The Bin Ladens

19. THE GRINDER

BY THE MID-1980S, the twenty-four Bin Laden brothers who owned shares in the main family company resembled a bloc of legislators from the same political party—professional interests bound them, and they often acted with unified purpose, but their membership had distinctly liberal and conservative wings. On the left stood the family’s unquestioned leader, Salem, as well as Yeslam and several others who favored Europe and Beirut. Osama and Mahrouz held down the family’s fervent, activist religious wing. In between, fashioning more traditional and centrist Arabian lives, were the four rising brothers who had all trained as civil engineers: Bakr, Ghalib, Omar, and Yahya. They were inclined neither to collect five hundred pairs of shoes nor to volunteer as jihadi fighters in foreign wars. They were observant Muslims, but they were notable more for their technical expertise and their willingness to work—they were the grinders among Mohamed’s sons, and they invested long hours at the office and on job sites.

Of the four, Bakr, Salem’s full brother, who had been born just a year or two after him in Mecca, had emerged as a sort of chief operating officer for the family and its businesses. His title was Field Project Manager for the construction division of the Mohamed Bin Laden Organization; he sat on that company’s board of directors, as well as on the boards of several other joint ventures that had emerged from Salem’s separate Bin Laden Brothers enterprise. Salem was the one “who got all the business for the Bin Ladens,” recalled Mohamed Ashmawi, the Saudi oil executive. “Bakr managed it.”¹

He had the efficient air of a natural bureaucrat; he favored wrinkle-free, white traditional thobe gowns, perhaps with a pen or folded business papers in the breast pocket. “Where Salem did everything from the gut,” recalled Francis Hunnewell, the investment banker who worked on the telephone project, “Bakr was much more conservative and more process-oriented.” Michael Pochna remembered him as “a very intelligent person,” but he never heard Bakr say anything in front of his elder brother besides “Yes, Salem.”²

While his older brother had learned Beatles songs at his Essex boarding school, Bakr had studied in Syria and Lebanon. He spoke some French, but his English was less well developed. After his father’s death, Salem decided that both his younger full brothers, Bakr and Ghalib, should pursue university degrees in civil engineering in the United States, so that they could spend their careers running construction projects for the family. Bakr finished high school first, and at this time, in the late 1960s, Salem had very few acquaintances in America. However, his great carousing Turkish friend from boarding school, Mehmet Birgen, known to all of Salem’s acquaintances as “Baby Elephant,” had moved to Miami. He was a good-looking, loquacious young man with a thick head of black hair. At the time, he was rooming with an American airline pilot, taking a few college classes, and devoting much of his considerable energy to the pursuit of the opposite sex. Salem telephoned and announced that he was dispatching Bakr to attend college in Miami, and he asked Baby Elephant to serve as Bakr’s guardian.

This was not a natural match; like Salem, Baby Elephant was less than fully devoted to the traditional precepts of Islam, while Bakr, although young, was nonetheless devout; he had formally studied the Koran. Baby Elephant enrolled him initially at Miami-Dade Community College’s North Campus, several miles north of downtown, at 119th Street, three blocks from Interstate 95. He bought Bakr a Vespa scooter, helped him find an apartment, and talked up Miami’s many social enticements. He found it difficult to tempt him, with one exception. He invited Bakr to Shorty’s Bar-B-Q, on South Dixie Highway, a pungent room where customers sat side by side at wooden tables and doused their ribs with hot sauces squirted from plastic bottles. Baby Elephant ordered a big rack of steaming ribs; when Bakr asked apprehensively if they were pork, his guardian assured him that no, they were beef. Bakr engorged himself, and for months afterward, he returned again and again. Finally, a visiting cousin from Saudi Arabia pointed out that, actually, he had been eating pork ribs all along, in violation of Islamic law. Shocked, Bakr asked a waitress for confirmation, stormed over to Baby Elephant’s apartment, and confronted him: “What kind of guardian are you! You knew! You lied to me!” He telephoned Salem and complained, but his brother only replied, “At least he allowed you to discover how good pork ribs actually taste.” Shorty’s, however, lost a customer.³

