Laden arrived, Jeddah was a citadel of hustlers.
He began as a porter in the pilgrim trade; a leather satchel he used to haul goods and luggage hung later in one of his offices. He and his younger brother were so poor during their first days in Jeddah that they slept in a ditch they dug in the sand, and covered themselves with bags, according to Nadim Bou Fakhreddine, who worked for the family years later. Early on, Mohamed opened a small grill stand in the Nadha market on the Jeddah seafront, “a small shop with one or two big dishes” for cooking, recalled Hassan Al-Aesa, who worked as a laborer with Bin Laden in Jeddah during the 1930s. An account of Bin Laden’s origins written by a British diplomat several decades later reported that he had sold “fruit off a donkey” in these early years, an assertion that may have been more metaphorical than factual.
He saw that the housing industry offered promise. He began to look for odd jobs in the building trade. The coral and sediment paste used in the walls of Jeddah’s multistory town houses crumbled easily and required continuous patching and repair. Particularly during the late 1920s, when the city’s economy enjoyed a brief period of relative prosperity, there were opportunities for young men to work in the coral quarries or as crude masons and small-time contractors. In 1931, Bin Laden founded his own small company.22
He was an attractive man with even features and coffee-colored skin. His wandering glass eye distracted some who met him, but he had a natural lightness and bounce about him. He was not an imposing man—about five feet eight inches tall—but he was a natural organizer, a good-natured practical joker, and a man who thrived in the company of others. He and his brother found their way into Jeddah’s tight-knit Hadhrami community and joined in its traditional entertainments, particularly the dances and group songs, called
Bin Laden had a gift for sensing the qualities of people around him, and for retaining their loyalty, recalled Gerald Auerbach, an American pilot who later worked for him. “He knew how to get people who could do the job. He knew how to tell when they were doing the job and when they weren’t. He had a better feel for engineering by birth, or accidentally, than many people that I’ve known have on purpose after they go through a lot of schooling.” As Al-Aesa put it: “Because he was so good and so kind, all the chief craftsmen used to work with him willingly.”24
Abdullah Hashan ran Jeddah’s lucrative foreign-exchange markets, where Maria Theresa silver thalers and gold coins traded amid wild swings of prices. He handed Bin Laden his first major job in the old city, “doing maintenance and renovation,” on a grand town house he owned that served as a part-time courthouse for some of Jeddah’s Islamic judges, as Al-Aesa recalled it. Bin Laden “made some arches and fixed things” in a modest renovation project. “It was pure luck.” But not luck alone: he had the ability to build and perform contracting work quickly, and in a manner that pleased the whimsical, demanding personalities of Jeddah’s wealthy. The Hashan job set him on his way. Mohamed and Abdullah moved into a very small house on the city’s north side.25
As the Great Depression settled in during the early 1930s, however, global travel and tourism collapsed, and along with it the Muslim religious pilgrimage to Mecca. The number of annual pilgrim arrivals in Jeddah fell precipitously, as did other Red Sea trade. Jeddah sank into a period of torpor and hardship. Mohamed Bin Laden soon found that his business in Jeddah was not enough to sustain him. He took to the road to find a paying job, across the vast and empty desert steppes that rose to the east, beyond Jeddah’s walls. Fortunately for him, profound political and economic changes had begun to sweep across the Arabian Peninsula. Oil was at the heart of this transformation—along with the extraordinary king who owned it.
2. THE ROYAL GARAGE
ABDULAZIZ IBN SAUD walked out of Kuwait in 1902 with a sword, some camels, and a small band of followers to reclaim, in his family’s name, the mud-walled town of Riyadh in the central Arabian plateau, and the paltry realm it oversaw. The Al-Saud had twice ruled this scorched, lightly populated emirate in recent centuries, overthrown each time by Egyptian and Ottoman enemies. Abdulaziz fought more than fifty-two battles across an expanse of hundreds of square miles in his quest for restoration. The battles were often little more than a massed, screaming charge on camels and foot by one malnourished band of rifle-toting Bedouin into the encampment of another, but they could take a toll; by 1932, when Abdulaziz announced at last the formation of the new Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, he bore slashing scars on his arms and body, and he limped from a war wound in his leg.
The king was about six feet three inches tall, broad-shouldered—visible on camelback from across a wide valley. Standing in his majlis court, he towered over many of his subjects and slaves, but he ruled as much by charm as by intimidation. He told visitors that he was like the Prophet Mohamed in that there were “three things in the world” that he truly loved: “Women, scent and prayer.” He kept a vial of perfume in his robes and doused his hands when greeting visitors, so he might pass along his aroma. He possessed a magnetic and persistent smile, and seated on his throne he would launch into meandering monologues filled with metaphorical desert proverbs about treacherous foxes and venomous scorpions. Yet he was a skillful, pragmatic, cold-eyed politician, able to grasp and manage his peninsula’s tribal, religious, and colonial-era complexities better than anyone had done before. “I am not a man of imagination,” he told a visitor. “I am a man of actual fact—that is all I have.”1
His conquest of Hejaz, the western region of the Arabian peninsula, and of its city of Jeddah, had been the last phase of his campaign, and when he completed it in 1926, it delivered him the greatest prizes he had yet known—sovereignty over Islam’s holiest cities, in Mecca and Medina, as well as the vast tax revenue from pilgrims arriving there, and in addition, access to Jeddah’s Red Sea port. Yet Abdulaziz recognized wisely that his austere army of illiterate plateau warriors and Islamic proselytizers would not be much welcome in worldly Jeddah, so he tried to co-opt the city’s businessmen rather than confront them militarily. He laid a one-year siege at Jeddah’s walls, which reduced the city’s residents to even more desperate poverty than they already knew; the campaign ended when Jeddah’s merchant notables handed him the keys. Still, he kept his distance; as long as the tax revenue flowed, he much preferred the isolated comfort of Riyadh in central Arabia, and he felt more secure there. Hejaz and the Red Sea’s coast, in Abdulaziz’s assessment, was a zone of treacherous British and Italian intrigues.
The collapse of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War had left Europe’s colonial powers in competition for Arabia, a contest slowed by the terrible losses of the war but compelled by the inexorable logic of empire. The interior Arabian Peninsula had never been invaded by a European army—it seemed too barren and remote to bother about. To thwart the Turks, the British had subsidized Abdulaziz until 1925, but they never embraced him fully and he never trusted them, because they also propped up his rivals in Mecca, the Hashemite Sharifs. He felt about the British, he said, “like a father when cross with his son, wishing him dead—but the same father would immediately strike dead whomever said ‘Amen’ to this sentiment.” He wanted the Americans to protect him from British intrigues, and he was also fascinated by the rise of Nazi Germany. He had a crude, often xenophobic view of Christians, and even more so of Jews. “Praise be to God, for fourteen hundred years there have been no Jews in my territory,” he told one foreign delegation; so far as he knew, he had never set eyes on a Jewish person. As Israel’s creation was debated, he was passionate and unyielding in his opposition. “My honor is involved in this matter,” he declared. He assumed that all non-Muslims were unreliable. He asked one Christian visitor with cheerful curiosity, “You drink whiskey, you play at cards, you dance with the wives of your colleagues?”2
