Jews as enemies of Islam was little more than an expression of conventional wisdom. The testimony about him from contemporaries emphasizes other aspects of his religiosity—his insistent piety and his search for a life that was well rounded and pure.
A biography later published by his media office, drawn from the observations of an aide who knew him at a time when Osama was still interacting with the Bin Laden family, tried to inventory the sources of influence in his outlook and character. It read like the comment section in a schoolteacher’s report card:
Raised by his father, Bin Laden became used to responsibility, confidence, generosity, and modesty…It is known that he is also shy and taciturn, usually appearing serious, though trying to appear friendly, and avoiding raising his voice, generally, or laughing excessively…Osama is quite intelligent, confident, and observant, but also somewhat hesitant in making decisions and taking control, which has sometimes hurt him…One of the contradictions within Osama is his emotion and tenderness on the one hand, and his strength and stubbornness on the other hand. He loves to read, and does so frequently, and has an unusual passion for going through information, documents, and archives, as well as following the press.10
Some of his most uncompromising conduct involved women. Dating among suburban Jeddah teenagers was a difficult, risky, and frustrating endeavor even among relatively secular families, and for a young man as devout as Osama, it was just about out of the question. He was notably attracted to girls, however, according to Batarfi; by his account, Osama decided to marry at seventeen essentially because he wanted to have legitimate sex. The female cousins he saw in Syria in the summers did not veil or segregate themselves as rigorously as young women in Jeddah did. During his sojourns there, he had gotten to know Najwa, a daughter of his mother’s brother. Marriages among first cousins were commonplace in Arabian families; Osama’s mother and family may have encouraged and even arranged the match. Najwa’s brother, however, has suggested that the initiative came from Osama, and that he asked formally for his cousin’s hand. She was fourteen.11
Initially they lived with Osama’s mother and stepfamily in Jeddah; Najwa became pregnant and gave birth to a son, Abdullah. The marriage bed seems only to have sharpened Osama’s conviction that a righteous Muslim man should not cast his eyes even in passing on women other than his legal wives and his mother. He did not permit his wife to meet strangers. He averted his eyes from the family maid. When he made social calls on his brothers, he would back away and cover his eyes if an unveiled woman opened the door. He would not shake hands with any woman.12
Osama graduated from Al-Thaghr in 1976. The class photo depicts several rows of boys and teachers in ties and blazers, but Osama is not in the picture. By then, photography was one of the innovations that he rejected—photographs drew faithful eyes to false idols, to human imagery that competed with God’s oneness. Around this time he rejected secular music as well, because, as his teachers would have explained, it had not been a part of the Prophet’s life and it competed with the sacred sounds of Koranic recital and prayer. Osama did not smoke. He condemned gambling. His only conspicuous pleasures were sex, cars, work, and the outdoors. If he sometimes imagined himself as living in his departed father’s image, as some of his friends have suggested, he did so with considerable faithfulness.13
An exception was his view of polygamy. He talked with his friend Jamal Khalifa about the serial marriages their fathers had each undertaken, apparently from sexual motives. They felt this was “not the Islamic way at all.” They believed that there were more women then men in society, and so for that reason, multiple marriages were desirable, since they “solved a social problem,” Khalifa recalled. Yet, according to Islamic teaching, “you have to be fair, you have to give equal justice between all of them, and you have to divide the time, to give each of them what is enough for her.” They pledged to handle their married lives more responsibly—they might take the four wives permitted, but they would not divorce frivolously, and they would concentrate on the issue of equity.14
As his house filled up with young children (Najwa’s intervals between her pregnancies were short), he banned videotapes of Disney cartoons or Sesame Street. He rejected most television for the same reasons that he rejected photography and music; it coursed with blasphemous imagery. He did watch news programming, but he trained his children to stand by the television when the news was on, so they could turn down the volume knob when pulsing music announced a broadcast’s introduction.
He seems to have derived his early ideas about fatherhood in part from the lessons about self-reliance, faith, and parsimony imparted by his own self-made father. He took his young children camping in the desert. He taught them to ride horses, to sleep in the open, and to cover themselves with sand if they needed warmth. “He did talk a lot about how we lived in luxury, and how we would have to toughen up,” Batarfi recalled. “He wanted them to grow up tough—they would practice hunting and shooting.” He would not let his children drink from a straw, because these had been unknown in the Prophet’s lifetime; on one particularly hot family outing, Carmen Bin Laden watched, appalled, as Osama’s wife, draped in black, tried to hydrate her sweating children by spooning water into their mouths. The other Bin Ladens present, she felt, were “simply awed by Osama’s zeal, intimidated into silence.” Yet others who knew him then have said that while he could be severe with his children about Islamic precepts and instruction, he could also be playful and warm, particularly on family camping trips to the desert.15
IN THE PHYSICAL WORLD, liquids and gases swirl or condense when temperatures and densities rise and fall. A similar convection of cultures molded Osama’s late adolescence. He stood one degree separated from Mecca and two degrees from Las Vegas. And yet, in his own way, he seemed as comfortable with the presence of those competing densities as was Salem; he just managed their demands and temptations differently. Osama, in any event, was hardly the only Bin Laden of his generation to adhere strictly to Islamic teaching. In addition to his half-brother Mahrouz, two of his sisters, Sheikha and Rafah, became particularly devout in this period; they started a religious school in Jeddah for young family members. A number of his other brothers studied Islam formally and circulated in religious circles in the Hejaz. Among other things, religious credibility remained an imperative of the family business—Islamic scholars on urban planning committees in the two holy cities influenced contracting and real estate development decisions, as they had in Mohamed’s time.
Osama did not appear in the famous Swedish family portrait, but he certainly knew Europe. According to Batarfi, he visited London at age twelve, with his mother, to receive medical treatment for an eye condition; he stayed for at least a month and did some sightseeing. On a second trip, as a teenager, Bin Laden joined some friends and relatives on a big-game safari in East Africa. According to Batarfi, he also made one trip to the United States. Walid Al-Khatib, Osama’s supervisor at the family construction company, has also said that he “went on trips to the U.S. and Europe.” In Batarfi’s account, the visit to America came about because he and his wife sought treatment for a medical problem of one of their sons.16
Only one aspect of the journey made a particularly strong impression, according to Batarfi. On the way home, Osama and his wife were sitting in an airport lounge, waiting for their connecting flight. Najwa wore a black abaya, a draping gown, as well as the full head covering often referred to as hijab. Other passengers in the airport “were staring at them,” Batarfi said, “and taking pictures.” When Bin Laden returned to Jeddah, he said the experience was like “being in a show.” By Batarfi’s account, Bin Laden was not particularly bitter about all the stares and the photographs; rather, “he was joking about it.” The provenance of this account of Osama’s journey is uncertain; Batarfi is generally reliable, but in this case, his firsthand knowledge is limited. It seems clear that Osama did travel to the West to seek medical treatment for a son during the late 1970s, but he may have gone no further than Britain.17
Whatever his itineraries, the same themes prevail: Osama was not a stranger to the West, but he was not radicalized there. Through his own travel and that of his family, he knew something of Europe and America, but by age fifteen, he had already erected a wall against their allures. He felt implicated by the West, and by its presence in his own family, and yet, as he would demonstrate in the years ahead, he lacked a sophisticated or subtle understanding of Western society and history. He used his passport, but he never really left home.
THE AMBITION that most firmly bound Osama to his half-brothers was his interest in the family business. As his generation of Mohamed’s sons reached college, some of them drifted away from the prospect of a life in the construction trade—a few of his half-brothers managed to never work a day in their lives. Osama was among the larger group of boys who were strivers. They jockeyed for influence, salaries, and leadership roles. Osama’s religious inclinations made him a natural for management assignments involving the family’s Mecca and Medina renovation work. Assigning the most ardently religious Bin Laden brothers to work on projects in the holy cities would become a pattern as the family allocated management roles over the years.
Walid Al-Khatib, a Palestinian who supervised Osama in the Mecca office when he was still a teenager, remembered him as “serious for his age, and from the first day, I noticed his interest in small details. We operated heavy equipment, and soon this tall skinny boy was driving them all. His technical ability was impressive.”18
There were two main educational pathways for those brothers interested in a career at the company—engineering and business administration. The former was demanding academically and required a willingness to attend university abroad, as Saudi universities were not adequate. Between his religious studies and his swelling young family, the prospect of four or more years in Cairo or the West may have seemed undesirable to Osama. Whatever his reasoning, after Al-Thaghr, he enrolled as a business administration student at King Abdulaziz University, a sprawling white-walled campus built less than a decade earlier along the Mecca Road, near the Bin Laden family’s main compound at Kilo 7. It was a private university founded by Jeddah merchants who wanted a place to train their sons for business. Abdullah Suleiman, the former finance minister who had helped make Mohamed Bin Laden’s fortune, donated the land on which it stood, and had been among the Jeddah moguls who funded its creation during the 1960s.19
Years later, in an interview, Osama would boast that he balanced his academic studies with his assignments at the family company more successfully than any of his brothers. This was not only immodest, it was wrong. He apparently sought to leave university early to take a supervisory job in Mecca but may have changed his mind because of his mother’s pleadings. He implied in the interview that he had completed his university education, but according to Khalifa, he never earned a degree. A brief résumé prepared by Bin Laden or his aides in 1996 stated only that he “studied management and economics” at the university. In any event, he certainly fell well short of the achievements in academics and business management of a number of his older brothers.20
Osama was appointed as a manager in Mecca after he left university, according to Al-Khatib. The Bin Laden firms were responsible for a number of renovation projects in the area during this time. They built a new staircase at the Zamzam well, the Haram’s ancient source of sacred water; they demolished buildings to expand platforms and roads around the Mosque; and they restored walls and gates. Al-Khatib remembered Osama as stingy about distributing cash bonuses but fastidious about conserving food and handing out leftovers to the workers. Like his father, Osama prided himself on his ability to think through complex problems of demolition or engineering, even though he lacked the requisite formal training. As Al-Khatib put it: “He liked to solve technical problems by himself.”21
FRANCIS HUNNEWELL grew up in a stone hilltop mansion above a lake; he belonged to a Massachusetts family who traced their line-age and landholdings to the period of America’s founding. Michael Pochna’s father had been a legal adviser to J. Paul Getty. They were both Harvard men, class of 1960. Later they moved to Paris to seek their fortunes in private finance. They made lists of contacts from family, schools, sports teams, and social clubs, and then started calling around, looking for deals—an attractive line of work if you had the right lists, spoke French, and could raise some stake money. By the early 1970s, they operated a boutique merchant bank. Headquartered in Paris but registered in the Bahamas, it was called Lansdowne Ltd.; it engaged in the kinds of financings that would later be commonly known as venture capital and private equity.1
The multiple economic upheavals of 1973 and 1974—the Arab-Israeli war, the international oil embargo, inflation, and stagnating economic growth in America and Europe—forced them to rethink. Liquidity, a banker’s synonym for ready cash, was draining rapidly out of Europe and toward the oil regions of the Arab world. Hunnewell, Pochna, and their third active partner, Jan Baily, decided to relocate to the Middle East. Beirut and Cairo seemed the most appealing places for a new headquarters; they flipped a coin, and it came up Cairo. Pochna moved there, equipped with new lists of contacts. Hunnewell’s brother-in-law was an influential banker at Credit Suisse. He suggested that they call on a young Saudi he had met, Sheikh Salem Bin Laden.
Hunnewell arranged an introductory meeting and flew into Jeddah. He was a tall, athletic man in his thirties who projected the languid confidence of old money. Salem had grown used to these solicitous bankers who wanted a piece of what they presumed to be his outlandish fortune. He judged them not by the services they offered, about which he was generally indifferent, but by whether they enjoyed his sort of fun. He hosted lunch and then suggested they all ride out to the desert to see some of the Bin Laden horses. He had just bought a new dune buggy, a motorized contraption with a Volkswagen chassis and tires that could roar through soft sand. He loaded Hunnewell and Jan Baily into the passenger seats and began speeding at sixty miles an hour through the open desert, bouncing across dunes. One of the vehicle’s wheels soon fell off. Salem stopped and rounded up Bedouins who happened to be walking nearby and forced them to search for the missing wheel. They found it and a few of its nuts and bolts. Salem had no wrench, however. Hunnewell lifted the entire buggy into the air while Salem held a Bedouin’s hand in the position of a wrench, twisting it, which Hunnewell imagined must have been very painful for the volunteer. Baily tried to put the wheel back on. It worked, sort of, and Salem was impressed. For years later he would tell the story about how Hunnewell had lifted up the car like a superhero. He seemed to decide then and there that he would do business with them. They got back in the buggy and wobbled on; Salem sped almost as fast as before. What industry they might enter, how, and by what plan—those were details for another day.2
Michael Pochna flew out a few weeks later to try to put something specific together. He suffered through the usual long waits and chaotic scheduling before he received an audience with Salem. He pitched a Swiss company that could set up a factory in Saudi Arabia to manufacture pre-stressed concrete and modular housing, which could then support the Bin Ladens’ construction projects.
“Well, I’m not interested,” Salem said. “What else have you got?”
A silence followed, Pochna recalled, as he tried to come up with another idea. Salem then spoke.
“I think the future is telephones,” he said.
Pochna readily agreed, even though he had not previously given the subject any thought. They talked some more. Pochna made some calls to one contact he had in the American telephone industry. It became clear that Salem was thinking very ambitiously. He wanted nothing less than to win a contract from the royal family to build the kingdom’s first modern telephone network.
“My father built the roads,” Salem said. “I will build the telephones.”3
His vision was rooted in his global lifestyle. Salem and his generation of Bin Ladens were innovators of the jet age; they hopped effortlessly from Jeddah to Cairo to Corfu to Paris to New York and back again, sometimes in the course of just a few days. The more they moved around, however, the more they wished to stay connected. Salem lived at the center of a spinning family wheel, perpetually in motion. He could not bear to be out of touch—with Randa, or his European and American girlfriends, or his pilot friends, or his mother, or his brothers and sisters, or his royal patrons, or, if it was truly necessary, his business partners. In the 1970s, his and his family’s need for telephones with global reach far out-paced the technology’s development. Telephone service was particularly dire inside Saudi Arabia, where there were only a few tens of thousands of unreliable phone lines. When he was grounded in Jeddah, Salem resorted to flirting with his overseas girlfriends by telex from his Bin Laden Brothers office.
The idea that the world economy might be rapidly connected together and speeded up by affordable, border-crossing voice communication was barely understood or discussed in this divided era of the late Cold War. Russia and its East European clients lay firmly isolated behind the Iron Curtain. China was cut off and staggering after its dark period of Cultural Revolution. Even in the West the development of international satellites and telephones had only begun. Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke’s pioneering essay “Extra-Terrestrial Relays,” which first imagined the possibility of global satellite communications, had been published just three decades earlier, in 1945. Sputnik’s launch inaugurated the military satellite age in 1957, but missile and space races between the United States and the Soviet Union dominated the technology’s initial evolution. Governments and sclerotic monopolists controlled the major phone companies in America and Europe. There were no cell phones yet, and the only mobile satellite phones available to consumers were bulky and difficult to operate. The few global phones available usually required a user to identify his location and then call through a patchy private network. These devices improved incrementally every few years, but only a very passionate and very wealthy user (and Salem was both) could find them at all appealing.
It was often easier in these years for Salem to chat with friends and family while he was flying his airplanes than when he was moving around on the ground. Salem installed high-frequency radios in his private planes, at a price of about thirty thousand dollars each—these radios enhanced safety during transatlantic flights, but they also allowed him to connect to various telephone networks while he was up in the air. In Europe, he would call in from the cockpit to a company called Stockholm Radio. For a steep price, its operators would then route him into the Swedish phone system, through which he could connect to just about anyone in Europe. Salem so often called Stockholm Radio—and a similar firm in Houston, Texas—that the operators often just asked him for the name of the friend or sister he wanted to reach, since they already had all his numbers on hand. While flying over San Antonio or Houston, Salem would call down to friends in their houses below and tell them to come outside and look up in the sky. He would flash his jet’s lights and shout into his mobile telephone: “Do you see me? Do you see me?” On gliding trips in Europe, he would call his favorite sister in Montreal: “Randa! I’m over the Alps at twelve thousand feet! Do you believe this?” Flying between European capitals at night, he would talk for hours with his girlfriends while the Stockholm operators listened in sympathetically. If he was bored and his friends were asleep, he would call the Stockholm operators from his plane and play songs on his harmonica.4
“There’s a lot of money in phones,” Salem told his German friend Thomas Dietrich. He knew this because he and his family spent such vast sums of money on international phone calls. When he checked out of European hotels, he usually owed more for his phone bill than for his room and meals. He would call at night just to talk “and he would fall asleep, on an international call,” Dietrich recalled. “And when you hang up, he calls back and says, ‘Why are you hanging up?’” Dietrich learned that even if they were staying in the same hotel, it made much more sense to call Salem on the phone than to try to visit his room “because when you visit him, he sits in front of the TV and talks on the phone—he will not talk to you…In the day, he slept and was on the phone. And in the night, he was on the phone.”5
SALEM FOUNDED Bin Laden Telecommunications in 1975. He owned 51 percent. Lansdowne Ltd. owned 15 percent; the rest ended up with Salem’s bankers, the Bin Mahfouz family. The company operated at first from a modest residential villa in Jeddah. It possessed the air of whimsy that seemed to swirl around Salem like fairy dust.
Although he had virtually no prior experience in business, Rupert Armitage, Salem’s guitar-playing schoolmate from Copford Glebe, was soon appointed the company’s managing director. Salem and Rupert had fallen out of touch after school until they bumped into each other in the wee hours at a nightclub outside Rome, where Rupert was working as a bar manager and Salem was partying with a son of Lord Carrington, the British politician who was then his country’s foreign secretary. They jammed with their guitars that night, and six months later, Salem asked Rupert to come to Jeddah to give him additional lessons. Hunnewell and Pochna found Rupert to be a bit of an adventurer, and an unlikely telephone company executive, but they thought he was intelligent and reliable, and he was clearly trusted by Salem, so they accepted him.6
Their business at first centered on the sale in Saudi Arabia of American-made speed dialers for rotary telephones. These were primitive devices that allowed a user to program the numbers of friends or family and then dial by pressing a single button; they cost about one hundred dollars in the U.S. but sold at a brisk clip for three times that much in the kingdom. Lansdowne won an exclusive agency to sell the dialers in Saudi Arabia, and it turned out that every prince with a palace and a long list of brothers, sisters, aunts, and uncles wanted to have one. They soon branched out into other telephone equipment, such as private exchanges that allowed a palace to have dozens of separate lines. The kingdom still did not have a decent national telephone network, but the royal family wanted the latest and best equipment in their homes, even if the lines crackled or broke off when they punched the blinking buttons.
The biggest problem, Hunnewell discovered, was getting paid. “We were doing compounds in princes’ palaces and friends of Salem’s,” he recalled, and this drew them into the web of informal debts and credits that bound the Bin Ladens to other merchant families and the royal family. They would install an expensive 250-line exchange in a particular palace, only to be told by its owner, “I’m a friend of Salem’s, and Salem owes me money over here for this, and so he and I will work that out.” Hunnewell would then have to petition through Rupert Armitage to explain, “We’re owed 2.5 million by these people, who all say that you owe them money, and who aren’t gonna pay us” until Salem reconciled his debts.7
The company books were a continuous mess; there were so many claims of credit, debt, and barter exchange between Salem and his customers that it often seemed hopeless to sort out an accurate picture. “There must have been some cash flow problems” among the interlocking Bin Laden companies, and between Salem and his bankers, Rupert Armitage recalled. Salem “was always saying, ‘Rupert! Where can I find one hundred million dollars? I need it by tomorrow!’”8
Armitage dealt with much smaller amounts but in an atmosphere of disarray. He would make his way down to the National Commercial Bank “to pick up six hundred thousand riyals in order to pay off some official—and by the way, six hundred thousand riyals is really quite heavy, I can tell you.” In the hallways leading to the bank’s vaults, he would find “a few Yemenis shoveling out one hundred thousand riyals at a time…something huge. Anyhow, that’s a lot of money, and there were just blocks of it going off into the distance.”9
Hunnewell and Baily thought they should try to build a sustainable, organized business as they had tried to do in their previous merchant banking ventures. Hunnewell had contacts at General Electric and tried to deepen GE’s steadily expanding partnership with the Bin Ladens. They also tried to find a new source of profit in the Bin Ladens’ role as a customer of Caterpillar, the American manufacturer of construction machinery. Hunnewell noticed that there were all sorts of Caterpillar equipment—graders, earthmovers, bulldozers, and so on—just lying abandoned at former Bin Laden job sites. Salem explained that it had been his father’s practice to build the price of a new fleet of Caterpillar equipment into the bid of each road or other major project he took on. He would import the tractors, haul them to his job site, use them until the work was complete, and then just leave them. Caterpillar sent out a team to inventory all the equipment scattered around the kingdom. “They found stuff that was buried in the sands in crates that had never been opened,” Hunnewell recalled. They counted it up and told the Bin Ladens that they were the largest owners of Caterpillar equipment in the world. They discussed making the Bin Ladens their agents in Saudi Arabia, but Salem wasn’t interested. He wanted to build things, not sell somebody else’s products, he said.10
Salem had his eye on a big prize, a plan announced by the royal family to install about 450,000 new telephone lines in the kingdom, to bring Saudi Arabia into the modern communications age in a single leap. The contract—always on the verge of being finalized but never quite tangible—was the pot of gold at the end of the Saudi rainbow for many foreign businessmen who had flocked to the kingdom during the mid-1970s. Every Saudi merchant family, courtier, and arms broker in Jeddah and Riyadh, including Adnan Khashoggi, seemed to be angling for a piece of the contract as an agent or partner. With his new telecommunications company up and running, Salem decided to join the game. The American bankers were excited about the potential payoff, but Pochna, in particular, who increasingly found Salem arrogant and frustrating, became skeptical that the Bin Ladens would treat them fairly as partners. Salem, he felt, saw his merchant banking partners as “one of the many Westerners” who provided him with the services he required, “and we were no different than one of his pilots.” Pochna particularly resented the long waits he endured in Salem’s smoky reception rooms; he got so fed up that he began to bring a deck of cards to pass the time. This was not the way Harvard-educated investment bankers did business.11
They all recognized that the monster telephone contract would be won or lost on the basis of private accommodations within and around the royal family that the Americans and Europeans involved in the deal could never fully understand. Salem compounded the mystery of these informal negotiations by speaking about the deal to his partners through “delphic, inaccurate, odd comments,” which he then expected the Lansdowne partners to interpret accurately and act upon to strengthen their bid, in Pochna’s view.12
Saudi Arabia’s government-controlled telephone company had announced an exclusive deal with Phillips of the Netherlands, whose agent in the kingdom happened to be Mohammed bin Fahd, a son of the crown prince. The price of this tentative contract was estimated at $6.7 billion, an amount so much larger than the true cost of the system, as calculated by European consultants, that it appeared to involve several billion dollars of very mysterious payments. In 1976 and early 1977, Salem and others in Fahd’s circle managed to reopen the negotiations. Logs from Salem’s private jets show that he gave several rides to the minister and deputy minister of communications, and their families, during this period; presumably, he was impressing upon them, among other things, the perks of his friendship.13
Salem never explained to his American partners how he had worked his way into the contract’s new round of talks, or how the deal would finally be decided, but he made clear at a certain point that “this was one of the contracts he would get,” Pochna remembered. To succeed, however, Bin Laden Telecommunications needed a capable foreign telephone company as a partner—a company that could actually do the work. Lansdowne had negotiated relationships at Northern Telecom, an affiliate of Bell Canada. Northern’s president, Walter Light, flew into Jeddah. Salem threw a party at his house, invited the Canadian ambassador, pulled out his guitar, and sang “She’ll Be Coming ’Round the Mountain.” He then divided the audience into women and men for a rousing version of “Frère Jacques.”14
Salem’s methods paid off: Despite twists and complications, Bin Laden Telecommunications ended up as Bell Canada’s agent for a large portion of the contract, earning a straight cash commission of 1.5 percent of the company’s five-year, approximately $1.5 billion deal to operate and maintain the new Saudi phone system. The Bin Ladens also earned a similar percentage of a subsequent five-year Bell Canada contract with the kingdom, plus a large share of $400 million worth of ministry and housing construction contracts that Bell Canada was required to undertake as part of the deal. Almost everyone ended up happy—Phillips and Ericsson won a part of the contract involving equipment sales, and Prince Mohammed bin Fahd reportedly received a commission of about $500 million. Two exceptions were Francis Hunnewell and Michael Pochna. They accused Salem of cutting them out of some of the Bell Canada money and of improperly diverting construction contracts from the deal to other Bin Laden firms. They sued and ended up tied down in Canadian courts for many years.15
More and more, in business deals between Saudis and Americans, greed and a competing sense of entitlement became a risk. Each side condescended to the other. Even so, in the late 1970s, there was, it seemed, an almost endless amount of money to go around. Yachts, private jets, palaces filled with new technology, garages stuffed with European race cars—the princes were updating themselves, and a younger and more international generation was coming to the fore around Fahd. Yet the royal family and its courtiers were also drifting back toward the ethos of public luxury and payoffs that had prevailed two decades earlier under King Saud. The relative austerity and the official piety of the intervening Faisal years were receding. With Fahd firmly in control, with his own sons moving boldly into business, with oil prices rising ever higher, with construction cranes towering above every horizon, it was difficult for many privileged Saudis to imagine what might threaten the existing order.
