who was in line for the throne after Fahd. Salem’s strategy was to sniff out upcoming contracts through contacts with civil servants inside key government ministries, and then to seal the deals with the princes. “Some of these were just enormous carve-ups and so you were part of the carve-up as long as you could do the job” and were in the good graces of the royal family, Armitage said.9
The desert camping trips also offered a chance to collect on past-due bills. Salem would sit at Fahd’s side day after day, gently mentioning what he was owed, until a royal accountant finally arrived with a check. Bengt Johansson, who worked as Salem’s chief airplane mechanic for at least fifteen years, remembered him returning from Fahd’s tent on one occasion, waving a check in the air. “We’ve gotten paid, guys! Let’s go!” They packed up their tents and departed immediately.10
By the late 1970s, Salem had won enough contracts to begin to add Learjet and other luxury business aircraft to his private fleet. He used these planes for his own leisure travel overseas but also to cultivate ties with the royal family. If a prince called and asked to “borrow” one of Salem’s Lears, he often felt he had no choice but to turn the plane and its crew over for a weeks-long shopping spree to Europe. This was part of his unwritten bargain with the royal family. Johansson remembered Salem dodging telephone calls from certain princes who were particularly active plane borrowers. “He tried to avoid that, but if they get in touch with him and they put the question directly to him, he has to say yes.”11
Such favors, combined with the royal family’s unreliable accounts payable departments, as well as the normal purchasing and payroll demands of the contracting industry, put heavy pressure on Salem’s cash flow. Salem’s father had managed his own version of this problem through the support of his great Hadhrami banking friend Salem Bin Mahfouz, after whom Salem had been named. Salem Bin Laden developed a similar friendship and business partnership with Khalid Bin Mahfouz, an heir to his own father’s fortune who had been sent to school in England as Salem had, and who, by the mid-1970s, had begun to play an increasingly important role at his family’s National Commercial Bank. Khalid was a much quieter personality than Salem, but they became fast friends and close business partners. During the 1970s, they were both still trying to establish themselves as young executives in their own right.
Salem and Khalid each acquired a small fleet of private planes in the first years of the oil boom. They hired American, Pakistani, Afghan, Egyptian, and other pilots, and opened an aviation department at Jeddah’s airport. One of the department’s missions was to move cash around. Banking in Saudi Arabia remained in a relatively primitive state, with few reliable electronic or computer systems. Cash reigned. Salem often used his private planes to transport bags of money between NCB branches. In his pilots’ logbooks, these flights were sometimes listed simply as “money runs.” A run would typically begin at NCB headquarters in Jeddah, where trusted expatriate Yemeni workers would load five-foot-tall burlap sacks bulging with riyals and topped with lead seals into a convoy of Honda pickup trucks. Without guards or gunmen, the couriers would roll to the airport and hoist the cash into Learjets, filling all the passenger seats. Two pilots then flew the planes to Dhahran or Riyadh or Hail or some other Saudi city, where the money would be unloaded and transferred to a local NCB branch to fill up its vaults. On other trips they flew cash to Bin Laden desert campsites and doled it out to migrant construction workers. Once in a while, without explanation, the Yemeni couriers loaded a plane with bars of gold bullion, which were then flown to Bahrain, London, or Switzerland. As the years passed, the American pilots who flew on these money runs found the cargo and destinations increasingly intriguing.12
AT SOME POINT during the mid-1970s, Salem decided that he wanted to become a medical doctor. According to his friend Mohamed Ashmawi, he asked Fahd for permission to study in Cairo; the crown prince looked up at him and said, “Salem, grow up.”13
Undeterred, Salem asked his family doctor in Jeddah, an American named Terry Bennett, if he would write reference letters. “It was the scheme of the month,” Bennett recalled. “He had the attention span of a flea.”14 Salem was a quick study, however. He had become an excellent pilot without rigorous formal training, sometimes by asking more experienced fliers to accompany him to a few required classes. He seemed to believe he could pick up medicine by the same method. In any event, he was absolutely determined, in the manner of patriarchs throughout time, that someone in his family should become a doctor.
