The Bin Ladens

by Steve Coll

Salem, Mustafa, and other Bin Laden brothers and employees fought and consulted on the front lines of the Mecca siege for two weeks. Salem’s half-brother Yahya, a civil engineer with extensive experience in Mecca, was among those who risked their lives to aid the royal family’s increasingly violent assault. Yeslam Bin Laden, another senior executive at the time, “was frantic, dashing from house to office like a man unhinged,” his wife remembered. The Saudi forces poured fire at Juhaiman’s rebels in the minarets. “Everyone was saying, ‘God rest his soul, Mohamed bin Laden,’ and at the same time, they were cursing Mohamed bin Laden, because the 106-millimeter cannon could not penetrate the minarets—that was how much steel there was,” said a Bin Laden employee who was there. Helicopters swooped in firing machine guns from their open doors.21

  Juhaiman and his surviving followers soon retreated underground, a maneuver they had evidently planned in advance. Beneath the mosque there were many catacombs and tunnels, some of which carried wiring and pipes to support the mosque; others led to rooms for religious contemplation and retreat. Juhaiman had hidden food and ammunition below during weeks of clandestine preparation; in some cases, he apparently had gained access to privileged Bin Laden company vehicles. Once the rebels slipped into the catacombs, the Bin Ladens’ engineering and architectural knowledge became particularly crucial. The employee who was present remembered a Jordanian commander storming through the mosque, calling out, “Where is Bin Laden? Where is Bin Laden?” He found them and spread out the architectural plans, marking an X on every section of the mosque’s surface that lay above an underground passage where the rebels might be hiding. “Jackhammer it,” the Jordanian ordered.22

  The Bin Ladens brought in boring equipment to drill holes in the floor of the mosque so that security forces could drop grenades down the makeshift shafts. “They bored all these holes and the sergeant would sit there with his basket of grenades, tea, and cigarettes—drop a hand grenade in the hole,” said Tim Barger, who was living in Jeddah and was in contact with participants in the siege. They dropped so many hand grenades into the tunnels during this phase of the assault, said the Bin Laden employee, that up on the surface “we were slipping on the rings of the hand grenades.”23

  Salem seemed thrilled to be involved, but he was also worried. It did not require an advanced degree in political science to see that the Al-Saud was vulnerable to forces of Islamic revolution similar to those that had just toppled the shah of Iran across the Persian Gulf—and if the Saudi royal family fell, so would the Bin Ladens. The brothers moved quickly—and in secret—to create an offshore financial haven. On November 27, 1979, just one week after the Mecca uprising began, lawyers halfway around the world, in Panama City, filed a Notaría Primera del Circuito establishing a new company under Panamanian law: Binladin International Inc. They soon changed its name to the less conspicuous Binar, Inc. Its directors would eventually include the most influential brothers around Salem—Bakr, Omar, Yeslam, Tareq, Hassan, and Khalid. The company’s initial share capital was listed at $10 million. The timing of its formation suggests a panicked family hedging its financial bets against the possibility that it might soon face a hostile, postrevolutionary Saudi government. None of the Bin Ladens involved with these Panamanian companies has ever explained their purpose, but family members have acknowledged making a similarly hurried offshore transfer of funds during a later Saudi crisis.24

  In fact, Juhaiman and his followers were doomed. Saudi and French special forces called in for assistance killed many of the rebels at the Grand Mosque; Juhaiman and sixty-two surviving followers were arrested and beheaded. Still, their bloody revolt did create a profound crisis of legitimacy for the royal family. The rule of the Al-Saud rested on their claims to Islamic credibility, particularly as stewards of Mecca and Medina. They rationalized their assault on the mosque as a regrettable but necessary act of their stewardship, but they were obviously on shaky political and theological ground. As the assault wound down, royal family spokesmen emphasized the rebels’ wild claims about the arrival of the Apocalypse and downplayed their more temporal—and threatening—political grievances.

