The Bin Ladens

by Steve Coll

  5. King demanding wedding gifts, treasury empty: FO 371/82664 Jeddah to London, January 12, 1950. “not particularly…for his arrival”: FO 370/82639 Jeddah to London, January 3, 1950.

  6. DOS 59/5469 Jeddah to Washington, July 7, 1951. The budget announced that summer provided for 21 million riyals to the Ministry of Health, and about 109 million riyals on “palaces, princes, Riyadh.”

  7. Digging Faisal’s garden: DOS 59/5471 “Memorandum of Conversation,” October 25, 1951. “the headaches…the advantages”: DOS 59/57/D/298/7 “Memorandum of Conversation,” June 14, 1950.

  8. King to Taif: DOS 59/5469 Jeddah to Washington, July 26, 1951.

  9. “always together”: Interview with Ahmed Fathalla, April 23, 2006 (RS). Bin Laden’s work on Mecca water project: DOS 59/5467 Jeddah to Washington, April 17, 1951, and FO 371/82657 Jeddah to London, “Jeddah Monthly Economic Reports,” July and August 1950.

  10. Royal Order: Annual Record, KAA Foundation, May 24, 1950. “for grading around the new residence”: DOS 59/5472 Cover letter and memorandum from Bechtel International Corp. to DOS, January 17, 1951. Bechtel reported that it had been promised that Bin Laden would soon give the machinery back.

  11. “Various members…their installation”: DOS 59/5467 Jeddah to Washington, February 20, 1951.

  12. Translated in DOS 59/6119 Jeddah to Washington, July 7, 1952.

  13. Translated in DOS 59/5468, article dated January 3, 1951.

  14. Salha’s diversion: DOS 59/5471 “Memorandum of Conversation,” April 4, 1952. The Bechtel executive, Mr. English, is quoted as saying, “there was not the slightest doubt in his mind” that Salha had stolen the $400,000, the equivalent of about $3 million in 2008 dollars.

  15. “to be interested…constructional works”: FO 371/104859 Jeddah to London, Jeddah Economic Report, November 1952 to January 1953. Bahareth’s $100,000: DOS 59/5471 Jeddah to Washington, October 4, 1953.

  16. Royal Order 15/12/5607 dated June 22, 1951. KAA Foundation.

  17. Philby writes to the king: DOS 59/5472 Jeddah to Washington, January 12, 1950. “a marked reluctance…from the shock”: FO 371/82657 “Jeddah Monthly Economic Reports,” March and April 1950. Export insurance: DOS 59/5472 Jeddah to Washington, May 27, 1950.

  18. Tea party: DOS 59/5467 Jeddah to Washington, December 21, 1950, and January 20, 1951.

  19. Soil composition: DOS 59/5472 Survey by W. J. Chalkley of Bechtel, February 6, 1951. “end of a long chain of misfortunes”: DOS 59/5468 Jeddah to Washington, November 24, 1952.

  20. Eight hundred automobiles: DOS 59/5467 Jeddah to Washington, May 6, 1952. “Happily presiding…however misguided”: DOS 59/5472 Jeddah to Washington, January 7, 1953.

  21. Asphalt order: DOS 59/5472 Jeddah to Washington, January 7, 1953. “about half a million…ill humor”: FO 371/104859 Jeddah Economic Report, February 1953 to April 1953. “As this is…foreign firm”: FO 371/104859 Jeddah to London, January 7, 1953.

  22. “fright…do the job”: FO 371/104859, Jeddah to London, January 7, 1953. “has been given…to come from”: Ibid., Jeddah Economic Report, August 1953 to October 1953.

