The Bin Ladens

threatening. Saleha, Bakr’s half-sister, did go back from time to time with her Italian husband, but she was often detained at U.S. airports for two hours or more, which she found increasingly depressing. “I don’t know if we’re going to be able to keep this up because we just can’t travel this way,” she told Gail Freeman.

Europe seemed easier to navigate, particularly since the Bin Ladens often moved in the protective bubble of private aviation and so did not have to worry about alarming fellow passengers on a commercial airliner. Still, they had trouble. Police from Scotland Yard boarded Bakr’s private jet at Luton Airport and questioned him before allowing him on his way. A man punched Hassan Bin Laden in the face on the street outside the Inter-Continental Hotel in London in August 2002. In Germany or Austria, a local police chief surrounded a hotel where Bakr was vacationing, apparently in the belief that he was about to write himself into the history books for nabbing the world’s most wanted fugitive.¹³

Yasser Bin Laden was a younger half-brother of Bakr who lived in Jeddah and played squash with an English-speaking circle of friends in the city. He also belonged to a local Harley-Davidson motorcycle club. Each summer he and his Saudi friends would roar out on their Harleys on a cross-country road trip. After September 11 they biked through Europe. The other Saudi motorcyclists in the club joked with Yasser relentlessly, saying that his passport was going to cause them nothing but trouble every time they crossed a border. They were right: when Yasser presented his travel documents to British immigration at the entrance to the tunnel that runs beneath the English Channel from France, the British officer ordered Yasser aside, peered out his booth, and waved back all the rest of the motorcycle gang, which had previously been cleared. It took hours to run their names through all the relevant terrorist databases.

The Harley club members decided to bike through Syria and Lebanon on the next trip they took. When they reached the Saudi-Syrian border station, they all started joking with Yasser again, complaining about the trouble they would now endure from the Syrian border officials.

A Syrian guard combed through their passports and then came out to address the motorcyclists. “Where’s the sheikh? Where’s the sheikh?” the guard demanded.

They found Yasser, but the interest of the police turned out to be of a different sort than that to which they had grown accustomed: when Yasser Bin Laden thundered past on his Harley, the Syrian guards stood and saluted. For them, Osama had turned all Bin Ladens into heroes.¹⁴

“WHEN 20/20 RETURNS, a family name to be proud of—until September 11th. But what if your last name were Bin Laden now?”¹⁵

Barbara Walters traveled to Saudi Arabia early in 2002 to produce an ambitious report for the ABC television network’s evening news magazine program 20/20. In setting up the trip, Walters and her producers worked closely with Bandar Bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador in Washington, and Adel Al-Jubeir, then a political and media adviser in the court of Crown Prince Abdullah. Walters told both of them that she very much wanted to interview a member of the Bin Laden family for her report. Her broadcast would offer an opportunity for the family to humanize themselves before a large American television audience and to emphasize their estrangement from Osama. This in turn might salve some of the wounds in U.S.-Saudi relations, which had become increasingly constrained by the mutually hostile attitudes of the two countries’ publics. The Saudi officials Walters spoke with agreed that the program might be helpful. Adel Al-Jubeir, in particular, enlisted the support of Crown Prince Abdullah, and he met with Bakr Bin Laden and two other members of the Bin Laden family in an effort to persuade them to cooperate. But Crown Prince Abdullah had made clear that he would not order the Bin Ladens to appear on American television; the choice was theirs. Bakr proved reluctant, despite repeated entreaties from Al- Jubeir and other Saudi officials.¹⁶

The Bin Ladens had by now become a commodity in the media marketplace. According to Khaled Al-Maenna, editor of the Arab News in Jeddah and a frequent interlocutor with foreign media, an American media outlet (which he would not identify) telephoned to offer him a fifty-thousand-dollar fee if he could get a Bin Laden family member on camera. As a media strategist, Al-Maenna agreed that the Bin Ladens might have helped Saudi Arabia if a confident, English-speaking member of the family would appear on television, apologize, and try to make themselves accessible to American audiences. Yet the hostility and presumptuous attitudes of the American media offended him and many other Saudis.¹⁷ Pride, resentment, and fear predominated after September 11 in both America and Saudi Arabia. The Bin Ladens—with so much to lose, and in Bakr’s evident judgment, so little to gain from media publicity—kept their collective heads down.

