The Bin Ladens - читать онлайн бесплатно полную версию книги . Страница 5

PART ONEPATRIARCHS1900 to September 1967

1. IN EXILE

THE TROUBLE STARTED when an ox died.

The ox belonged to Awadh Aboud Bin Laden. Around the turn of the twentieth century, he lived in the desert village of Gharn Bashireih, in a deep canyon called Wadi Rakiyah. The gorge cut a path of fifty miles through a region of southern Arabia, in modern Yemen, called the Hadhramawt, which means “Death Is Among Us.” It was an accurate name; the land was mostly sand and rocks, baked by cyclical droughts. Barren clay bluffs rose on each side of Rakiyah’s chasm. Camels, donkeys, and goats strayed among thornbushes and scrub trees. There were perhaps forty villages scattered in the canyon’s depths; its population was no greater than ten thousand people.¹

Awadh’s house and the small patch of ground he farmed lay near a four-story rectangular turret built from mud bricks by two Bin Laden brothers, Ali and Ahmed, who probably lived during the early nineteenth century, judging by the genealogies kept by their descendants. This Bin Laden family fort rose from the highest point in Gharn Bashireih, shadowed by the canyon’s western wall. By Awadh’s lifetime, the turret, which had been used as a home by the two brothers, was eroding into a ruin; it looked like a sand castle washed over by the tide. Clusters of newer mud-brick homes encircled the hillside below the tower, forming a defensive apron. Around the village spread ten or twenty acres of flat farmland, divided into tiny plots of about ten yards by fifty yards, which various Bin Ladens owned. Farming was a precarious vocation dependent upon brief seasonal rains. After each storm, villagers rushed out to capture flood-waters and channel them into their fields. If they succeeded, they might grow wheat or other staple crops for a few months. If they failed, they might face famine.²

Awadh Bin Laden made his fateful decision to borrow a plow ox from an Obeid tribesman after one of these cyclical rains. The Obeidis were a powerful clan who patrolled the empty plateaus above Rakiyah’s canyon and also farmed in the valley. There was, of course, no system of insurance or collateral associated with such an ox loan. When the animal died suddenly under Awadh’s yoke, his creditor, whose name was Bilawal, made what the Bin Laden family’s oral history holds to be an outrageous demand: forty silver riyals. This smacked of extortion, but while there were perhaps several hundred Bin Ladens in the village, “they were so poor they could not stand by” Awadh, said Syed Bin Laden, who still lives in Gharn Bashireih.³

The Bin Ladens belonged to the Kenda tribe, which traced its origins to pre-Islamic Arabia and became a powerful federation in southern Hadhramawt by the seventeenth century. It had been known then as a tribe of rulers and sheikhs, but perpetual warfare gradually dissipated its strength and scattered its members. By Awadh’s time, the Kenda no longer functioned as an organized group with recognized leaders and armed militias. The Bin Ladens had become merely a family clan of perhaps four to five hundred people, clustered defensively in an ancestral fortress-village, struggling for survival. They were in no position to sustain warfare against rival groups.

The Bin Ladens divided themselves into four branches, each of which traced itself to the generation of the turret builders, Ahmed and Ali, who were two of four brothers, the others being Mansour and Zaid. Each of these brothers fathered a line of descendants who, by Awadh’s lifetime, acted together as an extended family within the wider Bin Laden clan.

Awadh belonged to Ali’s branch. The family’s oral genealogy holds that Ali was Awadh’s great-great grandfather. Little is recalled about the intervening generations except that Awadh was the only child of his father, Aboud. He therefore inherited all of Aboud’s land in Gharn Bashireih. This proved to be a very meager estate, however, and as it turned out, it was not enough to help Awadh forestall his ox creditor.⁴

At first, in lieu of forty silver riyals, which he did not have, Awadh negotiated to provide Bilawal with a lien on the several acres he farmed. Bilawal agreed to accept half of the profits from Awadh’s harvests until the debt was paid. If the rains had returned, Awadh might have worked himself out of difficulty and the subsequent history of his branch of the Bin Laden family might have turned out quite differently. As it happened, however, a drought hit Rakiyah. Awadh could offer his creditor no profits in the ensuing months, which angered Bilawal. By one Bin Laden family account, Bilawal threatened to kill Awadh unless he either came up with the cash he owed or turned over full title to his land.⁵

Awadh decided to abandon his ancestral village. He was a bachelor, free to travel. The drought had deepened steadily since the ox’s demise. Emigration was a common survival strategy in the Hadhramawt, even without the spur of a tribal death threat. Awadh packed his belongings and set out across the high plateau for a neighboring canyon known as Wadi Doan, about a day and a half ’s ride by camel or donkey. There he would begin again.

SHEER CLIFF WALLS of nine hundred feet or more plunge to the floor of the Wadi Doan, seventy miles inland from the Arabian Sea. Dark green date palm trees nourished by a riverbed cover the canyon’s floor. A race of giants hewed the chasm’s stones until God took umbrage at their arrogance and destroyed them with a sandstorm, according to local legend. This may explain the stunning architecture: Stacked against the rock walls rise the giant skyscrapers of fortified castle-villages, each town a gated, vertical redoubt against its neighbors. For purposes of defense there are no windows on the houses’ lower floors, and the slits higher up are designed for shooting.

To Europeans of the time, the canyons of the Hadhramawt seemed remote and filled with dangerous xenophobes; they were a “parallel, interior world…a blank on the map.” In truth, the Hadhramawt was not isolated at all, but its deeply religious inhabitants, although capable of gracious hospitality, did not always take kindly to unannounced Christian visitors. For several thousand years Hadhramis had been migrants, travelers, traders, and entrepreneurs, sailing out in wooden dhows from the port of Mukalla to the East Indies, Zanzibar, Abyssinia (modern Ethiopia), and up the Red Sea to Mecca and Cairo. For a time, centuries ago, they and their Sabean kings enjoyed enormous wealth as caravan monopolists in the global trade in myrrh and frankincense, drawn from the gum of Arabian trees. In pharaonic Egypt and during the Roman Empire, incense burned from costly frankincense and even more expensive myrrh transformed these oils into two of the most precious commodities on earth. In Rome, no god could be worshipped properly, no funeral commemorated, no respectable marriage bed entered, without the smoke of frankincense swirling through the room. Only as its empire dissolved and austere Christian preachers denounced incense as a perfume of blasphemers did the trade decline and Hadhramawt fall back into poverty. With Islam’s arrival in the seventh century, the men of the canyons sailed again as soldiers in proselytizing Muslim armies. They stayed on in the lands they conquered as bodyguards, traders, and, eventually, political notables. They remained devoted to their homeland and by the turn of the twentieth century, many prosperous Hadhramis had carried their colonial-era trading wealth back to the canyons to build retirement homes and family compounds. So many returned from Asia and Africa that when a British officer carried out the first formal survey of the gorges during the 1930s, he discovered Swahili and Malay among the local languages.⁶

At the time of Awadh Bin Laden’s arrival, Britain claimed Doan as part of its Aden Protectorate, a political entity that was more wish than fact, one in a chain of loosely governed coastal territories the empire’s strategists had stitched together in Arabia to protect India’s shipping lanes from Turkish and German scheming. The local instrument of British control was the Sultan of Mukalla, who ruled from a compound of whitewashed palaces on a rock outcropping beside the Arabian Sea, protected by a personal bodyguard of African slaves. The sultan’s family had earned its fortune as mercenaries for the Nizam of Hyderabad, in India; by the early twentieth century, they preferred to spend their time in Hyderabad’s luxurious courts. In Mukalla, they left in charge a succession of wazirs, or ministers, from the Al-Mihdhar family, which hailed from the Wadi Doan. One of these deputies, Sayyid Hamid Al-Mihdhar, was recalled by a British visitor as “a smooth, oily character, outwardly jovial but with unsmiling eyes,” who used his office “to ensure preferential treatment for his fellow Doanis.”[1] The Mukalla sultanate was far from a model government; to the extent it controlled the interior canyons, it did so by taking hostages from prominent local families.⁷

The real powers in southern Doan at the time of Awadh’s arrival were not the British or the Mukalla sultans, but a family of local sheikhs called the Ba Surras, who ruled from a mud-brick castle named Masna’a. The Ba Surra governor at the time Awadh Bin Laden arrived took ten wives during his lifetime and suffered from blindness. He ruled the canyon with a firm hand. “Murder cases are now practically non-existent,” a British agent reported with satisfaction to London. “Murderers are executed with a dagger plunged into the supra sternal notch.”⁸

Doan had about twenty thousand inhabitants, by the Ba Surras’ count. They were succored by nearly two hundred mosques, but only two small schools, in which the curriculum was the Koran. None of the women the English traveler Freya Stark met during the early 1930s could read. Palm trees from the riverbed were harvested for profit, and a few wealthier traders kept bees on their terraces, extracting an export crop of aromatic honey known as an aphrodisiac, particularly if eaten with meat, “something that only men may do, as it is thought inadvisable to excite women too much,” the traveler Doreen Ingrams noted.⁹

Awadh Bin Laden chose Doan as a sanctuary from the Obeidis because it enjoyed a reputation for peace and order under the Ba Surras that was then rare in the Hadhramawt, according to some of Awadh’s descendants. He settled a few miles from the Ba Surra fortress, in Rabat Bashan, a town stacked up against Doan’s southernmost wall, surrounded by palms on the valley floor. Eight hundred men owning one hundred rifles lived there, according to the British survey conducted in the early 1930s. Awadh seems to have had few firm connections when he first arrived in Doan; he relied instead on the region’s reputation for hospitality, and his own willingness to work. The evidence about Awadh’s circumstances after his arrival in Rabat is sketchy, as he was now separated from the family group in Rakiyah that has kept what oral history survives. He is said to have worked as a wage laborer on local small farms. He did well enough to marry a woman in the town; she was from the Al-Madudi family.¹⁰

Awadh and his wife had three daughters and three sons. The boys were Mohamed, Abdullah, and Omar; the latter died in childhood, a common fate. (The names of the daughters are not recalled; in Arabia then, as now, the stories of a family’s women were rarely told.) The year of Mohamed’s birth is sometimes given as 1908, an approximation at best; the celebration of birthdays is not an Arabian tradition, and there was barely a government in Doan then, never mind a birth registry.¹¹

Once he settled into his Rabat exile, Awadh Bin Laden worked hard and died young. Indeed, he seems to have died before his two surviving sons, Mohamed and Abdullah, had reached adolescence.¹²

As was true elsewhere in the Hadhramawt, Doan’s economy relied upon the persistent willingness of local boys and young men to sail away to foreign jobs, work for years at a time in difficult conditions, and remit money home. Some left at very early ages, as young as six or seven years old. It was also common for local men to marry in their teens, emigrate to Ethiopia or Somalia or Egypt, and stay away for as long as two decades, taking other wives while abroad. For most young men in Doan the question was not whether to leave, but where to go. They depended upon informal employment networks sponsored by Hadhrami traders who had business interests in particular ports abroad. The loyalty of one Hadhrami stranger to another was extraordinary, and by the early twentieth century this ethic had created a thriving diaspora from the Levant to Southeast Asia. In one letter discovered from the early twentieth century, a father writes instructions to two of his young boys about how they should make their way from Hadhramawt to Singapore—he provides lists of trusted contacts in four different port cities and urges the boys to send many postcards home. Young men from the northern Hadhramawt valleys generally emigrated through these kin networks to Southeast Asia; from Doan, they went primarily to Africa or up the Red Sea coastline.

Emigration would have seemed a natural choice for fatherless Mohamed and Abdullah Bin Laden. As they considered their destinations they were probably advised by their mother’s family and by other townspeople concerned about their welfare, now that Awadh was gone. The richest man in Rabat was a descendant of the Prophet Mohamed named Sayyid Muhammed Ibn Iasin, a Red Sea cotton dealer with a “long face and large pleasant mouth” whose household kept bees and Ethiopian slaves.¹³ The Iasins had connections in Massawa, the main Eritrean port. Another prominent family in the canyon, who lived about a mile or two away, had relatives in Addis Ababa, and had made a small fortune trading skins there. It was likely through one of these contacts that Mohamed Bin Laden, the eldest of Awadh’s sons, but a boy of less than twelve years old, first climbed the canyon walls and joined the camel caravans for the walk to the port of Mukalla.

He sailed to Africa, survived the voyage, and found work somewhere in Ethiopia. But his journey ended in disaster. The Bin Laden family’s oral history contains at least two versions about what happened to him. In one, Mohamed was working as a sweeper in a store or small business. According to what his brother Abdullah later told the family, his boss was a disagreeable man with a fierce temper who kept a ring of keys fastened to his belt; one day, annoyed at Mohamed, he hurled the keys at the boy and struck him in the face. The injury was so severe that Mohamed lost his eye. A second version, told by some of the Bin Ladens who remained in Yemen, holds that Mohamed was working on an Ethiopian building site when an iron bar dropped accidentally from a high building, hit the ground, bounced up, and struck his eye. In any event, Mohamed Bin Laden would grow into adulthood with a right eye made of glass.¹⁴

Mohamed returned to Doan after his injury. A massive earthquake destroyed the Abyssinian port of Massawa in 1921, devastating the region’s economy; this may also have been a factor in his retreat. Townspeople in Rabat say it was 1925 when Mohamed left again. This time he traveled with his younger brother Abdullah. It would be about twenty-five years before the brothers returned. Their mother later died in Doan, according to Bin Laden family members who stayed in Yemen; it seems doubtful that the boys ever saw her again.

They aimed now for the eastern coast of the Red Sea. In the port of Jeddah, the gateway favored by Muslim pilgrims traveling to the holy city of Mecca, there was a sizable community of Hadhrami merchants and laborers, including some from Doan; other Hadhramis resided in Mecca itself.

At the time the Bin Laden boys embarked on this journey, Abdullah was only about nine or ten years old; Mohamed was perhaps fourteen or fifteen, according to what Abdullah later related to his family. The journey Abdullah remembered was inflected by magic, miracles, and religious portents. They found their way aboard the overloaded wooden dhows at Mukalla, sailed around the Arabian Peninsula, then up the Red Sea, as far as the port of Jizan, nearly four hundred miles south of Jeddah. From here they began to walk. They became lost in the desert; they were hungry, nearly starving, and thought they might die. A fierce storm blew in on them, and when it cleared the boys found a farm, and in the irrigated fields they found a watermelon. They ate it and were revived.¹⁵

They walked on and finally reached the stone and coral walls of Jeddah, a fetid city of perhaps twenty-five thousand beside the Red Sea.¹⁶ Perhaps only a teenager who had known the deprivations and perpetual warfare of the Hadhramawt could regard this claustrophobic, disease-ridden port without a single paved street as a place of opportunity. Yet Mohamed Bin Laden had seen in Doan the proud mud skyscrapers, with their painted doors and complements of slaves, which had been built by Hadhramis who had earned their fortunes in all sorts of unlikely places, through luck and faith and hard work. He possessed the drive to seek a fortune of his own.

THE AIR WITHIN Jeddah’s protective walls “held a moisture and a sense of great age and exhaustion such as seemed to belong to no other place,” wrote T. E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia. There was “a feeling of long use, of the exhalations of many people, of continued bath-heat and sweat.” Temperatures rose well above one hundred degrees Fahrenheit in the summer, and salty Red Sea winds stifled breath. “Newspapers flop into rag, matches refuse to strike and keys rust in the pocket,” a British visitor complained. Each day about five thousand camels moved through the city, dropping what Jeddah’s mayor estimated to be more than thirty thousand pounds of manure. “The goods on display in the market are covered with so many flies that you cannot tell the color of the goods without chasing them away,” the Persian pilgrim Hossein Kazemzadeh wrote. “In the evening, when the shops close, the flies go, like the merchants, to private houses to seek their prey.”¹⁷

For more than a thousand years Jeddah had served as the gateway to Mecca. Through the city poured pilgrims bound for the annual Hajj festival—one hundred thousand of them each year by the early twentieth century. They were Muslims of every hue and background, from Africa, Southeast Asia, India, and Europe. They came, too, for lesser pilgrimages throughout the year; rowboats called sambuks ferried the new arrivals from ships anchored in the port’s deep water. At the pier porters and guides hustled them to crude barracks where they were segregated by national origin. Many of these pilgrims stayed on in Jeddah after they had offered their devotions, and their descendants had transformed the region, known as the Hejaz, into a polyglot, a “hodge-podge of humanity which Islam brings together from every corner of the earth,” as the pilgrim Amin Rihani wrote in 1922. In Jeddah there were extremes of wealth and poverty, observed Kazemzadeh: “You see rich people who will pay several pounds for a flacon of perfume, pour it all out on their heads and walk off…On the other hand, there are wretches in a state of total privation, lying nearly nude along the road, seeking some relief in the shade of the bushes.” Wealthier families lived in tall Turkish-style town houses fashioned from coral dug from the shoreline and covered in slatted wooden shutters that cooled the interiors and kept women invisible to passersby. The poor wrapped themselves in cloth and slept in Jeddah’s sandy lanes.¹⁸

Cholera epidemics swept through the city. Europe’s nascent public health authorities recognized the global migration to and from the Hajj as a potential source of pandemics. The colonial powers struggled to create a workable system of quarantine. An Ottoman doctor summoned to treat one cholera scourge around the century’s turn found Jeddah “a vast cemetery” teeming with “dead bodies that filled the caravansaries, mosques, cafes, houses and public places”; he was haunted by “the cries of men, women and children mixed with the roaring of the camels.”¹⁹

Harry St. John Bridger Philby, a British adventurer who would soon play a remarkable role in the city’s growth, arrived in Jeddah during the 1920s, around the same time as Mohamed Bin Laden. Philby encountered a

jumble of wealth and poverty; great mansions of the captains of commerce and enterprise, with their solid coral walls and wide expanses of woodwork tracery, side by side with hovels broken and battered with age; mosques great and small, with pointed minarets tapering skyward…Everywhere a contrast of light and shadow, splendor and squalor, dust and dirt; and above it all flew the flags of many nations, Great Britain, France, Italy, and Holland, amid the countless emblems of a united Arabia.²⁰

The city’s economy turned on pilgrims, who paid taxes amounting to about 3 million British pounds each year in this period and generated another 4 to 5 million pounds in commercial profits for the merchants, camel owners, tour guides, and hoteliers who competed for their purses. The greed and carnival-barking style of Jeddah’s hospitality industry was legendary; the medieval traveler Ibn Jubayr noted skeptically that even before the arrival of Islam, the city fathers had raised “an old and lofty domed shrine” to attract tourists; “it is said that this was the resting place of Eve, mother of the human race…God knows best about all that.”²¹ The opening of the Suez Canal in the late nineteenth century transformed the Red Sea into a colonial bazaar where European steamers, African traders, and Arabian middlemen competed for profit and influence. By the time Mohamed Bin Laden arrived, Jeddah was a citadel of hustlers.

He began as a porter in the pilgrim trade; a leather satchel he used to haul goods and luggage hung later in one of his offices. He and his younger brother were so poor during their first days in Jeddah that they slept in a ditch they dug in the sand, and covered themselves with bags, according to Nadim Bou Fakhreddine, who worked for the family years later. Early on, Mohamed opened a small grill stand in the Nadha market on the Jeddah seafront, “a small shop with one or two big dishes” for cooking, recalled Hassan Al-Aesa, who worked as a laborer with Bin Laden in Jeddah during the 1930s. An account of Bin Laden’s origins written by a British diplomat several decades later reported that he had sold “fruit off a donkey” in these early years, an assertion that may have been more metaphorical than factual.

He saw that the housing industry offered promise. He began to look for odd jobs in the building trade. The coral and sediment paste used in the walls of Jeddah’s multistory town houses crumbled easily and required continuous patching and repair. Particularly during the late 1920s, when the city’s economy enjoyed a brief period of relative prosperity, there were opportunities for young men to work in the coral quarries or as crude masons and small-time contractors. In 1931, Bin Laden founded his own small company.²²

He was an attractive man with even features and coffee-colored skin. His wandering glass eye distracted some who met him, but he had a natural lightness and bounce about him. He was not an imposing man—about five feet eight inches tall—but he was a natural organizer, a good-natured practical joker, and a man who thrived in the company of others. He and his brother found their way into Jeddah’s tight-knit Hadhrami community and joined in its traditional entertainments, particularly the dances and group songs, called zomals, which reminded the men of home. Al-Aesa recalled watching Mohamed and Abdullah dance and sing in the Jeddah night: “They were very humble.” There was one zomal, traditionally sung with pistols in hand, punctuated by celebratory shots fired into the sky, which the two Bin Laden brothers used to belt out with gusto:

Today my school is finishedAnd my watch is goldAnd my pistol with six bulletsDid not answer my salam aleikum²³

Bin Laden had a gift for sensing the qualities of people around him, and for retaining their loyalty, recalled Gerald Auerbach, an American pilot who later worked for him. “He knew how to get people who could do the job. He knew how to tell when they were doing the job and when they weren’t. He had a better feel for engineering by birth, or accidentally, than many people that I’ve known have on purpose after they go through a lot of schooling.” As Al-Aesa put it: “Because he was so good and so kind, all the chief craftsmen used to work with him willingly.”²⁴

Abdullah Hashan ran Jeddah’s lucrative foreign-exchange markets, where Maria Theresa silver thalers and gold coins traded amid wild swings of prices. He handed Bin Laden his first major job in the old city, “doing maintenance and renovation,” on a grand town house he owned that served as a part-time courthouse for some of Jeddah’s Islamic judges, as Al-Aesa recalled it. Bin Laden “made some arches and fixed things” in a modest renovation project. “It was pure luck.” But not luck alone: he had the ability to build and perform contracting work quickly, and in a manner that pleased the whimsical, demanding personalities of Jeddah’s wealthy. The Hashan job set him on his way. Mohamed and Abdullah moved into a very small house on the city’s north side.²⁵

As the Great Depression settled in during the early 1930s, however, global travel and tourism collapsed, and along with it the Muslim religious pilgrimage to Mecca. The number of annual pilgrim arrivals in Jeddah fell precipitously, as did other Red Sea trade. Jeddah sank into a period of torpor and hardship. Mohamed Bin Laden soon found that his business in Jeddah was not enough to sustain him. He took to the road to find a paying job, across the vast and empty desert steppes that rose to the east, beyond Jeddah’s walls. Fortunately for him, profound political and economic changes had begun to sweep across the Arabian Peninsula. Oil was at the heart of this transformation—along with the extraordinary king who owned it.

