In 1945 the budding science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, then an electronics officer in Britain’s Royal Air Force, published a short article called “Extra-Terrestrial Relays” in a magazine bearing the premature title Wireless World. Clarke imagined an array of manned satellites beaming television pictures down to Earth. His was the first outline of integrated global communications enabled by orbiting machines. The launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik in 1957, the subsequent space race between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the worldwide growth of the television industry fulfilled much of Clarke’s vision. Yet the commercial satellite industry, shadowed by the Cold War, remained largely a province of government and defense, and its initial market economics favored television, not telephony.2
Among the companies experimenting with portable telephones was Motorola Corporation, which manufactured a number of mobile radios that could connect to landline telephone systems. These devices were marketed for use on ships at sea, or by businesses with remote job sites, such as those working along the remote oil pipelines that crossed Saudi Arabia’s empty deserts.
Salem Bin Laden’s peripatetic life and his love of gadgetry had introduced his family to global telephony long before most American consumers imagined the possibilities. He used Motorola and other radio devices while flying or traveling on the ground—not only for his continent-hopping business and pleasure trips but also for camping and hunting in the Saudi deserts. He positioned himself as an agent for Motorola as he built his own telephone company during the 1970s and 1980s. The kingdom’s vast spaces, its weak infrastructure, and its excess cash all suggested Saudi Arabia as a natural marketplace for portable telephones that could function in remote locations.
Around 1987, while conducting experiments in the Arizona desert, Motorola engineers conceived the idea that would become Iridium—a network of satellites that orbited at a lower altitude than most others and that could assume the role normally played in telephony by ground-based switching and routing systems. By 1991 Motorola had developed the outlines of a business plan, one that would ultimately cost more than $5 billion to carry out. The corporation eventually spun off Iridium as a separate business, but Motorola designed and built the satellites it would use, under a fixed-price contract worth about $3.5 billion. It was a grandiose project infused with risk and uncertainty.3
Motorola’s executives approached major phone companies in Europe and Asia, seeking investors. Iridium’s founders were so convinced of the genius of their vision that when they held an initial conference in Switzerland, the legend was that they charged participants $1 million or more just to hear about their business plan—a price that kept many companies away, recalled F. Thomas Tuttle, who later served as Iridium’s general counsel. Ultimately, because interest in the venture was not as overwhelming as initially hoped, Motorola had to “drop down a tier or two” and form partnerships with secondary phone companies, Tuttle said. Iridium’s idea was to recruit a number of “gateway” investors scattered around the world, each of which would take responsibility for managing its global service in a particular region, such as the Middle East. Since Motorola had a prior business relationship with the Bin Ladens, they were natural targets for Iridium’s pitch.4
Bakr was interested. He formed an offshore corporation, Trinford Investments S.A., which was later described in U.S. regulatory filings as an affiliate of the Saudi Bin Laden Group. Trinford then purchased an interest in Iridium’s gateway for much of the Arab world and Central Asia with the right to appoint two of six directors. In 1993 this company, called Iridium Middle East Corporation, put up $40 million in cash to join the parent consortium, according to a second former Iridium executive involved. The following year, Iridium Middle East put up another installment of $40 million. The Bin Ladens reduced their initial exposure by syndicating some of their investment to other Saudi backers, including members of the royal family, according to the former Iridium executive. Worldwide, Iridium raised about $3.46 billion from gateway partners like the Bin Ladens.5
Flush with optimism and cash, the company opened its headquarters in Washington, D.C., at 1575 I Street, N.W. Bakr Bin Laden assigned the investment to his half-brother Hassan, as part of Hassan’s international portfolio. (He was already the liaison to the Saudi Bin Laden Group’s American office in suburban Maryland, and he also traveled regularly to Texas on assignment, where he helped oversee the refurbishment of Saudi Air Force planes at a U.S. facility.) Iridium Middle East opened a small office in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington. Two or three young Arabs with backgrounds in economics worked there, keeping in touch with Iridium headquarters as the satellites were built and launched, and as consumer marketing plans developed. Hassan joined the Iridium board of directors and flew to the United States for quarterly board meetings.6
He was a clean-shaven, congenial man in his late thirties or early forties who seemed to live nocturnally. He invited some Iridium executives to join him for chain-smoking late-night bull sessions fueled by Johnny Walker. Some of these executives had long worked in Saudi Arabia, and they were accustomed to encountering split personalities among their Saudi counterparts—social drinkers in the West, stern teetotalers at home. Hassan was different: he seemed to party the same way whether he was in Jeddah, Washington, or Beirut. After 1996, one of the former executives recalled, the subject of Hassan’s half-brother Osama occasionally arose at their after-hours bull sessions. Hassan practically spit in vitriol. Osama “has been ex-communicated,” he said, as the participant remembered it. That was about all Hassan had to say on the subject. He did not talk much about Islam or the sources of grievance in the Islamic world. It would be unusual for a Saudi to expound openly about his religious views with a foreigner. In any event, Hassan, it turned out, was more interested in vintage cars and rock and roll.7
HASSAN BIN LADEN was a major shareholder in Hard Rock Cafe Middle East, Inc., the official Hard Rock Cafe franchisee for much of the Arab world, Greece, Cyprus, and Turkey. More than satellite telephones or commercial real estate, Hard Rock’s music-themed restaurants seemed to be aligned with his personality. He had spent much of his youth in Beirut; he could speak in the local urban Lebanese slang, and he seemed to know every pinball machine in the city. He met his first wife, Layla, in Lebanon. They lived in hotel rooms, and Hassan collected cars—Ferraris, Cadillacs, a vintage Chrysler New Yorker, Rolls-Royces, and Mercedes-Benzes. He entered the import-export business as a young man, but he seemed to love soccer, music, casinos, and nightlife more. He was a committed follower of the Jeddah soccer team, Al-Ittihad (rival to the team Osama had supported as a teenager), and he was such a devoted fan of the Egyptian singer Umm Kulsum that he would fly to Cairo on weekends just to attend her concerts. When civil war broke out in Lebanon during the 1970s, Hassan moved his base to Jeddah, but he returned to Beirut as soon as the city began to revive, in the mid-1990s. It was a period of great longing among Beirutis for a return to cosmopolitan normalcy, and so even an event like the grand opening of a local Hard Rock Cafe franchise could seem special.8
Fireworks, not shells, burst brightly above the Beirut Corniche, alongside the Mediterranean, on opening night in December 1996. The Gipsy Kings, a pop-flamenco band from France, headlined on the restaurant’s main stage. Hassan roped off a special seating section for Bin Laden family members—about two dozen flew in for the occasion, including a number of Hassan’s half-brothers, such as Shafiq and Tareq. It was the sort of night that Salem had once lived for—it was easy to imagine him seizing the stage and singing off-key with the Gipsy Kings’ rhythm section.