The Bin Ladens

by Steve Coll

  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 Kin
g 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