Fatima Ahmed Bahareth. His appointment ensured the primacy of the Bahareth cluster within the larger family clan, led by the matriarch, Fatima, a senior widow of Mohamed, and her three sons, Salem, Bakr, and Ghalib.14
AS A PIPE-SMOKING erstwhile rock musician in his early twenties, Salem was hardly the prototype of a Saudi authority figure when he returned from London, but he did not lack confidence or ambition. He was appointed, along with his half-brother Ali, to the board of trustees governing the family company, and he was given a title, managing director. From the start, however, he struggled with Ali and chafed at the committee’s authority. “He wanted very much to get back and get control of the trust,” recalled Francis Hunnewell, an American banker who became a partner of Salem’s a few years later.15
In the evenings, at his house in Jeddah, Salem held court for local Bedouin, to entertain grievances and claims as his father had done before him. Some petitioners had complaints involving land. Mohamed had marked the boundaries of his various land grants as best he could, but his decisions sometimes conflicted with grazing rights or other claims by nomads. Salem found himself besieged by Bedouin bearing obscure slips of paper purporting to document their rights. Some of his friends who visited from Lebanon or London watched in amusement and admiration as Salem gradually adapted to the role of Bedouin land judge, listening patiently in his formal desert dress, trying to render decisions in the idealized manner of a fair-minded but strong-willed sheikh. One of his friends recalled that admiring petitioners nicknamed him “The Gate of Justice.” Salem had few pretensions, and he embraced Arabia’s egalitarian rituals, joining his brothers cross-legged on the floor for family meals.16
He tried to take stock of his company’s road building. His father’s shadow hung over everything; the remains of the plane in which he had died were placed on display at one of the company’s Jeddah compounds. Salem was never much for the desert fieldwork and motivational speeches at which his father excelled. He stumbled in his early attempts at deal making. The Bin Laden organization failed to win the bid on a military cantonment in Asir that it had submitted in partnership with Morrison-Knudsen; the Saudi government now seemed uncertain about whether the firm could finish the job on time. The road the company was trying to finish in the United Arab Emirates proceeded slowly. Salem claimed his father’s Hawker jet and flew off to Dubai in the spring of 1968 to inspect the work.17
He made no secret of his love of flying. Faisal, however, perhaps sensing Salem’s impetuousness, decided that he could not abide the loss of another Bin Laden in a plane crash. Around the end of 1968, the king ordered Salem to sell the Hawker and the company’s other propeller planes on the basis that they were too dangerous. The family was grounded, at least when it was in Saudi Arabia; when he was in Europe, Salem sometimes found a way to rent a plane and train as a pilot.18
Salem’s struggle for power with his half-brother Ali deepened. Ali was tall, sensitive, and without a boarding-school education. He would later become a passionate gardener and photographer. He felt entitled to more authority than either the king’s trustees or Salem would permit. Fed up, he asked the trustees to allow him to sell his share of the company and to go his own way. The trustees could not decide what to do, so Ali wrote a letter to King Faisal asking for permission to separate. Faisal granted his request and the trustees worked out a deal in which Ali was paid about $1 million for his holdings, according to the later estimates of family members. (If accurate, and if Ali received full value for his shares, the payment would suggest that the total fair market value of the company at the time was judged to be less than $50 million.) A few years later, Ali moved to Lebanon and then to Paris; he would have nothing to do with the family’s business again. Salem and his full brothers were now firmly in charge.19
Salem married Sheikha Al-Attas, the daughter of a wealthy and prominent Hadhrami family that managed a Dutch-connected bank; the match signaled Salem’s rise into the ranks of Jeddah’s international merchant class. Sheikha was about as tall as Salem, slim and impressive. She had grown up in Indonesia, and she spoke, in addition to Arabic, English, French, and Dutch. Salem struck some of his friends as too young and restless to be a reliable husband, but she was a prestigious woman, and she shared Salem’s taste for European travel and culture.20
Salem sought to prove himself to King Faisal, who would decide his future. They were far from a natural pair—one was young and irreverent, the other aging and cerebral. Whether because he doubted Salem and the viability of succession at the Bin Laden company, or because he was impatient to see his Asir projects finished, Faisal concluded within a year of Mohamed’s death that the Bin Ladens should sell a large minority share of itself to a foreign partner, preferably American.
