stranglehold on contracting at the self-dealing Ministry of Communications. Yet there was more to this than factional competition: the public criticism signaled a broad discontent with the quality and pace of the kingdom’s road-building program.
Highways in the early 1960s were a potent symbol of modernity. America’s interstate highway plan was now much advanced, and the big-finned Cadillacs and convertibles that streamed along those freeways from coast to coast seemed to epitomize American individualism and prosperity. John F. Kennedy, hatless and handsome, waved to crowds from an open sedan; in Hollywood films and television shows, the convertible was cool. The notion that a national highway network could speed up modernization had particular appeal in Saudi Arabia. For the kingdom’s heavily nomadic population, so long accustomed to freedom of movement, the automobile beckoned. The kingdom’s population was small—only about 4 million—and dispersed over vast desert territory. Highways were not only exciting; they were essential.
Faisal’s austerity budgets cooled the economy, but oil revenue continued to rise. By 1961 the government could afford a leap in highway construction—if only it could figure out how to build the roads efficiently. The kingdom announced plans for a network of highways totaling more than two thousand miles, but its bureaucrats fought to a standstill over how to let the contracts. An American road engineer, Harold Folk, hired as the kingdom’s chief development adviser, recommended European consultants who could oversee work by local builders to ensure it met international standards. Faisal returned to the cabinet in the spring of 1962 and embraced Folk’s goals, but he balked at the Europeans’ fees. Apart from his innate parsimony, Faisal shared the widespread fear within the Saudi royal family, grounded in experience, that Western consultants often jacked up their rates unscrupulously when they did business in the kingdom. “One Roadblock After Another” was the title of a confidential U.S. embassy report on the accumulating fiasco. Privately, Faisal pressed American officials for help. He wanted his government to create a proper highway department that would own a fleet of road-building machinery so that it would not be so dependent upon private contractors like Bin Laden. He appreciated all the consultants, he said, but the “problem was not finding out what needed to be done,” which he already knew, “but getting it done quickly.”10
Faisal also pressured Bin Laden. During the summer of 1962, he revoked Bin Laden’s dormant concession to mine gypsum north of Jeddah. The contractor had a “duty not to delay,” Faisal’s published royal decree declared, yet Bin Laden had nonetheless “shirked” his responsibilities.11
The most visible example of Bin Laden’s failure to deliver was his performance on the forty-five-mile mountain road linking Mecca with the resort town of Taif, a magnet for royal family vacationers. The road rose from the sandy flatlands near the Red Sea, twisting through steep, treeless, crumbly mountains, climbing almost five thousand feet. For decades the only way to traverse this distance had been on donkeys and camels; this was how Faisal and his royal train had often traveled it during the reign of Abdulaziz. By one contemporary Saudi account, it was Faisal’s idea to pave the road. West German engineers pronounced it a formidable job—about thirty tunnels would have to be blasted through the mountains, great mounds of debris removed, and difficult problems of grading overcome. The Germans wanted the work but feared losing out to “dumping bids” by a local contractor who would blithely underestimate the costs and degree of difficulty.12
Their worries were justified. Bin Laden, as ever, insisted that he could do the job, and he won a deal worth more than $10 million in 1959; he pledged to finish the work by early 1961. He missed that deadline, however, and when a Swiss television crew turned up late that summer to film his work, they found Bin Laden and his workers stuck at a particularly steep section of the escarpment twelve miles west of Taif. Italian and Egyptian crew chiefs roared away atop German and American graders and bulldozers, but it was obvious that they were a long way from finishing. Months passed, and still Bin Laden could not complete the road. Great stores of dynamite were exhausted to dig tunnels and blast away the mountainsides. The road lay a short distance from Jeddah; for Mohamed’s young boys, it was another site of thrilling explosions, in this case to move mountains.13
Three years later, Bin Laden was still at it. Occasionally he would host Saud or Faisal at roadside banquets, where he would pull out maps to describe the wonder of engineering that he was attempting, but the plain fact was that Bin Laden was far behind schedule, and nobody could be sure what quality of road he would finally deliver.
