The Bin Ladens

by Steve Coll

  He tried to take stock of his company’s road building. His father’s shadow hung over everything; the remains of the plane in which he had died were placed on display at one of the company’s Jeddah compounds. Salem was never much for the desert fieldwork and motivational speeches at which his father excelled. He stumbled in his early attempts at deal making. The Bin Laden organization failed to win the bid on a military cantonment in Asir that it had submitted in partnership with Morrison-Knudsen; the Saudi government now seemed uncertain about whether the firm could finish the job on time. The road the company was trying to finish in the United Arab Emirates proceeded slowly. Salem claimed his father’s Hawker jet and flew off to Dubai in the spring of 1968 to inspect the work.17

  He made no secret of his love of flying. Faisal, however, perhaps sensing Salem’s impetuousness, decided that he could not abide the loss of another Bin Laden in a plane crash. Around the end of 1968, the king ordered Salem to sell the Hawker and the company’s other propeller planes on the basis that they were too dangerous. The family was grounded, at least when it was in Saudi Arabia; when he was in Europe, Salem sometimes found a way to rent a plane and train as a pilot.18

  Salem’s struggle for power with his half-brother Ali deepened. Ali was tall, sensitive, and without a boarding-school education. He would later become a passionate gardener and photographer. He felt entitled to more authority than either the king’s trustees or Salem would permit. Fed up, he asked the trustees to allow him to sell his share of the company and to go his own way. The trustees could not decide what to do, so Ali wrote a letter to King Faisal asking for permission to separate. Faisal granted his request and the trustees worked out a deal in which Ali was paid about $1 million for his holdings, according to the later estimates of family members. (If accurate, and if Ali received full value for his shares, the payment would suggest that the total fair market value of the company at the time was judged to be less than $50 million.) A few years later, Ali moved to Lebanon and then to Paris; he would have nothing to do with the family’s business again. Salem and his full brothers were now firmly in charge.19

  Salem married Sheikha Al-Attas, the daughter of a wealthy and prominent Hadhrami family that managed a Dutch-connected bank; the match signaled Salem’s rise into the ranks of Jeddah’s international merchant class. Sheikha was about as tall as Salem, slim and impressive. She had grown up in Indonesia, and she spoke, in addition to Arabic, English, French, and Dutch. Salem struck some of his friends as too young and restless to be a reliable husband, but she was a prestigious woman, and she shared Salem’s taste for European travel and culture.20

  Salem sought to prove himself to King Faisal, who would decide his future. They were far from a natural pair—one was young and irreverent, the other aging and cerebral. Whether because he doubted Salem and the viability of succession at the Bin Laden company, or because he was impatient to see his Asir projects finished, Faisal concluded within a year of Mohamed’s death that the Bin Ladens should sell a large minority share of itself to a foreign partner, preferably American.

  Anwar Ali, the Saudi central bank governor, led these negotiations. He made it clear that a sale would enjoy the king’s favor. Ali felt the “management vacancy” left by Mohamed Bin Laden made such a merger imperative, even though it would change the character of the company. Increasingly, the kingdom turned to foreign contractors for major public works, partly to ensure higher quality materials and engineering; in that respect, a merger would help to draw the Bin Laden firm into the kingdom’s modernization drive. Anwar Ali and the company trustees held discussions with German, Italian, and Dutch construction companies, but their principal target was the American consortium Morrison-Knudsen, for whom the Bin Ladens acted as agents in Saudi Arabia.21

  Early in 1970, Anwar Ali proposed a joint venture, in which the Bin Ladens would hold 60 percent and the American company 40 percent. Morrison-Knudsen would contribute cash—half of which, more than $2 million, would be lent by the Saudi central bank. Ali flew to the United States to meet with Morrison-Knudsen executives, and he dangled a prospective contract to build a new airport in Jeddah, which would become one of the largest construction deals ever handed out to a foreign firm. But the parties bickered over how to divide responsibility in the new venture.22

