The Bin Ladens

“Frere Jacques.”¹⁴

Salem’s methods paid off: Despite twists and complications, Bin Laden Telecommunications ended up as Bell Canada’s agent for a large portion of the contract, earning a straight cash commission of 1.5 percent of the company’s five-year, approximately $1.5 billion deal to operate and maintain the new Saudi phone system. The Bin Ladens also earned a similar percentage of a subsequent five-year Bell Canada contract with the kingdom, plus a large share of $400 million worth of ministry and housing construction contracts that Bell Canada was required to undertake as part of the deal. Almost everyone ended up happy—Phillips and Ericsson won a part of the contract involving equipment sales, and Prince Mohammed bin Fahd reportedly received a commission of about $500 million. Two exceptions were Francis Hunnewell and Michael Pochna. They accused Salem of cutting them out of some of the Bell Canada money and of improperly diverting construction contracts from the deal to other Bin Laden firms. They sued and ended up tied down in Canadian courts for many years.¹⁵

More and more, in business deals between Saudis and Americans, greed and a competing sense of entitlement became a risk. Each side condescended to the other. Even so, in the late 1970s, there was, it seemed, an almost endless amount of money to go around. Yachts, private jets, palaces filled with new technology, garages stuffed with European race cars—the princes were updating themselves, and a younger and more international generation was coming to the fore around Fahd. Yet the royal family and its courtiers were also drifting back toward the ethos of public luxury and payoffs that had prevailed two decades earlier under King Saud. The relative austerity and the official piety of the intervening Faisal years were receding. With Fahd firmly in control, with his own sons moving boldly into business, with oil prices rising ever higher, with construction cranes towering above every horizon, it was difficult for many privileged Saudis to imagine what might threaten the existing order.

DURING THE LATE 1920S, as he completed his conquest of the Arabian Peninsula, King Abdulaziz faced a Frankenstein problem. He had employed his jihadi militia, the Ikhwan, or “Brothers,” to vanquish his enemies and take the Hejaz, but he could not persuade these zealous volunteers that their religious war had reached its end. The Ikhwan protested Abdulaziz’s blasphemous embrace of the automobile and the telegraph. Soon they revolted violently. The king showed little mercy; in some battles, he mocked their beliefs by using his Fords as makeshift motorized cavalry to break their ranks. At the same time he sought a broader political accommodation with his enemies. He created oasis settlements for demobilized holy warriors and encouraged them to take up farming and passive religious study. Qasim, a deeply conservative province of rolling dunes and watered oases to the immediate northwest of Riyadh, hosted a number of these villages filled with resettled Ikhwan. Around 1940, a time when the Brothers’ memories of their grievances against Abdulaziz and his family remained fresh, Juhaiman Al-Otaibi was born in one such Qasim settlement, called Sajir. As he grew up, he seems to have identified early on with the causes and religious austerity of the Ikhwan and to have felt some nostalgia for their revolt against the royal family.¹⁶

He joined his tribe’s levy, or mujaheddin, in the kingdom’s National Guard, a paramilitary force that served as a check on the regular Saudi armed services and also as a kind of national employment scheme for restive tribesmen. Juhaiman became a corporal but left his tribe’s ranks to take up religious study at the University of Medina during the early 1970s. The university was known for its heavy contingent of exiled faculty who belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood. Its students included exiles from Egypt, Yemen, Kuwait, and Pakistan; there were even some American converts to Islam in what became Juhaiman’s Islamic study group. At Medina they studied tenets of Salafi orthodoxy, inherited in part from the beliefs of the Ikhwan, which emphasized the need to withdraw into a state of Islamic purity. These teachings intermingled with the political activism of the Muslim Brotherhood and the specific grievances of expatriate students about their home governments. In all, this blend of Koranic introspection and political dissent, tracing back into Saudi history and connecting outward to pan- Islamic movements abroad, would have seemed quite familiar to Osama Bin Laden and his Muslim Brotherhood– influenced after-school study group at Al-Thaghr, in nearby Jeddah.¹⁷

Juhaiman was almost two decades older than Osama’s generation, but many of his followers at Medina were younger students. They wore short mustaches, long beards, and thobes that fell only to the middle of their calfs, styles they attributed to the companions of the Prophet. They rejected photography as a blasphemous innovation, but their views went even further than those of Osama and his schoolmates in Jeddah. Juhaiman echoed the original Ikhwan by attacking modernity as a kind of grand conspiracy against true believers. After 1974 he and his followers also concluded that the Saudi royal family was illegitimate and corrupt. They withdrew from Medina to form an explicit political conspiracy to challenge the Al-Saud. Informal circles of study groups and students, frequently overlapping in their ideologies, were distinguished by intense and often very subtle debates over theology and the correct course of religious politics. Osama moved in one circle in Jeddah and Mecca; Juhaiman and his followers occupied a partially overlapping but separate realm in Medina.