DURING THE LATE 1920S, as he completed his conquest of the Arabian Peninsula, King Abdulaziz faced a Frankenstein problem. He had employed his jihadi militia, the Ikhwan, or “Brothers,” to vanquish his enemies and take the Hejaz, but he could not persuade these zealous volunteers that their religious war had reached its end. The Ikhwan protested Abdulaziz’s blasphemous embrace of the automobile and the telegraph. Soon they revolted violently. The king showed little mercy; in some battles, he mocked their beliefs by using his Fords as makeshift motorized cavalry to break their ranks. At the same time he sought a broader political accommodation with his enemies. He created oasis settlements for demobilized holy warriors and encouraged them to take up farming and passive religious study. Qasim, a deeply conservative province of rolling dunes and watered oases to the immediate northwest of Riyadh, hosted a number of these villages filled with resettled Ikhwan. Around 1940, a time when the Brothers’ memories of their grievances against Abdulaziz and his family remained fresh, Juhaiman Al-Otaibi was born in one such Qasim settlement, called Sajir. As he grew up, he seems to have identified early on with the causes and religious austerity of the Ikhwan and to have felt some nostalgia for their revolt against the royal family.16
He joined his tribe’s levy, or mujaheddin, in the kingdom’s National Guard, a paramilitary force that served as a check on the regular Saudi armed services and also as a kind of national employment scheme for restive tribesmen. Juhaiman became a corporal but left his tribe’s ranks to take up religious study at the University of Medina during the early 1970s. The university was known for its heavy contingent of exiled faculty who belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood. Its students included exiles from Egypt, Yemen, Kuwait, and Pakistan; there were even some American converts to Islam in what became Juhaiman’s Islamic study group. At Medina they studied tenets of Salafi orthodoxy, inherited in part from the beliefs of the Ikhwan, which emphasized the need to withdraw into a state of Islamic purity. These teachings intermingled with the political activism of the Muslim Brotherhood and the specific grievances of expatriate students about their home governments. In all, this blend of Koranic introspection and political dissent, tracing back into Saudi history and connecting outward to pan-Islamic movements abroad, would have seemed quite familiar to Osama Bin Laden and his Muslim Brotherhood–influenced after-school study group at Al-Thaghr, in nearby Jeddah.17
Juhaiman was almost two decades older than Osama’s generation, but many of his followers at Medina were younger students. They wore short mustaches, long beards, and thobes that fell only to the middle of their calfs, styles they attributed to the companions of the Prophet. They rejected photography as a blasphemous innovation, but their views went even further than those of Osama and his schoolmates in Jeddah. Juhaiman echoed the original Ikhwan by attacking modernity as a kind of grand conspiracy against true believers. After 1974 he and his followers also concluded that the Saudi royal family was illegitimate and corrupt. They withdrew from Medina to form an explicit political conspiracy to challenge the Al-Saud. Informal circles of study groups and students, frequently overlapping in their ideologies, were distinguished by intense and often very subtle debates over theology and the correct course of religious politics. Osama moved in one circle in Jeddah and Mecca; Juhaiman and his followers occupied a partially overlapping but separate realm in Medina.
After breaking with his professors in Medina, Juhaiman returned to Qasim, then moved to Riyadh, where his following grew to about two hundred. By 1978 they began to print anti-royal pamphlets on presses in Kuwait. One of the pamphlets was called “Rules of Allegiance and Obedience: The Misconduct of Rulers.” It attacked the Saudi royals and the officially sanctioned religious scholars who supported them as false stewards of Islam and its holy places. Some princes were “drunkards” who “led a dissolute life in luxurious palaces.” The royal family had “seized land” and “squandered the state’s money.” Commission-laden contracts like the deal to build a national telephone system were symptoms of a broader political rot. Juhaiman’s fulminations drew the attention of the Saudi interior minister, who arrested and interrogated Juhaiman and his followers. They were released in Riyadh after they promised to quiet down.18
In fact, they began to plan for a violent revolt.
IN SEPTEMBER 1979, Salem flew to Washington, D.C., to buy a new Learjet. He visited his American girlfriend Patty Deckard. The two picked up Jack and Anita Pizza from Panama City, Florida, then flew to Europe. They visited Cairo, Jeddah, Dubai, and Abu Dhabi. In early November, they scooped up two of Salem’s sisters, Mona and Randa, and flew to Athens. They spent a night on the Greek island of Crete, then they jetted back to Cairo. It was a particularly busy season in Salem’s playhouse at thirty thousand feet.19
The siege at the Grand Mosque at Mecca began at the call to dawn prayer on November 20, the first day of the portentous Islamic year of 1400. Juhaiman and his followers unpacked weapons they had smuggled in coffins normally carried by worshippers to bless the dead. They seized microphones and announced that among them was the Mahdi—the prophesied redeemer of Islam whose arrival on earth would signal Judgment Day. The purported Mahdi was Mohamed Al-Qahtani, an otherwise undistinguished follower of Juhaiman whose true role had been divined in a dream by another member of the group. As they fired their weapons from the mosque’s minarets, Juhaiman’s followers announced the start of what they believed would be the last battle known to mortals.20
It quickly devolved into a bloody catastrophe. Saudi security forces arrived and tried to undertake a frontal assault on the holy Haram. Floodlights installed by Bin Laden engineers during past renovations, which normally illuminated worshippers and pilgrims in a celestial glow, lit a killing field for Juhaiman’s sharpshooters. Scores bled to death on the marble. Salem and his muscular Lebanese aide Mustafa Fathlalla donned military uniforms and drove into Mecca with drawings of the mosque’s layout hurriedly pulled from office files.
Salem, Mustafa, and other Bin Laden brothers and employees fought and consulted on the front lines of the Mecca siege for two weeks. Salem’s half-brother Yahya, a civil engineer with extensive experience in Mecca, was among those who risked their lives to aid the royal family’s increasingly violent assault. Yeslam Bin Laden, another senior executive at the time, “was frantic, dashing from house to office like a man unhinged,” his wife remembered. The Saudi forces poured fire at Juhaiman’s rebels in the minarets. “Everyone was saying, ‘God rest his soul, Mohamed bin Laden,’ and at the same time, they were cursing Mohamed bin Laden, because the 106-millimeter cannon could not penetrate the minarets—that was how much steel there was,” said a Bin Laden employee who was there. Helicopters swooped in firing machine guns from their open doors.21
Juhaiman and his surviving followers soon retreated underground, a maneuver they had evidently planned in advance. Beneath the mosque there were many catacombs and tunnels, some of which carried wiring and pipes to support the mosque; others led to rooms for religious contemplation and retreat. Juhaiman had hidden food and ammunition below during weeks of clandestine preparation; in some cases, he apparently had gained access to privileged Bin Laden company vehicles. Once the rebels slipped into the catacombs, the Bin Ladens’ engineering and architectural knowledge became particularly crucial. The employee who was present remembered a Jordanian commander storming through the mosque, calling out, “Where is Bin Laden? Where is Bin Laden?” He found them and spread out the architectural plans, marking an X on every section of the mosque’s surface that lay above an underground passage where the rebels might be hiding. “Jackhammer it,” the Jordanian ordered.22
The Bin Ladens brought in boring equipment to drill holes in the floor of the mosque so that security forces could drop grenades down the makeshift shafts. “They bored all these holes and the sergeant would sit there with his basket of grenades, tea, and cigarettes—drop a hand grenade in the hole,” said Tim Barger, who was living in Jeddah and was in contact with participants in the siege. They dropped so many hand grenades into the tunnels during this phase of the assault, said the Bin Laden employee, that up on the surface “we were slipping on the rings of the hand grenades.”23
Salem seemed thrilled to be involved, but he was also worried. It did not require an advanced degree in political science to see that the Al-Saud was vulnerable to forces of Islamic revolution similar to those that had just toppled the shah of Iran across the Persian Gulf—and if the Saudi royal family fell, so would the Bin Ladens. The brothers moved quickly—and in secret—to create an offshore financial haven. On November 27, 1979, just one week after the Mecca uprising began, lawyers halfway around the world, in Panama City, filed a Notaría Primera del Circuito establishing a new company under Panamanian law: Binladin International Inc. They soon changed its name to the less conspicuous Binar, Inc. Its directors would eventually include the most influential brothers around Salem—Bakr, Omar, Yeslam, Tareq, Hassan, and Khalid. The company’s initial share capital was listed at $10 million. The timing of its formation suggests a panicked family hedging its financial bets against the possibility that it might soon face a hostile, postrevolutionary Saudi government. None of the Bin Ladens involved with these Panamanian companies has ever explained their purpose, but family members have acknowledged making a similarly hurried offshore transfer of funds during a later Saudi crisis.24
In fact, Juhaiman and his followers were doomed. Saudi and French special forces called in for assistance killed many of the rebels at the Grand Mosque; Juhaiman and sixty-two surviving followers were arrested and beheaded. Still, their bloody revolt did create a profound crisis of legitimacy for the royal family. The rule of the Al-Saud rested on their claims to Islamic credibility, particularly as stewards of Mecca and Medina. They rationalized their assault on the mosque as a regrettable but necessary act of their stewardship, but they were obviously on shaky political and theological ground. As the assault wound down, royal family spokesmen emphasized the rebels’ wild claims about the arrival of the Apocalypse and downplayed their more temporal—and threatening—political grievances.
The revolt implicated the Bin Ladens as well. Rumors swirled even as the siege raged that family members must have been involved, for it was their trucks and their Jeeps that had privileges to move freely in and out of the Holy Mosque; surely, the rumors went, some Bin Ladens had aided the conspirators. Mahrouz and a second brother, probably Osama, were arrested briefly during the crisis while driving near Mecca. According to the Bin Laden employee who participated in the siege, the brothers were mistaken for conspirators because they were using company radios to monitor police communications—only out of curiosity.25
When the Bin Laden employee himself drove away from Mecca one night, his clothes bloodied from his involvement in the grenade assaults, a policeman stopped him on the highway. He showed his Bin Laden company identity card, and the officer responded by shoving a gun in his face, announcing, “God sent you to me.” The employee said he avoided execution on the spot only by convincing the policeman to consider more than the swirling rumors about the family’s role and to check in with his superiors before shooting him.26
Years later, Osama criticized then–crown prince Fahd for using indiscriminate force against the rebels. “He could have solved this crisis without a shot being fired, as all sensible people agreed at the time,” Osama said. “What the situation needed was some time, especially since those present inside the Haram were only a few dozen. They had only light weapons, mostly hunting rifles, they had few provisions, and they were surrounded.” Fahd, he continued—making no reference to Salem or other family members who were involved—“stubbornly fought with them and put bulldozers and armored cars inside the Haram. I still remember the bulldozer’s tracks on the paving stones of the Haram…People still remember the minarets covered in black after they had been pounded by tanks.”27
His true attitude toward the revolt at the time it was actually going on is more difficult to discern. Osama was twenty-one years old. The Islamic faith in which he had so deeply immersed himself was stirring suddenly. Beyond the Mecca siege, revolutionaries in Iran had overthrown their corrupt shah. The Muslim Brotherhood was gaining strength and planning revolt in Syria, a conspiracy that Osama would later say he was involved in. Juhaiman and his followers might have been misguided, particularly in their identification of a Mahdi, or divine savior, but their political critique was stimulating, and the royal family’s massive counterattack was, at the least, disquieting.
Still, there is hardly any evidence to suggest that Osama was willing to take significant personal risks in the name of rebellion—nor is there evidence that he disagreed at the time with his brothers’ cooperation with Saudi security forces. Rather, he seems to have conducted himself as an exceptionally pious, rising construction mogul and family man, an Islamist on the make—a rather common profile in Saudi Arabia. Far from conspiring to revolt, Osama in these years seemed to be exploring how he might have it all—money, multiple wives, children, an ambitious work life, and God’s favor. His status as a young Bin Laden son in good standing was a crucial prerequisite.
By early 1980, Osama’s tax-free income from Bin Laden sources probably exceeded $150,000 per year and may have been twice that—an income greater than that of many junior princes. In these years, Salem controlled allowances for younger Bin Laden brothers like Osama, and by several accounts from business partners and employees, Salem’s system appeared to be arbitrary and inconsistent. By the early 1990s, when dividends were allocated in a more orderly fashion, the minimum amount a son could expect was just under $300,000 annually, according to U.S. court filings by accountants hired to examine Bin Laden finances. It seems safe to assume that comparable allowances were lower a decade earlier. In both periods, the amount a brother received would be greater if he also owned shares in other Bin Laden companies or worked as a salaried executive. Osama’s older brother Yeslam, who had earned a degree in business from the University of Southern California, received a salary of about $800,000 per year in 1986, according to an affidavit filed by his wife Carmen. Osama was among those brothers who had ownership in more than one company, and he also took management jobs, although he was more junior than Yeslam and certainly would have earned less in salary. From these fragments of evidence, it is possible to estimate—or guess—that Osama’s total annual income from family sources would likely have been around $200,000 during this period. He certainly behaved as if he had money to spare. He bought a small apartment building in the Al-Aziziyah district of Jeddah after he left university and then took a second, and eventually a third, wife, whom he installed in equally sized apartments. These wives were more mature and better educated than the teenaged cousin who had borne his first children—at least one of them had earned a doctoral degree in Arabic or religious studies, according to Osama’s later bodyguard. Their qualifications and religious expertise matched his evolving self-image.28
At the Bin Ladens’ Mecca office, Osama was promoted to supervise Walid Al-Khatib, the Palestinian who had previously been his boss. One of their projects involved routing a new road between the Grand Mosque and a palace, which required demolishing buildings in a densely populated neighborhood—without using any dynamite. Osama worked on detailed engineering questions involving the structural weaknesses of buildings and how these might be leveraged to knock them down. Al-Khatib found Osama “especially effective in liaising with various government departments and smoothing over problems.” He worked easily with European and American engineers and spoke to them in English. He was reserved, certainly, and very pious, but in a Saudi context he was a rising young man of the Mecca establishment.29
One day a driver came into the office trembling. He showed Al-Khatib a subversive book he had found; it was an underground tract denouncing the Saudi royal family. They searched the place where the driver had discovered the pamphlet and found more than one hundred other such books. Al-Khatib was terrified. “I knew it meant a death sentence, and I didn’t want to be associated with it.” He called Osama immediately. Bin Laden flipped through the pages and “smiled his famous smile as he turned the pages.”
“Will you please call the police?” Al-Khatib asked him, as he recalled it.
“No, you call the police.”
Al-Khatib protested; as a non-Saudi, he would be particularly vulnerable to the security investigation that would surely follow. He begged Osama to make the initial contact with the police, but Osama again refused, got into his car, and drove away. Reluctantly, Al-Khatib reported his discovery. The police arrived, and eventually, Al-Khatib “got away with it.” The incident changed his feelings about Osama, however. “I didn’t like him anymore.”30
Saudi Arabia’s political fabric was stretching. Iran’s example seemed to prove that oil money might accelerate dissent rather than quell it. Fearful, Fahd and his brothers hurriedly began to accommodate the kingdom’s Islamists, showering them with increased budgets and acceding to the demands by religious scholars for stricter gender segregation and media censorship. Culture and public life in the kingdom grew steadily more conservative. Yet the secular wing of the royal family did not interrupt their lives behind palace walls or in Europe’s capitals.
The Bin Ladens remained united, too, after the Mecca uprising. The cultural distance between the secular wing and the religious wing of the family had widened considerably during the 1970s, but Salem’s leadership, and his strategy of mutual accommodation and generous financial subsidy, kept the family well intact. Bin Laden identity—and Bin Laden wealth—remained fixed on the same star that had guided Mohamed after his arrival in Jeddah a half century before. Above all else, they depended upon, and loyally served, the Saudi royal family.
AFTER THE MECCA UPRISING, Salem flew to New York for hemorrhoid surgery. He had put the procedure off for years; when he could delay no longer, he arranged his operation as P. T. Barnum might. He retained an American vascular heart surgeon at New York–Presbyterian; this was considerably more surgical talent than was normally required for such a minor procedure, but Salem said he would pay handsomely. He also announced that he would videotape the event, casting his exposed rear end as the star of the show. The hospital objected, but it did allow him to bring a friend with a Polaroid camera. Afterward, Salem created a multimedia show in which he set to music a medley of photos of his backside. He later showed the pictures at parties and to Saudi royalty, including Crown Prince Fahd.1
During his recovery, which he prolonged in a similar spirit of self-dramatization, Salem brooded about his family’s vulnerability to revolution in Saudi Arabia. He continued to prepare financial infrastructure that could aid the family if it was ever forced into exile. On January 23, 1980, Panamanian lawyers working for the Bin Ladens established a second company, following on Binar. It was called Saudin Inc., and its directors again read like a roster of the most influential brothers around Salem: Yeslam, Bakr, Omar, Tareq, Hassan, and Khalid. Around this time, Salem told one of his American business partners, Robert Freeman, that he was concerned about what might happen to the family “should there be some sort of turmoil in Saudi Arabia.” Salem had his estate near London, but he decided that he should build a larger compound where many of Mohamed’s children could also retreat, if it was ever necessary—a place where they could live side by side with their families, as they did in Jeddah.2
White, Weld & Co., an elite Boston-based investment bank, had introduced Salem to a property called Oaktree Village, in Orlando, Florida; it was a tract of land that had been divided into 229 lots for single-family homes but had been developed no further. The company that owned Oaktree “was having some cash flow problems,” recalled Aaron Dowd, who later managed the property, and it offered the tract for sale for $1.9 million, or about $8,300 per lot. Salem decided to buy. He put down about $380,000 in cash and assumed a mortgage on the rest of the purchase price. It was his first major real estate investment in the United States. He reserved about sixty of the Oaktree lots for the Bin Laden family; each brother or sister who participated would receive two, one for a house and a second for a spacious yard. He decided to create separate corporations, each named after a flower, to hold each family member’s property—he bought a book about flowers and paged through it, choosing his favorites. The first flowers went to those closest to him—his devout mother; his full “kid brother,” Ghalib; his full sister Mona; his free-living half-brother Shafiq; his half-sisters Raja and Raedah; and, of course, Randa. Salem envisioned that if all remained well in Saudi Arabia, the Bin Ladens would gather at Oaktree occasionally for group vacations around the nearby Walt Disney World resort. If, for any reason, the Saudi kingdom fell apart, they would have a ready refuge beside the Magic Kingdom.3
Salem preferred the sprawl and amusement parks of Orlando to Palm Beach, which was favored by some Saudi royalty. He rented limousines and arranged masseuses for visiting princes in Palm Beach but otherwise minimized his time there. He seemed to be put off by its social pretensions. He mocked all snobs. Once, at dinner, an American businessman sampled the wine and haughtily sent it back. Salem excused himself, slipped into the kitchen, and arranged for the waiters to pour the rejected wine into a new bottle. This time, the businessman made a show of being pleased—until Salem announced his prank.4
Still, he knew that his royal clients required a grander style than he generally favored for himself. In 1980, as construction began at Oaktree, Salem asked one of his partners if he could locate an elegant mansion in Orlando that might be suitable for rental by a vacationing Saudi prince. There was nothing on the open market, but after some effort, they found a wealthy local businessman named Miller McCarthy, who lived on a multi-acre estate overlooking Johns Lake, to the west of Orlando and not far from Disney World. His stunning Mediterranean main house had been constructed in the mid-1920s by a man named Pratt, a chemist who reputedly derived his fortune from patents on coagulants used in Jell-O. Pratt had taste: He purchased fine materials and commissioned arched walkways and careful detailing. The rear lawn sloped down from the swimming pool to weeping willows and palm groves beside the lake. In later years the property deteriorated, but McCarthy and his wife bought it during the early 1970s and spent about $600,000 on a painstaking restoration.5
For a handsome price, the owner and his wife agreed to move out temporarily while Salem’s royal friends moved in. The Saudis surrounded the estate with security guards who had been trained by the CIA, or so Salem told McCarthy. They left the place a mess, McCarthy said; he later billed them for $25,000. Still, “the Prince really enjoyed his stay,” as Robert Freeman recalled, and “that was good news” for Salem. Afterward, in Salem’s “impulsive way,” he immediately asked McCarthy if he could buy the entire property. According to Freeman, Salem thought he could use the place “to do some lavish entertaining of visitors from Saudi Arabia.”6
As they neared an agreement, Salem called McCarthy from Singapore in the middle of the night to bargain. He wanted everything in the house—sheets, pillowcases, even a Chevy van of McCarthy’s that had caught Salem’s eye because it had a phone inside. When they agreed on terms—McCarthy recalled that the total price was just under $2.2 million—Salem sent an emissary with a $250,000 cashier’s check. They closed the transaction in December 1980. Salem’s accountants in New York, at Price Waterhouse, set up a Liberian corporation to purchase and hold the estate, apparently as part of Salem’s international tax-avoidance strategy. Salem dubbed this offshore holding company Desert Bear Limited. From then on, the Orlando estate became known simply as Desert Bear.7
Neighbors around Johns Lake watched in astonishment as Salem and his royal guests transformed the place into a private amusement park. Hot air balloons lifted off the lawns and drifted over Orlando. Helicopters buffeted the palm trees as they landed inside the walls; men in suits climbed out, briefcases chained to their forearms, and jogged to the main house. Salem was friendly to his neighbors, and welcoming, and he tried to keep his parties under control, but the occasional amorous couple did tumble down the lawn, a neighbor said, and according to McCarthy, “they liked to smoke marijuana,” and they “did it openly.”8
When Salem’s brothers and sisters visited Desert Bear with their children, the atmosphere calmed considerably. Salem transformed one of the outbuildings into a hangar for ultralight aircraft. He hired a pilot from Texas, Pat Deegan, to assemble his fleet. Deegan walked into the main house one day and found Salem on a couch in the living room, still in his bathrobe, with a large group of Bin Laden children, all under twelve years old, lined up before him. Salem presided over a stack of one-hundred-dollar bills. “Come on up,” he told the children, handing out one bill after another. Deegan watched for a while and asked, “Hey, can I get in line?”9
By this time, Salem had purchased a seaplane. He kept it in America and used it for family recreation in Florida and Texas. He and Ghalib were among the family’s more active fliers during these years; they would zip above Johns Lake and nearby orange groves in ultralights or else haul out the seaplane for takeoffs and splashdowns. “Kid Brother” Ghalib was becoming considerably more religious than Salem, but he was pleasant and adventurous, and he had a growing family of young children who particularly enjoyed Disney World.
Flying ultralights off the back lawn at Desert Bear required some maneuvers during takeoff and landing; there was a fairly tight glide path between orange trees and power lines. Ghalib had flown the route many times without incident, but one day he drifted too close to the power lines. His engine caught one of the lines, and he flipped over and crashed.
