The Bin Ladens

Whatever his reasoning, after Al-Thaghr, he enrolled as a business administration student at King Abdulaziz University, a sprawling white-walled campus built less than a decade earlier along the Mecca Road, near the Bin Laden family’s main compound at Kilo 7. It was a private university founded by Jeddah merchants who wanted a place to train their sons for business. Abdullah Suleiman, the former finance minister who had helped make Mohamed Bin Laden’s fortune, donated the land on which it stood, and had been among the Jeddah moguls who funded its creation during the 1960s.¹⁹

Years later, in an interview, Osama would boast that he balanced his academic studies with his assignments at the family company more successfully than any of his brothers. This was not only immodest, it was wrong. He apparently sought to leave university early to take a supervisory job in Mecca but may have changed his mind because of his mother’s pleadings. He implied in the interview that he had completed his university education, but according to Khalifa, he never earned a degree. A brief resume prepared by Bin Laden or his aides in 1996 stated only that he “studied management and economics” at the university. In any event, he certainly fell well short of the achievements in academics and business management of a number of his older brothers.²⁰

Osama was appointed as a manager in Mecca after he left university, according to Al-Khatib. The Bin Laden firms were responsible for a number of renovation projects in the area during this time. They built a new staircase at the Zamzam well, the Haram’s ancient source of sacred water; they demolished buildings to expand platforms and roads around the Mosque; and they restored walls and gates. Al-Khatib remembered Osama as stingy about distributing cash bonuses but fastidious about conserving food and handing out leftovers to the workers. Like his father, Osama prided himself on his ability to think through complex problems of demolition or engineering, even though he lacked the requisite formal training. As Al-Khatib put it: “He liked to solve technical problems by himself.”²¹

15. WIRED

FRANCIS HUNNEWELL grew up in a stone hilltop mansion above a lake; he belonged to a Massachusetts family who traced their line-age and landholdings to the period of America’s founding. Michael Pochna’s father had been a legal adviser to J. Paul Getty. They were both Harvard men, class of 1960. Later they moved to Paris to seek their fortunes in private finance. They made lists of contacts from family, schools, sports teams, and social clubs, and then started calling around, looking for deals—an attractive line of work if you had the right lists, spoke French, and could raise some stake money. By the early 1970s, they operated a boutique merchant bank. Headquartered in Paris but registered in the Bahamas, it was called Lansdowne Ltd.; it engaged in the kinds of financings that would later be commonly known as venture capital and private equity.¹

The multiple economic upheavals of 1973 and 1974—the Arab-Israeli war, the international oil embargo, inflation, and stagnating economic growth in America and Europe—forced them to rethink. Liquidity, a banker’s synonym for ready cash, was draining rapidly out of Europe and toward the oil regions of the Arab world. Hunnewell, Pochna, and their third active partner, Jan Baily, decided to relocate to the Middle East. Beirut and Cairo seemed the most appealing places for a new headquarters; they flipped a coin, and it came up Cairo. Pochna moved there, equipped with new lists of contacts. Hunnewell’s brother-in-law was an influential banker at Credit Suisse. He suggested that they call on a young Saudi he had met, Sheikh Salem Bin Laden.

Hunnewell arranged an introductory meeting and flew into Jeddah. He was a tall, athletic man in his thirties who projected the languid confidence of old money. Salem had grown used to these solicitous bankers who wanted a piece of what they presumed to be his outlandish fortune. He judged them not by the services they offered, about which he was generally indifferent, but by whether they enjoyed his sort of fun. He hosted lunch and then suggested they all ride out to the desert to see some of the Bin Laden horses. He had just bought a new dune buggy, a motorized contraption with a Volkswagen chassis and tires that could roar through soft sand. He loaded Hunnewell and Jan Baily into the passenger seats and began speeding at sixty miles an hour through the open desert, bouncing across dunes. One of the vehicle’s wheels soon fell off. Salem stopped and rounded up Bedouins who happened to be walking nearby and forced them to search for the missing wheel. They found it and a few of its nuts and bolts. Salem had no wrench, however. Hunnewell lifted the entire buggy into the air while Salem held a Bedouin’s hand in the position of a wrench, twisting it, which Hunnewell imagined must have been very painful for the volunteer. Baily tried to put the wheel back on. It worked, sort of, and Salem was impressed. For years later he would tell the story about how Hunnewell had lifted up the car like a superhero. He seemed to decide then and there that he would do business with them. They got back in the buggy and wobbled on; Salem sped almost as fast as before. What industry they might enter, how, and by what plan—those were details for another day.²

