The Bin Ladens

by Steve Coll

  The private-jet purchase proved complicated, however. Bin Laden had to locate pilots who could be trained and certified on the Hawker in England and who would then be willing to work for him in Jeddah. Also, since the new jet could not land on the desert airstrips that Bin Laden visited frequently in Asir, he would need to expand his roster of pilots, so that one might be available to fly the desert-capable Twin Beech while another flew the Hawker jet.

  In the summer of 1966, Gerald Auerbach, a veteran of the United States Air Force who had flown B-47s for the Strategic Air Command, the American reconnaissance and nuclear bombing force, temporarily joined Bin Laden’s crew. (A former U.S. Navy pilot named Tom Heacock had fallen ill and returned to the United States.) Auerbach was a meticulous pilot who enjoyed flying Mohamed around the desert. Bin Laden asked him to stay on as one of his permanent pilots. Auerbach’s TWA supervisor told him the change would be okay but that he would lose seniority, because it was TWA’s policy not to pay Bin Laden’s pilots as much as those who worked commercial flights. Auerbach told Bin Laden about the problem, but Mohamed declined to make up the difference in his salary. It would prove to be a fateful decision.

  In June 1967, a new American pilot turned up in Jeddah—Jim Harrington, a former fighter pilot in the U.S. Air Force, a sandy-haired man around forty years old. Auerbach decided to leave Bin Laden but agreed to train Harrington. “I took him out to some of the nastiest strips that we went into,” Auerbach recalled. These included “dry riverbeds” and other makeshift landing areas in Asir with nothing but sand and rows of rocks to mark the runway.10

  Harrington hadn’t flown for several years and he “was rusty.” Auerbach told their mutual supervisor: “I’m a little worried about him. This isn’t routine flying.” But the supervisor checked Harrington out and declared him ready to go, Auerbach recalled. In July, Harrington took over the Twin Beech and began shuttling with Bin Laden to and from Asir. Auerbach returned to Saudi commercial work.

  Bin Laden was at work on the highway extension from Abha to Nejran, a road that climbed through high elevations before falling back down to a desert plain just above the Yemen border. His crews had cut the road about forty miles toward Nejran, and they had set up work sites at a small town called Oom. This was where Harrington landed the Twin Beech when Bin Laden flew down from Jeddah.

  Gerald Auerbach bumped into Harrington that summer and asked how he was doing. Harrington said that everything was fine but that Bin Laden had “built a strip up in this Oom area and it’s really hard. It’s high elevation and it goes up a hill. It’s not really good.” Bin Laden’s crews had used their bulldozers and graders, and cleaned off a section of desert about a thousand yards long, not a particularly long runway. The strip was on a ridge shaped like half of a bowl, so it was difficult to bank or turn to the sides while descending or ascending; you had to fly straight in and straight out, and you had to land uphill and take off downhill. The higher elevation also was an issue because in thinner air, less oxygen ran to the aircraft’s engines, which could cause them to lose power.

  “Well, just tell him,” Auerbach told Harrington, as he later recalled it. “You’re in charge. You pick a place and say I want the runway here, and he’ll do it for you. He’ll do it that way. Tell him this is not safe.”

  “Oh, I can do it,” Harrington said, meaning he could handle the landings at Oom. “I can do it.”11

  On September 3, 1967, one of Mohamed Bin Laden’s long-serving drivers, Omar, rode out to the airstrip with a car to await his sheikh’s arrival. He saw the Twin Beech descend in clear daylight. As it made its approach over the landing area, about 150 feet in the air, a heavy crosswind blew. Harrington probably found his plane pushed out of alignment with the makeshift runway and then tried to pull up at full power, to ascend out of the bowl and go around to try again, according to what Gerald Auerbach later concluded. Auerbach, who led a team of investigators to examine the site, described what probably happened that morning after Harrington pulled back hard on the Twin Beech’s throttle: “The ground is climbing. At his speed, to keep flying at that altitude, he would have had to be able to climb four or five hundred feet a minute to get out. He couldn’t turn…The airplane didn’t have that climb capability, and he ended up stalling it.” Because of the thin mountain air, his engines couldn’t deliver full power; this exacerbated the chance of a stall. Additional gusts of wind may have made matters worse.