He broke his back but he was fortunate; he suffered no permanent damage or paralysis. He was immobilized in the hospital for a time and then recuperated at Desert Bear. It was one more close call in the Bin Laden annals of aviation. It would not be the last.10
SALEM OPERATED AN OFFICE in the Olympic Tower on Fifth Avenue, in Midtown Manhattan. His local partner was Robert Freeman, a former investment banker whose father had befriended King Faisal decades earlier. Freeman’s wife, Gail, had met Salem’s wife, Sheikha, in the first-class cabin of a commercial airliner flying from London to Jeddah. The couples clicked, and they remained close even after Salem and Sheikha divorced. Salem asked Freeman to work for him as his personal financial adviser; Freeman proposed instead that they create a holding company in New York for investments in America. They called their Delaware-registered corporation Amarco—for American Arabian Company. Salem and Khalid Bin Mahfouz each took 40 percent and Freeman took 20 percent. Freeman hoped they would enrich themselves through ambitious undertakings, mainly in commercial real estate; he discovered that Salem was averse to stocks and other intangible assets.11
Freeman introduced Salem to Donald Trump. The Bin Ladens owned a vacant tract of land near a royal palace in Riyadh, and Freeman thought the property offered “an excellent opportunity for Donald Trump to build one of his signature buildings, like the Trump Tower in New York.” When they met in Trump’s office, the developer told Salem that he was intrigued, but he would require $25,000 in cash plus two first-class tickets to Riyadh for himself and a colleague. According to Freeman, Trump explained that given his reputation, he did not feel that he should be spending his own money on “exploratory ventures in faraway places.” Besides, Trump continued, if Salem was willing to put up the $25,000, it would show that he was serious about the deal. Salem declined. People were clamoring to do business with the Bin Ladens, he said; they did not need incentive pay. The meeting ended in stalemate, to Freeman’s regret. Salem and Trump, he observed, were “very strong personalities, and there was very little give-and-take for either of them.”12 Trump’s spokesperson denied that such a discussion took place. Asked to review the author’s written source materials describing the meeting, the spokesperson did not respond.
Freeman pitched investment idea after investment idea to his Saudi partners, but Salem rarely expressed interest. He seemed to regard his Manhattan operation mainly as a platform for shopping. When he was in New York, his first priority was to head down to 47th Street, where he expended great energy bargaining for jewelry and consumer electronics with the Hasidim who owned many of the district’s retail stores. He bought bags full of diamond necklaces and earrings for Bin Laden mothers and sisters in Saudi Arabia. Other Saudi tourists swaggered around Tiffany’s, proud to pay the sticker price and to carry conspicuously the Tiffany’s shopping bag, but Salem “was looking for deals,” Freeman recalled. He loved haggling with Hasidic retailers but feared losing out, so he ordered Freeman to find an appraiser who could examine particular pieces of jewelry and offer a sense of what he should pay. Freeman located an Italian appraiser with a second-floor office on 47th Street, to whom he could ferry jewelry entrusted to him by the store owners downstairs. He was never entirely sure, however, whether the appraiser was secretly in cahoots with the jewelers. It hardly mattered; Salem relished the negotiations more than the results. He had imbibed the anti-Semitic stereotype that Jews are the world’s canniest bargainers; he seemed to regard shopping at Hasidic stores as a feat of daring.13
He prowled the nearby electronics stores for the latest portable phones, calculators, cameras, music players, and miniature televisions, all of which he bought in bulk. “He’d buy hundreds of these things for the princes,” recalled Gail Freeman. He would walk the aisles and peer through the glass cases, asking “Now, tell me the truth: These are brand new? Nobody’s seen them yet, right?” Like a salesman who uses season tickets at Madison Square Garden to cultivate clients, Salem used his mobility and expertise in American consumerism to acquire gadgets that he could use back in Saudi Arabia to ingratiate himself with princes.14
Khalid Bin Mahfouz bought two apartments at the Olympic Tower, but he and Salem usually preferred the room service and convenience of hotels; when in New York, they stayed mainly at the Helmsley Palace or the Plaza. Salem threw an extravagant twenty-eighth-birthday party for Randa at the Plaza. Since he didn’t know too many people in the city, he asked the Freemans to fill up the private room with friends from their neighborhood in suburban Long Island. Salem sang his usual repertoire of corny folk and Christmas songs. “We were his playthings,” Freeman recalled. Salem’s lack of interest in ambitious business projects frustrated him—he had, after all, given up a career at a major investment bank.
Still, he tried to live as his partner did. Once, on a trip to Jeddah, Salem ordered Freeman and an Italian associate out of a Jeep at night in the middle of the desert. Salem drove away—Freeman and his colleague had to stumble through the sand to the road, and then hitchhike into Jeddah. When they made it back, Salem was giddy; he seemed to regard his prank as part practical joke, part survival test. Freeman waited patiently for his revenge. One night in New York, when they were all out to dinner with Randa, they discovered that Salem had forgotten his wallet and had no money. Immediately afterward, Freeman drove to Harlem, forced Salem out of the car, and sped away. Randa fretted that Salem would never make it back, but he soon strode into her hotel with two new African American friends. He was, of course, delighted: “Bob, you do have a sense of humor.”15
Freeman needed it. Salem was often so pinched for cash that Freeman had to call Jeddah night after night to plead for wire transfers: “Salem, we’ve got to have some money—we’ve got people at our door. We’ve got to pay the rent…What are we doing? Where are we heading?” Salem usually came through with the minimum amounts needed to maintain the office, “but it was always at the last minute.” As best Freeman could determine, the Bin Laden companies in Jeddah, which Salem now firmly controlled, had a reasonably steady cash flow, but there were so many calls on that money—employees, equipment, loan repayments, family—that Salem was not able to tap into it very easily for personal projects. Late payments to his construction companies by the royal family drained his liquidity even more. And yet as each year passed, Salem’s appetite for private jets and real estate abroad seemed only to grow. Oil prices fell during the early 1980s, but this did not visibly crimp Salem’s style. Instead, a pattern set in, according to Freeman and other partners and employees. When Salem needed money, Freeman recalled, “he had to turn to Khalid Bin Mahfouz.”16
THEY WERE CONTEMPORARIES and best friends, each a scion of a Hadhrami business fortune, each adapting to the international imperatives of the oil boom. As they reached their thirties and assumed their inherited responsibilities, however, they exhibited contrasting personalities. When they flew together on their private jets, Salem might joke and sip champagne and play guitar, but Khalid would sit quietly, drinking tea or smoking an Arabian water pipe. He stayed away from Salem’s more provocative parties for decadent Saudi princes. He did seem to enjoy Salem and his outrageous antics, but he would often observe his friend impassively, or issue only a slight, crooked smile. He was “a very quiet man, a very private man—very deep in thought,” said an employee who spent many hours with the two men. “I think he enjoyed seeing that Salem was not afraid to say or do anything, and I think that he kind of vicariously lived through him.”17
Khalid was “just as happy to let Salem run the show,” said a second employee. Among other things, this meant adapting to Salem’s idiosyncratic ideas about when and how to spend his money. Once, on a trip to California, Bin Laden and Bin Mahfouz arranged to meet at the private aviation terminal at Los Angeles International Airport. As they waited, Khalid’s aides watched the country singer Kenny Rogers arrive on a private jet and climb with his entourage into stretch limousines. Salem turned up in a cheap rental car—he waved Khalid into the front passenger seat and they peeled out toward the freeway. “Nobody knows who they are and they couldn’t care less,” recalled the employee.18
Some of their American and European colleagues found the friendship and business relationship between Salem and Khalid to be extraordinarily complex. On money matters, Khalid was clearly the senior partner. Yet it was Salem who enjoyed such easy, informal access to Fahd and other royalty; because of his charm and energy, Salem’s influence in Riyadh exceeded the size of his bank accounts. One European business partner who knew them both believed that Khalid harbored some quiet resentment about this imbalance. As for Bin Mahfouz himself, some of his partners and employees regarded him as an enigma, a man of many contradictions.
The least complicated thing about him was his wealth; by the early 1980s, it was on full display. Salem had befriended Harry Winston, the prominent New York jeweler, and through him, he and Khalid were invited to the showroom of Hammerman Brothers, a wholesale jeweler in Manhattan. Khalid picked out some exquisite—and very expensive—pieces. Bernie Hammerman pulled Robert Freeman aside and asked if it would be too great an embarrassment to ask Khalid for a credit reference before he walked out with the jewelry. Khalid suggested two names, Freeman recalled: Ben Love, the chairman of Texas Commerce Bank in Houston, and Tom Clausen, the chairman of Bank of America in San Francisco. Hammerman’s credit department contacted Clausen, who said he was authorized to clear any check up to $50 million for Khalid Bin Mahfouz. As Freeman recalled it, “This created quite a stir in the showroom.”19
Bin Mahfouz spent much of his time in America in the Houston area. He had met the aircraft broker Jim Bath around the same time that Salem had, and through Bath and other American partners he purchased private jets and real estate. He bought a large ranch on Houston’s outskirts and a mansion in River Oaks, a city neighborhood of oil barons and their retainers who poured their money into antebellum-style plantation houses and columned Georgian estates. The Bin Mahfouz property, at 3800 Willowick, lay just around the corner from Jim Bath’s relatively modest pine-shaded home. Khalid’s main house looked something like Versailles; in the rear was a swimming pool with an island in the middle that could be reached by a footbridge. Bath called it “the Big House,” his partner Bill White recalled. Khalid opened the estate and its guesthouses to the Bin Ladens. Salem’s sisters visited and amused themselves climbing trees on the sprawling grounds. Khalid and Salem hosted parties for the Texas notables who promoted and managed some of Bin Mahfouz’s American investments. At one point during this period, Khalid noticed that tour buses kept stopping on Willowick in front of his estate. “Why do these people keep coming by?” he asked. One of his employees explained that his home was now on the River Oaks celebrity tour. “The next time they come,” he said, apparently quite serious, “invite them in for tea.”20
John Connally flew on Bin Mahfouz’s jets during his 1980 presidential campaign, according to two of Khalid’s employees. The oil barons Nelson and Bunker Hunt traveled with him, too, and they tried to draw Bin Mahfouz into their ill-fated attempt to corner the world silver market; one of the employees remembered Khalid complaining that he lost money on the venture. In contrast to Salem, Khalid tracked world financial markets and directed investment strategies in precious metals, foreign currencies, and other volatile instruments. His advisers were sophisticated about finance, and some enjoyed connections at the highest levels of international politics—in Houston, his attorneys included Baker Botts, the powerful firm that also represented the Bush family.21
Khalid was one of several Bin Mahfouz sons who participated in the management of his family’s National Commercial Bank; his aging father, Salem, remained chairman. Khalid involved himself in the bank’s international transactions. NCB was becoming a formidable global institution; in 1985 it would report that it held more than $1 billion in cash or equivalent instruments and more than $6 billion in deposits. As the largest bank in Saudi Arabia, it was inevitably entwined with the royal family and the government. NCB planes sometimes transported payrolls for Aramco, the oil consortium; they carried boxes of brand-new hundred-dollar bills from the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas, according to pilot David Grey. NCB planes also ferried documents to Baghdad in the early 1980s; the pilots who flew this route believed the missions supported Saudi Arabia’s quiet liaison with Saddam Hussein during the early stages of the Iran-Iraq war, Grey said. Whatever their role, the flights supported Saudi policy to shore up Saddam, a tilt backed by Washington; Fahd later acknowledged providing $25.7 billion in aid to Iraq, and the kingdom also transferred U.S.-supplied weaponry to Saddam.22
NCB’s finances were complex, not least because the bank had to hold an unpublished amount of reserves to protect against loans in Saudi Arabia that might not be repaid. Yet the bank’s profitability and financial health were never in doubt, and Khalid Bin Mahfouz himself appeared to have no difficulty accessing large amounts of cash. Robert Freeman recalled that Bin Mahfouz protested that some of the real estate investments he proposed, in the neighborhood of $5 million, were too small to be worth his attention. Indeed, in Orlando, separately from Salem, Bin Mahfouz began acquiring land on a larger scale than Salem’s family-oriented Oaktree project. In an endeavor code-named “Project Debra,” after a waitress who served him while he was discussing the proposal in an Orlando restaurant, Bin Mahfouz and his agents quietly purchased tracts toward what would become an ambitious eighteen-hundred-acre commercial development known as Metro West; it would eventually be worth just under $1 billion. Khalid routinely traveled with $100,000 or more in his briefcase; at the end of a trip, according to his partner Rick Peterson, he would give whatever was left—as much as $30,000—as tips to employees at his Jeddah headquarters.23
Salem also traveled with a briefcase full of tens of thousands of dollars, but his underlying accounts appear to have been less secure. Around the time he bought Desert Bear in late 1980, Salem told Miller McCarthy that he and the Bin Laden companies owed Bin Mahfouz and his bank about $220 million. Much of that debt may have involved project loans or letters of credit that would be repaid routinely, but even so, there can be no doubt that Salem lived closer to the financial edge than did Khalid. Robert Freeman was not the only partner of Salem’s who sometimes found it painful to extract money from him. Particularly after the fall in oil prices, Salem occasionally struggled to make dollar payments that ran only to six figures. At one point he backed out of the purchase of a $750,000 yacht, pleading depleted accounts, even though it might lead to the loss of a $200,000 deposit, according to his German friend Thomas Dietrich, who was helping him with the acquisition. In 1984, for unknown reasons, he took out a $200,000 mortgage on Desert Bear, according to Florida property records.24
These occasional signals of distress usually passed quickly. He stayed close to Khalid, and partly by borrowing, Salem still managed to find cash for one Learjet after another. In any event, it was often impossible to tell when Salem was handling his own money and when he was managing someone else’s funds. Some of the cash Salem touched seemed to lie outside of the international banking system. Robert Freeman recalled that Salem once asked him to find a way to surreptitiously deposit—or launder—about $5 million to $10 million in cash into Western banks. Freeman said he refused; he never learned where the money Salem wanted to wash had come from.25
Such were Salem’s financial dealings in the early 1980s: transnational, but connected with America; impressively resourced; complex; and sometimes mysterious. Those traits also perfectly described the covert war in Afghanistan that was about to alter the Bin Laden family’s destiny.
SALEM’S POLITICAL BELIEFS were vague, if they could be said to exist at all. What the royal family wanted, he wanted. If his friends were in trouble, he helped. When Lebanon cracked up during the 1970s, Salem brought families he knew there to Saudi Arabia and arranged for jobs. He handed cash to a friend who spent time in Beirut during the civil war and told him, “You know what to do with this.” His friend used the money to support families in need—“Sunni, Shia, Christians.”1 Such loose charity appealed to Salem’s sense of purpose more than, say, political organizing. For a Saudi, he was not a particularly ardent anti-Zionist. He emphatically saw himself as an architect of closer ties between the kingdom and the United States—but if these views were his own, they also coincided with those of Fahd, his royal patron. He did not devour newspapers, and during the long hours he spent propped up in bed, watching television and talking simultaneously on the telephone, he was much more likely to watch action movies than news broadcasts. Yet he loved the rush of adrenaline, and as at Mecca in 1979, he could throw himself into a fight if he had a point of entry.
The events of that year—the Grand Mosque uprising, the Iranian revolution, and in December, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan—forced all the Bin Ladens to reckon with global politics to a greater extent than ever before. In this, too, they tracked the Al-Saud. Self-preservation motivated both families more than ideology. From the Nasserite revolution onward, the Bin Ladens had often been instruments of clandestine Saudi foreign policy projects whose primary purpose was the protection of the royal family’s rule. After the crises of 1979, they were called upon again.
The Al-Saud and the Carter administration both interpreted the invasion of Afghanistan as an initial thrust by Moscow toward oil supplies in the Gulf. This was a misperception of Soviet motives, but Kremlin secrecy made it impossible to know otherwise. Despite their arms purchases and military construction projects during the 1960s and 1970s, the Saudis were hopelessly ill prepared to defend the kingdom from any serious attack; only the American military could do this. Fahd had always leaned toward Washington within the councils of his family; he responded to the events of 1979 by deepening the kingdom’s protective alliance with America. He negotiated secret agreements to build oversized military bases in Saudi Arabia that would permit the United States to preposition equipment for a crisis or quickly deploy large forces after one began—this undeclared policy was known in Washington as “overbuilding, overstocking.”2 Abroad, Fahd decided to partner more actively with America’s campaign to contain and defeat communism around the world. Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 made such collaboration more palatable to the Saudis; Jimmy Carter’s human rights rhetoric and Camp David peacemaking had alienated them. Yet if Fahd embraced Reagan’s priorities too openly, he risked angering his kingdom’s Islamic activists, whose potency and underground organizing had just been revealed so shockingly at Mecca. The shah of Iran had fallen, in part, because he had come to be seen by ordinary Iranians as a stooge of the Americans. All this argued for yet greater secrecy in U.S.-Saudi collaborations. Here, too, the Bin Ladens had a reliable track record.
Both the Americans and the Saudis were initially cautious about supporting the Afghan mujaheddin as the rebels revolted spontaneously against Kabul’s new communist government. The Central Intelligence Agency’s analysts doubted the rebels could do more than harass the mechanized Soviet occupying army. American policy toward the Afghan rebels during the early 1980s rested not on a premise of future victory but on the notion that providing them guns could raise the cost of the invasion for the Soviets. Fahd agreed to match dollar for dollar the secret U.S. aid budget for the rebels, which initially was in the range of only $30 million annually.3 For Fahd, the war offered a convenient way to redirect the attention of Islamists outside the kingdom’s borders. Even in this era before Al-Jazeera, Afghan suffering had quickly become a celebrated humanitarian cause across the Muslim world. Hundreds of thousands of destitute refugees poured by the month into Pakistan. Soviet planes bombed them as they fled. Fahd organized charitable support for the war’s victims; he blessed such donations as official Saudi policy. The Afghan war united in a foreign cause factions of Saudi society that might have been in conflict had they focused solely on domestic matters.
It had the same effect within the Bin Laden family. Through his ambition, force of personality, and control of purse strings, Salem had held the secular and religious wings of his family together. This balancing act became more difficult after the Mecca uprising because the kingdom’s Islamist movement acquired new legitimacy and budgets; this revival, often referred to as the sawa, or “awakening,” emboldened many Saudi believers to assert themselves, including those among the Bin Ladens. “It was not uncommon for a single Saudi family to have its own members divided along these lines,” a Saudi writer observed:
A relative would be labeled mutawawa if he internalized the rhetoric and discourse of the new Islamist groups. He would be identified by his constant preaching among family members, listening to religious cassettes, regular denunciation of Western culture, music and luxury goods, and his enforcing of a strict moral code among his female relatives. The era witnessed the emergence of a new generation of self-appointed, literate and articulate mutawawa. They coexisted with less conservative members of their families…Within families, tolerance and tension progressed hand in hand.4
At the periodic family meetings where he reviewed business and financial issues and received requests from his brothers and sisters, Salem had to manage not only his openly religious half-brothers Osama and Mahrouz, but other brothers and sisters for whom Islam was an increasingly important part of their young adult lives—and even their political outlooks. Charity, one of the five pillars of the Islamic faith, offered the least problematic way to meet such aspirations. The Mohamed Bin Laden Organization, like every other merchant company in Jeddah, operated a zakat fund, or family foundation, to handle much of the formal tithing required by Islamic law.5 Such routine charity in Saudi Arabia typically ranged from local mosque construction to feeding hungry orphans overseas—a range of activities little different from those of churches in the American heartland. During the first years of the 1980s, organizing donations to Afghan refugees offered Salem, who was a savvy manipulator, a kind of triple play—it fulfilled his family’s tithing obligations, it supported Fahd’s clandestine foreign policy, and it diverted the energies of the Bin Laden family’s religious wing.
Salem had his own connections to the Afghan frontier. He had flown his sisters to boarding school in Peshawar and visited Kabul. His stable of pilots, based in Jeddah, included several veterans of the Pakistani air force, as well as an Afghan pilot named Mohammed Daoud, who had been forced into exile by the Afghan communists. Flight logs show that Salem flew into Karachi as early as November 1980. It was around then, according to his fellow Muslim Brother Jamal Khashoggi, that Osama took his first trip to Pakistan, announcing himself there as a junior philanthropic activist.6
BENEATH A BILINGUAL sign that reads “Al-Thaghr Model Schools,” Ahmed Badeeb is pictured alongside other teachers in the second row of the official photograph of the class of 1976, the year Osama Bin Laden graduated from Jeddah’s elite private high school. Badeeb was a full-faced man with a rakish expression that reflected his profane, unruly, entertaining personality. He was also highly ambitious—an attribute that some who knew him traced to his Yemeni roots. Like the Bin Ladens, the Badeebs had emigrated to Jeddah from the Hadhramawt. By the late 1970s, Ahmed and his brother Saeed, who was studying for a doctorate in political science in the United States, had begun to forge connections to the Saudi government. Ahmed taught biology at Al-Thaghr, where his students included young members of the royal family. He also knew Osama from the school’s religious committee and remembered him as “not an extremist at all…I liked him because he was a decent and polite person.”7
After Osama left Al-Thaghr, Ahmed Badeeb came to the attention of Turki Al-Faisal, the youngest son of the late king who, although he was only in his thirties, had recently been appointed by Fahd to succeed his uncle, Kamal Adham, as Saudi Arabia’s chief of foreign intelligence. Faisal named Saeed Badeeb as his chief of analysis, and he hired Ahmed as his chief of staff—a job that involved much discreet travel. After 1979, Badeeb became, among other things, Turki’s bagman for transfers of government cash to Pakistan. In this role he soon revived his mentorship of Osama.
The official Saudi-American channel for funneling money to the Afghan rebels ran through Pakistan’s main intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI. By insisting upon this conduit, Pakistan ensured it would maintain secrecy, as well as greater control over how the funds were distributed. One of Badeeb’s roles during these early years was to purchase weapons clandestinely on the international market, and then ship them into Pakistan through ISI. From the beginning, Badeeb said, this Pakistan-dominated channel made him uncomfortable; he wanted to develop independent contacts among Afghan fighters. “We cannot depend only one hundred percent on what the Pakistanis give us,” he recalled. “We have to know the number of fighters, how many in this organization, how many in that, and how much they received.” One easy way to develop such unilateral relationships for Saudi intelligence was to invite particularly important Afghan rebel commanders to visit the holy cities of Mecca and Medina for the minor umrah pilgrimage or the annual Hajj. It was an ideal environment for making friends and recruiting clients—on Saudi soil, amid feasts and informal gatherings in the desert evenings, shadowed by the holiest mosques in Islam, at the site of the religion’s birth. The visiting Afghans could be showered, too, with cash donations from admiring Saudi businessmen. And who better to help manage such invitations, and to participate in the ensuing charitable and religious festivities, than Osama Bin Laden, a scion of the family that played such an influential role in the holy cities?8
He was approaching his midtwenties, married to three wives, with a brood of small children scampering across the floor of the partitioned Jeddah apartment building where his expanding family lived. At his office in Medina he was the boss; he roared around in a desert-beige Land Cruiser and drove bulldozers at job sites, as his father had done. On visits to Pakistan he was a sheikh, deferred to obsequiously because of the cash he carried. On religious holidays at Mecca, he possessed a new aura in the Bin Laden hospitality tents—a righteous activist, a rising son in a respected family. In clandestine meetings of Brotherhood activists in the Hejaz, he may also have joined the movement’s planning sessions for violent, secret campaigns in Syria and Yemen; he later said that he was involved, but because these campaigns operated outside the boundaries of Saudi policy, he seems to have participated only quietly and cautiously.
