The Bin Ladens

into the ambulance by the Bin Laden brothers, so that he could sit beside the coffin. “You haven’t left him throughout his life,” one of the brothers said. “You’re not going to leave him now.”⁴

They washed the body at Mohamed Bin Laden’s former Medina home. In a gesture of respect, one of the brothers handed Khalid Bin Mahfouz the key to Salem’s coffin, so that he could initiate the washing. Afterward they wrapped his body in a shroud of green cloth, the color of dress in Paradise. The only sounds were of grief and prayer.⁵

At the graveyard, in the darkness, mourners in flowing white robes and headdresses swelled and jostled. The outstretched arms of his brothers and friends carried Salem above shoulder height to a sandy ditch. As he was laid in, a man shouted and approached with the shrouded corpse of a very young girl; it was not clear who she was, or how she had died, but she had been chosen to lie in Salem’s grave at his feet, to keep him company—her soul was pure and innocent, and would comfort and protect his in the passage to afterlife.⁶

Osama was among the brothers who attended Salem’s funeral. It is not clear when he arrived. He continued to travel back and forth from Afghanistan, and it is possible that he was in the kingdom at the time of Salem’s death; the Ramadan holiday, a time when the Bin Ladens often gathered together in Saudi Arabia, had ended only recently. If he was present at the burial, he would have joined Mahrouz in the rigorous prayers that believing Wahhabis offer the dead. He was certainly present through the mourning receptions that followed during the next three days. He felt closer to Salem than to any of his other brothers, according to Osama’s mother, even though they lived by such different creeds. He had regarded Salem “like a father,” she said later. “Salem’s death saddened Osama a great deal.”⁷

In later years, as he held forth loquaciously about America’s alleged crimes against Islam, Osama never spoke about Salem’s death on American soil, just as he never spoke about the airplane crash caused by an American pilot that had claimed his father’s life. Did he consider the possibility of conspiracies? In Arabia, it would be far more exceptional if he did not. The available evidence about Osama’s specific reaction to Salem’s accident, however, is virtually nonexistent. His half-brother Ghalib, who visited Osama at least once near the Afghan border, did consider the possibility that a hidden plot might lie behind Salem’s death. Later that summer, Ghalib flew to Texas to inspect the Kitty Hawk Field of Dreams. He obtained a copy of the Bexar County Medical Examiner’s autopsy report, according to a family business partner. The report found that Salem had no heart disease at the time of his death and had no trace of drugs, alcohol, or other intoxicants in his bloodstream. By the partner’s account, Ghalib was relieved at these discoveries, and seemed willing to accept the autopsy’s formal conclusion, which read, “Manner of Death: Accident.” Jamal Khashoggi, who spoke regularly with Osama during this period, and who shared his Muslim Brotherhood–influenced outlook at the time, said that while he was certain Salem’s sudden death “was a big event in his life,” Osama never discussed it. Nor, according to the publicly available record, did he discuss it with other friends or journalists.⁸

In Jeddah, as they had two decades earlier after their father’s passing, the sons of Mohamed Bin Laden gathered at the family compound, between the evening mahgrib and isha prayers, for formal ceremonies of condolence. Thousands of mourners flocked to the home Mohamed had built for Salem’s mother at Kilo 7 on the Mecca Road, near the headquarters of the family’s main construction company.

This time, however, the receptions had a secondary purpose—many of those who had been close to Salem now shuffled forward to swear bayah, or fealty, to Bakr Bin Laden as the new head of the Bin Laden family. This ritual was a direct and self-conscious echo of the bayah ceremonies in Riyadh that followed the death of a Saudi king. (At the Al-Saud court, the ascending king sits in mourning and receives a line of visitors who demonstrate their loyalty and respect by kissing his shoulder, hand, or cheek.) That it would be Bakr, and not another brother, who received these gestures of obedience was a decision that had accumulated gradually within the Bin Laden family over a period of years. Salem had increasingly designated Bakr as chief of business operations, and Bakr’s central role in the Mecca and Medina renovations put him in the lead of the family’s two most lucrative and politically sensitive construction contracts. He was not the oldest living son after Salem, but he was among the most senior, and by virtue of his civil engineering degree, also among the most qualified. He was, in addition, Salem’s full brother, the guardian of his estate and his legacy, the eldest surviving son of a senior and respected widow of Mohamed. All this made him the natural choice. There is no evidence that Bakr’s anointment required any debate or deliberation within the family; it seems, rather, to have been taken more or less for granted.

