first place, and he appointed himself the sole judge. One of the American women played piano and sang, the band ran through some numbers, and Lynn took a turn at the Yamaha. Lynn’s girlfriend, however, had no particular musical talent. She decided, instead, to expound to her Saudi audience about her recent experiences of giving birth and of divorce.
Intimate monologues about a woman’s pain and the miracle of life were not often heard in the male- segregated sitting rooms of Saudi palaces or merchant houses, and the quiet that followed her presentation, it seemed to Lynn, was a little awkward.
“I feel really bad,” Salem told Lynn afterward. He liked her friend, he said, and he felt bad about her divorce. He peeled off about a thousand dollars in cash. “Please, give this to her.”
At one point, one of the American women who seemed to work with Salem in Orlando pulled Lynn aside. “You know, Salem really likes you,” she said.
“Romantically?”
As Lynn Peghiny recalled it years later: “She said—and I’ll never forget it—she said, ‘Lynn, this is a great opportunity for you. You’re young. You’re unattached…You know, he’ll show you places and take you places, and if I were you, I’d just go for it.’”4
SALEM BIN LADEN was a favored customer of AlamoArrow, a retailer outside San Antonio, Texas, of ultralight sport aircraft. The previous Christmas, he had turned up at the store unexpectedly on a Friday evening and purchased much of its inventory—planes and accessories—and asked that it all be delivered to the airport and loaded onto his private BAC-111 twin-engine jet. A few weeks later he returned to buy more ultralights, including a camouflaged former military prototype that had once been equipped to shoot missiles. Its armor had been removed, but “he thought that was pretty cool,” recalled George Harrington, one of the store’s sales associates.
Ultralights are small open-air hobby planes that are usually flown a few hundred feet high at speeds of about forty miles per hour, powered by a single engine roughly the size of that on a motorcycle. Salem loved them; like gliders, another of his passions, they offered the sensation of flying like a hawk, free and buffeted by wind. They were banned from Saudi Arabia on security grounds, so Salem stored the planes at his various refuges outside the kingdom.
During the last months of 1984, he collected the latest models, called Quicksilvers, because he was outfitting, for early in the New Year, an elaborate Saudi royal hunting expedition to Pakistan that Salem seemed to envision as a blend of
Salem liked to have musicians in his entourage; Harrington played the guitar, so Salem arranged to hire him to travel to Pakistan, where he could help oversee the ultralight flying by the royal guests. A few days before Christmas, Harrington, a genial, big-boned Texan who had never traveled abroad previously, found himself jetting to London in the company of an American pilot, Don Kessler, who worked for Salem and who also played the drums.
They all stopped initially at Salem’s estate outside London, and then, on Christmas Eve, they flew to the south of France, and after that, to Salzburg, Austria. They unloaded their luggage and drove to the ski resort in Kitzbuhel. Of course, they had no ski equipment with them, as the decision to fly to Austria had been made only hours earlier, so Salem led the group into a shop and bought everyone skis, boots, parkas, and pants. They hit the slopes and then accepted an invitation to a party at the local villa of Adnan Khashoggi, the well-known Saudi arms dealer.
Khashoggi’s home had a discotheque with a stage. The room that night was loud, dark, and teeming with Saudis and Europeans. Salem took the microphone and announced that he intended to perform. He and George Harrington took steel-string acoustic guitars onto the stage and struck up the folk and bar band classic “House of the Rising Sun.”
“He was a half-assed guitar player, and even less qualified as a vocalist, but you couldn’t embarrass him at all,” Harrington recalled. “So we played that night for a packed house.”6
They flew next to Marbella, Spain, and then on to Cairo for New Year’s Eve. They stopped for a while in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and then traveled to Dubai.
At the Hyatt hotel there Harrington met Salem’s new girlfriend from Orlando: Lynn Peghiny. They became instant friends, two Americans caught up in an unexpected adventure, hopping from one country to the next, unfamiliar with their surroundings. Lynn had flown in from New York to join the upcoming expedition to Pakistan. (“I look back and I’m astounded at what I did at twenty-four,” she said in hindsight.) Salem put her in a hotel suite with a grand piano. They listened to her play Chopin.
A FEW DAYS LATER, Salem packed Lynn and George into his Mitsubishi MU-2, a stubby, short-haul turboprop airplane. An elderly Bedouin aide carried aboard a hooded hunting falcon. George took possession of a briefcase containing at least $250,000 in cash and traveler’s checks; he had come to understand that one of his jobs was to keep track of Salem’s travel money. Also along was Bengt Johansson, a shaggy-haired, chain-smoking Swedish flight mechanic who was one of the longest-serving European members of Salem’s entourage. They roared down the runway, bound for Karachi. “It was so loaded down and they took off and everybody just applauded that the thing got up in the air,” Lynn recalled, “and I’m like, ‘Why are y’all taking chances?’”7
In Karachi, Salem met with a Saudi diplomat; he often dropped in on his country’s ambassadors when he traveled the world. His entourage checked into the Sheraton, a concrete-and-glass fortress that passed as the city’s finest hotel.
At the Karachi seaport, Salem discovered that the Pakistan Army would not permit either ultralights or hot air balloons into their country. On its eastern frontier, the Pakistan Army faced Indian military forces in a continuous state of alert; to the west, it was embroiled in a secret guerrilla war in Afghanistan against Soviet forces, who occasionally conducted raids inside Pakistan. Saudi princes flying around in uncontrolled small planes and balloons seemed to the army’s officers a prescription for disaster. Salem argued, and fumed, and tried to pull strings, but the Pakistani authorities stood firm; they told him to send his airborne toys back to Dubai.
In the midst of these frustrations Salem summoned George Harrington and Bengt Johansson one morning and announced that they would all fly in the Mitsubishi up to Peshawar, the Pakistani city that served as a staging area for the Afghan war. Initially, Salem explained only that he had an errand to run. As it turned out, it involved his half-brother Osama.
“I said, ‘Why?’” as Harrington recalled it. Eventually, “he explained that Peshawar was apparently the base for rebels…I had never heard of Peshawar. World politics were not on my radar screen. He said that Osama was up there and he was the liaison between the U.S., the Saudi government, and the Afghan rebels,” as Harrington remembered. “Salem needed to make sure that Osama was getting what he needed. The Saudi government was