Osama’s connections to the Afghan frontier ran through the Muslim Brotherhood, which had recruited him as a teenager. In Pakistan, the Brotherhood affiliate was a political party named Jamaat Islami. When Osama flew to Pakistan for the first time carrying donations for the Afghan rebels, he traveled not to the Afghan border, but to the eastern city of Lahore, where many of Jamaat’s senior political leaders were based. Osama “was not trusting ISI,” Badeeb recalled. “He doesn’t want to give the money to ISI or directly to the mujaheddin because he thinks Jamaat Islami in Lahore can get that money in the hands of the real mujaheddin,” or those who were truest to the Brotherhood’s aims. Bin Laden met two Arabic-speaking Afghan commanders, Burhanuddin Rabbani and Abdurrab Rahul Sayyaf; his trip lasted about a month.9
This initial travel signaled a pattern of Osama’s relationship with the Afghan war between 1980 and 1983: he was a commuter who did little more than carry cash and hold meetings. He made his contacts in Pakistan through several overlapping networks: his Brotherhood network of religious activists, the charitable circles of Jeddah merchants inhabited by his family, and the Saudi intelligence operation run by Badeeb. “The arrangement” during the early years of the Afghan war, recalled Jamal Khashoggi, was that the Saudi government, through its foreign intelligence service, would “support the military part,” while private philanthropists and religious activists would “support the humanitarian and relief work” along with the United States and Pakistani intelligence. These spheres overlapped, however. The donors Osama helped to organize for the Afghan cause included “members of the government,” recalled Khalil A. Khalil, a Saudi who tracked Islamic activists for the royal family. Also, Badeeb used humanitarian offices on the Afghan frontier as cover and infrastructure for intelligence operations. Because of Badeeb, Osama developed cordial relations with Prince Turki Al-Faisal, whom he met during Faisal’s periodic visits to Pakistan. He also won audiences with the powerful full brothers of Fahd—Nayef and Ahmed, with whom Salem had hunted in the Iraqi desert. Nayef and Ahmed ran the Saudi Interior Ministry, overseeing the kingdom’s domestic security.10
Because of his rising visibility and contacts with important princes, Osama began for the first time to create value for the Bin Laden family. Nothing was more important to the Bin Ladens than building and revitalizing royal connections. In this new era of Islamic awakening, Osama’s role as a courier and religious philanthropist complemented the concierge services Salem provided for Fahd and other secular-minded princes in Europe and America. Osama’s work also provided the Bin Ladens with renewed credibility among the religious leaders who influenced contracting in Mecca and Medina. Osama “was a very lovely figure in the family,” said Bassim Alim, a relative by marriage who knew him during these years and who traveled occasionally to Pakistan to support the Afghans. “They liked him.”11
In 1982 Salem appointed Osama as an executive overseeing a new round of renovation at the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina—a visible role, and another step in “the training or internship program that his elder brother gives to a younger brother,” as Khashoggi put it. Salem also ordered one of his aides to build a vault in Jeddah where Osama could temporarily store gold jewelry and cash donated for Afghans by businessmen and their wealthy wives. These rich Saudis had come to believe “that the Afghans were angels…the holy people,” recalled Ahmed Badeeb. “Women used to give their jewelry—huge amounts, you could not measure it.” The Bin Laden vault was twenty meters by twenty meters, fireproofed, and bombproofed, recalled the aide who built it.12
Osama later conceded that he worked during these years in cooperative alignment with clandestine Saudi policy; one of his assignments was to not get caught. “Due to my arrival in Afghanistan,” he recalled, “and due to my family’s closeness to the Saudi governmental system, a letter arrived commanding Osama not to enter Afghanistan, and to stay with the immigrants in Peshawar, because if the Russians were to capture or imprison him, it would be construed as proof of Saudi backing for the mujaheddin against the Soviet Empire.”13
His ego and his ambitions were swelling, yet he remained a reticent, almost painfully shy man in conversation. Sabry Ghoneim, a Bin Laden executive in Cairo, recalled Osama’s arrival in Egypt during this period for a meeting with construction engineers involved in a project Osama was supervising in Jubail, a coastal industrial city in Saudi Arabia. Ghoneim remembered him as “a young man with the attitude of a shy girl. He was always looking at his feet.” Nor was he a particularly effective executive. He said little during the interviews with the engineers. Ultimately, according to Ghoneim, the project Osama supervised lost more than $15 million.14
He was shy, but he now had several important mentors who decidedly were not: his elder half-brother, his former teacher Badeeb—and increasingly, a Muslim Brotherhood scholar and fundraiser fired by the Afghan war, Abdullah Azzam.
Like Osama, Azzam had been recruited into the Brotherhood as a young man. He was born in a village near Jenin, in the West Bank, and went into exile after Israel occupied the region during the 1967 war. He studied and taught Islamic politics in Egypt and Jordan before his subversive views led him to refuge in Saudi Arabia, where he won an appointment on the faculty of King Abdulaziz University; he lectured at the university when Osama was a student there. Azzam became an elder, charismatic, international figure in the Hejaz circles of the Brotherhood, in which Osama also moved. He was the author of a book about jihad, Signs of the Merciful, and he was developing the thesis for what would become an even more influential tract, Defense of Muslim Lands.
Like many subversive professors before him, Azzam was burdened by financial debts accumulated during his itinerant and poorly compensated career. Saudi Arabia—and Osama in particular—offered the prospect of financial liberation. There is more than a hint of opportunism in the way Azzam flattered and gradually befriended the high school–educated Osama during the first years of the 1980s, promoting the young philanthropist as a saintly patron of a righteous, assertive Islam. Azzam’s wife developed a friendship in Jeddah with Osama’s wives. They socialized at Bin Laden farms in the desert. By 1984 their acquaintanceship had deepened into partnership. It was “a meeting of money, will and youth, represented by Osama Bin Laden, and knowledge, direction and experience, represented by Abdullah Azzam,” observed Nasir Al-Bahri, Osama’s later bodyguard.15
Osama Bin Laden “was a soft person, and Abdullah Azzam was empowering him to become a symbol of the Saudi wing of the cause,” recalled Khalil A. Khalil. “Azzam saw Osama as a bridge to Saudi Arabia.”16
Sheltered Saudi teenagers and college students drilled in Islamic ideology but living far from any battlefield embraced the Afghan war as a romantic cause, a weekends-and-holidays rite of youthful passage. Religious students flew on direct Saudia Airlines flights to Peshawar to spend the last ten days of the holy month of Ramadan doing volunteer work or shooting off guns in the hills. Their commitment to the Afghans resembled that of American students who spend a few days a year hammering houses together for the poor. They might be moved by altruism, but they also sought a touch of cool. “When we used to look at the Afghan suits that the mujaheddin who returned from Afghanistan wore as they walked the streets of Jeddah, Mecca, or Medina, we used to feel we were living with the generation of the triumphant companions of the Prophet,” Al-Bahri remembered.17 For young Saudis during the early 1980s, the Afghan war was fashion, ideology, a fundraising opportunity, a touchstone of religious revival, a bonding experience—everything but the brutal combat known by the Afghans who actually fought it.
The Saudi religious establishment viewed Azzam as its bridge to Pakistan, which held one of the world’s largest Muslim populations and had long been a target of Wahhabi proselytizing. In late 1981, King Abdulaziz University dispatched Azzam to oversee the curriculum at the Islamic University in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital; the campus had been founded recently with $35 million in Saudi funds.18 Azzam also consulted for the Muslim World League, an arm of official Saudi charity. Peshawar, the frontier city that served as the principal base for the Afghan mujaheddin, lay less than two or three hours away by road. Azzam’s move to Islamabad created an Arabic-speaking, Jeddah-connected wing of the Muslim Brotherhood through which Osama could channel donations.
THE AFGHAN COMMANDER with the deepest connections in Saudi Arabia was Sayyaf, a white-bearded Arabic speaker schooled in Islamic law who embodied the religious romanticism many Saudis saw in the war. Sayyaf toured Saudi mosques in royal limousines during his periodic fundraising tours in the kingdom; the Saudi government permitted him to open permanent offices to raise money. Badeeb cultivated him on behalf of Saudi intelligence. Increasingly, however, commanders like Sayyaf had to weigh the lure of Saudi money against the headache of hosting teenaged Saudi volunteers on their Ramadan holidays. It was a hassle to provide them guns, light training, and a tour of the battlefield about which they could boast when they went home, but Sayyaf and a few other commanders came to accept their roles as jihad camp counselors—it was a necessary cost of their fundraising operations. In 1984, with Badeeb’s support, Sayyaf opened the first formal training camp for Arab volunteers, called Sada, or “Echo.” It was an appropriate name—it was a reverberation from the real war. The camp was near the Pakistan border, an easy day trip for Saudi and other wealthy Gulf Arab visitors. “They would watch some militant-inspired plays that would end with the guests donating all the money they had in their pockets,” according to one Arab history of the camps. “They would also write down lists of items that must be purchased urgently in order to enable Sayyaf to conquer Kabul.”19
In 1984 Osama entered Afghanistan for the first time, essentially as a tourist. He may have visited Sada. He witnessed some fighting around Jaji, near the new Arab camp. It was the first time in his life that he had heard the concussive thump of shells or felt the blood-quickening pulse of exposure to war. The experience seemed to thrill him but also infuse him with guilt over the length of time it had taken him to put himself at physical risk in the cause he had espoused with such conspicuous pride. “I feel so guilty for listening to my friends and those that I love not to come here, and stay home for reasons of safety,” he told a Syrian journalist. “I feel that this delay of four years requires my own martyrdom in the name of God.”20
It was a refrain he would repeat for many years, while managing, nonetheless, to persistently avoid what he claimed to welcome. Certainly Azzam wished to keep him in one piece. Osama’s fundraising prowess had reached new heights.
Azzam moved to Peshawar in October 1984 to establish the Makhtab Al-Khadamat, or “Services Office,” to support Afghan fighters and serve Arab volunteers who traveled to the war. His vision for the office blended Islamic charity and marketing. His projects included Al-Jihad magazine, whose first issue, published in December, concentrated mainly on fundraising. The start-up money came from Osama, who provided initial cash infusions at an annual rate of between $200,000 and $300,000. For the first time, too, the Bin Laden family also provided engineering and construction personnel to support the war effort—an Arab volunteer who arrived in Peshawar in 1984 recalled meeting a construction engineer assigned from the Bin Laden organization. During the Hajj pilgrimage of the Islamic year 1405, which took place in June 1985, Azzam lodged for days at a Bin Laden home in Mecca. “The entire Bin Laden family were hosting people. And they had food and busses to take people,” recalled Abdullah Anas, Azzam’s future son-in-law. A document about Osama’s work from that same year describes contributions provided by the Bin Laden family foundation.21
Osama associated himself with Azzam’s radical voice, yet he remained an entirely orthodox Saudi figure, a minor emissary of its establishment. His volunteerism remained inseparable from his family’s identity and its business strategy.
IT WAS AZZAM who first introduced Osama to the concept of transnational jihad. “When the Sheikh started out,” Bin Laden said years later, “the atmosphere among the Islamists and sheikhs was limited, location-specific and regional, each dealing with their own particular locale, but he inspired the Islamic movement and motivated Muslims to the broader jihad. At that point we were both in the same boat.” As an exiled Palestinian, Azzam spoke passionately about his homeland but encouraged his followers to regard the conflict with Israel as part of a larger war waged by unbelievers against Muslims—a millenarian conflict, leading inevitably to Judgment Day, as forecasted in the Koran. Azzam’s speeches and books dwelled on the suffering of Muslim innocents. He deified Afghan and Palestinian civilians as victims of aggression and cried for revenge. The women and children dying in Afghanistan under Soviet guns and in Lebanon after the Israeli invasion of 1982 were united by their identity as Muslims. These incursions into Muslim lands gave rise to fard ayn, a compulsory duty upon all Muslims to repel them. Azzam’s ideas traced to the writings of the thirteenth-century jihadi theorist Ibn Taymiyya, which Bin Laden himself would later quote: “As for repelling the enemy aggressor who corrupts religion and the world, there is no greater duty after faith than uncompromising struggle against him.” Azzam argued that Afghanistan was the most pressing theater for such jihad, and that it would strengthen the ummah, or “community of believers,” for a later war to liberate Palestine. Here the ideological and opportunistic sides of Azzam merged in argument; as a practical matter, in Afghanistan, he could raise money and influence events, whereas in Palestine, at least for the time being, he was a powerless and not particularly influential exile.22
The 1982 Israeli campaign in Lebanon lit up the Arab world; it was a televised war filled with infuriating news and images. Osama watched at a time when he was absorbed by Azzam’s lectures about jihad and mesmerized by his mentor’s stature as an unyielding Islamic activist and an exiled Palestinian. In later years it would become common to describe Osama’s overheated rhetoric about Palestinians as little more than media-savvy lip service from a Saudi who pandered to his Arab following. That interpretation overlooks Osama’s self-conscious pride about his father’s work in Jerusalem, however, as well as his close relationship with Azzam. It also ignores his recollections, which may be suspect in their emphases but are not likely invented. “The events that made a direct impression on me were during and after 1982, when America allowed the Israelis to invade Lebanon,” scene of his boyhood schooling, Osama wrote years later:
I still remember those distressing scenes: blood, torn limbs, women and children massacred. All over the place, houses were being destroyed and tower blocks were collapsing, crushing their residents…In those critical moments, many ideas raged inside me, ideas difficult to describe, but they unleashed a powerful urge to reject injustice and a strong determination to punish the oppressors. As I looked at those destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me to punish the oppressor in kind by destroying towers in America, so that it would have a taste of its own medicine…On that day I became sure that the oppression and intentional murder of innocent women and children is a deliberate American policy.23
This reminiscence—ideas that “raged inside” and were “difficult to describe”—suggest some of the tension and confusion in Osama’s expanding intellectual and political life. Inspired by Azzam, he began in Peshawar to synthesize the banal tasks of organizing and fundraising—forming bureaucratic committees, reviewing publishing plans, creating rules and systems to provide financial subsidies to young Saudi volunteers—with a more mystical and poetical rhetoric of martyrdom. Partly this reflected Azzam’s millenarian beliefs, but partly it was a marketing strategy crafted by a money-conscious proselytizer and the former business student who funded him. Their conduct suggests that Osama and Azzam were less interested in becoming martyrs than in creating a movement based on the emotional power of other people’s martyrdom. Azzam used testimonials and memorials to sanctify the sacrifices of the first young, poorly trained volunteers who passed through his guesthouses in Peshawar and died in Afghanistan. “Lucky him who is rewarded with martyrdom,” Azzam wrote. “Allah rewards him with seventy-two virgins and he can choose seventy of his relatives to join him in heaven.” Of the first four committees Osama organized at the Services Office, one promoted media operations and a second promoted education.24 His instincts were hardly surprising; he had spent much of his early working life in Bin Laden offices filled with glossy brochures and staffed by specialists in advertising and marketing. In his work for the royal family and the religious authorities in Medina and Mecca, Osama had learned that a project was a success only if its sponsors saw it as a success, and to ensure that they did, publishing and advertising had to play a role. He brought some of this modern business ethos to his earliest projects in Peshawar.
It was only about three months after Osama established the Services Office with Azzam that Salem, while on his hunting trip with Saudi royalty in Pakistan, flew into Peshawar with his video camera and his unbelieving entourage, consisting of a Swedish mechanic and an American specialist in ultralight aircraft.25 Osama seemed to instinctively understand where his own passion for jihad overlapped with Salem’s potential interest in the Afghan war—Osama chose to put orphans, not volunteer fighters, on display for his brother’s camera. This was mainstream charity marketing on which they could collaborate without any hint of conflict: “God instructs you to treat orphans fairly,” holds a Koranic verse. “He is well aware of whatever good you do.”26
Even now, as he began to think of himself as a war fighter and perhaps, eventually, a martyr in the name of jihad, Osama interacted respectfully with his cigarette-smoking, patently irreligious elder brother. The sawa, or religious awakening, in Saudi Arabia might tug at family unity, but Osama also stretched himself to forgive secular-minded siblings, recalled his friend Jamal Khashoggi. What Osama feared more than individual sinfulness was “a mass movement of secularization, mixed schools, top-down changes.” Also, recalled Khashoggi, “the Brotherhood emphasized the role of love and care and compassion in reaching out to non-observant Muslims. He had no problem with that, with non-observant Muslims. His method was to be compassionate and patient.” Osama regarded his family’s contributions to his work as nothing more or less than their duty: “Financial jihad,” he would later write, “likewise, is an obligation…particularly for those who have the resources, rather than those who don’t.”27
Salem visited Peshawar a second time during this period, according to Bengt Johansson, who accompanied him. They met Osama in a suburban villa, “an Arab office, with some sofas around.” They talked together for an hour or two, he remembered. Salem carried a large amount of cash in a case. “I don’t know where the money was coming from—if it was from Salem, all this money, because they were sponsored from different people in Saudi Arabia,” Johansson said.28
By 1985 Salem had learned to serve both Fahd’s clandestine foreign policy in Afghanistan and his self-indulgent luxuriating. At the time, these lines of activity did not seem to be burdened by contradictions.
FOLLOWING THE DEATH from heart failure of his placid brother Khalid, Crown Prince Fahd had ascended to become the king of Saudi Arabia. Now that the throne belonged to him, Fahd told Salem he wished to travel in a more regal style. The king wanted a Boeing 747—and not just any one, but the largest model then in existence, known as a 747-300, which had a stretched upper deck, offering the potential for an aerial duplex.
Fahd had become king at sixty-two, just young enough to indulge in one last splurge. His health remained poor and he sometimes had difficulty walking. But he had fallen hard for his new and younger wife, Jawhara Al-Ibrahim, who had left her husband for Fahd and had given him a son, Abdulaziz, upon whom the king doted without restraint. He decorated identical bedrooms for the boy at his various palaces, and he had taken Abdulaziz to the White House to meet Ronald Reagan, early in 1985. Jawhara’s brother, also named Abdulaziz, had become one of Fahd’s most influential court advisers and had amassed great wealth in a short time. He kept an apartment in London’s Mayfair neighborhood, and he purchased his own private planes—a Gulfstream and a DC-8. Salem cultivated a relationship with him; when the king went looking for a 747, his brother-in-law turned to Salem for help.29
Fahd knew he wanted something grand, but like a business mogul choosing among architects for a new mansion, he sought several imaginative proposals to which he could react. It would be a demanding, improvisational job to customize a single 747 to Fahd’s tastes, however. This was not a project naturally suited for a large company like Boeing, which earned its profits by engineering standardized airline models. Still, to curry favor with Fahd, whose government airline purchased many jets, Boeing developed a proposal for a unique and kingly 747. Its bid for the interior and systems renovations alone exceeded $100 million, however, and the Boeing designs did not excite Fahd’s imagination. In fact, the king was unhappy about Boeing’s plan, which made his brother-in-law unhappy, which made Salem unhappy.
On his Texas travels, Salem had taken some of his own Learjets to San Antonio for interior renovations, and there he had met a ninth-grade-educated legend of American aviation named Dee Howard, who ran an aircraft service and engineering company at the San Antonio airport. Howard was a compact, fast-talking white-haired man with an intuitive knack for engineering. He lived in a riverside mansion and collected antique cars, but his business rode cycles of boom and bust, and he was always looking for a big score. Salem told him that Fahd’s 747 project offered a golden opportunity to move his company into the global business of custom head-of-state aircraft renovation.
“He and I just hit it off real good,” Howard recalled. “We liked each other, and he liked the kinds of things I did…He insisted that I come over and meet King Fahd and talk about it.” Howard was reluctant; his San Antonio hangars weren’t even big enough to hold a 747. Salem paid him $60,000 just to prepare a presentation, however. “I was doing Salem a favor.”30
Salem was right to choose him; he had an instinct for theatrical luxury. Rather than turning to his San Antonio staff for initial designs, Howard hired Syd Mead, a Hollywood illustrator who had recently attracted attention for his work on the futuristic movie Blade Runner, directed by Ridley Scott. Mead flew with Howard and Salem to Riyadh to present their ideas to King Fahd. The illustrator dazzled them all by sketching ideas while holding his pad upside down, so that Fahd could see his work more clearly. “Your Majesty, I really want to do this plane for you,” Dee Howard told the king. “I’m sixty-three years old, and I’ll never get to do another one.” Fahd squeezed his hand and smiled, and Howard thought to himself that the king was feeling something similar.31
Fahd and Salem engaged in strikingly informal banter; between design sessions, over lunch, they would debate one subject or another in jocular and animated voices, and Salem felt free to shout at Fahd across the table, denouncing the king’s opinions. “Some people said, ‘Ah you can’t say that to the King—you can’t,’” remembered one member of the group. “He got away with it—he finally quieted down a little bit, but he got away with it.” They spent hours with Fahd working on the 747 designs; this was an aspect of royal life that the king seemed to particularly enjoy. Eventually, after arduous negotiations handled by Ibrahim, which included some unexpected demand, Dee Howard won the contract. It would ultimately be worth $92 million.32
The plane would include a number of features not normally found on commercial airliners. Among them was a fully equipped surgical operating theater linked by a private satellite communications system to the Cleveland Clinic, the American medical center. In an emergency, Fahd’s surgeons could operate on him while parked on a runway, transmit images by satellite to Cleveland, sedate their patient, then take off and fly to the clinic for follow-up. To protect Fahd from his enemies, Raytheon Corporation installed electronic warfare equipment on the plane, including a system to defend against heat-seeking missiles.33
In the absence of medical crises or assassination attempts, the king could expect a comfortable ride. After considerable effort, Howard designed an elevator system that would allow the six-foot-four-inch Fahd to exit his limousine on an airport tarmac, wave to the crowd, and then walk a few steps onto a ground-level lift without any undignified bending of his head. From there, out of view, he would be hoisted into the plane’s belly, where he could ascend a second elevator to the upper floor. His majlis contained a chandelier with five thousand unbreakable polycarbonate crystals. Beneath it, on either side of Fahd’s throne, these crystals also sparkled in two artificial waterfalls; a Mead-inspired painting of a field of stars spread out on the wall behind. The royal bedroom suite contained a shower large enough to comfortably accommodate the king’s girth, as well as a sitting room and a bed billowing with silks. Lest any of this luxury lead the king or his entourage to stray from their devotions, the ceiling of each room contained an electronic compass, linked to a global-positioning satellite system, which pointed continuously toward Mecca.
By 1985 the work on this fantasia was in full swing at the San Antonio airport. As Howard’s workers passed certain benchmarks, payments arrived by wire from the royal treasury, sometimes in single increments of more than $10 million. Salem—without compensation, so far as any of his American employees and partners knew—flew in frequently from Saudi Arabia to inspect Howard’s progress and urge him toward his deadlines. As Howard recalled it, speaking of Salem, “He was very interested in pleasing the king.”34
BY THE EARLY 1980S, among all the Bin Laden brothers, Salem’s only significant rival for leadership was Yeslam, who had graduated from the University of Southern California with a business degree in 1976. He was four or five years younger, but as the eldest of a group of three full brothers born to one of Mohamed’s more senior wives, Rabab, a woman of Iranian origin, he had natural allies within the family. He also had friendly relations with some singleton half-brothers who had gotten to know him in California. Yeslam had returned to Jeddah from Los Angeles with plans that seemed to be stoked by his beautiful and ambitious wife, Carmen, the French-speaking daughter of an Iranian mother and a Swiss father. Carmen did not mind saying that she thought Yeslam was the most intelligent of the Bin Laden sons, and that his training and experience in California, where he had dabbled in the nascent personal computer industry, qualified him to lead the Bin Laden companies into modern sectors of international business. By the time Yeslam returned, however, Salem had already established his Bin Laden Brothers incubator; he had sidelined the trustees at the original Mohamed Bin Laden Organization; and, most important, he had made himself indispensable to Fahd. He had also secured the partnership of his own younger full brothers, Bakr and Ghalib, as well as capable half-brothers such as Yahya, Omar, and Tareq, and he had won the contract to participate in the expansion of the kingdom’s telephone system, a major business achievement. Yeslam found he had relatively little room in which to maneuver.