2. THE ROYAL GARAGE

ABDULAZIZ IBN SAUD walked out of Kuwait in 1902 with a sword, some camels, and a small band of followers to reclaim, in his family’s name, the mud-walled town of Riyadh in the central Arabian plateau, and the paltry realm it oversaw. The Al-Saud had twice ruled this scorched, lightly populated emirate in recent centuries, overthrown each time by Egyptian and Ottoman enemies. Abdulaziz fought more than fifty-two battles across an expanse of hundreds of square miles in his quest for restoration. The battles were often little more than a massed, screaming charge on camels and foot by one malnourished band of rifle-toting Bedouin into the encampment of another, but they could take a toll; by 1932, when Abdulaziz announced at last the formation of the new Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, he bore slashing scars on his arms and body, and he limped from a war wound in his leg.

The king was about six feet three inches tall, broad-shouldered—visible on camelback from across a wide valley. Standing in his majlis court, he towered over many of his subjects and slaves, but he ruled as much by charm as by intimidation. He told visitors that he was like the Prophet Mohamed in that there were “three things in the world” that he truly loved: “Women, scent and prayer.” He kept a vial of perfume in his robes and doused his hands when greeting visitors, so he might pass along his aroma. He possessed a magnetic and persistent smile, and seated on his throne he would launch into meandering monologues filled with metaphorical desert proverbs about treacherous foxes and venomous scorpions. Yet he was a skillful, pragmatic, cold-eyed politician, able to grasp and manage his peninsula’s tribal, religious, and colonial-era complexities better than anyone had done before. “I am not a man of imagination,” he told a visitor. “I am a man of actual fact—that is all I have.”¹

His conquest of Hejaz, the western region of the Arabian peninsula, and of its city of Jeddah, had been the last phase of his campaign, and when he completed it in 1926, it delivered him the greatest prizes he had yet known—sovereignty over Islam’s holiest cities, in Mecca and Medina, as well as the vast tax revenue from pilgrims arriving there, and in addition, access to Jeddah’s Red Sea port. Yet Abdulaziz recognized wisely that his austere army of illiterate plateau warriors and Islamic proselytizers would not be much welcome in worldly Jeddah, so he tried to co-opt the city’s businessmen rather than confront them militarily. He laid a one-year siege at Jeddah’s walls, which reduced the city’s residents to even more desperate poverty than they already knew; the campaign ended when Jeddah’s merchant notables handed him the keys. Still, he kept his distance; as long as the tax revenue flowed, he much preferred the isolated comfort of Riyadh in central Arabia, and he felt more secure there. Hejaz and the Red Sea’s coast, in Abdulaziz’s assessment, was a zone of treacherous British and Italian intrigues.

The collapse of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War had left Europe’s colonial powers in competition for Arabia, a contest slowed by the terrible losses of the war but compelled by the inexorable logic of empire. The interior Arabian Peninsula had never been invaded by a European army—it seemed too barren and remote to bother about. To thwart the Turks, the British had subsidized Abdulaziz until 1925, but they never embraced him fully and he never trusted them, because they also propped up his rivals in Mecca, the Hashemite Sharifs. He felt about the British, he said, “like a father when cross with his son, wishing him dead—but the same father would immediately strike dead whomever said ‘Amen’ to this sentiment.” He wanted the Americans to protect him from British intrigues, and he was also fascinated by the rise of Nazi Germany. He had a crude, often xenophobic view of Christians, and even more so of Jews. “Praise be to God, for fourteen hundred years there have been no Jews in my territory,” he told one foreign delegation; so far as he knew, he had never set eyes on a Jewish person. As Israel’s creation was debated, he was passionate and unyielding in his opposition. “My honor is involved in this matter,” he declared. He assumed that all non-Muslims were unreliable. He asked one Christian visitor with cheerful curiosity, “You drink whiskey, you play at cards, you dance with the wives of your colleagues?”²

Sex seemed to be the greatest joy in his life, or at least the greatest compulsion. In 1930 he told the Englishman Philby that he had married one hundred thirty-five virgins and about one hundred other women to date, but that he had decided to limit himself to just two new wives annually for the remainder of his years. He bent the Islamic law that permitted four wives at a time by marrying and divorcing rapidly, and by keeping additional retinues of concubines and female slaves. There was a political and even a military aspect to his carnality: “The Saudi state was consolidated by marriage,” as the historian Madawi Al-Rasheed put it, and Abdulaziz often “married the ex-wives or daughters of his ex-rivals and enemies.”³

Estimates of the number of slaves in his kingdom ran from several thousand into the tens of thousands; several hundred served openly in the monarch’s Riyadh palace. When a slave concubine gave birth to a son, she received her freedom, and in a few rare cases, her son was acknowledged as legitimate. Abdulaziz ultimately recognized about forty-five legitimate sons, who became his royal heirs; the number of his daughters and other children is unknown.⁴

For all of his seeming profligacy, the king maintained an austere and pious lifestyle. He did not drink or smoke or permit his aides to wear silk; he prayed five times a day; and in his court the dominant sound from day to day was the quiet clink of coffee cups and the rhythmic chanting of Koran readers. He never doubted that God had called him to rule his desert kingdom; he would do his best to answer this call, and to conform to Islam’s laws, but the rest was in divine hands. The form of Islam he had been taught was severe and intolerant. In the Hejaz, there were Shias and Sufi mystics, and scholars from every historical school of the Sunni tradition. But in the Riyadh court of Abdulaziz there was only the simple and insistent creed of Mohamed Abdul Wahhab, an eighteenth-century desert preacher who had rejected virtually all adornment, art, music, and technology as blasphemy. In the isolated high desert of central Arabia, as the Jeddah architect Sami Angawi put it, “you have either day or night, you have cold or hot. You don’t have these shades. Even the music is only one string…It’s either black or white. It’s either you’re with me or against me.”⁵ Yet the religious passion of the king’s Wahhabi followers caused him continual trouble—particularly the Ikhwan, or “Brotherhood,” a militia of unbending radicals Abdulaziz created to conquer his enemies. When the Ikhwan threatened to revolt against Abdulaziz because they felt he was not religious enough by their exacting standards, the king turned his guns on them. At the same time, to hold his throne, he had to continuously appease his court’s Islamic scholars, the ulema.

He debated with these ulema about the attractions and dangers of modern technology. Through his contacts with the British, Abdulaziz came to understand the outlines of Europe’s industrialization and the dizzying array of products and comforts it had created. He had no desire at all to adapt to European civilization, but its gadgets intrigued him greatly. He never left the Arab world and he mocked English finery and pomposity. During a desert meeting with a British officer, he strode into an elaborate colonial tent outfitted with plush chairs, and announced, “Here we are in modernity! Bring tea, boy!” He urged his robed Bedouin retinue to join him on the carved chairs: “Let’s be modern!” He mocked, but he also imitated: By the 1930s he had ordered his own European furniture for his Riyadh majlis.

He particularly liked radio sets, through which he could follow European news without ever leaving his palace. The Marconi wireless network he began to build on the Arabian Peninsula during the early 1930s also offered an important, even revolutionary means for Abdulaziz to monitor and control events in his own kingdom. He set up radio stations in major cities and a central operations room in Riyadh from where he could track potential rebels on the periphery of his domain and dispatch orders or units of his army. He struggled to persuade Riyadh’s deeply suspicious Islamic scholars that these radio devices were permissible; among other things, the scholars strenuously objected to the music that came on to signal BBC news bulletins. Because it was impossible to anticipate exactly when this music would appear, Abdulaziz persuaded the scholars that the fault was with the radio knobs, not the radios or broadcasts. He also sought to persuade his religious scholars that the telegraph was not a form of sorcery.

Businessmen in Jeddah plied the king with Ford and Chevrolet automobiles, which he used to hunt gazelles in the desert. He would race along in the front seat beside his Bedouin driver, chasing his hunting falcons as they plunged to attack the fleeing antelopes, pecking out their eyes before the men completed the ceremonial kill. Thundering through the rough desert, Abdulaziz ground his cars down quickly and often left them to rust. In 1927 his royal garage had 250 Fords and Chevrolets, and it grew ever larger.⁶

The business agent who supplied Abdulaziz with Fords and Marconi radios, and who increasingly infiltrated his court and provided it with an air of burlesque intrigue, was Harry St. John Philby. He had graduated from Cambridge University with a First Class degree in Modern Languages, joined the Indian Civil Service, and later worked in Iraq, but he quit Britain’s colonial service and became increasingly bitter about his government. Still, he desperately wished to be recognized in England as the foremost Arabian geographer and traveler of his time. During the 1920s he attached himself to Abdulaziz as an informal adviser and converted to Islam; the king endowed him with the new name of Abdullah. He was a “stocky, bearded figure in Arab dress, fiercely and fearlessly argumentative, unalterably British and yet more Arab than the Arabs,” one acquaintance wrote. Yet for all his airs, he was “neither a soldier nor a poet…the kind of man who is always out of step.” When not attending the king’s Riyadh court, Philby lived in a comfortable house in Jeddah, where he set up his Ford dealership and collected baboons.⁷

Perhaps because Philby was so skeptical about the British government—he was ultimately arrested during the Second World War for promoting the causes of Nazi Germany—Abdulaziz came to rely upon him for independent advice in his dealings with Europeans and Americans. He presented Philby with a slave girl as a gift, and granted him permission to travel across the peninsula, documenting its flora and fauna for books and lectures Philby delivered to English geographers. And it was Philby who controlled the crucial negotiations during the 1930s for mining and oil concessions.

Winston Churchill had converted Britain’s navy from coal to oil during the First World War and by doing so helped usher in the oil age. Britain had locked up supplies in Iran and Iraq, but American explorers had begun to poke around the Middle East as well. An American oil company, SOCAL (Standard Oil Company of California), had the insight to put Philby on its payroll; the company paid him $1,000 a month and promised a bonus of $10,000 if it won a concession from the Saudi king, plus an additional $50,000 in royalties if significant amounts of oil were discovered and exported. Abdulaziz had run up huge debts to Philby by purchasing cars and radios from him, and an oil deal with SOCAL offered not only cash in Philby’s pocket, but a potential revenue stream from which the king could pay off his debts. Philby seemed determined to keep Britain out of Saudi Arabia. The deal he helped to broker, signed with SOCAL in 1933, provided Abdulaziz with 50,000 British pounds’ worth of gold, and the promise of an equal amount if oil was discovered in commercial quantities, plus additional royalties.⁸ The king displayed little personal interest in oil; he was much more interested in parallel explorations for minerals and especially water. But to finance his enormous family, to quell the peninsula’s tribes and other political rivals, he desperately needed gold.

As soon as he had it, Abdulaziz began to spend it. Like many of the newly wealthy, he and his sons decided that they would enjoy a bigger and finer place to live, and so in Riyadh and just outside its walls, a palace building boom began. At the same time, to the east, along the shores of the Persian Gulf, the Americans had arrived to begin drilling for oil; they began to construct houses, schools, offices, and warehouses.

It was an excellent time and place to be an enterprising young man in the building trades.

A CONSORTIUM called the Arabian American Oil Company, or Aramco, formed to manage the oil rights SOCAL had won. American geologists, drilling engineers, and construction managers settled at Dhahran, about three hundred miles to the east of Riyadh, near the sandy mounds beneath which, it was hoped, the largest oil reserves might lie. The Bedouin nomads who moved through the desert in loose bands, scraping their living from caravan trade and animal husbandry, disdained manual labor. Some did take oil jobs, but they kept their distance from Aramco’s settled camps. Hundreds of other Arabs—local Shia who faced discrimination from the Bedouin, and poor foreign migrants like Bin Laden—eagerly accepted the Americans’ salaried work.

Mohamed Bin Laden traveled to Dhahran from Jeddah and found work with Aramco as a bricklayer and mason. He excelled. His supervisor, a “redneck mason” from the United States, decided that “this guy’s really good,” according to Tim Barger, whose father was an Aramco executive. In a matter of just weeks, Aramco promoted Bin Laden to be foreman of a bricklaying crew. A few months later, they promoted him again to supervise several crews. “He had what it took,” said Barger, who recorded his father’s recollections and later worked in Saudi Arabia. “He was blind in one eye but he knew how to supervise people and get jobs done. Then after a long time—maybe a year or a year and a half—he went to Aramco and said, ‘I want to start my own business.’” It was difficult to bring in Americans to Saudi Arabia to do every little job, from catering to fence repair; therefore, Aramco supported any Arab who showed promise as an independent contractor. “They said, ‘Go on out, get started, we’ll give you some jobs. You can always come back here.’ He got his contracting job going well enough so that he could go to Riyadh and hang out for days and days.” A profile of Bin Laden assembled several decades later by the American government reported that he struck out on his own from Aramco in 1935.⁹

Building contracts in Riyadh depended upon the favor of King Abdulaziz. It was easy enough for a man like Bin Laden to connect with the ruler: he could attend his majlis, a daily session in which anyone could sit in the king’s throne room and wait for the chance to petition him for work.

The Riyadh where Bin Laden arrived during the 1930s was still a walled city-fortress similar to those he had known as a boy in Wadi Doan. The Saudis constructed castle-fortresses on their flat desert plateau by encircling the towns with mud-brick walls twenty-five feet high. Palm groves surrounded Riyadh, and townspeople came and went through its gates to harvest timber or collect water during the day. At night and during prayer time the gates closed shut. Riyadh’s wall, wrote Philby, was “surmounted by a fringe of plain shark’s tooth design at frequent intervals. Its continuity is interrupted by imposing bastions and guard-turrets.” Inside, thick-walled houses stacked up on top of one another along twisting lanes, which helped to create shade; there were also market squares, jumbled trading stalls, and, of course, a grand mosque built by the king.¹⁰

Because of his conquest of the Hejaz and his new contracts with American oil companies, Abdulaziz no longer feared that his enemies might raid Riyadh unexpectedly, and so in 1934, he began for the first time to build outside the city walls. He hired a local contractor to oversee a large new family palace compound where the king could hold his majlis sessions, install his new Marconi wireless radios, and accommodate at least some of his enormous family. As his sons married, Abdulaziz added to this construction plan by commissioning homes for them in the new complex. He named his new palace Al-Murabba, or “The Square,” and when it was finally completed in 1939, the main building was an impressive two-story edifice constructed around an open courtyard, where a tall date palm rose to the open sky. The majlis rooms were on the second floor, flanked by rows of offices for the king’s political aides, coffee servers, slave bodyguards, religious scholars, and keepers of the treasury. The entire project, including garages for Abdulaziz’s expanding fleet of automobiles, required the construction of dozens of buildings in a barren region that barely had enough timber to support the population’s daily requirements. The king and his advisers asked their new American friends for materials and construction help, but Aramco and the companies it had invited to Saudi Arabia, led by the Bechtel Corporation of San Francisco, were busy constructing infrastructure for the new oil economy; they did not want to get tied up by the king’s personal palace projects.¹¹

In this gap Mohamed Bin Laden saw opportunity. He “had a vision,” recalled Mohamed Ashmawi, a friend of the family. “He could foresee you could gain a lot by being helpful to the royalty members, especially the most important ones…He started building homes for some of the royalty.” Exactly when and how Bin Laden first met Abdulaziz is not known, but soon “many royal orders entitled him to establish projects at Riyadh,” according to a Saudi account of his early work. The most important of these was the first palace in Riyadh built entirely from stone; this led to many other contracts in what became known as the Murabba Quarter. Hadhramis, like their more sophisticated Lebanese counterparts, already enjoyed a reputation for entrepreneurialism. They were known as people who would push the limits to get a job done, even if they did not quite know exactly how to do the job in the first place. The plateau around Riyadh is called the Nejd, and the native Nejdis had a saying about Yemeni hustlers like Bin Laden: “If you want him to be a baker, he’ll be a baker; if you want him to be a road builder, he’ll be a road builder.” Bin Laden’s strength in these early days, according to the Saudi historian Fahd Al-Semmari, was that he was “always available…and he would bring many people to do the job. He made many messes but he learned how to do work quickly. If he needed ten people, he would bring one hundred.”¹²

Oil royalties had seen Abdulaziz through the Great Depression, if barely. The Second World War, however, shut down international shipping just as Saudi Arabia prepared to deliver its first sizable oil exports. This did not stop the king from building palaces or importing luxuries, but he did not have adequate stores of gold, and he began to run up debts to private merchants. As submarine warfare in the Atlantic and elsewhere crippled British fleets, food supplies to Saudi Arabia grew erratic, and famine haunted its interior desert, where many people lived on the margins even in the best of times.

Churchill’s government had many more pressing priorities, particularly during the war’s desperate early years, but London resumed subsidies to Abdulaziz early in 1940 in order to dissuade him from exploring an alliance with Germany. Britain ultimately gave the king the equivalent of $38 million during the war to keep him loyal; the American government, starting in 1943, contributed an additional $13 million in lend-lease aid. As Germany’s eventual defeat seemed assured, American planners eyed the kingdom as a convenient, uncontested transit point for pushing people and equipment to the Asian front. A top-secret State Department memo to Roosevelt dated December 22, 1944, laid out the case for a new and more committed partnership with Abdulaziz:

A strong and independent Saudi Arabian Government in the Near East…is less likely to fall victim to war-breeding aggression than a weak and disintegrating state vulnerable to economic and political penetration. The vast oil resources of Saudi Arabia, now in American hands…should be safeguarded and developed…The military authorities urgently desire certain facilities in Saudi Arabia for the prosecution of the war, such as the right to construct military airfields…¹³

This thinking spurred Roosevelt to meet Abdulaziz aboard the USS Quincy, afloat in the Red Sea, in February 1945. Eight sheep and forty-two courtiers followed the king aboard the American warship. Roosevelt was charming and empathetic; he and Abdulaziz bonded immediately over wonders of the wheelchair, and the president presented one of the latest models to the king as a gift. On the main issues—“oil, God and real estate,” as Rachel Bronson has put it—they also fell into easy, warm agreement.¹⁴

The Americans who began to travel to Riyadh afterward to consult with their new ally found the king admirable, if picaresque and at times puzzling. In the main, they were attracted to his land because, as a secret State Department cable put it, “Saudi Arabia may be likened to an immense aircraft carrier lying athwart a number of the principal air traffic lanes of the world.”¹⁵

Japan’s surrender opened the kingdom’s oil spigot; exports grew from 30,000 barrels per day to 476,000 barrels by 1949. The aging Abdulaziz was now rolling in gold and silver, and he and his sons and advisers embarked on a spending spree. Mohamed Bin Laden returned to Jeddah, summoned by the king’s closest financial adviser, Abdullah Suleiman, who invited him to work on a new royal palace, called Al-Khozam, which the king had decided to build outside of Jeddah’s old city walls, about three miles from the sea. It was a grand two-story coral stone and wood-beam building with twenty-foot ceilings, stained-glass windows, and dual staircases ascending to the majlis rooms on the second floor. Abdulaziz was by now in his late sixties and relied increasingly on his wheelchair. At the Al-Murabba palace in Riyadh, his advisers installed an elevator to lift him to the majlis floor—the problem facing his Jeddah contractors was that the king could not walk with dignity up the grand staircases they had designed. Mohamed Bin Laden helped to invent an ingenious solution: a circular stone ramp that ran from the driveway of the palace up to the second floor. It was wide and sturdy enough so that Abdulaziz could ride in one of his Fords directly into his majlis, descend from the car, and take his throne.¹⁶

Jeddah remained a city that “clamored and howled and brayed and snarled with a bedlam of animal noises, with once in a while a midnight shot as some irritated Englishman potted a prowling pariah dog,” wrote Wallace Stegner, a visitor in these years. Yet the city also underwent a “phenomenal building boom,” as an American diplomat reported. “Foundations, at least, if not the completed structures, mushroomed overnight. Contractors complained bitterly of their inability to obtain sorely-needed building materials.”¹⁷

Bin Laden and his brother moved into a multistory compound on Jeddah’s north side, where Mohamed met each day with subcontractors, haggled over purchases and debts, and assembled his workforces. He was now becoming so prosperous that he bought his first automobiles, yet he remained a hands-on foreman who sang with his men at job sites and did not hesitate to work alongside them. The volume of contracts he won meant that he had to devote himself increasingly to management, which required him to hire clerks and transcribers, since Bin Laden could barely read and could not write. “There were a lot of architects and staff coming in and out of the house,” recalled Hassan Al-Aesa, who worked for him during this period. “It became very busy.” The city’s building trades were divided into guilds, each overseen by a sheikh who controlled the labor supply and apprenticeships. Bin Laden bargained with all of them. “There was work for everyone,” recalled Al-Aesa. “Carpenters, plaster, steel, blacksmith—every craft.” There was little cement in the city in this period; the dominant building material was coral, harvested from four or five quarries along the sea. Bin Laden purchased one of these quarries, leased it to a partner and used it to deliver reliable supplies to his building sites.¹⁸

For the first time Mohamed Bin Laden felt secure enough to marry. He was in his late thirties when he took his first wife during the Second World War; she gave birth to a daughter, Aysha, in about 1943. Bin Laden took a second wife, Fatimah Ahmed Mohsen Bahareth, who was about nineteen years old and belonged to a prominent family in Mecca who had migrated to Saudi Arabia from the Hadhramawt. When Fatimah gave birth to a son in 1944 or 1945 (the year is not certain), Bin Laden named the boy Salem, after his closest friend in Jeddah, Salem Bin Mahfouz.¹⁹

Bin Mahfouz was a fellow Kenda tribesman from the Hadhramawt. He was born in 1906 to a poor family in the village of Khraikher in Wadi Doan, on the north side of the canyon, about thirty miles from Mohamed Bin Laden’s hometown of Rabat Bashan. At age six he traveled by foot to Mecca in the company of his brothers, a journey that lasted six months. He moved to Jeddah during the 1930s and entered into a lucrative foreign-exchange dealership. By the time of the building boom, Bin Mahfouz served as Bin Laden’s banker—a loose term in a kingdom that then had no formal banks, where all transactions were conducted in cash, where there were multiple coins and currencies and where savings took the form of personal hoards of gold. As a symbol of their friendship and business bond, not only did Mohamed name his firstborn son after Salem, but Bin Mahfouz named his first son Mohamed.

