The Bin Ladens Read online

  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

  13. DISCOVERING AMERICA

  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 w
anted 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 Uni
ted 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.