The Bin Ladens Read online

  Mohamed gave particular attention to his older sons. Succession in a business family like the Bin Ladens worked in a way similar to that in the royal family in the sense that there was a presumption that older boys would be favored, but there was also some flexibility, so that the most capable person might be placed in charge. During the 1960s, two of Mohamed’s sons, Salem and Ali, seemed to be the most favored by their father. Ali was the only son of an early wife, and he did not enjoy the fancy boarding school educations of his half-brothers—his father seems to have designated him as the son who would work most closely by his side on field operations. As the war-related infrastructure projects near Yemen grew in size, Ali ran the company’s regional office in Taif, an important role. He was a thin, dark-skinned young man who did not spend much time with his brothers. But if Ali seemed to be positioned by his father to become a sort of chief operating officer of the company’s vast labor and construction camps, there was no question about whom Mohamed was training to become the firm’s eventual chairman and chief executive, the heir to Mohamed’s crucial political and marketing role of cultivating favor within the royal family. This was Salem, Mohamed’s eldest son by Fatima Bahareth.11

  During the late 1950s and early 1960s, it became fashionable in certain progressive branches of the House of Saud to dispatch sons to America and Britain for high school and university educations. Faisal sent his boys to Princeton, Georgetown, and elsewhere. Bin Laden could see that the future of Saudi Arabia lay with Faisal. If his family were to keep up, his own sons would have to be comfortable in a Riyadh court influenced by Faisal’s English-speaking, university-credentialed boys. Bin Laden himself could speak only a few words of English, and while he traveled frequently to Arab capitals, he seems to have rarely, if ever, visited Europe. He preferred to keep most of his boys in Arabia or the nearby Levant, where there were guardians and mothers and other loyal relatives near at hand. For Salem, however, he made an exception. He dispatched his heir apparent to boarding school in England, to endow him with a proper British education.

  In doing this, Mohamed Bin Laden initiated his Arabian family’s integration with the West.

  AN ELDERLY London resident of subcontinental origin, Rasma Abdullah acted as Salem’s guardian in England and arranged for his schooling there. Salem seems to have arrived in Britain during the late 1950s, at about age twelve or thirteen, and to have initially enrolled at the elite English boarding school in Somerset, Millfield School. Salem’s principal memory of Millfield, as he described it to a friend and business partner years later, was of a female choirmaster who taught him Christian hymns, which Salem referred to as the “group sing.” Not surprisingly, given his lack of preparation, he did not stay at Millfield long. Sometime around 1960, Salem moved to Copford Glebe, a much smaller and less well-known private boarding school for boys in Essex, near the town of Colchester. He stayed here for several years. He came of age in an environment far removed from the milieu of work and Islam presided over by his father back home.12

  The school lay at the end of a curved stone driveway amid rolling green fields. It had once been a minister’s parish home, and the main building was a handsome white three-story Georgian, surrounded by smaller cottages and some trailers hauled in to serve as classrooms. There were only about forty boys during the years Salem attended—about half from overseas, the other half refugees from the better English schools. Salem’s classmates included a relative of the deputy chief of the Iranian secret police, a scion of the founder of Liberia, a wealthy boy from Istanbul, and the heir to a great Portuguese arms-trading fortune. Rupert Armitage, a classmate who had transferred from Eton, found the place an “amazing sort of pastiche of an English school…with this ridiculous overtone of chaos, because, I mean, there were all of these crazy people there.”13