He spent increasing amounts of time in Cairo. It lay a relatively short distance from Jeddah, close enough for a weekend commute by air, and its culture was much more vibrant and open than anything in Saudi Arabia. Salem’s father had married at least two Egyptian women, and the offspring of those unions lived in and around Cairo. Mohamed had left three children from one marriage to an Egyptian—two sons, Khalid and Abdulaziz, and a daughter, Mona—as well as a singleton daughter from a second marriage, Randa.
Randa was twelve or thirteen years old when Mohamed Bin Laden died, and she first met Salem at the memorial service. Salem told her, “Don’t worry, don’t worry. I will always take care of you.” There was “an immediate bond” between them, recalled an American friend, Gail Freeman. Salem discovered that Randa and her mother, who had remarried, were living in far from comfortable circumstances. He gave them money and bought them a three-story town house near Cairo’s colonial-era Shooting Club. Salem stayed on the ground floor when he was in town, Randa had an apartment above him, and her mother lived with her new husband on the highest floor. By the mid-1970s, Randa was becoming known to everyone in Salem’s entourage as his favorite sister. She was a slim, coffee-colored, dark-haired woman with an open personality. He doted on her, spoke to her frequently on the telephone, took her shopping in Europe, and traveled regularly to visit her in Cairo. The connection between them grew so intense that it seemed to approach romantic love. None of Salem’s close entourage ever thought that anything inappropriate passed between him and his half-sister; nonetheless, they marveled at the open passion in their relationship.15
Salem decided that Randa should also become a doctor, and he announced that he would study alongside her at Cairo University. “He pushed Randa to do it,” recalled Sabry Ghoneim, a family employee in Cairo.16 She studied hard. Salem paid for professors to come to her apartment and tutor her privately. He tried to attend these lessons, too, flying back and forth from Jeddah. He ordered his pilots to help Randa shop for supplies, and on at least one occasion, he flew in skeletons from Saudi Arabia in one of his private planes to aid their cram sessions.17
Inside Saudi Arabia, it was no longer unheard of for a woman to go to college or even to medical school, although if a woman studied in the kingdom, she did so in an environment of strict gender segregation. Salem encouraged many of his sisters and half-sisters to attend school. He enrolled his full sister Hoda in art school in Paris at the same time that he underwrote Randa’s medical education in Cairo. He placed two of his half-sisters in boarding school in Pakistan. Others applied to universities and design academies in the United States; several became interested in interior decorating, a profession they could profit from in turnkey palace-building projects for the family firm. Many of Salem’s half-sisters wore Western fashions and traveled without covering when they were outside Saudi Arabia. At the same time, Salem seemed fiercely determined to protect what he imagined to be his sisters’ honor. He discouraged any of the younger pilots who flew for him from even speaking with any of his sisters or half-sisters. Only the fatherly Gerald Auerbach was trusted as an escort.18
Salem did not live extravagantly when he visited Egypt. There were cooks and servants in the town house he shared with Randa, but it was not a palace. He wore blue jeans and T-shirts, and he drove an old Spanish car or a motorcycle. He opened an office at 14 Al-Thawra Street, hired a few Egyptian aides, and began to explore ambitious land and development deals in Cairo. “Salem dreamed of building residential towers and malls along the Nile,” Ghoneim recalled.19
By the late 1970s, he knew Cairo’s landscape better than most developers because he spent hours swooping above it in the air. Salem might fantasize about becoming a doctor, but he already was a pilot. It was the one passion in his life that never seemed to bore him.
SALEM PURCHASED a Cessna-172 single-engine propeller plane in the United States during this time and had it flown into Cairo. He kept it at a small airport on the city’s outskirts, Imbaba, which had been built in 1947 and was mainly used by recreational pilots. Among other things, he used the Cessna to tow his two-seat, German-made glider up to five thousand feet or so, from where it could be released for a meandering flight back to Imbaba— twisting down the Nile, out to the Pyramids, across dusty slums and arid parks, with only the sound of wind rushing across the wings. He reveled in the romance of these flights above the Pyramids. When he courted a new girlfriend (he was still married to Sheikha, but they were drifting apart), he often flew the woman to Cairo and took her aloft in his glider at sunset. With fellow pilots, he trained in acrobatics—loops, rolls, and flying upside down above