  23. Shareholder records submitted by the family in a consolidated series of civil cases arising from the events of September 11, 2001, In Re Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001, 03 MDL 1570, provide the year of birth, using the Islamic calendar, of each of Mohamed’s surviving children, except for Osama and also Mohamed’s son Ali, neither of whom was a shareholder in the period described by the records. The numbers of sons and daughters born before late 1953 is taken from these filings; the number of wives that produced these children has been calculated from confidential interviews with family members and business associates of the Bin Ladens, who described which brothers, and in some cases, which sisters, were born to the same mother. That the mother of Yeslam, Khalil, Ibrahim, and Fawzia is of Iranian origin is also confirmed by Bin Laden, Inside the Kingdom, p. 17. Yeslam’s birth date is from Swiss divorce pleadings translated and filed in Carmen Binladin v. Yeslam and Ibrahim Binladin, Los Angeles County Superior Court, BC212648.

  24. Aphrodisiacs and forcing his sons to stand: The House of Saud, p. 159. Holden and Johns provide a thorough account of Ousman’s murder, pp. 170–71.

  25. The scene and the king’s burial: FO 371/104868 Jeddah to London, November 24, 1953.

  26. “private and secret…begin with himself” and the loan request: DOS 59/5469 Jeddah to Washington, November 10, 1953. The scene was recorded by the American chargé d’affaires.

  4. THE GLORY OF HIS REIGN

  1. $20 million per month: Oil revenue during 1954 was $234.8 million, Holden and Johns, The House of Saud, p. 180. “administrative chaos…shortage of cash”: FO 371/104867 Jeddah to London, October 11, 1953.

  2. Mohamed and Abdullah, Sons of Awadh Bin Laden: Ger FM 366, WI 416-80.04-427/59 Jeddah to Bonn, September 8, 1959. “amorphous organization…ambitious plans”: FO 371/104867, op. cit.

  3. “royal expenditures…their pockets”: DOS 59/4944 Jeddah to Washington, “Economic and Financial Review: Saudi Arabia 1954,” April 7, 1955.

  4. The electric company and its problems: DOS 59/5472 Jeddah to Washington, June 12, 1954. Burns and Roe, “instrumental in winning”: DOS 59/4945 Jeddah to Washington, January 8, 1955.

  5. Royal Order: Decree no. 21/1/138/2265, Umm al-Qura Annual Record, KAA Foundation. West German estimate of $200 million: Ger FO 146/97-649/55 Jeddah to Bonn, December 23, 1955. Bin Laden’s projects circa 1955: FO 371/114885 Jeddah to London, April 6, 1955. Gypsum deposit: DOS 59/4945 Jeddah to Washington, July 5, 1955. Bin Laden’s New York agent: Burns and Roe report, attachment, ibid.

  6. Flight to Mukalla: DOS translation of article in Al-Bilad Al-Saudiyah no. 2110, March 25, 1956, 59/5371. Bought out Abdullah: DOS RG 59 “The Bin Ladin Construction Empire,” Jeddah to Washington, September 25, 1967. “Mohamed was more ambitious…wanted more”: Interview with Khalid Ameri, March 17, 2007.

  7. Abdullah’s return home: Interviews with Rabat town council members and with Khalid Ameri, March 17, 2007. Bin Mahfouz school: Interview with its principal, March 17, 2007. Mohamed’s Rakiyah water project: Interviews with Bin Laden family members in their ancestral village of Gharn Bashireih, March 18, 2007.

  8. Packard convertibles: Interview with Nadim Fakhreddine, April 26, 2006 (RS). “are known as…good reputation”: Ger FM 145/560 Jeddah to Bonn, September 19, 1957. “the richest company…state orders”: 277/200/WI-416-84-04.461/58 Jeddah to Bonn, July 2, 1958.

