Two months after he published these lines, Khaled stood with Prince Charles at the head of a reception line in Whitehall, London, the seat of British government. The occasion was the formal launch of “Painting and Patronage,” a joint art exhibition of twenty-six oil paintings by Khaled and thirty-five watercolors by Charles. Prince Khaled’s work depicted the sunlit contrasts of Asir’s barren mountains and verdant watered valley; Charles’s included scenes of Balmoral, Scotland, and a few of Asir as well, painted on his periodic private visits to the kingdom.6
Bakr Bin Laden arrived at the gala opening, waited in the reception line, and approached the two princes; Khaled introduced him to Charles.
“This is Mr. Bin Laden.”
Charles arched his eyebrows. “Not the Bin Laden?”
“No, no, it’s his brother,” Khaled hastened to explain.
The Prince of Wales turned to Bakr and shook his hand. “What’s your brother up to these days?” he asked.7
Bakr’s reply is not recorded. He apparently took no offense; he and Charles soon opened a cordial acquaintance. Bakr even landed on the royal Christmas card list; each December, he received warm seasonal greetings, typically accompanied by a photograph of young princes Harry and William.
Prince Charles took seriously his role as an informal emissary to Saudi Arabia. He had developed a deep and personal interest in the Islamic world. There was something about its suspicion of Western consumerism and media culture that seemed to appeal to Charles’s own traditionalism. He sought to promote a more emphatically multireligious Britain; he wished, if he became king, to be called Defender of the Faiths. In 1993 Charles had made these inclinations conspicuous, by becoming a formal Patron of the Oxford Center for Islamic Studies. As he announced this priority, he delivered a prescient speech based upon the premise that “misunderstandings between Islam and the West…may be growing.” Predictably, he argued for mutual accommodation and respect for peaceful Islamic traditions. More interesting was his personal identification with the sources of Muslim grievance in the era of globalization:
Some of us may think the material trappings of Western society which we have exported to the Islamic world—television, fast-food and the electronic gadgets of our everyday lives—are a modernizing, self-evidently good, influence. But we fall into the trap of dreadful arrogance if we confuse “modernity” in other countries with their becoming more like us. The fact is that our form of materialism can be offensive to devout Muslims—and I do not just mean the extremists among them…Western civilization has become increasingly acquisitive and exploitative in defiance of our environmental responsibilities. This crucial sense of oneness and trusteeship of the vital sacramental and spiritual character of the world about us is surely something important we can re-learn from Islam.8
In February 2001, Charles and Khaled brought “Paintings and Patronage” to the Al-Faisaliah Center in Riyadh, a glass shopping mall, office tower, and luxury hotel complex constructed by the Saudi Bin Laden Group. At a celebratory banquet, Charles sat beside Crown Prince Abdullah and Bakr Bin Laden sat at a nearby table. The Saudi press dutifully promoted the works on display and honored the kingdom’s distinguished royal guest—there was, of course, no risk of independent-minded art criticism in the newspapers that might irritate either of the royal painters.
Also in attendance that night at the Al-Faisaliah was Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, chairman of the Committee of Managing Directors of the Royal Dutch/Shell Group of Companies, the international oil giant, a cosponsor of the Riyadh exhibition, along with BAE Systems, the British defense contractor. Their financial contributions to the gala might not reflect the “vital sacramental and spiritual” link between Islam and the West that Charles had earlier emphasized, but unlike his friend Khaled, of course, Charles was only a figurehead prince, an informal ambassador in service of Her Majesty’s government, whose elected job it was to attend to more material concerns of British factory workers and automobile owners.9
Prince Charles’s Christmas cards offered Bakr one additional source of reassurance as Osama’s violent ambitions became more visible. Bakr and his brothers actively sought other such contacts in the United States and Europe after the Africa embassy bombings. Philip Griffin, from his office in Maryland, telephoned his former contacts at the State Department, but his connections operated at a lower level than that to which the Bin Ladens were accustomed. The Carlyle Group, where the Bin Ladens had already made investments, offered a more influential pathway: George H. W. Bush, the former American president, traveled to Saudi Arabia in November 1998, three months after the Africa attacks, and again in 2000, to speak at Carlyle events designed to raise money from Saudi investors. He met the Bin Ladens and wrote them gracious thank-you notes for their hospitality.10
Former president Jimmy Carter, seeking to raise money for the Carter Center, which promoted human rights and disease eradication worldwide, met with a group of ten Bin Laden brothers during a fundraising campaign in Saudi Arabia in early 2000. The Bin Ladens assured Carter that they had nothing to do with Osama; the former president, in turn, urged them to support his efforts to combat poverty and suffering in the Third World. Perhaps the Bin Ladens realized that at the end of a two-term Clinton administration, with Vice President Al Gore looking like a plausible next president, it would be useful to broaden their political contacts beyond the Republican-heavy, Texas-centric networks offered by Carlyle. In any event, Bakr flew to New York in September 2000, on the eve of the U.S. presidential election, and had breakfast with Carter. It was a very rare effort on Bakr’s part—one of only two trips to the United States that he had made since he left the University of Miami in 1973. Bakr pledged a $1 million gift to the Carter Center, to be paid over several years; the initial donation was $200,000. The funds would support Carter’s campaign to control and prevent river blindness disease.11
INSIDE THE UNITED STATES itself, after 1998, what the Bin Ladens sought most was to avoid attention, but even this did not always prove easy. Bin Laden children continued to attend prep schools, colleges, and universities in the U.S. Khalil Bin Laden’s children were among them. Although he had long since abandoned America in Motion, Khalil still visited Desert Bear, the estate outside Orlando. His wife’s Brazilian mother often stayed there, as did his wife’s sister, Regina Frisaura, and her four daughters. Regina had lived in Jeddah during the mid-1990s, but she had gone through a divorce from her American husband, Franklin Frisaura, and had returned to Orlando. She was a deeply troubled woman, and her behavior increasingly threatened to attract the interest of the police at a time when the Bin Laden family did not need such attention.
On June 11, 1999, Michele Smith, a local Florida police officer, arrived at Regina Frisaura’s home, where she discovered the aftermath of a violent argument. Regina’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Vanessa, told the policewoman that her mother had beaten her with her fists, thrown a picture frame at her, thrown a skateboard at her three times, and grabbed her by the hair. Vanessa said that “for as long as she can remember, she has been physically and emotionally abused by her mother,” according to Smith’s police report. Two other daughters joined Vanessa in recounting “numerous acts of violence” over the previous several years.12