The Bin Ladens

Faisal, who still ran the sprawling Mohamed Bin Laden Organization. Salem opened a shabby office off an alley near the old souk in downtown Jeddah; the suite was crowded with clerks and accountants who labored amid blue clouds of cigarette smoke. In the style of a palace diwan, sofas and chairs ran around the outer edge of the reception room, where businessmen pitching deals or younger Bin Laden boys seeking an allowance payment would sit for hours waiting for an audience with Salem or a senior brother. Inside, the older brothers who were partners in the company—Salem, Bakr, Yahya, Hassan, Ghalib, Omar, and perhaps two or three others—had private offices. Salem rarely used his, preferring to work out of his bedroom at home, but most of the other brothers kept regular hours. A visitor would stride in with a bulging armload of traveler’s checks, and a boy at the reception desk would size him up and say simply, “Come in the back.” There were “loose ends all over the place,” recalled Armitage, who worked there. There always seemed to be a scramble under way to get some signature on a document. “It was constant chaos…of a small, needling nature.” Still, the larger problems were managed well, Armitage thought, and his overall impression was that the Bin Laden brothers were learning in these years to work successfully “as a family, together.”²⁹

There was no question about who was in charge, however. Salem presided over his younger brothers and half-brothers in the manner of an Arabian patriarch. They responded with obedience. They called him “Sheikh” and they were “very subservient to him, very respectful of him as an elder. He was like the king,” recalled his pilot Jack Hinson. Bedouin servants brought him tea and coffee. His brothers would ask Salem’s European friends and pilots if they would please arrange audiences for them with the boss; they were very reluctant to walk in on him unannounced. Salem alone decided how much money the brothers received in allowances, what schools they attended, what projects they might work on, and how much salary they would earn. He made these decisions confidently, with an air of entitlement to authority, and he did not hesitate to slap or strike a younger brother lightly if he was particularly displeased. He rewarded the engineers and hard workers, such as Bakr, Ghalib, Yahya, and Omar: among other things, they could relieve Salem of day-to-day responsibilities on construction contracts. Not even they enjoyed much autonomy, however. “No one did anything without Salem’s approval,” said David Grey, another of his pilots. On the phone or in business meetings, Salem would announce forcefully, “I will determine who will get what money, and no one will get anything until I decide,” as Grey recalled. “I’ve heard him use those words time and time again.”³⁰

His new business was becoming steadily more complex. A profile of Bin Laden Brothers prepared by Aramco’s political office in 1979 lists more than a dozen partnerships or companies Salem had organized with foreign firms. These included joint ventures with large American and European building companies, such as Lozinger in Switzerland and Kaiser in the United States, as well as companies that made windows, pre-stress concrete, air- conditioning systems, kitchens, doors, and accessories for highway construction. Salem could pick and choose as he pleased from the scores of unsolicited proposals he received from visiting Europeans and Americans seeking to cash in on the Saudi boom. The ideas submitted to him by Western suitors had a random, comical diversity—plastic bag manufacturing one day, aeronautical lubricants the next. For the most part, Salem stuck to industries he knew, and he sought out prestigious corporations. He formed a shareholding partnership with General Electric during this time, one that would allow him to develop deals in Saudi Arabia across all GE’s lines of business, from medical technology to power generation. Particularly with American businessmen, who were relatively informal, “He was perfect with people,” said the investment banker Francis Hunnewell, a partner of Salem’s during this period.³¹

Bin Laden Brothers continued to work as a subcontractor for his father’s former company. By the late 1970s, Salem had become chairman of the old family firm, and he gradually wrested complete control from the trustees— they formally stepped aside at some point around 1978 or 1979. The Mohamed Bin Laden Organization still drew much of its revenue from big defense and infrastructure projects. It continued to build roads and other facilities in Asir; it worked on a military garrison project in northern Al-Jouf, alongside the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; and in the vast Empty Quarter, the desert along the kingdom’s southern frontier, the company built roads and an airstrip. Salem occasionally flew out for inspections as his father had so often done, but he was not a hands-on engineer who walked the roads or argued over decisions about tunnels or grading. Indeed, he seemed increasingly to avoid that sort of responsibility. He ordered his two younger full brothers, Bakr and Ghalib, to enroll in civil engineering courses in the United States, and he told his half-brothers Yahya and Omar to do the same. He knew the Bin Ladens would require civil engineering expertise over the long run, but he had no interest in acquiring such knowledge himself.