Mark Bridges, Bakr’s principal attorney in London, who also served as personal solicitor to the Queen, reinforced these instincts. His advice was that there was simply no reason for the Bin Ladens to speak publicly or to make unnecessary disclosures.¹⁸

Bridges was perhaps unable to conceive, however, of the force of nature that was Barbara Walters. As she traveled in Saudi Arabia early in 2002, conducting a number of interviews with members of the royal family and with families of September 11 hijackers in Asir, she grew increasingly frustrated. She had sought an interview with Crown Prince Abdullah, the most powerful man in the kingdom; this did not materialize. Without a Bin Laden on camera, she told the Saudis assisting her, her trip would be a bust—and the implication was, of course, that she would be very angry. Sensing a public relations fiasco, Bandar and Al-Jubeir concocted a bold ploy to help Walters. As it happened, Bandar owed the Bin Ladens a large sum of money for work they had completed on his palace in Jeddah. The Bin Ladens had been agitating for payment. Bandar proposed inviting Abdullah Bin Laden, the Harvard graduate, to his home, supposedly for a meeting with accountants called to settle the final palace bill. Barbara Walters would arrive—and Abdullah would have no choice but to submit to an interview.¹⁹

The ambush came off seamlessly. Walters walked in on the business meeting and Abdullah, as Bandar hovered, reluctantly agreed to sit for a few questions. On her broadcast, Walters did not burden viewers with the story of how the interview had come about, but she did note on air, during her introduction, “As we sat down together, he was so nervous—and who could blame him?”

“How difficult has this been for your family?” Walters asked Abdullah in her signature tone of empathy.

“We went through a tough time, it was difficult. But—and we felt we are a victim as well, but no matter what happened to us, it is not—our tragedy is not as bad, or we didn’t feel as bad, as those victims, the families and victims in New York. Our tragedy compared to their tragedies—there is no comparison, and we do feel for them.”

“Do you have any idea what made Osama bin Laden the man he is?”

“I wish I can answer this question.”²⁰

38. BRANDS

JACK KAYAJANIAN practiced family law in Costa Mesa, California, south of Los Angeles. He was a gregarious man who spent some of his spare time at the Del Mar racetrack, where he dabbled in Thoroughbreds and kept his eyes peeled for long-shot winners. He was an active member of the Armenian American community in conservative Orange County, and he regarded himself as a fiercely patriotic American. So when an Armenian friend of his telephoned in the summer of 2002 to say that his daughter, Christine, was having custody trouble with her ex-husband, who happened to be a member of the Bin Laden family, Kayajanian took up the case with some gusto.¹

After their divorce in 1993, Ibrahim Bin Laden and Christine Hartunian had accommodated one another for eight years without notable difficulty. They cooperated in raising their only child, their daughter Sibba. She lived with her mother and attended school in Southern California but also spent summers and Ramadan holidays with Ibrahim in Jeddah or at his Stone Canyon estate in Bel Air. The rise of Osama Bin Laden during the late 1990s created some tension within the family because Ibrahim started to think that he might not be safe in the United States. “I began to feel uncomfortable in Los Angeles in the summer of 2001,” he said later, “as a result of remarks that were made to me even before September 11.”²

When the Bin Ladens evacuated to Jeddah, Ibrahim took Sibba with him; they had been vacationing in Geneva when the attacks took place. Sibba found the scene in Jeddah somewhat unnerving, according to Kayajanian: she told family members that some of the young people at the Bin Laden compound openly celebrated the September 11 attacks. Ibrahim enrolled his daughter in the British International School in Jeddah that autumn.