The Bin Ladens

by Steve Coll

Khalil also sued in civil court. Ali-Khan hired lawyers who summoned Khalil to a conference room in a skyscraper in downtown Los Angeles for five grueling days of deposition testimony in July 1990. Ali-Khan’s lawyers grilled Bin Laden about the history of America in Motion, his outstanding loans from Banque Indosuez and other banks, his decision to pursue criminal charges at the police station—they even asked whether Khalil had a vendetta against his former employee because they had both become interested in the same woman at the Sherman Oaks office. (“No,” he answered.) One of the lawyers involved in the examination later described, in a written declaration, the scene that unfolded in the skyscraper’s conference room as the interrogation proceeded:

  At some point, Mr. Binladin claimed that I was asking the same questions over and over again…and seemed to be becoming agitated. I then asked a question and, while pondering his response to it, Mr. Binladin got out of his chair and walked around the deposition room to a spot near and behind me and then back to the general area where Mr. Finkel [his lawyer] was sitting…Mr. Grimwade made a comment on the record to the effect that the record should reflect that the witness was pacing…At that, there was a heated exchange…Mr. Binladin (at about 1:40 P.M.) broke into tears, sobbing, holding his head in his hands, with Mr. Finkel claiming on the record that I had “made” his client cry…16

  “The tears in my eyes were real,” Khalil recalled. The opposing lawyers were “disrespectful of both me and my attorney”; they made “nasty comments” and asked “questions full of innuendo”:

  The repeated questioning and harassment finally got to me…The stress relates not…to “kickbacks” or my conduct, but rather, to the continuing barrages of questioning…which are intrusive into my personal life…17

  It was enough to make a man nostalgic for shariah courts. Nor had Khalil yet discovered the limits of his aggravations.

  ABOUT SIX WEEKS AFTER Khalil’s ordeal by deposition, two officers from the Los Angeles Police Department, accompanied by a Brazilian woman, Elizabeth Borges, appeared at the door of the Bin Laden home in Brentwood. The officers asked to speak with Marta Silva and Auria DaSilva, two Brazilian women who worked as maids and nannies for the Khalil Bin Laden family. When the two women appeared, the police asked questions about the circumstances of their employment; Borges translated between Portuguese and English. The thrust of the police questioning, as Borges later put it, involved whether the maids were “unable to leave the [Bin Laden] residence and were being prevented from leaving by threats and demands that they must pay monies” to their employers.18

  Borges later explained the origins of her visit in court documents. She had been telephoned in June and told that Marta Silva “was being forced to work” for the Bin Ladens “for long hours without days off or relief, and she was not being paid for the work she was performing.” Borges agreed to contact the Brazilian consulate in Los Angeles, but when she did, she found they “would do nothing.” (In Jeddah, Khalil had been appointed Honorary Consul of Brazil, a position designed to help facilitate business between his wife’s native country and Saudi Arabia.) The consulate told Borges to contact the Los Angeles Police if she felt there was a serious problem, and she did. She acted, she wrote in a court declaration, because she believed that the Bin Ladens had “violated the constitutional rights” of their maids “by holding them in their employment against their will.” Borges claimed that the maids told her that:

  They were both required to work 18 hours a day without any breaks for breakfast, lunch or dinner…. They were never given any days off and worked seven days a week. They were never paid directly for their work either by cash or check. The conduct of Isabel Binladin was generally very rude and disrespectful to them…Their movement and ability to go outside the family compound in Jeddah or Los Angeles was very limited and restricted…[The Bin Ladens] also made statements to Ms. Silva that past employees had tried to escape and leave their job, that they were apprehended and made to pay for it in more ways than just with money…19

  After interviewing the two Brazilian women, however, the Los Angeles Police Department took no action. The two employees left the Bin Laden home the following day; according to the Bin Ladens, Borges agreed to arrange for their immediate departure by air, home to Brazil. Instead, they remained in Los Angeles.

