months. And it made people a little bit crazy.”8
The boom seemed only to deepen the frugal Faisal’s dour mood. He particularly deplored the cultural styles of his kingdom’s nouveaux riches. “In one generation we went from riding camels to driving Cadillacs,” he commented. “The way we are spending money today, I fear we will soon be riding camels again.”9
Faisal bin Musaid, a nephew of King Faisal, was a failed graduate student in political science who had pleaded guilty to conspiring to sell LSD while at the University of Colorado and then had been sent home from the University of California at Berkeley. In 1965 his brother had been shot dead by Saudi police during a protest against the kingdom’s television studio in Riyadh; the protestors feared that television would undermine Islam. Musaid, who apparently lived in a chronic state of intoxication, decided to avenge his brother’s death.10
King Faisal held open majlis receptions about twice weekly, and on March 25, 1975, Musaid followed an old acquaintance, the Kuwaiti oil minister, into the palace hall, shielding himself behind the minister’s girth. He pulled out a .38-caliber pistol and fired three shots at Faisal, striking him in the throat. Guards wrestled Musaid to the floor as aides rushed the king to the Central Hospital in Riyadh, one of the monuments to Faisal’s development campaigns. A blood transfusion and heart massage failed, however, and Faisal died that afternoon. The king was sixty-nine years old. Mourners hoisted his body, wrapped in brown cloth, onto a gurney and carried it through the streets of Riyadh to the royal family’s burial ground. Three months later, twenty thousand Saudis watched an executioner behead Musaid in a public square.
Faisal’s murder deprived the Bin Laden family of its patron and protector, and it marked the end of a long and extraordinary partnership between the king and the family, in pursuit of Saudi modernization. If the alliance was to continue, it would require a new understanding among the next generation of leaders—for the Bin Ladens, Salem, now about thirty years old, and for the Al-Saud, Crown Prince Fahd, who took the reins of government after Faisal’s death.
Faisal and Mohamed Bin Laden had forged a bond because they had compatible values and work habits. Salem and Fahd would prove compatible as well. The values and habits they shared, however, were notably less pious.
FAHD BIN ABDULAZIZ had reached his early fifties at the time of Faisal’s assassination. He was a tall man whose body seemed to spread out around him a little more as each year passed. He sported a thin goatee on his round, double-chinned face, which had a placid aspect. His dark, hooded eyes could seem sad and withdrawn. Fahd had been raised along with many of his brothers and half-brothers in the informal schools of the premodern Riyadh court. He was distinguished from an early age, in the judgment of his family, by his interest in affairs of state. He watched attentively his father’s decision making and he seemed naturally intelligent. For these reasons he was promoted early on as a candidate to run ministries and to join the royal line of succession. He served first as education minister and then as interior minister, an important security post, and began to travel abroad during the 1960s. He was attracted to the West but showed little capacity for self-discipline when confronted with its entertainments and temptations. Beginning in the mid-1960s, he began to spend several months each year in Europe and America, drifting with his entourage from luxury hotel to luxury hotel. He gambled conspicuously and rotated his wives whenever the whim struck him, which seemed to be quite often. Among his more notorious mistresses was a Palestinian Christian woman known as “Miss Arabia,” so called because that was the name of the fashion boutique she ran in Jeddah.11
Fahd was the eldest of a group of seven full brothers within the royal family who possessed unusual influence because of the sheer size of their clan, their relative seniority, and the competence in office several of them displayed. They were sometimes referred to as the “Sudayri Seven” because their mother came from the Sudayri family. Fahd appointed or reaffirmed several of his full brothers in key security positions—Sultan, as defense minister; Nayef, as interior minister; and Ahmed, as deputy interior minister. In addition, his full brother Salman served as governor of Riyadh. Their personalities and political outlooks varied, but the seven brothers were, overall, a relatively liberal group with a taste for wealth and luxury that was notable even by Al-Saud standards. This was particularly true of Sultan and Fahd.
