The Bin Ladens

by Steve Coll

  By the early 1950s, the Dome of the Rock had sunk into disrepair. Tiles were damaged or missing altogether, its roof was sagging, and its interior required fresh paint, carpentry, and metalwork. The Kingdom of Jordan then controlled the sanctuary, the Old City, and East Jerusalem. Young King Hussein, who had taken the throne after the assassination of his father, announced a pan-Islamic campaign to renovate the Dome in 1952, a project that had political as well as religious appeal amid the anti-Zionist feeling prevalent in the Arab world. Saudi Arabia and Egypt pledged financial support, but the project languished.

  Four years later, Nasser announced his own plan to refurbish the Dome, and later that year, with Jordan’s agreement, he dispatched engineering and architectural experts to Jerusalem to prepare for contracting bids. Nasser’s initiative seems to have galvanized Faisal, for as soon as the crown prince took power in 1958, he worked to ensure Saudi influence over the project. His government backed Mohamed Bin Laden in the bidding. As Bin Laden prepared to make a proposal during the spring of 1958, he was buoyed by financial guarantees from Riyadh.15

  Seven Arab-owned companies submitted bids by the May deadline—two from Jordan, four from Egypt, and Bin Laden’s. He passed an initial cut down to three bidders, but his submission was not initially the lowest in price. Bin Laden corresponded with the decision-making committee about switching materials so as to reduce his bid further. “First, this is a sacred Islamic project, and I am very pleased to participate in the construction of this holy Muslim site,” he wrote on July 8, 1958. He pledged to work “at any cost and provide any materials in order to do this great and honorable service to the Muslim community.” To ensure success, Bin Laden provided an aide with power of attorney and sent him to Jerusalem for the last round of negotiations. He dropped his bid further to ensure that his was the lowest. His final submission was for 276,990.2 Jordanian dinars, just below the 278,225.5 dinars proposed by the Ali Abrahim Company of Egypt. The narrow margin suggests that a decision to favor Bin Laden might have already been made privately. Bin Laden later said that he had deliberately accepted a loss on the contract, as an act of personal religious charity, so it is also possible that he was determined, on his own, to win the honor. In any event, on July 17, 1958, the committee announced that Bin Laden had won.16

  “Your highness, Sheikh Mohammed Bin Laden, it is my pleasure to inform you that the Committee for the Reconstruction of the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque has awarded the work of the construction…to your company,” the committee’s Supreme Judge wrote. “I am hoping this work will be completed in accordance with God’s expectations, and I hope God will help us preserve this Islamic treasure.”17

  For the next nine years, Mohamed Bin Laden oversaw construction and renovations at the sanctuary, first on the Dome of the Rock and the grounds around it, then on the Al-Aqsa Mosque and elsewhere in Muslim areas of Jerusalem’s Old City. He emphasized that the project was an act of personal devotion. “It is well known, Your Highness, that I care a great deal about the Dome of the Rock project,” he wrote to the Supreme Judge in 1959 while bidding on a contract for lighting and electrical work. “I will execute the plan…at my own expense. In addition, I will submit receipts without including any service or labor costs…This is not for financial gain, but for its religious significance.”18

  Bin Laden’s Jerusalem workforce was multinational and multireligious; it included Italian marble specialists, Armenian Christians and Palestinian Christians, as well as Palestinian Muslims. When the call to prayer rang out, Bin Laden would join the Muslim workers in prostrated worship, but the Italians would carry on or take a coffee break. “We learned a bit of Italian,” recalled Nadir Shtaye, a workshop supervisor. “They learned a bit of Arabic.” Bin Laden imported aluminum and marble from Europe, sand and cement from Jordan, wood from Lebanon, and tiles from Turkey, all trucked in from the Jordanian port at Aqaba. He won popularity by sometimes tipping workers on top of their salaries—ten dinars per man. A photograph shows him standing near a bank of microphones at a Jerusalem press conference in the late 1950s; he is dressed in a long white Saudi robe and a fashionable pair of dark sunglasses, carrying a modern briefcase. Photographs taken by his American pilot toward the end of the project show an enormous crane rising above the sanctuary’s esplanade; nearby are turbaned workers hammering to repair the outdoor plaza, amid piles of white sand.19