The young Bin Laden patriarch began to travel, overseeing simultaneous palace-building jobs in Riyadh and Al-Kharj, an experimental, irrigated farming community founded by Abdulaziz south of Riyadh. His projects brought him into increasingly close contact with the king. A mud-brick house on Bin Laden’s job site in Al-Kharj collapsed one day and killed one of his workers; the victim left a widow, a son, and a daughter. Bin Laden carried the infant son to the king’s majlis in Riyadh, entered with the boy on his shoulder, and presented him to Abdulaziz, according to Al-Aesa, who remained close to the victim’s family for years afterward. “This is from my responsibility in front of God to yours,” Mohamed said. Abdulaziz handed the boy back and instructed him, “Go and buy a house for them in Mecca.” Bin Laden made the arrangements; the widow moved in and received a royal stipend for the rest of her life.²⁰

Bin Laden was not only the king’s contractor; he was also among his creditors. By 1949 rough estimates of the royal family’s debts to merchants and palace builders ran between $20 million and $40 million. Saud, the eldest son of Abdulaziz, reportedly ordered a $250,000 American kitchen for his new palace in Riyadh that year. Suleiman, the finance minister for whom Bin Laden worked, embarked for Paris on a medical leave with a $600,000 budget. The royal family was spending more than 400,000 British pounds sterling per month during 1949, the British ambassador estimated, and “construction projects more ambitious than economic absorbed much of the revenue…In general it cannot, however, be said that the country’s real needs in regard to development had been properly considered.” Indeed, the royal family’s projects were “often of doubtful value and managed by incompetent individuals.” Particularly objectionable were “the building of palaces at Riyadh, Mecca and elsewhere for the King’s enormous family.”²¹

The postwar boom might not benefit Saudi Arabia’s impoverished subjects, but it had presented Mohamed Bin Laden with opportunity—and he would seize it.

3. SILENT PARTNERS

ABDULLAH SULEIMAN had become the second-most powerful man in Saudi Arabia next to the king, and he had grown wealthy beyond imagining. His was an accidental fortune. He had journeyed as a young man from an oasis town on the Nejd plateau to Bombay, where he worked for an Arab merchant. He later failed in business in Bahrain and returned home to aid his uncle, a merchant who looked after King Abdulaziz’s finances. When his uncle died suddenly, Suleiman became the king’s minister of finance, an exalted title for a man whose main job in those days, before the oil wealth, was to look after a tin trunk that contained whatever gold and silver coins the king possessed. Suleiman eventually oversaw Abdulaziz’s royalty receipts and palace expenditures, but his highly personal accounting methods never changed. He was a “frail little man,” according to Philby, “but with something of the inspiration of the prophets in his soul.” He “knew no fatigue,” wrote the Dutch diplomat and traveler Daniel Van der Meulen, and he was “endowed with the genuine Arab gift of accommodating himself to all circumstances of life, but he was not strong enough to withstand two enemies who unexpectedly came his way: money and whisky.”¹

By late 1949, Suleiman was at least as important to Mohamed Bin Laden’s prospects as the king himself was. He was “reputed to be a silent partner in Bin Laden’s construction company,” according to a later U.S. State Department report. He commissioned Bin Laden to build what would become a $3 million palace along the Red Sea, in which Suleiman intended to live; the minister also controlled or influenced access to scores of other construction projects, funded by an annual building budget that totaled about $100 million. Apart from his construction work with Suleiman, Bin Laden had a second connection to this endowment: Suleiman’s secretary, Mohamed Bahareth, a fellow Hadhrami to whom Bin Laden was now related by marriage. Through these ties Bin Laden adapted to a system of contracting that American and British diplomats in the kingdom referred to as graft, but which the Saudis who benefited from it regarded as an entirely proper form of business in a country where all the land, all the natural resources, and all the power to dispose of them were vested in the estate of the royal family.²

During the Second World War, Suleiman had recruited as an aide a Lebanese Druze named Najib Salha, and the two built what an American government report described as “sizeable personal fortunes” by “misappropriating shipments” of trucks and other equipment from the British lend-lease program of military aid to Saudi Arabia; the pair sold the diverted goods to wealthy Saudis. When the British complained, Abdulaziz fired Salha; by that time he had amassed assets in Egypt alone worth 2 million pounds sterling. The king could not bear to get rid of Suleiman, however. Even though his adviser facilitated “rampant graft and corruption,” which the king knew about, Abdulaziz was so dependent upon him to keep track of money matters that “it was unlikely in the extreme that anything could be done which would in the slightest way prejudice” Suleiman’s position, “so long as the King lived,” as a British official judged it.³

Suleiman owned a transport business that profited from the pilgrim trade to Mecca. He owned land across the kingdom and after the war he began to develop hotels. He planned one for Dammam, near the American-run oil fields, which he hoped to endow with a bar and movie theater, plans that proved too ambitious, since Islamic scholars in the kingdom had decreed movies illegal—along, of course, with alcohol. He entered into partnerships with many Saudi merchants; his partner in one Jeddah firm, named Ibrahim Shakir, who imported Dodge cars and trucks, became “one of the wealthiest private citizens in Saudi Arabia, beneficiary of many fat government contracts,” according to an American cable. Suleiman acquired farms and irrigated them with scarce water supplies, and he protected his land from encroachments—when the Saudi government sought to improve Jeddah’s sanitation by piping fresh water from one of Suleiman’s estates, he shut the project down. Alcohol exacerbated the effects of age and an itinerant life without modern medical care. Suleiman fell out of sight for months at a time; he typically said he was fishing in the Red Sea. The American embassy feared that the minister was losing his grip and “hitting [the] bottle” at an “increasing rate.”⁴

King Abdulaziz never cared about money as much as his sons and advisers did, but when he occasionally ran out, he became annoyed. In December 1949 the king demanded 10 million riyals from Suleiman to provide wedding gifts to some of his sons and daughters who were soon to be married. When Suleiman told him that the treasury was empty, Abdulaziz was apoplectic. In a supposed move toward reform, the minister of finance summoned from Cairo Najib Salha, his wartime profiteering crony. Having been taken once, the British government was “not particularly hopeful…that the Augean stables of the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Finance will be any cleaner for his arrival.”⁵

Nor were the Americans. They increasingly regarded the self-dealing and commissions that Suleiman oversaw as an obstacle to Washington’s plan to secure its alliance with Saudi Arabia by promoting rapid economic and social progress in the kingdom. The king’s budget allocated five times more for palaces and support of the royal family and its allies than it did for the embryonic Ministry of Health.⁶ Royal excess and social inequality might make the Saudi population vulnerable to the utopian appeals of the international communist movement, some American officials feared.

As oil flowed during the late 1940s, the Bechtel Corporation negotiated a cost-plus contract with the Saudi government to undertake an ambitious plan, influenced by Washington, to help lift the kingdom into the modern capitalist age. Bechtel’s imported bulldozers demolished Jeddah’s old city walls and plowed the sand to build piers, ports, airports, and an asphalted road that could speed visiting pilgrims from Jeddah to Mecca. Saudi princes, however, criticized Bechtel’s profits as excessive and impossible to police. For its part, Bechtel discovered that Suleiman, the king, and his sons expected the company to be on call around the clock to repair broken refrigerators, air conditioners, or even automobiles at their private palaces. The royal family ordered Bechtel’s bulldozers and earthmovers diverted from roads and airports to such work as the digging of a sunken garden at the palace of Prince Faisal, the king’s second son. Moreover, Suleiman fell behind on the government’s payments to Bechtel; by the summer of 1950, the Saudis owed the company $2 million. Stephen Bechtel told the State Department that “the headaches” of his company’s Saudi work “far outweighed the advantages.”⁷

Abdulaziz’s sons and advisers were divided by factional feuds that proved impossible for Bechtel’s executives to manage. When the electricity went out at the huge Riyadh palace of the king’s eldest son, Saud, the prince became furious at Bechtel. At the same time, Saud complained that his brother Faisal was spending royal funds too freely, a rich gripe coming from him. Suleiman threw up his hands and said the boys were beyond his ability to control. Abdulaziz was by this time largely oblivious. His legendary energy had drained away with age, and he napped through his days, encased by his many wives, bodyguards, and slaves. He suffered from cataracts in both eyes, one of which drooped in near blindness. Simply moving the king from one palace to another had become an epic production: when Abdulaziz shifted himself and his entourage from Riyadh to Taif in the summer of 1951, it required fifty-five flights over three days and the diversion of every aircraft in the young fleet of Saudi Arabian Airlines.⁸

Bechtel’s failure to adapt to the royal family’s way of business created openings for Mohamed Bin Laden. The Americans obsessed about the timeliness of hard currency payments to their New York bank accounts; Bin Laden relied upon a much more flexible network of Hadhrami moneylenders based in Jeddah. The Americans wrung their hands over the excesses of Suleiman and the Saudi princes; Bin Laden saw Abdulaziz and his heirs as faithful Muslims ordained by God to rule over Mecca and its environs, and he skillfully cast himself as their obedient and enterprising servant.

Around this time Bin Laden began to prove himself, too, to the committees of Islamic scholars appointed by Abdulaziz to oversee public works in Mecca and Medina. The scholars awarded him contracts to build mosques in the Hejaz, and as the postwar boom gathered momentum, the scale of Bin Laden’s contracts for religious works increased. In earlier periods, Egyptian and Lebanese firms had won much of the repair and renovation work in the Islamic holy cities; these companies had connections with the previous Ottoman regime and they employed European-trained engineers. But Abdulaziz found it useful to have a favored contractor of his own. Like Mecca’s guardians before him, the king took great pride in sponsoring improvements that would impress pilgrims visiting from around the world. At his instruction, Mohamed Bin Laden traveled to Beirut in 1949 to purchase tents that could shield worshippers from the sun as they prayed at Mecca’s grand mosque. When the Lebanese businessman who made the tents, Ahmed Fathalla, flew to Mecca to install them, King Abdulaziz happened to arrive to wash the Ka’ba, the holy black cube that is the focal point of Muslim prayer. Among the king’s entourage was Mohamed Bin Laden, Fathalla recalled; Bin Laden and Abdulaziz were “always together, side by side.” The next year, Bin Laden was appointed to build a series of dams and reservoirs, at an estimated cost of $1 million, which could pipe fresh water to Mecca from a newly discovered well twenty-eight miles away. A Belgian company provided Bin Laden with an experienced engineer, as well as high-grade piping from Germany. The mason from Wadi Doan was building an international network of Arab and European business contacts and partners.⁹

The king ratified Bin Laden’s rise by issuing a Royal Order on May 24, 1950, which appointed Mohamed “Director-General of Construction Works of King Abdulaziz”; he was assigned to work under Suleiman and now had a title to wave around when he needed one. To the consternation of Bechtel executives, Bin Laden moved the company’s heavy equipment from the Jeddah-Mecca road so he could use it “for grading around the new residence” he was building for Suleiman by the Red Sea. (Bechtel and State Department correspondence recording this diversion of construction equipment, dated January 17, 1951, apparently marks the first time that the Bin Laden family name appeared in an American government document.)¹⁰

The boom in palace construction in which Bin Laden specialized had now become influenced by Western notions of luxury, as an American cable from that winter reported:

Various members of the Royal Family, Government dignitaries, and rich merchants lavished vast amounts on the construction of quasi palaces, each endeavoring to outdo the other in size, expense and design of their future homes. In many instances Parisienne “interior decorators” were employed to buy expensive materials and oversee their installation.¹¹

Saudis increasingly traveled abroad and saw for themselves the industrialized world’s wealth; they carried its aspirations and tastes home. The Meccan newspaper Al-Bilad Al-Saudiyah published a travelogue in the summer of 1952 by a Saudi writer, titled “With the Americans in Their Country”; the writer described Times Square as “like a bright flame or a diamond necklace…Luxury is visible everywhere, in restaurants full of all kinds of meat placed in lines in glass show cases.” Most marvelous of all was the sanitation:

Rarely will you find an insect in New York and months will pass before you catch sight of a fly…People do not speak there about insects or flies. Years have passed, and now they speak about television and the atom bomb and the new invention for curing TB…. The civilized countries, especially the western nations, respect a country according to its cleanliness and organizations. The Americans even go further for they respect a country according to the number of pipes she possesses. This should not be a surprising fact to the reader, for pipes play an important part in the cleanliness of a country, because water runs through them and is consequently free of insects and dirt.¹²

It did not require a trip to New York for many Saudis to see that their royal family seemed deeply involved with its own luxuries yet lacked any similar devotion to public welfare or even basic national infrastructure. “Our poor are of families who are not of the habitual beggar type,” a Saudi writer complained in Al-Bilad, in a rare public expression of dissent. “Hardly able to walk, they aimlessly roam the streets…They are starved; they have not tasted even bread for two or three days. There is no exaggeration in this…Our misfortune is the creation of our wealthy people, who are too greedy to try and do anything for the people.”¹³

Neither the king nor his sons nor Suleiman seemed able to take control of the kingdom’s finances. Fed up with late payments and the misuse of its people and equipment, Bechtel finally abandoned its Saudi public works contracts. Najib Salha, the deputy finance minister, diverted $400,000 to his own account as part of the final settlement, according to a Bechtel executive.¹⁴

Suleiman brought in another American contractor, Michael Baker Jr., Inc., of Pittsburgh, to replace Bechtel, but they, too, soon departed, frustrated by late payments and demands for ad hoc palace repairs. The British mission in Jeddah noted that Mohamed Bin Laden appeared “to be interested in ousting Bakers and, while there is little hard evidence for this, it is clear that [Bin Laden’s] firm is taking an increasing part in Government constructional works.” Next arrived a German company called Govenco, which was rumored to have paid Bahareth, Suleiman’s secretary, a reported $100,000 to help win business in the kingdom, but Govenco abandoned its public works contract even faster than the Americans had done, and for similar reasons.¹⁵

The American and European companies left behind unfinished infrastructure projects that involved complex engineering challenges. Mohamed Bin Laden rapidly recruited his own engineers—Italians, Lebanese, Palestinians, Iraqis, and Egyptians—and he convinced Suleiman that he could oversee this work, even though he had no background in it. He was once again persuasive; a new Royal Order issued by King Abdulaziz in June 1951 granted Bin Laden a lucrative concession “to build a power station at the city of Jeddah.”¹⁶

One more unlikely expansion now augured a feat of self-invention that would secure Bin Laden’s legend and his family’s fortune.

THE ONLY PAVED ROADS in all of Saudi Arabia at this time were a few that Aramco had laid around the eastern oil fields and a single ribbon of badly engineered asphalt between Jeddah and Mecca. Ships continued to unload hundreds of automobiles, trucks, and buses at the Jeddah port, but these vehicles had to navigate the kingdom’s deserts along crude, flood-ravaged tracks and riverbeds. Abdulaziz and his eldest son, Saud, seemed to have little interest in paved highways; they saw railroads as the epitome of industrial achievement, and they pressed the American government for loans to build a rail network in the kingdom. The Americans, however, resisted; the railway age was receding, they impressed upon the king, and the era of automobiles and asphalted highways had arrived.

The Hejaz pilgrim trade in particular suffered from the lack of even a rudimentary road network to support religious tourists. Medina, the second city of Islam, was situated a forbidding distance from Jeddah, to the northeast. It was possible to bump and slide across the rock and sand to Medina in a car or bus, but a smooth paved road was desperately needed. Harry St. John Philby, the English adventurer now back in the kingdom after his wartime detention for pro-Nazi oratory, saw in this problem a business opportunity. He wrote to Abdulaziz arguing that Saudi Arabia’s honor would suffer in the world’s eyes if it did not start paving decent roads for pilgrims to the holy places, and he won the king’s support for a plan to pave a 350-mile road from Jeddah to Medina. Massive overspending on palaces and gifts meant the royal treasury could not be relied upon to fund this project, however, and there was, as the British embassy noted, “a marked reluctance on the part of all concerned to undertake the unenviable and difficult task of explaining to the King that the extravagances of himself, his family and his Ministers have brought the Government heavily into debt…The King’s elder sons are understood to have claimed that the King’s health might suffer from the shock.” Philby contracted with two British road-building companies and negotiated for export insurance from the British government, so the companies would not have to depend entirely on the royal family for payment.¹⁷

The Jeddah-to-Medina road, via the Red Sea port of Yanbu, was the most ambitious public works project yet undertaken in the kingdom, estimated to cost about 4 million British pounds. A sun-soaked tea party at the side of the roadbed eight miles outside of Jeddah, hosted by the British embassy and attended by a dozen princes and ministers, formally launched the undertaking on December 11, 1950. The principal British contractor was Thomas Ward, Ltd., of Sheffield, England. Its local manager, Robert Donald, expounded at the launch party on his plans: He would build scores of culverts and bridges, and gird the road with a nine-meter foundation. Its surface of bituminous macadam would be six meters across. Donald was cautious but optimistic about the timetable for this work. He had no inkling of the disaster that awaited him.¹⁸

Building an asphalt road in the Saudi kingdom was difficult even in the best of circumstances. The terrain was rocky and mountainous in some places, and sandy and unstable in others. The soil composition varied; it might be a shifting, wind-blown mix of sand and clay, or a blend of granite gravel and sand, or a bog of brown limestone silt. The ground was often soft, the wind was unrelenting, and periodic storms unleashed destructive flash floods. Aramco manufactured asphalt from its oil fields, but other materials were scarce, and the sandstorms damaged mechanical equipment. For all of these reasons, in the months after the tea party, Thomas Ward’s work on the road north from Jeddah and west from Medina proceeded slowly. As ever, the Saudi government fell behind on its promised payments, and the British insurance plan proved inadequate to prevent losses from accumulating on Thomas Ward’s books. In August 1951, the company’s chief road engineer in the kingdom died in an automobile collision. The following January, Robert Donald and his wife perished in a second car crash. By the summer of 1952, at the “end of a long chain of misfortunes,” the company at last gave up, and its executives approached Suleiman to negotiate a settlement that would allow Thomas Ward to leave the kingdom and abandon the road.¹⁹

Once again, Mohamed Bin Laden stepped forward as a Western contractor retreated. The royal family had gone on a car-buying binge; eight hundred automobiles were handed out as gifts to family members, friends, and government officials in April 1952. The princes were revved up, but they had no place to drive. In November, Crown Prince Saud traveled from Jeddah to Medina, and as he sped across the partially completed road’s smooth surface, he had a revelation about the glories of asphalt. Soon Saud announced that it was of vital importance that the Medina highway be finished. “Happily presiding over the arrangements for the Crown Prince’s sojourn in Medina was Mohammed bin Ladin,” the American ambassador reported to Washington. Bin Laden convinced Saud that he could handle the job, and had “already approached his new task with great display of energy and enthusiasm, however misguided.”²⁰

