Fahd’s sudden rise to power within the royal family in the summer of 1975 coincided with Salem Bin Laden’s restlessness. His family’s main company was still overseen by the trustees appointed by Faisal eight years earlier. The post-embargo oil boom had created rich opportunities for Saudi construction companies, yet the Bin Ladens, with their dissipated leadership, were in danger of missing out on many of the larger contracts. They required Fahd’s patronage, and to attain it, they had to build deeper personal connections with the new crown prince and his six full brothers. This became Salem Bin Laden’s mission. He would woo Fahd and the Sudayris as his father had charmed their predecessors.
12. THE RISING SON
SALEM BIN LADEN had a guileless quality, a giddy and childlike joyousness that allowed him, even as he reached his thirties, to get away with outrageous stunts and pronouncements. The Saudi royal family enforced an acute culture of decorum; like the fool in a Shakespearean court drama, Salem entertained them by violating their etiquette without giving profound offense. He had a particular habit, remembered by many of his friends and employees, of speaking frankly about the gas he passed. Once, in the company of the august governor of Riyadh, Salman bin Abdulaziz, Salem noisily let himself go. This was as taboo in Bedouin culture as in a French drawing room. Prince Salman asked Salem what had happened. “I just farted, Prince,” he answered. “Don’t you fart sometimes?” He once offended a minister by turning up late and poorly dressed to an important meeting. “I thought you were a man,” the minister said angrily. “Who told you I am a man?” Salem replied. “I am a kid!”1
His father had cultivated the royal family by attending religious ceremonies in Mecca and Medina, or by leading tours of his construction sites. Salem took other approaches. Many of the younger royals were contemporaries who had traveled abroad and shared his appetite for adventure and experimentation during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Other important princes, like Fahd, were older, yet they delighted in Salem’s enthusiasm for Europe, women, fast cars, and private planes. Salem’s challenge was to develop genuine friendships with these royal decision makers even while assuring them, too, that he knew his rank. Speaking of Fahd, Salem once told a friend, “He can break me or he can make me—one word out of his mouth.”2
Each winter many of the senior Al-Saud princes drove out in convoys from Riyadh or Jeddah to camp for several weeks in the desert. The weather was cool and it rained occasionally. Flowers and green grasses blossomed amid the cacti and thornbushes. The trips offered a chance for a prince to return to the land, reaffirm his Bedouin identity, and relive memories of his youth. The expeditions were also good politics, the equivalent of a Western politician’s bus or railroad tour through the heartland. Bedouin gathered for feasts with the royal campers, and they would line up to receive cash gifts or to petition for local development projects.
One February afternoon during the mid-1970s, a German pilot and writer named Wolf Heckmann landed a novelty glider at an airstrip in the northern Saudi desert, near the pipeline that transported Saudi crude west from the Persian Gulf to Jordan and Syria. Heckmann was attempting to set an informal world record by flying his plane, OSKAR, which had a small sixty-horsepower engine, about ten thousand miles from Dachau to Australia. As he was refueling, a “thin man, looking like a teenager, in Arabic clothing, dagger and pistol in his belt,” approached him. This was Salem Bin Laden. When Salem learned about Heckmann’s adventure, he could barely contain himself. He dragged the German into his room in a guesthouse. “Until three in the morning, we talked about adventures in the sky,” Heckmann recalled.3
Salem said he would be visiting two princes, Nayef and Ahmed, who were full brothers of Fahd, at their winter desert hunting camp the next morning, and he invited Heckmann to join him. The princes had pitched their tents across the border in Iraq, then ruled by Saddam Hussein, but Salem said they would have no trouble crossing into Iraq’s police state, since they were guests of Saudi royalty.
Salem climbed into an American-made Jeep the next morning with several aides and six hooded hunting falcons. Heckmann took the wheel of a second vehicle. “The Sheikh drove with hell-like speed,” he later wrote:
Sometimes we followed the traces of other cars, but in most cases, Sheikh Salem would just drive cross-country like a maniac. The area was full of biblical thornbushes, which had strong roots in the sandy soil. In front of each of these, the ever-blowing wind had created little dunes. The Sheikh’s soft-spring mounted Jeep drove over those like a ship in a storm…Sometimes we would shoot over waves like ski jumpers—only the landing wasn’t as elegant.4
The Arab passengers in Heckmann’s vehicle shook his hand in admiration when they stopped. “A brutal iron foot on the accelerator was apparently seen as the highest driving skill,” he noted correctly. He and Salem joined Nayef and Ahmed in a tent heated by a fire pit fueled with smoky wood from thornbushes. Prince Ahmed coughed and commented acidly, “Central heating wouldn’t hurt.”
Salem unpacked his falcons and hunted with the two senior Sudayri princes, one of whom, Nayef, was about to become the kingdom’s powerful interior minister, with Ahmed serving as his chief deputy. Heckmann observed the ease with which Salem crossed from one world to another: “There Sheikh Salem was sitting, his long legs crossed as if he had spent his whole life sitting around a fire basin in a desert hunting camp, when, in fact, he also had completed all-round studies in London, was leading a construction empire, and was able to develop intelligent and even inventive thoughts about economic and political subjects.”5
Crown Prince Fahd’s camps, by comparison, were not plagued by wood smoke. He typically drove out four or five hours from Riyadh in a convoy of fifty or sixty Mercedes trucks and well-appointed trailers; his winter camp came to include a mobile hospital suite staffed by rotating American doctors. Fahd seemed to enjoy being away from Riyadh and the pressures of office; he would sometimes remain in the desert for five or six weeks. The sojourns attracted a swarm of camp followers who pitched their own tents nearby and tried to spend as much time in His Majesty’s presence as possible. Salem was often a part of Fahd’s invited entourage, and he set up his own site of four or five tents about ten miles from his patron. He brought with him a camp manager, often one of his European employees, plus a mechanic and a cook. He would stay for two or three weeks at a time, riding over to Fahd’s camp each day in a dune buggy or some other adventure vehicle that had recently caught his eye. In the evenings he would join a hundred or more male guests at the feasts Fahd hosted. These were egalitarian affairs undertaken in the efficient Bedouin style—the food was spread out on the ground and consumed as quickly as possible, with no time wasted on toasts, speeches, or, for that matter, digestion.6