At this time, Bath’s principal business was JB&A Associates, his aircraft brokerage. In 1975 he was trying to sell a Fokker-27 propeller plane owned by a tobacco company in North Carolina; the plane was outfitted with a small bedroom in the cabin. Salem Bin Laden was looking for a plane to support his company’s road-building work in the Saudi deserts. They made a deal, and Bath accompanied the plane to Jeddah. Like just about every American entrepreneur who could find the Middle East on a map, Bath seemed determined to cash in on the Saudi oil boom. He didn’t just want to make a few commissions from airplane sales; he wanted to develop deeper partnerships with the rising younger generation of Saudi sheikhs, to help them invest their money profitably in the United States. “He talked a mile a minute,” remembered Rupert Armitage, who was working in the Bin Laden Brothers office when Bath turned up. Still, Salem found Bath entertaining. Salem “loved larger-than-life people,” said the Houston lawyer Charles Schwartz. Jim Bath “was a wheeler-dealer, and Salem just loved that kind of stuff.”10
American promoters and deal makers besieged Salem; he learned to be cautious. He rarely committed large sums of money to their care, unless it was to buy something concrete, such as an airplane or a house. Yet, at the same time, for work and play, Salem began to acquire offices, residences, and agents in more and more cities around the world. In each place, he chose a primary representative or partner—someone who could help him confidentially entertain visiting Saudi royalty, host Bin Laden family members when they traveled for school or vacation, and assist in business deals. Bath became Salem’s agent and partner in Houston. In a sense, Bath opened a service bureau for Salem in Texas, so that Salem, in turn, could extend his global service bureau for the Saudi royal family, particularly in the field of aviation, where Salem was now establishing himself as an in-house expert for the Al-Saud by helping them make smart decisions as they spent more and more of their windfall on private jets.
Bath made his money from airplane commissions and by channeling Saudi investors like Salem into real estate or other business deals, where Bath took a 5 percent piece of the action for his efforts. He operated out of offices in the Fannin Bank Building in Houston, and he registered Salem Bin Laden’s new Texas businesses at that address. He created a vehicle called MBO Investments, Inc., named after the Bin Laden family firm in Jeddah. Bath’s authority was established in a “trust agreement” signed by Salem on July 8, 1976, and filed with the Texas secretary of state. Salem provided Bath “full and absolute authority to act on my behalf in all matters relating to the business and operation of Bin Laden-Houston offices,” which included “full authority to disburse funds for Company, or Bin Laden family expenses.” Bath maintained a revolving line of credit for the Bin Laden family that amounted at one stage to about $6 or $7 million, according to Bill White, who was a business partner of Bath’s after 1978.11
As his Saudi contacts grew, Bath moved into international aircraft leasing. This was a complex business in which, at the time, American tax and export laws made it particularly attractive to finance aircraft sales to overseas customers. Bath opened offshore corporations in Caribbean tax havens to facilitate such deals. He established a Cayman Islands corporation called Skyway Aircraft Leasing, Ltd., whose ownership was Saudi, according to White and other accounts.12
Bath also opened offshore companies for Salem. On July 5, 1977, he incorporated Binco Investments, N.V., in the Netherlands Antilles. Its parent company was SMB Investments, apparently in reference to Salem’s initials; it was also located in the Netherlands Antilles. Documents Bath filed with the state of Texas reported that the main purpose of these companies was to hold real estate. Binco Investments, for example, became a vehicle for Bath’s purchase around this time, on Salem’s behalf, of Houston Gulf Airport, a small field outside the city that Bath hoped would grow into a profitable feeder airport—a hope that was never realized.13
Bath’s deals with the Bin Ladens appear to have involved smaller amounts of money than those he developed with other Saudis, particularly Salem’s friend and banker Khalid Bin Mahfouz. In 1977, for example, Bath invested in the Main Bank in Houston; his partners included Bin Mahfouz, the wealthy Saudi businessman Gaith Pharaon, and former Texas governor John Connally. Salem invested with Bin Mahfouz in the Saudi Bank of Paris but apparently did not join his Texas banking deals.14
Bath’s Saudi clients, his politically connected friends in Texas, his offshore corporations, his freewheeling lifestyle, and his forays into international aviation all contributed to a growing air of mystery. Bath himself seemed to relish the intrigue. He flew back and forth to Caribbean tax havens, sometimes with hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash aboard the planes; he told his wife, Sandra, that the cash was needed to pay for fuel and contingencies. Sometimes the Saudis who traveled with Bath carried diplomatic passports, which allowed them to bring their briefcases through U.S. Customs without being inspected; on some occasions, according to a pilot who worked with Bath, the cases contained very large sums of cash.15
SALEM LED a family migration to America during the 1970s. As his brothers and sisters finished secondary school in Lebanon, Egypt, and Jeddah, he encouraged many of them to enroll in college in the United States. Like many Saudis, they gravitated toward Florida and California, where the weather felt like home. Salem’s youngest full brother, Ghalib, studied civil engineering at the University of California at Berkeley. His half-brother Abdulaziz, from Cairo, enrolled at the University of San Francisco, where he earned a master’s degree in business administration in 1978. Two other half-brothers, Shafiq and Saleh, and a half-sister, Raja, also enrolled at USF. Yeslam, Khalil, and Ibrahim, a cluster of full brothers by an Iranian-born wife of Mohamed Bin Laden, studied at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Other family members enrolled in colleges or design academies in Miami and Houston. School records and interviews show that more than a quarter of Mohamed Bin Laden’s fifty-four children studied in the United States at some point, primarily during the 1970s and early 1980s.16
Osama, of course, was part of the larger group that enrolled in Saudi or other Arab universities. Salem traveled frequently back and forth between Jeddah and the United States, zipping from city to city in his jets, organizing vacations, and handing out allowances. He was the family leader who kept track of everybody, no matter where they went to school. He carried one of the first portable phones, a bulky model as big as a brick, so that his brothers and sisters could reach him at any time. Mohamed’s children were now mainly teenagers or in their twenties, and they constantly had decisions to make about school, jobs, and even marriages. All came to Salem for consultation or permission.
His half-brother Yeslam and his stunning Iranian-born wife, Carmen, provided one harbor for the family in Los Angeles. Yeslam had drifted through Europe after high school. He took race-car driving lessons in Sweden, considered a plan to breed Doberman pinscher dogs in Saudi Arabia, and lodged for a time in the Royal Hotel in Geneva, Switzerland. While leasing an apartment in Geneva with his family in the summer of 1973, he met Carmen, the daughter of the apartment’s owner. Her father was Swiss; her mother Iranian. She spoke French and Persian, was twenty-two, extraordinarily beautiful, and fiercely ambitious. Yeslam, also twenty-two, found himself swept away by Carmen. He was a mild, reticent, sensitive young man prone to anxiety attacks. She felt that Yeslam nonetheless had the intelligence to lead his family’s international business one day, to bring it into the modern era. “Carmen was very anxious for Yeslam to do well,” recalled Mary Martha Barkley, who befriended the couple through her husband, who oversaw international students at USC, where Yeslam enrolled to study business in late 1973. “She had great ambitions for him.”17