The Bin Ladens

by Steve Coll

  It was a testament to Bakr’s temperament that his employees rarely left him unhappy. He was usually a reasonable boss—respectful and correct. It was difficult to find former business partners or executives who felt badly used by any of the Bin Ladens, although there were some. The salaries paid by Bin Laden companies were not extravagant, but they were in line with international standards, and once housing subsidies and Saudi aversion to taxation were taken into account, a Bin Laden engineer or accountant could do fairly well. As the Bin Laden companies modernized, they took on the trappings of typical multinationals, or at least of those typical in the Arab world: Employees were assigned to various categories, depending on their rank, and issued color-coded badges—red, yellow, or blue. There were regular vacations, home leave, and even a formal severance policy for expatriate employees at the Saudi Bin Laden Group: half a month’s pay for each year of service for those remaining less than five years, and a month’s pay for each year of service after five.3

  Those who stayed long and developed personal connections to the family could expect exceptional rewards. A Pakistani on Bakr’s household staff in Jeddah had been with him so long it was rumored that he had a net worth of at least several million dollars. Bakr’s driver in London, a Pole nicknamed “Martin,” had put his children through fine British schools on the money and abandoned luxury cars he had been given by various Bin Ladens over the years. In middle age, Bakr had become something of a health nut, and Martin eventually found a Polish-born personal trainer and masseur who accompanied him on his travels, worked him out, and kept his muscles loose. Perhaps the most remarkable case of an accidental fortune in Bakr’s entourage belonged to Nur Bayoun, the Lebanese travel agent who had served as an informal guardian to some of the Bin Laden boys during the early 1960s. After civil war erupted in Lebanon, Bayoun was invited to Jeddah. He won a luxury Bulgari jewelry franchise in Saudi Arabia; the attractiveness of owning such a business in the kingdom can be readily imagined, and Bayoun became exceptionally wealthy. He eventually married a young woman who seemed to be about half his age and who traveled on vacations with the Bin Laden family draped in what appeared to be two to three million dollars’ worth of Bulgari jewelry.4

  Apart from Osama, the primary source of concern in Bakr’s world seemed to be his relationship with the Al-Saud. All the confidence and swagger he had built up in the years since Salem’s death could vanish the instant a prince walked in the room. In the confines of his own majlis, he was a sheikh among sheikhs, but in the royal courts of Riyadh, he remained just an overachieving Yemeni, vulnerable to the whims of the genealogy-conscious Al-Saud; he could never marry into their ranks or expect their full acceptance. Bakr would leap to open the door deferentially for even a minor royal. He seemed to worry chronically about the disposition of the major Al-Saud on whom his businesses relied—Crown Prince Abdullah, of course, but also Prince Salman, the governor of Riyadh, and Abdulaziz bin Fahd, the son of the disabled king. Abdulaziz had built himself a palace campus along the Red Sea in Jeddah that made Bakr’s look cramped by comparison. The Bin Ladens watched after the king’s son attentively.

  Bakr kept track of the news, and he had some contemporary political interests: For example, he was more interested in environmental issues, such as the health of the Red Sea, than many Arabians. He spoke up with friends and colleagues about the Palestinian cause, and his majlis sometimes filled with the usual Arabian talk about the unseen power of Jews in American government and media. But those who issued these harangues regarded them as commonplace, hardly controversial.

  Bakr had become a kind of Babbitt of the Hejaz by the turn of the century, an optimistic embodiment and promoter of the Saudi Arabian mainstream. The question was how durable this mainstream order would prove to be in a world that had lost communism but gained Osama. At the heart of Saudi Arabia’s dilemmas—involving national identity, foreign policy, and defense—was its partnership with America, forged at the Cold War’s dawn and rarely questioned afterward. By the time of Osama’s war declarations, Saudi elites were already searching tentatively for a new direction—one that could accommodate the American partnership (which remained essential to defend the kingdom’s oil from predators) but also enhance Saudi pride, room for maneuver, and, of course, the power of its royal family.

