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