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 deepen their contacts with American and British elites—to construct, subtly but unmistakably, an alternative basis to evaluate the family’s attitude toward the West. The more trouble Osama caused, the more Bakr seemed to search for ways to make offsetting donations and financial investments.
ALL OF THE BIN LADEN companies, whether in Saudi Arabia or abroad, operated as privately held entities, so the family was not legally required to disclose its spider’s web of global holdings to stock market regulators or public investors or even to their own executives. There was a random and whimsical nature to some of the family’s investments. A brother might go on vacation in Eastern Europe, meet an enterprising local man, invest in a travel agency, and then neglect it, until the company’s very existence was forgotten. Family firms sold casual wear in London’s Covent Garden and in shopping malls in Cairo and Beirut (“tank tops, jogging shorts, jeans, denims…”); produced television programming and commercials in a Jeddah photo lab; published children’s books in London; and licensed intellectual property in Dubai. The lines between the hobbies of family members and serious businesses were not always easy to discern. Offshore companies would open, fall dormant, and then sit on the books for years, earning fees for the lawyers and accountants who renewed their registrations, but doing little else. By the early 1990s, there were so many small companies and affiliates scattered around the world that at one point, around the time Griffin opened the Rockville office, executives at headquarters retained an American firm just to inventory the family’s holdings, according to a person familiar with the study.7