The Twin Beech fell toward the desert, tilted to one side, bounced once, crashed, and burned.
The impact crushed the cockpit, where Harrington and Mohamed Bin Laden sat. The force was so great that the front end of the plane bore a hole in the desert two to three feet deep. Both men died from the impact. Fire raced through the wreckage as Omar looked on helplessly. Two passengers in the rear cabin may have survived the initial crash but were trapped inside by a chain lock on the cabin door. They burned to death.
In an instant, Mohamed Bin Laden was gone. He was about sixty years old. The investigators identified him by his shiny watch.
PART TWO
SONS AND DAUGHTERS
September 1967 to May 1988
9. THE GUARDIANS
THE PRINCIPAL at the school in Lebanon where Mohamed had sent many of his sons called nine of the boys into his office after he received the news. “You have to be practical and logical,” he recalled telling them. “All people die.” He flew with three of the older boys—Hassan, Yeslam, and Mahrouz—to Jeddah. Their half-brother Ali, the eldest of Mohamed’s sons then living in the kingdom, met them at the airport with a car and driver. In concert with Saudi tradition, their father had been buried quickly in an unmarked grave; the family chose Jeddah’s most prestigious site, where religious pilgrims had once worshipped the tomb attributed to the biblical Eve. Days of mourning followed. Family, employees, Jeddah merchants, and princes enveloped the boys at the Bin Laden compound. Islamic and Hejazi rituals of death and remembrance, so often required in harsh Arabia, emphasized the comforts of crowds. Each evening between the sunset prayer and the final daily prayer, the Bin Laden men gathered to receive long lines of sympathetic visitors. (Mohamed’s daughters and wives received visitors separately during the afternoon.) This grieving assembly offered a rare public display of family unity. Rhythmic chanting of Koran readers rang out in the humid night air.1
It took Salem a few days to reach Jeddah from London. After boarding school he had moved into a flat in Gloucester Place, north of Marble Arch. He had enrolled in a local college, but the friends who visited him found him less than devoted to his studies. His apartment was often filled with young men in black leather jackets, cigarette smoke, and the occasional amateur strains of Salem’s guitar.2
He boarded a commercial flight to Jeddah wearing jeans and a T-shirt, his hair falling toward his shoulders. When he stepped off the plane, his locks were shorn and he wore a white Saudi thobe and headdress. He was a little older than twenty-one, suddenly and unexpectedly heir to the largest construction firm in the kingdom. He knew little of engineering and had only a passing acquaintance with King Faisal. He had not even met all his half-brothers and half-sisters; some were introduced to him for the first time at his father’s funeral.3
Mohamed’s sudden death raised immediate fears that the Bin Laden business empire would collapse. The primary concern was that Mohamed’s many young sons and surviving brother might prove unable to forge an orderly succession. A cable to Washington dispatched by American ambassador Hermann Eilts on the day after Mohamed’s death summed up Jeddah’s anxiety:
Death of Mohammed Bin Laden, sole proprietor of largest construction company in Saudi Arabia, has caused immediate concern in both SAG [Saudi Arabian government] and local business circles. Under Islamic lawn [sic] assets could conceivably be divided among Bin Laden’s 40 [sic] sons, move which could destroy organization. However, as Saudi contractor displaying enough energy to handle major public works, Bin Laden was well established as SAG avorite [sic]: King, Finance Minister, and others aware of importance organization to Saudi economy, and reported determined it shall somehow continue.4
Eilts thought he saw an opportunity: a merger between the Bin Laden organization and a major American construction company:
One suggestion emerging in private discussions is possibility SAG will seek qualified foreign firm to provide management team to run organization. Company, which is financially sound, normally employs between 4 and 5 thousand workers… As Bin Laden operated enterprise single-handedly (to the extent even of signing all checks), need is for team not only experienced in construction operations but also competent create and impose new administrative structure. In embassy’s view, this could be excellent opportunity for American firm.5
The ambassador suggested that Morrison-Knudsen, an American construction giant that was already working with Bin Laden on a bid to build a military cantonment near the Yemen border, might be an excellent candidate. The Americans might have to move promptly, however, as Bin Laden’s technical staff was dominated by Italians and this “may encourage preference for Italian management unless other proposals advanced promptly.”6
Mohamed Bin Laden had left twenty-five sons. (The youngest, Mohamed bin Mohamed, was born after his death and was named in remembrance.) The potential for disarray or conflict was considerable.
Abdullah, his only surviving brother, no longer had any share in the company and no longer even lived in Saudi Arabia, having moved back to the Hadhramawt with his family seven years earlier. However, harassed by rival militias engaged in Yemen’s deepening civil war, he returned to Saudi Arabia not long after Mohamed’s death. The Moscow-backed government of South Yemen later confiscated his house, and Abdullah never returned—a bitter end to his nostalgic homecoming. Abdullah now had his own sons and investments to look after. He had no formal claim to leadership in the company he had founded with Mohamed thirty-six years before.
Salem and Ali were the only two sons of Mohamed who had reached adulthood. But while Ali had helped oversee some of his father’s road-building operations, he was far from qualified to manage the entire enterprise. Salem had been groomed for leadership by his father, but he had even less business training.
Islamic inheritance law, derived from passages in the Koran, is quite specific: It establishes conditional classes of heirs and lays out the exact percentages of the estate each class shall receive; these entitlements are seen as God’s mandate and cannot be altered by a will. One Koranic principle is that sons receive twice as much as daughters. Some Westerners might regard the system as unfair or inflexible, but it has girded social cohesion and family unity in the Muslim world for centuries by removing the whim and intrigue of inheritance that often sunders families in other cultures. A wealthy Muslim man has no way to disinherit sons he does not favor; he may therefore be more inclined to encourage cooperation among his children. There is also no way to change the allocations from an estate by writing a last-minute will and testament. Written wills are permitted but only to designate up to one-third of the writer’s estate for charities or other beneficiaries. There are many detailed provisions of this kind; as with prayer and the annual calendar of faith, it is an area of Islam rich with rule making and nuanced interpretation.7