He had some advantages, nonetheless: He understood Western stock and bond markets, from which Salem shied away; he spoke excellent French and English; and he had a cosmopolitan, business-minded spouse. Carmen established herself as a hostess in Jeddah’s merchant and diplomatic circles. She and Yeslam built a tennis court at their villa along the Mecca Road, and on Thursday nights, the beginning of the Saudi weekend, they hosted tennis parties for young Saudi financiers, socialites, foreign executives, and ambassadors. These were casual events where alcohol flowed freely, steaks were grilled on the barbecue, and English was prevalent—a California-influenced refuge amid the kingdom’s Wahhabi awakening.1
Yeslam shared Salem’s obsession with speed. He had trained as a race car driver as well as a pilot, and over the years he had collected Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and Porsches. His full brother Ibrahim had a fondness for Rolls-Royces. After Yeslam’s return to Jeddah, his brother-in-law—the husband of his full sister, Fawzia—suffered fatal brain damage in his Jeddah garage when he snapped his head while backing an imported Formula One racer out of his garage too quickly. Increasingly, among the Bin Laden men, jets and fast cars beckoned as a measure of manhood.2
In business, because of his USC classes and his encounters with bankers in America, Yeslam was more comfortable with the complexities of securities markets than were many of his brothers. He imported computers and began to think about how he could build up a modern investment advisory service, run by Saudis for Saudis, to compete with the American and European brokers who flocked to the kingdom to promote stock investments to the newly wealthy.3
As his ambitions in this field grew, so did tensions with Salem, who expected utter deference from younger brothers. Yeslam resented being patronized. Still, Salem rewarded him handsomely for his rising contributions. Yeslam earned the equivalent of more than $1 million in 1976, according to filings in a Swiss court by Carmen. Two years later, she reported, he was paid almost $1.5 million in salary and other compensation.4
Yeslam and Carmen escaped periodically to Geneva, where they had first met; in 1978, in the suburb of Genthod, at number 1, Chemin de la Petite-Voie, they bought and furnished an old estate. They paid just over 1 million Swiss francs for the property. He lavished her with jewelry—by her count, between 1975 and 1985, he gave her more than $2 million worth of diamond, emerald, ruby, and gold pieces. (“I admit I can be vain,” she later conceded.) Her routine spending money sometimes totaled 20,000 Swiss francs per month. They kept a box of cash in their Jeddah home that often contained about $50,000.5
Like many of the Bin Laden brothers—other than Salem—Yeslam spoke softly and projected a mild, gentle demeanor. He was a thin, fragile-looking man who had his own streak of vanity—he dressed in fashionable designer brands, and he seemed to favor visible labels. He could seem more at home in Switzerland or California than in Saudi Arabia, and as the months passed after his return to Jeddah, he struggled in his search for a comfortable identity. As he approached thirty, he was rich and successful in business, and a father of two young daughters, but he was plagued increasingly by panic attacks.6
He managed for a time to fight through these episodes, but in 1979, that year of multiple upheavals, anxiety finally overwhelmed Yeslam. He “hid himself away in the house,” according to Carmen’s assertions in court filings. She spent “whole nights trying to give him reassurance.” His behavior grew erratic: He “wanted to play backgammon day and night and he was forever waking his wife up and asking her to join in this mania.” During the Mecca uprising, Carmen recalled, he dashed “from house to office like a man unhinged.” In the aftermath of the violence, “he had nightmares. He was frightened of everything—frightened of dying, especially.”7
For his part, as his interior struggles deepened, Yeslam felt that his wife was less than understanding. As his attorneys put it in Swiss court filings, “His wife seemed to take a malicious pleasure in aggravating his condition through constant violent scenes, during which she would scream and threaten to commit suicide if her capricious demands were not immediately satisfied…Her usual line was that she was going to drive her car into a tree.” Carmen denied these allegations; she felt that she had done “everything she could to help him take care of himself and stay in control of his destiny and his business.” In any event, unable to cope with either his demons or his wife, Yeslam sought professional help in Geneva, but he found no relief. He flew to Los Angeles for six weeks of medical treatment. According to Yeslam’s court statements, this produced some improvement in his condition.8
In the midst of these struggles, he decided to lead his family into the international stock and bond markets. He bought computers that could support a stock trading operation, and he opened, in Jeddah, the first Saudi Arabian stock brokerage, designed, as one of its brochures put it, “To dispose of the idea that one has to live on Wall Street in order to make money.”9
Yeslam quickly emerged, during the early 1980s, as the Bin Laden family’s pioneer in global stock trading, syndicated real estate investments, and the use of offshore companies in Caribbean, Central American, and European tax and bank secrecy havens. Bin Laden family charity funds had become entangled with Osama’s increasingly disoriented international radicalism; in a similar way, some of the family’s investment money would become entangled with Yeslam’s global financial vision, his anxiety disorders, and his deteriorating marriage.
AROUND 1980, Yeslam formed a Swiss company that would become the Saudi Investment Company, or SICO. A Cayman Islands corporation called Falken Limited—controlled by Yeslam and his full siblings—owned the firm. Falken also would hold stakes in other corporations; the full rosters of shareholders and activities at these offshore companies are unknown, but some of their names suggest a slightly Gaelic whimsy: Celta Finance S.A., Galway Inc. Some of these offshore companies were formed to manage single investments in commercial real estate projects or private Bin Laden family residences in the United States or Europe; others may have handled import or leasing operations for Bin Laden companies; still others were set up to channel finance for construction work in countries such as Sudan; and some remain entirely mysterious. In 1983 Yeslam formed the Saudi Investment Company Panama Corporation; he served as president, and a Swiss lawyer, Baudouin Dunand, joined him as a director. The next year, also in Panama, he organized a branch of the Mohamed Binladin Organization Incorporated, with Salem as president, Yeslam as treasurer and secretary, and Salem’s full brother Bakr as an additional director. The paper residue of these and other Bin Laden–related companies in Panama, the Caymans, Curaçao, the Netherlands Antilles, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Switzerland, the Channel Isles, and elsewhere soon extended across oceans and continents. The firms opened and closed, changed names, bought one another out, or lay dormant for years at a time, their bare-bones registrations punctually renewed by family lawyers or accountants based in London and elsewhere. Yeslam appears to have been involved with many of these offshore companies, particularly those directed at real estate projects in the United States.10
He hired about a dozen employees at the Saudi Investment Company in Jeddah and held “hundreds of marketing meetings introducing the company to the public,” according to a company brochure. In these presentations, Yeslam and his colleagues emphasized the forces of financial globalization: “Since the Kingdom provides much improved communication networks, the information gap to foreign markets is getting very small, enabling us to compete against foreign brokers, and that’s exactly what we planned to do when we laid the ground work to cover American stock markets for our customers,” the brochure said. Saudi Investment sent several of its brokers abroad to study the operations at foreign brokerages, and it created a department in Jeddah specializing in American and Japanese stock markets. By the end of 1983, the firm claimed to hold more than $10 million worth of stocks for its Saudi customers; it reported annual turnover of almost $200 million. Computer-aided stock trading, which sought to exploit price gaps in markets scattered around the world, and which could increase an investor’s speed and volume, was now roiling stock markets in Tokyo, London, and New York; Yeslam, in effect, promised to bring a small piece of the action to Saudi Arabia.11
He also developed contacts at Wall Street investment banks. Through one of them—Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette—Yeslam arranged to clear trades for Saudi customers in the American stock markets, which made it much easier for them to buy and sell stocks on the New York Stock Exchange and in over-the-counter markets.12
Investment bankers at Donaldson, Lufkin introduced Yeslam to Charles Tickle, the chief executive of Daniel Corporation, an American real estate development company. Tickle sought partners who could fund office and residential projects in the United States; Yeslam said he was interested. Yeslam formed another Panamanian company called Saudi Investors, Incorporated, whose shareholders were described in a company document as “Mohamed Binladin Family.” In 1980 they joined with Daniel to develop Imperial Plaza, in Richmond, Virginia, a twenty-two-acre adult-residential community with a restaurant, auditorium, barbershop, bank, pharmacy, library, nursing home, and four high-rise towers containing 891 apartments. Three years later, they invested in Woodgate West, a development of 34 two-story apartment buildings in southwest Houston. One of Yeslam’s brochures described these deals as “a unique concept of investing in American property.” The company expected to have “purchasing power” of $100 million by the spring of 1984.13
Charles Tickle, who operated out of Birmingham, Alabama, found Yeslam to be “always very professional…well educated, well spoken.” Daniel Corporation “never had a bad business dealing with him of any kind.” In all, they worked together on about a half dozen commercial real estate ventures in the United States; in each case, Yeslam’s firm, Saudi Investment, was the only investor besides Daniel Corporation. They formed offshore corporations to serve as financing vehicles, with Tickle and Yeslam sometimes named as directors. The only real mystery, Tickle recalled, was whose money Yeslam was actually investing—his, or that of other members of the Bin Laden family, or that of other Saudi investors, or money from some other source. “That was always such a secretive thing,” Tickle said. At the time, as a business issue, “We could have cared less.” For Daniel Corporation’s purposes, all investment funds were the same; Yeslam had access to quite a lot of cash, and there was no reason for Tickle to believe that it was coming from improper sources.14
AS HE BUILT this global portfolio, Yeslam found it more and more difficult to work with Salem. Yeslam was “now, in effect, the chief financial officer” of the Bin Laden companies, according to Carmen, but his “rise was not welcomed by Salem and Bakr,” who increasingly served as Salem’s second in command. The pair challenged some of Yeslam’s decisions; his resentment deepened. Also, Yeslam and some other brothers “were frustrated by their lack of contact” with the Saudi royal family because “Salem and Bakr guarded their contacts with the princes,” according to Carmen. Yeslam was reluctant to openly confront his elder brothers, however. Even in later years, he never spoke in detail about these conflicts, referring only obliquely to “disagreements” and his gradual exclusion from the principal family businesses.15
In 1985 Yeslam left Jeddah and moved to his estate in the Geneva suburbs. He distanced himself from his brothers, but he did not break completely with them—Yeslam, Salem, and Bakr remained codirectors of a number of offshore companies for years afterward, and they held business and social meetings from time to time. Yeslam also continued to manage family money, particularly that of his full brothers and sister. He would facilitate Swiss banking and some investments for other half-brothers and half-sisters as well. Mainly, however, Yeslam hoped, by breaking away from the business scene dominated by Salem in Jeddah, to cultivate his own independent relations with Saudi princes and other wealthy investors who were not already clients of Salem or Bakr—Prince Majid and Prince Mishal, half-brothers of Fahd, were two of his most important contacts during this period.16
Yeslam decided to develop the sort of investment firm that would impress Saudis, Europeans, and Americans alike—one that exuded the mahogany elegance of a Swiss bank. For just over 5 million Swiss francs, he purchased and renovated a grand stone building on a corner lot in Old Geneva, on rue François Lefort; it would serve as the headquarters for Saudi Investment Company. From there, Yeslam managed brokerage accounts and international stock trading. A three-page letter to his full brother Ibrahim, written on Saudi Investment Company stationery on March 11, 1985, and later filed in an American court case, offers a snapshot of his trading activity. It refers to an audit by Arthur Andersen of Geneva and then lists Ibrahim Bin Laden’s holdings: small positions in gold and silver; several hundred thousand U.S. dollars in cash deposits, apparently to provide collateral for stock trades; and shares or options in eighty-five different corporations, most of them American. Included in Ibrahim’s stock portfolio were Anheuser-Busch, the beer company; Bally Manufacturing, a maker of pinball machines; and American Airlines.17
It was a heady time to be promoting the stock market, whatever one’s strategy. After a severe recession in the United States in 1982, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose by more than 50 percent over the next three years. Through the summer and autumn of 1985, as Yeslam built up his firm in Geneva, the markets climbed further still; the Dow soon doubled from its 1982 low, and then kept climbing. A mania about stock investing spread across the United States and around the industrialized world; the volume of shares traded daily on the major exchanges skyrocketed, and many middle-class investors who had previously shied away from stocks now dived in.
Carmen felt that a similar craze was overtaking Yeslam. In 1985 “he went through a period of massive and reckless spending, amassing more than 500 pairs of shoes, hundreds of suits and over a dozen luxury cars,” her attorneys wrote in Swiss court filings. All the while, he “continued to suffer poor health, phobias and panic attacks.” Carmen found him “increasingly intolerant and dogmatic.” She sought treatment for her own anxiety and panic attacks. For his part, Yeslam found Carmen increasingly hysterical, and he became exhausted by her repeated threats to kill herself, according to the Swiss court filings by his attorneys. He believed that his wife was involved with another man, that she was “taking him for a ride and that her suicide threats were a pretense.” Finally, “unable to stand his wife’s scenes any longer,” he moved out of their Genthod estate and into his building in Old Geneva. His wife then announced that she was pregnant. They argued over whether they should expand their family together; afer some back and forth, she ultimately gave birth to their third daughter in April 1987.18
In the middle of this tumult, Yeslam decided to purchase control of a stock brokerage in London. It was not, perhaps, the most sanguine time in his life to undertake such a complicated investment, but he forged ahead nonetheless. Russell Wood & Company had offices at Southwark, on the south side of the Thames River. George Russell Wood, a British stockbroker, founded the firm with several partners in 1972; it specialized in what was known as the private client business, meaning that it handled stock trading for wealthy individuals. The firm had a seat as a broker-dealer on the London Stock Exchange; this meant it could buy and sell stocks on its own account or for clients without going through any intermediaries—it was a member of the exchange. This allowed it to promote speed, efficiency, and expertise while recruiting wealthy investors. By taking control of the company, Yeslam could bring his firm and the Bin Laden family directly into the international stock markets for the first time. “They wanted to establish themselves as brokers in London because they were brokers in their own country,” recalled Auguste Sauter, then one of the firm’s partners. Yeslam wanted “to advise all the people in Saudi Arabia with pockets of cash, to invest globally.”19
Yeslam had brought with him to Switzerland a Tanzanian passport holder named Akbar Moawalla, who had previously worked at an American bank in Saudi Arabia. Moawalla served as Yeslam’s chief accountant and manager, and he became Russell Wood’s principal contact in Geneva as the acquisition talks unfolded during 1986 and early 1987.
All the while, stock prices went up and up. Trading volume on the major exchanges swelled. By the spring of 1987, they had a deal. The purchase price was not disclosed, but it appears to have totaled at least several million pounds sterling. Yeslam used Falken Limited, his Cayman Islands entity, to take control of Russell Wood. Moawalla became a director. Yeslam brought in one of his stock trading computers to keep track of all the trading by the London brokerage’s existing clients and new clients from Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. The computer system was scheduled to take charge of all trading at the firm in late August 1987.20
On August 1, at two in the morning, Carmen went to Yeslam’s building in Old Geneva and found him with another woman. “The discovery of the affair was a devastating blow for Carmen,” her attorneys wrote. She said she wanted a divorce. Yelsam moved to write a separation contract.
On August 17, the Dow Jones Industrial Average reached its all-time high, and then began to fall.
Carmen slipped into a dire emotional state, and a week later, a doctor in Geneva, allegedly anticipating her divorce negotiations with Yeslam, issued a medical certificate indicating that her “anxiety and panic attacks had recently increased” and that “any decision or signature” by her should be “deemed null and void.” She was soon hospitalized, suffering from exhaustion.21
In London, an accidental power surge of about one thousand volts, originating in the city’s electrical grid, “burned all the hard disks” on the Russell Wood computer system, as Sauter recalled it. The surge destroyed all records of stock and option trading by the firm’s clients. There were no backup disks, according to Sauter. What happened next is not entirely clear. Sauter recalled that some stockbrokers at the firm had drawn many of Russell Wood’s clients into a risky options trading scheme involving the shares of a beer pump manufacturer in Croydon, England, and that suddenly, amid the confusion caused by the computer breakdown, some rival brokers made a run on these shares, causing Russell Wood’s positions to collapse. In any event, that autumn, the brokerage’s finances declined very rapidly. In October the stock market suffered its biggest one-day crash since the Great Depression of 1929. By the end of the year, Russell Wood had lost £3.5 million sterling, or about $6 million. In filings for British regulators, the firm blamed its trouble on the computer failure, which had led to “a breakdown in accounting controls.”22
All in all, it had been a discouraging encounter between the Bin Laden family and the forces of globalization. There would soon be worse.
BY THE MID-1980S, the twenty-four Bin Laden brothers who owned shares in the main family company resembled a bloc of legislators from the same political party—professional interests bound them, and they often acted with unified purpose, but their membership had distinctly liberal and conservative wings. On the left stood the family’s unquestioned leader, Salem, as well as Yeslam and several others who favored Europe and Beirut. Osama and Mahrouz held down the family’s fervent, activist religious wing. In between, fashioning more traditional and centrist Arabian lives, were the four rising brothers who had all trained as civil engineers: Bakr, Ghalib, Omar, and Yahya. They were inclined neither to collect five hundred pairs of shoes nor to volunteer as jihadi fighters in foreign wars. They were observant Muslims, but they were notable more for their technical expertise and their willingness to work—they were the grinders among Mohamed’s sons, and they invested long hours at the office and on job sites.
Of the four, Bakr, Salem’s full brother, who had been born just a year or two after him in Mecca, had emerged as a sort of chief operating officer for the family and its businesses. His title was Field Project Manager for the construction division of the Mohamed Bin Laden Organization; he sat on that company’s board of directors, as well as on the boards of several other joint ventures that had emerged from Salem’s separate Bin Laden Brothers enterprise. Salem was the one “who got all the business for the Bin Ladens,” recalled Mohamed Ashmawi, the Saudi oil executive. “Bakr managed it.”1
He had the efficient air of a natural bureaucrat; he favored wrinkle-free, white traditional thobe gowns, perhaps with a pen or folded business papers in the breast pocket. “Where Salem did everything from the gut,” recalled Francis Hunnewell, the investment banker who worked on the telephone project, “Bakr was much more conservative and more process-oriented.” Michael Pochna remembered him as “a very intelligent person,” but he never heard Bakr say anything in front of his elder brother besides “Yes, Salem.”2
While his older brother had learned Beatles songs at his Essex boarding school, Bakr had studied in Syria and Lebanon. He spoke some French, but his English was less well developed. After his father’s death, Salem decided that both his younger full brothers, Bakr and Ghalib, should pursue university degrees in civil engineering in the United States, so that they could spend their careers running construction projects for the family. Bakr finished high school first, and at this time, in the late 1960s, Salem had very few acquaintances in America. However, his great carousing Turkish friend from boarding school, Mehmet Birgen, known to all of Salem’s acquaintances as “Baby Elephant,” had moved to Miami. He was a good-looking, loquacious young man with a thick head of black hair. At the time, he was rooming with an American airline pilot, taking a few college classes, and devoting much of his considerable energy to the pursuit of the opposite sex. Salem telephoned and announced that he was dispatching Bakr to attend college in Miami, and he asked Baby Elephant to serve as Bakr’s guardian.
This was not a natural match; like Salem, Baby Elephant was less than fully devoted to the traditional precepts of Islam, while Bakr, although young, was nonetheless devout; he had formally studied the Koran. Baby Elephant enrolled him initially at Miami-Dade Community College’s North Campus, several miles north of downtown, at 119th Street, three blocks from Interstate 95. He bought Bakr a Vespa scooter, helped him find an apartment, and talked up Miami’s many social enticements. He found it difficult to tempt him, with one exception. He invited Bakr to Shorty’s Bar-B-Q, on South Dixie Highway, a pungent room where customers sat side by side at wooden tables and doused their ribs with hot sauces squirted from plastic bottles. Baby Elephant ordered a big rack of steaming ribs; when Bakr asked apprehensively if they were pork, his guardian assured him that no, they were beef. Bakr engorged himself, and for months afterward, he returned again and again. Finally, a visiting cousin from Saudi Arabia pointed out that, actually, he had been eating pork ribs all along, in violation of Islamic law. Shocked, Bakr asked a waitress for confirmation, stormed over to Baby Elephant’s apartment, and confronted him: “What kind of guardian are you! You knew! You lied to me!” He telephoned Salem and complained, but his brother only replied, “At least he allowed you to discover how good pork ribs actually taste.” Shorty’s, however, lost a customer.3
Bakr polished his English, adjusted to American classrooms, and transferred to the engineering school at the University of Miami, then a sprawl of palm trees and low-slung concrete buildings in Coral Gables. He joined the class of 1973. There were more than four thousand Jewish students at the school, and just over fifteen hundred international students—from Taiwan, Venezuela, Iran, Algeria, and elsewhere. Protests over the Vietnam War roiled the campus. The Republican Party staged its convention in Miami in 1972, and university students joined other protestors in violent battles against police. Three quarters of University of Miami students smoked marijuana, according to a professor’s poll. “Three things are essential for a pot party,” noted the 1972 edition of the university yearbook, “namely, people, a place and pot.”4
Bakr joined a clique at the engineering school that seemed oblivious to all this. “We never talked about race or the war,” recalled Joaquin Avino, a Cuban American classmate. “The only thing we talked about was graduating, getting a job, becoming an engineer, and making some money.” Many of the civil engineering students were second-generation Cuban exiles; they belonged to “a relatively conservative culture within the university,” said John Hall, another classmate. Most commuted to school from their parents’ homes. Hall’s father was a city fireman; Avino worked part-time as a baggage handler at the airport. Bakr fit right in—quiet, serious, pleasant, a bookworm, with no interest in rambunctious student life. He was particularly friendly with the Cubans, and he partnered with them on lab projects that involved analyzing soil composition and calculating stability and stress in building structures. At exam time, his results were solid but average. He stood out among the twenty to thirty students in the civil engineering course only because he wore silk shirts and drove a Cadillac Seville.5
He lived off campus in a suburban rambler with a small swimming pool in the Kendall/Pinecrest neighborhood, just south of Coral Gables. His neighbors included an elementary school and a “Youth For Christ” facility. Family joined him eventually. His half-brother Omar also enrolled in the University of Miami’s engineering school, class of 1974, and rented an apartment a half mile from Bakr’s house. At one point, Bakr returned home to marry, and he brought his new wife to Miami. She was Haifa Nabulsi, a beautiful Syrian blonde whom he had first met in Damascus when she was about sixteen; she came from an exiled Palestinian family originally from Nazareth. While Bakr completed his studies, Haifa gave birth to two sons, Nawaf and Firas; the Bin Ladens obtained American passports for each of the boys. Bakr would not permit his university classmates to socialize with his wife, and he made a lasting impression on one of them while describing his family when he mentioned that no man in Saudi Arabia bothered to count how many sisters he had. Still, apart from these cultural idiosyncrasies, with his big-finned car, his young boys, his house on a manicured corner lot, and his earnest sense of purpose, Bakr seemed to some of his classmates to be just like them—a young immigrant householder in pursuit of the American dream. As they got to know him better, however, they learned that he would be returning to his family’s business in Saudi Arabia after graduation. Bakr offered one Cuban American classmate, Jorge Rodriguez, a job in Jeddah at double the starting salary he could expect to earn in the United States, but Jorge’s wife announced, “By no means—I’m staying in America.” Bakr departed and they gradually lost touch with him.6
In Jeddah he and his family moved into one of the suburban villas at the Kilo 7 family compound. Carmen Bin Laden befriended Haifa and found her “open-minded and lively”; they tanned together beside Haifa’s swimming pool and “howled with laughter at how depraved the mothers-in-law would think us if they caught sight of our bathing suits.” Carmen found Bakr formal but kind, and unlike some Saudi men, he did not criticize or shun Haifa when she gave birth to a daughter. Bakr was religious but not insistent or strident. He prayed punctually when in Saudi Arabia, but when he traveled to France, he did not search for mosques or carry a prayer rug to business meetings. “He is the type of person who doesn’t like to attract the attention of others for things that are not necessary,” said a longtime business partner.7
At the office, Bakr tried to keep up with Salem’s demands and peripatetic deal making. Gradually other brothers returned to the kingdom with engineering degrees to ease some of his burden. Ghalib ran the construction equipment yard, helped to manage procurement from Caterpillar, and supervised projects in the field. Omar supervised complex building projects on his own.
Yahya proved to be a particular workhorse; he was exceptionally well organized and seemed to pride himself on putting in the very longest hours. He made a strong impression on some of the business partners and bankers who met with him. He had always been devout and deeply reflective; asked a question, he might pause for several searching minutes before he answered. He smoked cigarettes from a long plastic holder and had slightly bulging eyes, which created an exaggerated effect when he stared out during these long, contemplative pauses. In a top hat, he would have resembled Penguin from the Batman movies.
