The king ratified Bin Laden’s rise by issuing a Royal Order on May 24, 1950, which appointed Mohamed “Director-General of Construction Works of King Abdulaziz”; he was assigned to work under Suleiman and now had a title to wave around when he needed one. To the consternation of Bechtel executives, Bin Laden moved the company’s heavy equipment from the Jeddah-Mecca road so he could use it “for grading around the new residence” he was building for Suleiman by the Red Sea. (Bechtel and State Department correspondence recording this diversion of construction equipment, dated January 17, 1951, apparently marks the first time that the Bin Laden family name appeared in an American government document.)10
The boom in palace construction in which Bin Laden specialized had now become influenced by Western notions of luxury, as an American cable from that winter reported:
Various members of the Royal Family, Government dignitaries, and rich merchants lavished vast amounts on the construction of quasi palaces, each endeavoring to outdo the other in size, expense and design of their future homes. In many instances Parisienne “interior decorators” were employed to buy expensive materials and oversee their installation.11
Saudis increasingly traveled abroad and saw for themselves the industrialized world’s wealth; they carried its aspirations and tastes home. The Meccan newspaper Al-Bilad Al-Saudiyah published a travelogue in the summer of 1952 by a Saudi writer, titled “With the Americans in Their Country”; the writer described Times Square as “like a bright flame or a diamond necklace…Luxury is visible everywhere, in restaurants full of all kinds of meat placed in lines in glass show cases.” Most marvelous of all was the sanitation:
Rarely will you find an insect in New York and months will pass before you catch sight of a fly…People do not speak there about insects or flies. Years have passed, and now they speak about television and the atom bomb and the new invention for curing TB…. The civilized countries, especially the western nations, respect a country according to its cleanliness and organizations. The Americans even go further for they respect a country according to the number of pipes she possesses. This should not be a surprising fact to the reader, for pipes play an important part in the cleanliness of a country, because water runs through them and is consequently free of insects and dirt.12
It did not require a trip to New York for many Saudis to see that their royal family seemed deeply involved with its own luxuries yet lacked any similar devotion to public welfare or even basic national infrastructure. “Our poor are of families who are not of the habitual beggar type,” a Saudi writer complained in Al-Bilad, in a rare public expression of dissent. “Hardly able to walk, they aimlessly roam the streets…They are starved; they have not tasted even bread for two or three days. There is no exaggeration in this…Our misfortune is the creation of our wealthy people, who are too greedy to try and do anything for the people.”13
Neither the king nor his sons nor Suleiman seemed able to take control of the kingdom’s finances. Fed up with late payments and the misuse of its people and equipment, Bechtel finally abandoned its Saudi public works contracts. Najib Salha, the deputy finance minister, diverted $400,000 to his own account as part of the final settlement, according to a Bechtel executive.14
Suleiman brought in another American contractor, Michael Baker Jr., Inc., of Pittsburgh, to replace Bechtel, but they, too, soon departed, frustrated by late payments and demands for ad hoc palace repairs. The British mission in Jeddah noted that Mohamed Bin Laden appeared “to be interested in ousting Bakers and, while there is little hard evidence for this, it is clear that [Bin Laden’s] firm is taking an increasing part in Government constructional works.” Next arrived a German company called Govenco, which was rumored to have paid Bahareth, Suleiman’s secretary, a reported $100,000 to help win business in the kingdom, but Govenco abandoned its public works contract even faster than the Americans had done, and for similar reasons.15
The American and European companies left behind unfinished infrastructure projects that involved complex engineering challenges. Mohamed Bin Laden rapidly recruited his own engineers—Italians, Lebanese, Palestinians, Iraqis, and Egyptians—and he convinced Suleiman that he could oversee this work, even though he had no background in it. He was once again persuasive; a new Royal Order issued by King Abdulaziz in June 1951 granted Bin Laden a lucrative concession “to build a power station at the city of Jeddah.”16
One more unlikely expansion now augured a feat of self-invention that would secure Bin Laden’s legend and his family’s fortune.
THE ONLY PAVED ROADS in all of Saudi Arabia at this time were a few that Aramco had laid around the eastern oil fields and a single ribbon of badly engineered asphalt between Jeddah and Mecca. Ships continued to unload hundreds of automobiles, trucks, and buses at the Jeddah port, but these vehicles had to navigate the kingdom’s deserts along crude, flood-ravaged tracks and riverbeds. Abdulaziz and his eldest son, Saud, seemed to have little interest in paved highways; they saw railroads as the epitome of industrial achievement, and they pressed the American government for loans to build a rail network in the kingdom. The Americans, however, resisted; the railway age was receding, they impressed upon the king, and the era of automobiles and asphalted highways had arrived.
The Hejaz pilgrim trade in particular suffered from the lack of even a rudimentary road network to support religious tourists. Medina, the second city of Islam, was situated a forbidding distance from Jeddah, to the northeast. It was possible to bump and slide across the rock and sand to Medina in a car or bus, but a smooth paved road was desperately needed. Harry St. John Philby, the English adventurer now back in the kingdom after his wartime detention for pro-Nazi oratory, saw in this problem a business opportunity. He wrote to Abdulaziz arguing that Saudi Arabia’s honor would suffer in the world’s eyes if it did not start paving decent roads for pilgrims to the holy places, and he won the king’s support for a plan to pave a 350-mile road from Jeddah to Medina. Massive overspending on palaces and gifts meant the royal treasury could not be relied upon to fund this project, however, and there was, as the British embassy noted, “a marked reluctance on the part of all concerned to undertake the unenviable and difficult task of explaining to the King that the extravagances of himself, his family and his Ministers have brought the Government heavily into debt…The King’s elder sons are understood to have claimed that the King’s health might suffer from the shock.” Philby contracted with two British road-building companies and negotiated for export insurance from the British government, so the companies would not have to depend entirely on the royal family for payment.17