Bin Laden ordered twenty-one thousand tons of asphalt from Aramco and opened negotiations with Thomas Ward to purchase their abandoned road-building equipment. It turned out that the British machines would not work with the type of asphalt Aramco manufactured, so the oil consortium sent Bin Laden an engineer to help him. Thomas Ward prepared to leave, “about half a million pounds out of pocket and in a very ill humor,” as the British embassy put it. American officials, after years of frustrating efforts to support Bechtel and other companies, were resigned to Bin Laden’s attempt to take over the Medina road contract. As the ambassador explained in a dispatch to Washington,

As this is the Government’s first venture into a major construction project not directly supervised or carried out under the auspices of a foreign firm, its success or failure may be of considerable significance to future operations…As the project is so heartily sanctioned by the Crown Prince and the Ministry of Finance, Bin Ladin will not be hindered by lack of funds or the restrictions of a fixed-fee contract which have proved to be the undoing of many a foreign firm.²¹

To overcome his complete lack of experience in road building, Bin Laden sought out an Italian company that had previously constructed roads and dams in Sardinia; he offered them work as his subcontractor. The Italians, however, took “fright on realizing the full extent of the shabby deal meted out to Thomas Ward…and the enormous capital which will be necessary to do the job,” the British embassy reported. Bin Laden did seem to enjoy impressive access to the king’s treasury—he made a hard currency payment of 328,000 pounds at the scheduled time to Thomas Ward, to pay for their equipment—but the slow pace of Saudi reimbursements and other troubles hindered his attempts to make much progress paving the highway. Throughout 1953, Bin Laden “[had] been given impossible tasks of constructing roads at short notice without any idea where payment [was] to come from.” Still, he managed. His great Hadhrami friend Salem Bin Mahfouz had that same year founded the National Commercial Bank, so Bin Laden could more easily draw upon sources of finance outside of the Saudi government.²²

MOHAMED BIN LADEN was now becoming rich, but money could not change his social identity in Arabia. The Al-Saud royal family and the tribes on the Nejd desert plateau were extraordinarily concerned about the purity of their tribal and family bloodlines. Nejd families kept careful track of their genealogies, and for a price, an enterprising tribal leader might be persuaded to “discover” a respectable lineage for a family whose past ran, say, to slavery. To the self-conscious Nejdis, a hardworking Hadhrami immigrant like Bin Laden, even one as full of ambition and surprises as he was, only conformed to a cliché of their racial stereotyping: the Hadhramis, everyone in Nejd knew, were frugal, avaricious, enterprising, yet also unusually honest and reliable. A prince of the Al-Saud royal family might admire these qualities in a man like Mohamed Bin Laden, but he certainly would never allow Bin Laden to marry one of his daughters. In the Nejd heartland, where political power in Saudi Arabia was concentrated, the Bin Ladens would always be foreigners who had embedded themselves in the mongrel Hejaz. The attitude toward Bin Laden among even a poor but proud Nejdi tribal family, to say nothing of the Al-Saud royal family, was akin to that which a 1950s-era WASP bank executive in New England might hold toward a dark-skinned, grade-school-educated entrepreneurial Sicilian who built his lakeside summer cottage—charming fellow, but keep him away from the girls.

The Muslim sheikhs and kings Bin Laden had known since his childhood in Wadi Doan inspired his emerging vision of his own family life. All the rulers he had ever encountered had not just the four wives permitted at any one time by Islamic law, but many more. Wealth might not buy Bin Laden entry into Nejdi families, but in Jeddah and Mecca it instantly transformed him into a sheikh—a loose title of respect, and one that he had more than earned by 1953 through his association with the king, as well as his business accomplishments. He offered a desirable match for any family with eligible daughters that might be attracted by the business and employment connections that Bin Laden could provide. Beginning in the late 1940s, Bin Laden began to imitate his mentor, Abdulaziz, by marrying a succession of young women who caught his eye, or who were offered by fathers in business with him. Between his first marriage in about 1943 and his final takeover of the Medina road contract from Thomas Ward in the autumn of 1953, Mohamed Bin Laden married at least nine times, and he fathered at least fifteen sons and nine daughters, according to records later produced in a court case by the Bin Laden family. Some of the women Bin Laden married during this time stayed with him for many years; others he divorced very quickly. Fatimah Bahareth, for example, enjoyed a privileged position as the mother of Salem, his eldest son, and her marriage endured and proved bountiful—she gave birth to two additional sons, Bakr and Ghalib, as well as three daughters, Su’aad, Zeenat, and Huda. Like Bahareth, some of Bin Laden’s early wives were from Hadhrami immigrant families like his own. One early wife, who was of Iranian origin, would bear three sons; she gave birth to the eldest of them, Yeslam, in Mecca on October 19, 1950. Khalil and Ibrahim followed, as did a daughter, Fowziyah. A number of Mohamed’s wives were foreigners: one was Egyptian, another Palestinian, and another from this period may have been Ethiopian. The family Mohamed Bin Laden was creating with such vigor looked very much like the Hejaz itself—a polyglot, bound by Islamic faith.²³

In the manner of every sheikh and prince in Arabia, Bin Laden installed his wives in his Jeddah compound, each with a household of her own but segregated from contact with men other than him or the wife’s relatives. Sometimes his ex-wives stayed on at his compound after their divorce. It was customary for wealthy moguls like Bin Laden to ensure that women he divorced had ample means. In some cases this might be accomplished by arranging for the divorced woman to marry a new husband with a steady job. If a wife gave birth to a son, Islamic law ensured that the boy would eventually inherit a share of his father’s wealth, and the boy, in turn, was expected to ensure the welfare of his mother. In any event, by the autumn of 1953, Bin Laden had more than enough money to support his expanding family. He was never extravagant or particularly acquisitive in his personal habits, except when it came to women. The family compounds he built, while comfortable, were not as opulent or garish as many of the palaces he built for the royals. He did not seem to have time for indulgences. Mohamed Bin Laden appeared to enjoy work above all, and his ambition was far from sated.

THE AMERICAN EMBASSY supplied Abdulaziz with aphrodisiacs to curry favor with him, but in his last years blindness and impotency deprived the king of the pleasures so long at the center of his life. He withdrew into his court and his harem. Saud, his heir, was fifty years old, but the king still treated him and his other older sons like children, insisting, for example, that they stand in his presence unless he invited them to sit down. Some of his adult sons disappointed Abdulaziz; Mishairi, at about twenty years old, disgraced the family by drinking himself into a rage and shooting to death a British diplomat, Cyril Ousman, whom Abdulaziz had known and liked. Only afterward, in late 1952, did the king impose a formal ban on alcohol in Saudi Arabia.²⁴

There was no single Bedouin tradition of succession, but a common practice held that new rulers should be chosen by consensus, on the basis of their ability to lead, and not strictly by primogeniture. Abdulaziz had long before arrogated the decision about succession to himself, however, and he had designated Saud as his political heir, despite Saud’s manifest indiscipline, which by the early 1950s included heavy drinking. The king did sense that the crown prince would need help, and so he cultivated an uneasy partnership between Saud and Faisal, his second son, born to a different mother. Faisal was an austere and enigmatic man who seemed more suited for leadership than Saud. To cement this arrangement, and to overcome the tension that was palpable between his two sons, Abdulaziz declared that succession would pass laterally, from Saud to Faisal, rather than through Saud to his own eldest son.

In October 1953, Abdulaziz fell gravely ill at his palace in the mountain town of Taif, a retreat from the humid coastal air of Jeddah. On November 8, as the king’s condition worsened, Saud flew to Jeddah, where a military band and a parade festooned him. Word came to him the next morning that his father had arrived at his last hours; Saud rushed to Taif, but too late—Abdulaziz had died that morning in Faisal’s arms. Scores of family members had assembled around the king’s body by the time Saud arrived. To dispel the uncertainty that hung over them all, Faisal pulled a ring from his dead father’s finger, approached Saud, and presented it to him in obedience. Saud handed the ring back and announced that Faisal was his heir and crown prince.²⁵

Faisal accompanied his father’s body on an airplane to Riyadh, where in the Wahhabi tradition, which rejects the adornment of gravestones and other memorials to the dead, Abdulaziz was loaded onto a truck and buried in an unmarked desert graveyard.

Saud remained in Jeddah. He sensed that his life was about to change profoundly, and that somehow he needed to address the financial chaos and social inequality in the kingdom he had inherited. On the day after his father’s death, he met with the American chargé d’affaires and asked to discuss a “private and secret matter.”

The new king lamented his land’s low standard of living. He pledged to begin a “war against widespread poverty, ignorance, and disease,” and said he was “determined to emerge victorious from this war.” He would build schools, hospitals, military bases, and highways. He said he was “sickened” by the unsound financial practices in the kingdom. He recognized, he said, that efforts to eradicate “corrupt practices” would have to “begin with himself.”

He had just one request, he continued: The kingdom was broke, and he wondered if the United States might lend him $300 million.²⁶

4. THE GLORY OF HIS REIGN

AT THE TIME of Saud’s ascension to the throne, American oil companies paid about $20 million each month to the Saudi treasury. Mohamed Bin Laden received a fixed percentage. He appears to have been the only person, apart from Suleiman and the royal family, who had direct access to Aramco payments during this period. In theory, his allowance would ensure that he could finance the many building projects he was assigned, whether these were palaces or highways, as the British commercial secretary J. M. Heath wrote in a confidential dispatch to London. In practice, however, the kingdom’s state of “administrative chaos” meant that Bin Laden, despite having “influential connections,” was nonetheless “obliged to take on all manner of work whose cost, had it been fully carried out, would have far outrun his resources (which, as it is, may well be over-strained).” Bin Laden’s work had fallen to a standstill, apart from those jobs he could pay for with his Aramco installments. Overspending on palaces and luxuries had left the royal treasury, once more, facing an “extreme shortage of cash.”¹

In late 1953 Bin Laden decided to reorganize his company, which was known in Jeddah by the same informal title he had given it when he arrived from Wadi Doan more than two decades earlier: Mohamed and Abdullah, Sons of Awadh Bin Laden. He assigned this task to FuadZahed, an Iraqi engineer trained in the United States. Zahed decided to turn Bin Laden’s “amorphous organization” into professional departments—one for administration, another for construction projects, and a third for new industries. Zahed hoped to persuade the new king to build a cement mill, a tile factory, an iron foundry, a pottery factory, and an aluminum plant. He also wanted to pursue agencies for the exclusive import of industrial equipment from Europe and the United States. Like his employer, Zahed harbored “ambitious plans,” Heath concluded.²

American advisers told King Saud that he could not expect anyone to lend him money until he put his financial affairs in order. Throughout 1954, Saud’s first full year in power, “royal expenditures were immense,” the discouraged American embassy in Jeddah reported:

The King, visiting neighboring countries with his heavily spending entourage, exhausted the state treasury during the spring of the year. While reports of the largesse he dispensed abroad filtered back to Jidda, salaries of Government employees were delayed because of insufficient funds. The Government’s debts to merchants were ignored. A palace building program was begun, and its cost was heavy. Conservative estimates ran from $30 million to $50 million. Others were higher. In the midst of this spending orgy, a few voices could be heard calling for responsibility in high places. But for the most part, those who could lined their pockets.³

Mohamed Bin Laden, of course, stood near the head of this queue. He managed to hold his place despite a major palace shake-up. Encouraged by his half-brother Faisal, Saud forced Suleiman into retirement in the summer of 1954. Yet Bin Laden remained the king’s favored builder; he had an uncanny sense of how to maneuver among the factions of the royal family and its retainers, and he had already distanced himself from Suleiman by the time of his mentor’s fall.

Bin Laden became preoccupied by a frantic attempt to improve electricity supplies in Jeddah. The problem was that when King Saud brought his train of wives, concubines, and slaves to visit his Red Sea palaces, the lights and air-conditioning sometimes flickered out; this greatly annoyed the king. Early in 1954 Bin Laden joined with Mohamed Alireza, patriarch of Jeddah’s oldest and most influential merchant family, to buy shares in the newly formed National Company for Electrical Power, Ltd., under a license granted by Saud. The company raised about 2 million pounds sterling and inherited some Swiss turbines from the government, but its board of directors couldn’t decide on a plausible plan. When Saud and his family camped in Jeddah during the summer of 1954, his household sucked up so much of the city’s electricity that more than half of the town had to go without for twelve to sixteen hours each day. Bin Laden turned to an American firm, Burns and Roe, headquartered on lower Broadway in New York City; its engineers promised to ease the crisis by installing the mothballed Swiss generating equipment. The Burns and Roe engineer who flew to Jeddah found Bin Laden “instrumental in winning over the doubtful shareholders” in his electric company—and anxious to see the city’s supply improved before the king returned in the summer of 1955 and ran all of his air conditioners again.⁴

Mohamed succeeded. Evidently pleased, the king issued a royal decree on July 22, 1955, which named Bin Laden a state minister of the Saudi government. It was not an administrative position, as Saud barely possessed a functioning cabinet, but it did signal Bin Laden’s increasing influence. The contracts he now controlled were large and varied. The West German embassy reported at the end of 1955 that the annual revenue of his enterprise was about $200 million. That may have been an overestimate, perhaps a considerable one—if true, it would have meant that Bin Laden had access that year to the equivalent of more than half of the kingdom’s oil royalties from Aramco. Like the Saudi princes who patronized him, Mohamed Bin Laden possessed a wealth of assets, but he did not always have a lot of cash; princes demanded that their palaces be finished very quickly, but afterwards, they turned into sullen dead-beats. In some seasons, documents depict Bin Laden scrambling to obtain local bank loans of just several million dollars, but in others, he was able to deliver large hard currency payments to foreign accounts. His accounts receivable department always looked good on paper, but his cash holdings were volatile. Still, the $200 million West German revenue estimate certainly reflected the scale of Bin Laden’s visible activity in the kingdom at this time. In addition to his many palace projects and the gargantuan undertaking of the Jeddah-to-Medina road (which proceeded slowly under the twin burdens of poor conditions and late payments), Bin Laden built a water pipeline into Medina, installed electric generators in that holy city, built a new headquarters for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, paved streets in the eastern city of Dammam, and ran a marble factory. He hired American engineers to survey a gypsum deposit where he hoped to build a $1.5 million factory. By now he was also doing so much business with the United States that he retained an American agent to coordinate his purchasing and contracts in that country: International Development Services, Inc., of New York, New York.⁵

Bin Laden and his brother Abdullah had by now become legends in their hometown of Rabat, in Wadi Doan; they were the latest of the many Hadhramis who had walked out from that region’s canyons in sandal-clad poverty to earn a fortune that would allow them to return in glory. The brothers flew together during 1956 in a special Saudi government plane to visit Hadhramawt. Increasingly, however, they had divergent views of the future. Mohamed’s drive seemed unbounded, but Abdullah, who married at least nine times during his lifetime, increasingly felt satisfied with what they had already achieved. He was drawn to the idea of returning to Rabat to enjoy semiretirement and engage in charitable works. The brothers soon decided to go their separate ways; in 1957 Mohamed bought out Abdullah’s share of their company, twenty-six years after they had founded it together. “Mohamed was more ambitious than Abdullah and that’s why they split,” said Khalid Ameri, one of Abdullah’s grandsons. “Mohamed wanted more.”⁶

Abdullah moved home to Yemen not long after this separation. He brought his wives and children with him. His decision reflected a degree of nostalgia that was not unusual among Hadhrami merchants in Jeddah. Many had secured Saudi citizenship through their endeavors, and they enjoyed great wealth, yet they remained foreigners in the kingdom, their sons and daughters excluded from prestigious marriages. There was a sense among many, too, of religious and charitable duty toward the poor kin they had left behind in Hadhramawt’s stark canyons.

Salem Bin Mahfouz, founder of Saudi Arabia’s National Commercial Bank, opened a school in his Hadhrami hometown during this period. Mohamed Bin Laden paid for a water project in his father’s home region of Rakiyah a few years later, although he never visited the place, according to the Bin Ladens who still live there. Abdullah constructed Rabat’s first drinking water supply soon after he arrived in Rabat. He walked through the barren hills with Bedouin guides until he found a suitable spring. He then called in one of the Bin Laden firm’s Italian engineers. He supervised the piping project and also built for his family a new seven-story house with a modern plaster facade. His showy new compound rose on a slope near the center of the village of his birth.⁷

Mohamed preferred Saudi Arabia, which offered him renown and relative luxury. His Jeddah garage filled up with the gleaming accessories of his success: ten 1957 Packard convertibles imported from the United States. He and his two Hadhrami banking associates, Bin Mahfouz and H. A. Sharbatly, president of the Riyadh Bank, “are known as the ‘Three Great Illiterates’ of Saudi Arabia,” wrote the West German ambassador in September 1957. “Due to his energetic and determined character and a mixture of shrewdness and honesty, he has a good reputation.” A second West German report the following summer described Bin Laden’s firm as “the richest company in Saudi Arabia…whose assets and wealth are said to exceed by far those of the entire state,” buoyed by “some sort of monopoly for state orders” granted by King Saud.⁸

As his prominence grew, so did the risk that he might become ensnared in the factionalism and rivalry that constituted politics within the Saudi royal family. There were more than forty Al-Saud brothers who were nominally heirs to the throne, plus scores of mothers, wives, and former wives, all competing for access to the treasury; the potential for an outsider like Bin Laden to err was very great. If he did so, he could lose his contracts, his company—or perhaps his freedom. Shortly after Saud became king, he and his brother Faisal sought to involve Bin Laden in a dispute between them, according to a Lebanese friend of Bin Laden. Mohamed responded by pretending to be ill for a month. He summoned doctors to treat him and hid in his compound until the royal feud had passed. He explained his fears to this friend: “They are King Abdulaziz’s sons—whatever happened, they will not hurt each other. But I am not. My head could go.” Deference and obedience, expressed in florid Arabic, were Bin Laden’s chief political tactics, the balm he applied to soothe royal egos. As a Yemeni of relatively low social status, he did not represent a political threat to the Al-Saud, and so the wealth he accumulated, besides confirming the local cliché of Hadhrami entrepreneurialism, was not particularly relevant in Riyadh. Still, Bin Laden was careful to continually remind the royal family that he knew he served at their pleasure, that he was merely an executor of their decisions. “He told us not to get involved in politics,” his son Yeslam recalled. “We are a construction company. We are businesspeople. We do what we are told to do…This was our upbringing.”

When he did express political opinions, they mimicked those of the royal family. During 1956, when the Al-Saud was locked in a border dispute with Britain over the obscure Buraimi oasis, Bin Laden let it be known to the American embassy that he resented U.S. policy, which he interpreted as insufficiently supportive of King Saud. For the most part, however, he kept his head down.⁹

Perhaps he could sense that the reign of King Saud had become untenable. Increasingly, Faisal emerged as the figure many within the royal family wished to invest with power. As this struggle unfolded, Bin Laden’s challenge was to please both men—a difficult feat, for they were two very different leaders, with distinct ideas about what direction Saudi Arabia should pursue.

SAUD LOVED being king—traveling from palace to palace, presiding over sumptuous feasts, handing out money, and retiring to bed with one of his wives or concubines. He had inherited his father’s height, and he could project regal dignity even as he became obese. Yet he lacked his father’s intelligence and his grasp of international politics. Saud had become heir apparent after the eldest son of Abdulaziz died in the flu pandemic of 1919, but the king had poorly prepared Saud for the throne. His boyhood education was limited to Koran memorization and the desert arts of horsemanship and falconry, at which Saud proved less than outstanding; he had weak eyesight and fallen arches, so he peered through thick eyeglasses and walked awkwardly. He reached adulthood as an illiterate and did not travel to the West until he was in his forties. Abdulaziz assigned him to serve as his principal deputy in Riyadh, but rather than absorbing the subtleties of his father’s statecraft, he was drawn instead to the example of his marriage bed; Saud ultimately fathered just over one hundred acknowledged children by an unknown number of wives.¹⁰

Apart from his automobiles and radio sets, Abdulaziz had mainly ignored Western ideas about modernity, but his eldest son became enamored of consumer luxuries and, gradually, also became addicted to alcohol. Aramco and American government officials initially encouraged Saud’s fondness for baubles and modern conveniences. They saw him as crucial to their access to the country’s oil, and they sought to impress him with the material benefits of an American alliance.