After breaking with his professors in Medina, Juhaiman returned to Qasim, then moved to Riyadh, where his following grew to about two hundred. By 1978 they began to print anti-royal pamphlets on presses in Kuwait. One of the pamphlets was called “Rules of Allegiance and Obedience: The Misconduct of Rulers.” It attacked the Saudi royals and the officially sanctioned religious scholars who supported them as false stewards of Islam and its holy places. Some princes were “drunkards” who “led a dissolute life in luxurious palaces.” The royal family had “seized land” and “squandered the state’s money.” Commission-laden contracts like the deal to build a national telephone system were symptoms of a broader political rot. Juhaiman’s fulminations drew the attention of the Saudi interior minister, who arrested and interrogated Juhaiman and his followers. They were released in Riyadh after they promised to quiet down.¹⁸

In fact, they began to plan for a violent revolt.

IN SEPTEMBER 1979, Salem flew to Washington, D.C., to buy a new Learjet. He visited his American girlfriend Patty Deckard. The two picked up Jack and Anita Pizza from Panama City, Florida, then flew to Europe. They visited Cairo, Jeddah, Dubai, and Abu Dhabi. In early November, they scooped up two of Salem’s sisters, Mona and Randa, and flew to Athens. They spent a night on the Greek island of Crete, then they jetted back to Cairo. It was a particularly busy season in Salem’s playhouse at thirty thousand feet.¹⁹

The siege at the Grand Mosque at Mecca began at the call to dawn prayer on November 20, the first day of the portentous Islamic year of 1400. Juhaiman and his followers unpacked weapons they had smuggled in coffins normally carried by worshippers to bless the dead. They seized microphones and announced that among them was the Mahdi—the prophesied redeemer of Islam whose arrival on earth would signal Judgment Day. The purported Mahdi was Mohamed Al-Qahtani, an otherwise undistinguished follower of Juhaiman whose true role had been divined in a dream by another member of the group. As they fired their weapons from the mosque’s minarets, Juhaiman’s followers announced the start of what they believed would be the last battle known to mortals.²⁰

It quickly devolved into a bloody catastrophe. Saudi security forces arrived and tried to undertake a frontal assault on the holy Haram. Floodlights installed by Bin Laden engineers during past renovations, which normally illuminated worshippers and pilgrims in a celestial glow, lit a killing field for Juhaiman’s sharpshooters. Scores bled to death on the marble. Salem and his muscular Lebanese aide Mustafa Fathlalla donned military uniforms and drove into Mecca with drawings of the mosque’s layout hurriedly pulled from office files.

Salem, Mustafa, and other Bin Laden brothers and employees fought and consulted on the front lines of the Mecca siege for two weeks. Salem’s half-brother Yahya, a civil engineer with extensive experience in Mecca, was among those who risked their lives to aid the royal family’s increasingly violent assault. Yeslam Bin Laden, another senior executive at the time, “was frantic, dashing from house to office like a man unhinged,” his wife remembered. The Saudi forces poured fire at Juhaiman’s rebels in the minarets. “Everyone was saying, ‘God rest his soul, Mohamed bin Laden,’ and at the same time, they were cursing Mohamed bin Laden, because the 106-millimeter cannon could not penetrate the minarets—that was how much steel there was,” said a Bin Laden employee who was there. Helicopters swooped in firing machine guns from their open doors.²¹

Juhaiman and his surviving followers soon retreated underground, a maneuver they had evidently planned in advance. Beneath the mosque there were many catacombs and tunnels, some of which carried wiring and pipes to support the mosque; others led to rooms for religious contemplation and retreat. Juhaiman had hidden food and ammunition below during weeks of clandestine preparation; in some cases, he apparently had gained access to privileged Bin Laden company vehicles. Once the rebels slipped into the catacombs, the Bin Ladens’ engineering and architectural knowledge became particularly crucial. The employee who was present remembered a Jordanian