The Bin Ladens

by Steve Coll

  The Kitty Hawk Field of Dreams lay about twenty miles northeast of San Antonio, on the edge of Schertz, an undistinguished town of several thousand people that was being slowly consumed by San Antonio’s far suburbs. A tattooed former U.S. Marine named Earl Mayfield had created the flying field about seven years earlier. He owned a small restaurant near San Antonio, took up ultralight flying as a hobby, and decided that he needed some land to fly properly. He bought a plot of fifty-seven acres off the Old Nacogdoches Road. He cleared the cedar trees himself with a bulldozer and built a few light metal hangars. One of his clients was AlamoArrow Ultralights, the local retailer whose salesman, George Harrington, had accompanied Salem all the way to Peshawar, Pakistan, in early 1985. AlamoArrow kept some rental aircraft at the field. It was a relaxed, casual place. In the open grass, Mayfield had built a small asphalt runway; it was about twenty feet wide. Nearby he had erected a snack bar with picnic tables and barbecues. The field lay flanked by scrubland—tall grasses and thorny mesquite trees bent by the wind. To the south, beyond a line of brush and trees, power line towers shaped like giant metallic scarecrows traversed a cleared right of way, running west to east; these towers rose more than one hundred feet into the air.10

  Salem arrived about two in the afternoon that Sunday with at least four or five of his traveling party. Ian Munro, his patrician British business partner, was one of them. His half-brother Tareq was also along. They ate a big breakfast. Hinson drove Salem to his house so he could wash and use the bathroom. Salem wandered into Hinson’s garage and saw a Yamaha 1500cc motorcycle. He begged to ride back on the bike. Hinson climbed on and motioned Salem to get on behind him.

  “No, I want to be on the front,” Salem said, as Hinson remembered it.

  “You will kill me!…Do you think I’m crazy?”

  “I used to own motorcycles—I had Harleys, I know how to ride a motorcycle…I will not show off or do anything.”11

  He kept his word, at least until Hinson climbed off at Kitty Hawk, after which Salem promptly roared around pulling wheelies out in the field. Finally he set the motorcycle down, found a dune buggy with big rubber tires, and raced around in that. All the while, one of the Alamo-Arrow fliers was buzzing overhead in a new single-seater model, called a Sprint, which had just a few hours of flying time on it.

  The Sprint came in for a landing and Salem decided to take a turn. A light rain had cleared, and the day had turned bright and sunny, with good visibility. The wind was blowing at about twenty to twenty-five miles per hour, brisk but not fierce. Salem emptied his pockets of coins, keys, and cigarettes, and climbed in.

  He was wearing blue jeans and a short-sleeve, blue-and-white striped shirt. He had a pair of sunglasses tied around his neck on a chain, but no helmet or visor. Salem’s eyes tended to tear up badly in the wind; according to his friend Thomas Dietrich, he sometimes skied accidentally into trees because the tears would blur his eyesight. He used the sunglasses to protect his eyes, but they were not as effective as a visor. Somebody asked Salem if he wanted a helmet, but he said no; at that time, helmets were not required.12

  He powered down the runway, tilted back, and climbed to about fifty feet. Then he leveled off and turned toward the power lines. The standard flight path at Kitty Hawk, particularly for new or inexperienced fliers, lay in the opposite direction—a westward turn, and eventually, a loop back around for a landing. It was not unusual for a veteran flier to turn southwest, however, and Salem had done this before, according to Hinson; the alternate path simply required a little more care because you had to climb quickly to an adequate height.

  Salem’s friends watched him from the snack bar and the picnic tables. One person had climbed onto the cantina roof, from where he tracked Salem’s flight with a handheld video camera. The ultralight’s engine whined steadily. There were no signs of mechanical distress—no waggling of the wings, no audible change of power, no yaw or struggle to hold altitude. Salem flew straight and level—directly into the power lines.13

  There was no sound, no pop or crackle, no shower or spark of electricity. The entangled aircraft tilted forward, nose down, as if in slow motion, and then it plummeted to the ground.

  Amid stunned shouts and gasps, somebody called 911. It was a few minutes before 3:00 P.M. Earl Mayfield jumped in a golf cart and raced toward the tree line. Hinson and others ran behind him.

  When they found Salem, he was strapped into his seat, facing down toward the ground. His eyes were open. Blood trickled from his ears. The engine had struck his head from behind. Both his legs were visibly broken.

