hundred.”
“Thousand?”
“Yeah, dollars.”
“Okay, so one million, six hundred thousand dollars?”
“Yes.”
“Where did you get the cash?”
“From Saudi Arabia, from my brother, Yeslam.”
“Was that a loan?”
“No. He sold some of my stocks.”
“…And whose name was the house put in?”
“My brother in—my brother’s name.”
“Which brother?”
“Yeslam.”
“Why?”
“Because they told me if I put the house under my name, and then here, I have to pay income taxes if I own something.”
“Who told you that?”
“Some of my friends.”8
On and on it went, the lawyers probing, Ibrahim responding in a tone of genial indolence. Following the depositions, as their trial date steadily approached, the estranged couple filed dueling declarations about the collapse of their marriage and their daughter’s best interests.
Christine wrote that she felt trapped when she visited Saudi Arabia with Sibba. Ibrahim would disappear and “stay at the beach or go to one of his brothers’ houses…and if he did come home…he would eat and take a nap or eat and leave the house quickly.” During her stay in Jeddah during 1991, she wanted to go home to California, but Ibrahim “would not allow Sibba and myself to return to the United States.” Ibrahim took her passport and told her “that it was being held at the Bin Laden Organization’s office.” She needed Ibrahim’s signature to obtain an exit visa, and he refused, she wrote, telling her, “If you want to go home, you can go home, but Sibba is staying.” She now feared, she told the court, that if Ibrahim was permitted to take Sibba to Saudi Arabia as part of their postdivorce custody agreement, she might never return. During their quarrels, Ibrahim had told her “numerous” times that Sibba “would go to Saudi Arabia no matter what happens and no matter what the court orders.” Other members of the Bin Laden family had also told her that if Ibrahim took Sibba to Saudi Arabia, “he would not return her to me.”9
“I see very clearly the intention of Chris is to punish me by keeping Sibba from going to Saudi Arabia,” Ibrahim wrote in reply. He had “never tried to stop her from leaving” the kingdom; in fact, “I helped her to leave… One time we had an argument and she wanted to leave and I told her you could do whatever you want, she knows very well she could leave if she wanted to. The law a wife can’t leave without a husband’s permission applies on the Saudis only. The only time I take her passport is to get her an exit visa…She did not need any signature from me for her to leave.”
He felt that Christine was deliberately attempting to alienate him from his young daughter. As an example, he reported that he had recently been laughing with Sibba in the car when he asked her if she was happy, and she said she was, and then she asked him, “Are you happy,
“Yes,” he had answered.
“But mom said you are unhappy man.”10
At a deposition called by Ibrahim’s lawyers, Christine described the agreements she and her husband had made about Sibba’s upbringing.
“So it would be correct, then, that you and Mr. Bin Laden agreed that she was going to be reared in the Muslim faith?
“Yes.”
“And would the child be exposed to, and if possible, learn to speak, read and write Arabic?” “Yes.”11
Ibrahim wanted to raise his daughter as a Saudi and as a Bin Laden, he told the court. It was in Sibba’s best interest to understand who she was, and to become a full member of an extended family upon which she could long rely:
It is better for her now to know these things and grow up exposed to that culture, because I believe growing up with different “way of life” make you accept them, and it would be harder if she is not exposed to it until later—after she is grown. The other reason I want her to go to Saudi Arabia is to know her other part of the family, to feel their love for her, to be able to speak the language and feel comfortable to pick up the phone and ask any of her family if she needed anything or had a problem.12
He was convinced that Christine was using their daughter as a lever to extract money from him. “She only started to give me this trouble when she found out the Court will not give her what she wants from me,” namely, alimony of $21,648 a month and an additional $6,188 in child support. He was prepared to offer $3,250 in monthly child support, but as for alimony for Christine, his lawyers asserted, she had “remained with Ibrahim for less than five years, during which she enjoyed the benefits of Ibrahim’s family’s largesse. She certainly didn’t earn a lifetime of such living.” She should go out and find a job; she “has been supported long enough.”13
Their trial was scheduled for June 1993. As it neared, the two finally began to negotiate. On July 6, 1993, they completed a “Final Divorce Judgment” that brought their struggle to an end—or so they believed.
Ibrahim agreed to pay $5,000 per month in child support and $335,000 in a onetime cash settlement payment to Christine, with no additional alimony or attorney fees. He would be permitted to keep his 1977 Rolls- Royce Silver Shadow; his 1983 Rolls-Royce Corniche; his 1992 Hummer; his 1991 Lexus; his 1984 Honda Civic; his 1987 Lamborghini jeep; his 1986 Mercedes-Benz 500 SEL; and his Mercedes jeep, as well as sole title to his real estate in Los Angeles and Jeddah, his bank accounts, and his interest in the Mohamed Bin Laden Company. Ibrahim agreed to spend six months of each year in the United States and to share custody of Sibba during that period.
Christine agreed to enroll their daughter in an Islamic school and to ensure that she received Arabic lessons. Until she was seven years old, Ibrahim could take her to Saudi Arabia for visits of up to one month; later, the stays could be longer.
It seemed a reasonable if expensively constructed compromise, and, indeed, the divorce decree between Ibrahim and Christine Bin Laden would hold steady for the rest of the decade—until the events of September 11 shattered the bicultural comity on which it rested.
29. THE CONSTRUCTION OF EXILE
BRITISH IMPERIALISTS laid out Port Sudan’s geometrical street grid in 1905. Its harbor lay tucked behind coral reef barriers halfway up the Red Sea’s western coast, across from Jeddah. In Britain’s vision of the coming century, the town would thrive at the head of a rail line linking the Nile River to Europe, via the Suez Canal, but the place was still awaiting its renaissance as the twentieth century neared its close. Postcolonial Sudan’s latest leader-for-life, General Omar Bashir, a veteran of brutal wars against African Christians in the country’s south, overthrew an elected prime minister in 1989. As he consolidated power, Bashir allied himself with an Islamist coalition led by a Sorbonne-educated, self-impressed Sudanese theoretician of religion and politics, Hassan Al-Turabi. In the usual manner of coup leaders, they promised to revive their country by investing in infrastructure projects that would benefit “The People.” In the same year that Bashir came to power, an offshore company controlled by the senior Bin Laden brothers won a contract to build a new airport at Port Sudan, where the country’s modest but economically vital oil exports flowed to market. The government of Saudi Arabia, which sought influence with its Red Sea neighbor, pledged to shoulder most of the $35 million cost.1
The project was assigned to the Public Buildings and Airports Division of the Saudi Bin Laden Group. Omar Bin Laden, the University of Miami graduate, was placed in charge. By 1992 construction was well under way.
