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Eilts thought he saw an opportunity: a merger between the Bin Laden organization and a major American construction company:
One suggestion emerging in private discussions is possibility SAG will seek qualified foreign firm to provide management team to run organization. Company, which is financially sound, normally employs between 4 and 5 thousand workers… As Bin Laden operated enterprise single-handedly (to the extent even of signing all checks), need is for team not only experienced in construction operations but also competent create and impose new administrative structure. In embassy’s view, this could be excellent opportunity for American firm.5
The ambassador suggested that Morrison-Knudsen, an American construction giant that was already working with Bin Laden on a bid to build a military cantonment near the Yemen border, might be an excellent candidate. The Americans might have to move promptly, however, as Bin Laden’s technical staff was dominated by Italians and this “may encourage preference for Italian management unless other proposals advanced promptly.”6
Mohamed Bin Laden had left twenty-five sons. (The youngest, Mohamed bin Mohamed, was born after his death and was named in remembrance.) The potential for disarray or conflict was considerable.
Abdullah, his only surviving brother, no longer had any share in the company and no longer even lived in Saudi Arabia, having moved back to the Hadhramawt with his family seven years earlier. However, harassed by rival militias engaged in Yemen’s deepening civil war, he returned to Saudi Arabia not long after Mohamed’s death. The Moscow-backed government of South Yemen later confiscated his house, and Abdullah never returned—a bitter end to his nostalgic homecoming. Abdullah now had his own sons and investments to look after. He had no formal claim to leadership in the company he had founded with Mohamed thirty-six years before.
Salem and Ali were the only two sons of Mohamed who had reached adulthood. But while Ali had helped oversee some of his father’s road-building operations, he was far from qualified to manage the entire enterprise. Salem had been groomed for leadership by his father, but he had even less business training.
Islamic inheritance law, derived from passages in the Koran, is quite specific: It establishes conditional classes of heirs and lays out the exact percentages of the estate each class shall receive; these entitlements are seen as God’s mandate and cannot be altered by a will. One Koranic principle is that sons receive twice as much as daughters. Some Westerners might regard the system as unfair or inflexible, but it has girded social cohesion and family unity in the Muslim world for centuries by removing the whim and intrigue of inheritance that often sunders families in other cultures. A wealthy Muslim man has no way to disinherit sons he does not favor; he may therefore be more inclined to encourage cooperation among his children. There is also no way to change the allocations from an estate by writing a last-minute will and testament. Written wills are permitted but only to designate up to one- third of the writer’s estate for charities or other beneficiaries. There are many detailed provisions of this kind; as with prayer and the annual calendar of faith, it is an area of Islam rich with rule making and nuanced interpretation.7
Mohamed Bin Laden had a will written on his behalf before his death, according to the account of a Saudi researcher, Adel Toraifi, who said he had read a copy of the document. It was reported to be about eleven or twelve pages, by his account, and was primarily devoted to issues involving Mohamed’s religious trust, or
The principal asset of Mohamed’s estate, however, was the Mohamed Bin Laden Organization itself, the family company in which Mohamed was the sole shareholder. Under Islamic law, his heirs automatically received fixed percentages. His four wives at the time of his death split one-eighth of the shares. (Former wives had no entitlement to inheritance; their children were expected to take care of them.) Nearly all the remaining shares were divided on a two-to-one basis among Mohamed’s twenty-five sons and twenty-nine daughters. Each son, including Osama, inherited 2.27 percent of the company’s shares, and each daughter received just over 1 percent, according to documents later filed in an American divorce case. In rough terms, then, Mohamed’s sons wound up sharing ownership of just over 50 percent of the company; his daughters shared ownership of just under 30 percent; and his widows owned most of the rest. There is no evidence that any of these heirs received large cash distributions at the time of Mohamed’s death; it is unlikely that he kept much of his wealth in bank accounts, and even less likely that he invested in securities. His heirs would have received his houses and his land and his cars, which they seem to have managed largely as communal holdings. Salem and Ali soon went on the company’s payroll, but the great majority of his other children had not yet reached adulthood, and it would be Salem, as eldest son and head of the family, overseen by the company’s board of trustees, who would determine the siblings’ stipends.9
There is no known record of the size of Mohamed’s estate at this time, nor would it have been easy to craft an estimate that would pass muster with Western accountants. Michael Pochna, an American investment banker who became a business partner of the Bin Ladens during the mid-1970s, said family members told him the estate was worth about $150 million at the time of Mohamed’s death. Gerald Auerbach, the pilot who worked with Mohamed in his last years, said he was told the Saudi government owed the Bin Laden company more than $100 million when Mohamed died. These appear to be reliable indicators of the estate’s approximate size, but unlike a fortune invested in stocks or bonds or actively traded real estate, Mohamed’s holdings could not be easily valued. He owned a great deal of Saudi land, some of which had been given to him as payment for past contracts, but the true worth of these tracts would have been difficult to determine. His company had some hard assets, mainly tractors and bulldozers and the like, but the firm’s value at the time of his death was inseparable from the massive government contracts it had recently been awarded, particularly the road from Jeddah to the Yemen border and related defense work. If the company failed to finish these projects profitably, its finances might decline. More broadly, Bin Laden’s fortune depended almost entirely on the patronage of the Al-Saud royal family; if this support disappeared, so would most of his firm’s income.10
The king called in some of the older Bin Laden sons and told them, “I am going to be your father now.”11 Saudi Arabia was in the midst of an undeclared war, and the Mohamed Bin Laden Organization was an important part of the kingdom’s defense capability. Faisal pledged to appoint several trustees to operate the family firm. This would guarantee the company’s continued access to government contracts, and it would also assure Faisal that work on his crucial infrastructure projects in Asir would proceed.
Faisal issued a Royal Ordinance in mid-September announcing these new arrangements. Bin Laden’s fortune “was mostly in equipment and in knowing that he could get the job done, because he had the equipment there, and he had the engineers,” recalled Faisal’s son Turki. The trust Faisal established would ensure “that the companies did not dissolve or go bankrupt or something, until they grew up and started taking over.” The length of this interregnum was not spelled out; the decision to hand the company back to the family would be made by Faisal, or his successor, when the time seemed right.12
The American government continued to try to convert Bin Laden’s death into a business opportunity for a U.S. company. The Commerce Department in Washington contacted major construction firms. A vice president of Brown and Root arranged to fly to Jeddah to open negotiations about a possible merger with the Bin Laden group, but the embassy waved him off, reporting that the “legal situation [is] not completely settled.” Still, the State Department remained alert: Bin Laden had run his company “in an entirely personal and centralized manner. The management vacuum created by his death may make it necessary for the heirs to bring in foreign management in order to keep the company going.”13
King Faisal asked Anwar Ali, the Pakistani-born governor of the kingdom’s central bank, to provide financial and management advice to the Bin Laden trustees, a relationship that guaranteed that the company would not falter for lack of government funds. The king also designated Mohamed Bahareth, a Jeddah businessman who operated mainly in the food industry, as the company’s leading trustee; Bahareth was a cousin of Salem’s mother,
