The Bin Ladens

by Steve Coll

  Bath made his money from airplane commissions and by channeling Saudi investors like Salem into real estate or other business deals, where Bath took a 5 percent piece of the action for his efforts. He operated out of offices in the Fannin Bank Building in Houston, and he registered Salem Bin Laden’s new Texas businesses at that address. He created a vehicle called MBO Investments, Inc., named after the Bin Laden family firm in Jeddah. Bath’s authority was established in a “trust agreement” signed by Salem on July 8, 1976, and filed with the Texas secretary of state. Salem provided Bath “full and absolute authority to act on my behalf in all matters relating to the business and operation of Bin Laden-Houston offices,” which included “full authority to disburse funds for Company, or Bin Laden family expenses.” Bath maintained a revolving line of credit for the Bin Laden family that amounted at one stage to about $6 or $7 million, according to Bill White, who was a business partner of Bath’s after 1978.11

  As his Saudi contacts grew, Bath moved into international aircraft leasing. This was a complex business in which, at the time, American tax and export laws made it particularly attractive to finance aircraft sales to overseas customers. Bath opened offshore corporations in Caribbean tax havens to facilitate such deals. He established a Cayman Islands corporation called Skyway Aircraft Leasing, Ltd., whose ownership was Saudi, according to White and other accounts.12

  Bath also opened offshore companies for Salem. On July 5, 1977, he incorporated Binco Investments, N.V., in the Netherlands Antilles. Its parent company was SMB Investments, apparently in reference to Salem’s initials; it was also located in the Netherlands Antilles. Documents Bath filed with the state of Texas reported that the main purpose of these companies was to hold real estate. Binco Investments, for example, became a vehicle for Bath’s purchase around this time, on Salem’s behalf, of Houston Gulf Airport, a small field outside the city that Bath hoped would grow into a profitable feeder airport—a hope that was never realized.13

  Bath’s deals with the Bin Ladens appear to have involved smaller amounts of money than those he developed with other Saudis, particularly Salem’s friend and banker Khalid Bin Mahfouz. In 1977, for example, Bath invested in the Main Bank in Houston; his partners included Bin Mahfouz, the wealthy Saudi businessman Gaith Pharaon, and former Texas governor John Connally. Salem invested with Bin Mahfouz in the Saudi Bank of Paris but apparently did not join his Texas banking deals.14

  Bath’s Saudi clients, his politically connected friends in Texas, his offshore corporations, his freewheeling lifestyle, and his forays into international aviation all contributed to a growing air of mystery. Bath himself seemed to relish the intrigue. He flew back and forth to Caribbean tax havens, sometimes with hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash aboard the planes; he told his wife, Sandra, that the cash was needed to pay for fuel and contingencies. Sometimes the Saudis who traveled with Bath carried diplomatic passports, which allowed them to bring their briefcases through U.S. Customs without being inspected; on some occasions, according to a pilot who worked with Bath, the cases contained very large sums of cash.15

  SALEM LED a family migration to America during the 1970s. As his brothers and sisters finished secondary school in Lebanon, Egypt, and Jeddah, he encouraged many of them to enroll in college in the United States. Like many Saudis, they gravitated toward Florida and California, where the weather felt like home. Salem’s youngest full brother, Ghalib, studied civil engineering at the University of California at Berkeley. His half-brother Abdulaziz, from Cairo, enrolled at the University of San Francisco, where he earned a master’s degree in business administration in 1978. Two other half-brothers, Shafiq and Saleh, and a half-sister, Raja, also enrolled at USF. Yeslam, Khalil, and Ibrahim, a cluster of full brothers by an Iranian-born wife of Mohamed Bin Laden, studied at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Other family members enrolled in colleges or design academies in Miami and Houston. School records and interviews show that more than a quarter of Mohamed Bin Laden’s fifty-four children studied in the United States at some point, primarily during the 1970s and early 1980s.16

  Osama, of course, was part of the larger group that enrolled in Saudi or other Arab universities. Salem traveled frequently back and forth between Jeddah and the United States, zipping from city to city in his jets, organizing vacations, and handing out allowances. He was the family leader who kept track of everybody, no matter where they went to school. He carried one of the first portable phones, a bulky model as big as a brick, so that his brothers and sisters could reach him at any time. Mohamed’s children were now mainly teenagers or in their twenties, and they constantly had decisions to make about school, jobs, and even marriages. All came to Salem for consultation or permission.

