by Steve Coll
Because of his conquest of the Hejaz and his new contracts with American oil companies, Abdulaziz no longer feared that his enemies might raid Riyadh unexpectedly, and so in 1934, he began for the first time to build outside the city walls. He hired a local contractor to oversee a large new family palace compound where the king could hold his majlis sessions, install his new Marconi wireless radios, and accommodate at least some of his enormous family. As his sons married, Abdulaziz added to this construction plan by commissioning homes for them in the new complex. He named his new palace Al-Murabba, or “The Square,” and when it was finally completed in 1939, the main building was an impressive two-story edifice constructed around an open courtyard, where a tall date palm rose to the open sky. The majlis rooms were on the second floor, flanked by rows of offices for the king’s political aides, coffee servers, slave bodyguards, religious scholars, and keepers of the treasury. The entire project, including garages for Abdulaziz’s expanding fleet of automobiles, required the construction of dozens of buildings in a barren region that barely had enough timber to support the population’s daily requirements. The king and his advisers asked their new American friends for materials and construction help, but Aramco and the companies it had invited to Saudi Arabia, led by the Bechtel Corporation of San Francisco, were busy constructing infrastructure for the new oil economy; they did not want to get tied up by the king’s personal palace projects.11
In this gap Mohamed Bin Laden saw opportunity. He “had a vision,” recalled Mohamed Ashmawi, a friend of the family. “He could foresee you could gain a lot by being helpful to the royalty members, especially the most important ones…He started building homes for some of the royalty.” Exactly when and how Bin Laden first met Abdulaziz is not known, but soon “many royal orders entitled him to establish projects at Riyadh,” according to a Saudi account of his early work. The most important of these was the first palace in Riyadh built entirely from stone; this led to many other contracts in what became known as the Murabba Quarter. Hadhramis, like their more sophisticated Lebanese counterparts, already enjoyed a reputation for entrepreneurialism. They were known as people who would push the limits to get a job done, even if they did not quite know exactly how to do the job in the first place. The plateau around Riyadh is called the Nejd, and the native Nejdis had a saying about Yemeni hustlers like Bin Laden: “If you want him to be a baker, he’ll be a baker; if you want him to be a road builder, he’ll be a road builder.” Bin Laden’s strength in these early days, according to the Saudi historian Fahd Al-Semmari, was that he was “always available…and he would bring many people to do the job. He made many messes but he learned how to do work quickly. If he needed ten people, he would bring one hundred.”12
Oil royalties had seen Abdulaziz through the Great Depression, if barely. The Second World War, however, shut down international shipping just as Saudi Arabia prepared to deliver its first sizable oil exports. This did not stop the king from building palaces or importing luxuries, but he did not have adequate stores of gold, and he began to run up debts to private merchants. As submarine warfare in the Atlantic and elsewhere crippled British fleets, food supplies to Saudi Arabia grew erratic, and famine haunted its interior desert, where many people lived on the margins even in the best of times.