  King Hussein called for a celebration at the sanctuary after the first round of work was finished. Bin Laden flew into Jerusalem on his own private airplane on August 5, 1964, accompanied by a Saudi cabinet minister and notables from Medina. The Jordanian governor of Jerusalem and his military commander met Bin Laden at the airport. About five hundred Arab dignitaries crowded onto the sanctuary platform the next morning under a hot sun. A Koran reader sang out verses, and King Hussein presented Bin Laden with a medal honoring him for his work on Jerusalem’s behalf. As was by now a ritual of public Arab oratory, the king pledged to reclaim Palestine from Israel: “Let me emphasize that the actual renovation of the Mosque and the Dome of the Holy Rock assumes significance far beyond the physical repair work,” the king said. The renovation project had also advanced the cause of “complete restoration of our full rights in our usurped land.”20

  Bin Laden asked the Saudi minister who had accompanied him to read out his speech. He began with quotations from the Koran and a disquisition on the Prophet’s Night Journey. He lavishly praised King Hussein and his family. Bin Laden then moved on to the subject of himself:

  God has also honored me, as I carried out the construction project at the two great mosques of Mecca and Medina, the two holy sites which God bestowed upon the Saudi Arabian government…[They] contracted me to undertake this project and thus I was granted the honor of developing the three great mosques in Islam, which draw pilgrims from near and far. This is truly a great privilege from God, who gave it to whom He chose.21

  He told the audience that the final cost had been about 516,000 dinars, or roughly $1.5 million at contemporary rates of exchange. Bin Laden paused to “point out here the generous, large contribution made by the Saudi Arabian government,” which had covered about half the budget. He then advertised his own charity rather conspicuously:

  I wish Your Majesty to know that Yours Truly sacrificed an amount of no less than 150,000 dinars, which was spent willingly for this project, without concern about the material losses. I donated for this blessed work without any thought of the losses, but rather, my goal was spiritual gain, which for me is more important than hundreds of thousands of dinars.

  He told the audience that King Hussein still owed him 167,000 dinars, but that he would renounce this debt as an additional act of charity—“my contribution to this great duty.” He said that as he now moved on to work on the Al-Aqsa Mosque, he intended to build a large ten-acre garden nearby, from his own funds, and he asked for God’s help.22

  Bin Laden bought a house in East Jerusalem around 1963 or 1964. It was a spacious, white-stoned, red-roofed building of the sort that sprouted all around the city during the 1950s and early 1960s. It had a spectacular view of Jerusalem in the distance, as well as sandy ground and white-stone buildings nearer at hand. The cease-fire line then prevailing between Israel and Jordan was just a short walk down the street. To the east was Mount Scopus, a U.N.-controlled no-man’s-land, and to the south lay the Israeli neighborhoods of Givat Ha-Mivtar and Ramat Eshkol. Jerusalem’s old Qalandia airport was a short drive away, from where Bin Laden could fly directly to Jeddah, Mecca, or Medina on his private plane.

  Bin Laden may have married at least one Palestinian wife during the years he worked on the Jerusalem project, but he stayed in his Jerusalem house mainly on short-term visits; it was otherwise occupied by his servants, company aides, and a guard who kept watch over his cars, according to the house’s current owner, a Christian Arab who is a citizen of Israel and a former owner, a retired Israeli naval officer.23

  Israel seized East Jerusalem from J
ordan in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war; after that, Bin Laden never returned. The home was renovated and expanded. For a time, a Palestinian consul of Spain leased a unit. Years later, the house fell under the administration of an Israeli government department that managed land abandoned by Arab owners because of the war. The house was transferred formally to the Israeli government, sold to the naval officer, and later sold by this officer to the current owner. Throughout this time, the Bin Ladens remained firmly and prosperously centered in Jeddah, but in a practical and material way, the family could trace its history to the resonant cause—and perhaps even the unresolved legal claims—of Palestinian refugees from the 1967 war.

