The Bin Ladens

these included the Red Crescent of Saudi Arabia and the Muslim World League, the large Mecca-based charity. Badeeb visited Pakistan as often as once a month. Prince Turki Al-Faisal, the chief of Saudi intelligence, also traveled there regularly. Their host in Islamabad was Yousef Mottakbani, the Saudi ambassador to Pakistan, a clean-shaven professional who kept a photograph of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar on the wall in his living room. Mottakbani channeled funds from both Saudi intelligence and from private charities to favored Afghan clients, including Haqqani, according to a former American envoy who participated in the covert program. Mottakbani hosted dinner parties in Islamabad at which Osama was a regular guest. Turki met him at these soirees and in Peshawar. He found Osama “shy, friendly, and almost gentle. He always spoke in a low voice; he was a man of pithy statements.”²⁰

Turki and other senior Saudi officials, such as Prince Bandar, later said their government had little direct involvement with Osama during this period. Turki characterized Osama as a volunteer from a respectable family who was an “interesting figure” but not an instrument of Saudi tradecraft. By Turki’s account, unlike the CIA, Saudi intelligence, which is known by the acronym GID, never deviated from its pledge to funnel money to the Afghans only through the Pakistani intelligence service, known as ISI. “Abdullah Azzam was never supported by me or the GID,” Turki wrote later. “GID stuck to its agreement…that support for the Mujaheddin would be distributed according to their effectiveness, which was measured by the ISI and then evaluated by both the CIA and GID. Sayyaf consistently came in fifth or sixth place.”²¹

Turki’s account leaves ambiguous whether, separately from Azzam, Saudi intelligence provided direct funding to Bin Laden, particularly after he moved away from Azzam and began to build infrastructure along the Pakistan border. Some of Osama’s own followers have said that he did receive direct aid from Saudi intelligence. Abu Musab Al-Suri, a longtime colleague and later an important Al Qaeda ideologist, has written, “It is a big lie that the Afghan Arabs were formed with the backing of the CIA…The truth is that Saudi intelligence agencies did have involvement with Bin Laden, and elements of their apparatus did send assistance from Saudi Arabia.”²²

Ahmed Badeeb, the former Al-Thaghr biology teacher and Turki’s chief of staff, has provided the fullest inside account of Osama’s contacts with the Saudi government during this period:

He had a strong relation with the Saudi intelligence and with our embassy in Pakistan. The nature of this relation with Saudi intelligence was because the Saudi embassy in Pakistan had a very powerful and active role… When persons came from the Kingdom to present assistance, the ambassador would hold dinner parties and invite people, and due to Osama bin Laden’s family and personal contacts, he would be invited as well. He had a very good rapport with the ambassador and with all Saudi ambassadors who served there. At times, the embassy would ask Osama bin Laden for some things and he would respond positively…[Also,] the Pakistanis saw in him one who was helping them do what they wanted done there.²³

In a broad sense, then, Osama had come to enjoy relations with the Saudi royal family and its intelligence service quite similar to those cultivated with other sectors of the government by his half-brothers: Osama’s connections were social, but girded and constrained by his role as a construction contractor; they were respectful and solicitous; and Osama’s honorable place at court was reaffirmed periodically in the formal settings of an embassy salon. Unlike his half-brothers, however, he did not return from these rather orthodox Arabian gatherings to a conventional Saudi home, to watch television or smoke a water pipe on the patio. Instead, Osama rolled back down the Grand Trunk Road in his four-wheel-drive vehicles, through Peshawar, and then up rocky roads to the barren encampments, just inside Afghanistan, where he led his small incubating cult of martyrdom.