  IN APRIL 2000, Prince Khaled Al-Faisal, the governor of Asir Province, near the border with Yemen, published a poem in the Jeddah daily newspaper Al-Medina. A son of the former king, Khaled was a painter, falconer, and writer regarded as one of the more progressive and effective Al-Saud governors. He traveled; he counted Britain’s Prince Charles among his personal friends; and he seemed to reflect the modernizing and internationally minded wing of Saudi royal opinion. His outlook about American and European human rights and democracy campaigning, however, was less than accommodating. Khaled titled his poem “Human Rights”:

  If they accept it or do not accept it,

  We have only the rights of our Islam.

  Even if they do not declare it,

  We know their goal is to spread vice among us.

  Why do we have to accept their lies

  And abandon for their sake our traditions? 5

  Two months after he published these lines, Khaled stood with Prince Charles at the head of a reception line in Whitehall, London, the seat of British government. The occasion was the formal launch of “Painting and Patronage,” a joint art exhibition of twenty-six oil paintings by Khaled and thirty-five watercolors by Charles. Prince Khaled’s work depicted the sunlit contrasts of Asir’s barren mountains and verdant watered valley; Charles’s included scenes of Balmoral, Scotland, and a few of Asir as well, painted on his periodic private visits to the kingdom.6

  Bakr Bin Laden arrived at the gala opening, waited in the reception line, and approached the two princes; Khaled introduced him to Charles.

  “This is Mr. Bin Laden.”

  Charles arched his eyebrows. “Not the Bin Laden?”

  “No, no, it’s his brother,” Khaled hastened to explain.

  The Prince of Wales turned to Bakr and shook his hand. “What’s your brother up to these days?” he asked.7

  Bakr’s reply is not recorded. He apparently took no offense; he and Charles soon opened a cordial acquaintance. Bakr even landed on the royal Christmas card list; each December, he received warm seasonal greetings, typically accompanied by a photograph of young princes Harry and William.

  Prince Charles took seriously his role as an informal emissary to Saudi Arabia. He had developed a deep and personal interest in the Islamic world. There was something about its suspicion of Western consumerism and media culture that seemed to appeal to Charles’s own traditionalism. He sought to promote a more emphatically multireligious Britain; he wished, if he became king, to be called Defender of the Faiths. In 1993 Charles had made these inclinations conspicuous, by becoming a formal Patron of the Oxford Center for Islamic Studies. As he announced this priority, he delivered a prescient speech based upon the premise that “misunderstandings between Islam and the West…may be growing.” Predictably, he argued for mutual accommodation and respect for peaceful Islamic traditions. More interesting was his personal identification with the sources of Muslim grievance in the era of globalization:

  Some of us may think the material trappings of Western society which we have exported to the Islamic world—television, fast-food and the electronic gadgets of our everyday lives—are a modernizing, self-evidently good, influence. But we fall into the trap of dreadful arrogance if we confuse “modernity” in other countries with their becoming more like us. The fact is that our form of materialism can be offensive to devout Muslims—and I do not just mean the extremists among them…Western civilization has become increasingly acquisitive and exploitative in defiance of our environmental responsibilities. This crucial sense of oneness and trusteeship of the vital sacramental and spiritual character of the world about us is surely something important we can re-learn from Islam.8

 
In February 2001, Charles and Khaled brought “Paintings and Patronage” to the Al-Faisaliah Center in Riyadh, a glass shopping mall, office tower, and luxury hotel complex constructed by the Saudi Bin Laden Group. At a celebratory banquet, Charles sat beside Crown Prince Abdullah and Bakr Bin Laden sat at a nearby table. The Saudi press dutifully promoted the works on display and honored the kingdom’s distinguished royal guest—there was, of course, no risk of independent-minded art criticism in the newspapers that might irritate either of the royal painters.