  His half-brother Yeslam and his stunning Iranian-born wife, Carmen, provided one harbor for the family in Los Angeles. Yeslam had drifted through Europe after high school. He took race-car driving lessons in Sweden, considered a plan to breed Doberman pinscher dogs in Saudi Arabia, and lodged for a time in the Royal Hotel in Geneva, Switzerland. While leasing an apartment in Geneva with his family in the summer of 1973, he met Carmen, the daughter of the apartment’s owner. Her father was Swiss; her mother Iranian. She spoke French and Persian, was twenty-two, extraordinarily beautiful, and fiercely ambitious. Yeslam, also twenty-two, found himself swept away by Carmen. He was a mild, reticent, sensitive young man prone to anxiety attacks. She felt that Yeslam nonetheless had the intelligence to lead his family’s international business one day, to bring it into the modern era. “Carmen was very anxious for Yeslam to do well,” recalled Mary Martha Barkley, who befriended the couple through her husband, who oversaw international students at USC, where Yeslam enrolled to study business in late 1973. “She had great ambitions for him.”17

  They married the following summer and bought a house on Amalfi Drive in Pacific Palisades, a wealthy neighborhood near the ocean. Yeslam took flying lessons and purchased a twin-engine propeller plane for weekend trips to Santa Barbara and Arizona; his wife drove a Pontiac Firebird. Yeslam’s great passion, apart from Carmen, was his rather unfriendly Doberman, Khalif.18

  Salem flew into Los Angeles periodically and organized family expeditions to Las Vegas, where the Bin Ladens stayed at Caesars Palace. He gambled the way he drank—lightly, and to pass the time. He once wandered over to a Vegas blackjack table while waiting for his traveling party to organize themselves in the hotel lobby. Soon he built up a pile of chips worth more than a thousand dollars. He joked with the female card dealer, and when it was time to go, simply shoved all his winnings over to her with a shrug. He reveled in the thrill that ordinary Americans and Europeans, particularly women, would express when he unexpectedly handed them large amounts of cash; he seemed to enjoy those exchanges more than some of the luxuries his money could buy.19

  Salem never seemed to doubt himself or to question his identity as a Saudi who traveled widely in America. Some of his brothers and half-brothers, however, found themselves unsettled by the adventures he led them on.

  The older boys, in particular, had all known their father in his prime. They had been instilled, naturally, with pride in the family’s achievements as Muslims, Arabs, Yemenis, and Saudis. This pride was not only a matter of family honor or some vague sense of national or religious belonging; it was inseparable from the detailed Koranic instruction the boys had received from an early age—the verses memorized and recited, the laws listed and observed. It was part and parcel, too, of the scenes they had enjoyed and the prayers they had offered on frequent visits to Mecca and Medina. Their father’s religion was not that of an ardent proselytizer; among other things, in his long association with American, Italian, and Lebanese Christians, he displayed little of the xenophobia sometimes exhibited by Saudi clerics. Yet his devotion lay at the core of his own identity and that which he hoped his sons and daughters would embrace. His adherence to Islamic ritual and values, the prayers he gave five times each day, the many Hajj pilgrimages he ho
sted in his carpeted tent, the fasts he adhered to during Ramadan—it would be difficult for any son of Mohamed’s to blithely set all this aside, even if Salem seemed at times to provide an example of how it might be done.

