royal family, particularly in the field of aviation, where Salem was now establishing himself as an in-house expert for the Al-Saud by helping them make smart decisions as they spent more and more of their windfall on private jets.
Bath made his money from airplane commissions and by channeling Saudi investors like Salem into real estate or other business deals, where Bath took a 5 percent piece of the action for his efforts. He operated out of offices in the Fannin Bank Building in Houston, and he registered Salem Bin Laden’s new Texas businesses at that address. He created a vehicle called MBO Investments, Inc., named after the Bin Laden family firm in Jeddah. Bath’s authority was established in a “trust agreement” signed by Salem on July 8, 1976, and filed with the Texas secretary of state. Salem provided Bath “full and absolute authority to act on my behalf in all matters relating to the business and operation of Bin Laden-Houston offices,” which included “full authority to disburse funds for Company, or Bin Laden family expenses.” Bath maintained a revolving line of credit for the Bin Laden family that amounted at one stage to about $6 or $7 million, according to Bill White, who was a business partner of Bath’s after 1978.11
As his Saudi contacts grew, Bath moved into international aircraft leasing. This was a complex business in which, at the time, American tax and export laws made it particularly attractive to finance aircraft sales to overseas customers. Bath opened offshore corporations in Caribbean tax havens to facilitate such deals. He established a Cayman Islands corporation called Skyway Aircraft Leasing, Ltd., whose ownership was Saudi, according to White and other accounts.12
Bath also opened offshore companies for Salem. On July 5, 1977, he incorporated Binco Investments, N.V., in the Netherlands Antilles. Its parent company was SMB Investments, apparently in reference to Salem’s initials; it was also located in the Netherlands Antilles. Documents Bath filed with the state of Texas reported that the main purpose of these companies was to hold real estate. Binco Investments, for example, became a vehicle for Bath’s purchase around this time, on Salem’s behalf, of Houston Gulf Airport, a small field outside the city that Bath hoped would grow into a profitable feeder airport—a hope that was never realized.13
Bath’s deals with the Bin Ladens appear to have involved smaller amounts of money than those he developed with other Saudis, particularly Salem’s friend and banker Khalid Bin Mahfouz. In 1977, for example, Bath invested in the Main Bank in Houston; his partners included Bin Mahfouz, the wealthy Saudi businessman Gaith Pharaon, and former Texas governor John Connally. Salem invested with Bin Mahfouz in the Saudi Bank of Paris but apparently did not join his Texas banking deals.14
Bath’s Saudi clients, his politically connected friends in Texas, his offshore corporations, his freewheeling lifestyle, and his forays into international aviation all contributed to a growing air of mystery. Bath himself seemed to relish the intrigue. He flew back and forth to Caribbean tax havens, sometimes with hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash aboard the planes; he told his wife, Sandra, that the cash was needed to pay for fuel and contingencies. Sometimes the Saudis who traveled with Bath carried diplomatic passports, which allowed them to bring their briefcases through U.S. Customs without being inspected; on some occasions, according to a pilot who worked with Bath, the cases contained very large sums of cash.15
SALEM LED a family migration to America during the 1970s. As his brothers and sisters finished secondary school in Lebanon, Egypt, and Jeddah, he encouraged many of them to enroll in college in the United States. Like many Saudis, they gravitated toward Florida and California, where the weather felt like home. Salem’s youngest full brother, Ghalib, studied civil engineering at the University of California at Berkeley. His half-brother Abdulaziz, from Cairo, enrolled at the University of San Francisco, where he earned a master’s degree in business administration in 1978. Two other half-brothers, Shafiq and Saleh, and a half-sister, Raja, also enrolled at USF. Yeslam, Khalil, and Ibrahim, a cluster of full brothers by an Iranian-born wife of Mohamed Bin Laden, studied at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Other family members enrolled in colleges or design academies in Miami and Houston. School records and interviews show that more than a quarter of Mohamed Bin Laden’s fifty-four children studied in the United States at some point, primarily during the 1970s and early 1980s.16
Osama, of course, was part of the larger group that enrolled in Saudi or other Arab universities. Salem traveled frequently back and forth between Jeddah and the United States, zipping from city to city in his jets, organizing vacations, and handing out allowances. He was the family leader who kept track of everybody, no matter where they went to school. He carried one of the first portable phones, a bulky model as big as a brick, so that his brothers and sisters could reach him at any time. Mohamed’s children were now mainly teenagers or in their twenties, and they constantly had decisions to make about school, jobs, and even marriages. All came to Salem for consultation or permission.
