The Bin Ladens

8. CROSSWIND

1. Interviews with Gerald Auerbach, March 10, 2005, and April 7, 2005. Other pilots who knew Bin Laden provide similar accounts.

2. “It was completely boring”: Times-Picayune, October 13, 2001. Flight logs and photographs from the period 1965 through 1967 reviewed by the author document Bin Laden’s international travel during this period, primarily to Jerusalem, Beirut, and the United Arab Emirates.

3. “He was the law…judgment”: Ibid.

4. Kilo 170 is from interviews with Auerbach, op. cit., who flew there regularly.

5. Bin Laden’s work on the Trucial coast road from Sharjah to Ras al-Khayma is documented in British and American diplomatic cables during 1966 and 1967. The figure of $6.7 million is from DOS 59/761 Jeddah to Washington, September 19, 1966.

6. Interviews with Auerbach, op. cit. The figure of $120 million and the report that he agreed not to take on additional highway work are from DOS 59/761 Jeddah to Washington, May 24, 1966. The cable calls Bin Laden “The Old Master of Saudi highway construction.”

7. The $100 million Military Construction Project: DOS RG 59/2643 Jeddah to Washington, June 2, 1965. British military sales, missile and radar deployments: “At a glance—Saudi Arabia/November 1967,” a report then classified secret, in Burdett, Records of Saudi Arabia, 1966–1971, Volume 2: 1967, Part I.

8. Sequence of attacks and “terrorist infiltrators and saboteurs”: British report of January 12, 1967, in Burdett, op. cit.

9. Hawker Siddeley purchase: Interviews with Auerbach, op. cit. History of Kilo 7 complex: Bin Laden, Inside the Kingdom, p. 36.

10. Heacock: Interview with a daughter of the pilot. “I took him out…riverbeds”: Interviews with Auerbach, op. cit.

11. All quotations in this section are from interviews with Auerbach, op. cit. The author failed to locate any of Harrington’s surviving family. Auerbach flew to the crash site with a team of pilots and other personnel on September 4, 1967, the day after the accident occurred. Mike Ameen, then working in Aramco’s political department, said he had heard that Bin Laden intended to remarry in Asir at the time of his death. Identified from his watch: Interview with Nadim Bou Fakhreddine, April 26, 2006 (RS).

9. THE GUARDIANS

1. Interview with Nadim Bou Fakhreddine, April 26, 2006 (RS). For a thorough account of Hejazi funeral and mourning rituals, see Yamani, Cradle of Islam, pp. 102–10.

2. Interview with Rupert Armitage, September 19, 2006, as well as a second friend who visited Salem at the flat. Armitage recalled that Salem thought nothing about sitting around naked with his male friends and that he had the memorable habit of displaying his erect penis, which he had nicknamed “Lucky.”

3. Salem’s transformational flight: Interview with Gerald Auerbach, April 7, 2005. That Salem did not know all of his half-siblings and that he met some brothers and sisters for the first time: Interviews with Mohamed Ashmawi, November 26, 2005 (RS), and Robert Freeman, April 27, 2006.

4. DOS 59 Jeddah to Washington, September 7, 1967.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. Koranic principle about male and female heirs: Surah 4, verse 11. Islamic inheritance law: Interview with a Saudi lawyer who has worked for the Bin Laden family. See also Almidhar, “International Succession Laws.”

8. Interview with Adel Toraifi, February 9, 2005.

9. That the boys received 2.27 percent: Declaration of Barbara L. Irshay, January 21, 1993, Christine Hartunian v. IbrahimBinladin, Los Angeles County Superior Court, BD058156. The five heirs other than the children is from shareholder lists submitted by the family in In Re Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001, 03 MDL 1570. The 9/11 Commission dates Osama Bin Laden’s first cash dividend to 1973, six years after Mohamed’s death. This would have been a time when more of the boys were reaching adulthood and oil revenue in the kingdom began to boom because of the Arab embargo. Salem was then running his own company and was gaining influence at his father’s firm. It is clear that a regular system of annual dividends to all Mohamed’s children evolved at some point during this period; the 9/11 Commission’s date is drawn from submissions made to the U.S. Treasury Department by family representatives prior to the September 11 attacks.

10. Interview with Michael Pochna, August 31, 2006. Interview with Gerald Auerbach, March 10, 2005.

11. “I am going to be your father now”: from Yeslam Bin Laden, quoted by The Australian, December 17, 2001.

12. Royal Ordinance: DOS RG 59 Jeddah to Washington, September 25, 1967. “was mostly in equipment… started taking over”: Interview with Turki Al-Faisal, August 2, 2002.

13. “legal situation”: DOS RG 59 Jeddah to Washington, September 22, 1967. “in an entirely personal… company going”: Ibid., Jeddah to Washington, September 25, 1967.

14. Interview with Bassim Alim, February 21, 2005. Alim is Mohamed Bahareth’s grandson. Bahareth died in 2004.

15. “He wanted…get control”: Interview with Francis Hunnewell, August 9, 2006.

16. Interviews with several friends and employees of Salem who asked not to be identified.

17. The plane on display: Interview with Peter Blum, who later served as Salem’s personal assistant, March 5, 2006. Salem’s travel to Dubai is from flight logs examined by the author.

18. Interview with Auerbach, op. cit.

19. That Ali wrote a letter to King Faisal: Interview with a person close to the Bin Laden family, who asked not to be identified. Also, on the struggle with Ali: Interviews with Carmen Bin Laden, August 6, 2004, and Fakhreddine, op. cit.

20. Sheikha’s appearance, languages: Interview with Auerbach, op. cit. The date of their marriage is uncertain, but it occurred before May 1973.

21. DOS 59/553 Jeddah to Washington, August 30, 1969; September 3, 1969; September 10, 1969; November 5, 1970; March 19, 1971; March 27, 1972; April 7, 1972.

22. Saudi loan, deal terms, Ali to U.S.: Ibid., November 5, 1970.

23. “difficult ownership…foreign ownership”: Ibid., March 27, 1972. “uneasiness…Ben Ladin organization”: Ibid., November 5, 1970. The correspondence also quotes Anwar Ali as emphasizing the Saudi government’s need to complete defense and infrastructure projects in Asir on which the Bin Laden company had been at work.

24. Interview with Hermann Eilts, March 29, 2006.

25. The advertisement for “Tarik Mohammed Bin Ladin Organization For General Civil Contracting and Crushing” appeared in a Financial Times survey of Saudi Arabia published December 28, 1970. It was filed in FCO 8/1742. A number of employees and business partners date the founding of Binladen Brothers to the early 1970s; an entry in the Graham & Whiteside Ltd. Business database dates the founding to 1972.

26. “What surprised me…each other”: Interview with Carmen Bin Laden, op. cit.

27. Interviews with Hunnewell, Pochna, and Armitage, op. cit., as well as other Bin Laden employees who asked not to be identified.

28. “liked what we called…Mick Jagger”: Interview with Joe Ashkar, April 22, 2006 (RS).

29. “They wore…anything for anybody”: Telephone interview with Shirley Cottam Bowman, April 18, 2006 (RS).

30. Ibid.