Bakr polished his English, adjusted to American classrooms, and transferred to the engineering school at the University of Miami, then a sprawl of palm trees and low-slung concrete buildings in Coral Gables. He joined the class of 1973. There were more than four thousand Jewish students at the school, and just over fifteen hundred international students—from Taiwan, Venezuela, Iran, Algeria, and elsewhere. Protests over the Vietnam War roiled the campus. The Republican Party staged its convention in Miami in 1972, and university students joined other protestors in violent battles against police. Three quarters of University of Miami students smoked marijuana, according to a professor’s poll. “Three things are essential for a pot party,” noted the 1972 edition of the university yearbook, “namely, people, a place and pot.”⁴

Bakr joined a clique at the engineering school that seemed oblivious to all this. “We never talked about race or the war,” recalled Joaquin Avino, a Cuban American classmate. “The only thing we talked about was graduating, getting a job, becoming an engineer, and making some money.” Many of the civil engineering students were second-generation Cuban exiles; they belonged to “a relatively conservative culture within the university,” said John Hall, another classmate. Most commuted to school from their parents’ homes. Hall’s father was a city fireman; Avino worked part-time as a baggage handler at the airport. Bakr fit right in—quiet, serious, pleasant, a bookworm, with no interest in rambunctious student life. He was particularly friendly with the Cubans, and he partnered with them on lab projects that involved analyzing soil composition and calculating stability and stress in building structures. At exam time, his results were solid but average. He stood out among the twenty to thirty students in the civil engineering course only because he wore silk shirts and drove a Cadillac Seville.⁵

He lived off campus in a suburban rambler with a small swimming pool in the Kendall/Pinecrest neighborhood, just south of Coral Gables. His neighbors included an elementary school and a “Youth For Christ” facility. Family joined him eventually. His half-brother Omar also enrolled in the University of Miami’s engineering school, class of 1974, and rented an apartment a half mile from Bakr’s house. At one point, Bakr returned home to marry, and he brought his new wife to Miami. She was Haifa Nabulsi, a beautiful Syrian blonde whom he had first met in Damascus when she was about sixteen; she came from an exiled Palestinian family originally from Nazareth. While Bakr completed his studies, Haifa gave birth to two sons, Nawaf and Firas; the Bin Ladens obtained American passports for each of the boys. Bakr would not permit his university classmates to socialize with his wife, and he made a lasting impression on one of them while describing his family when he mentioned that no man in Saudi Arabia bothered to count how many sisters he had. Still, apart from these cultural idiosyncrasies, with his big-finned car, his young boys, his house on a manicured corner lot, and his earnest sense of purpose, Bakr seemed to some of his classmates to be just like them—a young immigrant householder in pursuit of the American dream. As they got to know him better, however, they learned that he would be returning to his family’s business in Saudi Arabia after graduation. Bakr offered one Cuban American classmate, Jorge Rodriguez, a job in Jeddah at double the starting salary he could expect to earn in the United States, but Jorge’s wife announced, “By no means—I’m staying in America.” Bakr departed and they gradually lost touch with him.⁶

In Jeddah he and his family moved into one of the suburban villas at the Kilo 7 family compound. Carmen Bin Laden befriended Haifa and found her “open-minded and lively”; they tanned together beside Haifa’s swimming pool and “howled with laughter at how depraved the mothers-in-law would think us if they caught sight of our bathing suits.” Carmen found Bakr formal but kind, and unlike some Saudi men, he did not criticize or shun Haifa when she gave birth to a daughter. Bakr was religious but not insistent or strident. He prayed punctually when in Saudi Arabia, but when he traveled to France, he did not search for mosques or carry a prayer rug to business meetings. “He is the type of person who doesn’t like to attract the attention of others for things that are not necessary,” said a longtime business partner.⁷

At the office, Bakr tried to keep up with Salem’s demands and peripatetic deal making. Gradually other brothers returned to the kingdom with engineering degrees to ease some of his burden. Ghalib ran the construction equipment yard, helped to manage procurement from Caterpillar, and supervised projects in the field. Omar supervised complex building projects on his own.

Yahya proved to be a particular workhorse; he was exceptionally well organized and seemed to pride himself on putting in the very longest hours. He made a strong impression on some of the business partners and bankers who met with him. He had always been devout and deeply reflective; asked a question, he might pause for several