The Bin Ladens

11. Aramco visit and quotations: DOS 59/7208 “Crown Prince Saud’s Official Visit to America: Notes on the period Monday, January 13, through Wednesday, January 22, 1947.”

12. $200 million palace: FO 371/132661, Minute by J. M. Heath, January 7, 1958. “hundreds of colored…in orange”: Van der Meulen, The Wells of Ibn Saud, pp. 234–35.

13. European quacks: House of Saud, op. cit., p. 178. Two-thirds nomads, less than one in ten in school: Vassiliev, The History of Saudi Arabia, pp. 421, 433, statistics circa 1956 and 1954, respectively.

14. Saud’s erratic conduct: FO 371/132661 Minute of December 1, 1958. Coup attempt: Bligh, “Interplay Between…”; Mackey, The Saudis, p. 297. Conspiracy to kill Nasser: House of Saud, op. cit., p. 196.

15. House of Saud, pp. 191–94. “Welcome King Saud!”: Footage in “The House of Saud,” Algeria Productions, 2004. Thicker Than Oil, op. cit., pp. 69–75.

16. FO 371 Letter in reply to British engineer inquiring about National Electricity Co., June 6, 1958.

17. Alireza, “The Late King Faisal.” De Gaury, op. cit., pp. 86ff. Field, The Merchants, p. 40. “an unbelievably patient…time to solve”: Algosaibi, Arabian Essays. “he was anxious…go ahead slowly”: DOS 59/4945 Jeddah to Washington, March 5, 1959.

18. Interview with Khaled Batarfi, February 19, 2005. Batarfi’s uncle worked with Bin Laden in Mecca, and he is quoting what his uncle recalled.

19. Interview with Fakhreddine, op. cit. Bin Laden’s strategy of marrying the daughters of desert leaders and town mayors was described in interviews by several people who worked with him at the time.

20. Surah 2, verse 231.

21. Interviews with several people close to the Bin Laden family. The Al-Ghanem family provided an account of the marriage, and were described as poor and relatively secular in the Kuwaiti newspaper Al- Qabas, November 14, 2001. For other, similar accounts, see also Randal, Osama, p. 55; Scheuer, Through Our Enemies’ Eyes, pp. 80– 81; and Wright, The Looming Tower, p. 72.

22. In Re Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001, 03 MDL 1570. Interviews with people close to the family, including Carmen Bin Laden, August 6, 2004, establish that four different wives gave birth to the children listed in the court records as born in 1377. Wright, The Looming Tower, cites Osama’s 1991 statement to the newspaper Al-Umma Al- Islamiyya that he was born in the month of Ragab. Shafiq’s birth date is from the 2000 annual report of Symphony Advisers Ltd., Companies House records, London.

23. According to the court records, the four sons born during 1377, besides Osama, were Ibrahim, Shafiq, Khalil, and Haider. The two daughters were Mariam and Fowziyah. However, deposition testimony by Ibrahim and Khalil in other civil lawsuits in the United States confirms that they shared the same mother, so while it is conceivable they were both born during 1377, it is also possible that the court records submitted by the Bin Ladens are inaccurate in at least this respect.

24. $500 million in debt: House of Saud, op. cit., p. 199. No pilgrim receipts: DOS 59/4944 Jeddah to Washington, December 4, 1958. Structure of debt, Faisal’s thinking: DOS 59/4946 Dhahran to Washington, February 4, 1959.

25. Telephone interview with Mike Ameen, March 1, 2006. Ameen worked in Aramco’s political office during this period and knew Mohamed Bin Laden.

26. DOS 59/4945 Dhahran to Washington, May 27, 1959, and “Memorandum of Conversation with Sam Logan,” June 23, 1959. All quotations are from the Memorandum of Conversation.