  6. THE BACKLASH

  GERMAN ENGINEERS and Turkish laborers laid the Hejaz Railway, linking Damascus to Medina, between 1900 and 1908. It sped Muslim pilgrims more than eight hundred miles to the two holy cities, with the additional and not incidental capacity to carry the fading Ottoman Empire’s Turkish troops. As the First World War descended into trench slaughter in France, T. E. Lawrence and his colleagues in British intelligence seized upon the early stirrings of Arab nationalism to organize a guerrilla campaign against Turkish outposts, which included a garrison of eleven thousand soldiers at Medina. Bedouin militia repeatedly tore up Hejaz Railway tracks during the early months of 1917. Lawrence of Arabia enjoyed himself thoroughly: “This show is splendid: You cannot imagine greater fun for us, greater vexation and fury for the Turks,” he wrote to a colleague.1

  The main railway lay unusable for decades afterward and became, in Arab eyes, a symbol of colonial-era interference with the Islamic pilgrimage. The newly independent governments of Jordan and Syria, along with Saudi Arabia, pledged a restoration. From Riyadh, Abdulaziz expressed a particularly romantic view of railroads; they were the “only medium, by God’s willingness, whose full advantage will prevail,” he had cabled to President Harry Truman in 1946. His son Saud felt as strongly and later helped to organize the remnants of the Hejaz Railway as a formal religious trust. Its executive committee in Damascus spent several million dollars on engineering studies during the late 1950s; they showed that repairs would cost tens of millions of dollars. European and American officials refused financial support, arguing that modern highways and airports would make a better investment. Yet the American embassy in Jeddah recognized that the project held “much emotional appeal in certain Saudi quarters,” and it feared accusations of interference with Muslim prerogatives if it objected too strenuously. Finally, in 1960, in the midst of Crown Prince Faisal’s campaign to promote Islamic projects as an antidote to Nasser, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria revived their plan to repair the damage Lawrence and his Arab Revolt had done.2

  As he had in Jerusalem, Mohamed Bin Laden emerged as an instrument of a religious-minded Saudi foreign policy project. He partnered with a Japanese firm, Marubeni, to bid for the railway repair contract: Bin Laden would undertake the civil engineering work, such as blasting tunnels and building culverts, while his Japanese partners, supervised by West German engineers, would lay the track. An American who worked for Bin Laden in Jeddah reported that the Japanese government, hoping to establish a business foothold in Arabia, had promised to underwrite all Bin Laden’s costs. Bin Laden and his aides shuttled to Damascus. The contract “was Bin Laden’s for the asking,” boasted his American employee.3

  A delegation of thirteen from the Hejaz Railway Executive Committee flew into Saudi Arabia late in October 1961. Bin Laden hosted them in Riyadh and Taif, taking them on a tour “to show off some of the roads, mosques and other projects” he had built, the American embassy reported. It looked as if the fix was in: Bin Laden enjoyed “extremely good connections with the Saudi Government and Royal Family and is a figure to reckon with in most public tenders involving construction work.” The railway contract was likely to be awarded under a Saudi system that a separate cable described as “opening the locked stable after the horse is stolen.” Saudi government employees would often trade information about a bid until “the contract is then awarded to the firm assisted by the ‘insiders’ with handsome bonuses going into the appropriate pockets.” A later British government report asserted: “We have good evidence that contracts for this project were allocated on grounds that could not be considered strictly commercial.” Among other things, according to British reporting, “King Saud apparently insisted that Bin Laden” win the bid.4

  Whatever the reasons, Bin Laden and his Japanese partners did indeed win the contract; on November 14, 1961, they were awarded a $25 million deal. They signed a commitment the following summer, yet no work began. The Japanese proved unable to post a bond. Frustrated, the executive committee turned to a British company with proven railway experience, Thomas Summerson & Sons, to join Bin Laden in a new partnership. Two Summerson executives flew in to negotiate and joined British ambassador J. C. M. Mason in his Damascus apartment on the evening of February 18, 1963. “I spent some of the evening as Devil’s Advocate,” Mason recounted. Among the problems he cited were “the temperamental idiosyncracies of Bin Laden.”5

