by Steve Coll
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 com
e 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.