Randa was twelve or thirteen years old when Mohamed Bin Laden died, and she first met Salem at the memorial service. Salem told her, “Don’t worry, don’t worry. I will always take care of you.” There was “an immediate bond” between them, recalled an American friend, Gail Freeman. Salem discovered that Randa and her mother, who had remarried, were living in far from comfortable circumstances. He gave them money and bought them a three-story town house near Cairo’s colonial-era Shooting Club. Salem stayed on the ground floor when he was in town, Randa had an apartment above him, and her mother lived with her new husband on the highest floor. By the mid-1970s, Randa was becoming known to everyone in Salem’s entourage as his favorite sister. She was a slim, coffee-colored, dark-haired woman with an open personality. He doted on her, spoke to her frequently on the telephone, took her shopping in Europe, and traveled regularly to visit her in Cairo. The connection between them grew so intense that it seemed to approach romantic love. None of Salem’s close entourage ever thought that anything inappropriate passed between him and his half-sister; nonetheless, they marveled at the open passion in their relationship.15
Salem decided that Randa should also become a doctor, and he announced that he would study alongside her at Cairo University. “He pushed Randa to do it,” recalled Sabry Ghoneim, a family employee in Cairo.16 She studied hard. Salem paid for professors to come to her apartment and tutor her privately. He tried to attend these lessons, too, flying back and forth from Jeddah. He ordered his pilots to help Randa shop for supplies, and on at least one occasion, he flew in skeletons from Saudi Arabia in one of his private planes to aid their cram sessions.17
Inside Saudi Arabia, it was no longer unheard of for a woman to go to college or even to medical school, although if a woman studied in the kingdom, she did so in an environment of strict gender segregation. Salem encouraged many of his sisters and half-sisters to attend school. He enrolled his full sister Hoda in art school in Paris at the same time that he underwrote Randa’s medical education in Cairo. He placed two of his half-sisters in boarding school in Pakistan. Others applied to universities and design academies in the United States; several became interested in interior decorating, a profession they could profit from in turnkey palace-building projects for the family firm. Many of Salem’s half-sisters wore Western fashions and traveled without covering when they were outside Saudi Arabia. At the same time, Salem seemed fiercely determined to protect what he imagined to be his sisters’ honor. He discouraged any of the younger pilots who flew for him from even speaking with any of his sisters or half-sisters. Only the fatherly Gerald Auerbach was trusted as an escort.18
Salem did not live extravagantly when he visited Egypt. There were cooks and servants in the town house he shared with Randa, but it was not a palace. He wore blue jeans and T-shirts, and he drove an old Spanish car or a motorcycle. He opened an office at 14 Al-Thawra Street, hired a few Egyptian aides, and began to explore ambitious land and development deals in Cairo. “Salem dreamed of building residential towers and malls along the Nile,” Ghoneim recalled.19
By the late 1970s, he knew Cairo’s landscape better than most developers because he spent hours swooping above it in the air. Salem might fantasize about becoming a doctor, but he already was a pilot. It was the one passion in his life that never seemed to bore him.
SALEM PURCHASED a Cessna-172 single-engine propeller plane in the United States during this time and had it flown into Cairo. He kept it at a small airport on the city’s outskirts, Imbaba, which had been built in 1947 and was mainly used by recreational pilots. Among other things, he used the Cessna to tow his two-seat, German-made glider up to five thousand feet or so, from where it could be released for a meandering flight back to Imbaba—twisting down the Nile, out to the Pyramids, across dusty slums and arid parks, with only the sound of wind rushing across the wings. He reveled in the romance of these flights above the Pyramids. When he courted a new girlfriend (he was still married to Sheikha, but they were drifting apart), he often flew the woman to Cairo and took her aloft in his glider at sunset. With fellow pilots, he trained in acrobatics—loops, rolls, and flying upside down above Imbaba. Later he purchased a pair of ultralights. If there were enough pilots around, he would arrange an evening expedition to the Pyramids; his friends flew behind him in formation, creating a phalanx of toy aircraft.20
Wayne Fagan, an American lawyer who visited Salem in Cairo, remembered being invited into the back of one of these planes as Salem gunned the engine and roared down the runway while trying to light a tobacco pipe, all the while “pulling back on the throttles with his elbows.” They flew out over the desert in the evening light and circled the Pyramids. Salem had promised Fagan a flight in the glider, but it wasn’t available, so on the way back, he shut down his plane’s engines and drifted on the currents. “And he says, ‘Look, Wayne, we’re gliding.’ And I said, ‘That’s great, Salem, thanks a lot. You can start up any time now.’”21
On one courtship glider flight with an English girlfriend, Caroline Carey, he miscalculated wind and altitude, and seemed headed for a crash. Caroline became so frightened as they plummeted that she promised to convert to Islam if they somehow survived. Salem steered hurriedly toward a field at the Shooting Club, near Randa’s apartment, slipped the plane over high trees, and pulled up in time to stop before striking the club’s wall. “When I saw what Salem did, I said, ‘My God, any other pilot would crash it,’” recalled Anwar Khan, a Pakistani pilot who flew for him. Club security rushed up; Salem climbed out, helped his girlfriend to her feet, and joked: “Sorry, I’m not a member of the club—but my brother is a member.” Caroline kept her promise and became a Muslim.22
He employed his acrobatic skills to shake money from his debtors. “People were forever owing him money, so he would offer them rides,” recalled Rupert Armitage. Once in the air, “he’d say, ‘Look, you owe me two hundred thousand dollars. I want you to write out a check now.’” If they declined, he would threaten to take the plane’s controls and roll it upside down. If they still refused, “he’d start doing it…and then, ‘Okay, okay, I’ll sign it!’”23
Under Salem’s enthusiastic guidance, the Bin Ladens gradually became a family of pilots. Flight logs show no fewer than seven of Salem’s brothers and half-brothers taking lessons on his private planes during the 1970s. Several of his half-sisters also trained to fly. Osama, however, was apparently not among this group; he did later acquire private airplanes of his own, and may have taken some informal instruction, but he does not seem to have flown often during the 1970s. His relative youth appears to have been one factor; the brothers who took lessons were older, while Osama remained in high school, increasingly concerned with religious issues.
Flying lessons reinforced the boundaries of an inner circle of Bin Laden brothers around Salem, led by his full brothers Ghalib and Bakr, and including some older half-brothers, such as Omar, Issa, Yahya, Tareq, and Yeslam. They were an eclectic group—some devout, some more secular—tied together by their dependency on Salem’s leadership. To taste the pleasures Salem expounded upon, and to win his favor, they followed him into the sky.