funneling stuff to Osama; Salem said he needed to go up and check with his brother to make sure…things were going well.”
The trio flew up that same afternoon and landed on a dirt strip—Harrington could not tell if it was a road or a runway. Osama and some of his aides came out to greet them. “I remember being struck that he was so much taller than Salem.”8
He was then about twenty-seven years old. In addition to his height, his bushy dark beard made a striking impression; it poured down his cheeks and gathered below his chin, elongating his thin face. His brown eyes were bright and communicative, but his manner was reserved. Osama visited Pakistan regularly from his home in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, but he had not settled down on the war front; he was a philanthropic commuter, encouraged by his religious teachers to fund charities and Arab volunteers who had just begun to arrive to join the fighting.
Salem made formal introductions to his American and Swedish companions. Osama wore robes and a flat Afghan cap; he was reticent around the foreigners, but he shook Johansson’s hand respectfully. Bengt had learned over the years that all of Salem’s younger siblings treated their eldest brother with unquestioning respect, and that this respect extended by rights to Salem’s friends, no matter how indecorous they might appear in Saudi eyes.9
They drove to Osama’s office and sat in a circle. The two half-brothers spoke together in Arabic for about two hours. A modest lunch appeared. It was typical of Salem to bring his Western friends into settings where they might not otherwise be welcomed, but no one openly questioned their presence, and in any event, neither Harrington nor Johansson could understand much of what was being said.
After lunch Osama led them on a tour of the charitable and humanitarian work that he was supporting in the Peshawar region to help the Afghans. They visited refugee camps where Afghan civilians and fighters displaced by Soviet bombing lived in primitive tents or shelters. They visited a hospital “with people with amputated limbs,” and Harrington was amazed to hear tales of terrible atrocities carried out by the Soviets, and how, nonetheless, the wounded rebels “wanted to go back and fight for Afghanistan.” They visited an orphanage where, as Johansson recalled it, the children lived in “small blocks…concrete blocks, and they were sleeping on the floor.” The children gathered together and sang songs for Osama’s visitors.10
Salem recorded these scenes with a personal video camera, a large and awkward handheld device that he had brought with him. He appeared to be making a home movie to publicize Osama’s work and to raise funds. It was “a fact-finding mission,” Harrington remembered. “The camera was to show what was going on. Nothing militaristic…It was more about money.”
AFTER SOME additional adventures in Pakistan, Salem’s entourage flew back to Dubai; Salem announced that he had to make an unexpected business trip, and that he would be gone for about a week.
The American balloon champion who was a part of the entourage took George and Lynn on a soaring flight above the emirate’s sand dunes. Gulf breezes and desert winds blew them accidentally over a local emir’s palace. The emir’s guards pointed their automatic weapons angrily at the billowing red and yellow dirigible. “This is it,” Harrington remembered thinking. He would end his life as “just a bloodstain on the ruler’s lawn.” Fortunately, the guards held their fire.11
They heard nothing from Salem for a while, but Harrington knew where he had gone, because Salem had told him of his destination: Washington, D.C.
