owners because of the war. The house was transferred formally to the Israeli government, sold to the naval officer, and later sold by this officer to the current owner. Throughout this time, the Bin Ladens remained firmly and prosperously centered in Jeddah, but in a practical and material way, the family could trace its history to the resonant cause—and perhaps even the unresolved legal claims—of Palestinian refugees from the 1967 war.
6. THE BACKLASH
GERMAN ENGINEERS and Turkish laborers laid the Hejaz Railway, linking Damascus to Medina, between 1900 and 1908. It sped Muslim pilgrims more than eight hundred miles to the two holy cities, with the additional and not incidental capacity to carry the fading Ottoman Empire’s Turkish troops. As the First World War descended into trench slaughter in France, T. E. Lawrence and his colleagues in British intelligence seized upon the early stirrings of Arab nationalism to organize a guerrilla campaign against Turkish outposts, which included a garrison of eleven thousand soldiers at Medina. Bedouin militia repeatedly tore up Hejaz Railway tracks during the early months of 1917. Lawrence of Arabia enjoyed himself thoroughly: “This show is splendid: You cannot imagine greater fun for us, greater vexation and fury for the Turks,” he wrote to a colleague.1
The main railway lay unusable for decades afterward and became, in Arab eyes, a symbol of colonial-era interference with the Islamic pilgrimage. The newly independent governments of Jordan and Syria, along with Saudi Arabia, pledged a restoration. From Riyadh, Abdulaziz expressed a particularly romantic view of railroads; they were the “only medium, by God’s willingness, whose full advantage will prevail,” he had cabled to President Harry Truman in 1946. His son Saud felt as strongly and later helped to organize the remnants of the Hejaz Railway as a formal religious trust. Its executive committee in Damascus spent several million dollars on engineering studies during the late 1950s; they showed that repairs would cost tens of millions of dollars. European and American officials refused financial support, arguing that modern highways and airports would make a better investment. Yet the American embassy in Jeddah recognized that the project held “much emotional appeal in certain Saudi quarters,” and it feared accusations of interference with Muslim prerogatives if it objected too strenuously. Finally, in 1960, in the midst of Crown Prince Faisal’s campaign to promote Islamic projects as an antidote to Nasser, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria revived their plan to repair the damage Lawrence and his Arab Revolt had done.2
As he had in Jerusalem, Mohamed Bin Laden emerged as an instrument of a religious-minded Saudi foreign policy project. He partnered with a Japanese firm, Marubeni, to bid for the railway repair contract: Bin Laden would undertake the civil engineering work, such as blasting tunnels and building culverts, while his Japanese partners, supervised by West German engineers, would lay the track. An American who worked for Bin Laden in Jeddah reported that the Japanese government, hoping to establish a business foothold in Arabia, had promised to underwrite all Bin Laden’s costs. Bin Laden and his aides shuttled to Damascus. The contract “was Bin Laden’s for the asking,” boasted his American employee.3
A delegation of thirteen from the Hejaz Railway Executive Committee flew into Saudi Arabia late in October 1961. Bin Laden hosted them in Riyadh and Taif, taking them on a tour “to show off some of the roads, mosques and other projects” he had built, the American embassy reported. It looked as if the fix was in: Bin Laden enjoyed “extremely good connections with the Saudi Government and Royal Family and is a figure to reckon with in most public tenders involving construction work.” The railway contract was likely to be awarded under a Saudi system that a separate cable described as “opening the locked stable after the horse is stolen.” Saudi government employees would often trade information about a bid until “the contract is then awarded to the firm assisted by the ‘insiders’ with handsome bonuses going into the appropriate pockets.” A later British government report asserted: “We have good evidence that contracts for this project were allocated on grounds that could not be considered strictly commercial.” Among other things, according to British reporting, “King Saud apparently insisted that Bin Laden” win the bid.4
Whatever the reasons, Bin Laden and his Japanese partners did indeed win the contract; on November 14, 1961, they were awarded a $25 million deal. They signed a commitment the following summer, yet no work began. The Japanese proved unable to post a bond. Frustrated, the executive committee turned to a British company with proven railway experience, Thomas Summerson & Sons, to join Bin Laden in a new partnership. Two Summerson executives flew in to negotiate and joined British ambassador J. C. M. Mason in his Damascus apartment on the evening of February 18, 1963. “I spent some of the evening as Devil’s Advocate,” Mason recounted. Among the problems he cited were “the temperamental idiosyncracies of Bin Laden.”5
The Saudi construction magnate had annoyed the railway committee, whose chairman said “that Bin Laden was now fairly unpopular.” Syrian and Jordanian members seem to have resented how Bin Laden pulled Saudi royal strings and then underperformed on the work he won. He had become too powerful to challenge, however. The British executives were “quite prepared to ditch” Bin Laden, but they feared “the effect on eventual work in Saudi Arabia of making an enemy of him.” For his part, Bin Laden reportedly claimed “that Saudi support would be withdrawn from the project unless he had a share in it.”6
THE RAILWAY PROJECT fell apart a few weeks later. Crown Prince Faisal, too, appears to have been fed up with Mohamed Bin Laden; he pulled the contract from him “under severe reproaches,” according to a West German assessment.7 The Hejaz Railway was far from the only cause of Faisal’s frustration with Bin Laden. There was a sense emerging in at least some sections of the kingdom that Bin Laden promised too much, did shoddy work, and too often failed to finish on time. His wealth and privileges had also become exceptionally conspicuous. He owned three Beechcraft propeller aircraft as of March 1961—more than any other individual in the kingdom outside the royal family. He hired American pilots to fly him from one job site to another, sprawling encampments of laborers in the deserts over which he ruled. He worked energetically, but his improvised methods increasingly drew questions and complaints from the international consultants who were attempting, at the urging of Crown Prince Faisal, to inject the best modern engineering standards into Saudi building projects.
For the first time in Bin Laden’s long career, he had become a public figure of controversy, within the bounds of the kingdom’s heavily muted politics.
“We read on every occasion that construction projects in our country are opened up for bids—that Bin Laden’s office had a ‘lesser bid’ and got the project,” wrote Ahmad Mohamed Jamal in a front-page column in the Meccan newspaper
This at a time when observers are screaming at that office’s slowness in carrying out the projects it had undertaken two, three or more years previously. They also scream to high heaven at the dispersal of the efforts of [Bin Laden’s] engineers, workers and equipment among numerous projects in distant cities and roads far apart in the kingdom. They scream, too, complaining about the lack of quality of the work, faulting engineering and inefficient organization of most of the asphalting operations.8
The larger problem was “the practice of giving the road projects in the whole of our country to one contractor.” Ultimately, Jamal concluded, the problem was not only the quality of Bin Laden’s work but also the quality of Saudi Arabia’s government:
Have mercy upon us, you responsible officials of the Ministry of Communications. Have mercy on our country; have mercy on our projects. Spare our roads from the sole contractor, from him of the “lowest bid,” from him whose previous project commitments are also paralyzed. Have mercy upon us, so that God may have mercy upon you.9
Accusations that pungent did not typically appear in Saudi Arabia’s heavily censored newspapers without government sanction. Faisal and his allies were one possible source of backing for this criticism; Saud had temporarily pushed Faisal out of the cabinet, and at the time the article appeared, the crown prince was fighting to restore his authority. His allies promoted him as a cure for government inefficiency and corruption. A new minister of commerce, Ahmed Jamjum, from a merchant family that competed with Bin Laden, sought to break the
