expensive—pieces. Bernie Hammerman pulled Robert Freeman aside and asked if it would be too great an embarrassment to ask Khalid for a credit reference before he walked out with the jewelry. Khalid suggested two names, Freeman recalled: Ben Love, the chairman of Texas Commerce Bank in Houston, and Tom Clausen, the chairman of Bank of America in San Francisco. Hammerman’s credit department contacted Clausen, who said he was authorized to clear any check up to $50 million for Khalid Bin Mahfouz. As Freeman recalled it, “This created quite a stir in the showroom.”19
Bin Mahfouz spent much of his time in America in the Houston area. He had met the aircraft broker Jim Bath around the same time that Salem had, and through Bath and other American partners he purchased private jets and real estate. He bought a large ranch on Houston’s outskirts and a mansion in River Oaks, a city neighborhood of oil barons and their retainers who poured their money into antebellum-style plantation houses and columned Georgian estates. The Bin Mahfouz property, at 3800 Willowick, lay just around the corner from Jim Bath’s relatively modest pine-shaded home. Khalid’s main house looked something like Versailles; in the rear was a swimming pool with an island in the middle that could be reached by a footbridge. Bath called it “the Big House,” his partner Bill White recalled. Khalid opened the estate and its guesthouses to the Bin Ladens. Salem’s sisters visited and amused themselves climbing trees on the sprawling grounds. Khalid and Salem hosted parties for the Texas notables who promoted and managed some of Bin Mahfouz’s American investments. At one point during this period, Khalid noticed that tour buses kept stopping on Willowick in front of his estate. “Why do these people keep coming by?” he asked. One of his employees explained that his home was now on the River Oaks celebrity tour. “The next time they come,” he said, apparently quite serious, “invite them in for tea.”20
John Connally flew on Bin Mahfouz’s jets during his 1980 presidential campaign, according to two of Khalid’s employees. The oil barons Nelson and Bunker Hunt traveled with him, too, and they tried to draw Bin Mahfouz into their ill-fated attempt to corner the world silver market; one of the employees remembered Khalid complaining that he lost money on the venture. In contrast to Salem, Khalid tracked world financial markets and directed investment strategies in precious metals, foreign currencies, and other volatile instruments. His advisers were sophisticated about finance, and some enjoyed connections at the highest levels of international politics—in Houston, his attorneys included Baker Botts, the powerful firm that also represented the Bush family.21
Khalid was one of several Bin Mahfouz sons who participated in the management of his family’s National Commercial Bank; his aging father, Salem, remained chairman. Khalid involved himself in the bank’s international transactions. NCB was becoming a formidable global institution; in 1985 it would report that it held more than $1 billion in cash or equivalent instruments and more than $6 billion in deposits. As the largest bank in Saudi Arabia, it was inevitably entwined with the royal family and the government. NCB planes sometimes transported payrolls for Aramco, the oil consortium; they carried boxes of brand-new hundred-dollar bills from the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas, according to pilot David Grey. NCB planes also ferried documents to Baghdad in the early 1980s; the pilots who flew this route believed the missions supported Saudi Arabia’s quiet liaison with Saddam Hussein during the early stages of the Iran-Iraq war, Grey said. Whatever their role, the flights supported Saudi policy to shore up Saddam, a tilt backed by Washington; Fahd later acknowledged providing $25.7 billion in aid to Iraq, and the kingdom also transferred U.S.-supplied weaponry to Saddam.22
NCB’s finances were complex, not least because the bank had to hold an unpublished amount of reserves to protect against loans in Saudi Arabia that might not be repaid. Yet the bank’s profitability and financial health were never in doubt, and Khalid Bin Mahfouz himself appeared to have no difficulty accessing large amounts of cash. Robert Freeman recalled that Bin Mahfouz protested that some of the real estate investments he proposed, in the neighborhood of $5 million, were too small to be worth his attention. Indeed, in Orlando, separately from Salem, Bin Mahfouz began acquiring land on a larger scale than Salem’s family-oriented Oaktree project. In an endeavor code- named “Project Debra,” after a waitress who served him while he was discussing the proposal in an Orlando restaurant, Bin Mahfouz and his agents quietly purchased tracts toward what would become an ambitious eighteen-hundred-acre commercial development known as Metro West; it would eventually be worth just under $1 billion. Khalid routinely traveled with $100,000 or more in his briefcase; at the end of a trip, according to his partner Rick Peterson, he would give whatever was left—as much as $30,000—as tips to employees at his Jeddah headquarters.23