He spent more and more time in Britain and Europe. On May 18, 1975, Salem’s wife Sheikha gave birth in London to their first child, a daughter, Sara. A little more than two years later, also in London, she had a son, Salman.³²

During these sojourns, Salem met Ian Munro, a tall, elegant, white-haired Scotsman who had served in Britain’s famous Black Watch regiment; he had fought with the regiment to put down the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya during the 1950s, and later he served with the Air Wing of British security forces in Kenya. After leaving the military, Munro went into business in London. He had a sonorous voice and an accent that betrayed little of his Scottish heritage. He was a member of the Naval & Military Club, a flag-draped bastion of fireplaces and leather chairs in Piccadilly. Munro was a reliable, fatherly figure whom Salem decided he could trust to help organize his affairs outside Saudi Arabia. The two registered a company in London for aviation-related ventures named Salian International, a combination of their first names, as well as a British division of Bin Laden Brothers, which later evolved into Bin Laden London. Munro opened a small office in Park Lane.³³

Salem decided to buy a proper English mansion near London, but he could not be bothered with real estate shopping. He told Munro that he was sure that whatever Ian liked, he would like, too. Munro chose a manor estate built in the early 1920s in a village called Offley Chase, a short drive from the Luton airport, north of London, which was often used by private pilots. The estate conformed to some of the expectations that foreigners bring to English country homes—it was heavily bricked and somewhat gloomy. On a rainy night, it seemed like an ideal setting for a parlor murder. In the years ahead, Offley Chase would be the scene of some of the most dramatic events in Salem’s eccentric life.³⁴

13. DISCOVERING AMERICA

THE SOWELL FAMILY ran a flight school in Panama City, Florida, a town of about thirty- five thousand in the state’s western panhandle, where the pace hued to the milky rhythms of the Deep South rather than to the samba beat of distant Miami. Downtown held a brick courthouse and a jail, and along the nearby streets, there were Baptist churches, bait shops, and gun stores. White beaches stretched out to the west on sandbars in the Gulf of Mexico. There was an air force base nearby. Weathered roadhouse bars and a few tattoo parlors lined the beach road. Sowell Aviation occupied several hundred acres to the north of downtown. During the 1970s, Don Sowell was preparing to take over the business from his father. Their school offered piloting lessons, aircraft maintenance, charters, sales, and leasing—a typical array of private aviation services. The Sowells had gotten to know the former California governor Ronald Reagan a little, through friends and by attending fundraising events. They attracted international students to their school from Asia, Europe, and South America, so it was not a surprise when one of Don Sowell’s pilot contacts from Texas, Jim Bath, invited him to dinner with a Saudi client who was buying up Learjets in the States and who said he might be interested in lessons, for himself and perhaps also for one of his sisters. “I have a baby sister,” Salem Bin Laden explained, “and she would like to learn to fly.”¹

Without boasting, exactly, Salem made it clear over dinner that he had a great deal of money and that he was looking for partners in America who could provide a wide variety of services—not only piloting lessons but also business services, particularly the acquisition of cars and consumer goods for the royal family in Saudi Arabia. Afterward, Don Sowell told Jim Bath, “It’s either an Alice-in-Wonderland thing, or it may be the biggest opportunity of a lifetime.”²

The oil embargo transformed America into a shopping mall and vacation resort for many wealthy Saudis. Europe might be fine for skiing, yachting, jewelry shopping, and haute couture, but if you wanted to play in open spaces and find the latest in electronics and toys, there was no substitute for America. Salem, of course, did not initially know—and as the years passed he would never seem to care—that Panama City was not a particularly