  Morrison-Knudsen proposed taking majority control of the Bin Laden company, but Ali told State Department officials this would be a “difficult ownership set-up to sell” to Faisal and the royal family, as there was “opposition to joint enterprises with majority foreign ownership.” The American embassy in Jeddah, anxious to beat out European companies, wrung its hands over Morrison-Knudsen’s reservations. Twenty years earlier, Bechtel had walked away from similar royal family entreaties, clearing the way for Mohamed Bin Laden’s rise. Now another American construction giant was threatening to walk away from a chance to buy into the position Bin Laden had established as the kingdom’s leading contractor. Yet despite Faisal’s interest in the deal, Morrison-Knudsen executives felt “uneasiness over the capability to do business with somewhat unorthodox Ben Ladin organization,” as one American dispatch put it.23

  Hermann Eilts, the U.S. ambassador in Jeddah during the early stages of these negotiations, recalled that the American executives were put off “first of all” by the “disarray that was in the family,” and the unwieldy system of management by its board of trustees. In addition, Eilts said, Morrison-Knudsen “was asked by some members of the Bin Laden family for bribes” to secure their agreement to a merger. “Now, it’s not that Morrison-Knudsen hadn’t been accustomed to that sort of thing,” but in the circumstances, it helped tip their decision.24

  Ultimately, the merger talks failed. The Bin Laden sons would have no foreign partner to ensure the viability of the company they had inherited; they were on their own.

  Increasingly they seemed determined to go their separate ways. Tareq Bin Laden, a half-brother with whom Salem was particularly close, formed his own construction company and advertised in the international business press in 1970. To prove that he could handle sizable contracting jobs and perform on time, Salem and six of his brothers and half-brothers formed a separate company, Bin Laden Brothers for Contracting and Industry, two years later. The worried forecasts that had immediately followed Mohamed’s death still seemed plausible: his business empire was splitting gradually because of the centrifugal ambitions of his many sons.25

  EUROPE, Lebanon, and Jeddah were the three main venues of Bin Laden family life during the early 1970s. Mohamed’s fifty-four children ranged in age from toddlers to young adults; the majority were teenagers. In many cases, they were just getting to know one another. Salem increasingly asserted himself as the family’s new patriarch; it was he who handed out allowances, made decisions about schooling, and organized family gatherings and vacations.

  In Jeddah there were three centers of family activity—the offices of Mohamed’s old company, the new downtown offices of Bin Laden Brothers for Contracting and Industry, and the suburban housing compound at Kilo 7, on the Mecca Road, where Mohamed’s widows and other family members lived. Salem moved among all these places, holding court with employees, brothers, and sisters, and paying respectful calls upon his mother on Fridays when he was in town. The minarets of a family mosque, constructed as an act of religious charity by Mohamed, loomed above the compound’s flat-roofed houses. Nearby were the whitewashed, walled enclaves of Mohamed’s other wives and some former wives; the women shared their homes with whichever of their sons and daughters were not away at school. The widows were generally relaxed in one another’s company. “What surprised me,” recalled Carmen Bin Laden, who came to live with them during the mid-1970s, “was that they were all very close to each other…I thought, there will be rivalries, they will not talk to each other.” Instead, they treated one another as sisters.26

  On the outskirts of Jeddah sprawled the larger compounds of their father’s old company, with its vast yards of Caterpillar equipment a
nd its ranks of Arab and European engineers and accountants. The trustees mainly ran the firm with the help of the executives and technicians who had been in place when the father died. The boys had relatively little to do with it in these years.27

  Many of the Bin Laden boys, and some of the girls, still attended boarding school outside of Saudi Arabia. At some point after Mohamed’s death, after Faisal began to oversee the children’s educations, a large number of Bin Laden boys were enrolled in the elite Brummana High School in a Christian resort town nestled in the hills north of Beirut. Lebanon, then untouched by civil war, was the most sophisticated, modern country in the Arab world, religiously diverse and heavily influenced by Europe. Brummana had about seven hundred students. It accommodated primary school children as well as teenagers preparing for college. European Quaker missionaries founded the school during the early 1870s, and its main buildings, made from local stone and red tile, dated from that period. The school admitted girls from its beginning, and in 1902 it became one of the Arab world’s few fully integrated coeducational schools. It later found patronage from the British royal family; the Duke of Edinburgh inaugurated a new dormitory in 1967. New science labs and a health center opened a few years later. The curriculum was mainly in English; students included members of the Saudi and Jordanian royal families, but also European teenagers whose families worked in Lebanon. There was an active athletics program and a particular emphasis on volleyball and basketball, which suited two of the taller Bin Laden boys then in attendance, Saleh and Khalil.