  9. “They are…My head could go”: Interview with Fakhreddine, op. cit. “He told us…our upbringing”: Dateline NBC, broadcast July 10, 2004. Buraimi dispute: DOS 59/5371 Beirut to Washington, March 1, 1956. The Americans had hoped that Bin Laden would intervene with King Saud to prevent a construction contract from being awarded to a state-owned Polish communist firm, but Fouad Zahed, Bin Laden’s chief engineer, said that Bin Laden would not get involved because of “dissatisfaction United States policy re Buraimi dispute and handling of tank shipment,” as the cable reporting on the issue put it. In fact, the United States sided decisively with Saudi Arabia against Britain in this border dispute, according to Bronson, Thicker Than Oil, p. 62; nor is it clear from the documents reviewed what “tank shipment” Bin Laden was complaining about.

  10. FO 371/114872 Jeddah to London, January 6, 1955. De Gaury, Arabia Phoenix, pp. 86–92. House of Saud, op. cit., pp. 174–83. Saud’s children: DOS 59/2643 Jeddah to Washington, December 16, 1964.

  11. Aramco visit and quotations: DOS 59/7208 “Crown Prince Saud’s Official Visit to America: Notes on the period Monday, January 13, through Wednesday, January 22, 1947.”

  12. $200 million palace: FO 371/132661, Minute by J. M. Heath, January 7, 1958. “hundreds of colored…in orange”: Van der Meulen, The Wells of Ibn Saud, pp. 234–35.

  13. European quacks: House of Saud, op. cit., p. 178. Two-thirds nomads, less than one in ten in school: Vassiliev, The History of Saudi Arabia, pp. 421, 433, statistics circa 195
6 and 1954, respectively.

  14. Saud’s erratic conduct: FO 371/132661 Minute of December 1, 1958. Coup attempt: Bligh, “Interplay Between…”; Mackey, The Saudis, p. 297. Conspiracy to kill Nasser: House of Saud, op. cit., p. 196.

  15. House of Saud, pp. 191–94. “Welcome King Saud!”: Footage in “The House of Saud,” Algeria Productions, 2004. Thicker Than Oil, op. cit., pp. 69–75.

  16. FO 371 Letter in reply to British engineer inquiring about National Electricity Co., June 6, 1958.

  17. Alireza, “The Late King Faisal.” De Gaury, op. cit., pp. 86ff. Field, The Merchants, p. 40. “an unbelievably patient…time to solve”: Algosaibi, Arabian Essays. “he was anxious…go ahead slowly”: DOS 59/4945 Jeddah to Washington, March 5, 1959.

  18. Interview with Khaled Batarfi, February 19, 2005. Batarfi’s uncle worked with Bin Laden in Mecca, and he is quoting what his uncle recalled.

  19. Interview with Fakhreddine, op. cit. Bin Laden’s strategy of marrying the daughters of desert leaders and town mayors was described in interviews by several people who worked with him at the time.

  20. Surah 2, verse 231.

  21. Interviews with several people close to the Bin Laden family. The Al-Ghanem family provided an account of the marriage, and were described as poor and relatively secular in the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Qabas, November 14, 2001. For other, similar accounts, see also Randal, Osama, p. 55; Scheuer, Through Our Enemies’ Eyes, pp. 80–81; and Wright, The Looming Tower, p. 72.

  22. In Re Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001, 03 MDL 1570. Interviews with people close to the family, including Carmen Bin Laden, August 6, 2004, establish that four different wives gave birth to the children listed in the court records as born in 1377. Wright, The Looming Tower, cites Osama’s 1991 statement to the newspaper Al-Umma Al-Islamiyya that he was born in the month of Ragab. Shafiq’s birth date is from the 2000 annual report of Symphony Advisers Ltd., Companies House records, London.

  23. According to the court records, the four sons born during 1377, besides Osama, were Ibrahim, Shafiq, Khalil, and Haider. The two daughters were Mariam and Fowziyah. However, deposition testimony by Ibrahim and Khalil in other civil lawsuits in the United States confirms that they shared the same mother, so while it is conceivable they were both born during 1377, it is also possible that the court records submitted by the Bin Ladens are inaccurate in at least this respect.

