He felt that his Yeslam brand could compete successfully for market share with Hermes 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 trace 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.
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
