The Bin Ladens Read online

  The Bin Ladens

  Steve Coll

  The rise and rise of the Bin Laden family is one of the great stories of the twentieth century; its repercussions have already deeply marked the twenty-first. Until now, however, it is a story that has never been fully told, as the Bin Ladens have successfully fended off attempts to understand the family circles from which Osama sprang. In this the family has been abetted by the kingdom it calls home, Saudi Arabia, one of the most closed societies on earth.

  Steve Coll’s The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century is the groundbreaking history of a family and its fortune. It chronicles a young illiterate Yemeni bricklayer, Mohamed Bin Laden, who went to the new, oil-rich country of Saudi Arabia and quickly became a vital figure in its development, building great mosques and highways and making himself and many of his children millionaires. It is also a story of the Saudi royal family, whom the Bin Ladens served loyally and without whose capricious favor they would have been nothing. And it is a story of tensions and contradictions in a country founded on extreme religious purity, which then became awash in oil money and dazzled by the temptations of the West. In only two generations the Bin Ladens moved from a famine- stricken desert canyon to luxury jets, yachts, and private compounds around the world, even going into business with Hollywood celebrities. These religious and cultural gyrations resulted in everything from enthusiasm for America—exemplified by Osama’s free-living pilot brother Salem—to an overwhelming determination to destroy it.

  The Bin Ladens is a meticulously researched, colorful, shocking, entertaining, and disturbing narrative of global integration and its limitations. It encapsulates the unsettling contradictions of globalization in the story of a single family who has used money, mobility, and technology to dramatically varied ends.

  Steve Coll

  THE BIN LADENS

  An Arabian Family in the American Century

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  TWO JOURNALISTS now on the staff of the Washington Post made extraordinary contributions to the research for this book. Robin Shulman conducted interviews and dug up documents in Egypt, Lebanon, Israel, Spain, France, and the United States. Her persistence, empathy, and eye for detail have made the book immeasurably stronger. After I drafted the manuscript, Julie Tate recontacted my interview subjects to deepen the research and recheck facts and interpretations. Her attention to detail and nuance, her passion for the subject matter, and her astonishing work ethic made an enormous difference.

  THE BIN LADENS

  Born from mid-1940s to 1950:

  SONS: Salem, Ali, Thabit, Mahrous, Hassan, Omar, Bakr, Khaled, Yeslam, Ghalib, Yahya, Abdulaziz, Issa, Tareq

  DAUGHTERS: Aysha, Fatima, Sheikha, Su’add, Tayyeba, Wafa, Nour

  Born from 1951 to 1959:

  SONS: Ahmad, Ibrahim, Shafiq, Osama, Khalil, Saleh, Haider

  DAUGHTERS: Salma, Zeenat, Ruqqueiya, Randa, Zubaida, Najiah, Samiah, Muna, Saleha, Mariam, Fowziyah, Raja, Huda, Seema

  Born from 1959 to 1967:

  SONS: Saad, Abdullah, Yasir, Mohammad

  DAUGHTERS: Raedah, Eman, Aetedal, Sahar, Ilham, Sana’a, Malak, Muneera

  A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION

  THERE IS NO uniform system for transliteration between English and Arabic. The spellings of Arabic-originated place-and proper names relied upon in these pages are to some extent arbitrary, typically chosen to employ the simplest or most common forms. Occasionally, to avoid changing the original text in a quoted document, names may be spelled inconsistently. The Bin Ladens themselves offer an acute case. It is not unusual for family members to render their names in two different spellings in the same English-language document, even in official court filings. “Binladin” has been one common formulation; it is the preferred English spelling for the family’s flagship company, the Saudi Binladin Group. Yet “Binladen,” “Bin Ladin,” “Bin Laden,” and even “Benladin” are sometimes employed. I chose “Bin Laden” as the primary form because that is most familiar to American readers and also because when the family’s name is written in Arabic script, it appears as two words. For the first names of Mohamed’s children, I relied upon the spellings in English-language shareholder documents submitted by the family to a U.S. federal court.

