The Bin Ladens

by Steve Coll

  WEALTH, MOBILITY, and Salem’s secularism carried the Bin Ladens to far cultural shores, but they remained, at heart, a conservative and Arabian clan. Among other things, their honor was a business imperative; their wealth depended upon the patronage of the Saudi royal family, and so they lacked the political discretion to live entirely as they pleased, as some of the much larger Al-Saud family seemed to think they could do. Indeed, behavior that many Bin Ladens might find racy or challenging, such as Saleha’s marriage to Paul, could look timid or downright square alongside the unrestrained European cavorting of some Al-Saud princes—debauchery that Salem and his friends sometimes facilitated, in Salem’s role as a royal concierge.

  Salem prided himself on never sleeping with prostitutes. This required some fortitude because he arranged periodically for the supply of professional women to entertain Saudi guests at parties he hosted or arranged in England and elsewhere, according to several European friends and employees who were involved. The women were so numerous that they sometimes arrived together on a bus. As cohosts, those in Salem’s entourage were charged with promoting cheerful demeanors among the women (“I paid you to smile!”). But apart from their substantial compensation, the girls had little reason to be pleased. The guests could be crude, drunken, and unattractive. Thomas Dietrich recalled one event for visiting Saudis at Offley Chase when he stood eavesdropping on some young German prostitutes who did not know he could understand them as they spoke with one another. “They were bitching like hell” about the guests, he recalled. “‘Look at this guy—I hope he doesn’t pick me.’ I mean, they were just saying what you would imagine they would say.”13

  For many Saudis, Western vice confirmed the precepts of Arabian misogyny, and for many Americans and Europeans, Arabian vices confirmed the precepts of Western racism. “The awe that America commanded, with its skyscrapers, freeways, magnificent telephone system and raw riches, was diminishing as Saudi Arabia casually acquired all of these things with great rapidity,” wrote Peter Theroux, an American who lived in Riyadh during this period. “The Saudis saw themselves as our absolute superiors. The secular chaos of America’s elections, boisterous press and above all the public sex culture, seemed, except in small doses, to disgust them.”14 It was, in this context, easier and certainly more acceptable for wealthy Saudis to buy sex while visiting the West than it was for them to enter into the mixed marriages and bicultural family life that might produce, over time, integration or even assimilation—as occurred with some frequency, for example, among Pakistani, Iranian, Egyptian, and Palestinian émigrés to the West. The obsession with bloodlines among many Saudis, particularly those from the dominant Nejd region, along with their wealth and deep conservatism, kept them apart. Salem’s fantasy of a United Nations (or at least a Security Council) of intercultural marriages was exceptional, and even it presumed the primacy of inflexible and patriarchal Saudi family law.

  Whether the subject was sex or shoes, it was almost impossible for a Saudi prince or merchant to travel in the West without being aware, from hour to hour, of the centrality of money in his interactions with Americans and Europeans. Salem managed this by surrounding himself with genuine Western friends who had earned his trust over time; he provided them with enough money and all-expenses-paid vacations to secure their loyalty, but not so much cash that they would likely consider leaving his side. Some of those who attached themselves to Salem, such as the Swedish mechanic Bengt Johansson or the American pilot Gerald Auerbach, had no great appetite for wealth or what it could purchase, and they stayed with Salem the longest. Others in the entourage, such as Jim Bath, seemed much more passionate about making money, and they faded from the inner circle more quickly. It seemed that just about every American who won a retainer from Salem soon pitched him on a side business deal. The ideas came at him like random, subliminal images flashing on the movie screen of a demented experimental psychiatrist—a strip mall in San Antonio, a mining deal promoted by the relative of a powerful senator from Louisiana, a cowboy movie that would be shot in the Philippines. If a particular proposal appealed to Salem’s whimsy, he might say yes, even if it did not fit in his family’s business lines. Salem told his flight instructor, Don Sowell, for example, that he shared ownership of a luxury apartment in London with the boxer Muhammad Ali. If the idea bored Salem (as the cowboy movie’s story line did), he would dismiss it with a wave of his hand.15

  “These people are not great,” Johansson recalled telling Salem, speaking about the deal promoters who swirled around him.

