Bin Laden asked the Saudi minister who had accompanied him to read out his speech. He began with quotations from the Koran and a disquisition on the Prophet’s Night Journey. He lavishly praised King Hussein and his family. Bin Laden then moved on to the subject of himself:
God has also honored me, as I carried out the construction project at the two great mosques of Mecca and Medina, the two holy sites which God bestowed upon the Saudi Arabian government…[They] contracted me to undertake this project and thus I was granted the honor of developing the three great mosques in Islam, which draw pilgrims from near and far. This is truly a great privilege from God, who gave it to whom He chose.21
He told the audience that the final cost had been about 516,000 dinars, or roughly $1.5 million at contemporary rates of exchange. Bin Laden paused to “point out here the generous, large contribution made by the Saudi Arabian government,” which had covered about half the budget. He then advertised his own charity rather conspicuously:
I wish Your Majesty to know that Yours Truly sacrificed an amount of no less than 150,000 dinars, which was spent willingly for this project, without concern about the material losses. I donated for this blessed work without any thought of the losses, but rather, my goal was spiritual gain, which for me is more important than hundreds of thousands of dinars.
He told the audience that King Hussein still owed him 167,000 dinars, but that he would renounce this debt as an additional act of charity—“my contribution to this great duty.” He said that as he now moved on to work on the Al-Aqsa Mosque, he intended to build a large ten-acre garden nearby, from his own funds, and he asked for God’s help.22
Bin Laden bought a house in East Jerusalem around 1963 or 1964. It was a spacious, white-stoned, red-roofed building of the sort that sprouted all around the city during the 1950s and early 1960s. It had a spectacular view of Jerusalem in the distance, as well as sandy ground and white-stone buildings nearer at hand. The cease-fire line then prevailing between Israel and Jordan was just a short walk down the street. To the east was Mount Scopus, a U.N.-controlled no-man’s-land, and to the south lay the Israeli neighborhoods of Givat Ha-Mivtar and Ramat Eshkol. Jerusalem’s old Qalandia airport was a short drive away, from where Bin Laden could fly directly to Jeddah, Mecca, or Medina on his private plane.
Bin Laden may have married at least one Palestinian wife during the years he worked on the Jerusalem project, but he stayed in his Jerusalem house mainly on short-term visits; it was otherwise occupied by his servants, company aides, and a guard who kept watch over his cars, according to the house’s current owner, a Christian Arab who is a citizen of Israel and a former owner, a retired Israeli naval officer.23
Israel seized East Jerusalem from Jordan in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war; after that, Bin Laden never returned. The home was renovated and expanded. For a time, a Palestinian consul of Spain leased a unit. Years later, the house fell under the administration of an Israeli government department that managed land abandoned by Arab owners because of the war. The house was transferred formally to the Israeli government, sold to the naval officer, and later sold by this officer to the current owner. Throughout this time, the Bin Ladens remained firmly and prosperously centered in Jeddah, but in a practical and material way, the family could trace its history to the resonant cause—and perhaps even the unresolved legal claims—of Palestinian refugees from the 1967 war.
6. THE BACKLASH
GERMAN ENGINEERS and Turkish laborers laid the Hejaz Railway, linking Damascus to Medina, between 1900 and 1908. It sped Muslim pilgrims more than eight hundred miles to the two holy cities, with the additional and not incidental capacity to carry the fading Ottoman Empire’s Turkish troops. As the First World War descended into trench slaughter in France, T. E. Lawrence and his colleagues in British intelligence seized upon the early stirrings of Arab nationalism to organize a guerrilla campaign against Turkish outposts, which included a garrison of eleven thousand soldiers at Medina. Bedouin militia repeatedly tore up Hejaz Railway tracks during the early months of 1917. Lawrence of Arabia enjoyed himself thoroughly: “This show is splendid: You cannot imagine greater fun for us, greater vexation and fury for the Turks,” he wrote to a colleague.1
The main railway lay unusable for decades afterward and became, in Arab eyes, a symbol of colonial-era interference with the Islamic pilgrimage. The newly independent governments of Jordan and Syria, along with Saudi Arabia, pledged a restoration. From Riyadh, Abdulaziz expressed a particularly romantic view of railroads; they were the “only medium, by God’s willingness, whose full advantage will prevail,” he had cabled to President Harry Truman in 1946. His son Saud felt as strongly and later helped to organize the remnants of the Hejaz Railway as a formal religious trust. Its executive committee in Damascus spent several million dollars on engineering studies during the late 1950s; they showed that repairs would cost tens of millions of dollars. European and American officials refused financial support, arguing that modern highways and airports would make a better investment. Yet the American embassy in Jeddah recognized that the project held “much emotional appeal in certain Saudi quarters,” and it feared accusations of interference with Muslim prerogatives if it objected too strenuously. Finally, in 1960, in the midst of Crown Prince Faisal’s campaign to promote Islamic projects as an antidote to Nasser, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria revived their plan to repair the damage Lawrence and his Arab Revolt had done.2
As he had in Jerusalem, Mohamed Bin Laden emerged as an instrument of a religious-minded Saudi foreign policy project. He partnered with a Japanese firm, Marubeni, to bid for the railway repair contract: Bin Laden would undertake the civil engineering work, such as blasting tunnels and building culverts, while his Japanese partners, supervised by West German engineers, would lay the track. An American who worked for Bin Laden in Jeddah reported that the Japanese government, hoping to establish a business foothold in Arabia, had promised to underwrite all Bin Laden’s costs. Bin Laden and his aides shuttled to Damascus. The contract “was Bin Laden’s for the asking,” boasted his American employee.3
A delegation of thirteen from the Hejaz Railway Executive Committee flew into Saudi Arabia late in October 1961. Bin Laden hosted them in Riyadh and Taif, taking them on a tour “to show off some of the roads, mosques and other projects” he had built, the American embassy reported. It looked as if the fix was in: Bin Laden enjoyed “extremely good connections with the Saudi Government and Royal Family and is a figure to reckon with in most public tenders involving construction work.” The railway contract was likely to be awarded under a Saudi system that a separate cable described as “opening the locked stable after the horse is stolen.” Saudi government employees would often trade information about a bid until “the contract is then awarded to the firm assisted by the ‘insiders’ with handsome bonuses going into the appropriate pockets.” A later British government report asserted: “We have good evidence that contracts for this project were allocated on grounds that could not be considered strictly commercial.” Among other things, according to British reporting, “King Saud apparently insisted that Bin Laden” win the bid.4