  During Ramadan’s long afternoons, when he was supposed to be fasting and abstaining from tobacco, Salem chain-smoked and asked his younger brothers to serve him food and coffee. He rarely prayed when traveling in Europe or America, and he ate pork without hesitation—he thought it was delicious. In Saudi Arabia, he did attend mosques, but he was more likely to poke his friends in the belly while standing in a prayer line than to prostrate himself in humble supplication to God. He had a spiritual side—he talked about time travel, and infinity and the shape of the universe, questions that seemed to encroach upon him during his long hours in the sky. Islam did not seem to press upon him, nor he upon it. His more religious brothers would gently encourage him to find his way a little closer to God’s well-marked path, but the culture of deference to the family leader within an Arabian clan like the Bin Ladens was so strong that not even the most devoted of Salem’s younger siblings dared to challenge him severely about his lapses. Perhaps more important, their faith, as they understood it, taught that judging sinners was God’s business, not mortal man’s, as long as the sinner in question did not renounce Islam altogether. “No sin besides that of unbelief makes a believer step outside his faith, even if it is a serious sin, like murder or drinking alcohol,” Osama Bin Laden would say years later. “Even if the culprit died without repenting of his sins, his fate is with God, whether He wishes to forgive him or to punish him.”20

  America during the 1970s, roiled by its recent cultural and sexual revolutions—not to mention its garish hairstyles and clothing—continuously demanded an answer of each young Bin Laden who lived there: Are you a Muslim, and if so, how will you practice your faith? Many of Salem’s siblings found that they could not shrug off the question, as he seemed to do, and they tacked back and forth, searching for a comfortable answer. Carmen, who lived as a secular European, saw this when Yeslam’s brothers came to visit from San Francisco or Jeddah. “You never knew which brother would turn very religious,” she recalled. “Even if you had seen them very young, and being very open…The men, they used to go out. They go to the movies. They go to bars. And you think they are Westernized. And suddenly small things make you realize: No.” Her own husband, she gradually came to realize, “was not as Westernized as I thought he was. They cannot cut that bond that is embedded in them.”21

  An American businessman recalled visiting Yeslam’s brother Khalil in Los Angeles on the day Khalil decided to dump out all the alcohol in his house. “That’s it,” Khalil declared, as this person recalled it. “We’re not doing this anymore.” Afterward, Khalil still joined his brothers and university friends at the private clubs in Beverly Hills where they often went on Fridays and Saturday nights to dance and search for girls. Khalil would pay the maître d’ for a table but preferred to sit soberly and watch. Some of his brothers danced and caroused, but others let their beards grow and ensured they made time for evening prayers. For many of them, this was not a search for religious or personal identity that had a fixed destination; it was a journey of continuous motion, changeable at any time and place. One of the most striking examples involved Salem’s half-brother Mahrouz. He initially married a Frenchwoman; at his home, recalled a business partner of the family who visited him, he kept a globe that opened up to serve alcoholic drinks. Rupert Armitage remembered him as “kind of a party animal.” But suddenly, during the 1970s, “he turned.” Mahrouz rededicated himself to Islam. He eventually took four wives, grew a long beard, moved to Medina, and began to wear clothes thought typical of the Prophet’s lifetime. He built a large housing complex with a home for himself and his mother at the center, and homes for each of his four wives at equal distance, around the points of a square.22

  These questions and struggles involving Islam and identity were hardly unique to the young Bin Ladens. When they traveled or attended school in the West, young Saudis often had a sophisticated, self-conscious sense of their own dilemma. They did not carry themselves around America as disoriented victims, but rather as experimenters in accommodation. Gradually, wrote Peter Theroux, who lived in Riyadh during this period, this kind of private bargaining drove many Saudis back toward Islam, even those who were not necessarily prepared to live fully by its precepts:

  It was common in Saudi Arabia to look down on Europeans and Americans for selling sacreligious pleasures, then making illogical laws against drugs, drunk driving, and roughing up women. They could not keep track of that pesky line between what was licit and what was not. They often thought that the Manichean, if hypocritical situation imposed by Islamic law, which they so often violated, was saner than the West’s compromise with vices, regulating and tolerating them within limits.23

