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 cliche 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 the 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