This engineering coterie spent most of their days concentrating on their work as young construction executives, but as they approached middle age, and as the Islamic awakening spread in Saudi Arabia, their lifestyles became, in some cases, more overtly pious. Non-Muslim partners and friends noted this more explicit religiosity, but they saw, too, that it fell very much within the kingdom’s mainstream, which was becoming more conservative. Yahya’s wife, who had not previously covered herself, took the veil. Ghalib’s did, too. Charity and the Hajj became even more important to family routines. By the mid-1980s, at least one of the Bin Ladens’ business partners felt that some of the more traditional engineering coterie—Yahya, in particular—had begun to push Salem to ensure that Osama received all the support he needed as he became involved with the Afghan war. In this partner’s analysis, while these brothers did not share Osama’s radicalism, they had become very proud, nonetheless, of Osama’s charitable work on behalf of suffering Afghans, and they appreciated his ardent commitment to a defining Islamic cause. According to a senior Saudi government official, Bakr accompanied Osama to Pakistan on one of his early visits there.8
These were also the brothers who took the lead on construction and renovation work in Mecca and Medina. After he became king, Fahd took a number of steps to enhance his credentials as the regent and guardian of Islam’s birthplace. In 1985 he inaugurated an eight-year, multibillion-dollar project to expand, once more, the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, so that it could accommodate almost a half million additional worshippers. The massive spending in Medina helped Fahd to ingratiate himself with the Saudi religious authorities who mistrusted his secular lifestyle, and it increased his visibility across the Islamic world. As Saudi kings had done for four decades, Fahd handed the work to the Bin Ladens—without competitive bidding. The king’s decision was consistent with his method for allocating spheres of commissions in government contracting, according to the senior Saudi government official. Fahd identified reliable agents or business families—some Saudi, and some, such as the Lebanese developer Rafik Hariri, who were not—and gave them sole control of a particular sector, such as arms sales, roadwork, or palace construction. In this way Fahd could direct how contracts and commissions would be distributed, and who would benefit from extra payments. The system reinforced loyalty and secrecy. The Bin Ladens had once been dominant in highway construction, but after 1985 their major windfalls came through the huge, exclusive contracts Fahd awarded them in the holy cities—first the Prophet’s Mosque renovation in Medina, and then a similar project in Mecca.
The expansion of the Prophet’s Mosque contemplated by Fahd was mind-boggling in its scale—a new building of eighty-two thousand square meters, a new plaza and pedestrian spaces of more than two hundred thousand square meters, new and taller minarets, eighteen new staircases, six new escalators, sixty-four new doors and gates. For the Bin Ladens, Bakr played the key role in creating the detailed plans and executing them after approval by Fahd.
The work spoke to Bakr as an engineer, a businessman, a Bin Laden, a Saudi, and a Muslim; the projects became the overriding source of his professional identity and his pride. The work offered a rare and privileged opportunity to leave an authorial mark on the holiest places in his faith. European and Arab architects, designers, and suppliers all contributed to the project over time, but from the beginning, Bakr played a decisive role. He delivered the detailed presentations of designs to Fahd and answered the king’s questions, and he drove the golf cart when Fahd visited Medina for an inspection tour. “Many a time he would require us to repeat the plans and the designs, to improve on this side, or develop that side,” Bakr later wrote of Fahd. “He used to visit the two projects at various phases and choose the best and most suitable materials with no regard for financial cost.” The king even issued “a standing order to establish an open-ended account” to fund the work.9
Osama was an executive in the Bin Laden’s Medina office at the time this enormous undertaking took shape. He was still commuting from Saudi Arabia back and forth to the Afghan war. He had deepened his involvement after his brief visit to the fighting front in 1984, but he had not moved his family to Pakistan. He typically stayed in Pakistan for only three or four months at a time.
Fahd’s Medina project led to conflicts within the Bin Laden family that may have influenced Osama’s priorities, according to a former senior American government official who has discussed the episode with Bakr. The details are unclear, but according to this official, the Medina contract and its many pressures produced a “sort of realignment in the family,” which left Osama unhappy about his role. The essential issues were control and authority. “He just basically made a giant pest of himself and everybody wanted him gone,” according to the former official. By this account, Bakr and Salem stood on one side of the quarrel, and Osama and some of his more religious half-sisters tried to oppose them. “Salem told me, ‘This brother of mine in Afghanistan is going to be our family’s big problem,’” said a second business partner who worked very closely with the Bin Ladens during this period. Osama “didn’t bother Salem, he bothered all his family.” Whatever the nature and extent of this disagreement, it did not result in a full rupture between Osama and his half-brothers, however. Indeed, Salem’s risk taking on Osama’s behalf would soon increase. But the episode may have led both Osama and his half-brothers to see Pakistan, rather than Medina, as the best outlet for Osama’s energies.10
EARLY IN 1986, Abdullah Azzam wrote to Osama from Peshawar, urging him to move there. He told his protégé that administrative and financial problems had accumulated at the Services Office, the support service they had founded more than a year earlier for Arab volunteers in Afghanistan. Azzam urged Osama to help put the place in order. Here, at least, was an enterprise that wanted and appreciated Osama fully.
Later that year, Osama moved with his family to a pine-shaded house in the Hyatabad section of Peshawar. In the ensuing months, he would act like an ambitious young man who felt a need to prove himself. He threw himself more actively into the war, and for the first time, he independently sought publicity for his work, to extend his reputation in Saudi Arabia and the Muslim world. Was undeclared competition with Bakr and Salem, now themselves celebrated in Saudi media as the renovators of Medina, one strand in Osama’s web of motivations after he moved his family to Pakistan? Even if it was, one constant remained: to achieve his goals on the Afghan frontier, he needed the Bin Ladens.11
AROUND THE TIME he moved with his family to Peshawar, Osama made a new request of Salem. This time it wasn’t money; he told his brother that he needed weapons, and he specifically asked for portable anti-aircraft missiles.1
Osama entered the international arms market because he had decided, for the first time, to create his own jihadist militia. He found the Arab volunteer movement in some disarray early in 1986. Azzam’s Services Office, which Osama had funded with about a half million U.S. dollars to this point, was fracturing over petty disputes and prideful slights. As more Arabs arrived, Azzam’s inclusive governing system of committees and consultative councils fell under strain. Bin Laden’s aide, Abu Haji Al-Iraqi, recalled “an increase of complaints” that led to a decision to “change the administrative staff.” Increasingly, leading figures in the group irritated one another and engaged in tedious debates about money and theology. Ayman Al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian doctor who had been tortured in Cairo prisons for his involvement in violent conspiracies, arrived in Peshawar with other radical Egyptian exiles. Zawahiri cultivated a relationship with Osama, motivated as Azzam had been earlier—the doctor was ambitious but poor, and he needed Osama’s financial patronage. He stirred bitter disputes in Peshawar salons over jihad strategy. He found Arab allies ripe with grievance. Azzam had promoted the Afghan war as a province of miracles and beautiful sacrifice; the volunteers summoned up this stairway to heaven found the reality of the war to be cold, brutal, disputatious, and poorly organized.
In April some Arab volunteers participated in a brutal four-week battle at Jawr, a fortified rear base located in high, sandy ridges near the Pakistan border, in an area controlled by a fierce Afghan commander named Jalaladin Haqqani. The fight went badly. Bin Laden decided that the Arabs needed to strengthen themselves in these border areas. He moved away from Peshawar’s debilitating office culture and began to build his own brigade of Arab jihadis up in the mountains along the Afghan-Pakistan border. His aim was to participate directly in the war; it was for this that he required his own portable missiles, to challenge Soviet helicopter-borne assault teams.2
“It is well known that there are two elements of fighting,” Osama said later. “There is the fighting itself and then there is the financial element, such as buying weapons. This is emphasized in many verses of the Koran, such as the following: ‘God has purchased the persons and possessions of the believers in return for the Garden.’”3
Salem turned to a German friend with an Afghan connection: Thomas Dietrich. They had first met in Cairo; Dietrich was an amateur pilot on vacation, and they fell into a friendship centered on flying. As a boy, Dietrich had lived in Kabul; his father was a West German foreign aid official. He became a fixture in Salem’s European entourage. In the mid-1980s, he was enrolled at a university in Stuttgart, but he found time to ski and fly with Salem and some of his brothers and sisters, particularly at resorts in the Alps.
At Offley Chase, his estate outside London, Salem summoned Dietrich to his room. “We need to help my brother,” Salem told him, as Dietrich recalled it.
“You’ve got many of them.”
Salem talked about Osama; Dietrich had heard some about him but not a lot. “He is now very religious,” Salem said. “He is now in Afghanistan, and the Russians are there. People are getting killed. And I know that you lived there—and you need to help him.” Osama had identified two priorities: missiles that could shoot down helicopters, and equipment that would allow Arab volunteers to manufacture ammunition for AK-47 assault rifles, by filling spent shells with new rounds.4
The war was intensifying. After a policy review in the spring of 1985, the United States decided secretly to escalate its support for the Afghan mujaheddin; for the first time, the U.S. identified victory over the occupying Soviet army as an objective. The CIA rapidly increased the quantity and quality of the weapons it sent in through Pakistan. The Soviets introduced more aggressive tactics as well, ordering elite helicopter-borne Special Forces units, called Spetsnaz, to Afghanistan; these assault troops flew raids against rebel supply lines and wreaked havoc along the Pakistan border. To thwart the Spetsnaz, the CIA agreed in 1986 to send heat-seeking U.S.-made Stinger missiles to the Afghans; the missiles were particularly lethal against helicopters. The initial shipments occurred during the first half of the year, just as Osama was moving with his family to Peshawar. An Afghan commander fired the first Stingers on the Afghan battlefield in September, at Jalalabad. The missiles destroyed several Soviet helicopters that day, and they quickly acquired an almost mythical reputation for potency among both the mujaheddin and the Soviets.5
Separately, at some point during this period (it is not clear when), the Reagan administration team supervising U.S. involvement with the Afghan war discussed whether to provide aid directly to the Arab volunteers based in Peshawar. The CIA ran most of the secret war from day to day, but an interagency group at the White House, chaired by Assistant Undersecretary of Defense Michael Pillsbury, decided on the war’s broader policies. Twice Pillsbury flew by helicopter to the Afghan frontier to review training facilities and to meet Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, two rebel leaders who were particularly close to the Arabs. During these meetings, Pillsbury asked about the military effectiveness of the Arab volunteers. He concluded, he recalled, that the Afghan commanders didn’t want aid or supplies to be diverted to the Arabs; the Afghans saw these relatively small bands of shaheen, or “martyrs,” as righteous warriors but also as sacrificial pawns of marginal military value. The Afghans wanted all the weapons for themselves.6
After he received Osama’s requests, Salem made several attempts to contact the Pentagon to see if he could arrange to supply Osama with portable missiles, according to a business partner who participated in these inquiries. Salem tried to locate the right person in the American defense bureaucracy, but he was unsuccessful, the partner said. It is not clear whether the Reagan administration ever made a formal decision to refuse to supply weapons to the Arab volunteers—no such document or account has ever surfaced—but conclusions such as those formed by Pillsbury after his inquiries in Pakistan clearly influenced American thinking about the matter. Pillsbury said he knew of no explicit decision to refuse aid to the Arab volunteers and that he would have known if such a decision had been made; still, they were not a priority.
Salem felt he had no recourse but to use the private arms market, according to interviews with Dietrich and two other individuals in the private sector who joined discussions with Salem about supplying arms to Osama. Salem did receive some financial support from the Saudi government, according to these individuals, but he received no known aid from the United States. As Dietrich recalled it: “The problem was there was no clearance from any of the Western governments” to supply the Arab volunteers “with anti-aircraft missiles.”7
Dietrich had contacts at Heckler & Koch, the German arms manufacturer. Through them, Dietrich recalled, he arranged several meetings between Salem and salesmen at the firm who specialized in ammunition and rifle manufacturing. A second partner of Salem confirmed these negotiations; the partner said he warned Salem to not get involved, because it was a private transaction of uncertain legality, but that Salem went ahead anyway.8
It was not entirely clear to Dietrich why Osama wanted to make his own bullets. Like many of the mujaheddin, his volunteers carried mainly Chinese-made assault rifles based on a Soviet design; Pakistani markets were awash with ammunition for these guns. Osama seemed in part to regard remanufacture from spent shells as some sort of virtuous, efficient cottage industry; it was also the sort of technology that was sometimes advertised in the pages of mercenary magazines like Soldier of Fortune. Dietrich found an arms salesman who understood the process and flew with him to Dubai to meet with Salem and Osama. “We sat together and said, ‘It does not really make sense to refill the bullets there,’” Dietrich recalled. The technical problems were too great. The arms salesman suggested that Osama simply purchase the ammunition he needed from suppliers they could locate in South America.
To discuss buying missiles, Osama flew to London and met with Salem, Dietrich, and Dietrich’s contacts in a suite at the Dorchester Hotel on Park Lane, according to Dietrich. They met two or three times at the hotel over a period of six to eight weeks during 1986, he said. Before one meeting, Salem and Dietrich were horsing around in their usual way. As they walked from one room of the suite into a second room, where Osama was waiting, Salem admonished, “Don’t do any jokes with my brother. He’s very religious.”
Ultimately Dietrich heard that his contacts had helped arrange for the purchase in South America of both Russian-made SA-7 shoulder-fired missiles and ammunition for Chinese-made AK-47 rifles; the missiles and bullets were shipped to Karachi. One snag was that Osama’s sponsors in the transaction wanted to pay for the ammunition not with cash, but with crude oil. According to Dietrich, they expected the seller to accept “just a tanker offshore, which was not easy to accomplish because a company like Heckler & Koch, they don’t want oil, they want money.”9
Dietrich had “no idea” where the money or oil for these arms purchases originated. The best available evidence suggests it probably came at least in part from the Saudi government. Certainly Salem and Osama were working in concert with official Saudi policy at this time. Also, Osama’s arms purchases, as described by Dietrich, seem to fit inside a larger pattern. In late 1985, the Saudi government entered into a multibillion-dollar arms deal with the British government, called Al-Yamamah. The transaction had a number of unconventional aspects. The Saudi government allocated between four hundred thousand and six hundred thousand barrels of oil daily as barter currency to finance the purchase of major weapons systems from British companies. By using oil instead of cash, the Saudis were able to quietly evade official oil production caps imposed by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), according to an authorized biography drawing on extensive interviews with Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the longtime Saudi ambassador in Washington. According to this account, the financing umbrella arranged for the Al-Yamamah deal also supported a number of Saudi Arabia’s covert anti-communist programs, including “arms bought from Egypt and other countries, and sent to the mujaheddin in Afghanistan.”10
Other evidence about possible Saudi government participation in Osama’s arms supplies during this period is more fragmentary. Ahmed Badeeb, the Saudi intelligence officer who worked closely with Osama, acknowledged in an interview that he had purchased SA-7 missiles and supplied them to the Afghan fighters, although he did not specify Osama as a recipient. Salem also negotiated during this period to purchase weapons for Osama from South African arms dealers, according to two individuals familiar with those transactions. One individual who participated in these discussions, which were separate from those involving Dietrich, recalled that some of the funding came from the Saudi royal family.11
During 1986, in Peshawar, Osama delivered his first known speeches denouncing the United States because of its support for Israel; as Osama later recalled his words, he preached that “Americans take our money and give it to the Jews, so they can kill our children with it in Palestine.” It is possible that his hostility toward America, inculcated by Abdullah Azzam, was further inflamed when Salem informed him that his attempt to buy Stingers had been rebuffed at the Pentagon. In any event, by comparison, Osama was fiercely protective of the Saudi royal family during this same period. A Palestinian journalist who worked at Al-Jihad magazine recalled Osama lashing out when colleagues suggested during 1986 that King Fahd was not a legitimate Muslim because Queen Elizabeth had presented him a medal that resembled a Christian cross: “For God’s sake, don’t discuss this subject—concentrate on your mission,” Osama said, as the journalist recalled it. “I don’t permit anyone to discuss this issue here.” He was at war with the enemies of Saudi Arabia, not with its throne.12
BEGINNING IN THE SUMMER of 1986, Osama spent more of his time around Jaji, in the Afghan province of Khost, near a protrusion of Pakistani territory called Parrot’s Beak. This was an area of increasing strategic importance in the broader Afghan war. A number of important Afghan rebel fighting units with strong Islamist credentials—those led by Haqqani, Sayyaf, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and Younus Khalis—operated in this vicinity. They tried to pressure Kabul and its outskirts. Sayyaf, in particular, ran a training facility near Jaji. It was the theatrical site he had used to host Arab donors, but increasingly his camp was situated in a hot battle zone.
Pakistani intelligence officers who directed supplies and tried to manage war strategy on the front lines decided to fortify the border area around Jaji, to preserve their supply lines and protect Afghan fighters from the Soviet raids. Osama joined in this effort. He built infrastructure that served the Islamist Afghan commanders, and for himself, he constructed a new camp near Sayyaf ’s Jaji facility, which he called the Lion’s Den. The number of volunteers who initially joined him there in the autumn of 1986 was tiny—as few as a dozen, many still in their teens. Abdullah Azzam was uneasy about Osama’s solo venture. He was still financially dependent upon his protégé. Among other things, he feared that Soviet troops might kidnap Bin Laden and fly him off to Kabul as a propaganda prize. Azzam sent Arabs from his own nearby camp to join and protect Bin Laden; by the end of the year, the militia at the Lion’s Den had grown to about fifty.13
Osama built this initially unimposing brigade—barely a platoon, actually—with active support from his family. In addition to helping him buy weapons, the Bin Ladens shipped construction equipment during 1986 to support Osama’s projects on the border. Bin Laden company engineers had volunteered in Peshawar earlier, and some construction equipment probably arrived during that earlier period as well. A large batch reached Pakistan between October and December of 1986.14 Afterward, Osama expanded construction activity around Jaji and built roads north toward the mountain redoubt of Tora Bora, which Pakistani intelligence officers had identified as an area where caves and storage depots could be fortified and defended. None of this support from the Bin Ladens—apart from the missiles and ammunition—would have seemed exceptional; it differed little in character from the defense construction work they had done for the Saudi government for years on the Yemen frontier, among other places. Osama later described the scope of his imports:
In spite of the Soviet power, we used to move with confidence and God conferred favors on us so that we transported heavy equipment from Saudi Arabia estimated at hundreds of tons altogether that included bulldozers, loaders, dump trucks, and equipment for digging trenches. When we saw the brutality of the Russians bombing mujaheddin positions, we dug a good number of huge tunnels and built in them some storage places and in some others we built a hospital. We also dug some roads.15
Ahmed Badeeb recalled that Osama was “very professional” as he built these underground fortifications. Indeed, Bin Laden was literally operating at times as a construction professional, under contract with Pakistani and probably also Saudi intelligence. He chose a group of young Saudi volunteers from Medina, the city where he had so recently served as a Bin Laden executive, to work with him. The Bin Laden office in Cairo, in cooperation with the Saudi Ministry of Interior, obtained visas for young Egyptian Islamists who wanted to volunteer in Afghanistan. By one account, Bin Laden companies also contracted to build hospitals and other facilities for Islamic charities in Peshawar. These Peshawar building projects generated several hundred jobs for Arab workers from Egypt and elsewhere, by this account; the workers poured concrete nine to five and some toured the jihad on weekends.16
Osama was no longer a tourist to the war, however; he was now shaping the battlefield in a strategically important region at a time of military escalation. His ragtag unit of volunteers might be of little importance, but his construction work was significant, at least in the evaluation of American and Pakistani intelligence officers who monitored the overall war effort. Recalled Milton Bearden, the CIA station chief in Pakistan at the time, speaking of Osama: “He put a lot of money in a lot of the right places in Afghanistan.” With his cash and bulldozers, he won allegiance from Arab fighters who saw him as “more practical” than the preachy Azzam.17
“HISTORY RECOUNTS THAT AMERICA supported everyone who waged jihad and fought against Russia,” Osama once noted in passing. It is the only time he is known to have spoken positively about the American role in the anti-Soviet Afghan war. The great majority of his other comments have emphasized American hypocrisy during the conflict and his own staunch independence from the CIA. Even in radical Islamist circles, the canard occasionally circulated that Bin Laden had been a CIA client or paid agent during the 1980s. An Al-Jazeera interviewer once put the question to him directly, and Osama offered a lengthy, defensive reply, one that combined theological and realpolitik justifications for the proximity between his own activities and those of the CIA:
It’s an attempt to distort by the Americans, and praise be to God that He has thwarted their conspiracy…As for their claim that they supported the jihad and the struggle against the Soviets, well, this support came from Arab countries, especially from the Gulf…The Americans are lying when they claim they helped us at any point, and we challenge them to present a single shred of evidence to prove it. In fact, they were a burden on us…We were doing our duty, which is supporting Islam in Afghanistan, even if this did coincide with American interests. When the Muslims were fighting the Byzantines, during the fierce war between the Byzantines and the Persians, no one in their right mind could say that the Muslims were fighting as agents of the Persians against the Byzantines. There was merely a common interest…Unintended confluence of interests does not mean there is any kind of link or tacit agreement.18
There is no evidence from any source—no document, no interview—to suggest that Osama ever met an American intelligence officer. The only American of any kind whom he is known to have greeted personally—apart, perhaps, from Bin Laden family members and other Arab acquaintances who carried American passports—is George Harrington, the ultralight salesman and accidental adventurer from San Antonio who accompanied Salem to Peshawar in early 1985. Nonetheless, whether he was aware of it or not, Osama’s logistics and construction work along the Pakistan border, starting in 1986, intersected with CIA programs and funding. The agency’s logistics and construction units, working through Pakistani intelligence, provided cement and other materials for the caves and storage facilities that Afghan commanders such as Haqqani and Hekmatyar built along the border during this period. Osama’s construction with Bin Laden family equipment certainly complemented these projects, and he may well have participated in them. Moreover, after 1986, Haqqani became what intelligence officers refer to as a “unilateral” asset of the CIA, meaning that he received tens of thousands of dollars in cash directly from CIA officers working undercover in Pakistan, without any mediation by Pakistani intelligence, which normally handled and relayed the great majority of CIA funds to the Afghans. Haqqani had multiple sources of cash but the CIA payments were sizable. Haqqani, in turn, helped and protected Osama and the Arab volunteers as they built their nascent militia. (Osama later referred to Haqqani as a “hero mujahid sheikh” and “one of the foremost leaders of the jihad against the Soviets.”) Haqqani traveled frequently to Peshawar to meet with a Pakistani and, separately, with an American intelligence officer, and to pick up supplies. Osama would have had no reason to know about Haqqani’s opportunistic work with the CIA, but he and his Arab volunteers benefited from it. They stood apart from the CIA’s cash-laden tradecraft—but just barely.19
Osama’s contacts with the Saudi government, by comparison, were open and routine. Badeeb maintained offices for the Saudi intelligence service at the Saudi embassy in Islamabad and sleeping quarters in Saudi-funded charities in Peshawar. These charities, in turn, funneled contributions to the Services Office. Azzam’s Al-Jihad magazine praised the support of seven charities in its December 1986 issue; these included the Red Crescent of Saudi Arabia and the Muslim World League, the large Mecca-based charity. Badeeb visited Pakistan as often as once a month. Prince Turki Al-Faisal, the chief of Saudi intelligence, also traveled there regularly. Their host in Islamabad was Yousef Mottakbani, the Saudi ambassador to Pakistan, a clean-shaven professional who kept a photograph of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar on the wall in his living room. Mottakbani channeled funds from both Saudi intelligence and from private charities to favored Afghan clients, including Haqqani, according to a former American envoy who participated in the covert program. Mottakbani hosted dinner parties in Islamabad at which Osama was a regular guest. Turki met him at these soirees and in Peshawar. He found Osama “shy, friendly, and almost gentle. He always spoke in a low voice; he was a man of pithy statements.”20
Turki and other senior Saudi officials, such as Prince Bandar, later said their government had little direct involvement with Osama during this period. Turki characterized Osama as a volunteer from a respectable family who was an “interesting figure” but not an instrument of Saudi tradecraft. By Turki’s account, unlike the CIA, Saudi intelligence, which is known by the acronym GID, never deviated from its pledge to funnel money to the Afghans only through the Pakistani intelligence service, known as ISI. “Abdullah Azzam was never supported by me or the GID,” Turki wrote later. “GID stuck to its agreement…that support for the Mujaheddin would be distributed according to their effectiveness, which was measured by the ISI and then evaluated by both the CIA and GID. Sayyaf consistently came in fifth or sixth place.”21
Turki’s account leaves ambiguous whether, separately from Azzam, Saudi intelligence provided direct funding to Bin Laden, particularly after he moved away from Azzam and began to build infrastructure along the Pakistan border. Some of Osama’s own followers have said that he did receive direct aid from Saudi intelligence. Abu Musab Al-Suri, a longtime colleague and later an important Al Qaeda ideologist, has written, “It is a big lie that the Afghan Arabs were formed with the backing of the CIA…The truth is that Saudi intelligence agencies did have involvement with Bin Laden, and elements of their apparatus did send assistance from Saudi Arabia.”22
Ahmed Badeeb, the former Al-Thaghr biology teacher and Turki’s chief of staff, has provided the fullest inside account of Osama’s contacts with the Saudi government during this period:
He had a strong relation with the Saudi intelligence and with our embassy in Pakistan. The nature of this relation with Saudi intelligence was because the Saudi embassy in Pakistan had a very powerful and active role…When persons came from the Kingdom to present assistance, the ambassador would hold dinner parties and invite people, and due to Osama bin Laden’s family and personal contacts, he would be invited as well. He had a very good rapport with the ambassador and with all Saudi ambassadors who served there. At times, the embassy would ask Osama bin Laden for some things and he would respond positively…[Also,] the Pakistanis saw in him one who was helping them do what they wanted done there.23
In a broad sense, then, Osama had come to enjoy relations with the Saudi royal family and its intelligence service quite similar to those cultivated with other sectors of the government by his half-brothers: Osama’s connections were social, but girded and constrained by his role as a construction contractor; they were respectful and solicitous; and Osama’s honorable place at court was reaffirmed periodically in the formal settings of an embassy salon. Unlike his half-brothers, however, he did not return from these rather orthodox Arabian gatherings to a conventional Saudi home, to watch television or smoke a water pipe on the patio. Instead, Osama rolled back down the Grand Trunk Road in his four-wheel-drive vehicles, through Peshawar, and then up rocky roads to the barren encampments, just inside Afghanistan, where he led his small incubating cult of martyrdom.