  The Bin Ladens said they were outraged by the allegations made against them. They quickly filed a lawsuit against Borges, accusing her of helping the maids escape from their contractual employment obligations and speaking “slanderous” words in the presence of the two police officers. In their complaint, they explained that because Khalil and Isabel

  travel extensively, and because Mr. Binladin has heavy business commitments, it is necessary that they have domestic employees who travel with them to care for their five children…Ms. Silva and Ms. DaSilva agreed to accompany [the Bin Ladens] to Saudi Arabia to take care of the Binladins’ five children and perform light housework and to cook, respectively, at…various homes and vacation locales with the proviso that if they desired to terminate their employ, Ms. Silva and Ms. DaSilva would immediately return to Brazil. In reliance on these promises, [the Bin Ladens] obtained precious Saudi Arabian visas…20

  Under U.S. immigration law, the complaint continued, the Bin Ladens were responsible for keeping track of their maids “at all times.” Now that the women had disappeared, their family would suffer because they “may not be able to obtain U.S. visas for their household help in the future.” They had suffered “severe emotional distress” from the incident with the police, they wrote, and had agreed to allow the maids to leave and fly home only “in order to defuse the embarrassing situation (which could have adversely affected the Binladin children if it had continued).”21

  Borges replied that “any statements made by her to the Los Angeles Police Department…were made to protect the constitutional rights” of the two women and thus were legally privileged.22

  Borges eventually returned to Brazil; the lawsuit’s claims and counterclaims were never resolved, according to the available court file. The Bin Ladens ultimately concluded that they had had their fill of Los Angeles. Khalil agreed to purchase from Salem’s estate the Liberian corporation set up to hold Desert Bear, the Spanish-revival estate near Orlando; he paid just under $1 million, according to a person familiar with the transaction.23 The Bin Ladens sold their Brentwood home. In the future, their family would spend summer months in Florida.

  America was at times baffling and annoying, at times intrusive and insulting, but it was now an inexorable part of Khalil’s hyphenated family, Saudi-Brazilian-American. They were Bin Ladens, but their children were increasingly American influenced. Managing that balance would prove increasingly difficult.

  During that summer of 1990, the season of depositions and upstart maids and door-knocking police in Los Angeles, the allied governments of the United States and Saudi Arabia, rocked by crisis, were discovering something similar, on a parallel plane of foreign policy, oil, economics, and war. Here, too, the integrity and wealth of the Bin Laden family would be implicated—and jeopardized.

  27. THE SWISS ACCOUNTS

  ON THE NIGHT of August 6, 1990, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney led an American delegation to King Fahd’s seaside palace in Jeddah. Fahd preferred the Red Sea port to Riyadh; among other reasons, one of the astrologers he relied upon had forecasted that he might be knifed in the capital. On this particular evening, Jeddah had the additional advantage of placing the king as far from danger as possible and in position to escape Arabia quickly. Four days earlier, Saddam Hussein’s army had invaded and occupied Kuwait; the emirate’s small army had collapsed and the royal family had fled into exile. Iraqi units now seemed to be regrouping for a possible thrust at Saudi Arabia’s eastern oil fields, the largest of which lay below the Kuwaiti border, on the opposite side of the kingdom from Jeddah.

  General Norman Schwarzkopf, the senior American military commander for the Middle East, and Paul Wolfowitz, an under secretary of
defense, followed Cheney into the king’s reception hall. Fahd sat at the head of the room. Beside him was his half-brother Abdullah, now crown prince, an independent-minded man who prided himself on his warm relations with Saudi Arabia’s northern desert tribes. Several other princes and a Saudi general formed a row down one side of the room. Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, the ambassador to the United States, hovered near the king, prepared to interpret between English and Arabic. As the discussion began, Schwarzkopf kneeled on the floor to review satellite photos that showed Iraqi troop dispositions near Saudi Arabia; some of Saddam’s units, the general pointed out, were patrolling as deeply as twenty-five kilometers inside the kingdom’s sovereign territory.1

  Fahd’s government had showered Saddam with subsidies during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s—as much as $26 billion, by Fahd’s account, a tilt encouraged by the United States in its attempt to contain revolutionary Iran. All that cash had now proved to be a gossamer defense. Equally, the billions spent by the Saudi royal family on British fighter aircraft and weapons systems in the Al-Yamamah deal (which channeled hundreds of millions of dollars in fees each year to Bandar’s Washington bank accounts) had proved worthless; Saudi Arabia lacked the manpower (an army of 70,000, in comparison to Iraqi forces numbering about 2 million) and skill to even blunt, never mind defeat, an Iraqi invasion. Saddam’s incursion into Kuwait had starkly exposed the Al-Saud as rulers of a country that lacked the trained population, industrial strength, and military rigor to protect its treasure of hydrocarbons. Cheney said the United States could do the job, but its troops would have to deploy quickly and in large numbers. He promised that American forces would leave Saudi Arabia as soon as the crisis passed, or whenever Fahd ordered them to go. For his part, Fahd said that if the Americans were to deploy to the kingdom, he wanted large numbers and a serious operation. The security bargain that had long lain just below the surface of the U.S.-Saudi relationship, managed as discreetly as possible so that it would not embarrass the Al-Saud before their xenophobic people, had now been pulled into the open for all to see. America was the guarantor of Saudi Arabia’s independent existence; without that guarantee, the peninsula was vulnerable to any marauder bold or foolish enough to take it—as had been the case for centuries before the Second World War, when Arabia held no great prize but was periodically conquered nonetheless.

