The Bin Ladens

several times a year, when they were home from school. In the style of the royal family, and of many other Saudi dignitaries, he received the boys in informal diwaniyahs, a courtlike gathering in which everyone sits around the edges of the room, usually propped up on pillows on the carpeted floor. Mohamed took a place of primacy and the boys sat obediently around him, pouring coffee for adult guests or presenting themselves to their father for inspection or instruction. “Most of us were afraid of him, I would say,” Yeslam recalled. “He would punish us. He would lock somebody up, maybe.”⁹

Bin Laden placed a heavy emphasis on frugality, work, religious piety, and self-reliance. Yet he wanted his boys to prepare themselves to inherit his business, and he understood that they would require more technical training than he had received. He “brought us up in a conformist way [but] with more concentration on education” than he had known, his son Abdullah recalled.¹⁰

Mohamed was not rigid or humorless. When his young son Shafiq impertinently spoke up to demand his allowance money, his father praised his spiritedness. He took the boys to his desert camps and allowed them to drive his wondrous big machines. He impressed upon them, too, the rituals and the glory of Islam. Mohamed prayed faithfully and expected the boys to do the same. Each year, at the Hajj, he proudly hosted scores of prestigious guests in an elaborately provisioned family tent. The scene was a Saudi version of that later found at Western sports events, where corporate executives hosted clients and friends in stadium luxury suites. Mohamed’s boys often joined their father in Mecca for the Hajj, a large brood of handsome and growing sons circulating through the family hospitality tent, their presence at Mohamed’s side reflecting honor on the patriarch.

Mohamed gave particular attention to his older sons. Succession in a business family like the Bin Ladens worked in a way similar to that in the royal family in the sense that there was a presumption that older boys would be favored, but there was also some flexibility, so that the most capable person might be placed in charge. During the 1960s, two of Mohamed’s sons, Salem and Ali, seemed to be the most favored by their father. Ali was the only son of an early wife, and he did not enjoy the fancy boarding school educations of his half-brothers—his father seems to have designated him as the son who would work most closely by his side on field operations. As the war- related infrastructure projects near Yemen grew in size, Ali ran the company’s regional office in Taif, an important role. He was a thin, dark-skinned young man who did not spend much time with his brothers. But if Ali seemed to be positioned by his father to become a sort of chief operating officer of the company’s vast labor and construction camps, there was no question about whom Mohamed was training to become the firm’s eventual chairman and chief executive, the heir to Mohamed’s crucial political and marketing role of cultivating favor within the royal family. This was Salem, Mohamed’s eldest son by Fatima Bahareth.¹¹

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, it became fashionable in certain progressive branches of the House of Saud to dispatch sons to America and Britain for high school and university educations. Faisal sent his boys to Princeton, Georgetown, and elsewhere. Bin Laden could see that the future of Saudi Arabia lay with Faisal. If his family were to keep up, his own sons would have to be comfortable in a Riyadh court influenced by Faisal’s English-speaking, university-credentialed boys. Bin Laden himself could speak only a few words of English, and while he traveled frequently to Arab capitals, he seems to have rarely, if ever, visited Europe. He preferred to keep most of his boys in Arabia or the nearby Levant, where there were guardians and mothers and other loyal relatives near at hand. For Salem, however, he made an exception. He dispatched his heir apparent to boarding school in England, to endow him with a proper British education.

In doing this, Mohamed Bin Laden initiated his Arabian family’s integration with the West.

AN ELDERLY London resident of subcontinental origin, Rasma Abdullah acted as Salem’s guardian in England and arranged for his schooling there. Salem seems to have arrived in Britain during the late 1950s, at about age twelve or thirteen, and to have initially enrolled at the elite English boarding school in Somerset, Millfield School. Salem’s principal memory of Millfield, as he described it to a friend and business partner years later, was of a female choirmaster who taught him Christian hymns, which Salem referred to as the “group sing.” Not surprisingly, given his lack of preparation, he did not stay at Millfield long. Sometime around 1960, Salem moved to Copford Glebe, a much smaller and less well-known private boarding school for boys in Essex, near the town of Colchester. He stayed here for several years. He came of age in an environment far removed from the milieu of work and Islam presided over by his father back home.¹²