Heavily pregnant, Salem’s widow, Carrie, grieved in the company of hundreds of Saudi women at the separate but parallel female condolence receptions. She staggered through the days, and on June 15, less than three weeks after Salem’s accident, she gave birth in Jeddah to a daughter, Sama.⁹ More than five years earlier, Carrie had converted to Islam, fulfilling a promise she made to Salem while a passenger in his glider, which she thought was about to crash. Over the years, her decision secured her acceptance by the larger Bin Laden family. She took her new faith seriously. After her daughter’s birth, Carrie decided to embrace rather than recoil from her unexpected position as a Bin Laden widow—and she agreed to accept the Arabian and Islamic traditions this position carried.

SALEM HAD BEEN responsible in many important respects for Osama’s rise along the Afghan frontier. He publicized Osama’s humanitarian work, contributed to his Peshawar treasury, supplied him with construction equipment, procured him weaponry, and cemented his strong relations with the Saudi royal family, which advanced Osama’s influence and credibility as a fund-raiser. With Salem’s abrupt disappearance, Osama lost an important sponsor. At the same time, he was also losing some of his sense of purpose. The cause that had drawn him to the Afghan frontier was ebbing. The Soviet Union signed the Geneva Accords in April 1988 and announced that all its forces would withdraw by early the following year. The war and the jihad would continue, since Moscow would leave behind an Afghan communist government regarded as apostate by the mujaheddin, but with blond Russians no longer pledged to serve in an enemy occupation force, the Afghan war had already drifted from righteous rebellion toward muddy civil conflict. This development had a parallel within the camps of the Arab volunteers: during the first months of 1988, the variety and intensity of disputes among the Arabs increased.

Osama’s personality and his habits of mind led him to hold himself above this fray. He followed his father’s example. He adapted his work and his attitude to please his mentors, even when they were in competition with one another; simultaneously, as a leader in his own right, he attracted a following that was strikingly diverse.

When Osama returned to the Afghan frontier from Salem’s funeral, he shuttled among several homes, offices, and camps. His wives and children lived in Peshawar, and he held meetings there with followers and comrades. He occasionally joined Abdullah Azzam at his Peshawar area preaching and charitable facilities, which still drew upon Osama’s financial and rhetorical support, even though differences had arisen between them about war tactics. Osama quarreled with Azzam, but they never broke; early in 1988, the pair formed a joint camp along the Afghan border to train and house Arab fighters. Azzam’s rivals, the radical Egyptian military and police exiles led by Ayman Al-Zawahiri, controlled Osama’s other camps. He gave this Egyptian faction $100,000.¹⁰ He spread his money around. This was an instinctive tactic of balancing, drawn from the leadership examples of his father and Arabian regents, but it also reflected Osama’s embryonic philosophy of jihad—a creed that was not particularly sophisticated but that had an inherent populist appeal. All were welcome. The compulsion of jihad was a matter of individual conscience, not a consequence of group initiation. Osama saw himself as an inspirer of jihad, not a cult leader or a dictator.

In this season of disputation, for example, one of the arguments between Osama and Azzam involved whether they should screen and select among applicants to their cause. “Abdullah Azzam wanted to choose—we do not welcome everybody,” recalled Jamal Khashoggi, who was in and out of Peshawar during this period. As an adherent of the Muslim Brotherhood, Azzam sought to recruit elite and talented followers, and train them in the Brotherhood tradition. He felt this method produced more trustworthy and rational volunteers. By contrast, “Osama believed in opening up to everybody—everybody who comes under the banner of jihad is welcome.” This disagreement marked the beginning of his formal break with the Muslim Brotherhood, which had been his ideological point of entry to politically aware Islam as a young teenager at the Al-Thaghr Model School in Jeddah. As Osama put it later, he came to think that the true community of believers originates “from many different places and regions, representing a wide spectrum of the unity of Islam, which neither recognizes race nor color; nor does it pay any heed to borders and walls.” Here, too, he was emerging into his own, but as his father’s son; his camps of