21. OFF THE BOOKS

BY THE MID-1980S, Jim Bath, Salem’s partner in Houston, who had arrived in the city three decades earlier with hardly a dollar to his name, had acquired many of the accessories of a successful Texas adventurer: a pair of .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolvers, a Westchester high-powered rifle with a scope, a Winchester bolt-action rifle, a BMW 525 automobile, and a Rallye Minerva airplane. He owned interests in a number of residential and investment properties around Houston; these included hotel projects, apartment houses, an airport parking garage, a Denny’s restaurant, and a ranch in Liberty County. From offices on several floors of the Fannin Bank Building downtown, he oversaw his aircraft brokerage company, Bin Laden family business entities, his own scattered investments (which included $50,000 he had sunk into an oil-drilling fund run by George W. Bush, his friend from the Texas Air National Guard), and an aircraft leasing company called Skyway Aircraft, which was incorporated in the Cayman Islands and controlled by Khalid Bin Mahfouz. Bath and his wife Sandra still lived immediately behind Khalid’s enormous estate in the River Oaks neighborhood of Houston. All in all, Bath presented a grand facade. But it was little more than that; in truth, his life was unraveling.¹

Bath jetted around the world with his Arab clients and other oil industry friends—to Caribbean tax havens, Europe, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere in the Middle East. One of the leased oil company jets he occasionally flew on had a bed with a mink throw on it, and it was there that he first met Mary Ellen Lewis, a married air hostess, according to Sheryl Johnson-Todd, an attorney who represented two of Bath’s wives in subsequent divorce proceedings. Over the course of their long, tumultuous affair, Bath provided Mary Ellen with a Cadillac, transferred money to her and her husband, and fathered a child with her out of wedlock. After Sandra discovered the relationship, she later testified, anonymous postcards arrived at her home in River Oaks; the cards accused Sandra of clinging to an opportunistic marriage like the fictional one between J.R. and Sue Ellen in the prime-time television soap opera Dallas. Ultimately, Sandra learned about Bath’s child with Lewis when her husband pulled up to their house one day in a convertible with a little girl asleep in the passenger seat; according to Sandra, Jim Bath asked if she would please raise the child. She filed for divorce instead. Sandra alleged in court filings that Bath abused drugs; he denied her allegations. According to an affidavit by Bath, Mary Ellen Lewis eventually became no happier with him; she “made threats to blow my head off and to kill me.”²

Bath’s affair with Lewis may not have been the only secret he harbored during his last years of working with the Bin Laden family. According to a 1990 court filing by Bath’s estranged business partner Bill White, Bath “indicated that he was working as a CIA operative” during a conversation they held in 1982. By White’s account, Bath said he had been introduced to the CIA when the elder George Bush was its director, during the late 1970s, and that he had been asked to conduct “covert intelligence gathering on his Saudi Arabian business associates.” According to him, Bath said that he had been asked to undertake certain sensitive air-transport operations. After a series of scandals during the 1970s, the CIA had allegedly decided to privatize some of its covert air-transport operations, and the agency had been looking for reliable Americans with security clearances who might take on some of this work under contract. As a former air force pilot who was friendly with the younger Bush, Bath was a natural candidate for such a role, according to White, who was himself a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis and a former navy fighter pilot. White came to believe that Bath had used some of his offshore charter aircraft businesses to help ship construction equipment and possibly weapons to Osama Bin Laden on the Afghan frontier during the late 1980s.³

Jim Bath has spoken sparsely and infrequently about his business and chartered aviation endeavors during the 1980s. (He declined to be interviewed for this book.) In a court filing from that period, he seemed to mock all White’s allegations about their business disputes, arguing that his former business partner suffered from “paranoia” and “demonstrated frequent mood swings.” According to Bath, White believed that “those conspiring against him were engaged in ‘covert communications’ and had ‘secret agendas’ against him.” In 1991 Bath told Time that White’s account about his supposed intelligence work was “fantasy” and that he was “not a member of the CIA or any other intelligence agency.” About a decade later, however, in an interview with the journalist Craig Unger, Bath seemed to suggest that there might be some degree of truth in White’s portrayal. Speaking of the CIA, Bath said, “There’s all sorts of degrees of civilian participation.” He seemed to be referring to the voluntary cooperation sometimes offered to the agency by American businessmen with sensitive foreign contacts. Indeed, the CIA ran a station in Houston to facilitate informal interviews with Americans who worked in the international oil industry. If Bath did have agency connections, it is possible that all he did was report occasionally on what he picked up while consorting with the Bin Ladens, Bin Mahfouz, and other