It was common in Saudi Arabia to look down on Europeans and Americans for selling sacreligious pleasures, then making illogical laws against drugs, drunk driving, and roughing up women. They could not keep track of that pesky line between what was licit and what was not. They often thought that the Manichean, if hypocritical situation imposed by Islamic law, which they so often violated, was saner than the West’s compromise with vices, regulating and tolerating them within limits.23
THE BIN LADEN WOMEN encountered contrasts in America that were even more extreme than those known by their brothers. Salem urged them to broaden their horizons—literally, in some cases, by learning to fly—yet he remained acutely conscious of Arabian decorum. It did not bother him in the slightest if his sisters wore jeans and let their hair flow freely outside the kingdom; indeed, he preferred it. When it came to dating and marriage, however, he enforced a transparent double standard. Salem had many American and European girlfriends, particularly after his divorce from Sheikha in the late 1970s. One of his half-brothers married an American, Mahrouz married a Frenchwoman, and a third married a Danish woman—unions that all ended in divorce. Yet when one of his half-sisters, Salah, fell in love with an older Italian man, it created a firestorm within the family; the episode seemed to stretch the limits of Salem’s tolerance, although he did finally bless the marriage, which turned out to be a long-lasting success.24
He presided over these issues as an Arabian patriarch—authoritarian, but eager to maintain balance and consensus. “It was just a really hard, really tough job,” recalled Gail Freeman, an American who befriended and worked with some of Salem’s sisters on palace design projects in Saudi Arabia. “The phone was always ringing.” Salem would cradle the phone under his chin and issue a stream of advice about love and marriage, recalled Peter Blum, a German who traveled as Salem’s personal valet for several years. “You have a wife,” he would say, or “You have enough headaches,” or “Listen, wait for a half year and then we can talk about this again.” He was not harsh in his judgments, Blum said, but “always like a diplomat.” Salem sometimes seemed to spend more time on “the family problems,” as Freeman put it, than he did on business deals.25
Salem often hid his American and European girlfriends from his sisters and half-sisters, fearing their disapproval. He applauded when his sisters drove fast on American freeways or flew airplanes around California, but he did not want them running about unsupervised with American or European men. His attitudes reflected an uncomplicated sexism, but also a strain of male Saudi pride; Western women might be conquests, but Arab women never would. In the spring of 1978, while at home in Saudi Arabia, Salem punched one of his American pilots after the man spoke to one of his sisters without his permission. The pilot quit immediately. That night, he called Salem in Riyadh to ask for his paycheck and an exit visa, which was required if an American employee wished to leave Saudi Arabia. This maelstrom involving male honor and the virtue of Bin Laden women seemed to draw out Salem’s dark side. He launched into a tirade on the telephone, recalled Francis Hunnewell, an American banker who was with him; Salem said he would not allow the pilot to leave the kingdom until he publicly apologized, and if he refused to work, Salem promised to “have him thrown in jail.”26
Salem himself preferred intelligent women. His main American girlfriend during the late 1970s was a young doctor serving in the U.S. military, Patty Deckard, who practiced at a hospital in San Antonio. Salem visited her parents in California and talked seriously about their relationship. “He always said, ‘I love myself,’…but he probably came as close to really, really caring for somebody with her,” said his pilot Jack Hinson. “But she wouldn’t marry him.” She concluded that she could not convert to Islam or endure the role expected of her in Saudi Arabia, said a second employee of Salem’s who spent considerable time with the couple during these years. The pair traveled periodically around America and overseas for several years before the affair ended and Deckard married another man.27
It was difficult for any woman, including Salem’s former wife, Sheikha, to compete with his relationship with Randa. “It was just always ‘Randa, Randa, Randa, Randa,’” said Gail Freeman. In the same period when Salem installed Randa in Panama City for flight lessons, he also helped her enroll in medical school in Canada, and he would fly up to visit and deliver supplies. “I think most of the sisters were jealous of Randa.”28
To win her pilot’s license, Randa had to complete a cross-country solo flight, navigating on her own in a Cessna hundreds of miles across Florida to a designated airport, in this case, one near Palm Beach. The day of her big flight arrived in late September 1978, but Salem was very nervous. He called Don Sowell at the flight school and told him, as Sowell recalled, “I really don’t want her to go by herself. If something should happen, I really don’t want her by herself.” There was no legal way for Sowell to certify Randa as a pilot, however, if he allowed an instructor into the cockpit with her for the cross-country flight. So they agreed that Salem would pay for an instructor to fly behind her in a chase plane, just in case.29
Salem’s prescience was extraordinary: somewhere over central Florida, smoke billowed into Randa’s cockpit from some sort of engine or electrical malfunction. Fortunately, she had a trusted pilot nearby to speak with on the radio. But the smoke was so bad that it quickly became clear to both of them that she was not going to be able to reach an airport. The instructor told her to prepare to crash-land in a field.
Salem’s mobile phone rang at the Palm Beach airport, where he was waiting for Randa. “She’s gone off the radar—we can’t find her,” the caller said, according to Gail and Robert Freeman, who were with him. Salem “went berserk,” Gail remembered. “He went crazy running around the airport, screaming.” He cried out again and again that his sister was dead. “She crashed! She crashed!” Don Sowell had flown to Palm Beach to receive Randa at her moment of piloting triumph, and the family’s longtime pilot Gerald Auerbach, the air force veteran, was also present. They tried to calm Salem down, but he lashed out at them angrily, almost to the point of striking blows, and demanded that they do something. Salem and the two pilots took off in his Hawker jet for the area where Randa had apparently gone down. They found an airport nearby, but its runway was much too small for Salem’s plane. Salem insisted he would land anyway. “Over my dead body,” Sowell told Auerbach, as he recalled it, because, as Sowell put it, “I felt that was a possibility.” Finally, he appealed to Salem’s common sense; no matter what had happened to Randa, he pleaded, it was not going to help if Salem got himself killed trying to rescue her.30
They landed safely at a larger airport and at last they got Randa on the phone. She was crying—but she was fine. She had fought through the smoke, and with the help of Sowell’s instructor, she had found a field where she could put the Cessna down. She landed roughly but did no significant damage to the plane and none at all to herself. It was a remarkable feat for a student pilot. “She had plenty of guts,” Sowell said.
Now Salem was as ecstatic as he had been distraught. He asked the Freemans to help him organize a grand party at the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach, to celebrate Randa’s heroism and survival. “Call up everybody you know!” he said. “Call up your friends in a fifty-mile radius!” In the end, some of the guests flew in all the way from New York and Houston. Once more, aviation and its perils had been the source of great drama for the Bin Ladens. That night at the Breakers, Salem hired a band, and his guests danced and sang. The next day, they all went to Disney World.31