The school lay at the end of a curved stone driveway amid rolling green fields. It had once been a minister’s parish home, and the main building was a handsome white three-story Georgian, surrounded by smaller cottages and some trailers hauled in to serve as classrooms. There were only about forty boys during the years Salem attended—about half from overseas, the other half refugees from the better English schools. Salem’s classmates included a relative of the deputy chief of the Iranian secret police, a scion of the founder of Liberia, a wealthy boy from Istanbul, and the heir to a great Portuguese arms-trading fortune. Rupert Armitage, a classmate who had transferred from Eton, found the place an “amazing sort of pastiche of an English school…with this ridiculous overtone of chaos, because, I mean, there were all of these crazy people there.”¹³

The boys lived in small old dormitories in groups of four or five. Salem shared a dorm with a few other wealthy boys from Islamic countries. They had a small stove on which they occasionally cooked eggs stolen from the headmaster’s coop. Salem smoked a pipe—Flying Dutchman was his tobacco brand—and later took up cigarettes. The days began with a miserable run, rain or shine, around the playing fields; Salem was usually in a state of comical disarray, staggering out in mismatched shoes and socks. The boys changed into blue blazers, ties, and slacks for classes, then endured another round of athletics in the afternoon. Salem’s closest friend was a big Turkish boy named Mehmet Birgen, whom Salem nicknamed “Baby Elephant,” and whom he occasionally goaded to fight rival boys on his behalf. It was an awkward time for many of them, particularly those, like Salem, who had no prior experience of the West. Salem amused his English friends by climbing up on the toilet seat to squat on his haunches, as he was accustomed to doing at home. He was not athletic but he was popular nonetheless—full of adventure and mischief, and particularly devoted to chasing after the residents of the nearby all-girls boarding school. Occasionally they would arrange dates with these girls to go bowling or to the movies in Colchester, and afterward they ate hamburgers at Wimpy’s.

Salem’s father seems to have authorized a more indulgent budget for his eldest son’s British education than he did for his boys in Lebanon—or else Salem’s mother figured out how to outwit her husband; in any event, Salem had considerably more pocket money than some of his Copford Glebe classmates, and even more important, he had a car, an ancient German DKW. His car was a semisecret, not officially authorized by the school, and Salem kept it hidden on a lane outside the grounds. He and his friends would sneak out on weekend nights and drive into London, where they sometimes searched for sex, but all that happened each time, according to one of his coconspirators, was that club bouncers and bartenders lightened Salem’s wallet.

The Beatles and the Rolling Stones ruled England, and at Copford Glebe, Salem’s friends formed “The Echoes” to chase their own rock-and-roll dreams. There was some genuine talent in the group—Rupert Armitage later became an accomplished classical guitarist, and another member, Paul Kennerley, would enjoy success as a singer-songwriter-producer and marry the multitalented Emmylou Harris. Salem was never a formal band member, as he did not have that sort of ability, but he played the harmonica at jam sessions and begged for guitar lessons. He did not have the patience for sustained study, however. He just wanted to rock.

8. CROSSWIND

BY THE MID-1960S, Mohamed Bin Laden flew around Saudi Arabia in his seven- passenger Twin Beech propeller plane the way other businessmen might travel to sales calls in a shiny Lincoln. On a typical morning a driver picked him up at his Jeddah compound at daybreak and took him to the city’s airport, not far from Abdulaziz’s old Khozam Palace, with the conspicuous car ramp Bin Laden had built long ago. The airport served as a base for several dozen American pilots who flew for Saudi Arabian Airlines under a contract managed by the American carrier Trans World Airlines. Bin Laden had arranged for TWA to maintain his aircraft and to supply him with pilots. The tail number of his principal Twin Beech was HZ-IBN, which incorporated the international code for Saudi Arabia. The plane was designed for a single flier, with no copilot, but it had a passenger seat up front, and this was where Bin Laden liked to sit, staring out the cockpit window with a cup of Arabic coffee in his hand. He sometimes enjoyed frightening the aides and drivers who would fly with him to his job sites by grabbing the