The Bin Ladens

by Steve Coll

  The book’s success exacerbated the strains between her ex-husband, Yeslam, in Geneva and the senior Bin Laden brothers around Bakr in Jeddah. Carmen might not be the world’s most compliant woman, but Bakr and the brothers around him tended to blame Yeslam for Carmen’s decision to go public. Presumably money had been one motivation in her decision to write the book: Why couldn’t Yeslam reach a settlement with her that would satisfy her? Why had he allowed the divorce to drag on for so long? How had Yeslam allowed himself to become estranged from his own daughters—what kind of father would permit this?8 There had been many divorces among the Bin Ladens, but none with the Dickensian duration or humiliating public profile of this one.

  Yeslam and Carmen were both entrepreneurial; in the aftermath of September 11, they competed not only in their divorce litigation but also for control of the Bin Laden brand. Through her book tours, Carmen became the most famous Bin Laden in the world after Osama. Yeslam seemed determined to catch up.

  On her side, Carmen had an ally in this contest—her eldest daughter, Wafah, who followed her into the limelight after 2003. Wafah had been a graduate student at Columbia University at the time of the September 11 attacks; she lived in a $6,000-per-month rented loft in New York City’s West Village. She was a strikingly beautiful woman in her early twenties who aspired to a career as a popular singer. To promote her first recording, she sat for an interview with Barbara Walters. Wafah seemed to be in search of the marketing equivalent of a jujitsu move, in which a wrestler uses an opponent’s momentum as a weapon against him—in Wafah’s case, she would flip Osama’s notoriety into her own pop music career. She posed for come-hither pictures in a popular American men’s magazine, GQ. She changed her surname to Daufour, her mother’s maiden name, but Wafah did not shy away from her status as a Bin Laden; this brought the media to her door. And yet, she said, “I feel that everybody’s judging me and rejecting me. Come on, where’s the American spirit? Accept me. I want to be embraced, because my values are just like yours.” She spoke no Arabic and did not carry a Saudi passport. Perhaps her feeling of isolation was genuine, but there was also a hint of rock-and-roll posture in her complaints—she was an ingénue rebel without a culture. Her CD sales proved to be modest.9

  Yeslam raced to the marketplace ahead of his estranged wife and daughter in one respect: In February 2001 he had applied to trademark “Bin Laden” under Swiss law, through Falcon Sporting Goods, one of his companies. Yeslam planned to develop a line of Bin Laden–labeled clothing, glasses, and perhaps jewelry, bicycles, backpacks, and luggage. After the September 11 attacks, Yeslam’s Swiss attorney, Juerg Brand, confirmed their plans to go forward with a Bin Laden clothing line, initially in the Arab world. “The name is one of the most famous names in the world,” Brand said. Asked if he also intended to sell the jeans in the United States, Brand followed one unfortunate phrase with another: “We can’t make an immediate jump across the ocean,” he said.10

  Bin Laden jeans might appeal to rebellious Arab teenagers, but Yeslam and his partners did not account for the reaction in Switzerland and the United States. The Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property announced that it would revoke the Bin Laden trademark because it violated “accepted moral standards.” Yeslam then said his plans had been misunderstood. He recognized, he said, that selling a Bin Laden–labeled clothing line would be “insensitive.” And yet, he declared later, “I am not only a Bin Laden. I am Yeslam Bin Laden. I have my own identity.” Osama to him was now only “a name in a newspaper.”11

  Yeslam opened a luxury boutique in a pedestrian square in Old Geneva, where he sold luxury handbags, silk scarves, perfumes, and handmade watches whose faces were engraved with a map of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia; the watches cost upwards of twenty thousand dollars. He settled on a new brand: Yeslam. He spent hours blending the perfumes that bore his name; he sifted jasmine and fruit scents in a perfume he labeled “Passion.”

  The British writer Marianne MacDonald visited him in Geneva and found him a “shy, quiet man dressed in an Hermès jacket with Dior jeans covering his narrow legs.” Yeslam struck her as sensitive; he spoke openly about the anxieties that had bothered him since childhood.12

  Had Osama ruined his life? Yeslam clasped his hands. “Whatever had to happen, happened,” he told MacDonald. “There is nothing I can do. If you say, ‘Look what happened to me,’ I would only put myself into a depression. If I can do something I love, and create perfume and watches and so on, then I am doing something that’s good for me.”

