The Bin Ladens

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