major palace shake-up. Encouraged by his half-brother Faisal, Saud forced Suleiman into retirement in the summer of 1954. Yet Bin Laden remained the king’s favored builder; he had an uncanny sense of how to maneuver among the factions of the royal family and its retainers, and he had already distanced himself from Suleiman by the time of his mentor’s fall.
Bin Laden became preoccupied by a frantic attempt to improve electricity supplies in Jeddah. The problem was that when King Saud brought his train of wives, concubines, and slaves to visit his Red Sea palaces, the lights and air-conditioning sometimes flickered out; this greatly annoyed the king. Early in 1954 Bin Laden joined with Mohamed Alireza, patriarch of Jeddah’s oldest and most influential merchant family, to buy shares in the newly formed National Company for Electrical Power, Ltd., under a license granted by Saud. The company raised about 2 million pounds sterling and inherited some Swiss turbines from the government, but its board of directors couldn’t decide on a plausible plan. When Saud and his family camped in Jeddah during the summer of 1954, his household sucked up so much of the city’s electricity that more than half of the town had to go without for twelve to sixteen hours each day. Bin Laden turned to an American firm, Burns and Roe, headquartered on lower Broadway in New York City; its engineers promised to ease the crisis by installing the mothballed Swiss generating equipment. The Burns and Roe engineer who flew to Jeddah found Bin Laden “instrumental in winning over the doubtful shareholders” in his electric company—and anxious to see the city’s supply improved before the king returned in the summer of 1955 and ran all of his air conditioners again.4
Mohamed succeeded. Evidently pleased, the king issued a royal decree on July 22, 1955, which named Bin Laden a state minister of the Saudi government. It was not an administrative position, as Saud barely possessed a functioning cabinet, but it did signal Bin Laden’s increasing influence. The contracts he now controlled were large and varied. The West German embassy reported at the end of 1955 that the annual revenue of his enterprise was about $200 million. That may have been an overestimate, perhaps a considerable one—if true, it would have meant that Bin Laden had access that year to the equivalent of more than half of the kingdom’s oil royalties from Aramco. Like the Saudi princes who patronized him, Mohamed Bin Laden possessed a wealth of assets, but he did not always have a lot of cash; princes demanded that their palaces be finished very quickly, but afterwards, they turned into sullen dead-beats. In some seasons, documents depict Bin Laden scrambling to obtain local bank loans of just several million dollars, but in others, he was able to deliver large hard currency payments to foreign accounts. His accounts receivable department always looked good on paper, but his cash holdings were volatile. Still, the $200 million West German revenue estimate certainly reflected the scale of Bin Laden’s visible activity in the kingdom at this time. In addition to his many palace projects and the gargantuan undertaking of the Jeddah-to-Medina road (which proceeded slowly under the twin burdens of poor conditions and late payments), Bin Laden built a water pipeline into Medina, installed electric generators in that holy city, built a new headquarters for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, paved streets in the eastern city of Dammam, and ran a marble factory. He hired American engineers to survey a gypsum deposit where he hoped to build a $1.5 million factory. By now he was also doing so much business with the United States that he retained an American agent to coordinate his purchasing and contracts in that country: International Development Services, Inc., of New York, New York.5
Bin Laden and his brother Abdullah had by now become legends in their hometown of Rabat, in Wadi Doan; they were the latest of the many Hadhramis who had walked out from that region’s canyons in sandal-clad poverty to earn a fortune that would allow them to return in glory. The brothers flew together during 1956 in a special Saudi government plane to visit Hadhramawt. Increasingly, however, they had divergent views of the future. Mohamed’s drive seemed unbounded, but Abdullah, who married at least nine times during his lifetime, increasingly felt satisfied with what they had already achieved. He was drawn to the idea of returning to Rabat to enjoy semiretirement and engage in charitable works. The brothers soon decided to go their separate ways; in 1957 Mohamed bought out Abdullah’s share of their company, twenty-six years after they had founded it together. “Mohamed was more ambitious than Abdullah and that’s why they split,” said Khalid Ameri, one of Abdullah’s grandsons. “Mohamed wanted more.”6
Abdullah moved home to Yemen not long after this separation. He brought his wives and children with him. His decision reflected a degree of nostalgia that was not unusual among Hadhrami merchants in Jeddah. Many had secured Saudi citizenship through their endeavors, and they enjoyed great wealth, yet they remained foreigners in the kingdom, their sons and daughters excluded from prestigious marriages. There was a sense among many, too, of religious and charitable duty toward the poor kin they had left behind in Hadhramawt’s stark canyons.