King Fahd of Saudi Arabia was preparing that early winter of 1985 for a summit meeting and state dinner with President Ronald Reagan. “For some reason,” as Harrington recalled it, “the king wanted Salem” in Washington. Salem flew off immediately. This was hardly an unusual diversion. As Salem’s friend Mohamed Ashmawi, a wealthy Saudi oil executive, put it: “He used to go and visit the king wherever he is.”12
Secrecy and complexity governed the relationship between King Fahd and Ronald Reagan. That winter of 1985, apart from Great Britain, there was perhaps no government with which the Reagan administration shared more sensitive secrets than it did with Saudi Arabia. Unbeknownst to the American public, for example, Reagan had authorized an attempt to free American hostages held in Lebanon by selling weapons to the kidnappers’ sponsors in Iran; Adnan Khashoggi, who worked closely with the Saudi royal family, was centrally involved in those secret transactions. Also, the previous June, after a request by Reagan’s national security advisor Robert McFarlane, King Fahd had secretly agreed to funnel $1 million per month into a Cayman Islands bank account in support of Nicaragua’s anti-communist rebels, known as the Contras; this contribution allowed President Reagan to evade congressional restrictions on such aid. Saudi Arabia had no particular interest in the Nicaraguan cause, according to the kingdom’s longtime ambassador in Washington, Bandar Bin Sultan (“I didn’t give a damn about the Contras—I didn’t even know where Nicaragua was,” he said later). However, according to Bandar, McFarlane claimed the aid would help ensure Reagan’s reelection in November by preventing trouble in Central America. The Saudis contributed the money and, as it happened, Reagan won in a landslide.13
Early in 1985, King Fahd notified the Americans that he would now double his off-the-books contributions to the Cayman Islands account. Favor begat favor between these two governments during the late Cold War, and secret begat secret, a pattern of conduct that required an unusual measure of personal trust and understanding at the highest levels. Fahd’s visit to Washington was therefore of timely significance. Reagan was a master of the theatrical and ceremonial aspects of his office, and he prepared to put on a show.
Up the White House driveway they strolled on the chilly night of February 11—Yogi Berra, the New York Yankees manager; Vice President George Bush; Linda Gray, star of
Saudi royals do not travel on official business with their wives, so the king escorted Abdulaziz, his eleven- year-old son by Princess Jawhara Al-Ibrahim. They arrived at the White House in traditional Saudi robes and red- checked headdresses. Now in his early sixties, Fahd had become an obese man, and his legs could barely carry him, but his double-chinned face still had a gentle, boyish quality. Back home, Fahd was so devoted to Abdulaziz, who seemed likely to be his last son, that he spent vast sums to ensure that in each of his luxurious palaces, the boy’s room was outfitted with exactly the same toys, wallpaper, and bed silks, so that he would never feel that he was away from home. Reagan doted on the child, too, posed for a photograph with him, gave him a private tour of the Oval Office, presented him with a model of the Space Shuttle, and seated him next to Sigourney Weaver at the state dinner. Abdulaziz confided to the actress that when his father’s work in Washington was completed, he hoped to visit Disney World.15
Salem Bin Laden’s activity in Washington around the summit is difficult to pinpoint. A French intelligence report later claimed that Salem was involved in “U.S. operations” in Central America during this period. The American government has not declassified many of the records describing Saudi Arabia’s secret aid to the Nicaraguan Contras, but those available provide no evidence of Salem’s participation. (Like Bandar, the Saudi ambassador, Salem “had no idea where Nicaragua was,” said a European friend who worked with him on arms deals in other parts of the world.) An attorney who represented the Bin Laden family in a Texas civil lawsuit some years later recalled possessing a photo of Salem standing with Ronald Reagan, but that evidence file had been destroyed during a routine archive cleaning, and the photographs taken by White House staff during the Fahd summit show no trace of Salem. He was the eldest of fifty-four children, the leader of the sprawling Bin Laden family, the chairman of several multinational corporations, and a genuine friend to King Fahd, but Salem was also decidedly the king’s subordinate; he might just as well have been called to Washington to organize a night on the town as to participate in clandestine statecraft.16
There was one portfolio of secrets binding King Fahd and President Reagan that winter that unquestionably involved Salem Bin Laden, however. These concerned the covert aid provided by the United States and Saudi Arabia to anti-communist rebels fighting Soviet forces in Afghanistan. The United States and Saudi Arabia each had already channeled several hundred million dollars in cash and weapons to the Afghan rebels since the Soviet invasion in 1979. It seems probable that when Salem reached Washington that winter, he would have passed to King Fahd, if not directly to the White House, the video evidence he had just gathered documenting Osama’s humanitarian work on the Afghan frontier. As he welcomed Fahd to the White House, Reagan took pains to acknowledge Saudi Arabia’s particular efforts to support Afghan refugees on the Pakistani frontier: “Their many humanitarian contributions touch