  They pulled him free, cradling his head. They laid him on the ground and tried to perform CPR while they waited for the ambulance from the Schertz Area Facility for Emergency Services. It arrived in about fifteen minutes. Two paramedics administered oxygen and continued to perform CPR. They loaded Salem into the cabin and drove away, lights flashing and sirens wailing. One of the paramedics scribbled notes: “Unable to find a good airway…No change on monitor.” The note taker checked boxes on the ambulance run report, indicating the subject’s condition: “Convulsing…nonreactive…critical.”14

  The nearest trauma center was at the Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston, the command headquarters of the Fifth U.S. Army. It was less than fifteen minutes’ drive away.

  It was there, about an hour later, that American military doctors formally pronounced Salem Bin Laden dead.

  PART THREE

  THE GLOBAL FAMILY

  June 1988 to September 2001

  24. WRITER-DIRECTOR-PRODUCER

  THE NEWS ARRIVED in Saudi Arabia in the nighttime. King Fahd called Bakr to offer his formal condolences. Some of Salem’s friends and relatives had forecasted his death in an airplane crash, but as Mohamed Ashmawi put it, few of them imagined that he would die in a “Mickey Mouse plane.” The Bin Ladens, a second person close to them observed, had a way of experiencing such events with particular acuteness, as if they were succumbing to a collective illness. They felt Salem’s death as an overwhelming “family tragedy,” recalled Abdullah, one of his youngest half-brothers. There was also a pervasive confusion about how such an accident could have happened. Was suicide a possibility? Had he suffered an incapacitating heart attack or stroke while airborne? Had someone drugged or killed him? Conspiracy theories were commonplace in Saudi Arabia, where free discourse was forbidden and history was a narrative punctuated by genuine hidden conspiracies. Even if one presumed an accidental cause, Salem’s death marked the second time in two decades that the Bin Laden family had been decapitated by an aviation disaster with an American connection.1

  After telephone calls between Texas, Jeddah, Riyadh, and the Saudi embassy in Washington, Khalid Bin Mahfouz dispatched his private 707 to San Antonio to retrieve his friend’s body. The Bexar County Medical Examiner had taken possession of Salem’s corpse after his death; the office was required to perform an autopsy in a case of this type. Tareq and other family members pleaded with their San Antonio friends to call in local favors to minimize the autopsy’s visible effects. Once Salem’s body was returned to Saudi Arabia, it would be washed, in Islamic tradition, in the presence of Bin Laden brothers and male friends. Gerald Auerbach and Jack Hinson contacted a mortician they knew in San Antonio; he agreed to pick up Salem from the medical examiner and prepare him cosmetically for his journey home.

  Family members called Salem’s friends and relatives in Europe to say that if they wished to attend the burial and mourning services, they could converge on Geneva, where the Bin Mahfouz plane would make a stopover. When the 707 lumbered into the airport’s private aviation terminal above Lake Geneva, Yeslam was waiting, along with Shafiq, another half-brother who spent most of his time in Europe. Baby Elephant and several of Salem’s other friends and relatives were there, too.2

  Yeslam found himself gripped by paralyzing anxiety; he became so concerned about the prospect of flying with Salem’s coffin that he was unable to walk up the jet’s stairs. His siblings
tried to comfort him, but he was stricken. When the plane finally rolled away, Yeslam remained behind.3

  Ali, Salem’s estranged former rival for family leadership, and once a favorite of their father, flew to Saudi Arabia on his own private jet to pay his respects. From Jeddah, a group of relatives and friends drove to Medina to await the arrival of Salem’s body. A burial permit for Medina, where the Prophet Mohamed had also been laid to rest, required royal approval, which Fahd’s office readily provided. The group waiting at Medina’s VIP terminal called up to the air traffic control tower for word about the 707’s arrival time, just as they had always done when Salem’s private flights were due. They went outside to watch the landing. Salem often kept his friends waiting for hours, and when his jet would finally appear on the horizon, he often teased them with a touch-and-go—he descended until his wheels touched the runway, then pulled up, flew off, circled around, and landed on the second try. That night, his friends watched in astonishment as the Bin Mahfouz plane badly overshot the runway; the pilot had no choice but to pull up, fly around, and land again. The pilot later said it had been a genuine if rare error on his part; Salem’s entourage agreed that their friend’s spirit had awoken long enough to play one last practical joke on them.

