He was twice divorced, but his children remained under his roof. He hired guardians and tutors, and if the boys were perhaps more interested in the latest Sony PlayStation games than in their father’s ponderous Islamic verses, the generation gap between them seemed of normal expanse. Bakr sent his talented eldest son, Nawaf, an American passport holder, to the United States for schooling, and in the Arabian tradition, he cultivated the boy for a leadership role in the next generation.
When Bakr was at home in Jeddah, his world revolved around his palace near the Red Sea, a campus with a main home, a guesthouse, buildings that served as offices for executive staff, and his majlis, where he received executives and visitors in the afternoons and evenings. He attended banquets and receptions hosted by the Al-Saud, but these soirees often had more to do with attending to his royal clients than with the pursuit of pleasure. He retained a passion for aircraft, and he built out his private fleet of jets; when traveling, he moved in the privileged and luxurious bubble of private aviation—a subculture of exclusive lounges, limousines, and white-glove service far removed from the bus station ambience of commercial aviation. He commissioned a Swedish Egyptian boat builder to construct a 190-foot aluminum yacht with a landing pad for helicopters on its deck, but the project proceeded slowly, so in the meanwhile, Bakr motored back and forth across the Red Sea, between Jeddah and the Egyptian resort at Sharm El Sheikh, on one of several smaller yachts. Once out of Saudi Arabia, his lifestyle was active but restrained. His idea of a night out was ogling jets at the Dubai Air Show or taking in the Ice Capades in Paris. He could be generous, particularly to charitable or educational causes to which he had a personal or family connection, but he generally preferred to act discreetly, all the more so after Osama declared war on the United States.
It was a testament to Bakr’s temperament that his employees rarely left him unhappy. He was usually a reasonable boss—respectful and correct. It was difficult to find former business partners or executives who felt badly used by any of the Bin Ladens, although there were some. The salaries paid by Bin Laden companies were not extravagant, but they were in line with international standards, and once housing subsidies and Saudi aversion to taxation were taken into account, a Bin Laden engineer or accountant could do fairly well. As the Bin Laden companies modernized, they took on the trappings of typical multinationals, or at least of those typical in the Arab world: Employees were assigned to various categories, depending on their rank, and issued color-coded badges—red, yellow, or blue. There were regular vacations, home leave, and even a formal severance policy for expatriate employees at the Saudi Bin Laden Group: half a month’s pay for each year of service for those remaining less than five years, and a month’s pay for each year of service after five.3
Those who stayed long and developed personal connections to the family could expect exceptional rewards. A Pakistani on Bakr’s household staff in Jeddah had been with him so long it was rumored that he had a net worth of at least several million dollars. Bakr’s driver in London, a Pole nicknamed “Martin,” had put his children through fine British schools on the money and abandoned luxury cars he had been given by various Bin Ladens over the years. In middle age, Bakr had become something of a health nut, and Martin eventually found a Polish-born personal trainer and masseur who accompanied him on his travels, worked him out, and kept his muscles loose. Perhaps the most remarkable case of an accidental fortune in Bakr’s entourage belonged to Nur Bayoun, the Lebanese travel agent who had served as an informal guardian to some of the Bin Laden boys during the early 1960s. After civil war erupted in Lebanon, Bayoun was invited to Jeddah. He won a luxury Bulgari jewelry franchise in Saudi Arabia; the attractiveness of owning such a business in the kingdom can be readily imagined, and Bayoun became exceptionally wealthy. He eventually married a young woman who seemed to be about half his age and who traveled on vacations with the Bin Laden family draped in what appeared to be two to three million dollars’ worth of Bulgari jewelry.4
Apart from Osama, the primary source of concern in Bakr’s world seemed to be his relationship with the Al-Saud. All the confidence and swagger he had built up in the years since Salem’s death could vanish the instant a prince walked in the room. In the confines of his own majlis, he was a sheikh among sheikhs, but in the royal courts of Riyadh, he remained just an overachieving Yemeni, vulnerable to the whims of the genealogy-conscious Al-Saud; he could never marry into their ranks or expect their full acceptance. Bakr would leap to open the door deferentially for even a minor royal. He seemed to worry chronically about the disposition of the major Al-Saud on whom his businesses relied—Crown Prince Abdullah, of course, but also Prince Salman, the governor of Riyadh, and Abdulaziz bin Fahd, the son of the disabled king. Abdulaziz had built himself a palace campus along the Red Sea in Jeddah that made Bakr’s look cramped by comparison. The Bin Ladens watched after the king’s son attentively.
Bakr kept track of the news, and he had some contemporary political interests: For example, he was more interested in environmental issues, such as the health of the Red Sea, than many Arabians. He spoke up with friends and colleagues about the Palestinian cause, and his majlis sometimes filled with the usual Arabian talk about the unseen power of Jews in American government and media. But those who issued these harangues regarded them as commonplace, hardly controversial.
Bakr had become a kind of Babbitt of the Hejaz by the turn of the century, an optimistic embodiment and promoter of the Saudi Arabian mainstream. The question was how durable this mainstream order would prove to be in a world that had lost communism but gained Osama. At the heart of Saudi Arabia’s dilemmas—involving national identity, foreign policy, and defense—was its partnership with America, forged at the Cold War’s dawn and rarely questioned afterward. By the time of Osama’s war declarations, Saudi elites were already searching tentatively for a new direction—one that could accommodate the American partnership (which remained essential to defend the kingdom’s oil from predators) but also enhance Saudi pride, room for maneuver, and, of course, the power of its royal family.
IN APRIL 2000, Prince Khaled Al-Faisal, the governor of Asir Province, near the border with Yemen, published a poem in the Jeddah daily newspaper Al-Medina. A son of the former king, Khaled was a painter, falconer, and writer regarded as one of the more progressive and effective Al-Saud governors. He traveled; he counted Britain’s Prince Charles among his personal friends; and he seemed to reflect the modernizing and internationally minded wing of Saudi royal opinion. His outlook about American and European human rights and democracy campaigning, however, was less than accommodating. Khaled titled his poem “Human Rights”: