The Bin Ladens

by Steve Coll

“It was obvious in the way that he was telling stories, that he was trying to create a drive to bring in more, to use the media for attracting more Arabs, recruiting more Arabs to come to Afghanistan,” recalled Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist who was one of the first to interview Osama after the Jaji campaign. “I liked his enthusiasm.” Osama’s speaking style in this period was “like a university professor…like if he is at the head of the table of the political committee of this party or that party.” Yet his memories of the peril he felt at Jaji were florid, infused with a sense of fatalism and surrender to God’s will.10

  “We sometimes spent the whole day in the trenches or in the caves until our ears could no longer bear the sound of the explosions around us,” Osama told Khashoggi:

  War planes continually shrieked by us and their crazy song of death echoed endlessly. We spent the days praying to God Almighty. Despite the massive Russian onslaughts, one of us had to come out from our shelter regularly to see the enemy’s movements…Each time, we were able, by the grace of God, to inflict a crushing defeat on the Russians…It was God alone who protected us from the Russians…Reliance upon God is the main source of our strength and these trenches and tunnels are merely the military facilities God asked us to make. We depend completely on God in all matters.11

  Around this time, Osama permitted an Egyptian filmmaker, Essam Deraz, to follow him and document the movement he was building. Deraz helped to crystallize the themes that would later shape Osama’s legend—a rich man who lived like the poor, a socially advantaged man who was prepared to sacrifice everything for his religion, a fighter who would not waver in the face of death. “I saw him with my own eyes on the battlefield,” Deraz said later. “He was in the middle of the fighting. Being a rich man, no matter what he was like, people of course looked at him as a financier, just a man with money. After the battle of Jaji, he was looked upon as a military man who deserved to be the leader.”12

  This, at least, was the view that filmmaker and the other early Bin Laden publicists promoted; combined with Osama’s quiet charisma, and his ability—common in the Saudi court circles from which he had emerged—to avoid giving offense even to his adversaries, it would prove to be enough.

  He was emerging now from the shadow of his mentor, Abdullah Azzam. They quarreled over Osama’s plans to group Arabs together in their own separate military encampments; Azzam believed firmly that they should insert themselves into mixed militias, alongside the Afghans, where they could share the war’s burdens and proselytize to Afghan fighters whose own religious scholars had been killed off by the communists. “Bin Laden sought to pamper Arab fighters,” Azzam’s wife later complained. “Even their food was different from that of the Afghan mujaheddin. Bin Laden used to bring them special foodstuff in containers from Saudi Arabia.”13

  These tensions complicated Osama’s position, but he was careful; he and Azzam remained cordial. By late 1987, their global fundraising and recruitment network included offices in Brooklyn and Tucson in the United States, as well as in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere. As this worldwide retail network spread, it was not in Osama’s interest to precipitate a debilitating split.

  Osama’s own access to money remained unrivaled. His contributors included Salem’s friend Khalid Bin Mahfouz. Sometime before May 1988, Bin Mahfouz “was approached for a contribution to the Afghan resistance by Salem Bin Laden,” according to a statement by his attorneys. “Consistent with many other prominent Saudi Arabians, and in accordance with U.S. government foreign policy at that time, Sheikh Khalid Bin Mahfouz recalls making a donation of approximately $270,000. This donation was to assist the U.S.-sponsored resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and was never intended nor, to the best of Sheikh Khalid Bin Mahfouz’s knowledge, [was it] ever used to fund any extension of that resistance movement in other countries.” Bin Mahfouz did not donate the money “with the intention” that it be used to purchase arms, his attorneys said. Osama’s fundraising in Saudi Arabia “emphasized the need for humanitarian support (that is, food, shelter, medical supplies) for the Afghan resistance and the Afghan populations under their control that were subject to Soviet attacks…The financial needs of the Afghan resistance were, in fact, greater for these purposes than for weapons, which were being freely supplied by the U.S. Government.”14

  Osama spread his money and his favor around, some to Azzam, some to the rival Egyptian faction in Peshawar. By this signature method of accommodative Bedouin leadership, he gradually bound a loose coalition of multinational Arab volunteers to his undeclared leadership. As Azzam’s son-in-law put it: “I think Osama started to believe in himself.”15