  The revolt implicated the Bin Ladens as well. Rumors swirled even as the siege raged that family members must have been involved, for it was their trucks and their Jeeps that had privileges to move freely in and out of the Holy Mosque; surely, the rumors went, some Bin Ladens had aided the conspirators. Mahrouz and a second brother, probably Osama, were arrested briefly during the crisis while driving near Mecca. According to the Bin Laden employee who participated in the siege, the brothers were mistaken for conspirators because they were using company radios to monitor police communications—only out of curiosity.25

  When the Bin Laden employee himself drove away from Mecca one night, his clothes bloodied from his involvement in the grenade assaults, a policeman stopped him on the highway. He showed his Bin Laden company identity card, and the officer responded by shoving a gun in his face, announcing, “God sent you to me.” The employee said he avoided execution on the spot only by convincing the policeman to consider more than the swirling rumors about the family’s role and to check in with his superiors before shooting him.26

  Years later, Osama criticized then–crown prince Fahd for using indiscriminate force against the rebels. “He could have solved this crisis without a shot being fired, as all sensible people agreed at the time,” Osama said. “What the situation needed was some time, especially since those present inside the Haram were only a few dozen. They had only light weapons, mostly hunting rifles, they had few provisions, and they were surrounded.” Fahd, he continued—making no reference to Salem or other family members who were involved—“stubbornly fought with them and put bulldozers and armored cars inside the Haram. I still remember the bulldozer’s tracks on the paving stones of the Haram…People still remember the minarets covered in black after they had been pounded by tanks.”27

  His true attitude toward the revolt at the time it was actually going on is more difficult to discern. Osama was twenty-one years old. The Islamic faith in which he had so deeply immersed himself was stirring suddenly. Beyond the Mecca siege, revolutionaries in Iran had overthrown their corrupt shah. The Muslim Brotherhood was gaining strength and planning revolt in Syria, a conspiracy that Osama would later say he was involved in. Juhaiman and his followers might have been misguided, particularly in their identification of a Mahdi, or divine savior, but their political critique was stimulating, and the royal family’s massive counterattack was, at the least, disquieting.

  Still, there is hardly any evidence to suggest that Osama was willing to take significant personal risks in the name of rebellion—nor is there evidence that he disagreed at the time with his brothers’ cooperation with Saudi security forces. Rather, he seems to have conducted himself as an exceptionally pious, rising construction mogul and family man, an Islamist on the make—a rather common profile in Saudi Arabia. Far from conspiring to revolt, Osama in these years seemed to be exploring how he might have it all—money, multiple wives, children, an ambitious work life, and God’s favor. His status as a young Bin Laden son in good standing was a crucial prerequisite.

  By early 1980, Osama’s tax-free income from Bin Laden sources probably exceeded $150,000 per year and may have been twice that—an income greater than that of many junior princes. In these years, Salem controlled allowances for younger Bin Laden brothers like Osama, and by several accounts from business partners and employees, Salem’s system appeared to be arbitrary and inconsistent. By the early 1990s, when dividends were allocated in a more orderly fashion, the minimum amount a son could expect was just under $300,000 annually, according to U.S. court filings by accountants hired to examine Bin Laden finances. It seems safe to assume that comparable allowances were lower a decade earlier. In both periods, the amount a brother received would be greater if he also owned shares in other Bin Laden companies or worked as a salaried executive. Osama’s older brother Yeslam, who had earned a degree in business from
the University of Southern California, received a salary of about $800,000 per year in 1986, according to an affidavit filed by his wife Carmen. Osama was among those brothers who had ownership in more than one company, and he also took management jobs, although he was more junior than Yeslam and certainly would have earned less in salary. From these fragments of evidence, it is possible to estimate—or guess—that Osama’s total annual income from family sources would likely have been around $200,000 during this period. He certainly behaved as if he had money to spare. He bought a small apartment building in the Al-Aziziyah district of Jeddah after he left university and then took a second, and eventually a third, wife, whom he installed in equally sized apartments. These wives were more mature and better educated than the teenaged cousin who had borne his first children—at least one of them had earned a doctoral degree in Arabic or religious studies, according to Osama’s later bodyguard. Their qualifications and religious expertise matched his evolving self-image.28