  Also in attendance that night at the Al-Faisaliah was Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, chairman of the Committee of Managing Directors of the Royal Dutch/Shell Group of Companies, the international oil giant, a cosponsor of the Riyadh exhibition, along with BAE Systems, the British defense contractor. Their financial contributions to the gala might not reflect the “vital sacramental and spiritual” link between Islam and the West that Charles had earlier emphasized, but unlike his friend Khaled, of course, Charles was only a figurehead prince, an informal ambassador in service of Her Majesty’s government, whose elected job it was to attend to more material concerns of British factory workers and automobile owners.9

  Prince Charles’s Christmas cards offered Bakr one additional source of reassurance as Osama’s violent ambitions became more visible. Bakr and his brothers actively sought other such contacts in the United States and Europe after the Africa embassy bombings. Philip Griffin, from his office in Maryland, telephoned his former contacts at the State Department, but his connections operated at a lower level than that to which the Bin Ladens were accustomed. The Carlyle Group, where the Bin Ladens had already made investments, offered a more influential pathway: George H. W. Bush, the former American president, traveled to Saudi Arabia in November 1998, three months after the Africa attacks, and again in 2000, to speak at Carlyle events designed to raise money from Saudi investors. He met the Bin Ladens and wrote them gracious thank-you notes for their hospitality.10

  Former president Jimmy Carter, seeking to raise money for the Carter Center, which promoted human rights and disease eradication worldwide, met with a group of ten Bin Laden brothers during a fundraising campaign in Saudi Arabia in early 2000. The Bin Ladens assured Carter that they had nothing to do with Osama; the former president, in turn, urged them to support his efforts to combat poverty and suffering in the Third World. Perhaps the Bin Ladens realized that at the end of a two-term Clinton administration, with Vice President Al Gore looking like a plausible next president, it would be useful to broaden their political contacts beyond the Republican-heavy, Texas-centric networks offered by Carlyle. In any event, Bakr flew to New York in September 2000, on the eve of the U.S. presidential election, and had breakfast with Carter. It was a very rare effort on Bakr’s part—one of only two trips to the United States that he had made since he left the University of Miami in 1973. Bakr pledged a $1 million gift to the Carter Center, to be paid over several years; the initial donation was $200,000. The funds would support Carter’s campaign to control and prevent river blindness disease.11

  INSIDE THE UNITED STATES itself, after 1998, what the Bin Ladens sought most was to avoid attention, but even this did not always prove easy. Bin Laden children continued to attend prep schools, colleges, and universities in the U.S. Khalil Bin Laden’s children were among them. Although he had long since abandoned America in Motion, Khalil still visited Desert Bear, the estate outside Orlando. His wife’s Brazilian mother often stayed there, as did his wife’s sister, Regina Frisaura, and her four daughters. Regina had lived in Jeddah during the mid-1990s, but she had gone through a divorce from her American husband, Franklin Frisaura, and had returned to Orlando. She was a deeply troubled woman, and her behavior increasingly threatened to attract the interest of the police at a time when the Bin Laden family did not need such attention.

  On June 11, 1999, Michele Smith, a local Florida police officer, arrived at Regina Frisaura’s home, where she discovered the aftermath of a violent argument. Regina’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Vanessa, told the policewoman that her mother had beaten her with her fists, thrown a picture frame at her, thrown a skateboard at her three times, and grabbed her by the hair. Vanessa said that “for as long as she can remember, she has been physically and emotionally abused by her mother,” according to Smith’s police report. Two other daughters joined Vanessa in recounting “numerous acts of violence” over the previous several years.12

  That police encounter plunged the Orlando outpost of the extended Bin Laden family into the debilitating world of American family court, with its custody struggles, social worker reports, and judicial hearings. A report filed in July 1999 by a county social worker quoted one of the Frisaura girls saying that Regina used drugs, including crack cocaine, and “that the mother would disappear for days when they lived in Saudi Arabia, and the father once found the mother in a crack house.” This was only the beginning, it turned out, of a disturbing series of reports filed in an Orange County, Florida, courthouse after 1999, which described abusive behavior by Khalil Bin Laden’s sister-in-law toward her own children. Khalil appeared occasionally at Orlando court hearings called to evaluate the best interests of Regina’s children. It was a sad and prolonged ordeal; Regina sometimes disappeared in the night and left her children alone, according to reports filed with the court. Much of her violence appeared to be related to her abuse of crack cocaine, which continued into the spring of 2001, according to a home study filed by the Department of Children and Families.13

