The Bin Ladens Read online

  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 zomals, which reminded the men of home. Al-Aesa recalled watching Mohamed and Abdullah dance and sing in the Jeddah night: “They were very humble.” There was one zomal, traditionally sung with pistols in hand, punctuated by celebratory shots fired into the sky, which the two Bin Laden brothers used to belt out with gusto:

  Today my school is finished

  And my watch is gold

  And my pistol with six bullets

  Did not answer my salam aleikum23

  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

  Sex seemed to be the greatest joy in his life, or at least the greatest compulsion. In 1930 he told the Englishman Philby that he had married one hundred thirty-five virgins and about one hundred other women to date, but that he had decided to limit himself to just two new wives annually for the remainder of his years. He bent the Islamic law that permitted four wives at a time by marrying and divorcing rapidly, and by keeping additional retinues of concubines and female slaves. There was a political and even a military aspect to his carnality: “The Saudi state was consolidated by marriage,” as the
historian Madawi Al-Rasheed put it, and Abdulaziz often “married the ex-wives or daughters of his ex-rivals and enemies.”3

  Estimates of the number of slaves in his kingdom ran from several thousand into the tens of thousands; several hundred served openly in the monarch’s Riyadh palace. When a slave concubine gave birth to a son, she received her freedom, and in a few rare cases, her son was acknowledged as legitimate. Abdulaziz ultimately recognized about forty-five legitimate sons, who became his royal heirs; the number of his daughters and other children is unknown.4

  For all of his seeming profligacy, the king maintained an austere and pious lifestyle. He did not drink or smoke or permit his aides to wear silk; he prayed five times a day; and in his court the dominant sound from day to day was the quiet clink of coffee cups and the rhythmic chanting of Koran readers. He never doubted that God had called him to rule his desert kingdom; he would do his best to answer this call, and to conform to Islam’s laws, but the rest was in divine hands. The form of Islam he had been taught was severe and intolerant. In the Hejaz, there were Shias and Sufi mystics, and scholars from every historical school of the Sunni tradition. But in the Riyadh court of Abdulaziz there was only the simple and insistent creed of Mohamed Abdul Wahhab, an eighteenth-century desert preacher who had rejected virtually all adornment, art, music, and technology as blasphemy. In the isolated high desert of central Arabia, as the Jeddah architect Sami Angawi put it, “you have either day or night, you have cold or hot. You don’t have these shades. Even the music is only one string…It’s either black or white. It’s either you’re with me or against me.”5 Yet the religious passion of the king’s Wahhabi followers caused him continual trouble—particularly the Ikhwan, or “Brotherhood,” a militia of unbending radicals Abdulaziz created to conquer his enemies. When the Ikhwan threatened to revolt against Abdulaziz because they felt he was not religious enough by their exacting standards, the king turned his guns on them. At the same time, to hold his throne, he had to continuously appease his court’s Islamic scholars, the ulema.

  He debated with these ulema about the attractions and dangers of modern technology. Through his contacts with the British, Abdulaziz came to understand the outlines of Europe’s industrialization and the dizzying array of products and comforts it had created. He had no desire at all to adapt to European civilization, but its gadgets intrigued him greatly. He never left the Arab world and he mocked English finery and pomposity. During a desert meeting with a British officer, he strode into an elaborate colonial tent outfitted with plush chairs, and announced, “Here we are in modernity! Bring tea, boy!” He urged his robed Bedouin retinue to join him on the carved chairs: “Let’s be modern!” He mocked, but he also imitated: By the 1930s he had ordered his own European furniture for his Riyadh majlis.

  He particularly liked radio sets, through which he could follow European news without ever leaving his palace. The Marconi wireless network he began to build on the Arabian Peninsula during the early 1930s also offered an important, even revolutionary means for Abdulaziz to monitor and control events in his own kingdom. He set up radio stations in major cities and a central operations room in Riyadh from where he could track potential rebels on the periphery of his domain and dispatch orders or units of his army. He struggled to persuade Riyadh’s deeply suspicious Islamic scholars that these radio devices were permissible; among other things, the scholars strenuously objected to the music that came on to signal BBC news bulletins. Because it was impossible to anticipate exactly when this music would appear, Abdulaziz persuaded the scholars that the fault was with the radio knobs, not the radios or broadcasts. He also sought to persuade his religious scholars that the telegraph was not a form of sorcery.

  Businessmen in Jeddah plied the king with Ford and Chevrolet automobiles, which he used to hunt gazelles in the desert. He would race along in the front seat beside his Bedouin driver, chasing his hunting falcons as they plunged to attack the fleeing antelopes, pecking out their eyes before the men completed the ceremonial kill. Thundering through the rough desert, Abdulaziz ground his cars down quickly and often left them to rust. In 1927 his royal garage had 250 Fords and Chevrolets, and it grew ever larger.6