When Saud first traveled to the United States as crown prince in 1947, he rolled into New York on a private railway car. In the observation tower of the Empire State Building, he told his hosts, “I thought my brothers were exaggerating when they told me about New York, but they didn’t tell me half enough. Such a city cannot be real.” Thereafter he peered out his limousine window, pointed at cars, and asked, “Cadillac? Buick? Chrysler?” At a gala dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, the oil men sat Saud at a table decorated with an elaborate scene of a wintertime New England village, replete with a Texaco filling station and a miniature train rolling through cotton “snow”; the train’s controls were at Saud’s place setting, and he spent the evening blowing its whistle and making the engine issue puffs of smoke. Eight acts of entertainment followed dessert, including Chinese dancing girls, magicians, and tumblers, which Saud seemed to particularly enjoy. Aramco’s goal had been to establish a lasting connection with the crown prince; they did this, but they also helped to fire the imagination of a naive man about how a proper, modern king with a large bank account might display the glory of his reign.¹¹

With Mohamed Bin Laden’s help, Saud constructed a $200 million palace called Nassiriyah, outside Riyadh’s old city walls. The compound became an emblem of Saud’s vulgarity, a vast campus of pink and green buildings, with soccer fields and imported American cows. A guest at one of the king’s outdoor feasts watched as Saud issued an order at sunset and beamed in satisfaction as “hundreds of colored electric bulbs burst into light…The minaret suddenly rose up flood-lit out of the dark…in all colors: blue, yellow, green and red; the palace walls were in orange.”¹²

His health deteriorated as his drinking increased, and when he became concerned about his sexual potency, he surrounded himself with European quacks who sold him pills and poked him with needles. American and British diplomats clicked their tongues at Saud’s indiscipline and bad taste, but some of his impoverished subjects reveled in his seeming generosity, and they particularly appreciated his habit of tossing gold coins from his car as he drove past crowds of onlookers. Two-thirds of Saud’s subjects remained nomads or semi-nomads, and less than one in ten school-age children attended a classroom. There were less than a dozen native college graduates in the kingdom and not a university to be found, apart from the centers of Islamic scholarship in the two holy cities.¹³

Saud appeased the tribes by showering them with subsidies, but he proved inept at managing his authority within the royal family. He failed to build alliances among his half-brothers and placed his unqualified sons in positions of military command, exacerbating his relatives’ fear that he might use his large brood to usurp the planned succession to Faisal.

Saud’s reign coincided with the rise of Gamal Abdel Nasser, an army officer who seized power in Egypt and called for revolution and unity in the Arab world, appeals that won him popular acclaim. Nasser’s propaganda attacked the former European colonial powers and their reactionary clients; King Saud seemed to be a conspicuous example. Saud dodged a Nasser-inspired coup in 1955; the foiled conspiracy was a shocking event in politically quiescent Arabia. The king grasped that he had to respond to Nasser’s popularity, but he lacked the necessary insight and skill. He veered erratically, embracing Nasser at one point but later participating in a botched conspiracy to murder him.¹⁴

In Washington, President Eisenhower and his aides set out to make Saud into a staunch anti-communist ally. After Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal with Saud’s vocal support, Britain and France responded with an ill-judged invasion; after their defeat, Eisenhower saw a vacuum in the Arab world that American power might fill. He particularly coveted the use of an air base near the Saudi oil fields. In 1957 he invited King Saud to America once again, and while the dancing girls were not so conspicuous this time, the thrust of American flattery was the same; Eisenhower met the Saudi regent at the airport and escorted him beneath a banner strung across Pennsylvania Avenue: “Welcome King Saud!”¹⁵

Yet the king’s spending careened even more out of control. His yacht was impounded in Europe over unpaid bills owed to an Italian palace architect.¹⁶ The Americans might tolerate such embarrassments, for the sake of oil and air base rights, but increasingly the king’s relatives felt they could not. Their impatience was sharpened by the presence in their midst of an obvious alternative—Saud’s frugal, taciturn half-brother.

Faisal had been born at nearly the same time as Saud, in 1905, but to a different mother, a daughter of the Al-Shaykh family, descendants of Abdul Wahhab, the austere desert preacher of the eighteenth century whose creed had so influenced the peninsula. By the early twentieth century, the Al-Shaykhs had become Nejd’s most prestigious family of religious scholars. Faisal came of age studying religious doctrine and law under the tutelage of his family’s conservative but learned scholars. He acquired the same skills of horse riding and falconry as his brother, but proved to be a more convincing and committed military leader. He was small, thin, with a prominent nose and hooded eyes, which struck visitors as those of a hawk.

Abdulaziz decided as early as 1919 that Faisal was best suited to represent the king in the distant capitals of Europe. Under Philby’s escort he traveled to England as a teenager on a long, damp winter tour that left him with early lessons in formal diplomacy, as well as powerful memories of sea lions at the London Zoo. He represented his father at the Versailles Conference, where the treaty ending the First World War was signed. Back home, Abdulaziz placed him in charge of the Hejaz, but Faisal often seemed indifferent about governing and withdrew into palace and family life. Amid the challenges of the postwar oil boom, however, he came into his own. He served as the kingdom’s representative at the infant United Nations and toured America in a style considerably more mature and businesslike than Saud. At this time Faisal was not abstemious, and he could be a lively companion ready for a practical joke, but he was never remotely as undisciplined as his half-brother. As the years passed, he became increasingly austere and religious, his demeanor dampened by chronic intestinal ailments that left him dyspeptic and gaunt.

He retained strong convictions about the Islamic faith and desert culture he had been taught as a young man. He was a fervent anti-communist and a devoted subscriber to Zionist conspiracy theories. He was also open-minded about how Saudi Arabia might adapt its traditions as it pursued a program of national development. Faisal was innately conservative, in the sense of being cautious, “an unbelievably patient individual,” in the words of the Saudi diplomat Ghazi Algosaibi. “He felt that many problems could be safely left for time to solve.” To the American officials who pressed him for change, he quoted Arab proverbs about the dangers of haste; he told them “he was anxious for the country to go ahead, but to go ahead slowly.”¹⁷

His brother Saud’s reign appeared to require urgent attention, however. By late 1957, when yet another crisis caused by overspending left the kingdom teetering near bankruptcy, the royal family moved to install Faisal as prime minister. Reluctantly, Saud agreed. The implicit arrangement was that Saud could indulge himself, within the limits of an allowance, as a figurehead king, but Faisal would run economic and foreign policy, to restore the treasury and protect the Al-Saud from Nasserism.

Saud retreated temporarily, but he chafed at his half-brother’s ascension. This gathering contest between two regents presented Mohamed Bin Laden with a problem of rich complexity after 1958. He owed his fortune to Saud’s patronage and palace-building sprees, yet Faisal’s habits of piety and work lay much closer to his own. As Bin Laden reportedly told a colleague, “My pocketbook is with Saud, but my head is with Faisal.”¹⁸

FROM THE EXAMPLES of his rulers, Mohamed Bin Laden discerned that multiple marriages could provide not only an outlet for a wealthy man’s lust but also a means to build up political and economic alliances. Increasingly, Bin Laden’s projects took him to corners of Arabia where he had few acquaintances. There he had to win support from local sheikhs. To do so Bin Laden sometimes married the daughter of a desert tribal leader or town mayor, provided her with money and an impressive house, hired her male relatives onto his project, and then, a year or so later, when his work was completed, left her with a generous financial settlement and perhaps a child as well. “He was very canny politically” in some of these marriages, said Nadim Bou Fakhreddine, a guardian of some of Bin Laden’s sons.¹⁹

The full inventory of the approximately twenty-two wives who ultimately bore children with Bin Laden is unknown. Of the marriages that can be at least partially identified, some suggest a traditional arrangement between two Hadhramawt families; some suggest examples of Bin Laden’s tactic of building alliances useful to his construction projects; and others suggest a purely sexual motivation.

Multiple divorces and remarriages of the kind Bin Laden carried out were not unusual in some parts of the Nejd, but social mores in Arabia were changing during the 1950s, particularly in cities such as Jeddah. The practice of taking four wives simultaneously, and of serially divorcing to acquire even more partners, was increasingly seen as backward and anachronistic. Monogamy was modern, and modernity was in vogue. Yet the Hejaz easily accommodated the profligacy of a wealthy Hadhrami immigrant like Bin Laden, in no small part because of the examples of Abdulaziz and Saud.

The Koran’s verses about multiple marriages can be interpreted as discouraging or even prohibiting polygamy. The verses emphasize fairness. A married man should declare his intention to divorce, allow a waiting period to pass, and then confirm his decision: “When you divorce women and they have reached their set time, then either keep or release them in a fair manner.”²⁰ The evidence available about Bin Laden’s marriages suggests that he mainly followed these principles, yet inevitably, some of his wives enjoyed more favor and longevity than others, and some fared better after divorce than others.

During the early years of King Saud’s reign, Bin Laden traveled around the Levant to buy materials and find subcontractors, and during these trips he appears to have married a number of young Arab girls. He had already taken on one Syrian wife by the time he arrived in that country’s coastal city of Latakia in the summer of 1956 and was introduced to the Al-Ghanem family, who were poor and not particularly religious. How Bin Laden met the Al-Ghanems, and why they offered their fourteen-year-old daughter, Alia, to him is not known. Bin Laden took Alia with him back to Saudi Arabia and within a year she was pregnant. During the Islamic year of 1377—corresponding to a period from July 1957 until June 1958—Alia gave birth in Riyadh to a son, Osama.²¹

At the time of this marriage, Mohamed Bin Laden was in a particularly active phase of sexual partnering and fatherhood. He remained married to a woman whom he had taken as a wife more than a decade earlier; she was already the mother of one son, and she gave birth to two more sons in the same Islamic year of 1377, according to records supplied to an American court by the Bin Laden family. Besides this wife and fourteen-year-old Alia Ghanem, at least two other of Bin Laden’s wives gave birth to sons during that Islamic year. Altogether, according to the family records, Mohamed Bin Laden fathered seven children during the year of Osama’s birth—five sons and two daughters. Osama later said that he believed he had been born in the Islamic month corresponding to January 1958. If so, he was apparently one of two sons born to Mohamed by two different wives during that month—the other son, Shafiq, later reported in British corporate records that he was born on January 22, 1958.[2] It would be difficult for any of the children of Mohamed Bin Laden from this time to be entirely confident of their birth dates or even necessarily of the month of their birth; it was not something that Saudis typically kept track of then, and there was no system of government record keeping, either.²²

Alia’s family came from a city heavily populated by the Alawite religious sect, whose members would later dominate the top echelons of the Syrian army and government. The Alawites adhere to an obscure Islamic creed passed along by oral tradition, one that is regarded as heresy by Muslims from mainstream traditions. The Al-Ghanems later denied that they were Alawites and said they adhered to orthodox Sunni beliefs, but these claims were issued at a time when it would have been dangerous for the family to admit to an Alawite heritage, so the matter seems uncertain. During the 1950s, Syrian Alawite girls from poor families sometimes worked abroad as maids or even were sold as concubines, and this later produced speculation that Osama’s mother might have been such a consort. It seems possible, but there is no evidence to support this speculation. Even if Bin Laden did acquire Alia initially as some sort of temporary wife, he recognized her as legitimate once she had a son, and she retained this status within the Bin Laden family for decades afterward. Osama enjoyed legitimacy as a male heir to Mohamed throughout his life, and in legal and business matters, he was not treated as if he belonged to a lesser birth category than Bin Laden’s other younger sons. Still, it is clear that Alia Ghanem did belong to a group of wives who gave birth to a single son or daughter and were then divorced by Mohamed within a relatively short time. Some of these wives quickly remarried, and some drifted from the family’s inner circle. Those wives who were the mothers of Mohamed’s elder sons or who stayed married to him for longer periods might feel superior to wives like Alia, but the advantages these senior wives enjoyed, at least during the 1950s, were mainly of pride and social perception, and were unrecognized by Islamic law, to which Mohamed Bin Laden hewed.

The husband these women shared was on the move continually, and during the late 1950s he diluted the prestige of any one mother by embracing new ones. His family grew to the size of a small village. Osama would later be described in numerous reports as Mohamed’s seventeenth son, but this would mean that he was the first of the five Bin Laden boys born in the Islamic year 1377, and it is not clear how accurately the mothers kept track of such rankings. It seems safest to conclude that Osama arrived among the Bin Ladens as somewhere between son number seventeen and son number twenty-one. Certainly he had to compete for attention. By July 1958, according to the family records, Mohamed Bin Laden had become the father of forty-one children—twenty-one sons, and at least twenty daughters. Nor was he finished.²³

AS HE TOOK CONTROL of the Saudi government in 1958, Faisal discovered that his kingdom was $500 million in debt. The central bank’s vaults had virtually no cash holdings from pilgrim taxes. The government’s accounts at Jeddah’s commercial banks were overdrawn and myriad lenders were owed monies. Since the royal treasury received ever-larger monthly payments from Aramco, if Faisal could settle some of these debts and cut down on royal spending, he might emerge from this crisis fairly soon. To do this he required help from creditors like Mohamed Bin Laden and a dramatic change in behavior by King Saud.²⁴

Saud agreed to the sale of royal property around the kingdom. He surrendered his private office in Jeddah and many of his palaces and guesthouses, and he even conceded that the lights at Nassiriyah should be turned off during daytime hours.

Faisal called in Bin Laden and began negotiations that would last throughout 1958. The crown prince had no cash, so he offered hard assets. Faisal wanted to unload some government-owned enterprises that he felt should be operated by the private sector. To settle debts owed by King Saud for construction work at Nassiriyah, Bin Laden accepted title to the Al-Yamamah Hotel in Riyadh. (Bin Laden later leased the hotel to the U.S. military.)²⁵ Bin Laden may also have helped Faisal fund the government payroll temporarily during this period. This purported assistance by Bin Laden would become part of the family’s legend in Saudi Arabia, quietly promoted by his sons, but contemporary diplomatic records make no reference to such a loan from Bin Laden. If it occurred, the records suggest, it was one piece in a mosaic of barter trades and financing arrangements negotiated between Bin Laden and the crown prince. In any event, Saudi government employees were well accustomed to late paychecks.

At Faisal’s urging, Bin Laden also took on a twenty-year concession to manage a royal farm at Al-Kharj, sixty miles south of Riyadh, where American farmers on King Saud’s payroll raised livestock and grew wheat, oats, vegetables, and even watermelons. Abdulaziz had founded the farm in 1941 with help from American oil companies, and by 1958 it cost about $1 million a year to run. It showed a small paper profit from the sale of produce, milk, and eggs back to the royal family, but Faisal wanted Bin Laden to assume the operating costs. The crown prince offered him favorable terms on its machinery and agreed that the royal family would continue to buy its produce. Bin Laden had as little experience as a farmer as he had had as a road builder when he took on the Medina highway project five years earlier, but he agreed. He promptly neglected Al-Kharj, cut off supplies to save money, and soon told the American employees that he would have to let them go when their contracts ran out. He replaced them with relatives of some of his foreign wives. “The in-laws are a mixed group of Syrians, Egyptians and Palestinians, with no apparent agricultural experience,” reported Sam Logan, the Texas farm manager who was being sent home—an inventory of nationalities that suggests the family of Alia Ghanem, Osama’s mother, may have been among the replacement employees.

Logan felt that he and the other Americans at the farm had been fired purely because of the kingdom’s financial crisis “and that there was no anti-American sentiment behind this action. Bin Laden treated the Americans very fairly and lived up to all agreements, a rare thing in Saudi business dealings.” In Logan’s judgment, Bin Laden had taken on the farm “knowing he would lose money on it, on the condition that he be given certain privileges by the government in some other fields of endeavor.”²⁶

Indeed, Bin Laden’s Al-Kharj agreement coincided with a much more lucrative deal he struck with Faisal in the late spring of 1958. Bin Laden formed a joint venture with two Italian brothers named Roma who gave the impression—incorrectly, as it turned out—that they had financial support from one of Italy’s largest construction companies. Faisal offered a twenty-year barter plan in which Bin Laden would carry out highway construction and other work in exchange for natural gas from the American-run oil fields. At this time, Aramco flared off the gas from its fields because it was difficult to transport and market; the consortium’s priority was oil. The Roma brothers believed they could sell the kingdom’s gas in Europe, generating enough money to profitably finance Faisal’s planned infrastructure projects. These included more than fifteen hundred kilometers of highway construction that would link Riyadh to Jeddah, and Jeddah to the southern port of Jizan, as well as a new university in Riyadh.²⁷

The deal proved to be contentious. Aramco executives believed the natural gas belonged to them; Faisal argued that the kingdom owned it. The Roma brothers feared the dispute would jeopardize Bin Laden’s highway contracts, to which they had pledged $5 million in financing.

In September, Faisal summoned Bin Laden and the Italians to his Taif palace. Bin Laden and Faisal spoke at length in Arabic, after which Bin Laden turned to the Romas to assure them that the crown prince was convinced the natural gas was his, and that “Aramco could not impede [the] completion [of] needed public works, providing jobs [to] many workers,” as would be made possible by Bin Laden’s deal.²⁸

Bin Laden and Faisal needed each other. There were other merchant families in the kingdom who were building up experience in construction and light industry, but if the crown prince were to make a convincing start on a national development program, he needed Bin Laden’s large store of construction equipment, his army of semiskilled and unskilled laborers, and his irrepressible habit of saying Yes, Your Majesty, it can be done. For his part, Bin Laden had no choice but to adapt to Faisal’s priorities and terms. The crown prince’s fiscal austerity drive had ended the palace and housing boom in Jeddah by 1959. Thousands of Yemeni laborers left the city in search of jobs elsewhere as a local recession took hold; local merchants grumbled that Faisal’s reforms might be “good for the country, but not for a merchant class brought up and nourished on the lush profits of ‘the good old days.’” Bin Laden, however, evaded the brunt of this downturn. As before, he had adapted as required to serve the royal family; if highways and infrastructure were now the priority of the day, then they would become his priority, too.²⁹

He was cushioned as well by another patron. By the late 1950s, Mohamed Bin Laden was not only Faisal’s favored contractor. In the three holiest cities of Islam—Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem—he was also blessed, as he put it, by the favor of God.

5. FOR JERUSALEM

THE DECLINE of the Roman Empire produced as much disarray in the deserts of Arabia as it did in the barbarian-ravaged forests of Europe. Rome’s late emperors promoted Christianity as a universal creed, but their decrees proved unconvincing along the camel caravan routes to the east. In the late fifth century A.D., religious faith in Arabia had evolved into a vibrant plurality. There were Jewish and Christian communities, but many Bedouin worshipped portable idols, trees, and stones. A family in an oasis town might rely upon any one of several hundred deities to bless its endeavors; there were moon gods and travel gods and swirling narratives of celestial deities. One organizing force was the entrepreneurialism of religious festival sponsors, particularly those around Mecca, which lay about halfway along one of the great camel routes of the frankincense and myrrh trade. Meccan impresarios divined that a single unified religious fair held once a year, at which all gods would be welcome, might attract more attention—and produce more income—than a looser system of seasonal events. The annual ritual that became the Hajj after the birth of Islam began as a raucous devotional attraction involving hundreds of gods.¹

At the time of the Prophet Mohamed’s birth, in 570, the Ka’ba, or “Cube,” then a flat stone structure with no roof, served as a temple for some of the more popular deities. It contained “pictures of trees and pictures of angels,” according to the Meccan historian Al-Azraqi, as well as a drawing of Jesus and his mother, Mary, and an image of Abraham as an old man. At the annual Mecca festival, pilgrims who worshipped diverse gods joined in a ritual walk around the edifice. One of the deities then recognized in the Hejaz—a god of gods, not represented by a fixed idol—was named Allah. Even before he received the Koranic revelations, Mohamed developed a conviction that Allah was the one true God, and that the hundreds of other idols worshipped locally were false.²

In Koranic tradition, Abraham is credited as the Ka’ba’s creator. In this account, while visiting his son Ishmael in Mecca, God ordered Abraham to build a temple devoted to His oneness. As Mohamed received his revelations, he preached for the restoration of Abraham’s plan. His sermons provoked resistance from Meccan tribal leaders and elders, who seemed to view the Prophet, himself an active businessman, as a sort of anti-capitalist spoiler, one whose ideas could, in particular, ruin their lucrative festival. Meccan opposition forced Mohamed into exile, to the town later named Medina, where he found political support. He prevailed in a series of battles and returned to Mecca in triumph. He entered the Ka’ba and, according to Al-Azraqi, “he asked for a cloth which he soaked in water, and ordered all the pictures to be erased.” With this act Mohamed created an Islamic aesthetic rooted in the eradication of the multihued religious images of his Meccan youth. In the last years of his life Mohamed also announced the detailed new rules of the Hajj, one of the five pillars of the religion that Allah had revealed to him; this annual ritual’s crushing crowds, drawn from around the world, would soon belie the earlier skepticism of Mecca’s festival merchants.³

Islam expanded from Spain to Indonesia; a succession of dynasties ruled Mecca. Egyptian and Ottoman princes took the Hejaz and managed the Hajj after the thirteenth century. They often did so in a style that recalled the pre-Islamic festivals—there were marching bands and opulent parties, and a conspicuous emphasis on profiteering, which caused the reputation of Meccan merchants to fall so low that fleeced pilgrims referred to them as “the dogs of the Hejaz.” When the Wahhabi movement first rose in the Nejd desert in the late eighteenth century, its warriors saw themselves as purifiers in Mohamed’s name; as the Prophet had done, they would rescue Mecca from idolaters. Theirs was a desert world of parched deprivation and intense kin unity that had rarely been penetrated by other cultures. They shocked Mecca’s cosmopolitan pilgrims:

You must imagine a crowd of individuals, thronged together, without any covering than a small piece of cloth around their waist…being naked in every other respect, with their matchlocks upon their shoulders, and their khanjears or large knives hung to their girdles. All the people fled at the sight of this torrent of men…They had neither flags, drums nor any other instrument or military trophy during their march. Some uttered cries of holy joy, others recited prayers in a confused and loud voice.⁴

The Wahhabis destroyed every dome and tomb in the city; their scholars regarded much existing Islamic architecture as heretical, apart from the flat-roofed Ka’ba and mosques constructed in a similar design. Egyptian soldiers eventually drove the Wahhabis away and destroyed their featureless capital in Riyadh, but under the more durable leadership of Abdulaziz, the Islamic militias returned to Mecca in 1924. Again they tore down domes and attacked foreign pilgrims who lingered too long at decorated historical shrines, which the Wahhabis regarded as false temples.

