At the Bin Ladens’ Mecca office, Osama was promoted to supervise Walid Al-Khatib, the Palestinian who had previously been his boss. One of their projects involved routing a new road between the Grand Mosque and a palace, which required demolishing buildings in a densely populated neighborhood—without using any dynamite. Osama worked on detailed engineering questions involving the structural weaknesses of buildings and how these might be leveraged to knock them down. Al-Khatib found Osama “especially effective in liaising with various government departments and smoothing over problems.” He worked easily with European and American engineers and spoke to them in English. He was reserved, certainly, and very pious, but in a Saudi context he was a rising young man of the Mecca establishment.29
One day a driver came into the office trembling. He showed Al-Khatib a subversive book he had found; it was an underground tract denouncing the Saudi royal family. They searched the place where the driver had discovered the pamphlet and found more than one hundred other such books. Al-Khatib was terrified. “I knew it meant a death sentence, and I didn’t want to be associated with it.” He called Osama immediately. Bin Laden flipped through the pages and “smiled his famous smile as he turned the pages.”
“Will you please call the police?” Al-Khatib asked him, as he recalled it.
“No, you call the police.”
Al-Khatib protested; as a non-Saudi, he would be particularly vulnerable to the security investigation that would surely follow. He begged Osama to make the initial contact with the police, but Osama again refused, got into his car, and drove away. Reluctantly, Al-Khatib reported his discovery. The police arrived, and eventually, Al-Khatib “got away with it.” The incident changed his feelings about Osama, however. “I didn’t like him anymore.”30
Saudi Arabia’s political fabric was stretching. Iran’s example seemed to prove that oil money might accelerate dissent rather than quell it. Fearful, Fahd and his brothers hurriedly began to accommodate the kingdom’s Islamists, showering them with increased budgets and acceding to the demands by religious scholars for stricter gender segregation and media censorship. Culture and public life in the kingdom grew steadily more conservative. Yet the secular wing of the royal family did not interrupt their lives behind palace walls or in Europe’s capitals.
The Bin Ladens remained united, too, after the Mecca uprising. The cultural distance between the secular wing and the religious wing of the family had widened considerably during the 1970s, but Salem’s leadership, and his strategy of mutual accommodation and generous financial subsidy, kept the family well intact. Bin Laden identity—and Bin Laden wealth—remained fixed on the same star that had guided Mohamed after his arrival in Jeddah a half century before. Above all else, they depended upon, and loyally served, the Saudi royal family.
16. THE AMUSEMENT PARK
AFTER THE MECCA UPRISING, Salem flew to New York for hemorrhoid surgery. He had put the procedure off for years; when he could delay no longer, he arranged his operation as P. T. Barnum might. He retained an American vascular heart surgeon at New York–Presbyterian; this was considerably more surgical talent than was normally required for such a minor procedure, but Salem said he would pay handsomely. He also announced that he would videotape the event, casting his exposed rear end as the star of the show. The hospital objected, but it did allow him to bring a friend with a Polaroid camera. Afterward, Salem created a multimedia show in which he set to music a medley of photos of his backside. He later showed the pictures at parties and to Saudi royalty, including Crown Prince Fahd.1
During his recovery, which he prolonged in a similar spirit of self-dramatization, Salem brooded about his family’s vulnerability to revolution in Saudi Arabia. He continued to prepare financial infrastructure that could aid the family if it was ever forced into exile. On January 23, 1980, Panamanian lawyers working for the Bin Ladens established a second company, following on Binar. It was called Saudin Inc., and its directors again read like a roster of the most influential brothers around Salem: Yeslam, Bakr, Omar, Tareq, Hassan, and Khalid. Around this time, Salem told one of his American business partners, Robert Freeman, that he was concerned about what might happen to the family “should there be some sort of turmoil in Saudi Arabia.” Salem had his estate near London, but he decided that he should build a larger compound where many of Mohamed’s children could also retreat, if it was ever necessary—a place where they could live side by side with their families, as they did in Jeddah.2
White, Weld & Co., an elite Boston-based investment bank, had introduced Salem to a property called Oaktree Village, in Orlando, Florida; it was a tract of land that had been divided into 229 lots for single-family homes but had been developed no further. The company that owned Oaktree “was having some cash flow problems,” recalled Aaron Dowd, who later managed the property, and it offered the tract for sale for $1.9 million, or about $8,300 per lot. Salem decided to buy. He put down about $380,000 in cash and assumed a mortgage on the rest of the purchase price. It was his first major real estate investment in the United States. He reserved about sixty of the Oaktree lots for the Bin Laden family; each brother or sister who participated would receive two, one for a house and a second for a spacious yard. He decided to create separate corporations, each named after a flower, to hold each family member’s property—he bought a book about flowers and paged through it, choosing his favorites. The first flowers went to those closest to him—his devout mother; his full “kid brother,” Ghalib; his full sister Mona; his free-living half-brother Shafiq; his half-sisters Raja and Raedah; and, of course, Randa. Salem envisioned that if all remained well in Saudi Arabia, the Bin Ladens would gather at Oaktree occasionally for group vacations around the nearby Walt Disney World resort. If, for any reason, the Saudi kingdom fell apart, they would have a ready refuge beside the Magic Kingdom.3
Salem preferred the sprawl and amusement parks of Orlando to Palm Beach, which was favored by some Saudi royalty. He rented limousines and arranged masseuses for visiting princes in Palm Beach but otherwise minimized his time there. He seemed to be put off by its social pretensions. He mocked all snobs. Once, at dinner, an American businessman sampled the wine and haughtily sent it back. Salem excused himself, slipped into the kitchen, and arranged for the waiters to pour the rejected wine into a new bottle. This time, the businessman made a show of being pleased—until Salem announced his prank.4