  THE BIN LADEN WOMEN encountered contrasts in America that were even more extreme than those known by their brothers. Salem urged them to broaden their horizons—literally, in some cases, by learning to fly—yet he remained acutely conscious of Arabian decorum. It did not bother him in the slightest if his sisters wore jeans and let their hair flow freely outside the kingdom; indeed, he preferred it. When it came to dating and marriage, however, he enforced a transparent double standard. Salem had many American and European girlfriends, particularly after his divorce from Sheikha in the late 1970s. One of his half-brothers married an American, Mahrouz married a Frenchwoman, and a third married a Danish woman—unions that all ended in divorce. Yet when one of his half-sisters, Salah, fell in love with an older Italian man, it created a firestorm within the family; the episode seemed to stretch the limits of Salem’s tolerance, although he did finally bless the marriage, which turned out to be a long-lasting success.24

  He presided over these issues as an Arabian patriarch—authoritarian, but eager to maintain balance and consensus. “It was just a really hard, really tough job,” recalled Gail Freeman, an American who befriended and worked with some of Salem’s sisters on palace design projects in Saudi Arabia. “The phone was always ringing.” Salem would cradle the phone under his chin and issue a stream of advice about love and marriage, recalled Peter Blum, a German who traveled as Salem’s personal valet for several years. “You have a wife,” he would say, or “You have enough headaches,” or “Listen, wait for a half year and then we can talk about this again.” He was not harsh in his judgments, Blum said, but “always like a diplomat.” Salem sometimes seemed to spend more time on “the family problems,” as Freeman put it, than he did on business deals.25

  Salem often hid his American and European girlfriends from his sisters and half-sisters, fearing their disapproval. He applauded when his sisters drove fast on American freeways or flew airplanes around California, but he did not want them running about unsupervised with American or European men. His attitudes reflected an uncomplicated sexism, but also a strain of male Saudi pride; Western women might be conquests, but Arab women never would. In the spring of 1978, while at home in Saudi Arabia, Salem punched one of his American pilots after the man spoke to one of his sisters without his permission. The pilot quit immediately. That night, he called Salem in Riyadh to ask for his paycheck and an exit visa, which was required if an American employee wished to leave Saudi Arabia. This maelstrom involving male honor and the virtue of Bin Laden women seemed to draw out Salem’s dark side. He launched into a tirade on the telephone, recalled Francis Hunnewell, an American banker who was with him; Salem said he would not allow the pilot to leave the kingdom until he publicly apologized, and if he refused to work, Salem promised to “have him thrown in jail.”26

  Salem himself preferred intelligent women. His main American girlfriend during the late 1970s was a young doctor serving in the U.S. military, Patty Deckard, who practiced at a hospital in San Antonio. Salem visited her parents in California and talked seriously about their relationship. “He always said, ‘I love myself,’…but he probably ca
me as close to really, really caring for somebody with her,” said his pilot Jack Hinson. “But she wouldn’t marry him.” She concluded that she could not convert to Islam or endure the role expected of her in Saudi Arabia, said a second employee of Salem’s who spent considerable time with the couple during these years. The pair traveled periodically around America and overseas for several years before the affair ended and Deckard married another man.27

  It was difficult for any woman, including Salem’s former wife, Sheikha, to compete with his relationship with Randa. “It was just always ‘Randa, Randa, Randa, Randa,’” said Gail Freeman. In the same period when Salem installed Randa in Panama City for flight lessons, he also helped her enroll in medical school in Canada, and he would fly up to visit and deliver supplies. “I think most of the sisters were jealous of Randa.”28

  To win her pilot’s license, Randa had to complete a cross-country solo flight, navigating on her own in a Cessna hundreds of miles across Florida to a designated airport, in this case, one near Palm Beach. The day of her big flight arrived in late September 1978, but Salem was very nervous. He called Don Sowell at the flight school and told him, as Sowell recalled, “I really don’t want her to go by herself. If something should happen, I really don’t want her by herself.” There was no legal way for Sowell to certify Randa as a pilot, however, if he allowed an instructor into the cockpit with her for the cross-country flight. So they agreed that Salem would pay for an instructor to fly behind her in a chase plane, just in case.29

  Salem’s prescience was extraordinary: somewhere over central Florida, smoke billowed into Randa’s cockpit from some sort of engine or electrical malfunction. Fortunately, she had a trusted pilot nearby to speak with on the radio. But the smoke was so bad that it quickly became clear to both of them that she was not going to be able to reach an airport. The instructor told her to prepare to crash-land in a field.