  He felt that his Yeslam brand could compete successfully for market share with Hermès and Chanel, the Parisian fashion houses. This was an ambitious goal, he acknowledged, “But I am offering better quality, and I hope this will come across.”13

  39. SO WHAT?

  SALEM’S ENGLISH WIDOW, Caroline, expressed a desire after her husband’s death to remain part of the Bin Laden family. It was not unusual in Arabia for widows to marry a brother of the widow’s former husband. When Sama, Caroline’s daughter by Salem, was about eight years old, Bakr approached his half-brother in Egypt, Khaled, about taking Caroline as a wife. “She’s still young,” Bakr said of Caroline, according to Khaled’s aide Sabry Ghoneim. “She wants to live in Egypt. If she marries a foreigner, we lose our daughter, Sama. We need one of the family to marry her and be kind with her. We know you are close with her because you were close with Salem, and you will be good to Sama.” With his horse farms, his passion for Thoroughbreds, art, and poetry, and his apartment in open-minded Cairo, Khaled presided over a household more suitable for Caroline than any available in Jeddah. Khaled agreed to wed her.1

  On November 18, 2005, Caroline Carey arrived with her husband Khaled at the El Zahraa Farm, in the desert countryside outside Cairo, for the annual International Arabian Horse Show. She wore white pearl earrings, a white blouse, and tan pants, and she had a sweater wrapped around her waist. She has piercing blue eyes and a strong jaw. She was “Mum” to her daughter, Sama, who was now a spirited teenager with an interest in diplomacy; some in the family describe Sama as an heir to her father’s most attractive qualities. She, too, arrived for the horse competition; Khaled Bin Laden had entered a number of his Arabians.2

  In the entourage as well was Salem, Khaled’s son by an earlier wife. He had attended boarding school in Virginia and now worked in one of the family companies. He also has bred his own Arabian horses and has trained to enter Olympic shooting competitions as a Saudi marksman. He wore a black Prada turtleneck, narrow Giorgio Armani jeans, black boots, and reflective sunglasses. The screen saver on his silver Nokia cellular telephone was the Armani logo.

  A song played over the loudspeaker: “Barbie Girl.” Salem sat in the grandstands, watching stallions prance and trot in the ring below. He smoked fresh green tobacco in a pipe, a habit he picked up in the Gulf.

  He entertained a question: Has Osama changed life among the Bin Ladens? “What can we do?” Salem replied. “He is one of us, he has our name. We can deal with it…It affects us all. But we are a big family, we can absorb it.” The issue passed like a breeze.

  His father circulated below among the spectators, trainers, and riders participating in the competition. In his fifties, Khaled was well maintained. He wore stiff blue jeans, a blue shirt, running shoes of a mustard color, and a yellow, blue, and red tie. His receding hair was cropped closely.

  “My father sees horses as art,” Salem said. “He paints, too. He paints horses.”

  Khaled agreed to speak for a few minutes, “but only about horses.”

  The Bin Ladens had amassed a table beneath a tent near the competition ring. Khaled took a seat, pleasant but reticent.

  Like so many of his brothers, Khaled had once been a recreational pilot, but he gave up the hobby after running out of fuel one day above Luxor. He enjoys hunting and frequents the colonial Shooting Club in Cairo. He has owned a horse farm in Egypt since 1982 and now keeps about fifty Arabian horses there. The bloodlines of these animals t
race to the great Bedouin herds of the precolonial Arabian Peninsula; they were brought to Egypt by Ottoman conquerors of previous centuries. The horses do not race but are bred for show; the competitions revolve around appearance and presentation maneuvers. Khaled selects stallions and mares for breeding on his own Egyptian farm, Rabab Stud. There he also cultivates cactus plants, date palms, and mango trees in the desert. His stables are designed in old Arab and Moorish styles. In the main house there is a photograph of his father, Mohamed Bin Laden, as well as portraits of two Saudi kings, Fahd and Faisal. Khaled says that he has been refining his passion for Arabian horses over a quarter century.