  The business agent who supplied Abdulaziz with Fords and Marconi radios, and who increasingly infiltrated his court and provided it with an air of burlesque intrigue, was Harry St. John Philby. He had graduated from Cambridge University with a First Class degree in Modern Languages, joined the Indian Civil Service, and later worked in Iraq, but he quit Britain’s colonial service and became increasingly bitter about his government. Still, he desperately wished to be recognized in England as the foremost Arabian geographer and traveler of his time. During the 1920s he attached himself to Abdulaziz as an informal adviser and converted to Islam; the king endowed him with the new name of Abdullah. He was a “stocky, bearded figure in Arab dress, fiercely and fearlessly argumentative, unalterably British and yet more Arab than the Arabs,” one acquaintance wrote. Yet for all his airs, he was “neither a soldier nor a poet…the kind of man who is always out of step.” When not attending the king’s Riyadh court, Philby lived in a comfortable house in Jeddah, where he set up his Ford dealership and collected baboons.7

  Perhaps because Philby was so skeptical about the British government—he was ultimately arrested during the Second World War for promoting the causes of Nazi Germany—Abdulaziz came to rely upon him for independent advice in his dealings with Europeans and Americans. He presented Philby with a slave girl as a gift, and granted him permission to travel across the peninsula, documenting its flora and fauna for books and lectures Philby delivered to English geographers. And it was Philby who controlled the crucial negotiations during the 1930s for mining and oil concessions.

  Winston Churchill had converted Britain’s navy from coal to oil during the First World War and by doing so helped usher in the oil age. Britain had locked up supplies in Iran and Iraq, but American explorers had begun to poke around the Middle East as well. An American oil company, SOCAL (Standard Oil Company of California), had the insight to put Philby on its payroll; the company paid him $1,000 a month and promised a bonus of $10,000 if it won a concession from the Saudi king, plus an additional $50,000 in royalties if significant amounts of oil were discovered and exported. Abdulaziz had run up huge debts to Philby by purchasing cars and radios from him, and an oil deal with SOCAL offered not only cash in Philby’s pocket, but a potential revenue stream from which the king could pay off his debts. Philby seemed determined to keep Britain out of Saudi Arabia. The deal he helped to broker, signed with SOCAL in 1933, provided Abdulaziz with 50,000 British pounds’ worth of gold, and the promise of an equal amount if oil was discovered in commercial quantities, plus additional royalties.8 The king displayed little personal interest in oil; he was much more interested in parallel explorations for minerals and especially water. But to finance his enormous family, to quell the peninsula’s tribes and other political rivals, he desperately needed gold.

  As soon as he had it, Abdulaziz began to spend it. Like many of the newly wealthy, he and his sons decided that they would enjoy a bigger and finer place to live, and so in Riyadh and just outside its walls, a palace building boom began. At the same time, to the east, along the shores of the Persian Gulf, the Americans had arrived to begin drilling for oil; they began to construct houses, schools, offices, and warehouses.

  It was an excellent time and place to be an enterprising young man in the building trades.

  A CONSORTIUM called the Arabian American Oil Company, or Aramco, formed to manage the oil rights SOCAL had won. American geologists, drilling engineers, and construction managers settled at Dhahran, about three hundred miles to the east of Riyadh, near the sandy mounds beneath which, it was hoped, the largest oil reserves might lie. The Bedouin nomads who moved through the desert in loose bands, scraping their living from caravan trade and animal husbandry, disdained manual labor. Some did take oil jobs, but they kept their distance from Aramco’s settled camp
s. Hundreds of other Arabs—local Shia who faced discrimination from the Bedouin, and poor foreign migrants like Bin Laden—eagerly accepted the Americans’ salaried work.

  Mohamed Bin Laden traveled to Dhahran from Jeddah and found work with Aramco as a bricklayer and mason. He excelled. His supervisor, a “redneck mason” from the United States, decided that “this guy’s really good,” according to Tim Barger, whose father was an Aramco executive. In a matter of just weeks, Aramco promoted Bin Laden to be foreman of a bricklaying crew. A few months later, they promoted him again to supervise several crews. “He had what it took,” said Barger, who recorded his father’s recollections and later worked in Saudi Arabia. “He was blind in one eye but he knew how to supervise people and get jobs done. Then after a long time—maybe a year or a year and a half—he went to Aramco and said, ‘I want to start my own business.’” It was difficult to bring in Americans to Saudi Arabia to do every little job, from catering to fence repair; therefore, Aramco supported any Arab who showed promise as an independent contractor. “They said, ‘Go on out, get started, we’ll give you some jobs. You can always come back here.’ He got his contracting job going well enough so that he could go to Riyadh and hang out for days and days.” A profile of Bin Laden assembled several decades later by the American government reported that he struck out on his own from Aramco in 1935.9

  Building contracts in Riyadh depended upon the favor of King Abdulaziz. It was easy enough for a man like Bin Laden to connect with the ruler: he could attend his majlis, a daily session in which anyone could sit in the king’s throne room and wait for the chance to petition him for work.

  The Riyadh where Bin Laden arrived during the 1930s was still a walled city-fortress similar to those he had known as a boy in Wadi Doan. The Saudis constructed castle-fortresses on their flat desert plateau by encircling the towns with mud-brick walls twenty-five feet high. Palm groves surrounded Riyadh, and townspeople came and went through its gates to harvest timber or collect water during the day. At night and during prayer time the gates closed shut. Riyadh’s wall, wrote Philby, was “surmounted by a fringe of plain shark’s tooth design at frequent intervals. Its continuity is interrupted by imposing bastions and guard-turrets.” Inside, thick-walled houses stacked up on top of one another along twisting lanes, which helped to create shade; there were also market squares, jumbled trading stalls, and, of course, a grand mosque built by the king.10