  22. THE PROPOSAL

  SALEM, TOO, dreamed of an idyll. His vision did not revolve around war or martyrdom, however; it involved the women in his life. By 1985, as he approached forty, Salem had approximately five regular girlfriends—one American, one German, one French, one Danish, and one English. He used his money and pilots to weave them in and out of his itineraries. They swirled around Salem and one another like airplanes in an intricate air traffic control pattern; they brushed against one another now and then, but rarely collided. Occasionally he installed girlfriends on two different floors of the same hotel, each unaware of the other’s presence. One or two believed they were his only love; the others knew better.

  Salem developed a bold plan to resolve this state of affairs. It began as a friendly bet between Salem and King Fahd, Bengt Johansson recalled. Salem told Fahd that he could persuade four young European and American women—“normal family girls”—to marry him simultaneously, as permitted by Islamic law. Fahd said he was crazy, that he could never pull it off. Perhaps the king believed this; perhaps he also understood, as Johansson put it, that if you told Salem he could not do something, “then he was for sure doing it.”1

  Lynn Peghiny, the American pianist from Orlando, had returned to Florida from her adventure with Salem in Pakistan when he called to invite her to London. She flew over, but nobody came to meet her at the airport, so after some confusion, she took a taxi to the Carlton Tower Hotel in Belgravia. She went shopping, and when she returned, she found a handwritten note addressed to “Lin.” It read: “I came by to see you. I feel a little guilty, and I even went looking in the shops for you. I’ll call you sometime.” It was signed “S.”2

  He did call and arranged to pick her up, but when she arrived at his brick-walled estate at Offley Chase, she found two other young women already there. Lynn knew that Salem dated others, and she had never been particularly put out about it. Still, she was not sure what to make of this. The two other women were both named Caroline; one was French (“Caroleen”), the other English (“Caroline”).

  Caroline of France had dark eyes and thickly curled black hair that wrapped around her cheeks. She lived, as it turned out, not far from Cannes, in a house that Salem had purchased for her and her mother. She had been dating Salem for more than a year.

  Caroline of England was Caroline Carey, then about twenty-six years old. She had a thin, angular face with high cheekbones, chestnut hair, and a somewhat regal affect. She had grown up in Kensington, London, with her half-brother, Ambrose, and their mother, Anne Carey. Her family lineage touched the English aristocracy, if lightly. Caroline’s father, Simon Henry Carey, had not married her mother. Ambrose had also been born out of wedlock, to Anne and David Queensberry, the Marquis of Queensberry. Salem had met Caroline in Hyde Park during the early 1960s, when she was just a toddler. He came to London on school breaks and spotted the Carey family nanny in the park; he thought the nanny was cute and tried to ingratiate himself by playing with the children. Soon he was a regular guest for tea at the Carey residence. As the years passed, he fell out of touch, but he resurfaced during the mid-1980s; when he and Caroline were reacquainted, they began to see each other. Like Salem’s other girlfriends, she was his junior by about fifteen years.3

  Lynn greeted the two Carolines at Offley Chase. She deduced that Salem had convened som
e sort of girlfriend summit, but apparently they did not yet have a quorum. Anna from Germany had yet to arrive, and Salem asked a pilot friend to take one of his jets, fly over, and bring her back. Lynn decided to go along, to pass the time—“It was like taking a taxi somewhere.”4

  Anna, it turned out, was a very thin, blond woman, even younger than the others, whom Salem had met in a bar at an Austrian ski resort. She had a salaried job near Cologne but traveled often with Salem; he had taken her once to Medina, a city normally off limits to non-Muslims. She was far from imposing in appearance, but when he was with his male friends, Salem sometimes referred to her as his “German tank.”

  When Anna and Lynn arrived back, Salem settled on a couch in his living room with all four women. He summoned his most earnest demeanor. He explained that since boyhood, he had been raised in a culture where it was common for men to marry several Arabian wives and then live all together on a family compound.

