The Bin Ladens

Imbaba. Later he purchased a pair of ultralights. If there were enough pilots around, he would arrange an evening expedition to the Pyramids; his friends flew behind him in formation, creating a phalanx of toy aircraft.²⁰

Wayne Fagan, an American lawyer who visited Salem in Cairo, remembered being invited into the back of one of these planes as Salem gunned the engine and roared down the runway while trying to light a tobacco pipe, all the while “pulling back on the throttles with his elbows.” They flew out over the desert in the evening light and circled the Pyramids. Salem had promised Fagan a flight in the glider, but it wasn’t available, so on the way back, he shut down his plane’s engines and drifted on the currents. “And he says, ‘Look, Wayne, we’re gliding.’ And I said, ‘That’s great, Salem, thanks a lot. You can start up any time now.’”²¹

On one courtship glider flight with an English girlfriend, Caroline Carey, he miscalculated wind and altitude, and seemed headed for a crash. Caroline became so frightened as they plummeted that she promised to convert to Islam if they somehow survived. Salem steered hurriedly toward a field at the Shooting Club, near Randa’s apartment, slipped the plane over high trees, and pulled up in time to stop before striking the club’s wall. “When I saw what Salem did, I said, ‘My God, any other pilot would crash it,’” recalled Anwar Khan, a Pakistani pilot who flew for him. Club security rushed up; Salem climbed out, helped his girlfriend to her feet, and joked: “Sorry, I’m not a member of the club—but my brother is a member.” Caroline kept her promise and became a Muslim.²²

He employed his acrobatic skills to shake money from his debtors. “People were forever owing him money, so he would offer them rides,” recalled Rupert Armitage. Once in the air, “he’d say, ‘Look, you owe me two hundred thousand dollars. I want you to write out a check now.’” If they declined, he would threaten to take the plane’s controls and roll it upside down. If they still refused, “he’d start doing it…and then, ‘Okay, okay, I’ll sign it!’”²³

Under Salem’s enthusiastic guidance, the Bin Ladens gradually became a family of pilots. Flight logs show no fewer than seven of Salem’s brothers and half-brothers taking lessons on his private planes during the 1970s. Several of his half-sisters also trained to fly. Osama, however, was apparently not among this group; he did later acquire private airplanes of his own, and may have taken some informal instruction, but he does not seem to have flown often during the 1970s. His relative youth appears to have been one factor; the brothers who took lessons were older, while Osama remained in high school, increasingly concerned with religious issues.

Flying lessons reinforced the boundaries of an inner circle of Bin Laden brothers around Salem, led by his full brothers Ghalib and Bakr, and including some older half-brothers, such as Omar, Issa, Yahya, Tareq, and Yeslam. They were an eclectic group—some devout, some more secular—tied together by their dependency on Salem’s leadership. To taste the pleasures Salem expounded upon, and to win his favor, they followed him into the sky.

The American, Egyptian, and Pakistani pilots who flew with Salem, many of whom were veterans of their respective air forces, genuinely admired his skill. He had excellent reflexes, a natural feel for an aircraft in flight, and a strong enough mind to recall the subtle differences in the control panels of the various models of aircraft he accumulated. He was weak on technical issues and not the most meticulous of checklist followers, but he usually kept a skilled copilot on board to watch after such details. On a typical flight, he would take off and land but let his copilot handle the long cruise at altitude while he snoozed in the back or canoodled with one of his girlfriends. He reveled in “the sensation of speed, man over machine,” said one of his instructors, Don Sowell. His skills were “excellent” and he was “never reckless,” and yet, “Sheikh Salem was one who lived on the edge, bordered on the edge.” He never seemed to be concentrating because he always seemed to be doing more than one thing at a time—patching through phone calls to girlfriends on his high-frequency airplane radio, joking with control towers, and yet, all the while, recalled Anwar Khan, he would be “making a perfect, perfect approach” using only his instruments.²⁴

He was not much interested in formal licensing or aviation rules. If a trained copilot was unavailable for a particular flight on a plane that required two pilots, he would ask one of his untrained school buddies or business partners to sit in the jump seat and sign the flight plan so that he could take off. His friends learned to behave nonchalantly in these situations, because if Salem smelled fear in a passenger or putative copilot, he would mercilessly roll or spin the plane to exacerbate their discomfort, laughing all the while. On a long flight to Cairo, he drafted as his copilot Robert Freeman, an American business partner who had not a single hour of flight training. Freeman asked what he should do if Salem fell ill or blacked out. “That would be the end for both of us,” he answered matter-of-factly.²⁵