  Fahd spoke to Abdullah in Arabic. Bandar stopped interpreting, but Chas Freeman, the Arabic-speaking U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, followed their exchange.

  “Don’t you think there should be some consultation?” Abdullah asked, referring to the religious scholars and tribal leaders who would surely resent the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Christian and Jewish soldiers to defend the kingdom.

  “There’s no time,” Fahd said, as Freeman recalled it. “If we delay, we may end up like Kuwait. There is no Kuwait anymore.”

  “Yes, there’s a Kuwait,” Abdullah said. “There is a Kuwait.”

  “Yes, and its territory consists of hotel rooms in Cairo and Paris and London,” said Fahd.

  “I take your point,” said Abdullah.

  Fahd turned away from his half-brother and faced Cheney. “Okay,” he said simply.2

  American fighter jets and military transport planes thundered onto Dhahran’s airfields within twenty-four hours, but throughout August, American commanders later acknowledged, their intervention was something of a bluff; if Saddam had poured south from Kuwait with all his forces, he would have certainly been able to occupy some Saudi oil fields, at least temporarily. For several weeks, the kingdom’s fate seemed uncertain.

  Awkwardly, Fahd tried to consult with Islamic scholars and tribal leaders, even though it was plain that his decision to rely on Washington for rescue was irreversible. On August 14, the kingdom’s blind grand mufti, Sheikh Bin Baz, issued a fatwa officially blessing the arrival of non-Muslim troops as necessary and permissible under Islamic law. It was a document no more convincing than the sheikh’s pronouncements years earlier about Earth’s place at the center of the solar system. Even Saudis who supported Fahd’s decision could see, as Osama Bin Laden put it later, that the royal family was manipulating its salaried religious leaders “to increase its legitimacy” at a moment of crisis. The Bin Baz decree was particularly offensive, not least because it “insulted the intelligence of Muslims.”3

  Osama was certainly among those who were outraged, but his later ridicule of Fahd and Bin Baz belied the complexity of his actions and thinking at the time. He was a Bin Laden and still very much a creature of the Saudi government. He offered no public dissent that summer. Rather, he moved quickly with the rest of his family to protect his personal fortune against the possibility that the Al-Saud regime might collapse. Just as the Americans had been hedging for years against a crisis of this kind, so had the Bin Ladens. For them, too, it was a moment for decisive action, and Osama was a full participant in the family’s program of self-insurance.

  Omar and Haider Bin Laden flew to Geneva to confer with Yeslam about how to shift more of the family’s money to the safety of the Swiss banking system. The Bin Ladens had previously established accounts in a Swiss bank for a family foundation; the purpose of this foundation, established by Mohamed Bin Laden, remains unclear, but its Swiss account may have been a hard currency vehicle for overseas charity or inheritance transfers. With Yeslam’s assistance, the brothers now decided to close and liquidate that foundation, and to open a master account at a new bank, the Swiss Bank Corporation. On August 17, Omar, Haider, and Yeslam signed documents at the bank’s offices in Geneva to create sub-accounts for virtually all of Mohamed Bin Laden’s children. As Omar put it later: “Sub-accounts were set up for the benefit of each of more than fifty heirs of Mohammad Binladin, including one sub-account on behalf of Osama, and these sub-accounts were funded…with a portion of the legal inheritance of each heir.” The accounts were created, Omar acknowledged, “in response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait.”4

  On Osama’s behalf, Omar and Haider signed a “Declaration on opening an account or securities account,” as required by Swiss law. The two formally declared “as holder of the account” that “the beneficial owner of the assets to be deposited with the bank” was “Mr. Osama M. Binladin.” Someone handwrote Osama’s name into the appropriate blank. On the second page they chose the foreign currency to be used in Osama’s account: “U.S. $.”