  “But that is not my dream,” Salem said, as Lynn recalled it. “My dream is to have four Westernized women—that has always been my dream and my fantasy. So I picked you four. You would just make my dream come true.”5

  He outlined the plan he had refined over several months. It was not a coincidence that each girl he had selected was from a different country. Indeed, his vision was to build in Jeddah a new Bin Laden family estate that would resemble the United Nations.

  The compound would have four houses. Over one would fly an American flag, over a second a German flag, over a third a French tricolor, and over the fourth a British Union Jack. Each wife would have a car parked outside, a model from her home country—a Mercedes for Anna, a Rolls-Royce for Caroline of England, and so on. They would each have a home in their native countries, too—Salem already owned luxury properties in America, England, and France.

  As Salem spoke, Lynn smiled to herself and thought, “I get gypped—I don’t want a Corvette or a Cadillac.”

  Salem kept talking, trying to sell them. He knew they might feel trapped by the prospect of life in Saudi Arabia, so he had come up with an escape clause. He said that if there were children from any of the four marriages, those children would have to remain in the kingdom and be raised there in Saudi tradition. However, if no children were involved, then if any of the women were unhappy after one year, he would give them $100,000 and they could return home. He hoped, however, that they would all be happy together for a long time.

  “I would just take turns going from home to home and we would all be friends,” he said, as Lynn remembered it.

  Lynn found herself thinking, “Hmmm…That doesn’t sound too bad.” But then she would scold herself silently, worrying that if she left after a year no American man would ever marry her, and also, in any event, perhaps “I’d be selling my soul.” But then, on the other hand: “What the heck?” She was young and open-minded, and she cared for Salem, who had been very good to her.6

  The conversation went on for some time. They maintained a civil tone. Caroline of France seemed open to the idea, Lynn thought. Caroline of England—Salem called her “Carrie”—was cool but enigmatic. Anna, however, was clearly unhappy. She rolled her eyes. She seemed the most emotional about the revelation that Salem wanted more than just her. The more upset she became, the more Lynn began to think this wasn’t going to work after all. Finally, Anna walked out.

  “I’m in trouble,” Salem reported when he called a friend in America after the meeting. “They all got mad.”7

  That was an exaggeration. Lynn stayed that night and played Chopin. The French Caroline returned home, but Carrie stayed on, and a few days later, Lynn flew with her and Salem to Cairo on a holiday. They went from there to Saudi Arabia, and then to a Greek island, where they met Salem’s two children from his earlier marriage and went sailing on a yacht. Gradually, on this trip, Lynn began to conclude that Salem “favored Carrie…They were more connected.”

  Lynn flew home; some months later, Salem asked her to Jeddah. They spent some time together, and then Salem said what they were both were thinking: “I don’t know if this is going to work.”

  “That’s fine,” Lynn said. “I’ve had a wonderful year.”

  “We’ll always be friends,” Salem told her. “I’ll always keep in touch. I’ll always make sure—if you ever need anything.”8

  Lynn admired his generosity but did not want to take advantage of him. People who worked for Salem encouraged her to ask him for a house in Florida—after all, Caroline of France had gotten a house—but she declined.

  They went their separate ways. Caroline Carey, Lynn could see, would be the last girlfriend standing.

  SOME OF SALEM’S brothers and sisters searched, as he had, for forms of marriage that would synthesize modernity and tradition, but they hewed closer to convention. The beliefs and practices of Mohamed Bin Laden’s daughters contrasted almost as greatly as those of his sons; they were just much better hidden from view. In Jeddah, Sheikha and Rafah covered themselves in black abayas, threw themselves into Islamic study, and abjured birthday parties for their children, in the belief that such parties were forbidden by the tenets of their faith—birthdays were a Christian rite, and thus haram, or “forbidden.” Another group of daughters—Huda, Randa, and Mona—still jetted frequently around Europe to shop or across the Atlantic for spring skiing in Aspen with Salem. If they wanted to consider dating, they had to operate clandestinely and be willing to shoulder considerable risk; otherwise, they could wait for Salem to arrange or bless a traditional marriage to a respectable Arab professional. Like Mohamed’s sons, as they reached their thirties, some of these women became more outwardly religious and visited Europe less frequently.9

  A few followed Randa in pursuit of independent careers. Salem enrolled his half-sisters Raedah and Saleha in American schools specializing in interior design; after they completed their training, he said, they could work on palace projects for the Saudi royal family. None of these women, even the most ambitious, could free herself as easily from Saudi patriarchy as could her brothers, however.

