“He and I just hit it off real good,” Howard recalled. “We liked each other, and he liked the kinds of things I did…He insisted that I come over and meet King Fahd and talk about it.” Howard was reluctant; his San Antonio hangars weren’t even big enough to hold a 747. Salem paid him $60,000 just to prepare a presentation, however. “I was doing Salem a favor.”30
Salem was right to choose him; he had an instinct for theatrical luxury. Rather than turning to his San Antonio staff for initial designs, Howard hired Syd Mead, a Hollywood illustrator who had recently attracted attention for his work on the futuristic movie Blade Runner, directed by Ridley Scott. Mead flew with Howard and Salem to Riyadh to present their ideas to King Fahd. The illustrator dazzled them all by sketching ideas while holding his pad upside down, so that Fahd could see his work more clearly. “Your Majesty, I really want to do this plane for you,” Dee Howard told the king. “I’m sixty-three years old, and I’ll never get to do another one.” Fahd squeezed his hand and smiled, and Howard thought to himself that the king was feeling something similar.31
Fahd and Salem engaged in strikingly informal banter; between design sessions, over lunch, they would debate one subject or another in jocular and animated voices, and Salem felt free to shout at Fahd across the table, denouncing the king’s opinions. “Some people said, ‘Ah you can’t say that to the King—you can’t,’” remembered one member of the group. “He got away with it—he finally quieted down a little bit, but he got away with it.” They spent hours with Fahd working on the 747 designs; this was an aspect of royal life that the king seemed to particularly enjoy. Eventually, after arduous negotiations handled by Ibrahim, which included some unexpected demand, Dee Howard won the contract. It would ultimately be worth $92 million.32
The plane would include a number of features not normally found on commercial airliners. Among them was a fully equipped surgical operating theater linked by a private satellite communications system to the Cleveland Clinic, the American medical center. In an emergency, Fahd’s surgeons could operate on him while parked on a runway, transmit images by satellite to Cleveland, sedate their patient, then take off and fly to the clinic for follow-up. To protect Fahd from his enemies, Raytheon Corporation installed electronic warfare equipment on the plane, including a system to defend against heat-seeking missiles.33
In the absence of medical crises or assassination attempts, the king could expect a comfortable ride. After considerable effort, Howard designed an elevator system that would allow the six-foot-four-inch Fahd to exit his limousine on an airport tarmac, wave to the crowd, and then walk a few steps onto a ground-level lift without any undignified bending of his head. From there, out of view, he would be hoisted into the plane’s belly, where he could ascend a second elevator to the upper floor. His majlis contained a chandelier with five thousand unbreakable polycarbonate crystals. Beneath it, on either side of Fahd’s throne, these crystals also sparkled in two artificial waterfalls; a Mead-inspired painting of a field of stars spread out on the wall behind. The royal bedroom suite contained a shower large enough to comfortably accommodate the king’s girth, as well as a sitting room and a bed billowing with silks. Lest any of this luxury lead the king or his entourage to stray from their devotions, the ceiling of each room contained an electronic compass, linked to a global-positioning satellite system, which pointed continuously toward Mecca.
By 1985 the work on this fantasia was in full swing at the San Antonio airport. As Howard’s workers passed certain benchmarks, payments arrived by wire from the royal treasury, sometimes in single increments of more than $10 million. Salem—without compensation, so far as any of his American employees and partners knew—flew in frequently from Saudi Arabia to inspect Howard’s progress and urge him toward his deadlines. As Howard recalled it, speaking of Salem, “He was very interested in pleasing the king.”34
18. ANXIETY DISORDER
BY THE EARLY 1980S, among all the Bin Laden brothers, Salem’s only significant rival for leadership was Yeslam, who had graduated from the University of Southern California with a business degree in 1976. He was four or five years younger, but as the eldest of a group of three full brothers born to one of Mohamed’s more senior wives, Rabab, a woman of Iranian origin, he had natural allies within the family. He also had friendly relations with some singleton half-brothers who had gotten to know him in California. Yeslam had returned to Jeddah from Los Angeles with plans that seemed to be stoked by his beautiful and ambitious wife, Carmen, the French-speaking daughter of an Iranian mother and a Swiss father. Carmen did not mind saying that she thought Yeslam was the most intelligent of the Bin Laden sons, and that his training and experience in California, where he had dabbled in the nascent personal computer industry, qualified him to lead the Bin Laden companies into modern sectors of international business. By the time Yeslam returned, however, Salem had already established his Bin Laden Brothers incubator; he had sidelined the trustees at the original Mohamed Bin Laden Organization; and, most important, he had made himself indispensable to Fahd. He had also secured the partnership of his own younger full brothers, Bakr and Ghalib, as well as capable half-brothers such as Yahya, Omar, and Tareq, and he had won the contract to participate in the expansion of the kingdom’s telephone system, a major business achievement. Yeslam found he had relatively little room in which to maneuver.
He had some advantages, nonetheless: He understood Western stock and bond markets, from which Salem shied away; he spoke excellent French and English; and he had a cosmopolitan, business-minded spouse. Carmen established herself as a hostess in Jeddah’s merchant and diplomatic circles. She and Yeslam built a tennis court at their villa along the Mecca Road, and on Thursday nights, the beginning of the Saudi weekend, they hosted tennis parties for young Saudi financiers, socialites, foreign executives, and ambassadors. These were casual events where alcohol flowed freely, steaks were grilled on the barbecue, and English was prevalent—a California-influenced refuge amid the kingdom’s Wahhabi awakening.1
Yeslam shared Salem’s obsession with speed. He had trained as a race car driver as well as a pilot, and over the years he had collected Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and Porsches. His full brother Ibrahim had a fondness for Rolls-Royces. After Yeslam’s return to Jeddah, his brother-in-law—the husband of his full sister, Fawzia—suffered fatal brain damage in his Jeddah garage when he snapped his head while backing an imported Formula One racer out of his garage too quickly. Increasingly, among the Bin Laden men, jets and fast cars beckoned as a measure of manhood.2
In business, because of his USC classes and his encounters with bankers in America, Yeslam was more comfortable with the complexities of securities markets than were many of his brothers. He imported computers and began to think about how he could build up a modern investment advisory service, run by Saudis for Saudis, to compete with the American and European brokers who flocked to the kingdom to promote stock investments to the newly wealthy.3