  24. $500 million in debt: House of Saud, op. cit., p. 199. No pilgrim receipts: DOS 59/4944 Jeddah to Washington, December 4, 1958. Structure of debt, Faisal’s thinking: DOS 59/4946 Dhahran to Washington, February 4, 1959.

  25. Telephone interview with Mike Ameen, March 1, 2006. Ameen worked in Aramco’s political office during this period and knew Mohamed Bin Laden.

  26. DOS 59/4945 Dhahran to Washington, May 27, 1959, and “Memorandum of Conversation with Sam Logan,” June 23, 1959. All quotations are from the Memorandum of Conversation.

  27. The negotiations are described in a series of State Department cables from Jeddah to Washington between June 1958 and November 1958. When American commercial officers checked on the Roma brothers’ claims in Italy, they were told that Finmeccanica, the construction company with whom the brothers claimed affiliation, regarded them as “financially and commercially unreliable.”

  28. “Aramco…workers”: DOS 59 Jeddah to Washington, October 2, 1958.

  29. “good for the country…good old days”: DOS 59/4944 “Economic Summary, Third Quarter of 1959,” Jeddah to Washington, December 15, 1959.

  5. FOR JERUSALEM

  1. Peters, The Hajj, pp. 3–40. Aslan, No God but God, pp. 3–18. Caudill, “Twilight of the Hejaz” manuscript, pp. 21–23.

  2. The Hajj, pp. 40–55. “pictures of trees…angels”: Ibid., p. 48.

  3. “he asked for a cloth”: Ibid.

  4. “dogs of the Hejaz”: Caudill manuscript, op. cit., p. 24. “You must imagine…loud voice”: The observation is from a man whom Peters describes as a possible Jewish spy of Napoleon disguised as a traveling pilgrim, who went by the name Ali Bey Al-Abbasi. The Hajj, op. cit., p. 198.

  5. The Hajj, p. 359, quoting Eldon Rutter, an English convert to Islam, who visited Medina in 1925.

  6. Abbas, Story of the Great Expansion, pp. 100–101, 260–61.

  7. The official history, ibid., cites a figure of 30 million riyals for construction and 40 million riyals for eminent domain payments. DOS 59/5467 Jeddah to Washington, April 12, 1953, cites a figure of $1.35 million for construction costs in Medina in 1952 alone. Other diplomatic estimates, citing government budget documents and other sources, are similar in scale through 1955.

  8. “modern architectural style” and renovation statistics: Story of the Great Expansion, op. cit., p. 278. “an impressive…piece of work”: DOS 59/2810 Jeddah to Washington, June 24, 1961.

  9. Umm al-Qura, October 28, 1955, KAA Foundation.

  10. Ibid.

  11. “enjoyment of movies…point of view”: DOS 59/4946 Jeddah to Washington, March 29, 1958. “evil…corruption and destruction”: Published in Al-Yamamah, March 30, 1958.

  12. Fifty thousand to four hundred thousand and $130 million: DOS 59/4947 Jeddah to Washington, July 24, 1956, translation of King Saud’s Mecca welcome address. “Even this sum”: Ger FM File 145, Jeddah to Bonn, October 2, 1956.

  13. Medina demolition and debris removal: Story of the Great Expansion, op. cit., pp. 276–77. Osama’s account: Bergen, The Osama Bin Laden I Know, p. 2, quoting his interview with Al-Jazeera in 1999. Bin Laden’s description of his father’s bidding for the Jerusalem project, in particular, is somewhat detailed and entirely accurate, documents from the renovation project show. Mecca demolition statistics: Story of the Great Expansion, p. 264.

  14. Peters, Jerusalem, pp. 1–406, is rich with the accounts of travelers and participants in the city’s history.

  15. Hussein’s initiative and the date of Nasser’s announcement are from a 1981 Egyptian report reviewing the history of renovations in the site, one in a collection of documents supplied by the waqf authorities about the 1950s and 1960s renovation project. The author is indebted throughout this section to the exceptional research in Jerusalem carried out by Robin Shulman, who collected the documents and conducted related interviews. The documents were translated in Washington by Mohamed Elmenshawy; they will be referred to in notes hereafter as “Jer Docs.”