  Addictive drugs ruined lives in Jeddah just as they did in Orlando, and it was hardly surprising that a family as large as the Bin Ladens would be affected. The timing and geography of this particular case was awkward, but the Bin Ladens were fortunate: there was no publicity.

  BY EARLY 2001, the biggest change occurring in the Bin Laden family was the rise of a large third generation. The older children of Mohamed’s fifty-four sons and daughters were reaching their twenties, and a phalanx of teenagers stood right behind them. The sheer numbers were staggering: well over one hundred direct descendants of Mohamed, plus the collateral branch descending from his brother Abdullah Bin Laden’s many children, plus dozens more incorporated into the family through marriage. The children of Mohamed still tried to assemble together as a family, particularly in the summer. A number of them gathered each year at a modern, gated seaside resort in Egypt called the Marina, an archipelago of islands fashioned from reclaimed land along a palm-draped shore of the Mediterranean. The Bin Ladens had helped to develop the resort, and they had claimed an island for themselves—Bin Laden Island, as locals called it—where the family had built a ring of stone vacation homes side by side. It was an Egyptian version of the Oaktree family village in Florida that Salem had once envisioned. On their Marina island, the Bin Ladens laid themselves out on the seashore in all of their diversity—women who were fully covered, and women who were not; men who were bearded and prayed conspicuously, and others who strapped on earphones and jogged to contemporary music.14

  The Bin Laden women were by now just as striking in their diversity as the men; the difference was that they were much better hidden from view. Among Mohamed’s daughters, Randa remained an impressive figure, at least to the family’s American and European friends. She had retired from medical practice and raised her family in Jeddah. Bakr occasionally drew upon her unconventional life and comfort with the United States by inviting her as a guest at dinner when he hosted visiting American dignitaries, such as the U.S. consul general in Jeddah. One summer, Randa and her husband insisted that their teenaged son take a summer job at a Pizza Hut in Jeddah, so he would know something of ordinary life. In the family’s Westernized caucus, in addition to her, there was also Saleha, still married to her Italian designer and living on the Riviera. There was Najiah, who spent much of her time in Los Angeles, where she had taken up piloting lessons at the Santa Monica Airport. That such unconventional Arabian women shared membership in a family—and occasionally, a summer seashore—with
much more traditional sisters, draped in their black abayas, was perhaps no more or less striking than the fact that Osama and Shafiq Bin Laden had been born in the same month and had now fashioned such different worlds. Indeed, without Osama, by the year 2001, the Bin Ladens might have seemed no more remarkable than thousands of other Muslim melting-pot families in an age of cultural integration.

  As Hadhramis, they came from a long line of confident global travelers. As Mohamed’s children, they had inherited a spark of creative genius. As Saudis, they had learned to accommodate contradictions. These qualities described and complimented them; unfortunately, they also described and complimented Osama.

  THE “PLANES OPERATION,” as it was then being called among the few around Osama who were authorized to know about it, was apparently conceived as a media event.15

  Its origins are not entirely understood; the only full narrative available is one that was related under American interrogation by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. He was a Pakistani raised in Kuwait, educated in North Carolina, and radicalized on the Afghan frontier during the anti-Soviet war of the 1980s. He was not particularly close to Osama in those years, but he was an uncle of Ramzi Yousef, who had led the first attack on the World Trade Center. By Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s account, he and Yousef first conceived of using hijacked airliners as weapons while they were in exile in the Philippines during the early 1990s. His nephew was then arrested in Pakistan by a team that included FBI agents and CIA officers. At some point afterward, Mohammed met with Osama to discuss an idea that would offer a spectacular reply.