27. The negotiations are described in a series of State Department cables from Jeddah to Washington between June 1958 and November 1958. When American commercial officers checked on the Roma brothers’ claims in Italy, they were told that Finmeccanica, the construction company with whom the brothers claimed affiliation, regarded them as “financially and commercially unreliable.”

28. “Aramco…workers”: DOS 59 Jeddah to Washington, October 2, 1958.

29. “good for the country…good old days”: DOS 59/4944 “Economic Summary, Third Quarter of 1959,” Jeddah to Washington, December 15, 1959.

5. FOR JERUSALEM

1. Peters, The Hajj, pp. 3–40. Aslan, No God but God, pp. 3–18. Caudill, “Twilight of the Hejaz” manuscript, pp. 21–23.

2. The Hajj, pp. 40–55. “pictures of trees…angels”: Ibid., p. 48.

3. “he asked for a cloth”: Ibid.

4. “dogs of the Hejaz”: Caudill manuscript, op. cit., p. 24. “You must imagine…loud voice”: The observation is from a man whom Peters describes as a possible Jewish spy of Napoleon disguised as a traveling pilgrim, who went by the name Ali Bey Al-Abbasi. The Hajj, op. cit., p. 198.

5. The Hajj, p. 359, quoting Eldon Rutter, an English convert to Islam, who visited Medina in 1925.

6. Abbas, Story of the Great Expansion, pp. 100–101, 260–61.

7. The official history, ibid., cites a figure of 30 million riyals for construction and 40 million riyals for eminent domain payments. DOS 59/5467 Jeddah to Washington, April 12, 1953, cites a figure of $1.35 million for construction costs in Medina in 1952 alone. Other diplomatic estimates, citing government budget documents and other sources, are similar in scale through 1955.

8. “modern architectural style” and renovation statistics: Story of the Great Expansion, op. cit., p. 278. “an impressive…piece of work”: DOS 59/2810 Jeddah to Washington, June 24, 1961.

9. Umm al-Qura, October 28, 1955, KAA Foundation.

10. Ibid.

11. “enjoyment of movies…point of view”: DOS 59/4946 Jeddah to Washington, March 29, 1958. “evil… corruption and destruction”: Published in Al-Yamamah, March 30, 1958.

12. Fifty thousand to four hundred thousand and $130 million: DOS 59/4947 Jeddah to Washington, July 24, 1956, translation of King Saud’s Mecca welcome address. “Even this sum”: Ger FM File 145, Jeddah to Bonn, October 2, 1956.

13. Medina demolition and debris removal: Story of the Great Expansion, op. cit., pp. 276–77. Osama’s account: Bergen, The Osama Bin Laden I Know, p. 2, quoting his interview with Al-Jazeera in 1999. Bin Laden’s description of his father’s bidding for the Jerusalem project, in particular, is somewhat detailed and entirely accurate, documents from the renovation project show. Mecca demolition statistics: Story of the Great Expansion, p. 264.

14. Peters, Jerusalem, pp. 1–406, is rich with the accounts of travelers and participants in the city’s history.

15. Hussein’s initiative and the date of Nasser’s announcement are from a 1981 Egyptian report reviewing the history of renovations in the site, one in a collection of documents supplied by the waqf authorities about the 1950s and 1960s renovation project. The author is indebted throughout this section to the exceptional research in Jerusalem carried out by Robin Shulman, who collected the documents and conducted related interviews. The documents were translated in Washington by Mohamed Elmenshawy; they will be referred to in notes hereafter as “Jer Docs.”

16. “First, this is a sacred…Muslim community”: Jer Docs, MBL to Committee, July 8, 1958, written on stationery captioned “Office of Mohamed Awad Bin Laden, 51-S.” To get below the Egyptian bid, Bin Laden cut his proposal by 8,000 dinars in the very last round. The Supreme Judge said in his decision that in addition to price, the committee had been influenced by Bin Laden’s willingness to work without certain conditions named by the Egyptian bidder.

17. Jer Docs Letter MH-8-32-169, July 19, 1958.