The Bin Ladens

Saudis.⁴

White failed in his lawsuits against Bath and suffered heavy financial losses. He had an honorable military career before his troubles with Bath, but his credibility is difficult to judge. There is no evidence apart from his statements that Bath ran contract operations for the CIA. Nonetheless, for reasons that are not altogether clear, Bath did travel frequently to Caribbean tax havens during this period, according to Sandra’s divorce attorney, and he crossed borders carrying large amounts of cash, she said.⁵ Bath certainly had the means to support discreet international air operations if he wished, if not for the United States, then perhaps for his Saudi business clients. Salem frequently used his larger private aircraft as makeshift cargo transporters during this period, and it is conceivable, for example, that Salem or Bath might have used one of these planes, or one of the other large jets owned by some of Salem’s Saudi associates, to move weapons from South America or South Africa to aid Osama in Pakistan. This is merely conjecture, however; none of the individuals interviewed about Salem’s involvement in private arms transactions on Osama’s behalf understood how the weapons were to be shipped.

Salem flitted lightly and evasively through these spheres of intrigue, but his style was more Austin Powers than James Bond. Apart from the court filings and statements by White, there are additional fragments of evidence about Salem’s possible connections to conservative American political circles that were active in covert anti- communist operations during the 1980s. For example, according to flight logs, Larry McDonald, the Georgia congressman and president of the John Birch Society, flew on one of Salem’s private jets in Saudi Arabia just months before McDonald died aboard Korean Air Lines Flight 007, which was shot down on September 1, 1983, after it strayed into Soviet airspace. Jim Bath’s connections to the Bush family and other leading figures in the Reagan-era Republican Party in Texas have continued to raise questions about the extent of Salem’s relations with these politicians. White, for example, has alleged that Bath used Bin Laden money when investing in Bush’s Arbusto drilling fund, a charge that Bath and Bush have adamantly denied. At a minimum—through Jim Bath, Khalid Bin Mahfouz, and the Saudi government—Salem could justifiably regard himself as an ex officio member of the Houston oil and political establishment; he was draped in both its finery and its perpetual culture of mysterious deal making. Vinson and Elkins, one of the city’s most prestigious law firms, represented Salem. He owned a private airport in the city. He dined at River Oaks mansions and played with visiting Saudi royalty.⁶

In time, however, Bath’s accumulating personal and financial troubles seemed to alienate him from Salem. There were limits to how much craziness even Salem was prepared to tolerate. In 1986 Bath fell into a financial dispute with White involving allegations that he had improperly used a certificate of deposit belonging to Skyway Aircraft as collateral at a Houston bank for a $550,000 personal loan. Later that year, according to White’s court filings, the Houston Police Department contacted White and told him they were investigating Bath in an international drug case; no charges were ever brought against him, however. According to Gail Freeman, the Bin Laden family friend and occasional business partner, Salem’s beloved half-sister Randa also became estranged from the Baths during this period. She felt the Baths had treated her rudely, according to Freeman, and Randa then seemed to influence Salem’s attitude toward his longtime Houston partner.⁷

An era was ending, and Bath’s troubles reflected its eclipse. In 1986 oil prices fell to a record low of nine dollars per barrel. The economies of Saudi Arabia and Texas shuddered simultaneously. The real estate boom in Houston gradually imploded. That autumn, as Osama was organizing his first militia training camp on the Afghan frontier, the Iran-Contra scandal broke into the open, and the subsequent investigations dragged some of the uncomfortable history of off-the-books dealings between Reagan and King Fahd into the headlines. The adhesives that had held Salem’s multiple worlds together for a decade—spouting oil money, a confident and often secretive alliance between Washington and Riyadh, and an ethos of cultural mobility and play—began to come apart.