Salem also traveled with a briefcase full of tens of thousands of dollars, but his underlying accounts appear to have been less secure. Around the time he bought Desert Bear in late 1980, Salem told Miller McCarthy that he and the Bin Laden companies owed Bin Mahfouz and his bank about $220 million. Much of that debt may have involved project loans or letters of credit that would be repaid routinely, but even so, there can be no doubt that Salem lived closer to the financial edge than did Khalid. Robert Freeman was not the only partner of Salem’s who sometimes found it painful to extract money from him. Particularly after the fall in oil prices, Salem occasionally struggled to make dollar payments that ran only to six figures. At one point he backed out of the purchase of a $750,000 yacht, pleading depleted accounts, even though it might lead to the loss of a $200,000 deposit, according to his German friend Thomas Dietrich, who was helping him with the acquisition. In 1984, for unknown reasons, he took out a $200,000 mortgage on Desert Bear, according to Florida property records.24
These occasional signals of distress usually passed quickly. He stayed close to Khalid, and partly by borrowing, Salem still managed to find cash for one Learjet after another. In any event, it was often impossible to tell when Salem was handling his own money and when he was managing someone else’s funds. Some of the cash Salem touched seemed to lie outside of the international banking system. Robert Freeman recalled that Salem once asked him to find a way to surreptitiously deposit—or launder—about $5 million to $10 million in cash into Western banks. Freeman said he refused; he never learned where the money Salem wanted to wash had come from.25
Such were Salem’s financial dealings in the early 1980s: transnational, but connected with America; impressively resourced; complex; and sometimes mysterious. Those traits also perfectly described the covert war in Afghanistan that was about to alter the Bin Laden family’s destiny.
17. IN THE KING’S SERVICE
SALEM’S POLITICAL BELIEFS were vague, if they could be said to exist at all. What the royal family wanted, he wanted. If his friends were in trouble, he helped. When Lebanon cracked up during the 1970s, Salem brought families he knew there to Saudi Arabia and arranged for jobs. He handed cash to a friend who spent time in Beirut during the civil war and told him, “You know what to do with this.” His friend used the money to support families in need—“Sunni, Shia, Christians.”1 Such loose charity appealed to Salem’s sense of purpose more than, say, political organizing. For a Saudi, he was not a particularly ardent anti-Zionist. He emphatically saw himself as an architect of closer ties between the kingdom and the United States—but if these views were his own, they also coincided with those of Fahd, his royal patron. He did not devour newspapers, and during the long hours he spent propped up in bed, watching television and talking simultaneously on the telephone, he was much more likely to watch action movies than news broadcasts. Yet he loved the rush of adrenaline, and as at Mecca in 1979, he could throw himself into a fight if he had a point of entry.
The events of that year—the Grand Mosque uprising, the Iranian revolution, and in December, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan—forced all the Bin Ladens to reckon with global politics to a greater extent than ever before. In this, too, they tracked the Al-Saud. Self-preservation motivated both families more than ideology. From the Nasserite revolution onward, the Bin Ladens had often been instruments of clandestine Saudi foreign policy projects whose primary purpose was the protection of the royal family’s rule. After the crises of 1979, they were called upon again.
The Al-Saud and the Carter administration both interpreted the invasion of Afghanistan as an initial thrust by Moscow toward oil supplies in the Gulf. This was a misperception of Soviet motives, but Kremlin secrecy made it impossible to know otherwise. Despite their arms purchases and military construction projects during the 1960s and 1970s, the Saudis were hopelessly ill prepared to defend the kingdom from any serious attack; only the American military could do this. Fahd had always leaned toward Washington within the councils of his family; he responded to the events of 1979 by deepening the kingdom’s protective alliance with America. He negotiated secret agreements to build oversized military bases in Saudi Arabia that would permit the United States to preposition equipment for a crisis or quickly deploy large forces after one began—this undeclared policy was known in Washington as
