his money and his friendships. One of his business professors, Andrew Hess, felt that Salman had suffered psychologically because of Salem’s sudden death in Texas in 1988. Salman took after his father in some ways, and played the guitar, and he spoke fluent English in a British-inflected accent. But he had his ups and downs at Tufts. He made a personal connection with Hess, who prior to his professorship had worked for many years in Saudi Arabia, in the oil industry. Salman then introduced Hess to his Harvard uncle, Abdullah.24
They met several times for dinner at another of Abdullah’s favorite restaurants, in Cambridge. It was called Helmand, after a province in southern Afghanistan. It was run by a gregarious, exiled Afghan family—the Karzais.
Over dinners at Helmand, Hess mentioned to Abdullah that he was having trouble raising money to support some of his academic programs. The Bin Ladens were mostly interested in supporting Islamic studies, Abdullah told him. Hess said that if he had enough funding, he could bring in lecturers and speakers from the Islamic world, to address economic and political issues that fit the Tufts curriculum. Abdullah said he would see what he could do.
Later, he delivered a check to Tufts for $350,000.25
31. A TROJAN DESK
A CAR BOMB bearing about 250 pounds of explosives detonated in Riyadh on November 13, 1995. It was the worst terrorist attack in the kingdom since the almost-forgotten days of proxy war with Yemen during the 1960s. The targets this time were not Saudis, however. Seven people died, including five Americans, and thirty-four others were wounded. The attackers, soon beheaded, were former Afghan jihadis; one said in a televised confession that they had been inspired by the writings of Osama Bin Laden. From the point of view of the Bin Laden family, it was hard to judge which was the more discouraging possibility—that the terrorist’s confession had been authentic, or that he had been encouraged by Saudi interrogators to implicate Osama publicly, in order to discredit him. In an indirect sense, the Bin Ladens had also been on the receiving end of the attack. The targeted building was an American training facility for the Saudi National Guard. One of the facility’s principal contractors, a specialist in military training, was Vinnell Corporation, a low-profile company that has been described by a former board member as associated with the Central Intelligence Agency. Several spouses of Vinnell contractors were among the wounded. At the time, the Carlyle Group owned the firm—although not through the same fund in which the Bin Ladens had just invested. The larger point was the same: the family was now officially at war with itself, even if that war was embryonic and in many respects undeclared.1
Bakr said nothing in public, beyond the press statements he had previously issued, but in private, he tried to make clear to the Americans and Europeans he knew that he was appalled by Osama’s increasingly violent radicalism. Around Christmas 1995, just a few weeks after the Riyadh attack, Bakr flew a number of Salem’s old American and British friends to Jeddah, all expenses paid. Salem’s eldest daughter, Sara, was marrying a young man from a prominent Jeddah merchant family, one that had a lucrative car dealership. Bakr hosted a reunion of some of the pilots and musicians who had known Salem in the glory days.2
The contrasts now accumulating within the family, even at its home base in Jeddah, were startling. Bakr’s Red Sea estate lay a few miles south of one of the family’s grand real estate projects, the Salhia Lotus Beach Resort. The development was named for Saheha Bin Laden, the half-brother of Bakr who had traveled widely in Europe and the United States. The resort opened as a private beach club with two hundred furnished chalets and studios, located on Jeddah’s North Obhur Beach. Security guards carefully checked the names of Saudi members and authorized foreign guests before allowing them behind the resort’s walls. Once inside, the reason for such tight security became obvious: there were women in bikinis lounging alongside men in Speedos; Saudis mixing in their bathing suits with foreigners of both sexes; and Lebanese Christians splashing in the swimming pool with crosses and crucifixes dangling around their necks. It was as if the Bin Ladens had built, and were operating for profit, an alternative Saudi Arabia in a wealthy corner of Jeddah’s northern suburbs.3
Away from the beach club, at Sara’s wedding reception, Bakr was his more traditional self; the genders were duly segregated, and there was an emphasis on fruit juice. Bakr invited some of his foreign guests aboard his large, steel-hulled boat and motored into the Red Sea, where he dropped anchor and hosted an afternoon of shipside swimming. Spirits ran high throughout several days of celebration. Anita Pizza, the pianist, and Gerald Auerbach, the American pilot who had flown both Mohamed and Salem, and who was now in his seventies, were persuaded to run through some of Salem’s favorite numbers. Auerbach belted out “On Top of Old Smokey,” for old times.4
THE MUTED OPENING of Osama’s war on Saudi Arabia coincided with the end of King Fahd’s reign—at least, the end of his ability to rule actively. On November 29, 1995, Fahd suffered a massive stroke. Perhaps the Riyadh bombing and its aftermath raised his blood pressure, or perhaps it was only age or genetics or his untreated obesity. He almost died, but his doctors, so long the beneficiaries of his patronage and largesse, worked to save him. By doing so they inaugurated an Elizabethan-tinged drama of rivalry and succession maneuvering within the Saudi royal family.
