The Jeddah-to-Medina road, via the Red Sea port of Yanbu, was the most ambitious public works project yet undertaken in the kingdom, estimated to cost about 4 million British pounds. A sun-soaked tea party at the side of the roadbed eight miles outside of Jeddah, hosted by the British embassy and attended by a dozen princes and ministers, formally launched the undertaking on December 11, 1950. The principal British contractor was Thomas Ward, Ltd., of Sheffield, England. Its local manager, Robert Donald, expounded at the launch party on his plans: He would build scores of culverts and bridges, and gird the road with a nine-meter foundation. Its surface of bituminous macadam would be six meters across. Donald was cautious but optimistic about the timetable for this work. He had no inkling of the disaster that awaited him.18
Building an asphalt road in the Saudi kingdom was difficult even in the best of circumstances. The terrain was rocky and mountainous in some places, and sandy and unstable in others. The soil composition varied; it might be a shifting, wind-blown mix of sand and clay, or a blend of granite gravel and sand, or a bog of brown limestone silt. The ground was often soft, the wind was unrelenting, and periodic storms unleashed destructive flash floods. Aramco manufactured asphalt from its oil fields, but other materials were scarce, and the sandstorms damaged mechanical equipment. For all of these reasons, in the months after the tea party, Thomas Ward’s work on the road north from Jeddah and west from Medina proceeded slowly. As ever, the Saudi government fell behind on its promised payments, and the British insurance plan proved inadequate to prevent losses from accumulating on Thomas Ward’s books. In August 1951, the company’s chief road engineer in the kingdom died in an automobile collision. The following January, Robert Donald and his wife perished in a second car crash. By the summer of 1952, at the “end of a long chain of misfortunes,” the company at last gave up, and its executives approached Suleiman to negotiate a settlement that would allow Thomas Ward to leave the kingdom and abandon the road.19
Once again, Mohamed Bin Laden stepped forward as a Western contractor retreated. The royal family had gone on a car-buying binge; eight hundred automobiles were handed out as gifts to family members, friends, and government officials in April 1952. The princes were revved up, but they had no place to drive. In November, Crown Prince Saud traveled from Jeddah to Medina, and as he sped across the partially completed road’s smooth surface, he had a revelation about the glories of asphalt. Soon Saud announced that it was of vital importance that the Medina highway be finished. “Happily presiding over the arrangements for the Crown Prince’s sojourn in Medina was Mohammed bin Ladin,” the American ambassador reported to Washington. Bin Laden convinced Saud that he could handle the job, and had “already approached his new task with great display of energy and enthusiasm, however misguided.”20
Bin Laden ordered twenty-one thousand tons of asphalt from Aramco and opened negotiations with Thomas Ward to purchase their abandoned road-building equipment. It turned out that the British machines would not work with the type of asphalt Aramco manufactured, so the oil consortium sent Bin Laden an engineer to help him. Thomas Ward prepared to leave, “about half a million pounds out of pocket and in a very ill humor,” as the British embassy put it. American officials, after years of frustrating efforts to support Bechtel and other companies, were resigned to Bin Laden’s attempt to take over the Medina road contract. As the ambassador explained in a dispatch to Washington,
As this is the Government’s first venture into a major construction project not directly supervised or carried out under the auspices of a foreign firm, its success or failure may be of considerable significance to future operations…As the project is so heartily sanctioned by the Crown Prince and the Ministry of Finance, Bin Ladin will not be hindered by lack of funds or the restrictions of a fixed-fee contract which have proved to be the undoing of many a foreign firm.21
To overcome his complete lack of experience in road building, Bin Laden sought out an Italian company that had previously constructed roads and dams in Sardinia; he offered them work as his subcontractor. The Italians, however, took “fright on realizing the full extent of the shabby deal meted out to Thomas Ward…and the enormous capital which will be necessary to do the job,” the British embassy reported. Bin Laden did seem to enjoy impressive access to the king’s treasury—he made a hard currency payment of 328,000 pounds at the scheduled time to Thomas Ward, to pay for their equipment—but the slow pace of Saudi reimbursements and other troubles hindered his attempts to make much progress paving the highway. Throughout 1953, Bin Laden “[had] been given impossible tasks of constructing roads at short notice without any idea where payment [was] to come from.” Still, he managed. His great Hadhrami friend Salem Bin Mahfouz had that same year founded the National Commercial Bank, so Bin Laden could more easily draw upon sources of finance outside of the Saudi government.22
MOHAMED BIN LADEN was now becoming rich, but money could not change his social identity in Arabia. The Al-Saud royal family and the tribes on the Nejd desert plateau were extraordinarily concerned about the purity of their tribal and family bloodlines. Nejd families kept careful track of their genealogies, and for a price, an enterprising tribal leader might be persuaded to “discover” a respectable lineage for a family whose past ran, say, to slavery. To the self-conscious Nejdis, a hardworking Hadhrami immigrant like Bin Laden, even one as full of ambition and surprises as he was, only conformed to a cliché of their racial stereotyping: the Hadhramis, everyone in Nejd knew, were frugal, avaricious, enterprising, yet also unusually honest and reliable. A prince of the Al-Saud royal family might admire these qualities in a man like Mohamed Bin Laden, but he certainly would never allow Bin Laden to marry one of his daughters. In the Nejd heartland, where political power in Saudi Arabia was concentrated, the Bin Ladens would always be foreigners who had embedded themselves in the mongrel Hejaz. The attitude toward Bin Laden among even a poor but proud Nejdi tribal family, to say nothing of the Al-Saud royal family, was akin to that which a 1950s-era WASP bank executive in New England might hold toward a dark-skinned, grade-school-educated entrepreneurial Sicilian who built his lakeside summer cottage—charming fellow, but keep him away from the girls.
The Muslim sheikhs and kings Bin Laden had known since his childhood in Wadi Doan inspired his emerging vision of his own family life. All the rulers he had ever encountered had not just the four wives permitted at any one time by Islamic law, but many more. Wealth might not buy Bin Laden entry into Nejdi families, but in Jeddah and Mecca it instantly transformed him into a sheikh—a loose title of respect, and one that he had more than earned by 1953 through his association with the king, as well as his business accomplishments. He offered a desirable match for any family with eligible daughters that might be attracted by the business and employment connections that Bin Laden could provide. Beginning in the late 1940s, Bin Laden began to imitate his mentor, Abdulaziz, by marrying a succession of young women who caught his eye, or who were offered by fathers in business with him. Between his first marriage in about 1943 and his final takeover of the Medina road contract from Thomas Ward in the autumn of 1953, Mohamed Bin Laden married at least nine times, and he fathered at least fifteen sons and nine daughters, according to records later produced in a court case by the Bin Laden family. Some of the women Bin Laden married during this time stayed with him for many years; others he divorced very quickly. Fatimah Bahareth, for example, enjoyed a privileged position as the mother of Salem, his eldest son, and her marriage endured and proved bountiful—she gave birth to two additional sons, Bakr and Ghalib, as well as three daughters, Su’aad, Zeenat, and Huda. Like Bahareth, some of Bin Laden’s early wives were from Hadhrami immigrant families like his own. One early wife, who was of Iranian origin, would bear three sons; she gave birth to the eldest of them, Yeslam, in Mecca on October 19, 1950. Khalil and Ibrahim followed, as did a daughter, Fowziyah. A number of Mohamed’s wives were foreigners: one was Egyptian, another Palestinian, and another from this period may have been Ethiopian. The family Mohamed Bin Laden was creating with such vigor looked very much like the Hejaz itself—a polyglot, bound by Islamic faith.23