issued a brief written statement on behalf of the Bin Laden family, under the name of his uncle, Abdullah, Mohamed’s aged brother. The statement expressed “the strong denunciation and condemnation of this sad event, which resulted in the loss of many innocent men, women and children, and which contradicts our Islamic faith.”
Privately, Bakr was more forthright. Sabry Ghoneim, the family’s communications adviser in Egypt, recalled that Bakr told him, “This is a criminal act. If America seeks revenge, it’s their right, because that’s the price of the people who died.” This was not unusual language for Bakr to use about Al Qaeda when there was no public audience listening in. Once, after an Al Qaeda–inspired bombing, he telephoned a British friend from his private jet to denounce the “bloody Arabs” and their destructive terrorism. But he never offered such strong language in public.16
Instead, the belated statement Bakr authorized followed what had become Saudi government policy. In the initial days and weeks following September 11, Saudi princes and spokesmen denounced the terrible violence of that day, expressed sympathy for the victims, and said that the attacks contradicted the tenets of Islam. But Saudi statements usually made no specific reference to Osama, Al Qaeda, or the Saudi nationalities of nineteen of the September 11 hijackers. Indeed, as late as December 2002, Prince Nayef, the interior minister, who had such a long history with Osama and the Bin Ladens, still refused to acknowledge that the hijackers were Saudis at all; he suggested that September 11 was a Zionist conspiracy concocted to discredit Muslims. Nayef ’s comments shocked many Americans. Of course, his opinions about September 11—and his beliefs about Zionists and Jews—were quite commonplace in the kingdom. It was just that Americans previously had little occasion to hear such opinions, and certainly not at a transforming moment of national shock and grief. Nayef ’s words wafted through American political and media circles like a toxic gas released from a long-buried cavern.
There were certainly some Saudis who celebrated the September 11 attacks. Saad Al-Faqih, the exiled dissident, claimed that text messages ricocheted on mobile phones around the kingdom, declaring, “Congratulations” or “Our prayers to Bin Laden,” and that sheep and camels were slaughtered for celebratory feasts. Al-Faqih’s credibility is questionable—he wasn’t in the kingdom—but others who were there acknowledge that celebration was at least an element of initial popular reaction. This joy mingled with fear of retaliation against Arabs and Muslims, and confusion about how such an ambitious conspiracy could have been carried off by a loose band of individuals based in Afghanistan—the improbability of the attacks was widely taken as empirical proof of Zionist involvement. At the heart of the reaction lay the sense of grievance toward the United States and Israel nurtured by many Arabians, even though most of them had little or no meaningful contact with either country. Arab media and governments cultivated this discourse in part because it deflected anger from local failures. September 11 amplified all these perceptions at least temporarily.
Bassim Alim, an attorney in Jeddah who was related by marriage to the Bin Laden family, summed up the typical Saudi attitude: “Even if I do not condone what Osama has done, I’m not going to cry for the broken hearts of American mothers and American daughters and American fathers…Maybe what he did is wrong but it’s God’s justice, God’s way of helping us. Sometimes we have a criminal kill another criminal—it’s God’s way of having his own justice.” After the attacks in New York and Washington, Alim said, he attended “many social events and social gatherings” in Jeddah with “people from different stratas of life and different stratas of society, whether they’re extreme liberals or the extreme religious, and you can see this commonality: ‘Osama has destroyed our image…But you know, at the end of the day, the Americans deserve it.’”17
KHALIL BIN LADEN had been vacationing at Desert Bear outside Orlando on the morning of September 11; he and members of his family had watched the attacks unfold on the television news. An FBI agent telephoned Khalil at his estate on September 12; the agent said that the local FBI office had received reports, apparently from neighbors of Desert Bear, of “a large amount of activity” at the estate. Khalil denied that there was anything unusual going on at his home. He said his main concern was “the safety of his family,” and he asked the agent if the FBI was aware of specific threats against them. The agent told Khalil to call the Orange County Sheriff ’s Department if he or his family ever felt threatened.18
Khalil called the FBI agent back three days later and asked if it would be possible for him and his family to fly by commercial airliner to Washington, D.C., so they could connect with a charter flight home that was being arranged by the Saudi embassy. FBI agents drove out to Desert Bear to talk it over; ultimately, the charter plane was routed through Orlando.