As Fahd became obese, his sojourns in the West were increasingly taken up by visits to hospitals, where he was treated for heart and other disorders aggravated by his weight. Eventually he found it difficult to climb stairs or to walk more than a short distance. He found that Western governments were eager to ensure that he received the very best care available. The United States, in particular, pegged Fahd as an up-and-comer in the Saudi royal family, a man whose extravagant habits and accommodating personality seemed to promise a more pliant partnership than had proved possible with Faisal.
In 1969 the United States invited Fahd on the first of a series of private visits, during which he was flattered by a personal audience with President Nixon and flown by the Pentagon to Cape Kennedy, where the National Aeronautics and Space Administration laid on a private tour. In private conversations with American and British officials, Fahd did not hesitate to repudiate Faisal’s anti-Zionism, and he hinted that when he attained power, he would be willing to recognize Israel if a broader peace were agreed. He felt that only the United States could guarantee that no rival power would steal Saudi Arabia’s wealth, and so he was willing to go further than some of his brothers to win American military protection. Unlike Faisal, however, Fahd did not have a particularly activist or global vision of his own or his kingdom’s role in the world. He wanted as a general matter to be left alone, so that he could enjoy himself, and he wanted Saudi Arabia to be somewhat more influenced by European culture. He announced plans to build the Riyadh Opera House—its acoustics were superb, and it would probably have been the finest concert hall in the Middle East, though it never opened due to objections from religious scholars. The episode was typical of Fahd—he was at once bold and timid, but under pressure, he usually reacted more as a caretaker than a leader.12
He strained against Wahhabi convention. Faisal rebuked Fahd over some of his more outrageous behavior, such as his loss of millions of dollars in casinos in the south of France in 1974. Perhaps it was Fahd’s irritation with his older half-brother’s holier-than-thou attitude that led him to think about how he might carve a little breathing space and variety into Saudi culture. In a private meeting with an American official in the summer of 1972, during one of his long respites abroad, Fahd described Islam as
a stable but flexible framework within which and under whose guidance the needs of the future can be met. But there is no requirement for growing Islamic societies to abide indefinitely by the strictest Islamic tenets. Prevailing views of 80-year-old religious leaders need not be meticulously observed…Somehow a more progressive outlook needed to be imparted to judges and religious lecturers who do so much to determine the characteristics the Saudi hierarchy represents to its own people.13
Fahd did not immediately become king upon Faisal’s death. The crown fell instead to Khalid bin Abdulaziz, who was ten years older than Fahd and came from a different branch of the royal family. Faisal had chosen Khalid as his heir in 1965; his rectitude and unassuming manner made him a natural choice after the traumas inflicted by King Saud. Khalid was a lightly educated, pleasant man who displayed no interest in government, politics, or foreign affairs. He dropped out of public life from time to time to devote himself to farming and ranching; he was one of the first princes to establish country estates in the deserts surrounding Riyadh, and he prided himself on the dairy cows and other animals he kept there. To fund his bucolic leisure, he started a number of businesses. “He has been described as a known percentage maker on governmental contracts,” a classified American biographical sketch noted.14 This was not a notable source of distinction among Saudi princes, but it indicated where Khalid’s priorities lay after he became king. By his own inclination and with consensus support from the family’s senior brothers, Khalid turned management of the Saudi government over to Fahd and retired to enjoy the pleasures of being a figurehead farmer-king.
Fahd’s sudden rise to power within the royal family in the summer of 1975 coincided with Salem Bin Laden’s restlessness. His family’s main company was still overseen by the trustees appointed by Faisal eight years earlier. The post-embargo oil boom had created rich opportunities for Saudi construction companies, yet the Bin Ladens, with their dissipated leadership, were in danger of missing out on many of the larger contracts. They required Fahd’s patronage, and to attain it, they had to build deeper personal connections with the new crown prince and his six full brothers. This became Salem Bin Laden’s mission. He would woo Fahd and the Sudayris as his father had charmed their predecessors.