Churchill’s government had many more pressing priorities, particularly during the war’s desperate early years, but London resumed subsidies to Abdulaziz early in 1940 in order to dissuade him from exploring an alliance with Germany. Britain ultimately gave the king the equivalent of $38 million during the war to keep him loyal; the American government, starting in 1943, contributed an additional $13 million in lend-lease aid. As Germany’s eventual defeat seemed assured, American planners eyed the kingdom as a convenient, uncontested transit point for pushing people and equipment to the Asian front. A top-secret State Department memo to Roosevelt dated December 22, 1944, laid out the case for a new and more committed partnership with Abdulaziz:
A strong and independent Saudi Arabian Government in the Near East…is less likely to fall victim to war-breeding aggression than a weak and disintegrating state vulnerable to economic and political penetration. The vast oil resources of Saudi Arabia, now in American hands…should be safeguarded and developed…The military authorities urgently desire certain facilities in Saudi Arabia for the prosecution of the war, such as the right to construct military airfields…13
This thinking spurred Roosevelt to meet Abdulaziz aboard the USS Quincy, afloat in the Red Sea, in February 1945. Eight sheep and forty-two courtiers followed the king aboard the American warship. Roosevelt was charming and empathetic; he and Abdulaziz bonded immediately over wonders of the wheelchair, and the president presented one of the latest models to the king as a gift. On the main issues—“oil, God and real estate,” as Rachel Bronson has put it—they also fell into easy, warm agreement.14
The Americans who began to travel to Riyadh afterward to consult with their new ally found the king admirable, if picaresque and at times puzzling. In the main, they were attracted to his land because, as a secret State Department cable put it, “Saudi Arabia may be likened to an immense aircraft carrier lying athwart a number of the principal air traffic lanes of the world.”15
Japan’s surrender opened the kingdom’s oil spigot; exports grew from 30,000 barrels per day to 476,000 barrels by 1949. The aging Abdulaziz was now rolling in gold and silver, and he and his sons and advisers embarked on a spending spree. Mohamed Bin Laden returned to Jeddah, summoned by the king’s closest financial adviser, Abdullah Suleiman, who invited him to work on a new royal palace, called Al-Khozam, which the king had decided to build outside of Jeddah’s old city walls, about three miles from the sea. It was a grand two-story coral stone and wood-beam building with twenty-foot ceilings, stained-glass windows, and dual staircases ascending to the majlis rooms on the second floor. Abdulaziz was by now in his late sixties and relied increasingly on his wheelchair. At the Al-Murabba palace in Riyadh, his advisers installed an elevator to lift him to the majlis floor—the problem facing his Jeddah contractors was that the king could not walk with dignity up the grand staircases they had designed. Mohamed Bin Laden helped to invent an ingenious solution: a circular stone ramp that ran from the driveway of the palace up to the second floor. It was wide and sturdy enough so that Abdulaziz could ride in one of his Fords directly into his majlis, descend from the car, and take his throne.16
Jeddah remained a city that “clamored and howled and brayed and snarled with a bedlam of animal noises, with once in a while a midnight shot as some irritated Englishman potted a prowling pariah dog,” wrote Wallace Stegner, a visitor in these years. Yet the city also underwent a “phenomenal building boom,” as an American diplomat reported. “Foundations, at least, if not the completed structures, mushroomed overnight. Contractors complained bitterly of their inability to obtain sorely-needed building materials.”17
Bin Laden and his brother moved into a multistory compound on Jeddah’s north side, where Mohamed met each day with subcontractors, haggled over purchases and debts, and assembled his workforces. He was now becoming so prosperous that he bought his first automobiles, yet he remained a hands-on foreman who sang with his men at job sites and did not hesitate to work alongside them. The volume of contracts he won meant that he had to devote himself increasingly to management, which required him to hire clerks and transcribers, since Bin Laden could barely read and could not write. “There were a lot of architects and staff coming in and out of the house,” recalled Hassan Al-Aesa, who worked for him during this period. “It became very busy.” The city’s building trades were divided into guilds, each overseen by a sheikh who controlled the labor supply and apprenticeships. Bin Laden bargained with all of them. “There was work for everyone,” recalled Al-Aesa. “Carpenters, plaster, steel, blacksmith—every craft.” There was little cement in the city in this period; the dominant building material was coral, harvested from four or five quarries along the sea. Bin Laden
purchased one of these quarries, leased it to a partner and used it to deliver reliable supplies to his building sites.18
For the first time Mohamed Bin Laden felt secure enough to marry. He was in his late thirties when he took his first wife during the Second World War; she gave birth to a daughter, Aysha, in about 1943. Bin Laden took a second wife, Fatimah Ahmed Mohsen Bahareth, who was about nineteen years old and belonged to a prominent family in Mecca who had migrated to Saudi Arabia from the Hadhramawt. When Fatimah gave birth to a son in 1944 or 1945 (the year is not certain), Bin Laden named the boy Salem, after his closest friend in Jeddah, Salem Bin Mahfouz.19
Bin Mahfouz was a fellow Kenda tribesman from the Hadhramawt. He was born in 1906 to a poor family in the village of Khraikher in Wadi Doan, on the north side of the canyon, about thirty miles from Mohamed Bin Laden’s hometown of Rabat Bashan. At age six he traveled by foot to Mecca in the company of his brothers, a journey that lasted six months. He moved to Jeddah during the 1930s and entered into a lucrative foreign-exchange dealership. By the time of the building boom, Bin Mahfouz served as Bin Laden’s banker—a loose term in a kingdom that then had no formal banks, where all transactions were conducted in cash, where there were multiple coins and currencies and where savings took the form of personal hoards of gold. As a symbol of their friendship and business bond, not only did Mohamed name his firstborn son after Salem, but Bin Mahfouz named his first son Mohamed.