  At the Bin Ladens’ Mecca office, Osama was promoted to supervise Walid Al-Khatib, the Palestinian who had previously been his boss. One of their projects involved routing a new road between the Grand Mosque and a palace, which required demolishing buildings in a densely populated neighborhood—without using any dynamite. Osama worked on detailed engineering questions involving the structural weaknesses of buildings and how these might be leveraged to knock them down. Al-Khatib found Osama “especially effective in liaising with various government departments and smoothing over problems.” He worked easily with European and American engineers and spoke to them in English. He was reserved, certainly, and very pious, but in a Saudi context he was a rising young man of the Mecca establishment.29

  One day a driver came into the office trembling. He showed Al-Khatib a subversive book he had found; it was an underground tract denouncing the Saudi royal family. They searched the place where the driver had discovered the pamphlet and found more than one hundred other such books. Al-Khatib was terrified. “I knew it meant a death sentence, and I didn’t want to be associated with it.” He called Osama immediately. Bin Laden flipped through the pages and “smiled his famous smile as he turned the pages.”

  “Will you please call the police?” Al-Khatib asked him, as he recalled it.

  “No, you call the police.”

  Al-Khatib protested; as a non-Saudi, he would be particularly vulnerable to the security investigation that would surely follow. He begged Osama to make the initial contact with the police, but Osama again refused, got into his car, and drove away. Reluctantly, Al-Khatib reported his discovery. The police arrived, and eventually, Al-Khatib “got away with it.” The incident changed his feelings about Osama, however. “I didn’t like him anymore.”30

  Saudi Arabia’s political fabric was stretching. Iran’s example seemed to prove that oil money might accelerate dissent rather than quell it. Fearful, Fahd and his brothers hurriedly began to accommodate the kingdom’s Islamists, showering them with increased budgets and acceding to the demands by religious scholars for stricter gender segregation and media censorship. Culture and public life in the kingdom grew steadily more conservative. Yet the secular wing of the royal family did not interrupt their lives behind palace walls or in Europe’s capitals.

  The Bin Ladens remained united, too, after the Mecca uprising. The cultural distance between the secular wing and the religious wing of the family had widened considerably during the 1970s, but Salem’s leadership, and his strategy of mutual accommodation and generous financial subsidy, kept the family well intact. Bin Laden identity—and Bin Laden wealth—remained fixed on the same star that had guided Mohamed after his arrival in Jeddah a half century before. Above all else, they depended upon, and loyally served, the Saudi royal family.

  16. THE AMUSEMENT PARK

  AFTER THE MECCA UPRISING, Salem flew to New York for hemorrhoid surgery. He had put the procedure off for years; when he could delay no longer, he arranged his operation as P. T. Barnum might. He retained an American vascular heart surgeon at New York–Presbyterian; this was considerably more surgical talent than was normally required for such a minor procedure, but Salem said he would pay handsomely. He also announced that he would videotape the event, casting his exposed rear end as the star of the show. The hospital objected, but it did allow him to bring a friend with a Polaroid camera. Afterward, Salem created a multimedia show in which he set to music a medley of photos of his backside. He later showed the pictures at parties and to Saudi royalty, including Crown Prince Fahd.1

  During his recovery, which he prolonged in a similar spirit of self-dramatization, Salem brooded about his family’s vulnerability to revolution in Saudi Arabia. He continued to prepare financial infrastructure that could aid the family if it was ever forced into exile. On January 23, 1980, Panamanian lawyers working for the Bin Ladens established a second company, following on Binar. It was called Saudin Inc., and its directors again read like a roster of the most influential brothers around Salem: Yeslam, Bakr, Omar, Tareq, Hassan, and Khalid. Around this time, Salem told one of his American business partners, Robert Freeman, that he was concerned about what might happen to the family “should there be some sort of turmoil in Saudi Arabia.” Salem had his estate near London, but he decided that he should build a larger compound where many of Mohamed’s children could also retreat, if it was ever necessary—a place where they could live side by side with their families, as they did in Jeddah.2