By one account, Faisal and Bin Laden argued about the project, with Bin Laden insisting that it was a matter of personal pride that he should finish what he had begun, even if he had to pay for it out of his own pocket. This has a slight ring of mythmaking, but there can be no doubt that there were strains between Faisal and Bin Laden at this time, and Bin Laden may have had to bear substantial losses because of his delays. He had first established himself with the royal family and its retainers by handing out commissions and sharing revenue. With Faisal, who was the least corruptible of senior Saudi princes, perhaps by many orders of magnitude, what mattered was not money, but Bin Laden’s dependability, recalled Hermann Eilts, who knew both men when he served as American ambassador to the kingdom during the 1960s. Faisal knew that Bin Laden was not always as precise as his German or Swiss counterparts, yet he had been working in the kingdom faithfully for a long time, and “the point was, the roads were there.” Then, too, Faisal felt a “certain amount of national pride” that for all of the enormous technical challenges on a project like the Taif road, “a Saudi firm was doing it.” Faisal and Bin Laden were each pious workaholics devoted to Saudi Arabia’s advancement. The trouble between them would pass, and their alliance would only deepen as Faisal consolidated power during the 1960s.14
Bin Laden’s loyalty to Saudi Arabia was particularly at issue after late 1962, when Nasser inspired an Arab nationalist revolution in Yemen and then intervened in that country with tens of thousands of Egyptian troops, igniting a proxy war with Saudi Arabia. Nasser cranked up his propaganda broadcasts attacking the Al-Saud, launched aerial bombing raids on Saudi territory, dropped more than one hundred pallets of weapons along the Red Sea coast to encourage revolt, and conspired with sympathetic Saudi princes to overthrow the government in Riyadh. The years-long crisis that unfolded after Nasser’s intervention in Yemen was the most serious external threat yet faced by the modern Saudi kingdom. As he fashioned a survival strategy, Faisal would once again employ Bin Laden’s company and its vast fleet of construction equipment as instruments of Saudi defense and foreign policy—as the kingdom’s Halliburton.
PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY initially regarded Nasser as a modernizer who might lift Egypt out of poverty without succumbing to Soviet communism. Kennedy doubled American aid to Nasser’s regime, and even after Egyptian troops poured into Yemen and bombed Saudi towns, he urged Faisal to be patient as America tried to negotiate a compromise. This was a risky and even myopic strategy, as the Saudi government seemed to be cracking under Nasser’s pressure. King Saud, more erratic than ever, flirted with Moscow. The CIA reported that Saudi merchants were shifting money to Lebanon to protect themselves against a crisis. A group of self-styled “free princes” led by the influential Talal bin Abdulaziz decamped for exile in Beirut, where they held a press conference to announce that they were freeing their household slaves; the princes tacitly promoted themselves as a progressive Saudi government-in-exile. A desperate Faisal launched a publicity drive in the kingdom to improve his government’s image. He banned slavery and released his own household servants; Mohamed Bin Laden did the same, allowing the Saudi government to compensate him for their release. Faisal staged a rally in Jeddah and drove along its main streets in an open convertible. The crown prince presided over a festival of singing and dancing, and even seized on a campaign-style slogan: “We are your brothers!”15
Reports reached Faisal in early 1963 that Egyptian planes had dropped poison gas on Saudi-backed opposition forces in Yemen and on the Saudi town of Nejran, near the Yemen border. The Kennedy administration still counseled patience. Faisal blew up at a delegation from Washington. “He is evil,” Faisal declared of Nasser. “His desires are evil.” The Saudi royal family “opened our accounts in Swiss banks and others and gave him permission to take out any amount in dollars and sterling,” Faisal said, but still Nasser was unsatisfied:
What more does the man want? Obviously not our oil, as some people say; nor our money, because when he was a friend, he had easy access to it. Therefor it is obvious that he wants to satisfy his evil nature, his wicked instinct—to crush us…You are greatly mistaken to think you can subtly or gently guide Nasser back to the path of reasonableness or wisdom. The only way you can make Nasser listen to you or come around to your path is by sheer force…I know Nasser more than you do. I was his closest friend.16
Kennedy would eventually come around, but in the meantime, Faisal turned to Bin Laden to shore up his kingdom’s southern border. That autumn he pulled road-building and infrastructure contracts out of the highway department and handed them directly to Bin Laden; Faisal said he would “personally take care” of building roads in