Anwar Ali, the Saudi central bank governor, led these negotiations. He made it clear that a sale would enjoy the king’s favor. Ali felt the “management vacancy” left by Mohamed Bin Laden made such a merger imperative, even though it would change the character of the company. Increasingly, the kingdom turned to foreign contractors for major public works, partly to ensure higher quality materials and engineering; in that respect, a merger would help to draw the Bin Laden firm into the kingdom’s modernization drive. Anwar Ali and the company trustees held discussions with German, Italian, and Dutch construction companies, but their principal target was the American consortium Morrison-Knudsen, for whom the Bin Ladens acted as agents in Saudi Arabia.21
Early in 1970, Anwar Ali proposed a joint venture, in which the Bin Ladens would hold 60 percent and the American company 40 percent. Morrison-Knudsen would contribute cash—half of which, more than $2 million, would be lent by the Saudi central bank. Ali flew to the United States to meet with Morrison-Knudsen executives, and he dangled a prospective contract to build a new airport in Jeddah, which would become one of the largest construction deals ever handed out to a foreign firm. But the parties bickered over how to divide responsibility in the new venture.22
Morrison-Knudsen proposed taking majority control of the Bin Laden company, but Ali told State Department officials this would be a “difficult ownership set-up to sell” to Faisal and the royal family, as there was “opposition to joint enterprises with majority foreign ownership.” The American embassy in Jeddah, anxious to beat out European companies, wrung its hands over Morrison-Knudsen’s reservations. Twenty years earlier, Bechtel had walked away from similar royal family entreaties, clearing the way for Mohamed Bin Laden’s rise. Now another American construction giant was threatening to walk away from a chance to buy into the position Bin Laden had established as the kingdom’s leading contractor. Yet despite Faisal’s interest in the deal, Morrison-Knudsen executives felt “uneasiness over the capability to do business with somewhat unorthodox Ben Ladin organization,” as one American dispatch put it.23
Hermann Eilts, the U.S. ambassador in Jeddah during the early stages of these negotiations, recalled that the American executives were put off “first of all” by the “disarray that was in the family,” and the unwieldy system of management by its board of trustees. In addition, Eilts said, Morrison-Knudsen “was asked by some members of the Bin Laden family for bribes” to secure their agreement to a merger. “Now, it’s not that Morrison-Knudsen hadn’t been accustomed to that sort of thing,” but in the circumstances, it helped tip their decision.24
Ultimately, the merger talks failed. The Bin Laden sons would have no foreign partner to ensure the viability of the company they had inherited; they were on their own.
Increasingly they seemed determined to go their separate ways. Tareq Bin Laden, a half-brother with whom Salem was particularly close, formed his own construction company and advertised in the international business press in 1970. To prove that he could handle sizable contracting jobs and perform on time, Salem and six of his brothers and half-brothers formed a separate company, Bin Laden Brothers for Contracting and Industry, two years later. The worried forecasts that had immediately followed Mohamed’s death still seemed plausible: his business empire was splitting gradually because of the centrifugal ambitions of his many sons.25
EUROPE, Lebanon, and Jeddah were the three main venues of Bin Laden family life during the early 1970s. Mohamed’s fifty-four children ranged in age from toddlers to young adults; the majority were teenagers. In many cases, they were just getting to know one another. Salem increasingly asserted himself as the family’s new patriarch; it was he who handed out allowances, made decisions about schooling, and organized family gatherings and vacations.
In Jeddah there were three centers of family activity—the offices of Mohamed’s old company, the new downtown offices of Bin Laden Brothers for Contracting and Industry, and the suburban housing compound at Kilo 7, on the Mecca Road, where Mohamed’s widows and other family members lived. Salem moved among all these places, holding court with employees, brothers, and sisters, and paying respectful calls upon his mother on Fridays
