Bath’s affair with Lewis may not have been the only secret he harbored during his last years of working with the Bin Laden family. According to a 1990 court filing by Bath’s estranged business partner Bill White, Bath “indicated that he was working as a CIA operative” during a conversation they held in 1982. By White’s account, Bath said he had been introduced to the CIA when the elder George Bush was its director, during the late 1970s, and that he had been asked to conduct “covert intelligence gathering on his Saudi Arabian business associates.” According to him, Bath said that he had been asked to undertake certain sensitive air-transport operations. After a series of scandals during the 1970s, the CIA had allegedly decided to privatize some of its covert air-transport operations, and the agency had been looking for reliable Americans with security clearances who might take on some of this work under contract. As a former air force pilot who was friendly with the younger Bush, Bath was a natural candidate for such a role, according to White, who was himself a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis and a former navy fighter pilot. White came to believe that Bath had used some of his offshore charter aircraft businesses to help ship construction equipment and possibly weapons to Osama Bin Laden on the Afghan frontier during the late 1980s.3
Jim Bath has spoken sparsely and infrequently about his business and chartered aviation endeavors during the 1980s. (He declined to be interviewed for this book.) In a court filing from that period, he seemed to mock all White’s allegations about their business disputes, arguing that his former business partner suffered from “paranoia” and “demonstrated frequent mood swings.” According to Bath, White believed that “those conspiring against him were engaged in ‘covert communications’ and had ‘secret agendas’ against him.” In 1991 Bath told Time that White’s account about his supposed intelligence work was “fantasy” and that he was “not a member of the CIA or any other intelligence agency.” About a decade later, however, in an interview with the journalist Craig Unger, Bath seemed to suggest that there might be some degree of truth in White’s portrayal. Speaking of the CIA, Bath said, “There’s all sorts of degrees of civilian participation.” He seemed to be referring to the voluntary cooperation sometimes offered to the agency by American businessmen with sensitive foreign contacts. Indeed, the CIA ran a station in Houston to facilitate informal interviews with Americans who worked in the international oil industry. If Bath did have agency connections, it is possible that all he did was report occasionally on what he picked up while consorting with the Bin Ladens, Bin Mahfouz, and other Saudis.4
White failed in his lawsuits against Bath and suffered heavy financial losses. He had an honorable military career before his troubles with Bath, but his credibility is difficult to judge. There is no evidence apart from his statements that Bath ran contract operations for the CIA. Nonetheless, for reasons that are not altogether clear, Bath did travel frequently to Caribbean tax havens during this period, according to Sandra’s divorce attorney, and he crossed borders carrying large amounts of cash, she said.5 Bath certainly had the means to support discreet international air operations if he wished, if not for the United States, then perhaps for his Saudi business clients. Salem frequently used his larger private aircraft as makeshift cargo transporters during this period, and it is conceivable, for example, that Salem or Bath might have used one of these planes, or one of the other large jets owned by some of Salem’s Saudi associates, to move weapons from South America or South Africa to aid Osama in Pakistan. This is merely conjecture, however; none of the individuals interviewed about Salem’s involvement in private arms transactions on Osama’s behalf understood how the weapons were to be shipped.
Salem flitted lightly and evasively through these spheres of intrigue, but his style was more Austin Powers than James Bond. Apart from the court filings and statements by White, there are additional fragments of evidence about Salem’s possible connections to conservative American political circles that were active in covert anti-communist operations during the 1980s. For example, according to flight logs, Larry McDonald, the Georgia congressman and president of the John Birch Society, flew on one of Salem’s private jets in Saudi Arabia just months before McDonald died aboard Korean Air Lines Flight 007, which was shot down on September 1, 1983, after it strayed into Soviet airspace. Jim Bath’s connections to the Bush family and other leading figures in the Reagan-era Republican Party in Texas have continued to raise questions about the extent of Salem’s relations with these politicians. White, for example, has alleged that Bath used Bin Laden money when investing in Bush’s Arbusto drilling fund, a charge that Bath and Bush have adamantly denied. At a minimum—through Jim Bath, Khalid Bin Mahfouz, and the Saudi government—Salem could justifiably regard himself as an ex officio member of the Houston oil and political establishment; he was draped in both its finery and its perpetual culture of mysterious deal making. Vinson and Elkins, one of the city’s most prestigious law firms, represented Salem. He owned a private airport in the city. He dined at River Oaks mansions and played with visiting Saudi royalty.6
In time, however, Bath’s accumulating personal and financial troubles seemed to alienate him from Salem. There were limits to how much craziness even Salem was prepared to tolerate. In 1986 Bath fell into a financial dispute with White involving allegations that he had improperly used a certificate of deposit belonging to Skyway Aircraft as collateral at a Houston bank for a $550,000 personal loan. Later that year, according to White’s court filings, the Houston Police Department contacted White and told him they were investigating Bath in an international drug case; no charges were ever brought against him, however. According to Gail Freeman, the Bin Laden family friend and occasional business partner, Salem’s beloved half-sister Randa also became estranged from the Baths during this period. She felt the Baths had treated her rudely, according to Freeman, and Randa then seemed to influence Salem’s attitude toward his longtime Houston partner.7
An era was ending, and Bath’s troubles reflected its eclipse. In 1986 oil prices fell to a record low of nine dollars per barrel. The economies of Saudi Arabia and Texas shuddered simultaneously. The real estate boom in Houston gradually imploded. That autumn, as Osama was organizing his first militia training camp on the Afghan frontier, the Iran-Contra scandal broke into the open, and the subsequent investigations dragged some of the uncomfortable history of off-the-books dealings between Reagan and King Fahd into the headlines. The adhesives that had held Salem’s multiple worlds together for a decade—spouting oil money, a confident and often secretive alliance between Washington and Riyadh, and an ethos of cultural mobility and play—began to come apart.
OSAMA’S SMALL BAND of fighters suffered through a bitter winter in the high mountains around Jaji. The war usually went into hiatus during the snowy season. When the thaw arrived, so did Soviet soldiers. Osama’s rumbling bulldozers had created a provocation in an important battle zone that the Soviets were not about to ignore. Osama’s friend and brother-in-law Jamal Khalifa had visited the Lion’s Den and found it to be a death trap. That was the point, some of Osama’s colleagues told him: “We have plenty of shaheeds,” or “martyrs,” whose sacrifices would please God. Khalifa said he argued with Osama that this waste of life violated Islamic precepts and that “God will ask you about it in the hereafter.” Osama ignored his warning.8