BY THE MID-1980S, Jim Bath, Salem’s partner in Houston, who had arrived in the city three decades earlier with hardly a dollar to his name, had acquired many of the accessories of a successful Texas adventurer: a pair of .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolvers, a Westchester high-powered rifle with a scope, a Winchester bolt-action rifle, a BMW 525 automobile, and a Rallye Minerva airplane. He owned interests in a number of residential and investment properties around Houston; these included hotel projects, apartment houses, an airport parking garage, a Denny’s restaurant, and a ranch in Liberty County. From offices on several floors of the Fannin Bank Building downtown, he oversaw his aircraft brokerage company, Bin Laden family business entities, his own scattered investments (which included $50,000 he had sunk into an oil-drilling fund run by George W. Bush, his friend from the Texas Air National Guard), and an aircraft leasing company called Skyway Aircraft, which was incorporated in the Cayman Islands and controlled by Khalid Bin Mahfouz. Bath and his wife Sandra still lived immediately behind Khalid’s enormous estate in the River Oaks neighborhood of Houston. All in all, Bath presented a grand facade. But it was little more than that; in truth, his life was unraveling.1
Bath jetted around the world with his Arab clients and other oil industry friends—to Caribbean tax havens, Europe, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere in the Middle East. One of the leased oil company jets he occasionally flew on had a bed with a mink throw on it, and it was there that he first met Mary Ellen Lewis, a married air hostess, according to Sheryl Johnson-Todd, an attorney who represented two of Bath’s wives in subsequent divorce proceedings. Over the course of their long, tumultuous affair, Bath provided Mary Ellen with a Cadillac, transferred money to her and her husband, and fathered a child with her out of wedlock. After Sandra discovered the relationship, she later testified, anonymous postcards arrived at her home in River Oaks; the cards accused Sandra of clinging to an opportunistic marriage like the fictional one between J.R. and Sue Ellen in the prime-time television soap opera Dallas. Ultimately, Sandra learned about Bath’s child with Lewis when her husband pulled up to their house one day in a convertible with a little girl asleep in the passenger seat; according to Sandra, Jim Bath asked if she would please raise the child. She filed for divorce instead. Sandra alleged in court filings that Bath abused drugs; he denied her allegations. According to an affidavit by Bath, Mary Ellen Lewis eventually became no happier with him; she “made threats to blow my head off and to kill me.”2
Bath’s affair with Lewis may not have been the only secret he harbored during his last years of working with the Bin Laden family. According to a 1990 court filing by Bath’s estranged business partner Bill White, Bath “indicated that he was working as a CIA operative” during a conversation they held in 1982. By White’s account, Bath said he had been introduced to the CIA when the elder George Bush was its director, during the late 1970s, and that he had been asked to conduct “covert intelligence gathering on his Saudi Arabian business associates.” According to him, Bath said that he had been asked to undertake certain sensitive air-transport operations. After a series of scandals during the 1970s, the CIA had allegedly decided to privatize some of its covert air-transport operations, and the agency had been looking for reliable Americans with security clearances who might take on some of this work under contract. As a former air force pilot who was friendly with the younger Bush, Bath was a natural candidate for such a role, according to White, who was himself a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis and a former navy fighter pilot. White came to believe that Bath had used some of his offshore charter aircraft businesses to help ship construction equipment and possibly weapons to Osama Bin Laden on the Afghan frontier during the late 1980s.3
Jim Bath has spoken sparsely and infrequently about his business and chartered aviation endeavors during the 1980s. (He declined to be interviewed for this book.) In a court filing from that period, he seemed to mock all White’s allegations about their business disputes, arguing that his former business partner suffered from “paranoia” and “demonstrated frequent mood swings.” According to Bath, White believed that “those conspiring against him were engaged in ‘covert communications’ and had ‘secret agendas’ against him.” In 1991 Bath told Time that White’s account about his supposed intelligence work was “fantasy” and that he was “not a member of the CIA or any other intelligence agency.” About a decade later, however, in an interview with the journalist Craig Unger, Bath seemed to suggest that there might be some degree of truth in White’s portrayal. Speaking of the CIA, Bath said, “There’s all sorts of degrees of civilian participation.” He seemed to be referring to the voluntary cooperation sometimes offered to the agency by American businessmen with sensitive foreign contacts. Indeed, the CIA ran a station in Houston to facilitate informal interviews with Americans who worked in the international oil industry. If Bath did have agency connections, it is possible that all he did was report occasionally on what he picked up while consorting with the Bin Ladens, Bin Mahfouz, and other Saudis.4
White failed in his lawsuits against Bath and suffered heavy financial losses. He had an honorable military career before his troubles with Bath, but his credibility is difficult to judge. There is no evidence apart from his statements that Bath ran contract operations for the CIA. Nonetheless, for reasons that are not altogether clear, Bath did travel frequently to Caribbean tax havens during this period, according to Sandra’s divorce attorney, and he crossed borders carrying large amounts of cash, she said.5 Bath certainly had the means to support discreet international air operations if he wished, if not for the United States, then perhaps for his Saudi business clients. Salem frequently used his larger private aircraft as makeshift cargo transporters during this period, and it is conceivable, for example, that Salem or Bath might have used one of these planes, or one of the other large jets owned by some of Salem’s Saudi associates, to move weapons from South America or South Africa to aid Osama in Pakistan. This is merely conjecture, however; none of the individuals interviewed about Salem’s involvement in private arms transactions on Osama’s behalf understood how the weapons were to be shipped.
Salem flitted lightly and evasively through these spheres of intrigue, but his style was more Austin Powers than James Bond. Apart from the court filings and statements by White, there are additional fragments of evidence about Salem’s possible connections to conservative American political circles that were active in covert anti-communist operations during the 1980s. For example, according to flight logs, Larry McDonald, the Georgia congressman and president of the John Birch Society, flew on one of Salem’s private jets in Saudi Arabia just months before McDonald died aboard Korean Air Lines Flight 007, which was shot down on September 1, 1983, after it strayed into Soviet airspace. Jim Bath’s connections to the Bush family and other leading figures in the Reagan-era Republican Party in Texas have continued to raise questions about the extent of Salem’s relations with these politicians. White, for example, has alleged that Bath used Bin Laden money when investing in Bush’s Arbusto drilling fund, a charge that Bath and Bush have adamantly denied. At a minimum—through Jim Bath, Khalid Bin Mahfouz, and the Saudi government—Salem could justifiably regard himself as an ex officio member of the Houston oil and political establishment; he was draped in both its finery and its perpetual culture of mysterious deal making. Vinson and Elkins, one of the city’s most prestigious law firms, represented Salem. He owned a private airport in the city. He dined at River Oaks mansions and played with visiting Saudi royalty.6
In time, however, Bath’s accumulating personal and financial troubles seemed to alienate him from Salem. There were limits to how much craziness even Salem was prepared to tolerate. In 1986 Bath fell into a financial dispute with White involving allegations that he had improperly used a certificate of deposit belonging to Skyway Aircraft as collateral at a Houston bank for a $550,000 personal loan. Later that year, according to White’s court filings, the Houston Police Department contacted White and told him they were investigating Bath in an international drug case; no charges were ever brought against him, however. According to Gail Freeman, the Bin Laden family friend and occasional business partner, Salem’s beloved half-sister Randa also became estranged from the Baths during this period. She felt the Baths had treated her rudely, according to Freeman, and Randa then seemed to influence Salem’s attitude toward his longtime Houston partner.7
An era was ending, and Bath’s troubles reflected its eclipse. In 1986 oil prices fell to a record low of nine dollars per barrel. The economies of Saudi Arabia and Texas shuddered simultaneously. The real estate boom in Houston gradually imploded. That autumn, as Osama was organizing his first militia training camp on the Afghan frontier, the Iran-Contra scandal broke into the open, and the subsequent investigations dragged some of the uncomfortable history of off-the-books dealings between Reagan and King Fahd into the headlines. The adhesives that had held Salem’s multiple worlds together for a decade—spouting oil money, a confident and often secretive alliance between Washington and Riyadh, and an ethos of cultural mobility and play—began to come apart.
OSAMA’S SMALL BAND of fighters suffered through a bitter winter in the high mountains around Jaji. The war usually went into hiatus during the snowy season. When the thaw arrived, so did Soviet soldiers. Osama’s rumbling bulldozers had created a provocation in an important battle zone that the Soviets were not about to ignore. Osama’s friend and brother-in-law Jamal Khalifa had visited the Lion’s Den and found it to be a death trap. That was the point, some of Osama’s colleagues told him: “We have plenty of shaheeds,” or “martyrs,” whose sacrifices would please God. Khalifa said he argued with Osama that this waste of life violated Islamic precepts and that “God will ask you about it in the hereafter.” Osama ignored his warning.8
The fighting began in April of 1987. Osama’s volunteers clashed for a week with Soviet forces; this initial engagement was followed by a longer battle the next month. Bin Laden’s positions came under sustained aerial bombardment; the Soviets may have used incendiary weapons similar to napalm. Spetsnaz troops raided Bin Laden’s fortified encampments; the Arab volunteers, although lightly trained and little experienced, fought back fiercely in close engagements. Precisely what happened during these battles would become obscured over the years by retrospective accounts from self-mythologizing jihadis; their versions are sometimes contradictory. The earliest known published description, in Azzam’s Al-Jihad magazine, does not emphasize Osama’s role in the battles, but concentrates instead on the heroics of one of his Egyptian military aides; Osama was not even mentioned. He soon painted himself into the picture, however, by giving effusive interviews about his experiences to sympathetic Arab journalists. There is no doubt about the basic facts. The Jaji battles of 1987 were intense, with significant casualties on both sides, but they did nothing to alter the course of the larger war. Osama was present, and he performed honorably under heavy pressure. The battles seem to have left him with two main reactions: they endowed his belief that he had been called to war in God’s name with fresh and deep emotion, and they struck him as an outstanding marketing opportunity.9
“It was obvious in the way that he was telling stories, that he was trying to create a drive to bring in more, to use the media for attracting more Arabs, recruiting more Arabs to come to Afghanistan,” recalled Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist who was one of the first to interview Osama after the Jaji campaign. “I liked his enthusiasm.” Osama’s speaking style in this period was “like a university professor…like if he is at the head of the table of the political committee of this party or that party.” Yet his memories of the peril he felt at Jaji were florid, infused with a sense of fatalism and surrender to God’s will.10
“We sometimes spent the whole day in the trenches or in the caves until our ears could no longer bear the sound of the explosions around us,” Osama told Khashoggi:
War planes continually shrieked by us and their crazy song of death echoed endlessly. We spent the days praying to God Almighty. Despite the massive Russian onslaughts, one of us had to come out from our shelter regularly to see the enemy’s movements…Each time, we were able, by the grace of God, to inflict a crushing defeat on the Russians…It was God alone who protected us from the Russians…Reliance upon God is the main source of our strength and these trenches and tunnels are merely the military facilities God asked us to make. We depend completely on God in all matters.11
Around this time, Osama permitted an Egyptian filmmaker, Essam Deraz, to follow him and document the movement he was building. Deraz helped to crystallize the themes that would later shape Osama’s legend—a rich man who lived like the poor, a socially advantaged man who was prepared to sacrifice everything for his religion, a fighter who would not waver in the face of death. “I saw him with my own eyes on the battlefield,” Deraz said later. “He was in the middle of the fighting. Being a rich man, no matter what he was like, people of course looked at him as a financier, just a man with money. After the battle of Jaji, he was looked upon as a military man who deserved to be the leader.”12
This, at least, was the view that filmmaker and the other early Bin Laden publicists promoted; combined with Osama’s quiet charisma, and his ability—common in the Saudi court circles from which he had emerged—to avoid giving offense even to his adversaries, it would prove to be enough.
He was emerging now from the shadow of his mentor, Abdullah Azzam. They quarreled over Osama’s plans to group Arabs together in their own separate military encampments; Azzam believed firmly that they should insert themselves into mixed militias, alongside the Afghans, where they could share the war’s burdens and proselytize to Afghan fighters whose own religious scholars had been killed off by the communists. “Bin Laden sought to pamper Arab fighters,” Azzam’s wife later complained. “Even their food was different from that of the Afghan mujaheddin. Bin Laden used to bring them special foodstuff in containers from Saudi Arabia.”13
These tensions complicated Osama’s position, but he was careful; he and Azzam remained cordial. By late 1987, their global fundraising and recruitment network included offices in Brooklyn and Tucson in the United States, as well as in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere. As this worldwide retail network spread, it was not in Osama’s interest to precipitate a debilitating split.
Osama’s own access to money remained unrivaled. His contributors included Salem’s friend Khalid Bin Mahfouz. Sometime before May 1988, Bin Mahfouz “was approached for a contribution to the Afghan resistance by Salem Bin Laden,” according to a statement by his attorneys. “Consistent with many other prominent Saudi Arabians, and in accordance with U.S. government foreign policy at that time, Sheikh Khalid Bin Mahfouz recalls making a donation of approximately $270,000. This donation was to assist the U.S.-sponsored resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and was never intended nor, to the best of Sheikh Khalid Bin Mahfouz’s knowledge, [was it] ever used to fund any extension of that resistance movement in other countries.” Bin Mahfouz did not donate the money “with the intention” that it be used to purchase arms, his attorneys said. Osama’s fundraising in Saudi Arabia “emphasized the need for humanitarian support (that is, food, shelter, medical supplies) for the Afghan resistance and the Afghan populations under their control that were subject to Soviet attacks…The financial needs of the Afghan resistance were, in fact, greater for these purposes than for weapons, which were being freely supplied by the U.S. Government.”14
Osama spread his money and his favor around, some to Azzam, some to the rival Egyptian faction in Peshawar. By this signature method of accommodative Bedouin leadership, he gradually bound a loose coalition of multinational Arab volunteers to his undeclared leadership. As Azzam’s son-in-law put it: “I think Osama started to believe in himself.”15
SALEM, TOO, dreamed of an idyll. His vision did not revolve around war or martyrdom, however; it involved the women in his life. By 1985, as he approached forty, Salem had approximately five regular girlfriends—one American, one German, one French, one Danish, and one English. He used his money and pilots to weave them in and out of his itineraries. They swirled around Salem and one another like airplanes in an intricate air traffic control pattern; they brushed against one another now and then, but rarely collided. Occasionally he installed girlfriends on two different floors of the same hotel, each unaware of the other’s presence. One or two believed they were his only love; the others knew better.
Salem developed a bold plan to resolve this state of affairs. It began as a friendly bet between Salem and King Fahd, Bengt Johansson recalled. Salem told Fahd that he could persuade four young European and American women—“normal family girls”—to marry him simultaneously, as permitted by Islamic law. Fahd said he was crazy, that he could never pull it off. Perhaps the king believed this; perhaps he also understood, as Johansson put it, that if you told Salem he could not do something, “then he was for sure doing it.”1
Lynn Peghiny, the American pianist from Orlando, had returned to Florida from her adventure with Salem in Pakistan when he called to invite her to London. She flew over, but nobody came to meet her at the airport, so after some confusion, she took a taxi to the Carlton Tower Hotel in Belgravia. She went shopping, and when she returned, she found a handwritten note addressed to “Lin.” It read: “I came by to see you. I feel a little guilty, and I even went looking in the shops for you. I’ll call you sometime.” It was signed “S.”2
He did call and arranged to pick her up, but when she arrived at his brick-walled estate at Offley Chase, she found two other young women already there. Lynn knew that Salem dated others, and she had never been particularly put out about it. Still, she was not sure what to make of this. The two other women were both named Caroline; one was French (“Caroleen”), the other English (“Caroline”).
Caroline of France had dark eyes and thickly curled black hair that wrapped around her cheeks. She lived, as it turned out, not far from Cannes, in a house that Salem had purchased for her and her mother. She had been dating Salem for more than a year.
Caroline of England was Caroline Carey, then about twenty-six years old. She had a thin, angular face with high cheekbones, chestnut hair, and a somewhat regal affect. She had grown up in Kensington, London, with her half-brother, Ambrose, and their mother, Anne Carey. Her family lineage touched the English aristocracy, if lightly. Caroline’s father, Simon Henry Carey, had not married her mother. Ambrose had also been born out of wedlock, to Anne and David Queensberry, the Marquis of Queensberry. Salem had met Caroline in Hyde Park during the early 1960s, when she was just a toddler. He came to London on school breaks and spotted the Carey family nanny in the park; he thought the nanny was cute and tried to ingratiate himself by playing with the children. Soon he was a regular guest for tea at the Carey residence. As the years passed, he fell out of touch, but he resurfaced during the mid-1980s; when he and Caroline were reacquainted, they began to see each other. Like Salem’s other girlfriends, she was his junior by about fifteen years.3
Lynn greeted the two Carolines at Offley Chase. She deduced that Salem had convened some sort of girlfriend summit, but apparently they did not yet have a quorum. Anna from Germany had yet to arrive, and Salem asked a pilot friend to take one of his jets, fly over, and bring her back. Lynn decided to go along, to pass the time—“It was like taking a taxi somewhere.”4
Anna, it turned out, was a very thin, blond woman, even younger than the others, whom Salem had met in a bar at an Austrian ski resort. She had a salaried job near Cologne but traveled often with Salem; he had taken her once to Medina, a city normally off limits to non-Muslims. She was far from imposing in appearance, but when he was with his male friends, Salem sometimes referred to her as his “German tank.”
When Anna and Lynn arrived back, Salem settled on a couch in his living room with all four women. He summoned his most earnest demeanor. He explained that since boyhood, he had been raised in a culture where it was common for men to marry several Arabian wives and then live all together on a family compound.
“But that is not my dream,” Salem said, as Lynn recalled it. “My dream is to have four Westernized women—that has always been my dream and my fantasy. So I picked you four. You would just make my dream come true.”5
He outlined the plan he had refined over several months. It was not a coincidence that each girl he had selected was from a different country. Indeed, his vision was to build in Jeddah a new Bin Laden family estate that would resemble the United Nations.
The compound would have four houses. Over one would fly an American flag, over a second a German flag, over a third a French tricolor, and over the fourth a British Union Jack. Each wife would have a car parked outside, a model from her home country—a Mercedes for Anna, a Rolls-Royce for Caroline of England, and so on. They would each have a home in their native countries, too—Salem already owned luxury properties in America, England, and France.
As Salem spoke, Lynn smiled to herself and thought, “I get gypped—I don’t want a Corvette or a Cadillac.”
Salem kept talking, trying to sell them. He knew they might feel trapped by the prospect of life in Saudi Arabia, so he had come up with an escape clause. He said that if there were children from any of the four marriages, those children would have to remain in the kingdom and be raised there in Saudi tradition. However, if no children were involved, then if any of the women were unhappy after one year, he would give them $100,000 and they could return home. He hoped, however, that they would all be happy together for a long time.
“I would just take turns going from home to home and we would all be friends,” he said, as Lynn remembered it.
Lynn found herself thinking, “Hmmm…That doesn’t sound too bad.” But then she would scold herself silently, worrying that if she left after a year no American man would ever marry her, and also, in any event, perhaps “I’d be selling my soul.” But then, on the other hand: “What the heck?” She was young and open-minded, and she cared for Salem, who had been very good to her.6
The conversation went on for some time. They maintained a civil tone. Caroline of France seemed open to the idea, Lynn thought. Caroline of England—Salem called her “Carrie”—was cool but enigmatic. Anna, however, was clearly unhappy. She rolled her eyes. She seemed the most emotional about the revelation that Salem wanted more than just her. The more upset she became, the more Lynn began to think this wasn’t going to work after all. Finally, Anna walked out.
“I’m in trouble,” Salem reported when he called a friend in America after the meeting. “They all got mad.”7
That was an exaggeration. Lynn stayed that night and played Chopin. The French Caroline returned home, but Carrie stayed on, and a few days later, Lynn flew with her and Salem to Cairo on a holiday. They went from there to Saudi Arabia, and then to a Greek island, where they met Salem’s two children from his earlier marriage and went sailing on a yacht. Gradually, on this trip, Lynn began to conclude that Salem “favored Carrie…They were more connected.”
Lynn flew home; some months later, Salem asked her to Jeddah. They spent some time together, and then Salem said what they were both were thinking: “I don’t know if this is going to work.”
“That’s fine,” Lynn said. “I’ve had a wonderful year.”
“We’ll always be friends,” Salem told her. “I’ll always keep in touch. I’ll always make sure—if you ever need anything.”8
Lynn admired his generosity but did not want to take advantage of him. People who worked for Salem encouraged her to ask him for a house in Florida—after all, Caroline of France had gotten a house—but she declined.
They went their separate ways. Caroline Carey, Lynn could see, would be the last girlfriend standing.
SOME OF SALEM’S brothers and sisters searched, as he had, for forms of marriage that would synthesize modernity and tradition, but they hewed closer to convention. The beliefs and practices of Mohamed Bin Laden’s daughters contrasted almost as greatly as those of his sons; they were just much better hidden from view. In Jeddah, Sheikha and Rafah covered themselves in black abayas, threw themselves into Islamic study, and abjured birthday parties for their children, in the belief that such parties were forbidden by the tenets of their faith—birthdays were a Christian rite, and thus haram, or “forbidden.” Another group of daughters—Huda, Randa, and Mona—still jetted frequently around Europe to shop or across the Atlantic for spring skiing in Aspen with Salem. If they wanted to consider dating, they had to operate clandestinely and be willing to shoulder considerable risk; otherwise, they could wait for Salem to arrange or bless a traditional marriage to a respectable Arab professional. Like Mohamed’s sons, as they reached their thirties, some of these women became more outwardly religious and visited Europe less frequently.9
A few followed Randa in pursuit of independent careers. Salem enrolled his half-sisters Raedah and Saleha in American schools specializing in interior design; after they completed their training, he said, they could work on palace projects for the Saudi royal family. None of these women, even the most ambitious, could free herself as easily from Saudi patriarchy as could her brothers, however.
