The Bin Ladens

In Khartoum he remained surrounded by other wives, children, employees, and followers, and his calendar of business and conspiracy meetings mitigated his isolation. Yet there was now a self-reinforcing quality to the narrative Osama was constructing around his exile. The more pressure he faced, the more readily he compared his circumstances to those of the Prophet Mohamed, who had been driven by political opponents to Medina, where he waged a righteous war and eventually returned home. “Emigration is related to jihad, and jihad will go on until the Day of Judgment,” Osama wrote while in Sudan. It was not the sort of formulation likely to appeal to a restless wife or teenager with memories of Jeddah’s better restaurants. Yet there is no reason to doubt that Osama believed precisely what he penned.

Moreover, the wealth and global visibility of his enemies—King Fahd, and his patron, the Americans—only highlighted for him the enduring righteousness of his cause. He even seemed to regard some of the missions undertaken by his relatives as a form of outreach from the United States, the country on which Osama increasingly focused his wrath, particularly after Washington put pressure on Sudan’s government to expel him from Khartoum. At first he had regarded his family members as helpless, manipulated agents of the Al-Saud. Now he came to see his exile as a contest of will and faith between himself and the government of the most powerful country on earth. Each iteration of this contest only highlighted for him the significance of his struggle and his leadership. “I tell you that the Americans are bargaining with us in silence,” Osama would explain in late 1996. “America and some of its agents in the region have bargained with us discreetly more than ten times, I tell you: [they say] shut up and we’ll give you back your passport and possessions, we’ll give you back your i.d. card, but shut up. These people think that people live in this world for its own sake, but they have forgotten that our existence has no meaning if we do not strive for the pleasure of God.”³⁶

30. HEDGE FUNDS

DURING A LONG CAREER as an American diplomat, Philip Griffin became a specialist in the Arab world, and he acquired particular experience in the Persian Gulf region—he served in Kuwait, Abu Dhabi, and twice in Dhahran, the principal city in Saudi Arabia’s oil-producing region. He was a mild man with blue eyes and a full head of graying hair; his years in diplomacy and his extended exposure to reticent Arabia had left him with impeccable manners and a habit of speaking in cautious, deliberate, fully articulated paragraphs. In 1989 Griffin arrived in Jeddah as consul general, the State Department’s highest-ranking officer in the Hejaz and a liaison to the U.S. embassy in Riyadh.

On his early diplomatic rounds, Griffin met Henry Sarkissian, of the Sarkissian business family, Armenian Christians who had migrated to Lebanon, established themselves in the electrical and industrial air-conditioning field, and then become important partners of the Bin Ladens in Saudi Arabia. Sarkissian introduced Griffin to Bakr Bin Laden, a connection that led to periodic discreet conversations among Bakr, Griffin, and Chas Freeman, then the U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia. The two American diplomats used Bakr as a sounding board about goings-on in the court of King Fahd and about the king’s private views on issues of the day. They found Bakr to be very careful during these conversations, which usually took place in his Jeddah office; Bakr was far from a natural gossip, and he was protective of the king, but he occasionally passed along a useful nugget or insight.¹

During the summer of 1992, Griffin’s posting neared its end, and he let it be known that he was planning to retire from the diplomatic service; he was then sixty years old. Through Sarkissian, Bakr asked to see him. He did not mention Osama, although by now, the trouble with his half-brother had begun to percolate. Bakr did mention that although the Bin Ladens had enjoyed many business connections in the United States over the years, they had no one person—no brother, no other representative—to oversee their scattered investments in the U.S., or to develop new ones. After this encounter, through Sarkissian, Bakr inquired if Griffin might be interested in opening an office for the Saudi Bin Laden Group in Washington, an office that would be supported partly by Sarkissian’s joint venture with the Bin Ladens and partly by the Saudi Bin Laden Group itself. The inquiry Bakr relayed was not specific about the office’s writ or purpose, but in follow-up discussions, Sarkissian mentioned that in addition to maintaining ties with existing partners such as General Electric and pursuing new business development in the United States, they would want someone in the capital who could give them access to the American government if it was required.