  Their volleyball coach, Joe Ashkar, a Lebanese Christian, opened a music shop down the street from the school. The Bin Ladens “liked what we called ‘underground music,’” he remembered. “The Beatles, Chicago, Jimi Hendrix, Mick Jagger.” They listened, too, to mournful Arabic pop music about separation and longing. Sometimes they drove down to Beirut and went to the movies—“Elvis, Bruce Lee. No Arabic movies.” They dated European girls. One of the brothers, Khaled, who lived in Egypt, married a young Danish woman during this period. Saleh ended up in a long relationship with an English girl who boarded at Brummana, but his conservative Syrian mother would not allow him to marry her; only a local girl would do.28

  The boys were attracted to fashionable clothes, cars, and airplanes. Bakr, Salem’s full brother, kept a prized Oldsmobile in Beirut. Salem hired friends to fly to Europe and drive more new cars back to Lebanon or Saudi Arabia. “They wore really wide bell-bottoms,” remembered Saleh’s girlfriend, Shirley Bowman. “They were just outlandish. They did it to provoke comment, really. They all had Afro-style frizzy hair, which they grew very long. Shirts open to the belly button. Beirut was the place to be.” For the first time, some of them began to spend lavishly. Saleh bought expensive gifts for Bowman’s mother in England, which upset her father because he couldn’t afford such luxuries. Saleh “never quite understood the etiquette of Europeans,” she said. Still, “he had a really good heart, and he would do anything for anybody.”29

  Authority in the Bin Laden family seemed diffuse. “The family dynasty hadn’t really evolved,” Bowman said. “It was the older boys who were dictating everything and keeping an eye on the sisters. Some of the sisters were allowed to study abroad, some weren’t.” Saleh, for his part, “was very proud of his sisters. They were all gorgeous, really. They spent thousands on clothes.”30

  Salem organized family travel to England and Sweden. He had already taken freewheeling road trips to Sweden with boarding-school friends, and he seemed drawn to Scandinavia. In September 1971, Salem organized a family trip to Falun, Sweden. “Arab Celebrity Visit” was the headline in the local newspaper:

  Salem Bin Laden visited Falun on a combined business and pleasure trip through Europe. He was accompanied by twenty-two members of his family…He has visited the Club Ophelia in Falun. The young sheikh is reportedly a big fan of discos and has visited the discos of Falun at various times in the past.31

  “They were so elegantly dressed,” recalled Christina Akerblad, who ran the modest hotel where the family stayed. “We saw they used the extra bed in their rooms to lay out their clothes. They had lots of white silk shirts packaged in cellophane.”32

  A photographer persuaded twenty-one members of the family to pose together, leaning against a wide-finned American sedan. The boys wore colorful bell-bottoms, low-slung belts, and brightly patterned shirts. Eleven girls or young women appeared in the picture; they looked to be in their teens or early twenties. They all wore pants, not skirts, but only one of the girls covered her hair. They laughed joyously.

  Years later, one of the boys in the photograph, the second from the right, would be routinely identified in media accounts as Osama Bin Laden. There is certainly a resemblance, but Bin Laden family members said emphatically that this was a case of mistaken identity—Osama did not travel to Sweden with the group and was not in the picture. The family’s testimony seems convincing, as it comes from varied sources, including some, such as Carmen Bin Laden, who have been adversaries of the family.

  In any event, by the early 1970s, Osama’s education had begun to take a very different course from that of most of his brothers and sisters. It was increasingly difficult to imagine him in bell-bottoms.