  The boys lived in small old dormitories in groups of four or five. Salem shared a dorm with a few other wealthy boys from Islamic countries. They had a small stove on which they occasionally cooked eggs stolen from the headmaster’s coop. Salem smoked a pipe—Flying Dutchman was his tobacco brand—and later took up cigarettes. The days began with a miserable run, rain or shine, around the playing fields; Salem was usually in a state of comical disarray, staggering out in mismatched shoes and socks. The boys changed into blue blazers, ties, and slacks for classes, then endured another round of athletics in the afternoon. Salem’s closest friend was a big Turkish boy named Mehmet Birgen, whom Salem nicknamed “Baby Elephant,” and whom he occasionally goaded to fight rival boys on his behalf. It was an awkward time for many of them, particularly those, like Salem, who had no prior experience of the West. Salem amused his English friends by climbing up on the toilet seat to squat on his haunches, as he was accustomed to doing at home. He was not athletic but he was popular nonetheless—full of adventure and mischief, and particularly devoted to chasing after the residents of the nearby all-girls boarding school. Occasionally they would arrange dates with these girls to go bowling or to the movies in Colchester, and afterward they ate hamburgers at Wimpy’s.

  Salem’s father seems to have authorized a more indulgent budget for his eldest son’s British education than he did for his boys in Lebanon—or else Salem’s mother figured out how to outwit her husband; in any event, Salem had considerably more pocket money than some of his Copford Glebe classmates, and even more important, he had a car, an ancient German DKW. His car was a semisecret, not officially authorized by the school, and Salem kept it hidden on a lane outside the grounds. He and his friends would sneak out on weekend nights and drive into London, where they sometimes searched for sex, but all that happened each time, according to one of his coconspirators, was that club bouncers and bartenders lightened Salem’s wallet.

  The Beatles and the Rolling Stones ruled England, and at Copford Glebe, Salem’s friends formed “The Echoes” to chase their own rock-and-roll dreams. There was some genuine talent in the group—Rupert Armitage later became an accomplished classical guitarist, and another member, Paul Kennerley, would enjoy success as a singer-songwriter-producer and marry the multitalented Emmylou Harris. Salem was never a formal band member, as he did not have that sort of ability, but he played the harmonica at jam sessions and begged for guitar lessons. He did not have the patience for sustained study, however. He just wanted to rock.

  8. CROSSWIND

  BY THE MID-1960S, Mohamed Bin Laden flew around Saudi Arabia in his seven-passenger Twin Beech propeller plane the way other businessmen might travel to sales calls in a shiny Lincoln. On a typical morning a driver picked him up at his Jeddah compound at daybreak and took him to the city’s airport, not far from Abdulaziz’s old Khozam Palace, with the conspicuous car ramp Bin Laden had built long ago. The airport served as a base for several dozen American pilots who flew for Saudi Arabian Airlines under a contract managed by the American carrier Trans World Airlines. Bin Laden had arranged for TWA to maintain his aircraft and to supply him with pilots. The tail number of his principal Twin Beech was HZ-IBN, which incorporated the international code for Saudi Arabia. The plane was designed for a single flier, with no copilot, but it had a passenger seat up front, and this was where Bin Laden liked to sit, staring out the cockpit window with a cup of Arabic coffee in his hand. He sometimes enjoyed frightening the aides and drivers who would fly with him to his job sites by grabbing the airplane’s wheel during flight and shaking it.1

  Bin Laden got along well with his American pilots, but working for him was not a particularly popular assignment. He often flew out from Jeddah in the mornings to one of his desert sites and then spent the whole day there, meeting with engineers or walking along a highway under construction, talking with his crews. His pilot would have to wait for hours in a trailer or tent, and then fly back to Jeddah at sunset. “It was completely boring,” recalled Stanley Guess, who flew the Twin Beech during the mid-1960s. Sometimes there were small enjoyments, such as flights to Jerusalem or Beirut. Bin Laden would at times take one or two of his wives to his desert camps
; on those mornings, he would escort the women, covered head to toe in black, into the rear of the Twin Beech, and then pull black curtains across the cabin to protect their modesty.2

  His camps lay spread across the desert like the oasis dwellings of nomad clans. At some, Bin Laden worked in a trailer office powered by a small generator, with an air conditioner blowing. In the cooler mountains of Asir, his aides drove stakes into the sand and erected large white canvas tents. On the floor they laid out richly colored carpets and cushions, on which the boss could sit and receive visitors like a proper desert sheikh. Outside these tents, in addition to the occasional herd of camels, stood some of Bin Laden’s fleet of red Ford pickup trucks.