Michael Pochna flew out a few weeks later to try to put something specific together. He suffered through the usual long waits and chaotic scheduling before he received an audience with Salem. He pitched a Swiss company that could set up a factory in Saudi Arabia to manufacture pre-stressed concrete and modular housing, which could then support the Bin Ladens’ construction projects.

“Well, I’m not interested,” Salem said. “What else have you got?”

A silence followed, Pochna recalled, as he tried to come up with another idea. Salem then spoke.

“I think the future is telephones,” he said.

Pochna readily agreed, even though he had not previously given the subject any thought. They talked some more. Pochna made some calls to one contact he had in the American telephone industry. It became clear that Salem was thinking very ambitiously. He wanted nothing less than to win a contract from the royal family to build the kingdom’s first modern telephone network.

“My father built the roads,” Salem said. “I will build the telephones.”³

His vision was rooted in his global lifestyle. Salem and his generation of Bin Ladens were innovators of the jet age; they hopped effortlessly from Jeddah to Cairo to Corfu to Paris to New York and back again, sometimes in the course of just a few days. The more they moved around, however, the more they wished to stay connected. Salem lived at the center of a spinning family wheel, perpetually in motion. He could not bear to be out of touch— with Randa, or his European and American girlfriends, or his pilot friends, or his mother, or his brothers and sisters, or his royal patrons, or, if it was truly necessary, his business partners. In the 1970s, his and his family’s need for telephones with global reach far out-paced the technology’s development. Telephone service was particularly dire inside Saudi Arabia, where there were only a few tens of thousands of unreliable phone lines. When he was grounded in Jeddah, Salem resorted to flirting with his overseas girlfriends by telex from his Bin Laden Brothers office.

The idea that the world economy might be rapidly connected together and speeded up by affordable, border-crossing voice communication was barely understood or discussed in this divided era of the late Cold War. Russia and its East European clients lay firmly isolated behind the Iron Curtain. China was cut off and staggering after its dark period of Cultural Revolution. Even in the West the development of international satellites and telephones had only begun. Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke’s pioneering essay “Extra-Terrestrial Relays,” which first imagined the possibility of global satellite communications, had been published just three decades earlier, in 1945. Sputnik’s launch inaugurated the military satellite age in 1957, but missile and space races between the United States and the Soviet Union dominated the technology’s initial evolution. Governments and sclerotic monopolists controlled the major phone companies in America and Europe. There were no cell phones yet, and the only mobile satellite phones available to consumers were bulky and difficult to operate. The few global phones available usually required a user to identify his location and then call through a patchy private network. These devices improved incrementally every few years, but only a very passionate and very wealthy user (and Salem was both) could find them at all appealing.

It was often easier in these years for Salem to chat with friends and family while he was flying his airplanes than when he was moving around on the ground. Salem installed high-frequency radios in his private planes, at a price of about thirty thousand dollars each—these radios enhanced safety during transatlantic flights, but they also allowed him to connect to various telephone networks while he was up in the air. In Europe, he would call in from the cockpit to a company called Stockholm Radio. For a steep price, its operators would then route him into the Swedish phone system, through which he could connect to just about anyone in Europe. Salem so often called Stockholm Radio—and a similar firm in Houston, Texas—that the operators often just asked him for the name of the friend or sister he wanted to reach, since they already had all his numbers on hand. While flying over San Antonio or