The young Bin Laden patriarch began to travel, overseeing simultaneous palace-building jobs in Riyadh and Al-Kharj, an experimental, irrigated farming community founded by Abdulaziz south of Riyadh. His projects brought him into increasingly close contact with the king. A mud-brick house on Bin Laden’s job site in Al-Kharj collapsed one day and killed one of his workers; the victim left a widow, a son, and a daughter. Bin Laden carried the infant son to the king’s majlis in Riyadh, entered with the boy on his shoulder, and presented him to Abdulaziz, according to Al-Aesa, who remained close to the victim’s family for years afterward. “This is from my responsibility in front of God to yours,” Mohamed said. Abdulaziz handed the boy back and instructed him, “Go and buy a house for them in Mecca.” Bin Laden made the arrangements; the widow moved in and received a royal stipend for the rest of her life.20
Bin Laden was not only the king’s contractor; he was also among his creditors. By 1949 rough estimates of the royal family’s debts to merchants and palace builders ran between $20 million and $40 million. Saud, the eldest son of Abdulaziz, reportedly ordered a $250,000 American kitchen for his new palace in Riyadh that year. Suleiman, the finance minister for whom Bin Laden worked, embarked for Paris on a medical leave with a $600,000 budget. The royal family was spending more than 400,000 British pounds sterling per month during 1949, the British ambassador estimated, and “construction projects more ambitious than economic absorbed much of the revenue…In general it cannot, however, be said that the country’s real needs in regard to development had been properly considered.” Indeed, the royal family’s projects were “often of doubtful value and managed by incompetent individuals.” Particularly objectionable were “the building of palaces at Riyadh, Mecca and elsewhere for the King’s enormous family.”21
The postwar boom might not benefit Saudi Arabia’s impoverished subjects, but it had presented Mohamed Bin Laden with opportunity—and he would seize it.
3. SILENT PARTNERS
ABDULLAH SULEIMAN had become the second-most powerful man in Saudi Arabia next to the king, and he had grown wealthy beyond imagining. His was an accidental fortune. He had journeyed as a young man from an oasis town on the Nejd plateau to Bombay, where he worked for an Arab merchant. He later failed in business in Bahrain and returned home to aid his uncle, a merchant who looked after King Abdulaziz’s finances. When his uncle died suddenly, Suleiman became the king’s minister of finance, an exalted title for a man whose main job in those days, before the oil wealth, was to look after a tin trunk that contained whatever gold and silver coins the king possessed. Suleiman eventually oversaw Abdulaziz’s royalty receipts and palace expenditures, but his highly personal accounting methods never changed. He was a “frail little man,” according to Philby, “but with something of the inspiration of the prophets in his soul.” He “knew no fatigue,” wrote the Dutch diplomat and traveler Daniel Van der Meulen, and he was “endowed with the genuine Arab gift of accommodating himself to all circumstances of life, but he was not strong enough to withstand two enemies who unexpectedly came his way: money and whisky.”1
By late 1949, Suleiman was at least as important to Mohamed Bin Laden’s prospects as the king himself was. He was “reputed to be a silent partner in Bin Laden’s construction company,” according to a later U.S. State Department report. He commissioned Bin Laden to build what would become a $3 million palace along the Red Sea, in which Suleiman intended to live; the minister also controlled or influenced access to scores of other construction projects, funded by an annual building budget that totaled about $100 million. Apart from his construction work with Suleiman, Bin Laden had a second connection to this endowment: Suleiman’s secretary, Mohamed Bahareth, a fellow Hadhrami to whom Bin Laden was now related by marriage. Through these ties Bin Laden adapted to a system of contracting that American and British diplomats in the kingdom referred to as graft, but which the Saudis who benefited from it regarded as an entirely proper form of business in a country where all the land, all the natural resources, and all the power to dispose of them were vested in the estate of the royal family.2