  “I know, Bengt,” Salem answered. “I am stealing more from them than they are stealing from me.”16

  Once, cruising at forty-one thousand feet in a LearJet above North Africa, Salem worried aloud about whether his girlfriends cared for him only because he had money, recalled his pilot Jack Hinson. Salem paused, and then discarded the conundrum: “As long as I’m happy.”17

  HE COULD NOT BEAR to be alone as he reached middle age. He turned forty in 1985 or 1986—he did not know either the year or the date of his birth, and he often used Valentine’s Day as a sentimental proxy. His need for constant companionship grew increasingly awkward. When he used the bathroom, for example, he kept the door open and demanded that his friends sit nearby and talk to him as he sat. If no members of his entourage were around, he called down to the front desk and offered to pay for a maid or maintenance man to come to his room, to sit outside the bathroom and keep him company while he did his business.18

  His sleeping habits were no less unusual. When he shared a house with his friend Mohamed Ashmawi in Riyadh, he could not bear to sleep alone, and so he would wander in and climb into bed with Mohamed—there was no hint of sexual purpose, just a need for company. When Mohamed had a girlfriend living with him, he would sneak into the room in the night and announce, “I’m going to sleep with you,” Ashmawi recalled.

  “I said, ‘You should be shy—I have my girlfriend.’ He said, ‘Let her sleep next to you and I’ll sleep next to you on the other side—you be in the middle.’”

  “No, Salem.”

  “Let’s try it. It might work.”

  “Go sleep in your room.”19

  He would finally leave, Ashmawi said, but then Salem slept fitfully and with his eyes open. He spent long days and evenings lying in bed, but he often only slept in fifteen-or thirty-minute intervals. He used all his bedrooms as a combination of office, family room, and playhouse. He routinely held meetings with foreign executives from companies such as Firestone while lying in bed; in the middle of a negotiation, he might tuck his head down and nod off, then just as suddenly jerk back awake.

  These restless habits took a visible toll on his health. His body grew soft, his legs had atrophied from lack of exercise, and his eyes sagged and darkened so much that he looked at times like a raccoon. He hardly ever walked—cars drove him from home to airport terminal, and then across the tarmac to his plane, and then from his plane to the next terminal, and so on, until he reached his next bed. Bengt worried that Salem’s legs would soon fail him altogether, and he tried to implement a regimen of no more car rides between airport terminals and airplanes—if they at least walked across every tarmac, he said, perhaps Salem would gain back some leg muscle strength.

  Sleeplessness exacerbated Salem’s temper, which could be volcanic. His outbursts usually passed quickly, and left him feeling guilty and sheepish, but particularly as his fatigue accumulated, he could succumb to brief rages. He might wordlessly walk back to the cabin of one of his airplanes and strike one of his brothers, then return and sit down without explanation. He might shout or berate a pilot or even a friend in his entourage, although with them he was very rarely physical. On two or three occasions, according to his friends, he allowed himself to drink beyond his limit and lost all control. Over the course of one particularly memorable and frightening night in Dubai during the late 1980s, Salem smashed up a Sheraton Hotel bandstand, broke a drum over a band member’s head, threatened his friends with viol
ence, and created such ugly scenes in the hotel lobby that his friend from boarding school, Mehmet “Baby Elephant” Birgen, finally called a doctor to sedate him. In the morning, Salem said he couldn’t remember a thing.20

  He speculated freely about his own death. In Cannes, around the time that he was developing his proposal to marry his four girlfriends, he sat with his Texas attorney Wayne Fagan and Baby Elephant. Salem mused about how he would react if he discovered that he had cancer or some other serious illness.

  “You know what I’d do?” he asked, as Fagan recalled it. “I’d get in my MU-2, and I’d go out and I would find the highest cloud in the sky. And I would climb to the top of that cloud. And I would shut the engines off. I wouldn’t have chemotherapy.”

  The room was silent. Salem looked over at Baby Elephant.