  They loaded the coffin into a General Motors Corporation ambulance. The full-bearded Mahrouz was among the brothers who climbed inside; he chanted a prayer for the dead. One of Salem’s friends recalled being hoisted into the ambulance by the Bin Laden brothers, so that he could sit beside the coffin. “You haven’t left him throughout his life,” one of the brothers said. “You’re not going to leave him now.”4

  They washed the body at Mohamed Bin Laden’s former Medina home. In a gesture of respect, one of the brothers handed Khalid Bin Mahfouz the key to Salem’s coffin, so that he could initiate the washing. Afterward they wrapped his body in a shroud of green cloth, the color of dress in Paradise. The only sounds were of grief and prayer.5

  At the graveyard, in the darkness, mourners in flowing white robes and headdresses swelled and jostled. The outstretched arms of his brothers and friends carried Salem above shoulder height to a sandy ditch. As he was laid in, a man shouted and approached with the shrouded corpse of a very young girl; it was not clear who she was, or how she had died, but she had been chosen to lie in Salem’s grave at his feet, to keep him company—her soul was pure and innocent, and would comfort and protect his in the passage to afterlife.6

  Osama was among the brothers who attended Salem’s funeral. It is not clear when he arrived. He continued to travel back and forth from Afghanistan, and it is possible that he was in the kingdom at the time of Salem’s death; the Ramadan holiday, a time when the Bin Ladens often gathered together in Saudi Arabia, had ended only recently. If he was present at the burial, he would have joined Mahrouz in the rigorous prayers that believing Wahhabis offer the dead. He was certainly present through the mourning receptions that followed during the next three days. He felt closer to Salem than to any of his other brothers, according to Osama’s mother, even though they lived by such different creeds. He had regarded Salem “like a father,” she said later. “Salem’s death saddened Osama a great deal.”7

  In later years, as he held forth loquaciously about America’s alleged crimes against Islam, Osama never spoke about Salem’s death on American soil, just as he never spoke about the airplane crash caused by an American pilot that had claimed his father’s life. Did he consider the possibility of conspiracies? In Arabia, it would be far more exceptional if he did not. The available evidence about Osama’s specific reaction to Salem’s accident, however, is virtually nonexistent. His half-brother Ghalib, who visited Osama at least once near the Afghan border, did consider the possibility that a hidden plot might lie behind Salem’s death. Later that summer, Ghalib flew to Texas to inspect the Kitty Hawk Field of Dreams. He obtained a copy of the Bexar County Medical Examiner’s autopsy report, according to a family business partner. The report found that Salem had no heart disease at the time of his death and had no trace of drugs, alcohol, or other intoxicants in his bloodstream. By the partner’s account, Ghalib was relieved at these discoveries, and seemed willing to accept the autopsy’s formal conclusion, which read, “Manner of Death: Accident.” Jamal Khashoggi, who spoke regularly with Osama during this period, and who shared his Muslim Brotherhood–influenced outlook at the time, said that while he was certain Salem’s sudden death “was a big event in his life,” Osama never discussed it. Nor, according to the publicly available record, did he discuss it with other friends or journalists.8

  In Jeddah, as they had two decades earlier after their father’s passing, the sons of Mohamed Bin Laden gathered at the family compound, between the evening mahgrib and isha prayers, for formal ceremonies of condolence. Thousands of mourners flocked to the home Mohamed had built for Salem’s mother at Kilo 7 on the Mecca Road, near the headquarters of the family’s main construction company.

  This time, however, the receptions had a secondary purpose—many of those who had been close to Salem now shuffled forward to swear bayah, or fealty, to Bakr Bin Laden as the new head of the Bin Laden family. This ritual was a direct and self-conscious echo of the bayah ceremonies in Riyadh that followed the death of a Saudi king. (At the Al-Saud court, the ascending king sits in mourning and receives a line of visitors who demonstrate their loyalty and respect by kissing his shoulder, hand, or cheek.) That it would be Bakr, and not another brother, who received these gestures of obedience was a decision that had accumulated gradually within the Bin Laden family over a period of years. Salem had increasingly designated Bakr as chief of business operations, and Bakr’s central role in the Mecca and Medina renovations put him in the lead of the family’s two most lucrative and politically sensitive construction contracts. He was not the oldest living son after Salem, but he was among the most senior, and by virtue of his civil engineering degree, also among the most qualified. He was, in addition, Salem’s full brother, the guardian of his estate and his legacy, the eldest surviving son of a senior and respected widow of Mohamed. All this made him the natural choice. There is no evidence that Bakr’s anointment required any debate or deliberation within the family; it seems, rather, to have been taken more or less for granted.