  10. YOUNG OSAMA

  OSAMA BIN LADEN’S MOTHER, Alia Ghanem, was about fifteen at the time of his birth. Mohamed Bin Laden divorced her soon afterward, probably before she was eighteen. The boy was her only child at the time. Naturally, they clung to each other during this period of change. Later, as a teenager, Osama “would lie at her feet and caress her,” said Khaled Batarfi, a neighbor and friend of Osama’s. He “wouldn’t sleep if he knew she was upset about something.”1

  Alia was handed off from one husband to another; Mohamed arranged for her to remarry a midlevel administrator who worked at his company. This was Mohamed Al-Attas, from the prestigious family of Hadhrami descendants of the Prophet Mohamed. By the account of Batarfi, who knew him well in later years, Al-Attas was a gentle man, and he became a reliable husband and father; he and Alia eventually had four other children and incorporated Osama into a conventional Saudi household. The evidence about Osama’s earliest years is thin, yet surely the inauguration of Alia’s second marriage must have been a time of some uncertainty. Alia and Osama moved out of the bustling Bin Laden family compound in Jeddah, with its many wives and factions and servants, and into a more modest household with her new husband. Osama’s place in this new suburban home was unusual. In one respect, he was the odd boy out, the only child of an absent father, a conspicuous stepbrother. Yet as Mohamed Bin Laden’s male heir, Osama was the sole source of his new family’s wealth and access to Bin Laden family privileges. The emotional complexity of his position as a young boy who was both excluded and essential, marginalized and powerful, can be readily imagined, but the truth of it is unavailable and the subject lies entirely in the realm of conjecture.

  Alia remembered Osama as “a shy kid, very nice, very considerate. He has been always helpful. I tried to instill in him the fear and love of God, the respect and love for his family, neighbors and teachers.” All the available testimony about Osama’s early childhood emphasizes his shyness and placidity. Each summer, beginning in the late 1950s and continuing into the early 1970s, Alia and Osama, later accompanied by Osama’s three stepbrothers and stepsister, traveled from Jeddah to Alia’s hometown of Latakia, on the Mediterranean coast, where they stayed with Alia’s family. Relatives there remembered Osama as calm and extremely quiet, to the point of timidity. He preferred to be alone, was not particularly social with his cousins, and had trouble communicating at times. Still, he was not a cause of trouble, and he did not shutter himself inside, by their account; they recalled that he particularly enjoyed swimming, hunting, and horseback riding.2

  The Ghanem family could barely make ends meet; this may have been the reason they turned young Alia over to Mohamed Bin Laden in the first place. One section of the family cultivated fruit trees in a nearby village under a grant
from the Syrian government. “If there was no agricultural reform,” which provided them with this subsistence orchard, “we wouldn’t have had anything,” Hosam Aldin Ghanem said years later. By comparison, Osama’s stepfather in Jeddah enjoyed a decent salary, and Osama may have received occasional gifts and allowances from Mohamed during his boyhood. Yet he was not so wealthy that his mother could shower her Syrian relatives with money. As the years passed and his own financial circumstances improved, Osama could seem oblivious to the economic differences between himself and his mother’s less prosperous Syrian relations. There was a little island in a small lake near Latakia that Osama used to visit with his cousins. “I used to love it a lot,” one of them, Soliman Ghanem, recalled. “He asked me if he could buy it to live there.”3

  Mohamed Bin Laden was a distant figure during Osama’s boyhood but apparently an inspirational one. Most of the reliable evidence about Osama’s relations with his father’s side of the family dates to the period after his father’s death, but the information available suggests that Osama was always a fully recognized member of the brood of sons that Mohamed periodically called together for inspection and religious instruction. Osama himself has spoken of knowing his father as a boy, of reciting poetry to him, of joining his work sites, and of being uplifted by his example. “He considered him as a model,” said Osama’s college-era friend Jamal Khalifa. “He was not with his father much” but he “heard a lot” about him. In particular, Osama absorbed the idea that his father “was not a person who sits down behind the desk and gives orders.” Rather, Mohamed Bin Laden worked with his own hands in the desert, offering direct leadership to his ethnically diverse employees. This, of course, would become Osama’s style of leadership as well.4