“Well, that’s easier said than done,” Griffin responded. “Let me think about it.”²

He returned to his home in the Washington suburbs, but he stayed in touch as he moved through the State Department’s formal retirement process. By early 1993, the Bin Ladens made clear that they wanted to go ahead with the plan, and Griffin decided to come on board. The Bin Ladens agreed to allow him to open an office near his home in Maryland so he would not have to endure a grueling daily commute into downtown Washington. He found an office building that specialized in providing packaged services, such as telephone-answering and conference facilities, to very small companies. On June 16, 1993, in the same week that the Bin Laden brothers were in the midst of their still-private legal proceedings in Jeddah to divest Osama of his shareholdings, Griffin, as “resident agent,” incorporated a company in Maryland as the Saudi Bin Laden Group’s new American outpost. The firm was initially called Cromwell Corporation, but it then formally became SBG (USA), Inc.³ Griffin moved into an office at 51 Monroe Street, in downtown Rockville, Maryland, near Rockville Pike, a cluttered six-lane avenue lined with strip malls, consumer electronics stores, and brightly lit chain restaurants. It was perhaps not the marbled outpost in imperial-tinted Washington that Bakr might initially have imagined, but it was at least a foothold, manned by an experienced American diplomat, in a country that was coming to play an increasingly complicated role in the family’s life.

Bakr assigned Griffin’s office to his half-brother Hassan, who had been appointed to oversee international business development under Bakr’s new management regime. This sounded fairly clear-cut, but the inner workings of the Bin Laden companies remained idiosyncratic. Once, when a non-Saudi executive complained to Henry Sarkissian that he was puzzled about what the Saudi Bin Laden Group actually wanted him to do, Sarkissian quipped, “You’ll never learn,” by which he meant that vagueness and mystery were permanent features of the corporate culture. Under Bakr, in comparison to Salem’s reign, there was a new veneer of professional organization charts, yet Bakr himself made many of his most important decisions not in boardrooms, but while sitting in his afternoon majlis in Jeddah, in the manner of an Arabian sheikh, or while flying from place to place in his private jets. The corporate culture he oversaw remained utterly dependent on the boss, habitually secretive, compartmented, and at times confusing, particularly for outsiders who joined as executives or partners.⁴

During the mid-1990s, Bakr signed a number of lucrative contracts in partnership with General Electric to develop power stations in Saudi Arabia, and he even hosted a celebratory party in the kingdom for GE’s famous chief executive, Jack Welch—but none of this U.S.-connected work was routed through or coordinated with the new U.S. office. Also, at the time Griffin set up shop, elements of the family were invested in a number of commercial real estate partnerships in the United States—those developed by the Daniel Corporation of Alabama, whose project money was channeled by Yeslam Bin Laden; those purchased by Yeslam’s full brother Khalil, through America in Motion; and another suite of projects overseen by the Sarkissians from an office in New Jersey. These latter developments included commercial properties in the Dallas area; some of those partnerships were named in reference to iconic places or events of the American Revolutionary War period, such as Concord or Bunker Hill. None of these projects was assigned directly to the new American office opened by Griffin, either. If anything, Griffin would be subordinate to the family’s real estate partners: listed as directors of SBG (USA) in the official corporate records were Kourken Sarkissian, in Canada, who helped oversee some family investments in North America, and Robert McBride, of Spicewood, Texas, who worked in a similar vein.⁵

The Bin Ladens’ business and advisory network in the United States also included an additional outpost, in the person of Fuad Rihani, a businessman who had run a European company that supplied lighting equipment to the two holy mosques in Mecca and Medina. Rihani was originally from Jordan; he was a Christian who was active in that country’s Protestant Church circles. By the time SBG (USA) opened outside Washington, Rihani had become a senior and respected adviser to the Bin Ladens; he eventually purchased a home in North Carolina, carried the title of Director of Research and Development for the Saudi Bin Laden Group, and served on the board of a Washington think tank, the Middle East Policy Council, to which the Bin Ladens made donations. Its later chairman was Chas Freeman, the former U.S. ambassador in Riyadh.⁶

These contributions and connections offered the Bin Ladens a way to distinguish themselves from Osama, to