by Steve Coll
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 th
e 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