  White, Weld & Co., an elite Boston-based investment bank, had introduced Salem to a property called Oaktree Village, in Orlando, Florida; it was a tract of land that had been divided into 229 lots for single-family homes but had been developed no further. The company that owned Oaktree “was having some cash flow problems,” recalled Aaron Dowd, who later managed the property, and it offered the tract for sale for $1.9 million, or about $8,300 per lot. Salem decided to buy. He put down about $380,000 in cash and assumed a mortgage on the rest of the purchase price. It was his first major real estate investment in the United States. He reserved about sixty of the Oaktree lots for the Bin Laden family; each brother or sister who participated would receive two, one for a house and a second for a spacious yard. He decided to create separate corporations, each named after a flower, to hold each family member’s property—he bought a book about flowers and paged through it, choosing his favorites. The first flowers went to those closest to him—his devout mother; his full “kid brother,” Ghalib; his full sister Mona; his free-living half-brother Shafiq; his half-sisters Raja and Raedah; and, of course, Randa. Salem envisioned that if all remained well in Saudi Arabia, the Bin Ladens would gather at Oaktree occasionally for group vacations around the nearby Walt Disney World resort. If, for any reason, the Saudi kingdom fell apart, they would have a ready refuge beside the Magic Kingdom.3

  Salem preferred the sprawl and amusement parks of Orlando to Palm Beach, which was favored by some Saudi royalty. He rented limousines and arranged masseuses for visiting princes in Palm Beach but otherwise minimized his time there. He seemed to be put off by its social pretensions. He mocked all snobs. Once, at dinner, an American businessman sampled the wine and haughtily sent it back. Salem excused himself, slipped into the kitchen, and arranged for the waiters to pour the rejected wine into a new bottle. This time, the businessman made a show of being pleased—until Salem announced his prank.4

  Still, he knew that his royal clients required a grander style than he generally favored for himself. In 1980, as construction began at Oaktree, Salem asked one of his partners if he could locate an elegant mansion in Orlando that might be suitable for rental by a vacationing Saudi prince. There was nothing on the open market, but after some effort, they found a wealthy local businessman named Miller McCarthy, who lived on a multi-acre estate overlooking Johns Lake, to the west of Orlando and not far from Disney World. His stunning Mediterranean main house had been constructed in the mid-1920s by a man named Pratt, a chemist who reputedly derived his fortune from patents on coagulants use
d in Jell-O. Pratt had taste: He purchased fine materials and commissioned arched walkways and careful detailing. The rear lawn sloped down from the swimming pool to weeping willows and palm groves beside the lake. In later years the property deteriorated, but McCarthy and his wife bought it during the early 1970s and spent about $600,000 on a painstaking restoration.5

  For a handsome price, the owner and his wife agreed to move out temporarily while Salem’s royal friends moved in. The Saudis surrounded the estate with security guards who had been trained by the CIA, or so Salem told McCarthy. They left the place a mess, McCarthy said; he later billed them for $25,000. Still, “the Prince really enjoyed his stay,” as Robert Freeman recalled, and “that was good news” for Salem. Afterward, in Salem’s “impulsive way,” he immediately asked McCarthy if he could buy the entire property. According to Freeman, Salem thought he could use the place “to do some lavish entertaining of visitors from Saudi Arabia.”6

  As they neared an agreement, Salem called McCarthy from Singapore in the middle of the night to bargain. He wanted everything in the house—sheets, pillowcases, even a Chevy van of McCarthy’s that had caught Salem’s eye because it had a phone inside. When they agreed on terms—McCarthy recalled that the total price was just under $2.2 million—Salem sent an emissary with a $250,000 cashier’s check. They closed the transaction in December 1980. Salem’s accountants in New York, at Price Waterhouse, set up a Liberian corporation to purchase and hold the estate, apparently as part of Salem’s international tax-avoidance strategy. Salem dubbed this offshore holding company Desert Bear Limited. From then on, the Orlando estate became known simply as Desert Bear.7

  Neighbors around Johns Lake watched in astonishment as Salem and his royal guests transformed the place into a private amusement park. Hot air balloons lifted off the lawns and drifted over Orlando. Helicopters buffeted the palm trees as they landed inside the walls; men in suits climbed out, briefcases chained to their forearms, and jogged to the main house. Salem was friendly to his neighbors, and welcoming, and he tried to keep his parties under control, but the occasional amorous couple did tumble down the lawn, a neighbor said, and according to McCarthy, “they liked to smoke marijuana,” and they “did it openly.”8