  The Twin Beech fell toward the desert, tilted to one side, bounced once, crashed, and burned.

  The impact crushed the cockpit, where Harrington and Mohamed Bin Laden sat. The force was so great that the front end of the plane bore a hole in the desert two to three feet deep. Both men died from the impact. Fire raced through the wreckage as Omar looked on helplessly. Two passengers in the rear cabin may have survived the initial crash but were trapped inside by a chain lock on the cabin door. They burned to death.

  In an instant, Mohamed Bin Laden was gone. He was about sixty years old. The investigators identified him by his shiny watch.

  PART TWO

  SONS AND DAUGHTERS

  September 1967 to May 1988

  9. THE GUARDIANS

  THE PRINCIPAL at the school in Lebanon where Mohamed had sent many of his sons called nine of the boys into his office after he received the news. “You have to be practical and logical,” he recalled telling them. “All people die.” He flew with three of the older boys—Hassan, Yeslam, and Mahrouz—to Jeddah. Their half-brother Ali, the eldest of Mohamed’s sons then living in the kingdom, met them at the airport with a car and driver. In concert with Saudi tradition, their father had been buried quickly in an unmarked grave; the family chose Jeddah’s most prestigious site, where religious pilgrims had once worshipped the tomb attributed to the biblical Eve. Days of mourning followed. Family, employees, Jeddah merchants, and princes enveloped the boys at the Bin Laden compound. Islamic and Hejazi rituals of death and remembrance, so often required in harsh Arabia, emphasized the comforts of crowds. Each evening between the sunset prayer and the final daily prayer, the Bin Laden men gathered to receive long lines of sympathetic visitors. (Mohamed’s daughters and wives received visitors separately during the afternoon.) This grieving assembly offered a rare public display of family unity. Rhythmic chanting of Koran readers rang out in the humid night air.1

  It took Salem a few days to reach Jeddah from London. After boarding school he had moved into a flat in Gloucester Place, north of Marble Arch. He had enrolled in a local college, but the friends who visited him found him less than devoted to his studies. His apartment was often filled with young men in black leather jackets, cigarette smoke, and the occasional amateur strains of Salem’s guitar.2

  He boarded a commercial flight to Jeddah wearing jeans and a T-shirt, his hair falling toward his shoulders. When he stepped off the plane, his locks were shorn and he wore a white Saudi thobe and headdress. He was a little older than twenty-one, suddenly and unexpectedly heir to the largest construction firm in the kingdom. He knew little of engineering and had only a passing acquaintance with King Faisal. He had not even met all his half-brothers and half-sisters; some were introduced to him for the first time at his father’s funeral.3

  Mohamed’s sudden death raised immediate fears that the Bin Laden business empire would collapse. The primary concern was that Mohamed’s many young sons and surviving brother might prove unable to forge an orderly succession. A cable to Washington dispatched by American ambassador Hermann Eilts on the day after Mohamed’s death summed up Jeddah’s anxiety:

  Death of Mohammed Bin Laden, sole proprietor of largest construction company in Saudi Arabia, has caused immediate concern in both SAG [Saudi Arabian government] and local business circles. Under Islamic lawn [sic] assets could conceivably be divided among Bin Laden’s 40 [sic] sons, move which could destroy organization. However, as Saudi contractor displaying enough energy to handle major public works, Bin Laden was well established as SAG avorite [sic]: King, Finance Mi
nister, and others aware of importance organization to Saudi economy, and reported determined it shall somehow continue.4

  Eilts thought he saw an opportunity: a merger between the Bin Laden organization and a major American construction company:

  One suggestion emerging in private discussions is possibility SAG will seek qualified foreign firm to provide management team to run organization. Company, which is financially sound, normally employs between 4 and 5 thousand workers… As Bin Laden operated enterprise single-handedly (to the extent even of signing all checks), need is for team not only experienced in construction operations but also competent create and impose new administrative structure. In embassy’s view, this could be excellent opportunity for American firm.5

  The ambassador suggested that Morrison-Knudsen, an American construction giant that was already working with Bin Laden on a bid to build a military cantonment near the Yemen border, might be an excellent candidate. The Americans might have to move promptly, however, as Bin Laden’s technical staff was dominated by Italians and this “may encourage preference for Italian management unless other proposals advanced promptly.”6

  Mohamed Bin Laden had left twenty-five sons. (The youngest, Mohamed bin Mohamed, was born after his death and was named in remembrance.) The potential for disarray or conflict was considerable.