  “You’re my closest friend, so I’d take you with me—I’m not going alone!”21

  23. KITTY HAWK FIELD OF DREAMS

  IN THE YEARS following his service in Miami as Bakr’s guardian, Baby Elephant charmed his way through debutante society in Dallas and Moët-fueled nightlife in Geneva. He moved into the jewelry trade, met the actor Sean Connery, and opened a London store in partnership with him; they called it Bond Street Jewelry. Mehmet chased women even more energetically than Salem, and because of his broad shoulders and his brooding dark eyes, he often had success. He and Salem made a pact that if one ever settled down and married, the other would do so as well, but the agreement never seemed likely to come into force. At one stage, Mehmet considered retiring to his native Turkey to write a book about the art of loving women. Instead, following several heartbreaks and financial reversals, he moved to Saudi Arabia. His work was often an extension of Salem’s concierge services. It did have an appealing variety; Mehmet could regale his friends with surreal stories about the whims and peccadilloes of the wealthy Gulf businessmen he looked after during their travels in Europe and America.

  In late June 1987, he was in Miami having dinner with the family of his Venezuelan girlfriend, Margarita, when Salem telephoned. As Mehmet later described the conversation for his friends, it went like this:

  “This Saturday, I’m marrying Carrie,” Salem announced.

  “Oh, mabruk. Finally, you’re marrying—she cornered your ass.”

  “Yeah, Margarita cornered your ass, too.”

  “No, nobody cornered my ass.”

  “I’m telling you, she cornered your ass—because you’re going to marry her.”

  “Come on, Salem.”

  “No, no, Baby Elephant—you promised me. You’re going to do exactly what I tell you. If you don’t want to marry Margarita, I have two Egyptian girls here, come and have a look at them. They’re not bad. Marry one of them.”

  Mehmet put the phone down. “Margarita, this Saturday, we’re getting married,” he said.

  They flew the next day to London; Salem sent a car to retrieve them from the airport. When Mehmet hurriedly invited his only sister to the wedding, she asked, “If Salem says you’re going to kill yourself, you’re going to kill yourself?”1

  Bin Laden family and friends converged on London from several continents. Salem put his guests up in suites at the Grosvenor House hotel on Park Lane and arranged for limousines to shuttle them to and from Offley Chase. He had chosen July 4, 1987, and as ever, he was fortunate—the skies were clear and the sun shined magnificently through the afternoon. The atmosphere at the estate blended the elegance of a 1930s country house with Ringling Brothers festivity. A line of antique automobiles rolled into the driveway, ferrying the wedding party. In a field beyond the mansion billowed a hot air balloon with green, red, yellow, and purple stripes, its basket open to offer rides to the 250 guests. A helicopter parked on the grass nearby, also available for rides. Clowns, snake handlers, and acrobats wandered among grand white tents pitched on the lawns.2

  Salem donned a Saudi thobe for a brief traditional ceremony, but for much of the afternoon, he and Baby Elephant wore matching black business suits, white shirts, and plain maroon ties. Carrie wore a long-sleeved white bridal gown and a tiara fashioned from white daisies. At dinner, served beneath a white tent, Salem and Carrie sat with Baby Elephant, Margarita, and Salem’s two children, Sara and Salman.

  Salem’s former wife, Sheikha, attended with her second husband, an Austrian diplomat she had met in Jeddah, a match that signaled her modern, independent-minded outlook. Randa, too, arrived with her new husband. All in all, about twenty of Salem’s sisters and brothers came, a self-selecting group who were comfortable enough to circulate in England wearing business suits and dresses, in a setting without gender segregation and teeming with Europeans and Americans. The turnout at such an important event—the wedding of the family’s leader to an Englishwoman—measured the size of the Bin Ladens’ Western-leaning caucus at about half of Mohamed’s fifty-four children.

  Salem offered a sentimental speech about his friendship with Baby Elephant, and how they had pledged to take this passage into matrimony together. That night, as the music died down, the two betrothed couples climbed into cars and rode a few minutes to the Luton Airport, where they boarded one of Salem’s jets and flew to Bristol for a double-dating honeymoon night in a nearby hotel, and then on to the South of France and Germany.

