home…A woman needs her husband to relax and joke with her, to go out to eat with her. But he was in a bad way after the death of his brother.”2
Salem’s disappearance burdened Bakr with leadership responsibilities that he had never anticipated, but it also freed his considerable ambition. He thrived in business meetings and had a distinctly international outlook. As he gained control of the family during 1988 and 1989, he envisioned diversifying its businesses into new countries and new industries; he started up new divisions in dredging and medical supplies, and made plans to explore new opportunities from Southeast Asia to Europe.
Salem’s schooling had made him something of an Anglophile, and his restless free spirit drew him to America. Bakr was more influenced by France. His education in the former French colonial spheres of Damascus and Lebanon, and his first wife’s Syrian roots, helped draw him toward Paris, where he bought an enormous apartment on the Quai d’Orsay—although, like many of his half-brothers, he often preferred the easy convenience of luxury hotels, and typically, he forsook his apartment for the Ritz. Bakr spoke some French, but he conducted most of his business in English or in Arabic, and he kept private secretaries to assist him in each language; over the course of a typical day, he would slip frequently and easily between the two tongues. In this he resembled many younger, privileged Saudis who had adapted rapidly to global business idioms in the aftermath of the oil shock.
In some respects, he was unprepared for the leadership role he now occupied. As an engineer and an operations man, as Salem’s loyal number two, he had learned to work hard and to concentrate on results, but he lacked a natural touch for the richly diverse human foibles and quandaries that his family members continually presented him. As almost anyone would, Bakr suffered by comparison to Salem. He could seem like a bit of a nerd, eager to imitate the sources of his older brother’s charisma and popularity but not always able to pull it off. Some of Salem’s friends thought that Bakr carried something of a chip on his shoulder because of these deficits. Yet he seemed to have genuinely admired Salem, and as he explored his new circumstances as the boss of all he surveyed, Bakr tried to live in some ways as Salem had done.
He refused, for example, to back off from the family passion for flying, despite the enormous costs that aviation had exacted. Bakr had at first been a somewhat reluctant pilot. He “used to hate flying, maybe because his father died in an airplane” recalled one of his Egyptian instructors, Yahia El Agaty. “And then in Cairo one day at Imbaba Airport, I was flying the [Cessna] 172 which I bought from Salem. And Bakr came to the airport, and he said, ‘Okay, I want to fly.’ I chuckled: ‘You want to fly, Sheikh Bakr!’ He said, ‘Yeah.’”
“You’re a liar!” Salem had exclaimed when Agaty called to report what had happened, but Agaty was right: gradually, Bakr took instruction and conquered his fear.3 He eventually became qualified on jets and was regarded by his private pilots as quite a competent and enthusiastic flier. He did not fly with Salem’s reckless, showy flair—barrel rolls were not his style—but he did enjoy a few modest demonstrations at the controls from time to time, such as taking off in a Learjet or Gulfstream and leveling at a low altitude, and then suddenly tilting back and roaring upward. He came to talk about planes and private aviation with the same all-consuming hobbyist’s passion as Salem had possessed; gossip about new models and nuances of range and performance became for Bakr what baseball or soccer rosters were for other men. His piloting did seem to some of Salem’s old friends to be a metaphor for Bakr’s relationship with his brother’s ghost—he wanted to fly where Salem had been, but he did not embrace the same degree of risk.
AS HE ESTABLISHED himself as the new leader, Bakr decided to clean up some family inheritance issues. At the same time, he set up new business partnerships for the future. Court documents describing this period, while far from fully transparent, provide the most detailed snapshots available of the size of the main Bin Laden company and how its wealth was distributed to the heirs of Bakr’s generation after Salem’s death. Osama’s return to Saudi Arabia in 1989 coincided with this family reorganization, overseen by Bakr; it may even have been a factor in his decision to come home.