  The Saudi construction magnate had annoyed the railway committee, whose chairman said “that Bin Laden was now fairly unpopular.” Syrian and Jordanian members seem to have resented how Bin Laden pulled Saudi royal strings and then underperformed on the work he won. He had become too powerful to challenge, however. The British executives were “quite prepared to ditch” Bin Laden, but they feared “the effect on eventual work in Saudi Arabia of making an enemy of him.” For his part, Bin Laden reportedly claimed “that Saudi support would be withdrawn from the project unless he had a share in it.”6

  THE RAILWAY PROJECT fell apart a few weeks later. Crown Prince Faisal, too, appears to have been fed up with Mohamed Bin Laden; he pulled the contract from him “under severe reproaches,” according to a West German assessment.7 The Hejaz Railway was far from the only cause of Faisal’s frustration with Bin Laden. There was a sense emerging in at least some sections of the kingdom that Bin Laden promised too much, did shoddy work, and too often failed to finish on time. His wealth and privileges had also become exceptionally conspicuous. He owned three Beechcraft propeller aircraft as of March 1961—more than any other individual in the kingdom outside the royal family. He hired American pilots to fly him from one job site to another, sprawling encampments of laborers in the deserts over which he ruled. He worked energetically, but his improvised methods increasingly drew questions and complaints from the international consultants who were attempting, at the urging of Crown Prince Faisal, to inject the best modern engineering standards into Saudi building projects.

  For the first time in Bin Laden’s long career, he had become a public figure of controversy, within the bounds of the kingdom’s heavily muted politics.

  “We read on every occasion that construction projects in our country are opened up for bids—that Bin Laden’s office had a ‘lesser bid’ and got the project,” wrote Ahmad Mohamed Jamal in a front-page column in the Meccan newspaper Al-Nadwa on November 15, 1961:

  This at a time when observers are screaming at that office’s slowness in carrying out the projects it had undertaken two, three or more years previously. They also scream to high heaven at the dispersal of the efforts of [Bin Laden’s] engineers, workers and equipment among numerous projects in distant cities and roads far apart in the kingdom. They scream, too, complaining about the lack of quality of the work, faulting engineering and inefficient organization of most of the asphalting operations.8

  The larger problem was “the practice of giving the road projects in the whole of our country to one contractor.” Ultimately, Jamal concluded, the problem was not only the quality of Bin Laden’s work but also the quality of Saudi Arabia’s government:

  Have mercy upon us, you responsible officials of the Ministry of Communications. Have mercy on our country; have mercy on our projects. Spare our roads from the sole contractor, from him of the “lowest bid,” from him whose previous project commitments are also paralyzed. H
ave mercy upon us, so that God may have mercy upon you.9

  Accusations that pungent did not typically appear in Saudi Arabia’s heavily censored newspapers without government sanction. Faisal and his allies were one possible source of backing for this criticism; Saud had temporarily pushed Faisal out of the cabinet, and at the time the article appeared, the crown prince was fighting to restore his authority. His allies promoted him as a cure for government inefficiency and corruption. A new minister of commerce, Ahmed Jamjum, from a merchant family that competed with Bin Laden, sought to break the stranglehold on contracting at the self-dealing Ministry of Communications. Yet there was more to this than factional competition: the public criticism signaled a broad discontent with the quality and pace of the kingdom’s road-building program.

  Highways in the early 1960s were a potent symbol of modernity. America’s interstate highway plan was now much advanced, and the big-finned Cadillacs and convertibles that streamed along those freeways from coast to coast seemed to epitomize American individualism and prosperity. John F. Kennedy, hatless and handsome, waved to crowds from an open sedan; in Hollywood films and television shows, the convertible was cool. The notion that a national highway network could speed up modernization had particular appeal in Saudi Arabia. For the kingdom’s heavily nomadic population, so long accustomed to freedom of movement, the automobile beckoned. The kingdom’s population was small—only about 4 million—and dispersed over vast desert territory. Highways were not only exciting; they were essential.