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