  Bin Laden sometimes held a morning majlis in his tent, where workers or local tribes petitioned him for aid or asked him to settle disputes. “He was the law,” Guess recalled. “Sometimes he’d give out some money or whatever it took to make everyone happy. They looked to him for judgment.” Afterward he might settle down for a cup of coffee and a smoke from one of his four-foot-tall, elaborately painted water pipes. At some of his camps he kept green webbed-plastic lawn chairs of the sort then sprouting on the patios of American suburban homes; photographs from this period show Bin Laden relaxing at his camps on these, his water pipe in his mouth, his head draped in a traditional red-checked headdress. His body had begun to thicken and his goatee was flecked with gray. His wandering dark glass eye made him appear slightly inattentive. He dressed in a one-piece tailored robe that fell to his ankles—sometimes the traditional Saudi white, other times a slightly more fashionable design with checks or a hint of color; he strapped a fancy metal watch on the outside of the sleeve. On his feet he wore white socks and brown leather loafers. When he wasn’t smoking, he calmed himself by fingering a string of worry beads.3

  He had plenty to be anxious about; he was again overstretched during 1966 and early 1967. Faisal had given him a lucrative contract to lay a highway from Taif nearly 500 miles to the capital of Riyadh. At a place called Kilo 170, on a featureless desert plain 170 kilometers from Taif, Bin Laden built a large engineering camp with a depot of Caterpillar bulldozers, graders, and asphalt trucks. There were crews of drivers and mechanics, and hundreds of migrant laborers who slept in tents nearby. He had to tend his workers as if they were a militia camping between battles; cooks prepared meals, and truckers hauled in water from distant towns. There was no airport nearby; Bin Laden’s pilots landed the Twin Beech on sections of asphalted highway or on a leveled desert strip marked with rocks.4

  In this period, Bin Laden also regularly flew hundreds of miles east to the United Arab Emirates, along the Persian Gulf, where King Faisal had once again hired him to implement a Saudi foreign policy project—this time to build a sixty-mile, $6.7 million highway with Saudi government funds, to advance Saudi influence in the smaller Gulf kingdoms, from which the British were withdrawing. Bin Laden struggled with this Gulf highway; the site was too far for him to reach easily with his fleet of construction equipment. He formed his first foreign subsidiary in the port city of Dubai to carry out the project, but he worked slowly, and then, after missing some announced deadlines, he turned the entire job over to a local subcontractor.5

  Bin Laden’s greatest preoccupation by far, however, lay in the southern province of Asir, along the border with Yemen. Early in 1966, he was formally awarded a $120 million contract to build a difficult highway, designed by German consultants, from Taif down through the mountains to Abha, the provincial capital of Asir. One spur would then drop down a steep escarpment to the port of Jizan on the Red Sea, where Bin Laden and his brother Abdullah had first landed in Saudi Arabia as immigrant boys many decades earlier. Another road would wind east through rugged mountains to the border town of Nejran. The project was the most lucrative announced contract of Bin Laden’s long career, and by one account he pledged not to take on any other new highway work until it was discharged. His crews worked on the main road from both ends. His son Ali oversaw the portion that extended south from Taif, while other crews worked in the Yemen border and coastal areas, attempting to cut a track up the steep cliff sides from the sea, which involved feats of blasting and engineering similar to those that had earlier daunted Bin Laden on the Taif road.6