  “We make the selection from the stable and see which one is the best,” he said. Even anodyne questions about horses seem to pain him, however. Straining to be polite, he conceded that his favorite is named Afrah, or “Joy.”

  In a pamphlet he has published, which he offers to visitors, Khaled has been more expansive about his passion: “I am trying to create a symphony with the horse,” he said. “It is like a composition where you take elements from many sources to form a piece of living art that must be harmonious.” The history of Arabia moves through these animals. “You have to see an Arabian horse moving with pride and elegance,” he says. “It has to snort and trumpet with the tail flowing and flying over the ground, catching the wind. Then you are seeing what you should.”

  Khaled’s horses have performed well in the competition this day—one first place, two seconds, and a third.

  Several middle-aged British women approached his table beneath the tent to offer congratulations. “Mabruk!” one of them exclaimed. She leaned down to kiss him on each cheek. Khaled returned the kisses.

  He looked over. “So I can kiss like a European,” he said.3

  EGYPT BECAME A LOCUS of recovery and sanctuary for the Bin Ladens after September 11. There was Khaled’s farm and his other properties in and around Cairo, as well other town houses and estates owned by other half-brothers and half-sisters of Bakr. There was Bin Laden Island and Bakr’s separate resort property at Sharm El Sheikh, on the Red Sea. Like Beirut, Egypt offered a respite from the puritanical humidity of Jeddah, without the complications that came with crossing borders or using credit cards in Europe or America. It was a lively and welcoming country—a place where the mosque and Hard Rock Cafe wings of the family could each relax.

  It also offered the distractions of work. The Bin Laden subsidiary in Egypt employed about a thousand people and won several contracts for airport work in Cairo and Sharm El Sheikh after 2002; the contracts were partially supported by the World Bank, which offered a visible endorsement of the family’s continuing business legitimacy. Osama’s violence did force one adjustment: The Egyptian government felt that if construction signs scattered around two of its most important international airports advertised the name Bin Laden, this might confuse and worry foreign tourists, and so the local subsidiary changed its name to Al-Murasim.4

  By late 2005, it was clear that the Bin Ladens would not only survive Osama, but might thrive as never before. The Saudi royal family stuck by them and ensured their continuing prestige as the most important building contractors in Mecca and Medina. King Fahd died in the summer of 2005, but Bakr had already cultivated ties with his successor, Abdullah; the Bin Ladens gathered hurriedly in Riyadh that summer to swear loyalty to the new king. Rather than the dawn of a new period of uncertainty for the Bin Ladens, Abdullah’s ascension promised new opportunity. The Bin Ladens suffered from no political backlash in Saudi Arabia. As a large family with its share of black sheep, the Al-Saud acted on principle by supporting them, but Abdullah also sent a subliminal message to the Islamic world—the Saudi royal family might not condone Osama, but they would not seek revenge against him or his family, either, as sometimes happened to the families of dissidents in Arab countries. As ever, the Al-Saud needed the Bin Ladens’ expertise. As the war in Iraq deteriorated, oil prices soared above seventy dollars a barrel, and construction boomed in the kingdom and in neighboring Dubai. New condominium and office skyscrapers, shopping malls, freeways, mosques, and airports were announced one after another—even an inexperienced and poorly organized construction company could thrive in this atmosphere, which resembled the 1970s in its indiscriminate showers of cash. The Bin Ladens were particularly well positioned to profit.

  The drive to modernize and internationalize the family companies, overseen by Bakr and Yahya, had largely succeeded. The engineer brothers might not be as glamorous or amusing as Salem, but after many years of hard work, they had positioned the Bin Ladens to enjoy sustained and secure wealth, and to successfully pass the family fortune intact through several generations. In his heyday, Salem had paraphrased King Faisal: “My father was riding on a camel. I am flying in jets. My children will fly in jets. My grandchildren will ride a camel again.” Bakr and Yahya had not rendered this forecast implausible, but they had certainly reduced its likelihood, with a notable assist from the geopolitical forces that drove oil prices up and up.5

