Najiah told Blum that she had not talked to Osama in thirty years. She could not believe a member of her family had done this.
Maybe it will turn out to be someone else who was responsible, Blum said. He mentioned how after the Oklahoma City terrorist attack in 1995, much of the initial speculation had centered on Muslim extremists, but then it had turned out to be a homegrown terrorist plot.
No, Najiah replied, this is Osama’s work.
She held a Koran. As the airplane accelerated down the runway and lifted into the air, she opened its pages and read.4
SOMEWHERE OVER ARIZONA, Blum ducked into the cockpit to speak with the pilot, who was in his late forties or early fifties. His copilot was a woman who said that she had previously flown for Southwest Airlines. The captain asked Blum who he was, who he worked for, and why he was on the flight.
Blum explained that he used to be a cop, but that he was now working as a security guard, to protect the airplane’s crew.
Why do I need security? the pilot asked. They were just picking up some college students in Florida, he said, and some other college kids in Washington, and then taking them to Boston. Then he asked: Do you have a passenger manifest?
Blum paused. He had one, but it was full of Bin Laden names—obviously, the captain had not been told. He felt it was a bad idea to lie to airplane pilots, however, particularly while they were in the air, so he handed the paper over.
“The guy turned white,” Blum recalled, “just absolutely ghost white.” He was visibly angry as he handed the manifest to his copilot. They all passed it around. Then they pulled out cigarettes and started chain-smoking. Blum found his Marlboros and joined them.
The pilot and copilot contacted their charter company and issued a series of profane complaints. The crew told Blum that, no offense, but they were a little worried about his ability to control things on his own once the rest of the Bin Ladens came aboard—should something go wrong.
“You’ve got one woman in her midforties in the center of the plane,” Blum said. There was nothing to be anxious about.
Now the flight attendants also picked up on who was on their passenger list. “They started going berserk,” Blum recalled. The attendants paced back and forth to the cockpit.
Finally they landed in Orlando. It was late afternoon East Coast time. The charter crew had decided upon their demands: because they were concerned about their safety and also felt they had been deceived, they were not going to fly any farther than Orlando unless they were each paid an additional $10,000.
Blum learned that a TV channel was reporting that a flight related to September 11—the report was sketchy about the nature of the connection—was preparing to take off from Orlando. Great, Blum thought. He started to worry about some nut turning up with a rifle to take pot shots at them on the tarmac or to try to shoot them out of the sky.
He went back out to the 727 to monitor who and what went aboard. Their flight plan was now on indefinite hold because of the crew’s demands. Three FBI agents patrolled the tarmac and the terminal.
Blum talked on his cell phone with a manager at Ryan Air: the longer we sit on the tarmac, Blum pleaded, the bigger target we become.
Blum spotted a tall man, perhaps six feet four inches tall, and handsome. He wore a thin mustache. He looked exactly like Osama Bin Laden, Blum thought, except that he wore designer sunglasses and a five-thousand-dollar Bijan suit.
Khalil Bin Laden introduced himself and apologized to Blum; he said he was sorry that Blum even had to be there.
Najiah came out and asked Khalil what the long delay was all about. Blum explained: The flight crew was not made aware of your identities. One problem, he continued, is that they are terrified to fly with you. The other is they want more money.
Give them whatever they want, Khalil said, exasperated. “Let’s just get out of here.”5
ON THE EVENING of September 13, the same day Jason Blum was first contacted about the Bin Laden flight, Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador in Washington, met with President George W. Bush at the White House. They smoked cigars on the Truman Balcony, overlooking the South Lawn. The number of dead was still uncounted—in the thousands, certainly. The televised imagery of the attacks and their aftermath—the helpless office workers leaping to their deaths from the twin towers; the tear-streaked, dust-covered faces of the wounded; the shards of paper and debris; the impromptu bulletin boards covered by photos of the missing—still pulsed through the country like a crackling current. What the events would mean ultimately for the U.S.-Saudi governmental alliance was difficult to predict, but there would obviously be a rethinking on both sides.
Bandar insisted later that he did not trouble Bush that evening with the plans he had been working on at the Saudi embassy to evacuate the Bin Laden family, as well as the several dozen members of the Saudi royal family and their entourages who were scattered around the United States. (One group of royals had come to the country before September 11 to purchase Thoroughbred horses in Kentucky; another had come to vacation in California and Las Vegas.) According to Bandar, he called the FBI directly to obtain permission for the charter flights he organized and to ensure that Saudi nationals were adequately protected from vigilante revenge attacks. “Those people were scattered all over America and with tempers high at that time, rightly so, we were worried that someone getting emotional would hurt them,” Bandar said later. He did not say whom he telephoned at the FBI, but he had an excellent relationship with the director, Louis Freeh. After settling things with the bureau, Bandar telephoned Richard Clarke, the counterterrorism director at the White House, who told him, “I have no problem if the FBI has no problem.”6
About three or four days after September 11, Bandar also called Fred Dutton, a Washington lawyer who had served as a legal and political adviser to the Saudi royal family for many years. Bandar explained that some of Osama’s half-brothers happened to be in the United States and wanted to retain legal counsel. “Talk to them and see if you can be of any help,” Bandar said. Dutton was reluctant, but he agreed.7
Dutton was a white-haired doyen of the Washington bar, now in his seventies, a man who was protective of his reputation and who spoke with precision and care. He drove to the Four Seasons Hotel on the edge of Georgetown and rode the elevator to a two-room suite. There he introduced himself to Shafiq Bin Laden and Abdullah Bin Laden, the Harvard law graduate. The brothers both wore business suits. They all sat down to talk in the living room area of the suite.
Shafiq Bin Laden had been attending a Carlyle Group investors’ conference at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Washington, near Dupont Circle, when American Airlines Flight 77 smashed into the Pentagon across the Potomac River. Abdullah Bin Laden had been buying a latte at a Starbucks in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when news of the attacks flashed on the television. He had then made his way to Washington to join his half-brother, to assist with the efforts to evacuate his family, and to assess how to manage their legal position.
The brothers asked Dutton for advice on “what to do, how to handle what was obviously a very embarrassing, messy situation for most of the rest of the Bin Laden family,” as Dutton recalled it. They said they were estranged from Osama, hadn’t seen him in a very long time, and thought he was “a bad apple,” as Dutton put it later.8