  16. “First, this is a sacred…Muslim community”: Jer Docs, MBL to Committee, July 8, 1958, written on stationery captioned “Office of Mohamed Awad Bin Laden, 51-S.” To get below the Egyptian bid, Bin Laden cut his proposal by 8,000 dinars in the very last round. The Supreme Judge said in his decision that in addition to price, the committee had been influenced by Bin Laden’s willingness to work without certain conditions named by the Egyptian bidder.

  17. Jer Docs Letter MH-8-32-169, July 19, 1958.

  18. Jer Docs Letter 1390, March 8, 1959.

  19. “We learned…a bit of Arabic,” import details, and tipping: Interviews with Nadir Shtaye, October 31, 2005, and November 6, 2005 (RS). Other Palestinian Muslims who were in Jerusalem at the time confirm the presence of Christian workers on the job site. Late-1950s photograph: Story of the Great Expansion, op. cit. The book dates the photo to 1959 but the caption suggests it might have been taken in 1964. Photos from American pilot: Provided by Terri Daley, the pilot’s daughter. The aluminum cupola and joists Bin Laden installed on the Dome of the Rock would prove leaky and unreliable, and they were removed years later, but engineers and architects who later oversaw the mosque said the blame for this lay with the project’s oversight committee, which had been dazzled at the time of the original bidding by the promise of “modern” aluminum, about which they knew too little. A UNESCO report written in 1979 by European experts documents the problems in detail.

  20. English translation: “Address on the Occasion of the Unveiling of the Restored Dome of the Rock,” April 18, 1994, which includes excerpts from the earlier 1964 speech. Accesse
d at www.kinghussein.gov.jo/94_april18.html.

  21. Text reprinted in Palestine, August 8, 1964, p. 5.

  22. All quotations: Ibid.

  23. This account of the house is primarily from an interview with its owner and a tour of the home (RS). Other residents of the area who knew of Bin Laden at this time confirmed that he stayed at the house when he was in town. Two acquaintances said he took a Palestinian wife; one thought the wife was from Gaza, another thought she was from Jenin. These specific accounts could not be confirmed, but they accord with the recollections of other family acquaintances and business partners that Bin Laden had at least one Palestinian wife. Interviews conducted for the author by Israeli journalist Samuel Sockol confirm that Bin Laden owned the house and was not merely a tenant. Sockol interviewed Yehuda Semberg, a retired Israeli naval officer who lived in the house for twenty-five years, and also Aharon Shakarji, a former official of Israel’s land authority.

  6. THE BACKLASH

  1. “This show is splendid…the Turks”: Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder, p. 151.

  2. “only medium…will prevail”: DOS 59/7214, text of telegram, October 3, 1946. “much emotional appeal”: DOS 59/3100 Jeddah to Washington, September 28, 1960.

  3. “Bin Laden’s for the asking”: Ibid., Jeddah to Washington, April 5, 1961.

  4. “to show off…other projects”: Ibid., Jeddah to Washington, November 25, 1961. “extremely good connection…construction work”: Ibid., Jeddah to Washington, November 28, 1961. “opening the locked stable…appropriate pockets”: Ibid., Jeddah to Washington, October 20, 1960. “We have…strictly commercial”: FO 371/170324 FO minute, February 20, 1963. “King Saud…Bin Laden”: Ibid., Memorandum of telephone call, February 8, 1963.

  5. “I spent…Bin Laden”: Ibid., Damascus to London, February 20, 1963.

  6. “that Bin Laden…an enemy of him”: Ibid. “that Saudi support…a share in it”: FO 371/170190 Board of Trade to Jeddah, December 2, 1963.