Of all the myths that would come to swirl around Al Qaeda, none was greater than the fable of Osama Bin Laden’s wealth. His followers (and, later, some of his adversaries) romanticized every aspect of his leadership, but they particularly exaggerated his personal fortune. The unrestrained, poetic language employed by Islamist propagandists to celebrate Osama’s battlefield achievements in Afghanistan soon extended to the subject of his bank account. To some extent, their exaggerations are explained by Osama’s fundraising achievements; his ability to attract outside donations and government support had made him appear wealthier to his comrades in Pakistan than he actually was. Still, the prosaic truth about his personal finances mattered greatly—because of misreporting about Osama’s wealth, his adversaries, particularly those in the United States, would repeatedly misunderstand him.
None of Mohamed Bin Laden’s children could easily guess what he or she was worth. The family companies did not trade on any stock exchange, and their web of opaque financial entanglements with the Al-Saud complicated any attempt at financial valuation. At the center of the empire stood the Mohamed Bin Laden Organization, the original construction company founded in 1931. Each of Mohamed’s sons—except for Ali, who had sold his shares when he broke with Salem after their father’s death—owned 2.27 percent of the flagship company, and each of the daughters owned half of that amount, or about 1.14 percent.4 After Bakr became the Bin Laden emir, or leader, he approved dividend payments to the family shareholders each year, based at least in part on that year’s actual profits. These dividends were separate from salaries that particular brothers might earn, and distinct also from profits that might be distributed from other businesses, such as Bin Laden Brothers. Some of the Bin Laden heirs reinvested their dividends in global stock markets, particularly after Yeslam established his Saudi and Swiss brokerages. Yeslam’s full brother Ibrahim, for example, testified in a court deposition that in 1983, in order to raise about $1 million in cash for the purchase of a mansion in Los Angeles, he sold “stocks that I inherited from my father.” He borrowed the rest of the purchase price, about $600,000. It seems most likely that Ibrahim actually inherited cash from Mohamed’s estate, in the form of dividends, which he then shifted into stocks at Yeslam’s direction; his testimony on this point is not precise, but overall, it suggests the scale and fluidity of the inheritance.
The most reliable portrait of the family dividend system comes from an American certified public accountant, Linda Pergament Swift, a specialist in forensic accounting, who examined the Bin Laden family’s finances during the early 1990s as part of an American divorce proceeding involving Ibrahim. In 1989, Swift reported to an American court, Ibrahim received two dividend payments from the Mohamed Bin Laden Organization totaling just over $325,000. This appears to be roughly the amount allotted to all male shareholders that year, including Osama. Swift wrote, however, that her investigation revealed a strikingly flexible and informal family system: “Each beneficiary receives allotments, usually from profits of the business, on an annual or semi-annual basis. The family business does not simply distribute a lump sum…[but] acts as a money manager or clearing house.” Each son and daughter was credited his or her share of the annual profits, she continued, and then the company doled out the cash as directed by the heir.5
Ibrahim’s 1989 take implies that Bakr allotted a total of about $15 million in dividends to family members that year. That is consistent with figures in the 1990 edition of
Also in 1989, Bakr oversaw a one-time distribution to Mohamed Bin Laden’s heirs from the patriarch’s broader estate, according to what the family later told American government investigators. Mohamed’s children and the four women to whom he was married when he died had inherited not only shares in his company but also his land, his homes, and his personal property. Initially the trustees appointed by King Faisal doled out allowances and conserved the estate’s principal. When Salem eventually gained control, according to the account of one family business partner, he argued with some of his brothers over whether and how to distribute the estate’s underlying assets, which were not easy to divvy up, since they included much land and real property. By this account, Salem resisted a straight application of Islamic law, under which each brother would receive one equal share, and each sister one equal half-share, after provisions for charity and Mohamed’s wives. Among other things, Salem felt that brothers who worked at the company deserved a larger distribution than those who did nothing.7 Islamic inheritance law, however, made no such distinction, and it would have been difficult for Salem to sustain his position before a Saudi court if any of his brothers had formally objected.
