The Bin Ladens Read online

  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 His dark, hooded eyes could seem sad and withdrawn.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.

  12. THE RISING SON

  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 str
ategy 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