Abdulaziz sought Mecca for its tax receipts and its prestige. He adhered to Wahhabi precepts, but he had no particular interest in the endless scholarly arguments in Riyadh about the status of every last curved roof and revered historical tourist site in his expanding kingdom. As with other aspects of his statecraft, Abdulaziz sought a synthesis: he appeased the Islamic radicals who gave him soldiers and legitimacy, yet he tried not to alienate the Ottoman subjects whom he had inherited. The king’s Wahhabi militias, for instance, wanted to tear down the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, where Mohamed had preached during his exile; they saw it as a kind of heretical tourist trap. Abdulaziz recognized that its destruction would be deeply unpopular and would also crimp the pilgrim trade. He settled on a compromise in which the Wahhabis were allowed to take off the mosque’s dome but were otherwise required to leave it be, and to accommodate its thronging crowds. As a contemporary traveler put it, the king gained credit from the Wahhabis “for having allowed the dome to be demolished, and credit from the foreign Hajjis for protecting the place from complete demolition.”⁵ This would become a basis for Saudi management of Mecca and Medina in the ensuing decades. The Wahhabi aesthetic would predominate, but it might, at times, be bent grudgingly to accommodate Islam’s global diversity, particularly in pursuit of pilgrim revenue.

With ownership of the Hejaz came responsibility for the civic upkeep and improvement of Mecca and Medina. Abdulaziz carpeted the Holy Mosque in Mecca in 1928 and paid for a new gold-plated door in 1944, but otherwise, during the sparse years of the Great Depression and the Second World War, he could afford only light renovations. Amid the postwar boom, however, as the number of pilgrims arriving in his kingdom swelled, the king allocated larger sums. His objectives were not decorative but practical: Both the Medina and Mecca mosques were too small to accommodate the number of pilgrims they now attracted, particularly during the peak Hajj season. Jumbled town houses, market stalls, and twisting lanes surrounded both mosques, preventing their expansion. Encouraged by his sons Saud and Faisal, Abdulaziz agreed to remake both the old towns—Medina first, then Mecca.⁶

By September 6, 1949, when Abdulaziz published an open letter announcing his redevelopment plan for Medina, Mohamed Bin Laden had established himself as the king’s principal builder. Mecca’s and Medina’s mosques and sacred sites were organized as Islamic trusts, or waqfs, overseen by boards of scholars and Hejazi notables, but a construction contract of this size was the king’s decision, abetted by Suleiman. Bin Laden was their man. He was invited to run the entire Medina project, a lucrative grant that would include the demolition and construction work around the mosque itself, and also a new electrical grid, waterworks, and an airport. An official Bin Laden history, as well as contemporary diplomatic correspondence, suggests the Prophet’s Mosque expansion and renovation project alone cost about $19 million during the early 1950s, not counting the even larger sum spent on compensation to landowners whose property was seized and cleared.⁷

The Medina project marked the beginning of the profound architectural and design influence that the Bin Laden family would have on the two holy cities for many years to come. Mohamed Bin Laden brought to the renovation a “modern architectural style,” as his company’s official history put it, involving the heavy use of reinforced concrete and decorative black marble. The brass lamps might be gaudy and the concrete oppressive, but both were certifiably up to date, and thus, during the 1950s, praiseworthy. And not only in Saudi eyes: one contemporary Lebanese visitor called the architecture Bin Laden oversaw “an impressive and luxurious piece of work.” When his redesign was completed in 1955, about two years after the death of Abdulaziz, Bin Laden had constructed more than seven hundred new pillars in the Prophet’s Mosque, as well as a similar number of concrete arches. He had added nine gates, two gravel squares for worshippers, and forty-four windows; altogether, he had expanded by 60 percent the area where pilgrims could mingle and pray.⁸

Because he could not read very well, Bin Laden could not deliver his own speeches in public, and so, in late October 1955, at the celebration called by King Saud to mark the project’s completion, Bin Laden asked a substitute to read out a speech. It is the first known text attributed to Mohamed Bin Laden, a florid symphony of piety and flattery. He told the king:

God wants you and your father to have this honor and God gave you the success to establish this historic building. And your names will be recorded in glorious history and everlasting light. Your name will be within the everlasting light of those who built this mosque in different epochs since the time of the Prophet. I congratulate you on achieving this everlasting honor. Praise be to God alone that this construction was completed in your age.⁹

Bin Laden was not so humble as to avoid any reference to his own role. He listed painstakingly all the improvements he had overseen as he expanded this “very strong and fascinating building.” He emphasized the jobs that the royal family had helped him to create in the Hejaz by financing new factories for carpet making. He highlighted the huge sums spent on compensation for landowners, and he praised the king’s decision “to increase the salaries of the workers of the two holy mosques, so as to provide them with money which made them work honestly—you did not leave any door to reform unopened.” As he neared the end of his exegesis, Bin Laden recounted the work he had done to support both modern and traditional transportation to Medina:

You ordered us to build an airport, which is one of the biggest airports. Large airplanes could use this airport; it is about to be finished. You ordered us also to build the road from Medina to Jedda, which is about to be finished. Also, we built an area for camels to gather and rest…You purchased the land which lies to the east of the Holy Mosque, and you made it a place for camels to rest for the benefit of Muslims…Your Majesty, God’s grace is looking after you.¹⁰

The truth about Saud was less uplifting. In managing public religion, as in so many other areas, the new king struggled to sustain his father’s canny balancing act. Saud’s “enjoyment of movies, music and vaudeville, and his interest in promoting education for girls, sports, and other pursuits, are deviationist from the Wahhabi point of view,” the American embassy noted. To compensate, Saud repudiated in public the conduct he embraced in private. In an open letter, he denounced as “evil” those who listen “on the radio to songs and music; this causes corruption of the soul and morals and keeps people away from God and prayer…Another evil thing is that women are dressing extravagantly and going out of doors with full make-up, some of them without veils; this is the worst of evils and a major cause of corruption and destruction.”¹¹

The king sought to stave off rumors of his impiety by showering the kingdom’s holy sites with conspicuous renovation budgets. As soon as the Medina work was finished, Saud directed Bin Laden to start work on an even more expensive project in Mecca, one that would increase the capacity of the Holy Mosque surrounding the Ka’ba from about fifty thousand worshippers to four hundred thousand. Saud declared in public speeches that his budget for the Mecca and Medina projects totaled more than $130 million. The West German embassy estimated that the real figure was closer to $60 million, but as its report noted, “Even this sum seems to be tremendous in Western terms.” The Mecca project proceeded slowly, crimped by Faisal’s budget tightening after he became prime minister, but it provided Bin Laden a steady supplement to his highway and industrial work.¹²

Between 1956 and the mid-1960s—including the first seven or so years of Osama Bin Laden’s life—a principal aspect of Bin Laden’s Mecca renovation involved demolishing buildings. Bin Laden had undertaken some demolition and clearing work in Medina, starting in 1951; he brought in explosives to knock down houses and markets in the old city, and the following year, he began to cart away the debris. Mecca’s urban clearance project was considerably more ambitious. Ultimately the Saudi government spent more than $375 million on eminent domain payments to Meccan property owners and shopkeepers. Mohamed Bin Laden sometimes brought his young sons to his work sites in these years, and what they saw, there beside the holy Ka’ba, was a succession of controlled explosions and falling buildings, scenes that would thrill many boys. How much of this demolition Osama witnessed is not known, but in later years, he spoke admiringly and accurately, in general terms, about his father’s renovation work in Mecca and at other religious sites during this period. Through 1962, the last year for which statistics are available, Mohamed Bin Laden used explosives to blast away eighty-six thousand cubic meters of mountains and rocks in and around Mecca. He and his engineers also demolished 768 houses in the city, along with 928 shops and stores.¹³

FAISAL WAS DEVOUT. He believed that he could defeat Nasser and exclude communism from Arabia by promoting Islamic values; this was a pillar of both his foreign and domestic policies. He supported Bin Laden’s work in Mecca in part because it promoted Saudi Arabia’s credentials as a steward of Islam. In 1958, shortly after he became prime minister (a professional-sounding title in a thoroughly unprofessional government), Faisal seized on another renovation project that promised similar visibility and prestige, one that appealed in addition to Faisal’s fervent anti-Zionist convictions: the refurbishment of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.

The Haram Al-Sharif, or “Noble Sanctuary,” is a large raised area at the southeastern corner of Jerusalem’s walled Old City. The platform is regarded as the third holiest site in Islam. It contains two important buildings, the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, built in the late seventh century. The Dome’s gold-colored cupola soars ninety-eight feet above the sanctuary’s esplanade, atop what Jewish tradition identifies as a wall of the First Temple built by King Solomon a thousand years before Christ.

The Dome of the Rock’s place in Islamic tradition is more allusive and mystical than the historical narratives of war, politics, and law provided in the Koran about Mecca and Medina. Koranic verses and later interpretations by Muslim scholars hold that the Prophet Mohamed visited the rock outcropping beneath the Dome while on a “Night Journey” on a winged horse from Mecca to Jerusalem, then onward to heaven and finally back to Mecca. After Mohamed’s death, Jerusalem became the site of continual conflict among Jews, Christians, and Muslims; as the centuries passed, the Night Journey narrative, and the Dome itself, attracted powerful allegiance from Muslims worldwide. The more Jerusalem became a locus of religious war, the stronger this allegiance grew. European crusaders captured the Dome in 1099 and turned it into a church before the Muslim hero Saladin retook Jerusalem and restored the site to Islam. Much later, Jewish projects to recognize the site’s ancient temples, some of which dated to the earliest Jewish kingdoms, drew fierce resistance from Muslims.¹⁴

By the early 1950s, the Dome of the Rock had sunk into disrepair. Tiles were damaged or missing altogether, its roof was sagging, and its interior required fresh paint, carpentry, and metalwork. The Kingdom of Jordan then controlled the sanctuary, the Old City, and East Jerusalem. Young King Hussein, who had taken the throne after the assassination of his father, announced a pan-Islamic campaign to renovate the Dome in 1952, a project that had political as well as religious appeal amid the anti-Zionist feeling prevalent in the Arab world. Saudi Arabia and Egypt pledged financial support, but the project languished.

Four years later, Nasser announced his own plan to refurbish the Dome, and later that year, with Jordan’s agreement, he dispatched engineering and architectural experts to Jerusalem to prepare for contracting bids. Nasser’s initiative seems to have galvanized Faisal, for as soon as the crown prince took power in 1958, he worked to ensure Saudi influence over the project. His government backed Mohamed Bin Laden in the bidding. As Bin Laden prepared to make a proposal during the spring of 1958, he was buoyed by financial guarantees from Riyadh.¹⁵

Seven Arab-owned companies submitted bids by the May deadline—two from Jordan, four from Egypt, and Bin Laden’s. He passed an initial cut down to three bidders, but his submission was not initially the lowest in price. Bin Laden corresponded with the decision-making committee about switching materials so as to reduce his bid further. “First, this is a sacred Islamic project, and I am very pleased to participate in the construction of this holy Muslim site,” he wrote on July 8, 1958. He pledged to work “at any cost and provide any materials in order to do this great and honorable service to the Muslim community.” To ensure success, Bin Laden provided an aide with power of attorney and sent him to Jerusalem for the last round of negotiations. He dropped his bid further to ensure that his was the lowest. His final submission was for 276,990.2 Jordanian dinars, just below the 278,225.5 dinars proposed by the Ali Abrahim Company of Egypt. The narrow margin suggests that a decision to favor Bin Laden might have already been made privately. Bin Laden later said that he had deliberately accepted a loss on the contract, as an act of personal religious charity, so it is also possible that he was determined, on his own, to win the honor. In any event, on July 17, 1958, the committee announced that Bin Laden had won.¹⁶

“Your highness, Sheikh Mohammed Bin Laden, it is my pleasure to inform you that the Committee for the Reconstruction of the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque has awarded the work of the construction…to your company,” the committee’s Supreme Judge wrote. “I am hoping this work will be completed in accordance with God’s expectations, and I hope God will help us preserve this Islamic treasure.”¹⁷

For the next nine years, Mohamed Bin Laden oversaw construction and renovations at the sanctuary, first on the Dome of the Rock and the grounds around it, then on the Al-Aqsa Mosque and elsewhere in Muslim areas of Jerusalem’s Old City. He emphasized that the project was an act of personal devotion. “It is well known, Your Highness, that I care a great deal about the Dome of the Rock project,” he wrote to the Supreme Judge in 1959 while bidding on a contract for lighting and electrical work. “I will execute the plan…at my own expense. In addition, I will submit receipts without including any service or labor costs…This is not for financial gain, but for its religious significance.”¹⁸

Bin Laden’s Jerusalem workforce was multinational and multireligious; it included Italian marble specialists, Armenian Christians and Palestinian Christians, as well as Palestinian Muslims. When the call to prayer rang out, Bin Laden would join the Muslim workers in prostrated worship, but the Italians would carry on or take a coffee break. “We learned a bit of Italian,” recalled Nadir Shtaye, a workshop supervisor. “They learned a bit of Arabic.” Bin Laden imported aluminum and marble from Europe, sand and cement from Jordan, wood from Lebanon, and tiles from Turkey, all trucked in from the Jordanian port at Aqaba. He won popularity by sometimes tipping workers on top of their salaries—ten dinars per man. A photograph shows him standing near a bank of microphones at a Jerusalem press conference in the late 1950s; he is dressed in a long white Saudi robe and a fashionable pair of dark sunglasses, carrying a modern briefcase. Photographs taken by his American pilot toward the end of the project show an enormous crane rising above the sanctuary’s esplanade; nearby are turbaned workers hammering to repair the outdoor plaza, amid piles of white sand.¹⁹

King Hussein called for a celebration at the sanctuary after the first round of work was finished. Bin Laden flew into Jerusalem on his own private airplane on August 5, 1964, accompanied by a Saudi cabinet minister and notables from Medina. The Jordanian governor of Jerusalem and his military commander met Bin Laden at the airport. About five hundred Arab dignitaries crowded onto the sanctuary platform the next morning under a hot sun. A Koran reader sang out verses, and King Hussein presented Bin Laden with a medal honoring him for his work on Jerusalem’s behalf. As was by now a ritual of public Arab oratory, the king pledged to reclaim Palestine from Israel: “Let me emphasize that the actual renovation of the Mosque and the Dome of the Holy Rock assumes significance far beyond the physical repair work,” the king said. The renovation project had also advanced the cause of “complete restoration of our full rights in our usurped land.”²⁰

Bin Laden asked the Saudi minister who had accompanied him to read out his speech. He began with quotations from the Koran and a disquisition on the Prophet’s Night Journey. He lavishly praised King Hussein and his family. Bin Laden then moved on to the subject of himself:

God has also honored me, as I carried out the construction project at the two great mosques of Mecca and Medina, the two holy sites which God bestowed upon the Saudi Arabian government…[They] contracted me to undertake this project and thus I was granted the honor of developing the three great mosques in Islam, which draw pilgrims from near and far. This is truly a great privilege from God, who gave it to whom He chose.²¹

He told the audience that the final cost had been about 516,000 dinars, or roughly $1.5 million at contemporary rates of exchange. Bin Laden paused to “point out here the generous, large contribution made by the Saudi Arabian government,” which had covered about half the budget. He then advertised his own charity rather conspicuously:

I wish Your Majesty to know that Yours Truly sacrificed an amount of no less than 150,000 dinars, which was spent willingly for this project, without concern about the material losses. I donated for this blessed work without any thought of the losses, but rather, my goal was spiritual gain, which for me is more important than hundreds of thousands of dinars.

He told the audience that King Hussein still owed him 167,000 dinars, but that he would renounce this debt as an additional act of charity—“my contribution to this great duty.” He said that as he now moved on to work on the Al-Aqsa Mosque, he intended to build a large ten-acre garden nearby, from his own funds, and he asked for God’s help.²²

Bin Laden bought a house in East Jerusalem around 1963 or 1964. It was a spacious, white-stoned, red-roofed building of the sort that sprouted all around the city during the 1950s and early 1960s. It had a spectacular view of Jerusalem in the distance, as well as sandy ground and white-stone buildings nearer at hand. The cease-fire line then prevailing between Israel and Jordan was just a short walk down the street. To the east was Mount Scopus, a U.N.-controlled no-man’s-land, and to the south lay the Israeli neighborhoods of Givat Ha-Mivtar and Ramat Eshkol. Jerusalem’s old Qalandia airport was a short drive away, from where Bin Laden could fly directly to Jeddah, Mecca, or Medina on his private plane.

Bin Laden may have married at least one Palestinian wife during the years he worked on the Jerusalem project, but he stayed in his Jerusalem house mainly on short-term visits; it was otherwise occupied by his servants, company aides, and a guard who kept watch over his cars, according to the house’s current owner, a Christian Arab who is a citizen of Israel and a former owner, a retired Israeli naval officer.²³

Israel seized East Jerusalem from Jordan in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war; after that, Bin Laden never returned. The home was renovated and expanded. For a time, a Palestinian consul of Spain leased a unit. Years later, the house fell under the administration of an Israeli government department that managed land abandoned by Arab owners because of the war. The house was transferred formally to the Israeli government, sold to the naval officer, and later sold by this officer to the current owner. Throughout this time, the Bin Ladens remained firmly and prosperously centered in Jeddah, but in a practical and material way, the family could trace its history to the resonant cause—and perhaps even the unresolved legal claims—of Palestinian refugees from the 1967 war.