  PROLOGUE: “WE ALL WORSHIP THE SAME GOD”

  October 1984 to February 1985

  LYNN PEGHINY played piano most mornings at the Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress Hotel in Orlando, Florida. She was twenty-four, dark-haired, slim, and spirited. She had grown up in Melbourne, on the Atlantic coast, and studied music at the University of Central Florida. She was drawn to the piano and made a living at it, if barely. The breakfast shift in the Hyatt’s cavernous atrium was normally subdued—sleepy tourists fortifying themselves for a day at Disney World, businessmen murmuring about real estate. One morning in October 1984, however, a middle-aged man with bright eyes and a mop of black hair walked over and asked in an unfamiliar accent if she would play Beethoven’s Für Elise. He listened appreciatively, then handed her a twenty-dollar tip. “Do you play private parties?” he asked.

  They exchanged business cards. His name was Salem Bin Laden. He had a house just west of Orlando, he told her, not far from Disney World, and he happened to be entertaining some visitors from his native Saudi Arabia who were members of that oil-endowed country’s royal family. He owned a piano and hoped she would play at an evening party. A few days later, she drove out State Road 50, which ran due west through miles of orange groves toward Lake County. Salem’s home, near the decaying railroad town of Winter Garden, turned out to be an ochre-walled five-acre estate with horse stables, a tiled swimming pool, weeping willows, and palm trees. The main house, a Mediterranean Revival built during the 1920s, had russet Spanish-tile roofing, cupolas, and arched, shaded walkways; it rested on a knoll above a sparkling lake.

  “Leeen! Leeen!” Salem exclaimed when she arrived, waving her into the dining room, where his guests were taking breakfast at four in the afternoon. “Come, come,” he said. “Sit with us.”1 He placed her next to his guest of honor. Abdul Aziz Al-Ibrahim was a brother of Princess Jawhara Al-Ibrahim, the fourth and reputedly the favorite wife of Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd. The Ibrahims had ascended from obscurity after Fahd fell for Jawhara; she left her husband for the king and gave birth to a son, Abdulaziz, upon whom Fahd doted. Princess Jawhara’s place at the king’s side created opportunities for her brothers. They became influential businessmen, exciting jealousy and gossip in royal circles; they had recently started to invest in Orlando real estate.2 Salem Bin Laden, whose family’s construction firm relied upon access to the king’s court, cultivated the Ibrahims’ friendship.

  Lynn chattered freely; Ibrahim ate vigorously, but in silence. Salem leaned over and whispered, “You’re not allowed to speak directly to him.” Mortified, she fell silent; she wondered what she had gotten herself into.

  Salem took her outside to show her the grounds. He was a slight man in his late thirties, about five feet and seven inches, slim but soft from a life without much exercise. He smoked cigarettes continually, and dark bags had formed beneath his eyes. Yet he radiated a magnetic energy that seemed, along with his money, to immediately attract people and hold them in his orbit. He was a skilled pilot who spoke passionately about flight; he mentioned that one of his brothers had recently injured himself in a crash near the lake. He seemed restless, in perpetual motion, yet also sweet and trustworthy. Gradually that afternoon Lynn came to understand that she had been invited into some sort of rolling intercontinental party over which Salem presided, a party that had no particular beginning or end. He told her that he would be leaving soon on his private jet for California; he had a meeting there, he said, about a possible movie project involving the actress Brooke Shiel
ds.3

  As evening fell the estate began to fill, mainly with Saudi men who appeared to be on vacation. There were also a few middle-aged American women who were friends of Salem’s, or seemed to be in business with him. Lynn found a Yamaha upright piano in the living room and began to play. Eventually Salem told her that she should come back the next day; the party would carry on. “Bring your sisters! Bring your friends!” he urged. “We need girls!”

  When Lynn did return with a girlfriend and two of her sisters, she found a band in the living room. Salem decided amid some fanfare to organize a talent show. He promised five thousand dollars in cash to whoever won first place, and he appointed himself the sole judge. One of the American women played piano and sang, the band ran through some numbers, and Lynn took a turn at the Yamaha. Lynn’s girlfriend, however, had no particular musical talent. She decided, instead, to expound to her Saudi audience about her recent experiences of giving birth and of divorce.