  Abdullah, his only surviving brother, no longer had any share in the company and no longer even lived in Saudi Arabia, having moved back to the Hadhramawt with his family seven years earlier. However, harassed by rival militias engaged in Yemen’s deepening civil war, he returned to Saudi Arabia not long after Mohamed’s death. The Moscow-backed government of South Yemen later confiscated his house, and Abdullah never returned—a bitter end to his nostalgic homecoming. Abdullah now had his own sons and investments to look after. He had no formal claim to leadership in the company he had founded with Mohamed thirty-six years before.

  Salem and Ali were the only two sons of Mohamed who had reached adulthood. But while Ali had helped oversee some of his father’s road-building operations, he was far from qualified to manage the entire enterprise. Salem had been groomed for leadership by his father, but he had even less business training.

  Islamic inheritance law, derived from passages in the Koran, is quite specific: It establishes conditional classes of heirs and lays out the exact percentages of the estate each class shall receive; these entitlements are seen as God’s mandate and cannot be altered by a will. One Koranic principle is that sons receive twice as much as daughters. Some Westerners might regard the system as unfair or inflexible, but it has girded social cohesion and family unity in the Muslim world for centuries by removing the whim and intrigue of inheritance that often sunders families in other cultures. A wealthy Muslim man has no way to disinherit sons he does not favor; he may therefore be more inclined to encourage cooperation among his children. There is also no way to change the allocations from an estate by writing a last-minute will and testament. Written wills are permitted but only to designate up to one-third of the writer’s estate for charities or other beneficiaries. There are many detailed provisions of this kind; as with prayer and the annual calendar of faith, it is an area of Islam rich with rule making and nuanced interpretation.7

  Mohamed Bin Laden had a will written on his behalf before his death, according to the account of a Saudi researcher, Adel Toraifi, who said he had read a copy of the document. It was reported to be about eleven or twelve pages, by his account, and was primarily devoted to issues involving Mohamed’s religious trust, or waqf. It also reportedly contained instructions on how his heirs should carry on with his charitable construction and public works in Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem, such as those he announced in his Jerusalem speech in 1964.8

  The principal asset of Mohamed’s estate, however, was the Mohamed Bin Laden Organization itself, the family company in which Mohamed was the sole shareholder. Under Islamic law, his heirs automatically received fixed percentages. His four wives at the time of his death split one-eighth of the shares. (Former wives had no entitlement to inheritance; their children were expected to take care of them.) Nearly all the remaining shares were divided on a two-to-one basis among Mohamed’s twenty-five sons and twenty-nine daughters. Each son, including Osama, inherited 2.27 percent of the company’s shares, and each daughter received just over 1 percent, according to documents later filed in an American divorce case. In rough terms, then, Mohamed’s sons wound up sharing ownership of just over 50 percent of the company; his daughters shared ownership of just under 30 percent; and his widows owned most of the rest. There is no evidence that any of these heirs received large cash distributions at the time of Mohamed’s death; it is unlikely that he kept much of his wealth in bank accounts, and even less likely that he invested in securities. His heirs would have received his houses and his land and his cars, which they seem to have managed largely as communal holdings. Salem and Ali soon went on the company’s payroll, but the great majority of his other children had not yet reached adulthood, and it would be Salem, as eldest son and head of the family, overseen by the company’s board of trustees, who would determine the siblings’ stipends.9