6. THE BACKLASH

GERMAN ENGINEERS and Turkish laborers laid the Hejaz Railway, linking Damascus to Medina, between 1900 and 1908. It sped Muslim pilgrims more than eight hundred miles to the two holy cities, with the additional and not incidental capacity to carry the fading Ottoman Empire’s Turkish troops. As the First World War descended into trench slaughter in France, T. E. Lawrence and his colleagues in British intelligence seized upon the early stirrings of Arab nationalism to organize a guerrilla campaign against Turkish outposts, which included a garrison of eleven thousand soldiers at Medina. Bedouin militia repeatedly tore up Hejaz Railway tracks during the early months of 1917. Lawrence of Arabia enjoyed himself thoroughly: “This show is splendid: You cannot imagine greater fun for us, greater vexation and fury for the Turks,” he wrote to a colleague.¹

The main railway lay unusable for decades afterward and became, in Arab eyes, a symbol of colonial-era interference with the Islamic pilgrimage. The newly independent governments of Jordan and Syria, along with Saudi Arabia, pledged a restoration. From Riyadh, Abdulaziz expressed a particularly romantic view of railroads; they were the “only medium, by God’s willingness, whose full advantage will prevail,” he had cabled to President Harry Truman in 1946. His son Saud felt as strongly and later helped to organize the remnants of the Hejaz Railway as a formal religious trust. Its executive committee in Damascus spent several million dollars on engineering studies during the late 1950s; they showed that repairs would cost tens of millions of dollars. European and American officials refused financial support, arguing that modern highways and airports would make a better investment. Yet the American embassy in Jeddah recognized that the project held “much emotional appeal in certain Saudi quarters,” and it feared accusations of interference with Muslim prerogatives if it objected too strenuously. Finally, in 1960, in the midst of Crown Prince Faisal’s campaign to promote Islamic projects as an antidote to Nasser, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria revived their plan to repair the damage Lawrence and his Arab Revolt had done.²

As he had in Jerusalem, Mohamed Bin Laden emerged as an instrument of a religious-minded Saudi foreign policy project. He partnered with a Japanese firm, Marubeni, to bid for the railway repair contract: Bin Laden would undertake the civil engineering work, such as blasting tunnels and building culverts, while his Japanese partners, supervised by West German engineers, would lay the track. An American who worked for Bin Laden in Jeddah reported that the Japanese government, hoping to establish a business foothold in Arabia, had promised to underwrite all Bin Laden’s costs. Bin Laden and his aides shuttled to Damascus. The contract “was Bin Laden’s for the asking,” boasted his American employee.³

A delegation of thirteen from the Hejaz Railway Executive Committee flew into Saudi Arabia late in October 1961. Bin Laden hosted them in Riyadh and Taif, taking them on a tour “to show off some of the roads, mosques and other projects” he had built, the American embassy reported. It looked as if the fix was in: Bin Laden enjoyed “extremely good connections with the Saudi Government and Royal Family and is a figure to reckon with in most public tenders involving construction work.” The railway contract was likely to be awarded under a Saudi system that a separate cable described as “opening the locked stable after the horse is stolen.” Saudi government employees would often trade information about a bid until “the contract is then awarded to the firm assisted by the ‘insiders’ with handsome bonuses going into the appropriate pockets.” A later British government report asserted: “We have good evidence that contracts for this project were allocated on grounds that could not be considered strictly commercial.” Among other things, according to British reporting, “King Saud apparently insisted that Bin Laden” win the bid.⁴

Whatever the reasons, Bin Laden and his Japanese partners did indeed win the contract; on November 14, 1961, they were awarded a $25 million deal. They signed a commitment the following summer, yet no work began. The Japanese proved unable to post a bond. Frustrated, the executive committee turned to a British company with proven railway experience, Thomas Summerson & Sons, to join Bin Laden in a new partnership. Two Summerson executives flew in to negotiate and joined British ambassador J. C. M. Mason in his Damascus apartment on the evening of February 18, 1963. “I spent some of the evening as Devil’s Advocate,” Mason recounted. Among the problems he cited were “the temperamental idiosyncracies of Bin Laden.”⁵

The Saudi construction magnate had annoyed the railway committee, whose chairman said “that Bin Laden was now fairly unpopular.” Syrian and Jordanian members seem to have resented how Bin Laden pulled Saudi royal strings and then underperformed on the work he won. He had become too powerful to challenge, however. The British executives were “quite prepared to ditch” Bin Laden, but they feared “the effect on eventual work in Saudi Arabia of making an enemy of him.” For his part, Bin Laden reportedly claimed “that Saudi support would be withdrawn from the project unless he had a share in it.”⁶

THE RAILWAY PROJECT fell apart a few weeks later. Crown Prince Faisal, too, appears to have been fed up with Mohamed Bin Laden; he pulled the contract from him “under severe reproaches,” according to a West German assessment.⁷ The Hejaz Railway was far from the only cause of Faisal’s frustration with Bin Laden. There was a sense emerging in at least some sections of the kingdom that Bin Laden promised too much, did shoddy work, and too often failed to finish on time. His wealth and privileges had also become exceptionally conspicuous. He owned three Beechcraft propeller aircraft as of March 1961—more than any other individual in the kingdom outside the royal family. He hired American pilots to fly him from one job site to another, sprawling encampments of laborers in the deserts over which he ruled. He worked energetically, but his improvised methods increasingly drew questions and complaints from the international consultants who were attempting, at the urging of Crown Prince Faisal, to inject the best modern engineering standards into Saudi building projects.

For the first time in Bin Laden’s long career, he had become a public figure of controversy, within the bounds of the kingdom’s heavily muted politics.

“We read on every occasion that construction projects in our country are opened up for bids—that Bin Laden’s office had a ‘lesser bid’ and got the project,” wrote Ahmad Mohamed Jamal in a front-page column in the Meccan newspaper Al-Nadwa on November 15, 1961:

This at a time when observers are screaming at that office’s slowness in carrying out the projects it had undertaken two, three or more years previously. They also scream to high heaven at the dispersal of the efforts of [Bin Laden’s] engineers, workers and equipment among numerous projects in distant cities and roads far apart in the kingdom. They scream, too, complaining about the lack of quality of the work, faulting engineering and inefficient organization of most of the asphalting operations.⁸

The larger problem was “the practice of giving the road projects in the whole of our country to one contractor.” Ultimately, Jamal concluded, the problem was not only the quality of Bin Laden’s work but also the quality of Saudi Arabia’s government:

Have mercy upon us, you responsible officials of the Ministry of Communications. Have mercy on our country; have mercy on our projects. Spare our roads from the sole contractor, from him of the “lowest bid,” from him whose previous project commitments are also paralyzed. Have mercy upon us, so that God may have mercy upon you.⁹

Accusations that pungent did not typically appear in Saudi Arabia’s heavily censored newspapers without government sanction. Faisal and his allies were one possible source of backing for this criticism; Saud had temporarily pushed Faisal out of the cabinet, and at the time the article appeared, the crown prince was fighting to restore his authority. His allies promoted him as a cure for government inefficiency and corruption. A new minister of commerce, Ahmed Jamjum, from a merchant family that competed with Bin Laden, sought to break the stranglehold on contracting at the self-dealing Ministry of Communications. Yet there was more to this than factional competition: the public criticism signaled a broad discontent with the quality and pace of the kingdom’s road-building program.

Highways in the early 1960s were a potent symbol of modernity. America’s interstate highway plan was now much advanced, and the big-finned Cadillacs and convertibles that streamed along those freeways from coast to coast seemed to epitomize American individualism and prosperity. John F. Kennedy, hatless and handsome, waved to crowds from an open sedan; in Hollywood films and television shows, the convertible was cool. The notion that a national highway network could speed up modernization had particular appeal in Saudi Arabia. For the kingdom’s heavily nomadic population, so long accustomed to freedom of movement, the automobile beckoned. The kingdom’s population was small—only about 4 million—and dispersed over vast desert territory. Highways were not only exciting; they were essential.

Faisal’s austerity budgets cooled the economy, but oil revenue continued to rise. By 1961 the government could afford a leap in highway construction—if only it could figure out how to build the roads efficiently. The kingdom announced plans for a network of highways totaling more than two thousand miles, but its bureaucrats fought to a standstill over how to let the contracts. An American road engineer, Harold Folk, hired as the kingdom’s chief development adviser, recommended European consultants who could oversee work by local builders to ensure it met international standards. Faisal returned to the cabinet in the spring of 1962 and embraced Folk’s goals, but he balked at the Europeans’ fees. Apart from his innate parsimony, Faisal shared the widespread fear within the Saudi royal family, grounded in experience, that Western consultants often jacked up their rates unscrupulously when they did business in the kingdom. “One Roadblock After Another” was the title of a confidential U.S. embassy report on the accumulating fiasco. Privately, Faisal pressed American officials for help. He wanted his government to create a proper highway department that would own a fleet of road-building machinery so that it would not be so dependent upon private contractors like Bin Laden. He appreciated all the consultants, he said, but the “problem was not finding out what needed to be done,” which he already knew, “but getting it done quickly.”¹⁰

Faisal also pressured Bin Laden. During the summer of 1962, he revoked Bin Laden’s dormant concession to mine gypsum north of Jeddah. The contractor had a “duty not to delay,” Faisal’s published royal decree declared, yet Bin Laden had nonetheless “shirked” his responsibilities.¹¹

The most visible example of Bin Laden’s failure to deliver was his performance on the forty-five-mile mountain road linking Mecca with the resort town of Taif, a magnet for royal family vacationers. The road rose from the sandy flatlands near the Red Sea, twisting through steep, treeless, crumbly mountains, climbing almost five thousand feet. For decades the only way to traverse this distance had been on donkeys and camels; this was how Faisal and his royal train had often traveled it during the reign of Abdulaziz. By one contemporary Saudi account, it was Faisal’s idea to pave the road. West German engineers pronounced it a formidable job—about thirty tunnels would have to be blasted through the mountains, great mounds of debris removed, and difficult problems of grading overcome. The Germans wanted the work but feared losing out to “dumping bids” by a local contractor who would blithely underestimate the costs and degree of difficulty.¹²

Their worries were justified. Bin Laden, as ever, insisted that he could do the job, and he won a deal worth more than $10 million in 1959; he pledged to finish the work by early 1961. He missed that deadline, however, and when a Swiss television crew turned up late that summer to film his work, they found Bin Laden and his workers stuck at a particularly steep section of the escarpment twelve miles west of Taif. Italian and Egyptian crew chiefs roared away atop German and American graders and bulldozers, but it was obvious that they were a long way from finishing. Months passed, and still Bin Laden could not complete the road. Great stores of dynamite were exhausted to dig tunnels and blast away the mountainsides. The road lay a short distance from Jeddah; for Mohamed’s young boys, it was another site of thrilling explosions, in this case to move mountains.¹³

Three years later, Bin Laden was still at it. Occasionally he would host Saud or Faisal at roadside banquets, where he would pull out maps to describe the wonder of engineering that he was attempting, but the plain fact was that Bin Laden was far behind schedule, and nobody could be sure what quality of road he would finally deliver.

By one account, Faisal and Bin Laden argued about the project, with Bin Laden insisting that it was a matter of personal pride that he should finish what he had begun, even if he had to pay for it out of his own pocket. This has a slight ring of mythmaking, but there can be no doubt that there were strains between Faisal and Bin Laden at this time, and Bin Laden may have had to bear substantial losses because of his delays. He had first established himself with the royal family and its retainers by handing out commissions and sharing revenue. With Faisal, who was the least corruptible of senior Saudi princes, perhaps by many orders of magnitude, what mattered was not money, but Bin Laden’s dependability, recalled Hermann Eilts, who knew both men when he served as American ambassador to the kingdom during the 1960s. Faisal knew that Bin Laden was not always as precise as his German or Swiss counterparts, yet he had been working in the kingdom faithfully for a long time, and “the point was, the roads were there.” Then, too, Faisal felt a “certain amount of national pride” that for all of the enormous technical challenges on a project like the Taif road, “a Saudi firm was doing it.” Faisal and Bin Laden were each pious workaholics devoted to Saudi Arabia’s advancement. The trouble between them would pass, and their alliance would only deepen as Faisal consolidated power during the 1960s.¹⁴

Bin Laden’s loyalty to Saudi Arabia was particularly at issue after late 1962, when Nasser inspired an Arab nationalist revolution in Yemen and then intervened in that country with tens of thousands of Egyptian troops, igniting a proxy war with Saudi Arabia. Nasser cranked up his propaganda broadcasts attacking the Al-Saud, launched aerial bombing raids on Saudi territory, dropped more than one hundred pallets of weapons along the Red Sea coast to encourage revolt, and conspired with sympathetic Saudi princes to overthrow the government in Riyadh. The years-long crisis that unfolded after Nasser’s intervention in Yemen was the most serious external threat yet faced by the modern Saudi kingdom. As he fashioned a survival strategy, Faisal would once again employ Bin Laden’s company and its vast fleet of construction equipment as instruments of Saudi defense and foreign policy—as the kingdom’s Halliburton.

PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY initially regarded Nasser as a modernizer who might lift Egypt out of poverty without succumbing to Soviet communism. Kennedy doubled American aid to Nasser’s regime, and even after Egyptian troops poured into Yemen and bombed Saudi towns, he urged Faisal to be patient as America tried to negotiate a compromise. This was a risky and even myopic strategy, as the Saudi government seemed to be cracking under Nasser’s pressure. King Saud, more erratic than ever, flirted with Moscow. The CIA reported that Saudi merchants were shifting money to Lebanon to protect themselves against a crisis. A group of self-styled “free princes” led by the influential Talal bin Abdulaziz decamped for exile in Beirut, where they held a press conference to announce that they were freeing their household slaves; the princes tacitly promoted themselves as a progressive Saudi government-in-exile. A desperate Faisal launched a publicity drive in the kingdom to improve his government’s image. He banned slavery and released his own household servants; Mohamed Bin Laden did the same, allowing the Saudi government to compensate him for their release. Faisal staged a rally in Jeddah and drove along its main streets in an open convertible. The crown prince presided over a festival of singing and dancing, and even seized on a campaign-style slogan: “We are your brothers!”¹⁵

Reports reached Faisal in early 1963 that Egyptian planes had dropped poison gas on Saudi-backed opposition forces in Yemen and on the Saudi town of Nejran, near the Yemen border. The Kennedy administration still counseled patience. Faisal blew up at a delegation from Washington. “He is evil,” Faisal declared of Nasser. “His desires are evil.” The Saudi royal family “opened our accounts in Swiss banks and others and gave him permission to take out any amount in dollars and sterling,” Faisal said, but still Nasser was unsatisfied:

What more does the man want? Obviously not our oil, as some people say; nor our money, because when he was a friend, he had easy access to it. Therefor it is obvious that he wants to satisfy his evil nature, his wicked instinct—to crush us…You are greatly mistaken to think you can subtly or gently guide Nasser back to the path of reasonableness or wisdom. The only way you can make Nasser listen to you or come around to your path is by sheer force…I know Nasser more than you do. I was his closest friend.¹⁶

Kennedy would eventually come around, but in the meantime, Faisal turned to Bin Laden to shore up his kingdom’s southern border. That autumn he pulled road-building and infrastructure contracts out of the highway department and handed them directly to Bin Laden; Faisal said he would “personally take care” of building roads in the war zone, with Bin Laden’s assistance. When Saudi inspectors flew down to look at Bin Laden’s work, they found it wanting, but he told them that “he and not the Road Department would decide” how to proceed. The department’s chief engineer regarded his work on the Yemen border as “a repetition on a smaller scale of the road fiasco that occurred in constructing the two modern highways leading north and southwest of Medina,” but there was nothing he could do about “royal intervention.”¹⁷

Faisal, the American embassy believed, had turned to Bin Laden “to ensure fast action on what he probably considers to be an urgent project for the defense of Saudi Arabia.”¹⁸ Also, with personal ties to Yemen, Bin Laden would be a credible figure locally as he raised a labor force and supervised construction. It was the beginning of a series of private contracts in which Faisal asked Bin Laden to build infrastructure to defend Saudi Arabia against the spillover from Yemen’s guerrilla war. Bin Laden’s laborers had to work at times in areas under direct bombardment. Later Bin Laden was joined in the region by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which delivered American and British missiles and military infrastructure to the southern frontier. This was a role that the Bin Laden family would play for the House of Saud, in collaboration with the United States, for many years to come.

7. A MODERN MAN

THE FINAL ACT of Faisal’s conflict with his half-brother Saud was inflected with macabre farce. Alcohol had ravaged Saud’s stomach and produced episodes of internal bleeding, yet he could not stop drinking. His aides used a forklift to carry him onto his royal plane, a de Havilland Comet. The king and his entourage embarked on a tour of American and European hospital suites—cataract and stomach surgery in Boston, for which Aramco advanced $3.5 million; then further treatment in Lausanne, Switzerland; recuperation in Nice; and a long stay in a Vienna hospital. Periodically Saud would become coherent enough to plot a return to power. Faisal became so furious he could no longer speak Saud’s name. Saud decided to arm himself, and smuggled weapons into the Nassiriyah palace to equip his sons and bodyguards, but Faisal rallied the National Guard and the army against him. The rest of the family agreed that with an undeclared war against Egypt on their hands, Saud’s conniving and decadence could no longer be tolerated.¹

As ever, the Al-Saud relied on the kingdom’s Islamic scholars, or ulema, to provide them with legitimacy as they prepared to make their move. On November 3, 1964, the ulema issued a fatwa on Radio Mecca deposing Saud and naming Faisal his successor. It took months for Saud to accept his fate and go into exile, initially to Greece, and then subsequently to Egypt, where he joined with Nasser against his homeland. His disappointment over his forced abdication was presumably assuaged by his bank account: the American embassy, citing sources in the Saudi central bank, estimated Saud’s wealth in exile at $100 million in cash and $300 million in invested securities.²

Years later, some members of the Bin Laden family quietly circulated stories suggesting that Mohamed Bin Laden had played an important role in persuading Saud to give up his throne. This looks clearly to be a case of mythmaking. The notion that Bin Laden played any role at all in Saud’s abdication “is not the case,” said Faisal’s son Turki. “The man was a worthy man…But he was always the construction man. When there was a job to be done, Bin Laden would do it, and he did it at the orders of whoever was king.” As a 1965 American assessment put it, Saud’s overthrow “involved a surprisingly small number of decision makers.” These were “certain princes of the House of Saud and a few ulema; no other estates had won the right to be consulted.” As for businessmen like Bin Laden:

Economic power with a limited degree of political influence is enjoyed by the large merchant families concentrated in the Hejaz. These merchants have no present prospect of joining the ranks of the king makers and for the present feel a near complete identity of interest with their rulers…To ensure this identity of interests, a leading merchant family either stations one of its members in Riyadh to stay abreast of government contracts or even details one of its own to watch over its interests…through having royal partners, as well as by bribery where necessary.³

Faisal’s power was now uncontested, but the kingdom he had inherited languished in poverty and backwardness. Despite almost two decades of steadily rising oil revenue, the Al-Saud had done little to improve the lot of their subjects. Literacy rates were no higher than 10 percent, and the great majority of school-age children went uneducated. The few schools that functioned still concentrated on Koran memorization and the other religious texts through the third grade; Faisal opened the kingdom’s first vocational academy only in 1962. Disease and poor sanitation remained prevalent; clean drinking water was not widely available; and four out of five Saudis were believed to suffer from trachoma, the eye disease that had afflicted King Saud.⁴

The kingdom’s Bedouin population disdained manual and technical office work, preferring the freedom of self-employment as truck and taxi drivers; as a result, the kingdom suffered from a basic labor shortage, even amid high rates of unemployment. (This was the gap that Bin Laden’s vast desert camps of multinational immigrant workers helped fill.) Faisal sought to follow an Islamic version of the modernization drives championed by Nasser and India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, but he lacked the educated classes of civil servants, military officers, and technocrats that the British Empire had bequeathed Egypt and India. For the foreseeable future, foreigners like Bin Laden and the Lebanese builder Rafik Hariri would play major roles, along with a few Nejdi families who were moving into construction.

After six years of effort, Bin Laden at last finished the treacherous road between Mecca and Taif. During the first days of June 1965, King Faisal, senior princes, diplomats, and Jeddah dignitaries gathered under tents at a scenic way station to celebrate Bin Laden’s achievement. Reporters for government radio interviewed Bin Laden, and the king “formally inaugurated” the mountain road with “considerable fanfare,” as one guest described it.⁵

War emergencies and his own persistence had rehabilitated Bin Laden’s public reputation. He was once more indispensable. Like his new king, the third he had served, he would strive to be a pillar of Islam and a modern man.

BIN LADEN wanted for his sons, but not for his daughters, the formal education he had never enjoyed. On his business trips to Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt, he visited the advanced boarding schools of these postcolonial Arab societies. He decided as early as the 1950s that he would use his wealth to educate many of his sons outside of Saudi Arabia. The boys’ mothers had a role, too, in deciding how ambitious their education would be, and where they would enroll. By the mid-1960s, Mohamed had more than twenty young sons scattered with their mothers in households from Cairo to his own walled compound in downtown Jeddah. The Egyptian mother of Mohamed’s sons Khaled and Abdulaziz enrolled her boys in Cairo schools. Several of his other boys—Bakr, Omar, and Yahya—attended school in Syria. The largest group, however, attended boarding school in Lebanon.⁶

Yeslam, one of the Lebanon contingent, recalled being placed aboard an airplane from Jeddah to Beirut at age six without understanding why he was being sent away from home. He screamed in panic on the flight and didn’t see his mother again for a year, a separation that would leave him susceptible to panic attacks and a fear of flying throughout his adult life.⁷ Mohamed arranged a guardian for the boys in Lebanon, Nour Beydoun, who ran a small travel agency. The children attended several different schools. Many ended up initially at a boxy stone high school, Upper Metn Secondary School, in a sedate Druze village removed from Beirut’s temptations.

Tuition was about fifteen hundred dollars per boy for nine months’ full boarding, plus an additional fee for summer terms, an exorbitant amount by Saudi standards of the day. The school’s principal flew to Jeddah several times a year to pick up his fees in cash. He remembered that Mohamed “wanted someone to teach them religion,” which was not a notable feature of Lebanese schools, so the principal specially recruited a Syrian Islamic teacher to provide Koranic instruction. Mohamed Bin Laden also wanted to avoid giving them “much money, so they will be spoiled.” He instructed the principal to buy clothes as necessary and to dole out a small allowance, but not to indulge the boys. The school did provide them with a taste of Lebanon’s pleasures, however, including weekend trips to stock car races in Beirut and summer outings to beach resorts.⁸

The boys knew their father as a distant, stern, even regal figure. Mohamed gathered his sons together several times a year, when they were home from school. In the style of the royal family, and of many other Saudi dignitaries, he received the boys in informal diwaniyahs, a courtlike gathering in which everyone sits around the edges of the room, usually propped up on pillows on the carpeted floor. Mohamed took a place of primacy and the boys sat obediently around him, pouring coffee for adult guests or presenting themselves to their father for inspection or instruction. “Most of us were afraid of him, I would say,” Yeslam recalled. “He would punish us. He would lock somebody up, maybe.”⁹

Bin Laden placed a heavy emphasis on frugality, work, religious piety, and self-reliance. Yet he wanted his boys to prepare themselves to inherit his business, and he understood that they would require more technical training than he had received. He “brought us up in a conformist way [but] with more concentration on education” than he had known, his son Abdullah recalled.¹⁰

Mohamed was not rigid or humorless. When his young son Shafiq impertinently spoke up to demand his allowance money, his father praised his spiritedness. He took the boys to his desert camps and allowed them to drive his wondrous big machines. He impressed upon them, too, the rituals and the glory of Islam. Mohamed prayed faithfully and expected the boys to do the same. Each year, at the Hajj, he proudly hosted scores of prestigious guests in an elaborately provisioned family tent. The scene was a Saudi version of that later found at Western sports events, where corporate executives hosted clients and friends in stadium luxury suites. Mohamed’s boys often joined their father in Mecca for the Hajj, a large brood of handsome and growing sons circulating through the family hospitality tent, their presence at Mohamed’s side reflecting honor on the patriarch.