  Intimate monologues about a woman’s pain and the miracle of life were not often heard in the male-segregated sitting rooms of Saudi palaces or merchant houses, and the quiet that followed her presentation, it seemed to Lynn, was a little awkward.

  “I feel really bad,” Salem told Lynn afterward. He liked her friend, he said, and he felt bad about her divorce. He peeled off about a thousand dollars in cash. “Please, give this to her.”

  At one point, one of the American women who seemed to work with Salem in Orlando pulled Lynn aside. “You know, Salem really likes you,” she said.

  “Romantically?”

  As Lynn Peghiny recalled it years later: “She said—and I’ll never forget it—she said, ‘Lynn, this is a great opportunity for you. You’re young. You’re unattached…You know, he’ll show you places and take you places, and if I were you, I’d just go for it.’”4

  SALEM BIN LADEN was a favored customer of AlamoArrow, a retailer outside San Antonio, Texas, of ultralight sport aircraft. The previous Christmas, he had turned up at the store unexpectedly on a Friday evening and purchased much of its inventory—planes and accessories—and asked that it all be delivered to the airport and loaded onto his private BAC-111 twin-engine jet. A few weeks later he returned to buy more ultralights, including a camouflaged former military prototype that had once been equipped to shoot missiles. Its armor had been removed, but “he thought that was pretty cool,” recalled George Harrington, one of the store’s sales associates.

  Ultralights are small open-air hobby planes that are usually flown a few hundred feet high at speeds of about forty miles per hour, powered by a single engine roughly the size of that on a motorcycle. Salem loved them; like gliders, another of his passions, they offered the sensation of flying like a hawk, free and buffeted by wind. They were banned from Saudi Arabia on security grounds, so Salem stored the planes at his various refuges outside the kingdom.

  During the last months of 1984, he collected the latest models, called Quicksilvers, because he was outfitting, for early in the New Year, an elaborate Saudi royal hunting expedition to Pakistan that Salem seemed to envision as a blend of Arabian Nights and Dr. Seuss. Salem explained to the AlamoArrow managers that he and his Saudi guests, who were princes in the royal family, would camp in the desert and hunt by falconry in the traditional way, but they would also equip themselves with flying toys. He asked George Harrington and his colleagues to buy and prepare a twenty-foot Wells Cargo trailer so it could haul the ultralights across Pakistan’s rough roads and desert tracks. Salem had also ordered a hot air balloon from a champion balloonist in Florida; it came with a plaque that read “Custom Built for Salem Bin Laden.” He purchased a Honda mini-trail motorcycle and a red Chevy Blazer light truck outfitted for desert travel with high-beam lights and enormous tires. He installed a high-frequency radio in the truck so he could call out to the nearest Pakistani city if he were lost or stuck in the sand. In Germany he bought a four-wheel-drive air-conditioned Volkswagen camper with a shower and a kitchenette and stuffed it with “every gizmo he could get,” as Harrington remembered. They towed the American-made equipment to South Carolina, where the Bin Laden family worked with a freight-forwarding company that could ship the goods to the United Arab Emirates, a small kingdom on the Persian Gulf, and from there to the Pakistani port city of Karachi.5

  Salem liked to have musicians in his entourage; Harrington played the guitar, so Salem arranged to hire him to travel to Pakistan, where he could help oversee the ultralight flying by the royal guests. A few days before Christmas, Harrington, a genial, big-boned Texan who had never traveled abroad previously, found himself jetting to London in the company of an American pilot, Don Kessler, who worked for Salem and who also played the drums.

  They all stopped initially at Salem’s estate outside London, and then, on Christmas Eve, they flew to the south of France, and after that, to Salzburg, Austria. They unloaded their luggage and drove to the ski resort in Kitzbühel. Of course, they had no ski equipment with them, as the decision to fly to Austria had been made only hours earlier, so Salem led the group into a shop and bought everyone skis, boots, parkas, and pants. They hit the slopes and then accepted an invitation to a party at the local villa of Adnan Khashoggi, the well-known Saudi arms dealer.