OSAMA’S SMALL BAND of fighters suffered through a bitter winter in the high mountains around Jaji. The war usually went into hiatus during the snowy season. When the thaw arrived, so did Soviet soldiers. Osama’s rumbling bulldozers had created a provocation in an important battle zone that the Soviets were not about to ignore. Osama’s friend and brother-in-law Jamal Khalifa had visited the Lion’s Den and found it to be a death trap. That was the point, some of Osama’s colleagues told him: “We have plenty of shaheeds,” or “martyrs,” whose sacrifices would please God. Khalifa said he argued with Osama that this waste of life violated Islamic precepts and that “God will ask you about it in the hereafter.” Osama ignored his warning.⁸

The fighting began in April of 1987. Osama’s volunteers clashed for a week with Soviet forces; this initial engagement was followed by a longer battle the next month. Bin Laden’s positions came under sustained aerial bombardment; the Soviets may have used incendiary weapons similar to napalm. Spetsnaz troops raided Bin Laden’s fortified encampments; the Arab volunteers, although lightly trained and little experienced, fought back fiercely in close engagements. Precisely what happened during these battles would become obscured over the years by retrospective accounts from self-mythologizing jihadis; their versions are sometimes contradictory. The earliest known published description, in Azzam’s Al-Jihad magazine, does not emphasize Osama’s role in the battles, but concentrates instead on the heroics of one of his Egyptian military aides; Osama was not even mentioned. He soon painted himself into the picture, however, by giving effusive interviews about his experiences to sympathetic Arab journalists. There is no doubt about the basic facts. The Jaji battles of 1987 were intense, with significant casualties on both sides, but they did nothing to alter the course of the larger war. Osama was present, and he performed honorably under heavy pressure. The battles seem to have left him with two main reactions: they endowed his belief that he had been called to war in God’s name with fresh and deep emotion, and they struck him as an outstanding marketing opportunity.⁹

“It was obvious in the way that he was telling stories, that he was trying to create a drive to bring in more, to use the media for attracting more Arabs, recruiting more Arabs to come to Afghanistan,” recalled Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist who was one of the first to interview Osama after the Jaji campaign. “I liked his enthusiasm.” Osama’s speaking style in this period was “like a university professor…like if he is at the head of the table of the political committee of this party or that party.” Yet his memories of the peril he felt at Jaji were florid, infused with a sense of fatalism and surrender to God’s will.¹⁰

“We sometimes spent the whole day in the trenches or in the caves until our ears could no longer bear the sound of the explosions around us,” Osama told Khashoggi:

War planes continually shrieked by us and their crazy song of death echoed endlessly. We spent the days praying to God Almighty. Despite the massive Russian onslaughts, one of us had to come out from our shelter regularly to see the enemy’s movements…Each time, we were able, by the grace of God, to inflict a crushing defeat on the Russians…It was God alone who protected us from the Russians…Reliance upon God is the main source of our strength and these trenches and tunnels are merely the military facilities God asked us to make. We depend completely on God in all matters.¹¹

Around this time, Osama permitted an Egyptian filmmaker, Essam Deraz, to follow him and document the movement he was building. Deraz helped to crystallize the themes that would later shape Osama’s legend—a rich man who lived like the poor, a socially advantaged man who was prepared to sacrifice everything for his religion, a fighter who would not waver in the face of death. “I saw him with my own eyes on the battlefield,” Deraz said later. “He was in the middle of the fighting. Being a rich man, no matter what he was like, people of course looked at him as a financier, just a man with money. After the battle of Jaji, he was looked upon as a military man who deserved to be the leader.”¹²

This, at least, was the view that filmmaker and the other early Bin Laden publicists promoted; combined with Osama’s quiet charisma, and his ability—common in the Saudi court circles from which he had emerged—to avoid giving offense even to his adversaries, it would prove to be enough.

He was emerging now from the shadow of his mentor, Abdullah Azzam. They quarreled over Osama’s plans to group Arabs together in their own separate military encampments; Azzam believed firmly that they should insert themselves into mixed militias, alongside the Afghans, where they could share the war’s burdens and proselytize to Afghan fighters whose own religious scholars had been killed off by the communists. “Bin Laden sought to pamper Arab fighters,” Azzam’s wife later complained. “Even their food was different from that of the Afghan mujaheddin. Bin Laden used to bring them special foodstuff in containers from Saudi Arabia.”¹³

These tensions complicated Osama’s position, but he was careful; he and Azzam remained cordial. By late