In the manner of every sheikh and prince in Arabia, Bin Laden installed his wives in his Jeddah compound, each with a household of her own but segregated from contact with men other than him or the wife’s relatives. Sometimes his ex-wives stayed on at his compound after their divorce. It was customary for wealthy moguls like Bin Laden to ensure that women he divorced had ample means. In some cases this might be accomplished by arranging for the divorced woman to marry a new husband with a steady job. If a wife gave birth to a son, Islamic law ensured that the boy would eventually inherit a share of his father’s wealth, and the boy, in turn, was expected to ensure the welfare of his mother. In any event, by the autumn of 1953, Bin Laden had more than enough money to support his expanding family. He was never extravagant or particularly acquisitive in his personal habits, except when it came to women. The family compounds he built, while comfortable, were not as opulent or garish as many of the palaces he built for the royals. He did not seem to have time for indulgences. Mohamed Bin Laden appeared to enjoy work above all, and his ambition was far from sated.
THE AMERICAN EMBASSY supplied Abdulaziz with aphrodisiacs to curry favor with him, but in his last years blindness and impotency deprived the king of the pleasures so long at the center of his life. He withdrew into his court and his harem. Saud, his heir, was fifty years old, but the king still treated him and his other older sons like children, insisting, for example, that they stand in his presence unless he invited them to sit down. Some of his adult sons disappointed Abdulaziz; Mishairi, at about twenty years old, disgraced the family by drinking himself into a rage and shooting to death a British diplomat, Cyril Ousman, whom Abdulaziz had known and liked. Only afterward, in late 1952, did the king impose a formal ban on alcohol in Saudi Arabia.24
There was no single Bedouin tradition of succession, but a common practice held that new rulers should be chosen by consensus, on the basis of their ability to lead, and not strictly by primogeniture. Abdulaziz had long before arrogated the decision about succession to himself, however, and he had designated Saud as his political heir, despite Saud’s manifest indiscipline, which by the early 1950s included heavy drinking. The king did sense that the crown prince would need help, and so he cultivated an uneasy partnership between Saud and Faisal, his second son, born to a different mother. Faisal was an austere and enigmatic man who seemed more suited for leadership than Saud. To cement this arrangement, and to overcome the tension that was palpable between his two sons, Abdulaziz declared that succession would pass laterally, from Saud to Faisal, rather than through Saud to his own eldest son.
In October 1953, Abdulaziz fell gravely ill at his palace in the mountain town of Taif, a retreat from the humid coastal air of Jeddah. On November 8, as the king’s condition worsened, Saud flew to Jeddah, where a military band and a parade festooned him. Word came to him the next morning that his father had arrived at his last hours; Saud rushed to Taif, but too late—Abdulaziz had died that morning in Faisal’s arms. Scores of family members had assembled around the king’s body by the time Saud arrived. To dispel the uncertainty that hung over them all, Faisal pulled a ring from his dead father’s finger, approached Saud, and presented it to him in obedience. Saud handed the ring back and announced that Faisal was his heir and crown prince.25
Faisal accompanied his father’s body on an airplane to Riyadh, where in the Wahhabi tradition, which rejects the adornment of gravestones and other memorials to the dead, Abdulaziz was loaded onto a truck and buried in an unmarked desert graveyard.
Saud remained in Jeddah. He sensed that his life was about to change profoundly, and that somehow he needed to address the financial chaos and social inequality in the kingdom he had inherited. On the day after his father’s death, he met with the American chargé d’affaires and asked to discuss a “private and secret matter.”
The new king lamented his land’s low standard of living. He pledged to begin a “war against widespread poverty, ignorance, and disease,” and said he was “determined to emerge victorious from this war.” He would build schools, hospitals, military bases, and highways. He said he was “sickened” by the unsound financial practices in the kingdom. He recognized, he said, that efforts to eradicate “corrupt practices” would have to “begin with himself.”
He had just one request, he continued: The kingdom was broke, and he wondered if the United States might lend him $300 million.26
4. THE GLORY OF HIS REIGN
AT THE TIME of Saud’s ascension to the throne, American oil companies paid about $20 million each month to the Saudi treasury. Mohamed Bin Laden received a fixed percentage. He appears to have been the only person, apart from Suleiman and the royal family, who had direct access to Aramco payments during this period. In theory, his allowance would ensure that he could finance the many building projects he was assigned, whether these were palaces or highways, as the British commercial secretary J. M. Heath wrote in a confidential dispatch to London. In practice, however, the kingdom’s state of “administrative chaos” meant that Bin Laden, despite having “influential connections,” was nonetheless “obliged to take on all manner of work whose cost, had it been fully carried out, would have far outrun his resources (which, as it is, may well be over-strained).” Bin Laden’s work had fallen to a standstill, apart from those jobs he could pay for with his Aramco installments. Overspending on palaces and luxuries had left the royal treasury, once more, facing an “extreme shortage of cash.”1
In late 1953 Bin Laden decided to reorganize his company, which was known in Jeddah by the same informal title he had given it when he arrived from Wadi Doan more than two decades earlier: Mohamed and Abdullah, Sons of Awadh Bin Laden. He assigned this task to FuadZahed, an Iraqi engineer trained in the United States. Zahed decided to turn Bin Laden’s “amorphous organization” into professional departments—one for administration, another for construction projects, and a third for new industries. Zahed hoped to persuade the new king to build a cement mill, a tile factory, an iron foundry, a pottery factory, and an aluminum plant. He also wanted to pursue agencies for the exclusive import of industrial equipment from Europe and the United States. Like his employer, Zahed harbored “ambitious plans,” Heath concluded.2