  Yahya Bin Laden said late in 2005 that he expected the number of employees at the Bin Laden firms to rise from about thirty-five thousand toward about seventy-five thousand during the next decade as oil wealth continued to pour into the Gulf region. He hoped to further diversify the family companies, he said, so that construction contracts of the traditional type might ultimately generate only about a quarter of the Bin Ladens’ revenue. He quoted an Arabic saying: The first generation makes the money, the second generation tries to preserve it, and the third generation squanders it. The family could avoid this fate, he believed. His own children and those of Bakr and other brothers had acquired excellent educations at the finest universities in the West, and some were committed to the future of the business. Younger half-brothers such as Mohamed, not yet fifty years old, were proving to be capable and modern executives. But these younger Bin Ladens were not going to spend two weeks sitting around a Riyadh majlis waiting for a moody prince to sign a contract, as Salem and then Bakr had done patiently and obsequiously for so many years. It was imperative to modernize the company and then hope that something similar would happen to Saudi decision making.6

  The chances of this did not look especially promising. As had been true since the 1950s, the more oil money flowed into Saudi coffers, the less urgent seemed any imperative for change. In an unusually candid soliloquy, Bandar Bin Sultan described the assumptions of the Al-Saud:

  The way I answer the corruption charges is this: In the last thirty years—we have implemented a development program that was approximately… close to $400 billion worth. Okay? Now, look at the whole country, where it was, where it is now. And I am confident, after you look at it, you could not have done all of that for less than, let’s say, $350 billion. If you tell me that building this whole country, spending $350 billion out of $400 billion, that we had misused or [were] corrupt with $50 billion, I’ll tell you, “Yes. But I’ll take that anytime.” There are so many countries in the Third World that have oil that are still thirty years behind. But more important, more important—“Hey, who are you to tell me this?” What I’m trying to tell you is: So what?7

  Not long afterward, citing national security concerns, the British government dropped a criminal investigation into the sale of defense equipment to Saudi Arabia during the 1980s and 1990s. According to a British newspaper, as part of the financial arrangements required by the Saudis to consummate these arms deals, hundreds of millions of dollars flowed into bank accounts controlled by Bandar Bin Sultan.8

  So what? Unlike Bandar, the Bin Ladens lacked the nerve to ask this question out loud, and yet, the more time passed after September 11, the less significance the attacks seemed to hold for the family’s future. Lawsuits filed in the United States by families of the victims, consolidated under the title In Re: Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001, named the Saudi Bin Laden Group, and four Bin Laden brothers—Bakr, Omar, Tareq, and Yeslam—as defendants. One of the lawsuits alleged that, “under Ba
kr Bin Laden’s control,” the Saudi Bin Laden group had “provided substantial material support and assistance to Al Qaeda.” The Bin Ladens hired Jones Day, a large American law firm whose Washington offices occupied a polished building across from the U.S. Capitol, to handle the family’s defense. The legal bills endured by the Bin Ladens in this and related matters quickly exceeded $10 million, according to what Bakr told the Saudi government, but it was money well spent: early in 2005, U.S. District Judge Richard Casey in New York dismissed the individual Bin Ladens as defendants on jurisdictional grounds. He allowed some further investigation of whether the Saudi Bin Laden Group might have been significantly active in the United States to justify its inclusion in the lawsuit, but at the very minimum, it would be several years before the lawsuit considered the merits of the company’s history with Osama if it did so at all.9

  Desert Bear went up for sale in 2004 for about $4 million, more than twenty years after Salem first purchased the estate and began landing his helicopters on the lawn. Since the property was owned and titled in Florida by a Liberian corporation, the purchaser would not be able to buy the land or the home directly, but would have to buy portable bearer shares in the Liberian company and then try to prove ownership to Florida real estate authorities, according to several people who inquired about the property listing. Potential buyers were told that they would have to bring or deliver cash overseas to purchase control of the Liberian corporation; the Bin Ladens did not want to enter the United States to close the transaction. The buyers who persisted through these negotiations planned to subdivide the property and build suburban homes.10 It was an untidy end to the estate’s remarkable history, one that began with a Jell-O patent at the beginning of the twentieth century and ended, in effect, with the September 11 attacks.