  Heavily pregnant, Salem’s widow, Carrie, grieved in the company of hundreds of Saudi women at the separate but parallel female condolence receptions. She staggered through the days, and on June 15, less than three weeks after Salem’s accident, she gave birth in Jeddah to a daughter, Sama.9 More than five years earlier, Carrie had converted to Islam, fulfilling a promise she made to Salem while a passenger in his glider, which she thought was about to crash. Over the years, her decision secured her acceptance by the larger Bin Laden family. She took her new faith seriously. After her daughter’s birth, Carrie decided to embrace rather than recoil from her unexpected position as a Bin Laden widow—and she agreed to accept the Arabian and Islamic traditions this position carried.

  SALEM HAD BEEN responsible in many important respects for Osama’s rise along the Afghan frontier. He publicized Osama’s humanitarian work, contributed to his Peshawar treasury, supplied him with construction equipment, procured him weaponry, and cemented his strong relations with the Saudi royal family, which advanced Osama’s influence and credibility as a fund-raiser. With Salem’s abrupt disappearance, Osama lost an important sponsor. At the same time, he was also losing some of his sense of purpose. The cause that had drawn him to the Afghan frontier was ebbing. The Soviet Union signed the Geneva Accords in April 1988 and announced that all its forces would withdraw by early the following year. The war and the jihad would continue, since Moscow would leave behind an Afghan communist government regarded as apostate by the mujaheddin, but with blond Russians no longer pledged to serve in an enemy occupation force, the Afghan war had already drifted from righteous rebellion toward muddy civil conflict. This development had a parallel within the camps of the Arab volunteers: during the first months of 198
8, the variety and intensity of disputes among the Arabs increased.

  Osama’s personality and his habits of mind led him to hold himself above this fray. He followed his father’s example. He adapted his work and his attitude to please his mentors, even when they were in competition with one another; simultaneously, as a leader in his own right, he attracted a following that was strikingly diverse.

  When Osama returned to the Afghan frontier from Salem’s funeral, he shuttled among several homes, offices, and camps. His wives and children lived in Peshawar, and he held meetings there with followers and comrades. He occasionally joined Abdullah Azzam at his Peshawar area preaching and charitable facilities, which still drew upon Osama’s financial and rhetorical support, even though differences had arisen between them about war tactics. Osama quarreled with Azzam, but they never broke; early in 1988, the pair formed a joint camp along the Afghan border to train and house Arab fighters. Azzam’s rivals, the radical Egyptian military and police exiles led by Ayman Al-Zawahiri, controlled Osama’s other camps. He gave this Egyptian faction $100,000.10 He spread his money around. This was an instinctive tactic of balancing, drawn from the leadership examples of his father and Arabian regents, but it also reflected Osama’s embryonic philosophy of jihad—a creed that was not particularly sophisticated but that had an inherent populist appeal. All were welcome. The compulsion of jihad was a matter of individual conscience, not a consequence of group initiation. Osama saw himself as an inspirer of jihad, not a cult leader or a dictator.

  In this season of disputation, for example, one of the arguments between Osama and Azzam involved whether they should screen and select among applicants to their cause. “Abdullah Azzam wanted to choose—we do not welcome everybody,” recalled Jamal Khashoggi, who was in and out of Peshawar during this period. As an adherent of the Muslim Brotherhood, Azzam sought to recruit elite and talented followers, and train them in the Brotherhood tradition. He felt this method produced more trustworthy and rational volunteers. By contrast, “Osama believed in opening up to everybody—everybody who comes under the banner of jihad is welcome.” This disagreement marked the beginning of his formal break with the Muslim Brotherhood, which had been his ideological point of entry to politically aware Islam as a young teenager at the Al-Thaghr Model School in Jeddah. As Osama put it later, he came to think that the true community of believers originates “from many different places and regions, representing a wide spectrum of the unity of Islam, which neither recognizes race nor color; nor does it pay any heed to borders and walls.” Here, too, he was emerging into his own, but as his father’s son; his camps of racially and nationally diverse volunteers along the Afghan border increasingly resembled the diverse desert camps of olive-skinned and African construction workers he had seen in Arabia as aboy.11