ABOUT SIX WEEKS AFTER Khalil’s ordeal by deposition, two officers from the Los Angeles Police Department, accompanied by a Brazilian woman, Elizabeth Borges, appeared at the door of the Bin Laden home in Brentwood. The officers asked to speak with Marta Silva and Auria DaSilva, two Brazilian women who worked as maids and nannies for the Khalil Bin Laden family. When the two women appeared, the police asked questions about the circumstances of their employment; Borges translated between Portuguese and English. The thrust of the police questioning, as Borges later put it, involved whether the maids were “unable to leave the [Bin Laden] residence and were being prevented from leaving by threats and demands that they must pay monies” to their employers.18
Borges later explained the origins of her visit in court documents. She had been telephoned in June and told that Marta Silva “was being forced to work” for the Bin Ladens “for long hours without days off or relief, and she was not being paid for the work she was performing.” Borges agreed to contact the Brazilian consulate in Los Angeles, but when she did, she found they “would do nothing.” (In Jeddah, Khalil had been appointed Honorary Consul of Brazil, a position designed to help facilitate business between his wife’s native country and Saudi Arabia.) The consulate told Borges to contact the Los Angeles Police if she felt there was a serious problem, and she did. She acted, she wrote in a court declaration, because she believed that the Bin Ladens had “violated the constitutional rights” of their maids “by holding them in their employment against their will.” Borges claimed that the maids told her that:
They were both required to work 18 hours a day without any breaks for breakfast, lunch or dinner…. They were never given any days off and worked seven days a week. They were never paid directly for their work either by cash or check. The conduct of Isabel Binladin was generally very rude and disrespectful to them…Their movement and ability to go outside the family compound in Jeddah or Los Angeles was very limited and restricted…[The Bin Ladens] also made statements to Ms. Silva that past employees had tried to escape and leave their job, that they were apprehended and made to pay for it in more ways than just with money…19
After interviewing the two Brazilian women, however, the Los Angeles Police Department took no action. The two employees left the Bin Laden home the following day; according to the Bin Ladens, Borges agreed to arrange for their immediate departure by air, home to Brazil. Instead, they remained in Los Angeles.
The Bin Ladens said they were outraged by the allegations made against them. They quickly filed a lawsuit against Borges, accusing her of helping the maids escape from their contractual employment obligations and speaking “slanderous” words in the presence of the two police officers. In their complaint, they explained that because Khalil and Isabel
travel extensively, and because Mr. Binladin has heavy business commitments, it is necessary that they have domestic employees who travel with them to care for their five children…Ms. Silva and Ms. DaSilva agreed to accompany [the Bin Ladens] to Saudi Arabia to take care of the Binladins’ five children and perform light housework and to cook, respectively, at…various homes and vacation locales with the proviso that if they desired to terminate their employ, Ms. Silva and Ms. DaSilva would immediately return to Brazil. In reliance on these promises, [the Bin Ladens] obtained precious Saudi Arabian visas…20
Under U.S. immigration law, the complaint continued, the Bin Ladens were responsible for keeping track of their maids “at all times.” Now that the women had disappeared, their family would suffer because they “may not be able to obtain U.S. visas for their household help in the future.” They had suffered “severe emotional distress” from the incident with the police, they wrote, and had agreed to allow the maids to leave and fly home only “in order to defuse the embarrassing situation (which could have adversely affected the Binladin children if it had continued).”21
Borges replied that “any statements made by her to the Los Angeles Police Department…were made to protect the constitutional rights” of the two women and thus were legally privileged.22
Borges eventually returned to Brazil; the lawsuit’s claims and counterclaims were never resolved, according to the available court file. The Bin Ladens ultimately concluded that they had had their fill of Los Angeles. Khalil agreed to purchase from Salem’s estate the Liberian corporation set up to hold Desert Bear, the Spanish-revival estate near Orlando; he paid just under $1 million, according to a person familiar with the transaction.23 The Bin Ladens sold their Brentwood home. In the future, their family would spend summer months in Florida.
America was at times baffling and annoying, at times intrusive and insulting, but it was now an inexorable part of Khalil’s hyphenated family, Saudi-Brazilian-American. They were Bin Ladens, but their children were increasingly American influenced. Managing that balance would prove increasingly difficult.
During that summer of 1990, the season of depositions and upstart maids and door-knocking police in Los Angeles, the allied governments of the United States and Saudi Arabia, rocked by crisis, were discovering something similar, on a parallel plane of foreign policy, oil, economics, and war. Here, too, the integrity and wealth of the Bin Laden family would be implicated—and jeopardized.
27. THE SWISS ACCOUNTS
ON THE NIGHT of August 6, 1990, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney led an American delegation to King Fahd’s seaside palace in Jeddah. Fahd preferred the Red Sea port to Riyadh; among other reasons, one of the astrologers he relied upon had forecasted that he might be knifed in the capital. On this particular evening, Jeddah had the additional advantage of placing the king as far from danger as possible and in position to escape Arabia quickly. Four days earlier, Saddam Hussein’s army had invaded and occupied Kuwait; the emirate’s small army had collapsed and the royal family had fled into exile. Iraqi units now seemed to be regrouping for a possible thrust at Saudi Arabia’s eastern oil fields, the largest of which lay below the Kuwaiti border, on the opposite side of the kingdom from Jeddah.
General Norman Schwarzkopf, the senior American military commander for the Middle East, and Paul Wolfowitz, an under secretary of defense, followed Cheney into the king’s reception hall. Fahd sat at the head of the room. Beside him was his half-brother Abdullah, now crown prince, an independent-minded man who prided himself on his warm relations with Saudi Arabia’s northern desert tribes. Several other princes and a Saudi general formed a row down one side of the room. Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, the ambassador to the United States, hovered near the king, prepared to interpret between English and Arabic. As the discussion began, Schwarzkopf kneeled on the floor to review satellite photos that showed Iraqi troop dispositions near Saudi Arabia; some of Saddam’s units, the general pointed out, were patrolling as deeply as twenty-five kilometers inside the kingdom’s sovereign territory.1
Fahd’s government had showered Saddam with subsidies during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s—as much as $26 billion, by Fahd’s account, a tilt encouraged by the United States in its attempt to contain revolutionary Iran. All that cash had now proved to be a gossamer defense. Equally, the billions spent by the Saudi royal family on British fighter aircraft and weapons systems in the Al-Yamamah deal (which channeled hundreds of millions of dollars in fees each year to Bandar’s Washington bank accounts) had proved worthless; Saudi Arabia lacked the manpower (an army of 70,000, in comparison to Iraqi forces numbering about 2 million) and skill to even blunt, never mind defeat, an Iraqi invasion. Saddam’s incursion into Kuwait had starkly exposed the Al-Saud as rulers of a country that lacked the trained population, industrial strength, and military rigor to protect its treasure of hydrocarbons. Cheney said the United States could do the job, but its troops would have to deploy quickly and in large numbers. He promised that American forces would leave Saudi Arabia as soon as the crisis passed, or whenever Fahd ordered them to go. For his part, Fahd said that if the Americans were to deploy to the kingdom, he wanted large numbers and a serious operation. The security bargain that had long lain just below the surface of the U.S.-Saudi relationship, managed as discreetly as possible so that it would not embarrass the Al-Saud before their xenophobic people, had now been pulled into the open for all to see. America was the guarantor of Saudi Arabia’s independent existence; without that guarantee, the peninsula was vulnerable to any marauder bold or foolish enough to take it