  There is no known record of the size of Mohamed’s estate at this time, nor would it have been easy to craft an estimate that would pass muster with Western accountants. Michael Pochna, an American investment banker who became a business partner of the Bin Ladens during the mid-1970s, said family members told him the estate was worth about $150 million at the time of Mohamed’s death. Gerald Auerbach, the pilot who worked with Mohamed in his last years, said he was told the Saudi government owed the Bin Laden company more than $100 million when Mohamed died. These appear to be reliable indicators of the estate’s approximate size, but unlike a fortune invested in stocks or bonds or actively traded real estate, Mohamed’s holdings could not be easily valued. He owned a great deal of Saudi land, some of which had been given to him as payment for past contracts, but the true worth of these tracts would have been difficult to determine. His company had some hard assets, mainly tractors and bulldozers and the like, but the firm’s value at the time of his death was inseparable from the massive government contracts it had recently been awarded, particularly the road from Jeddah to the Yemen border and related defense work. If the company failed to finish these projects profitably, its finances might decline. More broadly, Bin Laden’s fortune depended almost entirely on the patronage of the Al-Saud royal family; if this support disappeared, so would most of his firm’s income.10

  The king called in some of the older Bin Laden sons and told them, “I am going to be your father now.”11 Saudi Arabia was in the midst of an undeclared war, and the Mohamed Bin Laden Organization was an important part of the kingdom’s defense capability. Faisal pledged to appoint several trustees to operate the family firm. This would guarantee the company’s continued access to government contracts, and it would also assure Faisal that work on his crucial infrastructure projects in Asir would proceed.

  Faisal issued a Royal Ordinance in mid-September announcing these new arrangements. Bin Laden’s fortune “was mostly in equipment and in knowing that he could get the job done, because he had the equipment there, and he had the engineers,” recalled Faisal’s son Turki. The trust Faisal established would ensure “that the companies did not dissolve or go bankrupt or something, until they grew up and started taking over.” The length of this interregnum was not spelled out; the decision to hand the company back to the family would be made by Faisal, or his successor, when the time seemed right.12

  The American government continued to try to convert Bin Laden’s death into a business opportunity for a U.S. company. The Commerce Department in Washington contacted major construction firms. A vice president of Brown and Root arranged to fly to Jeddah to open negotiations about a possible merger with the Bin Laden group, but the embassy waved him off, reporting that the “legal situation [is] not completely settled.” Still, the State Department remained alert: Bin Laden had run hi
s company “in an entirely personal and centralized manner. The management vacuum created by his death may make it necessary for the heirs to bring in foreign management in order to keep the company going.”13

  King Faisal asked Anwar Ali, the Pakistani-born governor of the kingdom’s central bank, to provide financial and management advice to the Bin Laden trustees, a relationship that guaranteed that the company would not falter for lack of government funds. The king also designated Mohamed Bahareth, a Jeddah businessman who operated mainly in the food industry, as the company’s leading trustee; Bahareth was a cousin of Salem’s mother, Fatima Ahmed Bahareth. His appointment ensured the primacy of the Bahareth cluster within the larger family clan, led by the matriarch, Fatima, a senior widow of Mohamed, and her three sons, Salem, Bakr, and Ghalib.14

  AS A PIPE-SMOKING erstwhile rock musician in his early twenties, Salem was hardly the prototype of a Saudi authority figure when he returned from London, but he did not lack confidence or ambition. He was appointed, along with his half-brother Ali, to the board of trustees governing the family company, and he was given a title, managing director. From the start, however, he struggled with Ali and chafed at the committee’s authority. “He wanted very much to get back and get control of the trust,” recalled Francis Hunnewell, an American banker who became a partner of Salem’s a few years later.15

  In the evenings, at his house in Jeddah, Salem held court for local Bedouin, to entertain grievances and claims as his father had done before him. Some petitioners had complaints involving land. Mohamed had marked the boundaries of his various land grants as best he could, but his decisions sometimes conflicted with grazing rights or other claims by nomads. Salem found himself besieged by Bedouin bearing obscure slips of paper purporting to document their rights. Some of his friends who visited from Lebanon or London watched in amusement and admiration as Salem gradually adapted to the role of Bedouin land judge, listening patiently in his formal desert dress, trying to render decisions in the idealized manner of a fair-minded but strong-willed sheikh. One of his friends recalled that admiring petitioners nicknamed him “The Gate of Justice.” Salem had few pretensions, and he embraced Arabia’s egalitarian rituals, joining his brothers cross-legged on the floor for family meals.16