Yet the king’s spending careened even more out of control. His yacht was impounded in Europe over unpaid bills owed to an Italian palace architect.16 The Americans might tolerate such embarrassments, for the sake of oil and air base rights, but increasingly the king’s relatives felt they could not. Their impatience was sharpened by the presence in their midst of an obvious alternative—Saud’s frugal, taciturn half-brother.
Faisal had been born at nearly the same time as Saud, in 1905, but to a different mother, a daughter of the Al-Shaykh family, descendants of Abdul Wahhab, the austere desert preacher of the eighteenth century whose creed had so influenced the peninsula. By the early twentieth century, the Al-Shaykhs had become Nejd’s most prestigious family of religious scholars. Faisal came of age studying religious doctrine and law under the tutelage of his family’s conservative but learned scholars. He acquired the same skills of horse riding and falconry as his brother, but proved to be a more convincing and committed military leader. He was small, thin, with a prominent nose and hooded eyes, which struck visitors as those of a hawk.
Abdulaziz decided as early as 1919 that Faisal was best suited to represent the king in the distant capitals of Europe. Under Philby’s escort he traveled to England as a teenager on a long, damp winter tour that left him with early lessons in formal diplomacy, as well as powerful memories of sea lions at the London Zoo. He represented his father at the Versailles Conference, where the treaty ending the First World War was signed. Back home, Abdulaziz placed him in charge of the Hejaz, but Faisal often seemed indifferent about governing and withdrew into palace and family life. Amid the challenges of the postwar oil boom, however, he came into his own. He served as the kingdom’s representative at the infant United Nations and toured America in a style considerably more mature and businesslike than Saud. At this time Faisal was not abstemious, and he could be a lively companion ready for a practical joke, but he was never remotely as undisciplined as his half-brother. As the years passed, he became increasingly austere and religious, his demeanor dampened by chronic intestinal ailments that left him dyspeptic and gaunt.
He retained strong convictions about the Islamic faith and desert culture he had been taught as a young man. He was a fervent anti-communist and a devoted subscriber to Zionist conspiracy theories. He was also open-minded about how Saudi Arabia might adapt its traditions as it pursued a program of national development. Faisal was innately conservative, in the sense of being cautious, “an unbelievably patient individual,” in the words of the Saudi diplomat Ghazi Algosaibi. “He felt that many problems could be safely left for time to solve.” To the American officials who pressed him for change, he quoted Arab proverbs about the dangers of haste; he told them “he was anxious for the country to go ahead, but to go ahead slowly.”17
His brother Saud’s reign appeared to require urgent attention, however. By late 1957, when yet another crisis caused by overspending left the kingdom teetering near bankruptcy, the royal family moved to install Faisal as prime minister. Reluctantly, Saud agreed. The implicit arrangement was that Saud could indulge himself, within the limits of an allowance, as a figurehead king, but Faisal would run economic and foreign policy, to restore the treasury and protect the Al-Saud from Nasserism.
Saud retreated temporarily, but he chafed at his half-brother’s ascension. This gathering contest between two regents presented Mohamed Bin Laden with a problem of rich complexity after 1958. He owed his fortune to Saud’s patronage and palace-building sprees, yet Faisal’s habits of piety and work lay much closer to his own. As Bin Laden reportedly told a colleague, “My pocketbook is with Saud, but my head is with Faisal.”18
FROM THE EXAMPLES of his rulers, Mohamed Bin Laden discerned that multiple marriages could provide not only an outlet for a wealthy man’s lust but also a means to build up political and economic alliances. Increasingly, Bin Laden’s projects took him to corners of Arabia where he had few acquaintances. There he had to win support from local sheikhs. To do so Bin Laden sometimes married the daughter of a desert tribal leader or town mayor, provided her with money and an impressive house, hired her male relatives onto his project, and then, a year or so later, when his work was completed, left her with a generous financial settlement and perhaps a child as well. “He was very canny politically” in some of these marriages, said Nadim Bou Fakhreddine, a guardian of some of Bin Laden’s sons.19
The full inventory of the approximately twenty-two wives who ultimately bore children with Bin Laden is unknown. Of the marriages that can be at least partially identified, some suggest a traditional arrangement between two Hadhramawt families; some suggest examples of Bin Laden’s tactic of building alliances useful to his construction projects; and others suggest a purely sexual motivation.
Multiple divorces and remarriages of the kind Bin Laden carried out were not unusual in some parts of the Nejd, but social mores in Arabia were changing during the 1950s, particularly in cities such as Jeddah. The practice of taking four wives simultaneously, and of serially divorcing to acquire even more partners, was increasingly seen as backward and anachronistic. Monogamy was modern, and modernity was in vogue. Yet the Hejaz easily accommodated the profligacy of a wealthy Hadhrami immigrant like Bin Laden, in no small part because of the examples of Abdulaziz and Saud.
The Koran’s verses about multiple marriages can be interpreted as discouraging or even prohibiting polygamy. The verses emphasize fairness. A married man should declare his intention to divorce, allow a waiting period to pass, and then confirm his decision: “When you divorce women and they have reached their set time, then either keep or release them in a fair manner.”20 The evidence available about Bin Laden’s marriages suggests that he mainly followed these principles, yet inevitably, some of his wives enjoyed more favor and longevity than others, and some fared better after divorce than others.
During the early years of King Saud’s reign, Bin Laden traveled around the Levant to buy materials and find subcontractors, and during these trips he appears to have married a number of young Arab girls. He had already taken on one Syrian wife by the time he arrived in that country’s coastal city of Latakia in the summer of 1956 and was introduced to the Al-Ghanem family, who were poor and not particularly religious. How Bin Laden met the Al-Ghanems, and why they offered their fourteen-year-old daughter, Alia, to him is not known. Bin Laden took Alia with him back to Saudi Arabia and within a year she was pregnant. During the Islamic year of 1377—corresponding to a period from July 1957 until June 1958—Alia gave birth in Riyadh to a son, Osama.21
At the time of this marriage, Mohamed Bin Laden was in a particularly active phase of sexual partnering and fatherhood. He remained married to a woman whom he had taken as a wife more than a decade earlier; she was already the mother of one son, and she gave birth to two more sons in the same Islamic year of 1377, according to records supplied to an American court by the Bin Laden family. Besides this wife and fourteen-year-old Alia Ghanem, at least two other of Bin Laden’s wives gave birth to sons during that Islamic year. Altogether, according to the family records, Mohamed Bin Laden fathered seven children during the year of Osama’s birth—five sons and two daughters. Osama later said that he believed he had been born in the Islamic month corresponding to January 1958. If so, he was apparently one of two sons born to Mohamed by two different wives during that month—the other son, Shafiq, later reported in British corporate records that he was born on January 22, 1958.[2] It would be difficult for any of the children of Mohamed Bin Laden from this time to be entirely confident of their birth dates or even necessarily of the month of their birth; it was not something that Saudis typically kept track of then, and there was no system of government record keeping, either.22
2
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Shafiq Bin Laden was attending an investors conference at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Washington, D.C., when the attack launched by his half-brother struck the Pentagon.