  Asir’s tan-and-black volcanic mountains rose sharply from the Red Sea beaches, soaring nearly ten thousand feet high. Its slopes and plateaus could be barren and featureless, like a moonscape, but some of its highest peaks were flecked with pine trees; they sheltered grassy valleys where settled tribes harvested crops of date palms, squash, melons, and grains. The population was poor, physically isolated, habitually rebellious, and deeply religious. Asir’s political history was complex and obscure; it had suffered through a series of Ottoman claimants before a local saint, influenced by the Shia branch of Islam, briefly established an independent kingdom at the turn of the twentieth century. During the early 1930s, Abdulaziz dispatched Wahhabi forces led by Faisal and Saud to conquer the province and incorporate it into his new kingdom. They succeeded, but neither the king nor his heir Saud paid the place much attention, preferring to spend their oil royalties at Riyadh, Mecca, Medina, and Jeddah. After Nasser sought to stir a revolution in Yemen, Faisal recognized an urgent need to secure the loyalty of Asir’s border tribes by connecting them to Saudi markets and promoting local development. He also embarked on a campaign of defense spending in the region. Bin Laden’s highway contract in Asir was the overt side of a multifaceted arrangement in which Bin Laden also helped to build air force bases, garrisons, and other secret military infrastructure around the Asiri towns of Abha and Khamis Mushayt, and the town of Nejran.

  Mohamed Bin Laden worked side by side on these classified projects with the American and British militaries. By 1966 American attempts to appease Nasser had yielded to a policy of arming Saudi Arabia against Egyptian incursions from Yemen. Washington signed a Military Construction Agreement with Faisal under which the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers pledged to design and help build about $100 million worth of military facilities near the kingdom’s borders, including in Asir. Flight logs documenting Bin Laden’s private trips during 1966 and 1967 show that he occasionally gave rides to U.S. Army personnel. In this same period, Britain agreed to sell Saudi Arabia jets, missiles, radar, and electronic warfare equipment. London supplied thirty-four Lightning jet aircraft, twenty Jet Provosts, as well as Hawk and Thunderbird missiles and related radars. The missiles were installed secretly at Khamis Mushayt, Jizan, and Nejran, where Bin Laden was simultaneously at work on roads and airfields. Faisal, in effect, employed Bin Laden as the Saudi civil engineering arm of a covert program, bolstered by British and American arms supplies, to defend the kingdom in a guerrilla war against leftist revolutionaries. It was precisely the sort of alliance that the Bin Laden family would participate in later in Afghanistan.7

  Faisal’s massive construction program in Asir reflected the degree of nervousness the king and his Western allies felt about Nasser’s continuing drive to overthrow the Al-Saud. Faisal supplied money and arms to royalist Yemeni forces opposed to the Egyptians. Nasser replied by sponsoring terrorist attacks inside Saudi Arabia. On November 18, 1966, a cell of Yemeni infiltrators set off bombs at the Riyadh palace of Prince Fahd, then the Saudi interior minister. Eight days later, three more bombs exploded, including one at a hotel used by American soldiers. The next month infiltrators bombed the home of a Saudi religious leader in Nejran. Faisal’s security police made arrests and concluded that the terrorists were Yemeni nationals who had been trained by Egyptians. The king launched a crackdown to prevent what a then-classified British report called “terrorist infiltrators and saboteurs” from disrupting the annual Hajj pilgrimage. The Saudis forced several Yemenis to read out confessions on national television, one of the earliest political uses of the Saudi broadcasting network, which had only recently been inaugurated by Faisal.8

  The thousands of Yemeni laborers in Saudi Arabia became a suspect class because of these terrorist
attacks. Many fled or were deported. It was a measure of his full incorporation into the Saudi kingdom that despite his deep Yemeni roots, Bin Laden was not only regarded by Faisal as an entirely loyal subject, but was trusted to build facilities designed to defend his adopted country against his native one.

  IN LATE 1966, Mohamed Bin Laden joined the jet age. To fly the international distances that his work now required, he purchased a Hawker Siddeley twin-engine jet aircraft. It cost more than a million dollars but would allow him to travel more easily to Dubai or Jerusalem. Around this time he also broke ground on a new compound of houses on the refurbished highway between Jeddah and Mecca, where he owned acres of open land in a section of Jeddah’s suburbs that was then most fashionable. At Kilo 7, seven kilometers toward Mecca from the Red Sea, Bin Laden designed what would become, in effect, a small subdivision of suburban homes, one for each of his wives and some for his ex-wives and their children, along with a mosque and business offices. Bin Laden still worked hard, but he was spending some of his wealth to live and travel in finer style.9