  His friends understood, of course, that Salem would never grow up entirely, but after so many years of flying hard on the edge, he seemed at last to be trying to settle and restore himself a little. Among other things, he desired more children. Three months after the wedding, Carrie was pregnant.

  SALEM CAMPED in the Saudi desert with Fahd the following winter. The mid-1980s had been a difficult period for the Bin Laden construction business in Saudi Arabia because falling oil prices crimped payment schedules and new project launches. Renovation projects in Medina provided some ballast, but according to Bengt Johansson, the desert sojourn of early 1988 produced a particularly big breakthrough when the king committed to a number of lucrative projects, including a massive renovation in Mecca, to follow on the work in Medina. Another individual close to Salem recalled that he was buoyant about these contracts; he instructed this friend to set up new Swiss accounts to ensure that Salem and his family banked a more reliable share of the proceeds than he had managed to do in the past.3

  At the same time, however, two individuals who worked closely with Salem recalled separately that he was haunted that same winter by a large international business transaction, involving bartered oil sales in the spot markets, which had gone very badly, causing Salem a substantial loss. One of these people recalled that the deal involved the acquisition by the Saudi government of commercial airliners from Boeing Corporation; the other believed that the deal may have concerned arms shipments to Afghanistan from China and Eastern Europe. In any event, by both of these accounts, Salem felt that he had been let down financially by his partners in the deal, and he was unusually angry and gloomy about what had happened.4

  In mid-April, Salem vacationed in Greece with Carrie and his two children. A week later, he flew to America with his two half-brothers, Tareq and Shafiq. Salem had purchased a Hawker Siddeley jet, the same model his father had owned at the time of his death two decades earlier. Among other projects, Salem oversaw the remodeling of its interior by an American company. He hopped back and forth across the Atlantic in May.5 Late that month, he called his former girlfriend, Lynn Peghiny, in Orlando; he had not spoken to her in about a year.

  “I’m going to be in Orlando, and I’d love to see you and take you to dinner—and your family is invited,” he told her, as Lynn recalled it.6

  She called up several of her sisters, who all lived nearby, and they met Salem at a little Italian restaurant a few nights later. Lynn learned about his marriage and also that Carrie was pregnant, so far along now that she could no longer travel. Salem and his entourage were all headed for Texas to attend the wedding of Anthony Auerbach, Gerald’s only son.

  Salem brought his guitar to the Italian restaurant. He ran thro
ugh his favorites and sang boisterously. He remained enamored of the most familiar American standards. “You Are My Sunshine” was one of his very favorites, and he belted it out that night.

  He seemed, as Lynn Peghiny recalled it, “just so happy.”7

  ON SATURDAY, MAY 28, 1988, Salem joined about 250 guests at the Auerbach wedding, which was held at the Officers Club at Lackland Air Force Base, outside San Antonio. The Cone Sisters, three platinum blondes who sang big band standards, provided the entertainment, but of course, when they were on break, Salem and his pilot friend Don Kessler took over their instruments and performed. During the reception, Salem stood before the crowd and ran through a comedy routine that was by now familiar to regular guests at Bin Laden weddings. He announced that he had written a commemorative poem for the occasion. Then he pulled a roll of inscribed toilet paper out of his pocket, explaining that in the bathroom, “I do my best work.”8

  Late the next morning, Sunday, Salem called his friend Jack Hinson from his midmarket hotel along Interstate 410. He was trying to figure out how to spend the day.

  “The Thunderbirds are flying,” Hinson told him, as he recalled it, referring to the air force’s precision-flying demonstration team.

  “I’ve seen the Thunderbirds,” Salem said.

  Hinson said he was going over to the field where he kept some ultralights, eat a little breakfast, and maybe do some flying.

  “What do they have for breakfast?” Salem asked

  “They have ham and eggs, fresh ham and eggs, and fresh tomatoes,” Hinson said. Teasing, he added, “You don’t eat none of that ham.”

  Salem knew the place; he had flown there several times before. “We’re going to come out,” he said, according to Hinson. As for the breakfast, Salem joked, “You tell everybody with me it’s beef…I know I’m going to hell anyway.”9