  Several of Mohamed’s daughters suffered divorces under inflexible Saudi laws that deprived them of the right to live with their children. Najiah, a mother of four, lost custody of her children in Jeddah when her husband divorced her. Carmen Bin Laden once asked Najiah why she didn’t fight back; Najiah looked at her as though she were the “village idiot,” Carmen recalled. Najiah eventually escaped to Los Angeles, where she took flying lessons, became an accomplished pilot and was noted by some of her American friends for the very high speeds at which she routinely drove on streets and highways.10

  Randa remained the most untraditional of Mohamed’s daughters—now both a licensed medical doctor and a pilot, as comfortable in the Austrian ski resort of Zell am See as in Cairo or Jeddah. Her relatively daring and visible life enjoyed Salem’s full protection and oversight, however, and so it carried little risk of censure from the family’s conservative wing.

  She was approaching thirty. Although it would mean an end to their special relationship, Salem decided it was time for Randa to marry, and he gave his blessing to a suitable Egyptian groom who would later work as a manager for the Bin Laden companies in Jeddah. Salem rented the ballroom of a luxury hotel in Cairo, paid for Randa’s American friends to fly to Egypt first-class, and staged a gala celebration. He even flew out the American doctors who had performed his hemorrhoid operation. Before the event, a cluster of brothers and sisters donned blue jeans and joined Randa’s American friends on a tour of their half-brother Khalid’s Thoroughbred horse farms in the Egyptian countryside.

  When the wedding day arrived, laced white tablecloths draped the tables, and the couple sat in fluted, high-backed white chairs. Several of Randa’s half-sisters served as bridesmaids. Some were veiled, others not; they wore peach chiffon dresses and gold headbands. The men dressed in black tuxedos. Osama was not among them. In a bittersweet moment, Salem gave the bride away. A few hours later, on stage, he sang and carried on, exuberan
t as ever.11

  AMONG SALEM’S half-sisters, it was Saleha, the apprentice interior designer, who most severely tested the family’s boundaries of decorum.

  Paul Piccirillo was an Italian interior designer and artist, about fifty years of age. He met the Bin Ladens through Salem’s New York partner Robert Freeman. Around the time that Saleha, who was about twenty years his junior, completed her studies at a design school in Houston, the Bin Ladens were busy on a number of demanding palace projects in Saudi Arabia; Piccirillo worked on some of these, as well as on the Jeddah home of Salem’s former wife, Sheikha. Several involved work on King Fahd’s own residences and required extensive travel to inspect and review rare silks for bedding and window treatments at Scalamandre in New York; custom-made furniture in Valencia, Spain; and chandeliers hand-crafted in Venice, Italy. Salem did not permit his sisters, even those who were professional designers, to travel abroad without either a female chaperone or one of a several older and trusted male business partners. One night in Paris, however, while on chaperone duty with Saleha, Bob Freeman went to bed early. He failed to notice that Paul and Saleha were paying particularly close attention to each other. While he slept, they “talked all night long and fell in love,” as Bob’s wife, Gail Freeman, recalled it.

  In the ensuing months, Paul and Saleha continued to see each other. Eventually Salem found out; naturally, he blamed Freeman. “We’ve got to do something about this,” he warned. “This is just a tragedy.” There were rumors, Gail Freeman recalled, that some of “the brothers were going to go kill” Saleha for dishonoring the family by falling for an older European.12

  Salem agonized and fumed, and eventually he gave in. He quietly arranged for the couple to marry; they moved to a small town on the Mediterranean coastline. It would take years before Paul was fully welcomed by the family, according to the Freemans, who felt that Paul was conspicuously shunned at Randa’s wedding. The couple held together, however, and gradually Bakr and other influential brothers accepted them.