little closer to God’s well-marked path, but the culture of deference to the family leader within an Arabian clan like the Bin Ladens was so strong that not even the most devoted of Salem’s younger siblings dared to challenge him severely about his lapses. Perhaps more important, their faith, as they understood it, taught that judging sinners was God’s business, not mortal man’s, as long as the sinner in question did not renounce Islam altogether. “No sin besides that of unbelief makes a believer step outside his faith, even if it is a serious sin, like murder or drinking alcohol,” Osama Bin Laden would say years later. “Even if the culprit died without repenting of his sins, his fate is with God, whether He wishes to forgive him or to punish him.”20
America during the 1970s, roiled by its recent cultural and sexual revolutions—not to mention its garish hairstyles and clothing—continuously demanded an answer of each young Bin Laden who lived there: Are you a Muslim, and if so, how will you practice your faith? Many of Salem’s siblings found that they could not shrug off the question, as he seemed to do, and they tacked back and forth, searching for a comfortable answer. Carmen, who lived as a secular European, saw this when Yeslam’s brothers came to visit from San Francisco or Jeddah. “You never knew which brother would turn very religious,” she recalled. “Even if you had seen them very young, and being very open…The men, they used to go out. They go to the movies. They go to bars. And you think they are Westernized. And suddenly small things make you realize: No.” Her own husband, she gradually came to realize, “was not as Westernized as I thought he was. They cannot cut that bond that is embedded in them.”21
An American businessman recalled visiting Yeslam’s brother Khalil in Los Angeles on the day Khalil decided to dump out all the alcohol in his house. “That’s it,” Khalil declared, as this person recalled it. “We’re not doing this anymore.” Afterward, Khalil still joined his brothers and university friends at the private clubs in Beverly Hills where they often went on Fridays and Saturday nights to dance and search for girls. Khalil would pay the maitre d’ for a table but preferred to sit soberly and watch. Some of his brothers danced and caroused, but others let their beards grow and ensured they made time for evening prayers. For many of them, this was not a search for religious or personal identity that had a fixed destination; it was a journey of continuous motion, changeable at any time and place. One of the most striking examples involved Salem’s half-brother Mahrouz. He initially married a Frenchwoman; at his home, recalled a business partner of the family who visited him, he kept a globe that opened up to serve alcoholic drinks. Rupert Armitage remembered him as “kind of a party animal.” But suddenly, during the 1970s, “he turned.” Mahrouz rededicated himself to Islam. He eventually took four wives, grew a long beard, moved to Medina, and began to wear clothes thought typical of the Prophet’s lifetime. He built a large housing complex with a home for himself and his mother at the center, and homes for each of his four wives at equal distance, around the points of a square.22
These questions and struggles involving Islam and identity were hardly unique to the young Bin Ladens. When they traveled or attended school in the West, young Saudis often had a sophisticated, self-conscious sense of their own dilemma. They did not carry themselves around America as disoriented victims, but rather as experimenters in accommodation. Gradually, wrote Peter Theroux, who lived in Riyadh during this period, this kind of private bargaining drove many Saudis back toward Islam, even those who were not necessarily prepared to live fully by its precepts:
It was common in Saudi Arabia to look down on Europeans and Americans for selling sacreligious pleasures, then making illogical laws against drugs, drunk driving, and roughing up women. They could not keep track of that pesky line between what was licit and what was not. They often thought that the Manichean, if hypocritical situation imposed by Islamic law, which they so often violated, was saner than the West’s compromise with vices, regulating and tolerating them within limits.23
THE BIN LADEN WOMEN encountered contrasts in America that were even more extreme than those known by their brothers. Salem urged them to broaden their horizons—literally, in some cases, by learning to fly—yet he remained acutely conscious of Arabian decorum. It did not bother him in the slightest if his sisters wore jeans and let their hair flow freely outside the kingdom; indeed, he preferred it. When it came to dating and marriage, however, he enforced a transparent double standard. Salem had many American and European girlfriends, particularly after his divorce from Sheikha in the late 1970s. One of his half-brothers married an American, Mahrouz married a Frenchwoman, and a third married a Danish woman—unions that all ended in divorce. Yet when one of his half-sisters, Salah, fell in love with an older Italian man, it created a firestorm within the family; the episode seemed to stretch the limits of Salem’s tolerance, although he did finally bless the marriage, which turned out to be a long-lasting success.24
