The Bin Ladens Read online

  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 th
e 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 ask
ed 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