As his prominence grew, so did the risk that he might become ensnared in the factionalism and rivalry that constituted politics within the Saudi royal family. There were more than forty Al-Saud brothers who were nominally heirs to the throne, plus scores of mothers, wives, and former wives, all competing for access to the treasury; the potential for an outsider like Bin Laden to err was very great. If he did so, he could lose his contracts, his company—or perhaps his freedom. Shortly after Saud became king, he and his brother Faisal sought to involve Bin Laden in a dispute between them, according to a Lebanese friend of Bin Laden. Mohamed responded by pretending to be ill for a month. He summoned doctors to treat him and hid in his compound until the royal feud had passed. He explained his fears to this friend: “They are King Abdulaziz’s sons—whatever happened, they will not hurt each other. But I am not. My head could go.” Deference and obedience, expressed in florid Arabic, were Bin Laden’s chief political tactics, the balm he applied to soothe royal egos. As a Yemeni of relatively low social status, he did not represent a political threat to the Al-Saud, and so the wealth he accumulated, besides confirming the local cliché of Hadhrami entrepreneurialism, was not particularly relevant in Riyadh. Still, Bin Laden was careful to continually remind the royal family that he knew he served at their pleasure, that he was merely an executor of their decisions. “He told us not to get involved in politics,” his son Yeslam recalled. “We are a construction company. We are businesspeople. We do what we are told to do…This was our upbringing.”
When he did express political opinions, they mimicked those of the royal family. During 1956, when the Al-Saud was locked in a border dispute with Britain over the obscure Buraimi oasis, Bin Laden let it be known to the American embassy that he resented U.S. policy, which he interpreted as insufficiently supportive of King Saud. For the most part, however, he kept his head down.9
Perhaps he could sense that the reign of King Saud had become untenable. Increasingly, Faisal emerged as the figure many within the royal family wished to invest with power. As this struggle unfolded, Bin Laden’s challenge was to please both men—a difficult feat, for they were two very different leaders, with distinct ideas about what direction Saudi Arabia should pursue.
SAUD LOVED being king—traveling from palace to palace, presiding over sumptuous feasts, handing out money, and retiring to bed with one of his wives or concubines. He had inherited his father’s height, and he could project regal dignity even as he became obese. Yet he lacked his father’s intelligence and his grasp of international politics. Saud had become heir apparent after the eldest son of Abdulaziz died in the flu pandemic of 1919, but the king had poorly prepared Saud for the throne. His boyhood education was limited to Koran memorization and the desert arts of horsemanship and falconry, at which Saud proved less than outstanding; he had weak eyesight and fallen arches, so he peered through thick eyeglasses and walked awkwardly. He reached adulthood as an illiterate and did not travel to the West until he was in his forties. Abdulaziz assigned him to serve as his principal deputy in Riyadh, but rather than absorbing the subtleties of his father’s statecraft, he was drawn instead to the example of his marriage bed; Saud ultimately fathered just over one hundred acknowledged children by an unknown number of wives.10
Apart from his automobiles and radio sets, Abdulaziz had mainly ignored Western ideas about modernity, but his eldest son became enamored of consumer luxuries and, gradually, also became addicted to alcohol. Aramco and American government officials initially encouraged Saud’s fondness for baubles and modern conveniences. They saw him as crucial to their access to the country’s oil, and they sought to impress him with the material benefits of an American alliance.
When Saud first traveled to the United States as crown prince in 1947, he rolled into New York on a private railway car. In the observation tower of the Empire State Building, he told his hosts, “I thought my brothers were exaggerating when they told me about New York, but they didn’t tell me half enough. Such a city cannot be real.” Thereafter he peered out his limousine window, pointed at cars, and asked, “Cadillac? Buick? Chrysler?” At a gala dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, the oil men sat Saud at a table decorated with an elaborate scene of a wintertime New England village, replete with a Texaco filling station and a miniature train rolling through cotton “snow”; the train’s controls were at Saud’s place setting, and he spent the evening blowing its whistle and making the engine issue puffs of smoke. Eight acts of entertainment followed dessert, including Chinese dancing girls, magicians, and tumblers, which Saud seemed to particularly enjoy. Aramco’s goal had been to establish a lasting connection with the crown prince; they did this, but they also helped to fire the imagination of a naive man about how a proper, modern king with a large bank account might display the glory of his reign.11
With Mohamed Bin Laden’s help, Saud constructed a $200 million palace called Nassiriyah, outside Riyadh’s old city walls. The compound became an emblem of Saud’s vulgarity, a vast campus of pink and green buildings, with soccer fields and imported American cows. A guest at one of the king’s outdoor feasts watched as Saud issued an order at sunset and beamed in satisfaction as “hundreds of colored electric bulbs burst into light…The minaret suddenly rose up flood-lit out of the dark…in all colors: blue, yellow, green and red; the palace walls were in orange.”12
His health deteriorated as his drinking increased, and when he became concerned about his sexual potency, he surrounded himself with European quacks who sold him pills and poked him with needles. American and British diplomats clicked their tongues at Saud’s indiscipline and bad taste, but some of his impoverished subjects reveled in his seeming generosity, and they particularly appreciated his habit of tossing gold coins from his car as he drove past crowds of onlookers. Two-thirds of Saud’s subjects remained nomads or semi-nomads, and less than one in ten school-age children attended a classroom. There were less than a dozen native college graduates in the kingdom and not a university to be found, apart from the centers of Islamic scholarship in the two holy cities.13
Saud appeased the tribes by showering them with subsidies, but he proved inept at managing his authority within the royal family. He failed to build alliances among his half-brothers and placed his unqualified sons in positions of military command, exacerbating his relatives’ fear that he might use his large brood to usurp the planned succession to Faisal.
Saud’s reign coincided with the rise of Gamal Abdel Nasser, an army officer who seized power in Egypt and called for revolution and unity in the Arab world, appeals that won him popular acclaim. Nasser’s propaganda attacked the former European colonial powers and their reactionary clients; King Saud seemed to be a conspicuous example. Saud dodged a Nasser-inspired coup in 1955; the foiled conspiracy was a shocking event in politically quiescent Arabia. The king grasped that he had to respond to Nasser’s popularity, but he lacked the necessary insight and skill. He veered erratically, embracing Nasser at one point but later participating in a botched conspiracy to murder him.14
In Washington, President Eisenhower and his aides set out to make Saud into a staunch anti-communist ally. After Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal with Saud’s vocal support, Britain and France responded with an ill-judged invasion; after their defeat, Eisenhower saw a vacuum in the Arab world that American power might fill. He particularly coveted the use of an air base near the Saudi oil fields. In 1957 he invited King Saud to America once again, and while the dancing girls were not so conspicuous this time, the thrust of American flattery was the same; Eisenhower met the Saudi regent at the airport and escorted him beneath a banner strung across Pennsylvania Avenue: “Welcome King Saud!”15