the war zone, with Bin Laden’s assistance. When Saudi inspectors flew down to look at Bin Laden’s work, they found it wanting, but he told them that “he and not the Road Department would decide” how to proceed. The department’s chief engineer regarded his work on the Yemen border as “a repetition on a smaller scale of the road fiasco that occurred in constructing the two modern highways leading north and southwest of Medina,” but there was nothing he could do about “royal intervention.”17
Faisal, the American embassy believed, had turned to Bin Laden “to ensure fast action on what he probably considers to be an urgent project for the defense of Saudi Arabia.”18 Also, with personal ties to Yemen, Bin Laden would be a credible figure locally as he raised a labor force and supervised construction. It was the beginning of a series of private contracts in which Faisal asked Bin Laden to build infrastructure to defend Saudi Arabia against the spillover from Yemen’s guerrilla war. Bin Laden’s laborers had to work at times in areas under direct bombardment. Later Bin Laden was joined in the region by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which delivered American and British missiles and military infrastructure to the southern frontier. This was a role that the Bin Laden family would play for the House of Saud, in collaboration with the United States, for many years to come.
7. A MODERN MAN
THE FINAL ACT of Faisal’s conflict with his half-brother Saud was inflected with macabre farce. Alcohol had ravaged Saud’s stomach and produced episodes of internal bleeding, yet he could not stop drinking. His aides used a forklift to carry him onto his royal plane, a de Havilland Comet. The king and his entourage embarked on a tour of American and European hospital suites—cataract and stomach surgery in Boston, for which Aramco advanced $3.5 million; then further treatment in Lausanne, Switzerland; recuperation in Nice; and a long stay in a Vienna hospital. Periodically Saud would become coherent enough to plot a return to power. Faisal became so furious he could no longer speak Saud’s name. Saud decided to arm himself, and smuggled weapons into the Nassiriyah palace to equip his sons and bodyguards, but Faisal rallied the National Guard and the army against him. The rest of the family agreed that with an undeclared war against Egypt on their hands, Saud’s conniving and decadence could no longer be tolerated.1
As ever, the Al-Saud relied on the kingdom’s Islamic scholars, or ulema, to provide them with legitimacy as they prepared to make their move. On November 3, 1964, the ulema issued a fatwa on Radio Mecca deposing Saud and naming Faisal his successor. It took months for Saud to accept his fate and go into exile, initially to Greece, and then subsequently to Egypt, where he joined with Nasser against his homeland. His disappointment over his forced abdication was presumably assuaged by his bank account: the American embassy, citing sources in the Saudi central bank, estimated Saud’s wealth in exile at $100 million in cash and $300 million in invested securities.2
Years later, some members of the Bin Laden family quietly circulated stories suggesting that Mohamed Bin Laden had played an important role in persuading Saud to give up his throne. This looks clearly to be a case of mythmaking. The notion that Bin Laden played any role at all in Saud’s abdication “is not the case,” said Faisal’s son Turki. “The man was a worthy man…But he was always the construction man. When there was a job to be done, Bin Laden would do it, and he did it at the orders of whoever was king.” As a 1965 American assessment put it, Saud’s overthrow “involved a surprisingly small number of decision makers.” These were “certain princes of the House of Saud and a few ulema; no other estates had won the right to be consulted.” As for businessmen like Bin Laden:
Economic power with a limited degree of political influence is enjoyed by the large merchant families concentrated in the Hejaz. These merchants have no present prospect of joining the ranks of the king makers and for the present feel a near complete identity of interest with their rulers…To ensure this identity of interests, a leading merchant family either stations one of its members in Riyadh to stay abreast of government contracts or even details one of its own to watch over its interests…through having royal partners, as well as by bribery where necessary.3
Faisal’s power was now uncontested, but the kingdom he had inherited languished in poverty and backwardness. Despite almost two decades of steadily rising oil revenue, the Al-Saud had done little to improve the lot of their subjects. Literacy rates were no higher than 10 percent, and the great majority of school-age children went uneducated. The few schools that functioned still concentrated on Koran memorization and the other religious texts through the third grade; Faisal opened the kingdom’s first vocational academy only in 1962. Disease and poor sanitation remained prevalent; clean drinking water was not widely available; and four out of five Saudis were believed to suffer from trachoma, the eye disease that had afflicted King Saud.4
The kingdom’s Bedouin population disdained manual and technical office work, preferring the freedom of self-employment as truck and taxi drivers; as a result, the kingdom suffered from a basic labor shortage, even amid high rates of unemployment. (This was the gap that Bin Laden’s vast desert camps of multinational immigrant workers helped fill.) Faisal sought to follow an Islamic version of the modernization drives championed by Nasser and India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, but he lacked the educated classes of civil servants, military officers, and technocrats that the British Empire had bequeathed Egypt and India. For the foreseeable future, foreigners like Bin Laden and the Lebanese builder Rafik Hariri would play major roles, along with a few Nejdi families who were moving into construction.
After six years of effort, Bin Laden at last finished the treacherous road between Mecca and Taif. During the first days of June 1965, King Faisal, senior princes, diplomats, and Jeddah dignitaries gathered under tents at a scenic way station to celebrate Bin Laden’s achievement. Reporters for government radio interviewed Bin Laden, and the king “formally inaugurated” the mountain road with “considerable fanfare,” as one guest described it.5
War emergencies and his own persistence had rehabilitated Bin Laden’s public reputation. He was once more indispensable. Like his new king, the third he had served, he would strive to be a pillar of Islam and a modern man.
BIN LADEN wanted for his sons, but not for his daughters, the formal education he had never enjoyed. On his business trips to Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt, he visited the advanced boarding schools of these postcolonial Arab societies. He decided as early as the 1950s that he would use his wealth to educate many of his sons outside of Saudi Arabia. The boys’ mothers had a role, too, in deciding how ambitious their education would be, and where they would enroll. By the mid-1960s, Mohamed had more than twenty young sons scattered with their mothers in households from Cairo to his own walled compound in downtown Jeddah. The Egyptian mother of Mohamed’s sons Khaled and Abdulaziz enrolled her boys in Cairo schools. Several of his other boys—Bakr, Omar, and Yahya— attended school in Syria. The largest group, however, attended boarding school in Lebanon.6
Yeslam, one of the Lebanon contingent, recalled being placed aboard an airplane from Jeddah to Beirut at age six without understanding why he was being sent away from home. He screamed in panic on the flight and didn’t see his mother again for a year, a separation that would leave him susceptible to panic attacks and a fear of flying throughout his adult life.7 Mohamed arranged a guardian for the boys in Lebanon, Nour Beydoun, who ran a small travel agency. The children attended several different schools. Many ended up initially at a boxy stone high school, Upper Metn Secondary School, in a sedate Druze village removed from Beirut’s temptations.
Tuition was about fifteen hundred dollars per boy for nine months’ full boarding, plus an additional fee for summer terms, an exorbitant amount by Saudi standards of the day. The school’s principal flew to Jeddah several times a year to pick up his fees in cash. He remembered that Mohamed “wanted someone to teach them religion,” which was not a notable feature of Lebanese schools, so the principal specially recruited a Syrian Islamic teacher to provide Koranic instruction. Mohamed Bin Laden also wanted to avoid giving them “much money, so they will be spoiled.” He instructed the principal to buy clothes as necessary and to dole out a small allowance, but not to indulge the boys. The school did provide them with a taste of Lebanon’s pleasures, however, including weekend trips to stock car races in Beirut and summer outings to beach resorts.8
The boys knew their father as a distant, stern, even regal figure. Mohamed gathered his sons together