Despite Mohamed Bin Laden’s fatal accident, Salem ensured that the risks of private aviation became an increasingly pervasive part of the Bin Ladens’ family life and conversation. His unconventional habits led to a succession of crashes and near misses from the mid-1970s onward, each of which was circulated and discussed within the family. Salem’s full brother Ghalib wrecked a Piper airplane by spinning it out during a landing. A family Learjet returning from Medina fell mysteriously out of the sky, killing the two expatriate pilots. Salem himself skated near disaster. He had trouble managing his MU-2’s de-icing equipment when he flew to Europe in winter; if the system was mishandled, the plane would stall. Once, climbing out after takeoff, his engines died at a dangerously low altitude. “I was telling God, ‘You can have all my airplanes. You can have all my money. Just give me one little engine,’” he recounted, according to Bengt Johansson. His plea was answered.²⁶

By the late 1970s, he was buying more planes than he was wrecking. He purchased a Fokker-27 turboprop, mainly to fly to construction work sites in the desert. He bought a Learjet 25-D and took an interest in more advanced models; he loved the Lears, and he often wore blue jeans with a little Learjet sewn into them. He also bought a Hawker-125, the same model jet that his father had purchased before his death. His friend and banker Khalid Bin Mahfouz added even more extravagant aircraft to their Jeddah department, including a Boeing 707 with a customized interior. Each plane had a unique tail number, and Salem often chose initials drawn from family names.

He played his harmonica over the radio to entertain air traffic controllers. In his Lear, he only had to announce himself on approach—“Hotel Zulu Bravo Lima One”—and controllers in Cairo or Beirut would call out in welcome, “Ahlan, Sheikh Salem!” Above all, his planes gave him freedom—to live as he wished, to go where he pleased. As one of his Lebanese friends summed it up: “Salem believed in his Learjet and his MU-2 and his jeans and guitar and harmonica.”²⁷

IT WAS AN APPEALING CREED, but an expensive one. To live this way, Salem needed to adapt his family’s strategy to better profit from the new economy of the oil boom. European and American corporations swarmed into Saudi Arabia during the 1970s. They hawked televisions, telephones, fancy cars, air conditioners, and dishwashers —all the badges of modern consumerism. Saudi law required these firms to sell through local agents. Saudi merchant families competed to sign up agencies with the most desirable brands, a pathway to instant profits. Like his father, Salem had mixed feelings about this approach; he preferred to act as a principal, and where it was desirable to work with foreign companies, to form partnerships, rather than to simply rake off commissions from overseas agencies. He did sign up some agency deals, such as those with the German automakers Volkswagen and Porsche, but he preferred joint ventures involving big construction contracts, and he preferred to concentrate on industries where his family had already built up credibility and expertise. Either way, during the oil boom of the 1970s, the Bin Ladens required, as they never had during Mohamed’s lifetime, a spokesman and deal maker who could represent the family successfully in Europe and the United States. This became Salem’s role. He was an ideal intermediary—fluent in English, fun to be around, energetic, mobile, and equally at home in Jeddah and London.

He used his uninhibited personality to disarm and manipulate Western executives during negotiations. Flying into Stockholm for a meeting with officials at AVB, one of Sweden’s largest construction companies, he asked his Swedish mechanic Johansson to meet him at the airport. Johansson drove down from his home on the coast in a corroded old Volkswagen Golf, while Salem flew in from Cairo. When Johansson arrived at the private aviation terminal, he saw AVB executives in business suits lined up in stiff formation beside a convoy of limousines, waiting for the sheikh. Salem landed, descended from his jet, shook hands with the lead AVB executive, walked past the limousines, and insisted that the Swedish executive cram into the backseat of the Golf, so they could ride into town with Salem’s disheveled friend Bengt. Salem wore his usual uniform for trips to Europe—jeans, a T-shirt, a leather jacket, and a ten-dollar plastic Casio watch.²⁸

Salem worked most of his overseas deals through Bin Laden Brothers, the company he and some of his brothers had started to prove themselves and to escape the control of the older Saudi trustees, appointed by King