The intrigue was more whispered about than witnessed, more presumed than observed, but its outlines were clear enough. As long as Fahd remained technically alive, he would be king, even if he could do little more than nod silently in his wheelchair. The Al-Saud had no precedent for removing an ailing monarch, and after all, the crown prince could govern in his stead. But there was more to this decision than constitutional order. As long as Fahd remained on the throne, his full brothers—Sultan at Defense; Nayef and Ahmed at Interior; and Salman, the governor of Riyadh—might remain unchallenged in their lucrative ministerial fiefdoms, free to supervise their own contracts and to preside over their own patronage machines. Moreover, Fahd’s favorite son, Abdulaziz, might continue to enrich himself and those around him. (By 1993 companies controlled by the Ibrahim family, Abdulaziz’s maternal uncles, owned real estate in the United States valued at more than $1.2 billion worldwide, including Ritz- Carlton hotels in New York, Washington, Houston, and Aspen; a 23,000-acre ranch in Colorado; the Marina del Rey complex in Los Angeles; and a planned resort community near Disney World.) If Fahd died, Crown Prince Abdullah would take the throne—penny-pinching, provincial, isolated, stubborn, unreliable Abdullah, as the Fahd group tended to see him. In “their heart of hearts,” said Wyche Fowler, who served as U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia as this narrative unfolded, Fahd’s full brothers “were not enthusiastic that Abdullah would be their next king.”5
Abdullah remained, as a British diplomat had described him several decades earlier, “abrupt, impulsive, but popular.”6 He had little formal education, but his steady contact across decades with tribal levies in the National Guard had attuned his ear to public opinion—or, at least, to the opinions of male soldiers from the major tribes. At the time of Fahd’s stroke, Abdullah seemed to grasp, in a way that Fahd’s son, full brothers, and brothers-in-law did not, that the kingdom simply could not continue to drift along, ignoring the excesses of the royal family, as it had done for so long. Oil prices fell steadily during the 1990s, eventually touching record lows, if inflation was taken into account. Saudi Arabia’s per capita income, which had soared during the initial oil boom period, also declined dramatically—in part because the size of the native Saudi population grew at alarming rates. Yet Saudis remained poorly equipped for the modern workplace, and the kingdom’s universities remained dominated by religious curricula. In his seventies, living in his own grand palaces and on his desert farms, Abdullah was no firebrand reformer, but at a minimum, he wanted to bring the most visible excesses and self-enrichment of senior princes under control. He tried after Fahd’s stroke to unwind or cancel some of the most egregious contracts, such as the Al-Yamamah deal overseen by Prince Sultan, but he found his anti-corruption drive to be difficult. Among other things, according to Fowler, Fahd’s group sometimes evaded his edicts on contracting by routing their business through the untouchable young Abdulaziz—he was, after all, still the king’s favorite son. Then, too, Abdullah faced his own family members interested in business opportunities. Some of his own sons were entering into commerce, and one of those sons was a school friend of Abdulaziz. Abdullah might have sound instincts about Saudi Arabia’s needs, but he shared power, lacked strong blood allies, and possessed no transformational vision. Political and economic reform in the kingdom, it soon became plain, would be at best an evolutionary project, one where the pace might be barely perceptible to the human eye—nothing like what Osama Bin Laden and his allied dissidents in London had apparently hoped that Abdullah might champion.