On September 19, as the plane carrying Najiah and Jason Blum flew toward Orlando from Los Angeles, FBI agents escorted Khalil and his family to the Orlando International Airport. The traveling party included Khalil’s wife, Isabel, and their son Sultan. FBI agents interviewed the embarking passengers and looked through their luggage.
Khalil wandered out to the tarmac. There he met Jason Blum and learned of the charter flight crew’s revolt.
As they waited, Khalil mentioned that he and his family had started to receive death threats at Desert Bear. Cars were driving by the estate very slowly, checking them out.19
Blum wore down his cell phone batteries talking to Bob Bernstein, the Ryan Air executive in charge of the charter flight, as they tried to resolve the crew’s demands for extra money. Blum and Bernstein joked on the phone that they were just two Jews trying to get the Bin Laden family out of the country. Finally they resolved the money issue, essentially by giving into the crew’s demands, according to Blum.20
The pilot and copilot climbed back aboard, the Bin Ladens took their seats, and they lifted off for Washington’s Dulles International Airport. At a private aviation terminal they met Shafiq and his London-based financial executive, Akber Moawalla, who had accompanied Shafiq to the United States to attend the September 11 Carlyle Group meeting.
Also boarding the plane in Washington was Omar Awadh Bin Laden. He had apparently once shared an address with the Abdullah Bin Laden who ran the local office of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth. (The office had previously been a subject of FBI inquiries, which had been aborted in part because of the issue of diplomatic immunity.) Of all the passengers on the Bin Laden flight, Omar is the only one known to have even a possible connection to Islamist preaching or organizing. And yet, oddly, Omar may have been one of the few passengers on the charter who was not interviewed by the FBI.21
As the number of Bin Ladens aboard the 727 swelled with each successive stop, there was a growing atmosphere inside the cabin of a mournful family reunion, Blum recalled. Some of the Bin Ladens aboard had not seen each other for a long while, and they greeted each other with excitement. Others were crying and visibly upset. Some stood at the bar and sipped tea or soft drinks. Almost everybody smoked cigarettes nervously, it seemed, and the passenger lounge filled up with thick clouds of blue smoke.22
As the plane flew toward its final departure from American airspace, there was a sense that the Bin Ladens might now be leaving the United States behind for good, or at least for a very long time. Najiah and Khalil talked with Blum about how they might have to change their name if they ever returned.
In Boston a number of college students from the family’s third generation came aboard. One was Nawaf, Bakr’s eldest son. Salem’s son Salman, the student at Tufts University, was another. Altogether, about a dozen younger Bin Ladens joined the plane in Boston, and many of them looked and sounded American. One of the male students mentioned that he was just starting his sophomore year in college and had finally managed to obtain a fake ID of some quality, so that he could go out to clubs and bars with his friends—this was not going to be of much use in Saudi Arabia, he told Blum ruefully.23
The FBI made one last pass through the plane at Logan International Airport in Boston, checking luggage and talking to the passengers. The original pilot and co-pilot disembarked and a new crew took over. Blum was supposed to leave the plane in Boston, too, but Najiah and Khalil asked him to stay all the way to Paris, and he agreed. Finally they lifted off and cleared American airspace. Because of the 727’s limited range, they would refuel in Nova Scotia and again in Iceland before they reached France. But the United States was at last behind them.
The younger Bin Ladens chatted and smoked with Blum and a second security guard who had joined them in Boston, Ric Pascetta, who, like Blum, was a martial arts specialist, and two other private security officers who had come aboard. The Bin Laden kids asked the two of them about police work; the students said they were particularly devastated that so many policemen and firemen had died in New York while trying to rescue others. “I was explaining to them that that’s what we do,” Blum remembered. “It’s like a mental defect that we have—instead of