  A second form, signed the same day, provided “full Power of Attorney” to Yeslam over the account; here the beneficiary was handwritten as “Sheikh Osama Mohamed BINLADIN.” The bank’s account form offered a choice between a kind of authority that would require Osama and Yeslam to sign all documents jointly, or one where either Yeslam or Osama would be authorized “to act severally and by their sole signature.” This latter was the approach they chose—Yeslam would be empowered to control money in the account on his own signature, without written approval from Osama. It was a sign of the coherence and confidence that persisted within the family, even amid the strains occasionally produced by Yeslam’s withdrawal to Geneva.

  On August 20, Osama’s account was funded with a deposit of $450,000—a modest portion of his inheritance, but a comfortable hedge against sudden disaster in the kingdom. That sum immediately began to earn interest at a rate of about $2,500 per month; the amount of monthly interest would vary with market rates.5

  In his later sermons, Osama equated interest-paying banking practices with usury, and he denounced them as stark violations of Islamic law. Usury, he once observed, “has been forbidden by all the religions,” yet in the United States, “you build your economy and investments on usury. As a result of this, in all their different forms and guises, the Jews have taken control of your economy.”6 That summer, however, amid his family’s panic, Osama showed no reluctance to earn interest—indeed, in his Swiss Bank Corporation account, he would soon take down more interest in a year than many Americans earned in annual salaries. It was a striking instance of his capacity for
hypocrisy—and telling that it involved money.

  THERE ARE credible accounts that Osama predicted Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait before it occurred. His high school–era friend Khaled Batarfi recalled listening to him speak at an informal luncheon diwaniyah gathering at the home of a wealthy businessman in Mecca early in 1990, when Arab news media were full of stories about Saddam’s buildup of troops on Kuwait’s borders and his bellicose claims to Kuwaiti territory. Osama urged that Saudis begin to train themselves to fight Saddam, as he and his followers had done in Afghanistan. He told an illustrative story, the thrust of which was, as Batarfi paraphrased it:

  You are sophisticated, you are an engineer, you are a doctor, and suppose you send [your children] to a good school. But it is a tough neighborhood, and there are other kids who are street smart and very tough. Then your neighbor comes to you and says, “Lend me money or I will send my kids after your kids.” You know he is never going to pay the money back. There is a limit to what you can give him. So it’s about time that you train your kids because you are going to have stand up eventually. Saddam has all these tough kids. He has these soldiers who are poor, unemployed, they are motivated and tough. I’m saying, Let us take advantage of our training in Afghanistan. We have gotten tough. But we have to get ready. We have to go to camps now. We have to get tough now. Otherwise, King Fahd won’t be ready.7

  This was certainly Osama’s sense of himself in 1990: An international Islamic guerrilla leader who worked in service of his king—someone so loyal to the Al-Saud that he even tried to think ahead on their behalf. Nor were Iraq and Afghanistan the only frontiers where Osama imagined that he played this role.

  Even before his return to Saudi Arabia in late 1989, he had provided money to support Islamist rebels fighting against the weakening communist government of South Yemen, the half of divided Yemen that controlled the Bin Laden family homeland in the Hadhramawt. The political and religious equation in Yemen as the Cold War ended was very complex. Ali Abdullah Saleh, an army officer and Sanhan tribesman who had come to power in a coup, led North Yemen; he received some support from Saudi Arabia—primarily because he was not a communist—but his relationship with the Al-Saud was not smooth. He did, however, share Saudi Arabia’s antipathy toward South Yemen’s Soviet-backed regime. As global communism teetered during 1989, confronted by democratic rebellions from China to Europe, South Yemen’s government looked vulnerable. From Afghanistan, where he had become close to a number of Yemeni volunteers to that war, Osama saw an opportunity to extend his achievements in jihad. South Yemen’s leftist government had stripped a number of previously elite families of land and privileges, particularly in the Abyan Governate, and during the 1980s, some younger members of these families had turned to international radical Islam as an ideology of resistance. One of the Abyan leaders, Tariq Hasan Al-Fadli, founded a group called Al-Jihad. Al-Fadli said later that his South Yemen group “did have external support…through the grace of Almighty God and our venerable Sheikh Osama Bin Laden, may God protect him…He funded everything.” Bin Laden supported other Yemeni Islamists as well.8