He presided over these issues as an Arabian patriarch—authoritarian, but eager to maintain balance and consensus. “It was just a really hard, really tough job,” recalled Gail Freeman, an American who befriended and worked with some of Salem’s sisters on palace design projects in Saudi Arabia. “The phone was always ringing.” Salem would cradle the phone under his chin and issue a stream of advice about love and marriage, recalled Peter Blum, a German who traveled as Salem’s personal valet for several years. “You have a wife,” he would say, or “You have enough headaches,” or “Listen, wait for a half year and then we can talk about this again.” He was not harsh in his judgments, Blum said, but “always like a diplomat.” Salem sometimes seemed to spend more time on “the family problems,” as Freeman put it, than he did on business deals.25
Salem often hid his American and European girlfriends from his sisters and half-sisters, fearing their disapproval. He applauded when his sisters drove fast on American freeways or flew airplanes around California, but he did not want them running about unsupervised with American or European men. His attitudes reflected an uncomplicated sexism, but also a strain of male Saudi pride; Western women might be conquests, but Arab women never would. In the spring of 1978, while at home in Saudi Arabia, Salem punched one of his American pilots after the man spoke to one of his sisters without his permission. The pilot quit immediately. That night, he called Salem in Riyadh to ask for his paycheck and an exit visa, which was required if an American employee wished to leave Saudi Arabia. This maelstrom involving male honor and the virtue of Bin Laden women seemed to draw out Salem’s dark side. He launched into a tirade on the telephone, recalled Francis Hunnewell, an American banker who was with him; Salem said he would not allow the pilot to leave the kingdom until he publicly apologized, and if he refused to work, Salem promised to “have him thrown in jail.”26
Salem himself preferred intelligent women. His main American girlfriend during the late 1970s was a young doctor serving in the U.S. military, Patty Deckard, who practiced at a hospital in San Antonio. Salem visited her parents in California and talked seriously about their relationship. “He always said, ‘I love myself,’…but he probably came as close to really, really caring for somebody with her,” said his pilot Jack Hinson. “But she wouldn’t marry him.” She concluded that she could not convert to Islam or endure the role expected of her in Saudi Arabia, said a second employee of Salem’s who spent considerable time with the couple during these years. The pair traveled periodically around America and overseas for several years before the affair ended and Deckard married another man.27
It was difficult for any woman, including Salem’s former wife, Sheikha, to compete with his relationship with Randa. “It was just always ‘Randa, Randa, Randa, Randa,’” said Gail Freeman. In the same period when Salem installed Randa in Panama City for flight lessons, he also helped her enroll in medical school in Canada, and he would fly up to visit and deliver supplies. “I think most of the sisters were jealous of Randa.”28
To win her pilot’s license, Randa had to complete a cross-country solo flight, navigating on her own in a Cessna hundreds of miles across Florida to a designated airport, in this case, one near Palm Beach. The day of her big flight arrived in late September 1978, but Salem was very nervous. He called Don Sowell at the flight school and told him, as Sowell recalled, “I really don’t want her to go by herself. If something should happen, I really don’t want her by herself.” There was no legal way for Sowell to certify Randa as a pilot, however, if he allowed an instructor into the cockpit with her for the cross-country flight. So they agreed that Salem would pay for an instructor to fly behind her in a chase plane, just in case.29
Salem’s prescience was extraordinary: somewhere over central Florida, smoke billowed into Randa’s cockpit from some sort of engine or electrical malfunction. Fortunately, she had a trusted pilot nearby to speak with on the radio. But the smoke was so bad that it quickly became clear to both of them that she was not going to be able to reach an airport. The instructor told her to prepare to crash-land in a field.
Salem’s mobile phone rang at the Palm Beach airport, where he was waiting for Randa. “She’s gone off the radar—we can’t find her,” the caller said, according to Gail and Robert Freeman, who were with him. Salem “went