Mohamed gave particular attention to his older sons. Succession in a business family like the Bin Ladens worked in a way similar to that in the royal family in the sense that there was a presumption that older boys would be favored, but there was also some flexibility, so that the most capable person might be placed in charge. During the 1960s, two of Mohamed’s sons, Salem and Ali, seemed to be the most favored by their father. Ali was the only son of an early wife, and he did not enjoy the fancy boarding school educations of his half-brothers—his father seems to have designated him as the son who would work most closely by his side on field operations. As the war-related infrastructure projects near Yemen grew in size, Ali ran the company’s regional office in Taif, an important role. He was a thin, dark-skinned young man who did not spend much time with his brothers. But if Ali seemed to be positioned by his father to become a sort of chief operating officer of the company’s vast labor and construction camps, there was no question about whom Mohamed was training to become the firm’s eventual chairman and chief executive, the heir to Mohamed’s crucial political and marketing role of cultivating favor within the royal family. This was Salem, Mohamed’s eldest son by Fatima Bahareth.¹¹

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, it became fashionable in certain progressive branches of the House of Saud to dispatch sons to America and Britain for high school and university educations. Faisal sent his boys to Princeton, Georgetown, and elsewhere. Bin Laden could see that the future of Saudi Arabia lay with Faisal. If his family were to keep up, his own sons would have to be comfortable in a Riyadh court influenced by Faisal’s English-speaking, university-credentialed boys. Bin Laden himself could speak only a few words of English, and while he traveled frequently to Arab capitals, he seems to have rarely, if ever, visited Europe. He preferred to keep most of his boys in Arabia or the nearby Levant, where there were guardians and mothers and other loyal relatives near at hand. For Salem, however, he made an exception. He dispatched his heir apparent to boarding school in England, to endow him with a proper British education.

In doing this, Mohamed Bin Laden initiated his Arabian family’s integration with the West.

AN ELDERLY London resident of subcontinental origin, Rasma Abdullah acted as Salem’s guardian in England and arranged for his schooling there. Salem seems to have arrived in Britain during the late 1950s, at about age twelve or thirteen, and to have initially enrolled at the elite English boarding school in Somerset, Millfield School. Salem’s principal memory of Millfield, as he described it to a friend and business partner years later, was of a female choirmaster who taught him Christian hymns, which Salem referred to as the “group sing.” Not surprisingly, given his lack of preparation, he did not stay at Millfield long. Sometime around 1960, Salem moved to Copford Glebe, a much smaller and less well-known private boarding school for boys in Essex, near the town of Colchester. He stayed here for several years. He came of age in an environment far removed from the milieu of work and Islam presided over by his father back home.¹²

The school lay at the end of a curved stone driveway amid rolling green fields. It had once been a minister’s parish home, and the main building was a handsome white three-story Georgian, surrounded by smaller cottages and some trailers hauled in to serve as classrooms. There were only about forty boys during the years Salem attended—about half from overseas, the other half refugees from the better English schools. Salem’s classmates included a relative of the deputy chief of the Iranian secret police, a scion of the founder of Liberia, a wealthy boy from Istanbul, and the heir to a great Portuguese arms-trading fortune. Rupert Armitage, a classmate who had transferred from Eton, found the place an “amazing sort of pastiche of an English school…with this ridiculous overtone of chaos, because, I mean, there were all of these crazy people there.”¹³

The boys lived in small old dormitories in groups of four or five. Salem shared a dorm with a few other wealthy boys from Islamic countries. They had a small stove on which they occasionally cooked eggs stolen from the headmaster’s coop. Salem smoked a pipe—Flying Dutchman was his tobacco brand—and later took up cigarettes. The days began with a miserable run, rain or shine, around the playing fields; Salem was usually in a state of comical disarray, staggering out in mismatched shoes and socks. The boys changed into blue blazers, ties, and slacks for classes, then endured another round of athletics in the afternoon. Salem’s closest friend was a big Turkish boy named Mehmet Birgen, whom Salem nicknamed “Baby Elephant,” and whom he occasionally goaded to fight rival boys on his behalf. It was an awkward time for many of them, particularly those, like Salem, who had no prior experience of the West. Salem amused his English friends by climbing up on the toilet seat to squat on his haunches, as he was accustomed to doing at home. He was not athletic but he was popular nonetheless—full of adventure and mischief, and particularly devoted to chasing after the residents of the nearby all-girls boarding school. Occasionally they would arrange dates with these girls to go bowling or to the movies in Colchester, and afterward they ate hamburgers at Wimpy’s.

Salem’s father seems to have authorized a more indulgent budget for his eldest son’s British education than he did for his boys in Lebanon—or else Salem’s mother figured out how to outwit her husband; in any event, Salem had considerably more pocket money than some of his Copford Glebe classmates, and even more important, he had a car, an ancient German DKW. His car was a semisecret, not officially authorized by the school, and Salem kept it hidden on a lane outside the grounds. He and his friends would sneak out on weekend nights and drive into London, where they sometimes searched for sex, but all that happened each time, according to one of his coconspirators, was that club bouncers and bartenders lightened Salem’s wallet.

The Beatles and the Rolling Stones ruled England, and at Copford Glebe, Salem’s friends formed “The Echoes” to chase their own rock-and-roll dreams. There was some genuine talent in the group—Rupert Armitage later became an accomplished classical guitarist, and another member, Paul Kennerley, would enjoy success as a singer-songwriter-producer and marry the multitalented Emmylou Harris. Salem was never a formal band member, as he did not have that sort of ability, but he played the harmonica at jam sessions and begged for guitar lessons. He did not have the patience for sustained study, however. He just wanted to rock.

8. CROSSWIND

BY THE MID-1960S, Mohamed Bin Laden flew around Saudi Arabia in his seven-passenger Twin Beech propeller plane the way other businessmen might travel to sales calls in a shiny Lincoln. On a typical morning a driver picked him up at his Jeddah compound at daybreak and took him to the city’s airport, not far from Abdulaziz’s old Khozam Palace, with the conspicuous car ramp Bin Laden had built long ago. The airport served as a base for several dozen American pilots who flew for Saudi Arabian Airlines under a contract managed by the American carrier Trans World Airlines. Bin Laden had arranged for TWA to maintain his aircraft and to supply him with pilots. The tail number of his principal Twin Beech was HZ-IBN, which incorporated the international code for Saudi Arabia. The plane was designed for a single flier, with no copilot, but it had a passenger seat up front, and this was where Bin Laden liked to sit, staring out the cockpit window with a cup of Arabic coffee in his hand. He sometimes enjoyed frightening the aides and drivers who would fly with him to his job sites by grabbing the airplane’s wheel during flight and shaking it.¹

Bin Laden got along well with his American pilots, but working for him was not a particularly popular assignment. He often flew out from Jeddah in the mornings to one of his desert sites and then spent the whole day there, meeting with engineers or walking along a highway under construction, talking with his crews. His pilot would have to wait for hours in a trailer or tent, and then fly back to Jeddah at sunset. “It was completely boring,” recalled Stanley Guess, who flew the Twin Beech during the mid-1960s. Sometimes there were small enjoyments, such as flights to Jerusalem or Beirut. Bin Laden would at times take one or two of his wives to his desert camps; on those mornings, he would escort the women, covered head to toe in black, into the rear of the Twin Beech, and then pull black curtains across the cabin to protect their modesty.²

His camps lay spread across the desert like the oasis dwellings of nomad clans. At some, Bin Laden worked in a trailer office powered by a small generator, with an air conditioner blowing. In the cooler mountains of Asir, his aides drove stakes into the sand and erected large white canvas tents. On the floor they laid out richly colored carpets and cushions, on which the boss could sit and receive visitors like a proper desert sheikh. Outside these tents, in addition to the occasional herd of camels, stood some of Bin Laden’s fleet of red Ford pickup trucks.

Bin Laden sometimes held a morning majlis in his tent, where workers or local tribes petitioned him for aid or asked him to settle disputes. “He was the law,” Guess recalled. “Sometimes he’d give out some money or whatever it took to make everyone happy. They looked to him for judgment.” Afterward he might settle down for a cup of coffee and a smoke from one of his four-foot-tall, elaborately painted water pipes. At some of his camps he kept green webbed-plastic lawn chairs of the sort then sprouting on the patios of American suburban homes; photographs from this period show Bin Laden relaxing at his camps on these, his water pipe in his mouth, his head draped in a traditional red-checked headdress. His body had begun to thicken and his goatee was flecked with gray. His wandering dark glass eye made him appear slightly inattentive. He dressed in a one-piece tailored robe that fell to his ankles—sometimes the traditional Saudi white, other times a slightly more fashionable design with checks or a hint of color; he strapped a fancy metal watch on the outside of the sleeve. On his feet he wore white socks and brown leather loafers. When he wasn’t smoking, he calmed himself by fingering a string of worry beads.³

He had plenty to be anxious about; he was again overstretched during 1966 and early 1967. Faisal had given him a lucrative contract to lay a highway from Taif nearly 500 miles to the capital of Riyadh. At a place called Kilo 170, on a featureless desert plain 170 kilometers from Taif, Bin Laden built a large engineering camp with a depot of Caterpillar bulldozers, graders, and asphalt trucks. There were crews of drivers and mechanics, and hundreds of migrant laborers who slept in tents nearby. He had to tend his workers as if they were a militia camping between battles; cooks prepared meals, and truckers hauled in water from distant towns. There was no airport nearby; Bin Laden’s pilots landed the Twin Beech on sections of asphalted highway or on a leveled desert strip marked with rocks.⁴

In this period, Bin Laden also regularly flew hundreds of miles east to the United Arab Emirates, along the Persian Gulf, where King Faisal had once again hired him to implement a Saudi foreign policy project—this time to build a sixty-mile, $6.7 million highway with Saudi government funds, to advance Saudi influence in the smaller Gulf kingdoms, from which the British were withdrawing. Bin Laden struggled with this Gulf highway; the site was too far for him to reach easily with his fleet of construction equipment. He formed his first foreign subsidiary in the port city of Dubai to carry out the project, but he worked slowly, and then, after missing some announced deadlines, he turned the entire job over to a local subcontractor.⁵

Bin Laden’s greatest preoccupation by far, however, lay in the southern province of Asir, along the border with Yemen. Early in 1966, he was formally awarded a $120 million contract to build a difficult highway, designed by German consultants, from Taif down through the mountains to Abha, the provincial capital of Asir. One spur would then drop down a steep escarpment to the port of Jizan on the Red Sea, where Bin Laden and his brother Abdullah had first landed in Saudi Arabia as immigrant boys many decades earlier. Another road would wind east through rugged mountains to the border town of Nejran. The project was the most lucrative announced contract of Bin Laden’s long career, and by one account he pledged not to take on any other new highway work until it was discharged. His crews worked on the main road from both ends. His son Ali oversaw the portion that extended south from Taif, while other crews worked in the Yemen border and coastal areas, attempting to cut a track up the steep cliff sides from the sea, which involved feats of blasting and engineering similar to those that had earlier daunted Bin Laden on the Taif road.⁶

Asir’s tan-and-black volcanic mountains rose sharply from the Red Sea beaches, soaring nearly ten thousand feet high. Its slopes and plateaus could be barren and featureless, like a moonscape, but some of its highest peaks were flecked with pine trees; they sheltered grassy valleys where settled tribes harvested crops of date palms, squash, melons, and grains. The population was poor, physically isolated, habitually rebellious, and deeply religious. Asir’s political history was complex and obscure; it had suffered through a series of Ottoman claimants before a local saint, influenced by the Shia branch of Islam, briefly established an independent kingdom at the turn of the twentieth century. During the early 1930s, Abdulaziz dispatched Wahhabi forces led by Faisal and Saud to conquer the province and incorporate it into his new kingdom. They succeeded, but neither the king nor his heir Saud paid the place much attention, preferring to spend their oil royalties at Riyadh, Mecca, Medina, and Jeddah. After Nasser sought to stir a revolution in Yemen, Faisal recognized an urgent need to secure the loyalty of Asir’s border tribes by connecting them to Saudi markets and promoting local development. He also embarked on a campaign of defense spending in the region. Bin Laden’s highway contract in Asir was the overt side of a multifaceted arrangement in which Bin Laden also helped to build air force bases, garrisons, and other secret military infrastructure around the Asiri towns of Abha and Khamis Mushayt, and the town of Nejran.

Mohamed Bin Laden worked side by side on these classified projects with the American and British militaries. By 1966 American attempts to appease Nasser had yielded to a policy of arming Saudi Arabia against Egyptian incursions from Yemen. Washington signed a Military Construction Agreement with Faisal under which the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers pledged to design and help build about $100 million worth of military facilities near the kingdom’s borders, including in Asir. Flight logs documenting Bin Laden’s private trips during 1966 and 1967 show that he occasionally gave rides to U.S. Army personnel. In this same period, Britain agreed to sell Saudi Arabia jets, missiles, radar, and electronic warfare equipment. London supplied thirty-four Lightning jet aircraft, twenty Jet Provosts, as well as Hawk and Thunderbird missiles and related radars. The missiles were installed secretly at Khamis Mushayt, Jizan, and Nejran, where Bin Laden was simultaneously at work on roads and airfields. Faisal, in effect, employed Bin Laden as the Saudi civil engineering arm of a covert program, bolstered by British and American arms supplies, to defend the kingdom in a guerrilla war against leftist revolutionaries. It was precisely the sort of alliance that the Bin Laden family would participate in later in Afghanistan.⁷

Faisal’s massive construction program in Asir reflected the degree of nervousness the king and his Western allies felt about Nasser’s continuing drive to overthrow the Al-Saud. Faisal supplied money and arms to royalist Yemeni forces opposed to the Egyptians. Nasser replied by sponsoring terrorist attacks inside Saudi Arabia. On November 18, 1966, a cell of Yemeni infiltrators set off bombs at the Riyadh palace of Prince Fahd, then the Saudi interior minister. Eight days later, three more bombs exploded, including one at a hotel used by American soldiers. The next month infiltrators bombed the home of a Saudi religious leader in Nejran. Faisal’s security police made arrests and concluded that the terrorists were Yemeni nationals who had been trained by Egyptians. The king launched a crackdown to prevent what a then-classified British report called “terrorist infiltrators and saboteurs” from disrupting the annual Hajj pilgrimage. The Saudis forced several Yemenis to read out confessions on national television, one of the earliest political uses of the Saudi broadcasting network, which had only recently been inaugurated by Faisal.⁸

The thousands of Yemeni laborers in Saudi Arabia became a suspect class because of these terrorist attacks. Many fled or were deported. It was a measure of his full incorporation into the Saudi kingdom that despite his deep Yemeni roots, Bin Laden was not only regarded by Faisal as an entirely loyal subject, but was trusted to build facilities designed to defend his adopted country against his native one.

IN LATE 1966, Mohamed Bin Laden joined the jet age. To fly the international distances that his work now required, he purchased a Hawker Siddeley twin-engine jet aircraft. It cost more than a million dollars but would allow him to travel more easily to Dubai or Jerusalem. Around this time he also broke ground on a new compound of houses on the refurbished highway between Jeddah and Mecca, where he owned acres of open land in a section of Jeddah’s suburbs that was then most fashionable. At Kilo 7, seven kilometers toward Mecca from the Red Sea, Bin Laden designed what would become, in effect, a small subdivision of suburban homes, one for each of his wives and some for his ex-wives and their children, along with a mosque and business offices. Bin Laden still worked hard, but he was spending some of his wealth to live and travel in finer style.⁹

The private-jet purchase proved complicated, however. Bin Laden had to locate pilots who could be trained and certified on the Hawker in England and who would then be willing to work for him in Jeddah. Also, since the new jet could not land on the desert airstrips that Bin Laden visited frequently in Asir, he would need to expand his roster of pilots, so that one might be available to fly the desert-capable Twin Beech while another flew the Hawker jet.

In the summer of 1966, Gerald Auerbach, a veteran of the United States Air Force who had flown B-47s for the Strategic Air Command, the American reconnaissance and nuclear bombing force, temporarily joined Bin Laden’s crew. (A former U.S. Navy pilot named Tom Heacock had fallen ill and returned to the United States.) Auerbach was a meticulous pilot who enjoyed flying Mohamed around the desert. Bin Laden asked him to stay on as one of his permanent pilots. Auerbach’s TWA supervisor told him the change would be okay but that he would lose seniority, because it was TWA’s policy not to pay Bin Laden’s pilots as much as those who worked commercial flights. Auerbach told Bin Laden about the problem, but Mohamed declined to make up the difference in his salary. It would prove to be a fateful decision.

In June 1967, a new American pilot turned up in Jeddah—Jim Harrington, a former fighter pilot in the U.S. Air Force, a sandy-haired man around forty years old. Auerbach decided to leave Bin Laden but agreed to train Harrington. “I took him out to some of the nastiest strips that we went into,” Auerbach recalled. These included “dry riverbeds” and other makeshift landing areas in Asir with nothing but sand and rows of rocks to mark the runway.¹⁰

Harrington hadn’t flown for several years and he “was rusty.” Auerbach told their mutual supervisor: “I’m a little worried about him. This isn’t routine flying.” But the supervisor checked Harrington out and declared him ready to go, Auerbach recalled. In July, Harrington took over the Twin Beech and began shuttling with Bin Laden to and from Asir. Auerbach returned to Saudi commercial work.

Bin Laden was at work on the highway extension from Abha to Nejran, a road that climbed through high elevations before falling back down to a desert plain just above the Yemen border. His crews had cut the road about forty miles toward Nejran, and they had set up work sites at a small town called Oom. This was where Harrington landed the Twin Beech when Bin Laden flew down from Jeddah.

Gerald Auerbach bumped into Harrington that summer and asked how he was doing. Harrington said that everything was fine but that Bin Laden had “built a strip up in this Oom area and it’s really hard. It’s high elevation and it goes up a hill. It’s not really good.” Bin Laden’s crews had used their bulldozers and graders, and cleaned off a section of desert about a thousand yards long, not a particularly long runway. The strip was on a ridge shaped like half of a bowl, so it was difficult to bank or turn to the sides while descending or ascending; you had to fly straight in and straight out, and you had to land uphill and take off downhill. The higher elevation also was an issue because in thinner air, less oxygen ran to the aircraft’s engines, which could cause them to lose power.

“Well, just tell him,” Auerbach told Harrington, as he later recalled it. “You’re in charge. You pick a place and say I want the runway here, and he’ll do it for you. He’ll do it that way. Tell him this is not safe.”

“Oh, I can do it,” Harrington said, meaning he could handle the landings at Oom. “I can do it.”¹¹

On September 3, 1967, one of Mohamed Bin Laden’s long-serving drivers, Omar, rode out to the airstrip with a car to await his sheikh’s arrival. He saw the Twin Beech descend in clear daylight. As it made its approach over the landing area, about 150 feet in the air, a heavy crosswind blew. Harrington probably found his plane pushed out of alignment with the makeshift runway and then tried to pull up at full power, to ascend out of the bowl and go around to try again, according to what Gerald Auerbach later concluded. Auerbach, who led a team of investigators to examine the site, described what probably happened that morning after Harrington pulled back hard on the Twin Beech’s throttle: “The ground is climbing. At his speed, to keep flying at that altitude, he would have had to be able to climb four or five hundred feet a minute to get out. He couldn’t turn…The airplane didn’t have that climb capability, and he ended up stalling it.” Because of the thin mountain air, his engines couldn’t deliver full power; this exacerbated the chance of a stall. Additional gusts of wind may have made matters worse.

The Twin Beech fell toward the desert, tilted to one side, bounced once, crashed, and burned.

The impact crushed the cockpit, where Harrington and Mohamed Bin Laden sat. The force was so great that the front end of the plane bore a hole in the desert two to three feet deep. Both men died from the impact. Fire raced through the wreckage as Omar looked on helplessly. Two passengers in the rear cabin may have survived the initial crash but were trapped inside by a chain lock on the cabin door. They burned to death.

In an instant, Mohamed Bin Laden was gone. He was about sixty years old. The investigators identified him by his shiny watch.

Decades later, Osama Bin Laden recruited Khalid Al-Mihdhar, a member of this well-known Wadi Doan family of sayyids, or descendants of the Prophet Mohamed, as a hijacker in the September 11 plot; Al-Mihdhar piloted the plane that crashed into the Pentagon.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Shafiq Bin Laden was attending an investors conference at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Washington, D.C., when the attack launched by his half-brother struck the Pentagon.