During the Second World War, Suleiman had recruited as an aide a Lebanese Druze named Najib Salha, and the two built what an American government report described as “sizeable personal fortunes” by “misappropriating shipments” of trucks and other equipment from the British lend-lease program of military aid to Saudi Arabia; the pair sold the diverted goods to wealthy Saudis. When the British complained, Abdulaziz fired Salha; by that time he had amassed assets in Egypt alone worth 2 million pounds sterling. The king could not bear to get rid of Suleiman, however. Even though his adviser facilitated “rampant graft and corruption,” which the king knew about, Abdulaziz was so dependent upon him to keep track of money matters that “it was unlikely in the extreme that anything could be done which would in the slightest way prejudice” Suleiman’s position, “so long as the King lived,” as a British official judged it.3
Suleiman owned a transport business that profited from the pilgrim trade to Mecca. He owned land across the kingdom and after the war he began to develop hotels. He planned one for Dammam, near the American-run oil fields, which he hoped to endow with a bar and movie theater, plans that proved too ambitious, since Islamic scholars in the kingdom had decreed movies illegal—along, of course, with alcohol. He entered into partnerships with many Saudi merchants; his partner in one Jeddah firm, named Ibrahim Shakir, who imported Dodge cars and trucks, became “one of the wealthiest private citizens in Saudi Arabia, beneficiary of many fat government contracts,” according to an American cable. Suleiman acquired farms and irrigated them with scarce water supplies, and he protected his land from encroachments—when the Saudi government sought to improve Jeddah’s sanitation by piping fresh water from one of Suleiman’s estates, he shut the project down. Alcohol exacerbated the effects of age and an itinerant life without modern medical care. Suleiman fell out of sight for months at a time; he typically said he was fishing in the Red Sea. The American embassy feared that the minister was losing his grip and “hitting [the] bottle” at an “increasing rate.”4
King Abdulaziz never cared about money as much as his sons and advisers did, but when he occasionally ran out, he became annoyed. In December 1949 the king demanded 10 million riyals from Suleiman to provide wedding gifts to some of his sons and daughters who were soon to be married. When Suleiman told him that the treasury was empty, Abdulaziz was apoplectic. In a supposed move toward reform, the minister of finance summoned from Cairo Najib Salha, his wartime profiteering crony. Having b
een taken once, the British government was “not particularly hopeful…that the Augean stables of the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Finance will be any cleaner for his arrival.”5
Nor were the Americans. They increasingly regarded the self-dealing and commissions that Suleiman oversaw as an obstacle to Washington’s plan to secure its alliance with Saudi Arabia by promoting rapid economic and social progress in the kingdom. The king’s budget allocated five times more for palaces and support of the royal family and its allies than it did for the embryonic Ministry of Health.6 Royal excess and social inequality might make the Saudi population vulnerable to the utopian appeals of the international communist movement, some American officials feared.
As oil flowed during the late 1940s, the Bechtel Corporation negotiated a cost-plus contract with the Saudi government to undertake an ambitious plan, influenced by Washington, to help lift the kingdom into the modern capitalist age. Bechtel’s imported bulldozers demolished Jeddah’s old city walls and plowed the sand to build piers, ports, airports, and an asphalted road that could speed visiting pilgrims from Jeddah to Mecca. Saudi princes, however, criticized Bechtel’s profits as excessive and impossible to police. For its part, Bechtel discovered that Suleiman, the king, and his sons expected the company to be on call around the clock to repair broken refrigerators, air conditioners, or even automobiles at their private palaces. The royal family ordered Bechtel’s bulldozers and earthmovers diverted from roads and airports to such work as the digging of a sunken garden at the palace of Prince Faisal, the king’s second son. Moreover, Suleiman fell behind on the government’s payments to Bechtel; by the summer of 1950, the Saudis owed the company $2 million. Stephen Bechtel told the State Department that “the headaches” of his company’s Saudi work “far outweighed the advantages.”7
