Salem behaved outrageously around Fahd. Once, he arrived back at his own camp in the company of security guards who seemed to be escorting him away from the ruler’s section, one of his camp guests recalled. Salem said he had been sitting around in the royal tent when Fahd complained, “W’allah, Salem, I am so tired of these Bedouins. They come to me, and I don’t mind giving money, but then there are hundreds of them, kissing my hand, giving money, kissing my hand, giving money. It tires me—and I come to rest here in the desert.”
“I can solve this problem,” Salem replied. “You let me know one day before, and all day long I’ll eat food. Some dark beans. You put me in the front of the queue, and I’ll start farting, and all the Bedouins will disappear.”
Fahd laughed so hard that his doctor feared he might have a heart attack, so Salem was hauled away. “Everybody was always bowing down” to Fahd, the guest recalled. “But Salem was like a friend. He would crack jokes.” Fahd, for his part, “loved that casual way of Salem. Of course, he was a lunatic. If a normal person would do this, they would chop his hand off. But because Salem was a bit on the loony side, it was accepted.”7
Salem finally won permission to buy a private plane. He began to replace his father’s fleet, which had been sold off after Faisal’s earlier order that no more Bin Ladens should fly. As his first purchase, rather than a fancy jet, he chose a Mitsubishi MU-2 turboprop, a six-passenger propeller plane that could land on short runways. During the late 1970s, Salem began to fly the MU-2 into the desert to join Fahd’s encampments. His aides would build a makeshift runway marked by strobe lights and burning tires. Salem could not resist the temptation to buzz Fahd’s tent. Versions of this incident vary from teller to teller; in some, Fahd’s bodyguards raise their weapons at Salem’s plane, while in others, Salem brazenly puts the plane down on a road near where the king is staying. In any event, Jack Hinson, a pilot who worked with Salem during this period, recalled that Salem often recited what Fahd had told him afterward: “You are crazy, and you are going to get killed one of these days.”8
Salem’s zest was genuine, of course, but he also mustered it cannily to ingratiate himself with Fahd and his brothers on business matters. Like a sales manager, Salem assigned each senior Saudi prince to one of his brothers or half-brothers; each Bin Laden’s mission was to cultivate a personal relationship with his prince and win contracts. “The question was, ‘Who is your prince?’” recalled Rupert Armitage, who ran a business division for Salem in Jeddah during this period. Salem took on Fahd himself; he assigned his full brother Bakr to cultivate Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, who was in line for the throne after Fahd. Salem’s strategy was to sniff out upcoming contracts through contacts with civil servants inside key government ministries, and then to seal the deals with the princes. “Some of these were just enormous carve-ups and so you were part of the carve-up as long as you could do the job” and were in the good graces of the royal family, Armitage said.9
The desert camping trips also offered a chance to collect on past-due bills. Salem would sit at Fahd’s side day after day, gently mentioning what he was owed, until a royal accountant finally arrived with a check. Bengt Johansson, who worked as Salem’s chief airplane mechanic for at least fifteen years, remembered him returning from Fahd’s tent on one occasion, waving a check in the air. “We’ve gotten paid, guys! Let’s go!” They packed up their tents and departed immediately.10
By the late 1970s, Salem had won enough contracts to begin to add Learjet and other luxury business aircraft to his private fleet. He used these planes for his own leisure travel overseas but also to cultivate ties with the royal family. If a prince called and asked to “borrow” one of Salem’s Lears, he often felt he had no choice but to turn the plane and its crew over for a weeks-long shopping spree to Europe. This was part of his unwritten bargain with the royal family. Johansson remembered Salem dodging telephone calls from certain princes who were particularly active plane borrowers. “He tried to avoid that, but if they get in touch with him and they put the question directly to him, he has to say yes.”11
Such favors, combined with the royal family’s unreliable accounts payable departments, as well as the normal purchasing and payroll demands of the contracting industry, put heavy pressure on Salem’s cash flow. Salem’s father had managed his own version of this problem through the support of his great Hadhrami banking friend Salem Bin Mahfouz, after whom Salem had been named. Salem Bin Laden developed a similar friendship and business partnership with Khalid Bin Mahfouz, an heir to his own father’s fortune who had been sent to school in England as Salem had, and who, by the mid-1970s, had begun to play an increasingly important role at his family’s National Commercial Bank. Khalid was a much quieter personality than Salem, but they became fast friends and close business partners. During the 1970s, they were both still trying to establish themselves as young executives in their own right.
Salem and Khalid each acquired a small fleet of private planes in the first years of the oil boom. They hired American, Pakistani, Afghan, Egyptian, and other pilots, and opened an aviation department at Jeddah’s airport. One of the department’s missions was to move cash around. Banking in Saudi Arabia remained in a relatively primitive state, with few reliable electronic or computer systems. Cash reigned. Salem often used his private planes to transport bags of money between NCB branches. In his pilots’ logbooks, these flights were sometimes listed simply as “money runs.” A run would typically begin at NCB headquarters in Jeddah, where trusted expatriate Yemeni workers would load five-foot-tall burlap sacks bulging with riyals and topped with lead seals into a convoy of Honda pickup trucks. Without guards or gunmen, the couriers would roll to the airport and hoist the cash into Learjets, filling all the passenger seats. Two pilots then flew the planes to Dhahran or Riyadh or Hail or some other Saudi city, where the money would be unloaded and transferred to a local NCB branch to fill up its vaults. On other trips they flew cash to Bin Laden desert campsites and doled it out to migrant construction workers. Once in a while, without explanation, the Yemeni couriers loaded a plane with bars of gold bullion, which were then flown to Bahrain, London, or Switzerland. As the years passed, the American pilots who flew on these money runs found the cargo and destinations increasingly intriguing.12
AT SOME POINT during the mid-1970s, Salem decided that he wanted to become a medical doctor. According to his friend Mohamed Ashmawi, he asked Fahd for permission to study in Cairo; the crown prince looked up at him and said, “Salem, grow up.”13
Undeterred, Salem asked his family doctor in Jeddah, an American named Terry Bennett, if he would write reference letters. “It was the scheme of the month,” Bennett recalled. “He had the attention span of a flea.”14 Salem was a quick study, however. He had become an excellent pilot without rigorous formal training, sometimes by asking more experienced fliers to accompany him to a few required classes. He seemed to believe he could pick up medicine by the same method. In any event, he was absolutely determined, in the manner of patriarchs throughout time, that someone in his family should become a doctor.
He spent increasing amounts of time in Cairo. It lay a relatively short distance from Jeddah, close enough for a weekend commute by air, and its culture was much more vibrant and open than anything in Saudi Arabia. Salem’s father had married at least two Egyptian women, and the offspring of those unions lived in and around Cairo. Mohamed had left three children from one marriage to an Egyptian—two sons, Khalid and Abdulaziz, and a daughter, Mona—as well as a singleton daughter from a second marriage, Randa.