Salem Bin Mahfouz, founder of Saudi Arabia’s National Commercial Bank, opened a school in his Hadhrami hometown during this period. Mohamed Bin Laden paid for a water project in his father’s home region of Rakiyah a few years later, although he never visited the place, according to the Bin Ladens who still live there. Abdullah constructed Rabat’s first drinking water supply soon after he arrived in Rabat. He walked through the barren hills with Bedouin guides until he found a suitable spring. He then called in one of the Bin Laden firm’s Italian engineers. He supervised the piping project and also built for his family a new seven-story house with a modern plaster facade. His showy new compound rose on a slope near the center of the village of his birth.7
Mohamed preferred Saudi Arabia, which offered him renown and relative luxury. His Jeddah garage filled up with the gleaming accessories of his success: ten 1957 Packard convertibles imported from the United States. He and his two Hadhrami banking associates, Bin Mahfouz and H. A. Sharbatly, president of the Riyadh Bank, “are known as the ‘Three Great Illiterates’ of Saudi Arabia,” wrote the West German ambassador in September 1957. “Due to his energetic and determined character and a mixture of shrewdness and honesty, he has a good reputation.” A second West German report the following summer described Bin Laden’s firm as “the richest company in Saudi Arabia…whose assets and wealth are said to exceed by far those of the entire state,” buoyed by “some sort of monopoly for state orders” granted by King Saud.8
As his prominence grew, so did the risk that he might become ensnared in the factionalism and rivalry that constituted politics within the Saudi royal family. There were more than forty Al-Saud brothers who were nominally heirs to the throne, plus scores of mothers, wives, and former wives, all competing for access to the treasury; the potential for an outsider like Bin Laden to err was very great. If he did so, he could lose his contracts, his company—or perhaps his freedom. Shortly after Saud became king, he and his brother Faisal sought to involve Bin Laden in a dispute between them, according to a Lebanese friend of Bin Laden. Mohamed responded by pretending to be ill for a month. He summoned doctors to treat him and hid in his compound until the royal feud had passed. He explained his fears to this friend: “They are King Abdulaziz’s sons—whatever happened, they will not hurt each other. But I am not. My head could go.” Deference and obedience, expressed in florid Arabic, were Bin Laden’s chief political tactics, the balm he applied to soothe royal egos. As a Yemeni of relatively low social status, he did not represent a political threat to the Al-Saud, and so the wealth he accumulated, besides confirming the local cliche of Hadhrami entrepreneurialism, was not particularly relevant in Riyadh. Still, Bin Laden was careful to continually remind the royal family that he knew he served at their pleasure, that he was merely an executor of their decisions. “He told us not to get involved in politics,” his son Yeslam recalled. “We are a construction company. We are businesspeople. We do what we are told to do…This was our upbringing.”
When he did express political opinions, they mimicked those of the royal family. During 1956, when the Al- Saud was locked in a border dispute with Britain over the obscure Buraimi oasis, Bin Laden let it be known to the American embassy that he resented U.S. policy, which he interpreted as insufficiently supportive of King Saud. For the most part, however, he kept his head down.9
Perhaps he could sense that the reign of King Saud had become untenable. Increasingly, Faisal emerged as the figure many within the royal family wished to invest with power. As this struggle unfolded, Bin Laden’s challenge was to please both men—a difficult feat, for they were two very different leaders, with distinct ideas about what direction Saudi Arabia should pursue.
SAUD LOVED being king—traveling from palace to palace, presiding over sumptuous feasts, handing out money, and retiring to bed with one of his wives or concubines. He had inherited his father’s height, and he could project regal dignity even as he became obese. Yet he lacked his father’s intelligence and his grasp of international politics. Saud had become heir apparent after the eldest son of Abdulaziz died in the flu pandemic of 1919, but the king had poorly prepared Saud for the throne. His boyhood education was limited to Koran memorization and the desert arts of horsemanship and falconry, at which Saud proved less than outstanding; he had weak eyesight and fallen arches, so he peered through thick eyeglasses and walked awkwardly. He reached adulthood as an illiterate and did not travel to the West until he was in his forties. Abdulaziz assigned him to serve as his principal deputy in Riyadh, but rather than absorbing the subtleties of his father’s statecraft, he was drawn instead to the example of