His half-brother Yeslam and his stunning Iranian-born wife, Carmen, provided one harbor for the family in Los Angeles. Yeslam had drifted through Europe after high school. He took race-car driving lessons in Sweden, considered a plan to breed Doberman pinscher dogs in Saudi Arabia, and lodged for a time in the Royal Hotel in Geneva, Switzerland. While leasing an apartment in Geneva with his family in the summer of 1973, he met Carmen, the daughter of the apartment’s owner. Her father was Swiss; her mother Iranian. She spoke French and Persian, was twenty-two, extraordinarily beautiful, and fiercely ambitious. Yeslam, also twenty-two, found himself swept away by Carmen. He was a mild, reticent, sensitive young man prone to anxiety attacks. She felt that Yeslam nonetheless had the intelligence to lead his family’s international business one day, to bring it into the modern era. “Carmen was very anxious for Yeslam to do well,” recalled Mary Martha Barkley, who befriended the couple through her husband, who oversaw international students at USC, where Yeslam enrolled to study business in late 1973. “She had great ambitions for him.”17
They married the following summer and bought a house on Amalfi Drive in Pacific Palisades, a wealthy neighborhood near the ocean. Yeslam took flying lessons and purchased a twin-engine propeller plane for weekend trips to Santa Barbara and Arizona; his wife drove a Pontiac Firebird. Yeslam’s great passion, apart from Carmen, was his rather unfriendly Doberman, Khalif.18
Salem flew into Los Angeles periodically and organized family expeditions to Las Vegas, where the Bin Ladens stayed at Caesars Palace. He gambled the way he drank—lightly, and to pass the time. He once wandered over to a Vegas blackjack table while waiting for his traveling party to organize themselves in the hotel lobby. Soon he built up a pile of chips worth more than a thousand dollars. He joked with the female card dealer, and when it was time to go, simply shoved all his winnings over to her with a shrug. He reveled in the thrill that ordinary Americans and Europeans, particularly women, would express when he unexpectedly handed them large amounts of cash; he seemed to enjoy those exchanges more than some of the luxuries his money could buy.19
Salem never seemed to doubt himself or to question his identity as a Saudi who traveled widely in America. Some of his brothers and half-brothers, however, found themselves unsettled by the adventures he led them on.
The older boys, in particular, had all known their father in his prime. They had been instilled, naturally, with pride in the family’s achievements as Muslims, Arabs, Yemenis, and Saudis. This pride was not only a matter of family honor or some vague sense of national or religious belonging; it was inseparable from the detailed Koranic instruction the boys had received from an early age—the verses memorized and recited, the laws listed and observed. It was part and parcel, too, of the scenes they had enjoyed and the prayers they had offered on frequent visits to Mecca and Medina. Their father’s religion was not that of an ardent proselytizer; among other things, in his long association with American, Italian, and Lebanese Christians, he displayed little of the xenophobia sometimes exhibited by Saudi clerics. Yet his devotion lay at the core of his own identity and that which he hoped his sons and daughters would embrace. His adherence to Islamic ritual and values, the prayers he gave five times each day, the many Hajj pilgrimages he hosted in his carpeted tent, the fasts he adhered to during Ramadan—it would be difficult for any son of Mohamed’s to blithely set all this aside, even if Salem seemed at times to provide an example of how it might be done.
During Ramadan’s long afternoons, when he was supposed to be fasting and abstaining from tobacco, Salem chain-smoked and asked his younger brothers to serve him food and coffee. He rarely prayed when traveling in Europe or America, and he ate pork without hesitation—he thought it was delicious. In Saudi Arabia, he did attend mosques, but he was more likely to poke his friends in the belly while standing in a prayer line than to prostrate himself in humble supplication to God. He had a spiritual side—he talked about time travel, and infinity and the shape of the universe, questions that seemed to encroach upon him during his long hours in the sky. Islam did not seem to press upon him, nor he upon it. His more religious brothers would gently encourage him to find his way a
