I still remember those distressing scenes: blood, torn limbs, women and children massacred. All over the place, houses were being destroyed and tower blocks were collapsing, crushing their residents…In those critical moments, many ideas raged inside me, ideas difficult to describe, but they unleashed a powerful urge to reject injustice and a strong determination to punish the oppressors. As I looked at those destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me to punish the oppressor in kind by destroying towers in America, so that it would have a taste of its own medicine…On that day I became sure that the oppression and intentional murder of innocent women and children is a deliberate American policy.23
This reminiscence—ideas that “raged inside” and were “difficult to describe”—suggest some of the tension and confusion in Osama’s expanding intellectual and political life. Inspired by Azzam, he began in Peshawar to synthesize the banal tasks of organizing and fundraising—forming bureaucratic committees, reviewing publishing plans, creating rules and systems to provide financial subsidies to young Saudi volunteers—with a more mystical and poetical rhetoric of martyrdom. Partly this reflected Azzam’s millenarian beliefs, but partly it was a marketing strategy crafted by a money-conscious proselytizer and the former business student who funded him. Their conduct suggests that Osama and Azzam were less interested in becoming martyrs than in creating a movement based on the emotional power of other people’s martyrdom. Azzam used testimonials and memorials to sanctify the sacrifices of the first young, poorly trained volunteers who passed through his guesthouses in Peshawar and died in Afghanistan. “Lucky him who is rewarded with martyrdom,” Azzam wrote. “Allah rewards him with seventy-two virgins and he can choose seventy of his relatives to join him in heaven.” Of the first four committees Osama organized at the Services Office, one promoted media operations and a second promoted education.24 His instincts were hardly surprising; he had spent much of his early working life in Bin Laden offices filled with glossy brochures and staffed by specialists in advertising and marketing. In his work for the royal family and the religious authorities in Medina and Mecca, Osama had learned that a project was a success only if its sponsors saw it as a success, and to ensure that they did, publishing and advertising had to play a role. He brought some of this modern business ethos to his earliest projects in Peshawar.
It was only about three months after Osama established the Services Office with Azzam that Salem, while on his hunting trip with Saudi royalty in Pakistan, flew into Peshawar with his video camera and his unbelieving entourage, consisting of a Swedish mechanic and an American specialist in ultralight aircraft.25 Osama seemed to instinctively understand where his own passion for jihad overlapped with Salem’s potential interest in the Afghan war—Osama chose to put orphans, not volunteer fighters, on display for his brother’s camera. This was mainstream charity marketing on which they could collaborate without any hint of conflict: “God instructs you to treat orphans fairly,” holds a Koranic verse. “He is well aware of whatever good you do.”26
Even now, as he began to think of himself as a war fighter and perhaps, eventually, a martyr in the name of jihad, Osama interacted respectfully with his cigarette-smoking, patently irreligious elder brother. The sawa, or religious awakening, in Saudi Arabia might tug at family unity, but Osama also stretched himself to forgive secular-minded siblings, recalled his friend Jamal Khashoggi. What Osama feared more than individual sinfulness was “a mass movement of secularization, mixed schools, top-down changes.” Also, recalled Khashoggi, “the Brotherhood emphasized the role of love and care and compassion in reaching out to non-observant Muslims. He had no problem with that, with non-observant Muslims. His method was to be compassionate and patient.” Osama regarded his family’s contributions to his work as nothing more or less than their duty: “Financial jihad,” he would later write, “likewise, is an obligation…particularly for those who have the resources, rather than those who don’t.”27
Salem visited Peshawar a second time during this period, according to Bengt Johansson, who accompanied him. They met Osama in a suburban villa, “an Arab office, with some sofas around.” They talked together for an hour or two, he remembered. Salem carried a large amount of cash in a case. “I don’t know where the money was coming from—if it was from Salem, all this money, because they were sponsored from different people in Saudi Arabia,” Johansson said.28
By 1985 Salem had learned to serve both Fahd’s clandestine foreign policy in Afghanistan and his self-indulgent luxuriating. At the time, these lines of activity did not seem to be burdened by contradictions.
FOLLOWING THE DEATH from heart failure of his placid brother Khalid, Crown Prince Fahd had ascended to become the king of Saudi Arabia. Now that the throne belonged to him, Fahd told Salem he wished to travel in a more regal style. The king wanted a Boeing 747—and not just any one, but the largest model then in existence, known as a 747-300, which had a stretched upper deck, offering the potential for an aerial duplex.
Fahd had become king at sixty-two, just young enough to indulge in one last splurge. His health remained poor and he sometimes had difficulty walking. But he had fallen hard for his new and younger wife, Jawhara Al-Ibrahim, who had left her husband for Fahd and had given him a son, Abdulaziz, upon whom the king doted without restraint. He decorated identical bedrooms for the boy at his various palaces, and he had taken Abdulaziz to the White House to meet Ronald Reagan, early in 1985. Jawhara’s brother, also named Abdulaziz, had become one of Fahd’s most influential court advisers and had amassed great wealth in a short time. He kept an apartment in London’s Mayfair neighborhood, and he purchased his own private planes—a Gulfstream and a DC-8. Salem cultivated a relationship with him; when the king went looking for a 747, his brother-in-law turned to Salem for help.29
Fahd knew he wanted something grand, but like a business mogul choosing among architects for a new mansion, he sought several imaginative proposals to which he could react. It would be a demanding, improvisational job to customize a single 747 to Fahd’s tastes, however. This was not a project naturally suited for a large company like Boeing, which earned its profits by engineering standardized airline models. Still, to curry favor with Fahd, whose government airline purchased many jets, Boeing developed a proposal for a unique and kingly 747. Its bid for the interior and systems renovations alone exceeded $100 million, however, and the Boeing designs did not excite Fahd’s imagination. In fact, the king was unhappy about Boeing’s plan, which made his brother-in-law unhappy, which made Salem unhappy.
On his Texas travels, Salem had taken some of his own Learjets to San Antonio for interior renovations, and there he had met a ninth-grade-educated legend of American aviation named Dee Howard, who ran an aircraft service and engineering company at the San Antonio airport. Howard was a compact, fast-talking white-haired man with an intuitive knack for engineering. He lived in a riverside mansion and collected antique cars, but his business rode cycles of boom and bust, and he was always looking for a big score. Salem told him that Fahd’s 747 project offered a golden opportunity to move his company into the global business of custom head-of-state aircraft renovation.