An intimate look at the Bin Laden family

From Steve Coll, author of "Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001" comes "The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century," an examination of the Bin Laden family, its fortune, and the contradictions of globalization. An excerpt:

October 1984 to February 1985
Lynn Peghiny played piano most mornings at the Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress Hotel in Orlando, Florida. She was ­twenty-­four, ­dark-­haired, slim, and spirited. She had grown up in Melbourne, on the Atlantic coast, and studied music at the University of Central Florida. She was drawn to the piano and made a living at it, if barely. The breakfast shift in the Hyatt’s cavernous atrium was normally ­subdued—­sleepy tourists fortifying themselves for a day at Disney World, businessmen murmuring about real estate. One morning in October 1984, however, a ­middle-­aged man with bright eyes and a mop of black hair walked over and asked in an unfamiliar accent if she would play Beethoven’s Für Elise. He listened appreciatively, then handed her a ­twenty-­dollar tip. “Do you play private parties?” he asked.

They exchanged business cards. His name was Salem Bin Laden. He had a house just west of Orlando, he told her, not far from Disney World, and he happened to be entertaining some visitors from his native Saudi Arabia who were members of that ­oil-­endowed country’s royal family. He owned a piano and hoped she would play at an evening party. A few days later, she drove out State Road 50, which ran due west through miles of orange groves toward Lake County. Salem’s home, near the decaying railroad town of Winter Garden, turned out to be an ­ochre-­walled ­five-­acre estate with horse stables, a tiled swimming pool, weeping willows, and palm trees. The main house, a Mediterranean Revival built during the 1920s, had russet ­Spanish-­tile roofing, cupolas, and arched, shaded walkways; it rested on a knoll above a sparkling lake.

“Leeen! Leeen!” Salem exclaimed when she arrived, waving her into the dining room, where his guests were taking breakfast at four in the afternoon. “Come, come,” he said. “Sit with us.”1 He placed her next to his guest of honor. Abdul Aziz ­Al-­Ibrahim was a brother of Princess Jawhara ­Al-­Ibrahim, the fourth and reputedly the favorite wife of Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd. The Ibrahims had ascended from obscurity after Fahd fell for Jawhara; she left her husband for the king and gave birth to a son, Abdulaziz, upon whom Fahd doted. Princess Jawhara’s place at the king’s side created opportunities for her brothers. They became influential businessmen, exciting jealousy and gossip in royal circles; they had recently started to invest in Orlando real estate.2 Salem Bin Laden, whose family’s construction firm relied upon access to the king’s court, cultivated the Ibrahims’ friendship.

Lynn chattered freely; Ibrahim ate vigorously, but in silence. Salem leaned over and whispered, ­“You’re not allowed to speak directly to him.” Mortified, she fell silent; she wondered what she had gotten herself into.

Salem took her outside to show her the grounds. He was a slight man in his late thirties, about five feet and seven inches, slim but soft from a life without much exercise. He smoked cigarettes continually, and dark bags had formed beneath his eyes. Yet he radiated a magnetic energy that seemed, along with his money, to immediately attract people and hold them in his orbit. He was a skilled pilot who spoke passionately about flight; he mentioned that one of his brothers had recently injured himself in a crash near the lake. He seemed restless, in perpetual motion, yet also sweet and trustworthy. Gradually that afternoon Lynn came to understand that she had been invited into some sort of rolling intercontinental party over which Salem presided, a party that had no particular beginning or end. He told her that he would be leaving soon on his private jet for California; he had a meeting there, he said, about a possible movie project involving the actress Brooke Shields.

As evening fell the estate began to fill, mainly with Saudi men who appeared to be on vacation. There were also a few ­middle-­aged American women who were friends of Salem’s, or seemed to be in business with him. Lynn found a Yamaha upright piano in the living room and began to play. Eventually Salem told her that she should come back the next day; the party would carry on. “Bring your sisters! Bring your friends!” he urged. “We need girls!”

When Lynn did return with a girlfriend and two of her sisters, she found a band in the living room. Salem decided amid some fanfare to organize a talent show. He promised five thousand dollars in cash to whoever won first place, and he appointed himself the sole judge. One of the American women played piano and sang, the band ran through some numbers, and Lynn took a turn at the Yamaha. Lynn’s girlfriend, however, had no particular musical talent. She decided, instead, to expound to her Saudi audience about her recent experiences of giving birth and of divorce.

Intimate monologues about a woman’s pain and the miracle of life were not often heard in the ­male-­segregated sitting rooms of Saudi palaces or merchant houses, and the quiet that followed her presentation, it seemed to Lynn, was a little awkward.

“I feel really bad,” Salem told Lynn afterward. He liked her friend, he said, and he felt bad about her divorce. He peeled off about a thousand dollars in cash. “Please, give this to her.”

At one point, one of the American women who seemed to work with Salem in Orlando pulled Lynn aside. “You know, Salem really likes you,” she said.

“Romantically?”

As Lynn Peghiny recalled it years later: “She ­said—­and ­I’ll never forget ­it—­she said, ‘Lynn, this is a great opportunity for you. ­You’re young. ­You’re unattached . . . You know, ­he’ll show you places and take you places, and if I were you, ­I’d just go for it.’”

Salem Bin Laden was a favored customer of AlamoArrow, a retailer outside San Antonio, Texas, of ultralight sport aircraft. The previous Christmas, he had turned up at the store unexpectedly on a Friday evening and purchased much of its ­inventory—­planes and ­accessories—­and asked that it all be delivered to the airport and loaded onto his private ­BAC-­111 ­twin-­engine jet. A few weeks later he returned to buy more ultralights, including a camouflaged former military prototype that had once been equipped to shoot missiles. Its armor had been removed, but “he thought that was pretty cool,” recalled George Harrington, one of the store’s sales associates.

Ultralights are small ­open-­air hobby planes that are usually flown a few hundred feet high at speeds of about forty miles per hour, powered by a single engine roughly the size of that on a motorcycle. Salem loved them; like gliders, another of his passions, they offered the sensation of flying like a hawk, free and buffeted by wind. They were banned from Saudi Arabia on security grounds, so Salem stored the planes at his various refuges outside the kingdom.

During the last months of 1984, he collected the latest models, called Quicksilvers, because he was outfitting, for early in the New Year, an elaborate Saudi royal hunting expedition to Pakistan that Salem seemed to envision as a blend of Arabian Nights and Dr. Seuss. Salem explained to the AlamoArrow managers that he and his Saudi guests, who were princes in the royal family, would camp in the desert and hunt by falconry in the traditional way, but they would also equip themselves with flying toys. He asked George Harrington and his colleagues to buy and prepare a ­twenty-­foot Wells Cargo trailer so it could haul the ultralights across Pakistan’s rough roads and desert tracks. Salem had also ordered a hot air balloon from a champion balloonist in Florida; it came with a plaque that read “Custom Built for Salem Bin Laden.” He purchased a Honda ­mini-­trail motorcycle and a red Chevy Blazer light truck outfitted for desert travel with ­high-­beam lights and enormous tires. He installed a ­high-­frequency radio in the truck so he could call out to the nearest Pakistani city if he were lost or stuck in the sand. In Germany he bought a ­four-­wheel-­drive ­air-­conditioned Volkswagen camper with a shower and a kitchenette and stuffed it with “every gizmo he could get,” as Harrington remembered. They towed the ­American-­made equipment to South Carolina, where the Bin Laden family worked with a ­freight-­forwarding company that could ship the goods to the United Arab Emirates, a small kingdom on the Persian Gulf, and from there to the Pakistani port city of Karachi.

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