The Bin Ladens

Laden designed what would become, in effect, a small subdivision of suburban homes, one for each of his wives and some for his ex-wives and their children, along with a mosque and business offices. Bin Laden still worked hard, but he was spending some of his wealth to live and travel in finer style.⁹

The private-jet purchase proved complicated, however. Bin Laden had to locate pilots who could be trained and certified on the Hawker in England and who would then be willing to work for him in Jeddah. Also, since the new jet could not land on the desert airstrips that Bin Laden visited frequently in Asir, he would need to expand his roster of pilots, so that one might be available to fly the desert-capable Twin Beech while another flew the Hawker jet.

In the summer of 1966, Gerald Auerbach, a veteran of the United States Air Force who had flown B-47s for the Strategic Air Command, the American reconnaissance and nuclear bombing force, temporarily joined Bin Laden’s crew. (A former U.S. Navy pilot named Tom Heacock had fallen ill and returned to the United States.) Auerbach was a meticulous pilot who enjoyed flying Mohamed around the desert. Bin Laden asked him to stay on as one of his permanent pilots. Auerbach’s TWA supervisor told him the change would be okay but that he would lose seniority, because it was TWA’s policy not to pay Bin Laden’s pilots as much as those who worked commercial flights. Auerbach told Bin Laden about the problem, but Mohamed declined to make up the difference in his salary. It would prove to be a fateful decision.

In June 1967, a new American pilot turned up in Jeddah—Jim Harrington, a former fighter pilot in the U.S. Air Force, a sandy-haired man around forty years old. Auerbach decided to leave Bin Laden but agreed to train Harrington. “I took him out to some of the nastiest strips that we went into,” Auerbach recalled. These included “dry riverbeds” and other makeshift landing areas in Asir with nothing but sand and rows of rocks to mark the runway.¹⁰

Harrington hadn’t flown for several years and he “was rusty.” Auerbach told their mutual supervisor: “I’m a little worried about him. This isn’t routine flying.” But the supervisor checked Harrington out and declared him ready to go, Auerbach recalled. In July, Harrington took over the Twin Beech and began shuttling with Bin Laden to and from Asir. Auerbach returned to Saudi commercial work.

Bin Laden was at work on the highway extension from Abha to Nejran, a road that climbed through high elevations before falling back down to a desert plain just above the Yemen border. His crews had cut the road about forty miles toward Nejran, and they had set up work sites at a small town called Oom. This was where Harrington landed the Twin Beech when Bin Laden flew down from Jeddah.

Gerald Auerbach bumped into Harrington that summer and asked how he was doing. Harrington said that everything was fine but that Bin Laden had “built a strip up in this Oom area and it’s really hard. It’s high elevation and it goes up a hill. It’s not really good.” Bin Laden’s crews had used their bulldozers and graders, and cleaned off a section of desert about a thousand yards long, not a particularly long runway. The strip was on a ridge shaped like half of a bowl, so it was difficult to bank or turn to the sides while descending or ascending; you had to fly straight in and straight out, and you had to land uphill and take off downhill. The higher elevation also was an issue because in thinner air, less oxygen ran to the aircraft’s engines, which could cause them to lose power.

“Well, just tell him,” Auerbach told Harrington, as he later recalled it. “You’re in charge. You pick a place and say I want the runway here, and he’ll do it for you. He’ll do it that way. Tell him this is not safe.”

“Oh, I can do it,” Harrington said, meaning he could handle the landings at Oom. “I can do it.”¹¹

On September 3, 1967, one of Mohamed Bin Laden’s long-serving drivers, Omar, rode out to the airstrip with a car to await his sheikh’s arrival. He saw the Twin Beech descend in clear daylight. As it made its approach over the landing area, about 150 feet in the air, a heavy crosswind blew. Harrington probably found his plane pushed out of alignment with the makeshift runway and then tried to pull up at full power, to ascend out of the bowl and go around to try again, according to what Gerald Auerbach later concluded. Auerbach, who led a team of investigators to examine the site, described what probably happened that morning after Harrington pulled back hard on the Twin Beech’s throttle: “The ground is climbing. At his speed, to keep flying at that altitude, he would have had to be able to climb four or five hundred feet a minute to get out. He couldn’t turn…The airplane didn’t have that climb capability, and he ended up stalling it.” Because of the thin mountain air, his engines couldn’t deliver full power; this exacerbated the chance of a stall. Additional gusts of wind may have made matters worse.

The Twin Beech fell toward the desert, tilted to one side, bounced once, crashed, and burned.

The impact crushed the cockpit, where Harrington and Mohamed Bin Laden sat. The force was so great that the front end of the plane bore a hole in the desert two to three feet deep. Both men died from the impact. Fire raced through the wreckage as Omar looked on helplessly. Two passengers in the rear cabin may have survived the initial crash but were trapped inside by a chain lock on the cabin door. They burned to death.

In an instant, Mohamed Bin Laden was gone. He was about sixty years old. The investigators identified him by his shiny watch.

PART TWO SONS AND DAUGHTERS September 1967 to May 1988

9. THE GUARDIANS

THE PRINCIPAL at the school in Lebanon where Mohamed had sent many of his sons called nine of the boys into his office after he received the news. “You have to be practical and logical,” he recalled telling them. “All people die.” He flew with three of the older boys—Hassan, Yeslam, and Mahrouz—to Jeddah. Their half-brother Ali, the eldest of Mohamed’s sons then living in the kingdom, met them at the airport with a car and driver. In concert with Saudi tradition, their father had been buried quickly in an unmarked grave; the family chose Jeddah’s most prestigious site, where religious pilgrims had once worshipped the tomb attributed to the biblical Eve. Days of mourning followed. Family, employees, Jeddah merchants, and princes enveloped the boys at the Bin Laden compound. Islamic and Hejazi rituals of death and remembrance, so often required in harsh Arabia, emphasized the comforts of crowds. Each evening between the sunset prayer and the final daily prayer, the Bin Laden men gathered to receive long lines of sympathetic visitors. (Mohamed’s daughters and wives received visitors separately during the afternoon.) This grieving assembly offered a rare public display of family unity. Rhythmic chanting of Koran readers rang out in the humid night air.¹

It took Salem a few days to reach Jeddah from London. After boarding school he had moved into a flat in Gloucester Place, north of Marble Arch. He had enrolled in a local college, but the friends who visited him found him less than devoted to his studies. His apartment was often filled with young men in black leather jackets, cigarette smoke, and the occasional amateur strains of Salem’s guitar.²

He boarded a commercial flight to Jeddah wearing jeans and a T-shirt, his hair falling toward his shoulders. When he stepped off the plane, his locks were shorn and he wore a white Saudi thobe and headdress. He was a little older than twenty-one, suddenly and unexpectedly heir to the largest construction firm in the kingdom. He knew little of engineering and had only a passing acquaintance with King Faisal. He had not even met all his half-brothers and half-sisters; some were introduced to him for the first time at his father’s funeral.³

Mohamed’s sudden death raised immediate fears that the Bin Laden business empire would collapse. The primary concern was that Mohamed’s many young sons and surviving brother might prove unable to forge an orderly succession. A cable to Washington dispatched by American ambassador Hermann Eilts on the day after Mohamed’s death summed up Jeddah’s anxiety:

Death of Mohammed Bin Laden, sole proprietor of largest construction company in Saudi Arabia, has caused immediate concern in both SAG [Saudi Arabian government] and local business circles. Under Islamic lawn [sic] assets could conceivably be divided among Bin Laden’s 40