Several of Mohamed’s daughters suffered divorces under inflexible Saudi laws that deprived them of the right to live with their children. Najiah, a mother of four, lost custody of her children in Jeddah when her husband divorced her. Carmen Bin Laden once asked Najiah why she didn’t fight back; Najiah looked at her as though she were the “village idiot,” Carmen recalled. Najiah eventually escaped to Los Angeles, where she took flying lessons, became an accomplished pilot and was noted by some of her American friends for the very high speeds at which she routinely drove on streets and highways.10
Randa remained the most untraditional of Mohamed’s daughters—now both a licensed medical doctor and a pilot, as comfortable in the Austrian ski resort of Zell am See as in Cairo or Jeddah. Her relatively daring and visible life enjoyed Salem’s full protection and oversight, however, and so it carried little risk of censure from the family’s conservative wing.
She was approaching thirty. Although it would mean an end to their special relationship, Salem decided it was time for Randa to marry, and he gave his blessing to a suitable Egyptian groom who would later work as a manager for the Bin Laden companies in Jeddah. Salem rented the ballroom of a luxury hotel in Cairo, paid for Randa’s American friends to fly to Egypt first-class, and staged a gala celebration. He even flew out the American doctors who had performed his hemorrhoid operation. Before the event, a cluster of brothers and sisters donned blue jeans and joined Randa’s American friends on a tour of their half-brother Khalid’s Thoroughbred horse farms in the Egyptian countryside.
When the wedding day arrived, laced white tablecloths draped the tables, and the couple sat in fluted, high-backed white chairs. Several of Randa’s half-sisters served as bridesmaids. Some were veiled, others not; they wore peach chiffon dresses and gold headbands. The men dressed in black tuxedos. Osama was not among them. In a bittersweet moment, Salem gave the bride away. A few hours later, on stage, he sang and carried on, exuberant as ever.11
AMONG SALEM’S half-sisters, it was Saleha, the apprentice interior designer, who most severely tested the family’s boundaries of decorum.
Paul Piccirillo was an Italian interior designer and artist, about fifty years of age. He met the Bin Ladens through Salem’s New York partner Robert Freeman. Around the time that Saleha, who was about twenty years his junior, completed her studies at a design school in Houston, the Bin Ladens were busy on a number of demanding palace projects in Saudi Arabia; Piccirillo worked on some of these, as well as on the Jeddah home of Salem’s former wife, Sheikha. Several involved work on King Fahd’s own residences and required extensive travel to inspect and review rare silks for bedding and window treatments at Scalamandre in New York; custom-made furniture in Valencia, Spain; and chandeliers hand-crafted in Venice, Italy. Salem did not permit his sisters, even those who were professional designers, to travel abroad without either a female chaperone or one of a several older and trusted male business partners. One night in Paris, however, while on chaperone duty with Saleha, Bob Freeman went to bed early. He failed to notice that Paul and Saleha were paying particularly close attention to each other. While he slept, they “talked all night long and fell in love,” as Bob’s wife, Gail Freeman, recalled it.
In the ensuing months, Paul and Saleha continued to see each other. Eventually Salem found out; naturally, he blamed Freeman. “We’ve got to do something about this,” he warned. “This is just a tragedy.” There were rumors, Gail Freeman recalled, that some of “the brothers were going to go kill” Saleha for dishonoring the family by falling for an older European.12
Salem agonized and fumed, and eventually he gave in. He quietly arranged for the couple to marry; they moved to a small town on the Mediterranean coastline. It would take years before Paul was fully welcomed by the family, according to the Freemans, who felt that Paul was conspicuously shunned at Randa’s wedding. The couple held together, however, and gradually Bakr and other influential brothers accepted them.
WEALTH, MOBILITY, and Salem’s secularism carried the Bin Ladens to far cultural shores, but they remained, at heart, a conservative and Arabian clan. Among other things, their honor was a business imperative; their wealth depended upon the patronage of the Saudi royal family, and so they lacked the political discretion to live entirely as they pleased, as some of the much larger Al-Saud family seemed to think they could do. Indeed, behavior that many Bin Ladens might find racy or challenging, such as Saleha’s marriage to Paul, could look timid or downright square alongside the unrestrained European cavorting of some Al-Saud princes—debauchery that Salem and his friends sometimes facilitated, in Salem’s role as a royal concierge.
Salem prided himself on never sleeping with prostitutes. This required some fortitude because he arranged periodically for the supply of professional women to entertain Saudi guests at parties he hosted or arranged in England and elsewhere, according to several European friends and employees who were involved. The women were so numerous that they sometimes arrived together on a bus. As cohosts, those in Salem’s entourage were charged with promoting cheerful demeanors among the women (“I paid you to smile!”). But apart from their substantial compensation, the girls had little reason to be pleased. The guests could be crude, drunken, and unattractive. Thomas Dietrich recalled one event for visiting Saudis at Offley Chase when he stood eavesdropping on some young German prostitutes who did not know he could understand them as they spoke with one another. “They were bitching like hell” about the guests, he recalled. “‘Look at this guy—I hope he doesn’t pick me.’ I mean, they were just saying what you would imagine they would say.”13
For many Saudis, Western vice confirmed the precepts of Arabian misogyny, and for many Americans and Europeans, Arabian vices confirmed the precepts of Western racism. “The awe that America commanded, with its skyscrapers, freeways, magnificent telephone system and raw riches, was diminishing as Saudi Arabia casually acquired all of these things with great rapidity,” wrote Peter Theroux, an American who lived in Riyadh during this period. “The Saudis saw themselves as our absolute superiors. The secular chaos of America’s elections, boisterous press and above all the public sex culture, seemed, except in small doses, to disgust them.”14 It was, in this context, easier and certainly more acceptable for wealthy Saudis to buy sex while visiting the West than it was for them to enter into the mixed marriages and bicultural family life that might produce, over time, integration or even assimilation—as occurred with some frequency, for example, among Pakistani, Iranian, Egyptian, and Palestinian émigrés to the West. The obsession with bloodlines among many Saudis, particularly those from the dominant Nejd region, along with their wealth and deep conservatism, kept them apart. Salem’s fantasy of a United Nations (or at least a Security Council) of intercultural marriages was exceptional, and even it presumed the primacy of inflexible and patriarchal Saudi family law.
Whether the subject was sex or shoes, it was almost impossible for a Saudi prince or merchant to travel in the West without being aware, from hour to hour, of the centrality of money in his interactions with Americans and Europeans. Salem managed this by surrounding himself with genuine Western friends who had earned his trust over time; he provided them with enough money and all-expenses-paid vacations to secure their loyalty, but not so much cash that they would likely consider leaving his side. Some of those who attached themselves to Salem, such as the Swedish mechanic Bengt Johansson or the American pilot Gerald Auerbach, had no great appetite for wealth or what it could purchase, and they stayed with Salem the longest. Others in the entourage, such as Jim Bath, seemed much more passionate about making money, and they faded from the inner circle more quickly. It seemed that just about every American who won a retainer from Salem soon pitched him on a side business deal. The ideas came at him like random, subliminal images flashing on the movie screen of a demented experimental psychiatrist—a strip mall in San Antonio, a mining deal promoted by the relative of a powerful senator from Louisiana, a cowboy movie that would be shot in the Philippines. If a particular proposal appealed to Salem’s whimsy, he might say yes, even if it did not fit in his family’s business lines. Salem told his flight instructor, Don Sowell, for example, that he shared ownership of a luxury apartment in London with the boxer Muhammad Ali. If the idea bored Salem (as the cowboy movie’s story line did), he would dismiss it with a wave of his hand.15
“These people are not great,” Johansson recalled telling Salem, speaking about the deal promoters who swirled around him.
“I know, Bengt,” Salem answered. “I am stealing more from them than they are stealing from me.”16
Once, cruising at forty-one thousand feet in a LearJet above North Africa, Salem worried aloud about whether his girlfriends cared for him only because he had money, recalled his pilot Jack Hinson. Salem paused, and then discarded the conundrum: “As long as I’m happy.”17
HE COULD NOT BEAR to be alone as he reached middle age. He turned forty in 1985 or 1986—he did not know either the year or the date of his birth, and he often used Valentine’s Day as a sentimental proxy. His need for constant companionship grew increasingly awkward. When he used the bathroom, for example, he kept the door open and demanded that his friends sit nearby and talk to him as he sat. If no members of his entourage were around, he called down to the front desk and offered to pay for a maid or maintenance man to come to his room, to sit outside the bathroom and keep him company while he did his business.18
His sleeping habits were no less unusual. When he shared a house with his friend Mohamed Ashmawi in Riyadh, he could not bear to sleep alone, and so he would wander in and climb into bed with Mohamed—there was no hint of sexual purpose, just a need for company. When Mohamed had a girlfriend living with him, he would sneak into the room in the night and announce, “I’m going to sleep with you,” Ashmawi recalled.
“I said, ‘You should be shy—I have my girlfriend.’ He said, ‘Let her sleep next to you and I’ll sleep next to you on the other side—you be in the middle.’”
“No, Salem.”
“Let’s try it. It might work.”
“Go sleep in your room.”19
He would finally leave, Ashmawi said, but then Salem slept fitfully and with his eyes open. He spent long days and evenings lying in bed, but he often only slept in fifteen-or thirty-minute intervals. He used all his bedrooms as a combination of office, family room, and playhouse. He routinely held meetings with foreign executives from companies such as Firestone while lying in bed; in the middle of a negotiation, he might tuck his head down and nod off, then just as suddenly jerk back awake.
These restless habits took a visible toll on his health. His body grew soft, his legs had atrophied from lack of exercise, and his eyes sagged and darkened so much that he looked at times like a raccoon. He hardly ever walked—cars drove him from home to airport terminal, and then across the tarmac to his plane, and then from his plane to the next terminal, and so on, until he reached his next bed. Bengt worried that Salem’s legs would soon fail him altogether, and he tried to implement a regimen of no more car rides between airport terminals and airplanes—if they at least walked across every tarmac, he said, perhaps Salem would gain back some leg muscle strength.
Sleeplessness exacerbated Salem’s temper, which could be volcanic. His outbursts usually passed quickly, and left him feeling guilty and sheepish, but particularly as his fatigue accumulated, he could succumb to brief rages. He might wordlessly walk back to the cabin of one of his airplanes and strike one of his brothers, then return and sit down without explanation. He might shout or berate a pilot or even a friend in his entourage, although with them he was very rarely physical. On two or three occasions, according to his friends, he allowed himself to drink beyond his limit and lost all control. Over the course of one particularly memorable and frightening night in Dubai during the late 1980s, Salem smashed up a Sheraton Hotel bandstand, broke a drum over a band member’s head, threatened his friends with violence, and created such ugly scenes in the hotel lobby that his friend from boarding school, Mehmet “Baby Elephant” Birgen, finally called a doctor to sedate him. In the morning, Salem said he couldn’t remember a thing.20
He speculated freely about his own death. In Cannes, around the time that he was developing his proposal to marry his four girlfriends, he sat with his Texas attorney Wayne Fagan and Baby Elephant. Salem mused about how he would react if he discovered that he had cancer or some other serious illness.
“You know what I’d do?” he asked, as Fagan recalled it. “I’d get in my MU-2, and I’d go out and I would find the highest cloud in the sky. And I would climb to the top of that cloud. And I would shut the engines off. I wouldn’t have chemotherapy.”
The room was silent. Salem looked over at Baby Elephant.
“You’re my closest friend, so I’d take you with me—I’m not going alone!”21
IN THE YEARS following his service in Miami as Bakr’s guardian, Baby Elephant charmed his way through debutante society in Dallas and Moët-fueled nightlife in Geneva. He moved into the jewelry trade, met the actor Sean Connery, and opened a London store in partnership with him; they called it Bond Street Jewelry. Mehmet chased women even more energetically than Salem, and because of his broad shoulders and his brooding dark eyes, he often had success. He and Salem made a pact that if one ever settled down and married, the other would do so as well, but the agreement never seemed likely to come into force. At one stage, Mehmet considered retiring to his native Turkey to write a book about the art of loving women. Instead, following several heartbreaks and financial reversals, he moved to Saudi Arabia. His work was often an extension of Salem’s concierge services. It did have an appealing variety; Mehmet could regale his friends with surreal stories about the whims and peccadilloes of the wealthy Gulf businessmen he looked after during their travels in Europe and America.
In late June 1987, he was in Miami having dinner with the family of his Venezuelan girlfriend, Margarita, when Salem telephoned. As Mehmet later described the conversation for his friends, it went like this:
“This Saturday, I’m marrying Carrie,” Salem announced.
“Oh, mabruk. Finally, you’re marrying—she cornered your ass.”
“Yeah, Margarita cornered your ass, too.”
“No, nobody cornered my ass.”
“I’m telling you, she cornered your ass—because you’re going to marry her.”
“Come on, Salem.”
“No, no, Baby Elephant—you promised me. You’re going to do exactly what I tell you. If you don’t want to marry Margarita, I have two Egyptian girls here, come and have a look at them. They’re not bad. Marry one of them.”
Mehmet put the phone down. “Margarita, this Saturday, we’re getting married,” he said.
They flew the next day to London; Salem sent a car to retrieve them from the airport. When Mehmet hurriedly invited his only sister to the wedding, she asked, “If Salem says you’re going to kill yourself, you’re going to kill yourself?”1
Bin Laden family and friends converged on London from several continents. Salem put his guests up in suites at the Grosvenor House hotel on Park Lane and arranged for limousines to shuttle them to and from Offley Chase. He had chosen July 4, 1987, and as ever, he was fortunate—the skies were clear and the sun shined magnificently through the afternoon. The atmosphere at the estate blended the elegance of a 1930s country house with Ringling Brothers festivity. A line of antique automobiles rolled into the driveway, ferrying the wedding party. In a field beyond the mansion billowed a hot air balloon with green, red, yellow, and purple stripes, its basket open to offer rides to the 250 guests. A helicopter parked on the grass nearby, also available for rides. Clowns, snake handlers, and acrobats wandered among grand white tents pitched on the lawns.2
Salem donned a Saudi thobe for a brief traditional ceremony, but for much of the afternoon, he and Baby Elephant wore matching black business suits, white shirts, and plain maroon ties. Carrie wore a long-sleeved white bridal gown and a tiara fashioned from white daisies. At dinner, served beneath a white tent, Salem and Carrie sat with Baby Elephant, Margarita, and Salem’s two children, Sara and Salman.
Salem’s former wife, Sheikha, attended with her second husband, an Austrian diplomat she had met in Jeddah, a match that signaled her modern, independent-minded outlook. Randa, too, arrived with her new husband. All in all, about twenty of Salem’s sisters and brothers came, a self-selecting group who were comfortable enough to circulate in England wearing business suits and dresses, in a setting without gender segregation and teeming with Europeans and Americans. The turnout at such an important event—the wedding of the family’s leader to an Englishwoman—measured the size of the Bin Ladens’ Western-leaning caucus at about half of Mohamed’s fifty-four children.
Salem offered a sentimental speech about his friendship with Baby Elephant, and how they had pledged to take this passage into matrimony together. That night, as the music died down, the two betrothed couples climbed into cars and rode a few minutes to the Luton Airport, where they boarded one of Salem’s jets and flew to Bristol for a double-dating honeymoon night in a nearby hotel, and then on to the South of France and Germany.
His friends understood, of course, that Salem would never grow up entirely, but after so many years of flying hard on the edge, he seemed at last to be trying to settle and restore himself a little. Among other things, he desired more children. Three months after the wedding, Carrie was pregnant.
SALEM CAMPED in the Saudi desert with Fahd the following winter. The mid-1980s had been a difficult period for the Bin Laden construction business in Saudi Arabia because falling oil prices crimped payment schedules and new project launches. Renovation projects in Medina provided some ballast, but according to Bengt Johansson, the desert sojourn of early 1988 produced a particularly big breakthrough when the king committed to a number of lucrative projects, including a massive renovation in Mecca, to follow on the work in Medina. Another individual close to Salem recalled that he was buoyant about these contracts; he instructed this friend to set up new Swiss accounts to ensure that Salem and his family banked a more reliable share of the proceeds than he had managed to do in the past.3
At the same time, however, two individuals who worked closely with Salem recalled separately that he was haunted that same winter by a large international business transaction, involving bartered oil sales in the spot markets, which had gone very badly, causing Salem a substantial loss. One of these people recalled that the deal involved the acquisition by the Saudi government of commercial airliners from Boeing Corporation; the other believed that the deal may have concerned arms shipments to Afghanistan from China and Eastern Europe. In any event, by both of these accounts, Salem felt that he had been let down financially by his partners in the deal, and he was unusually angry and gloomy about what had happened.4
In mid-April, Salem vacationed in Greece with Carrie and his two children. A week later, he flew to America with his two half-brothers, Tareq and Shafiq. Salem had purchased a Hawker Siddeley jet, the same model his father had owned at the time of his death two decades earlier. Among other projects, Salem oversaw the remodeling of its interior by an American company. He hopped back and forth across the Atlantic in May.5 Late that month, he called his former girlfriend, Lynn Peghiny, in Orlando; he had not spoken to her in about a year.
“I’m going to be in Orlando, and I’d love to see you and take you to dinner—and your family is invited,” he told her, as Lynn recalled it.6
She called up several of her sisters, who all lived nearby, and they met Salem at a little Italian restaurant a few nights later. Lynn learned about his marriage and also that Carrie was pregnant, so far along now that she could no longer travel. Salem and his entourage were all headed for Texas to attend the wedding of Anthony Auerbach, Gerald’s only son.
Salem brought his guitar to the Italian restaurant. He ran through his favorites and sang boisterously. He remained enamored of the most familiar American standards. “You Are My Sunshine” was one of his very favorites, and he belted it out that night.
He seemed, as Lynn Peghiny recalled it, “just so happy.”7
ON SATURDAY, MAY 28, 1988, Salem joined about 250 guests at the Auerbach wedding, which was held at the Officers Club at Lackland Air Force Base, outside San Antonio. The Cone Sisters, three platinum blondes who sang big band standards, provided the entertainment, but of course, when they were on break, Salem and his pilot friend Don Kessler took over their instruments and performed. During the reception, Salem stood before the crowd and ran through a comedy routine that was by now familiar to regular guests at Bin Laden weddings. He announced that he had written a commemorative poem for the occasion. Then he pulled a roll of inscribed toilet paper out of his pocket, explaining that in the bathroom, “I do my best work.”8
Late the next morning, Sunday, Salem called his friend Jack Hinson from his midmarket hotel along Interstate 410. He was trying to figure out how to spend the day.
“The Thunderbirds are flying,” Hinson told him, as he recalled it, referring to the air force’s precision-flying demonstration team.
“I’ve seen the Thunderbirds,” Salem said.
Hinson said he was going over to the field where he kept some ultralights, eat a little breakfast, and maybe do some flying.
“What do they have for breakfast?” Salem asked
“They have ham and eggs, fresh ham and eggs, and fresh tomatoes,” Hinson said. Teasing, he added, “You don’t eat none of that ham.”
Salem knew the place; he had flown there several times before. “We’re going to come out,” he said, according to Hinson. As for the breakfast, Salem joked, “You tell everybody with me it’s beef…I know I’m going to hell anyway.”9
The Kitty Hawk Field of Dreams lay about twenty miles northeast of San Antonio, on the edge of Schertz, an undistinguished town of several thousand people that was being slowly consumed by San Antonio’s far suburbs. A tattooed former U.S. Marine named Earl Mayfield had created the flying field about seven years earlier. He owned a small restaurant near San Antonio, took up ultralight flying as a hobby, and decided that he needed some land to fly properly. He bought a plot of fifty-seven acres off the Old Nacogdoches Road. He cleared the cedar trees himself with a bulldozer and built a few light metal hangars. One of his clients was AlamoArrow Ultralights, the local retailer whose salesman, George Harrington, had accompanied Salem all the way to Peshawar, Pakistan, in early 1985. AlamoArrow kept some rental aircraft at the field. It was a relaxed, casual place. In the open grass, Mayfield had built a small asphalt runway; it was about twenty feet wide. Nearby he had erected a snack bar with picnic tables and barbecues. The field lay flanked by scrubland—tall grasses and thorny mesquite trees bent by the wind. To the south, beyond a line of brush and trees, power line towers shaped like giant metallic scarecrows traversed a cleared right of way, running west to east; these towers rose more than one hundred feet into the air.10
Salem arrived about two in the afternoon that Sunday with at least four or five of his traveling party. Ian Munro, his patrician British business partner, was one of them. His half-brother Tareq was also along. They ate a big breakfast. Hinson drove Salem to his house so he could wash and use the bathroom. Salem wandered into Hinson’s garage and saw a Yamaha 1500cc motorcycle. He begged to ride back on the bike. Hinson climbed on and motioned Salem to get on behind him.
“No, I want to be on the front,” Salem said, as Hinson remembered it.
“You will kill me!…Do you think I’m crazy?”
“I used to own motorcycles—I had Harleys, I know how to ride a motorcycle…I will not show off or do anything.”11
He kept his word, at least until Hinson climbed off at Kitty Hawk, after which Salem promptly roared around pulling wheelies out in the field. Finally he set the motorcycle down, found a dune buggy with big rubber tires, and raced around in that. All the while, one of the Alamo-Arrow fliers was buzzing overhead in a new single-seater model, called a Sprint, which had just a few hours of flying time on it.
The Sprint came in for a landing and Salem decided to take a turn. A light rain had cleared, and the day had turned bright and sunny, with good visibility. The wind was blowing at about twenty to twenty-five miles per hour, brisk but not fierce. Salem emptied his pockets of coins, keys, and cigarettes, and climbed in.
He was wearing blue jeans and a short-sleeve, blue-and-white striped shirt. He had a pair of sunglasses tied around his neck on a chain, but no helmet or visor. Salem’s eyes tended to tear up badly in the wind; according to his friend Thomas Dietrich, he sometimes skied accidentally into trees because the tears would blur his eyesight. He used the sunglasses to protect his eyes, but they were not as effective as a visor. Somebody asked Salem if he wanted a helmet, but he said no; at that time, helmets were not required.12
He powered down the runway, tilted back, and climbed to about fifty feet. Then he leveled off and turned toward the power lines. The standard flight path at Kitty Hawk, particularly for new or inexperienced fliers, lay in the opposite direction—a westward turn, and eventually, a loop back around for a landing. It was not unusual for a veteran flier to turn southwest, however, and Salem had done this before, according to Hinson; the alternate path simply required a little more care because you had to climb quickly to an adequate height.
Salem’s friends watched him from the snack bar and the picnic tables. One person had climbed onto the cantina roof, from where he tracked Salem’s flight with a handheld video camera. The ultralight’s engine whined steadily. There were no signs of mechanical distress—no waggling of the wings, no audible change of power, no yaw or struggle to hold altitude. Salem flew straight and level—directly into the power lines.13
There was no sound, no pop or crackle, no shower or spark of electricity. The entangled aircraft tilted forward, nose down, as if in slow motion, and then it plummeted to the ground.
Amid stunned shouts and gasps, somebody called 911. It was a few minutes before 3:00 P.M. Earl Mayfield jumped in a golf cart and raced toward the tree line. Hinson and others ran behind him.
When they found Salem, he was strapped into his seat, facing down toward the ground. His eyes were open. Blood trickled from his ears. The engine had struck his head from behind. Both his legs were visibly broken.
They pulled him free, cradling his head. They laid him on the ground and tried to perform CPR while they waited for the ambulance from the Schertz Area Facility for Emergency Services. It arrived in about fifteen minutes. Two paramedics administered oxygen and continued to perform CPR. They loaded Salem into the cabin and drove away, lights flashing and sirens wailing. One of the paramedics scribbled notes: “Unable to find a good airway…No change on monitor.” The note taker checked boxes on the ambulance run report, indicating the subject’s condition: “Convulsing…nonreactive…critical.”14
The nearest trauma center was at the Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston, the command headquarters of the Fifth U.S. Army. It was less than fifteen minutes’ drive away.
It was there, about an hour later, that American military doctors formally pronounced Salem Bin Laden dead.
Five of the hijackers who crashed planes into American targets on September 11, who were recruited by Osama Bin Laden, came from Asir. There is a striking symmetry in these air crashes involving Americans and Asiris, which took place during two Septembers thirty-four years apart.