  Khashoggi’s home had a discotheque with a stage. The room that night was loud, dark, and teeming with Saudis and Europeans. Salem took the microphone and announced that he intended to perform. He and George Harrington took steel-string acoustic guitars onto the stage and struck up the folk and bar band classic “House of the Rising Sun.”

  There is a house in New Orleans

  They call the Rising Sun.

  It’s been the ruin of many a poor boy,

  And God I know I’m one…

  “He was a half-assed guitar player, and even less qualified as a vocalist, but you couldn’t embarrass him at all,” Harrington recalled. “So we played that night for a packed house.”6

  They flew next to Marbella, Spain, and then on to Cairo for New Year’s Eve. They stopped for a while in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and then traveled to Dubai.

  At the Hyatt hotel there Harrington met Salem’s new girlfriend from Orlando: Lynn Peghiny. They became instant friends, two Americans caught up in an unexpected adventure, hopping from one country to the next, unfamiliar with their surroundings. Lynn had flown in from New York to join the upcoming expedition to Pakistan. (“I look back and I’m astounded at what I did at twenty-four,” she said in hindsight.) Salem put her in a hotel suite with a grand piano. They listened to her play Chopin.

  A FEW DAYS LATER, Salem packed Lynn and George into his Mitsubishi MU-2, a stubby, short-haul turboprop airplane. An elderly Bedouin aide carried aboard a hooded hunting falcon. George took possession of a briefcase containing at least $250,000 in cash and traveler’s checks; he had come to understand that one of his jobs was to keep track of Salem’s travel money. Also along was Bengt Johansson, a shaggy-haired, chain-smoking Swedish flight mechanic who was one of the longest-serving European members of Salem’s entourage. They roared down the runway, bound for Karachi. “It was so loaded down and they took off and everybody just applauded that the thing got up in the air,” Lynn recalled, “and I’m like, ‘Why are y’all taking chances?’”7

  In Karachi, Salem met with a Saudi diplomat; he often dropped in on his country’s ambassadors when he traveled the world. His entourage checked into the Sheraton, a concrete-and-glass fortress that passed as the city’s finest hotel.

  At the Karachi seaport, Salem discovered that the Pakistan Army would not permit either ultralights or hot air balloons into their country. On its eastern frontier, the Pakistan Army faced Indian military forces in a continuous state of alert; to the west, it was embroiled in a secret guerrilla war in Afghanistan against Soviet forces, who occasionally conducted raids inside Pakistan. Saudi princes flying around in uncontrolled small planes and balloons seemed to the army’s officers a prescription for disaster. Salem argued, and fumed, and tried to pull strings, but the P
akistani authorities stood firm; they told him to send his airborne toys back to Dubai.

  In the midst of these frustrations Salem summoned George Harrington and Bengt Johansson one morning and announced that they would all fly in the Mitsubishi up to Peshawar, the Pakistani city that served as a staging area for the Afghan war. Initially, Salem explained only that he had an errand to run. As it turned out, it involved his half-brother Osama.

  “I said, ‘Why?’” as Harrington recalled it. Eventually, “he explained that Peshawar was apparently the base for rebels…I had never heard of Peshawar. World politics were not on my radar screen. He said that Osama was up there and he was the liaison between the U.S., the Saudi government, and the Afghan rebels,” as Harrington remembered. “Salem needed to make sure that Osama was getting what he needed. The Saudi government was funneling stuff to Osama; Salem said he needed to go up and check with his brother to make sure…things were going well.”

  The trio flew up that same afternoon and landed on a dirt strip—Harrington could not tell if it was a road or a runway. Osama and some of his aides came out to greet them. “I remember being struck that he was so much taller than Salem.”8

  He was then about twenty-seven years old. In addition to his height, his bushy dark beard made a striking impression; it poured down his cheeks and gathered below his chin, elongating his thin face. His brown eyes were bright and communicative, but his manner was reserved. Osama visited Pakistan regularly from his home in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, but he had not settled down on the war front; he was a philanthropic commuter, encouraged by his religious teachers to fund charities and Arab volunteers who had just begun to arrive to join the fighting.