Whatever the reasons, Bin Laden and his Japanese partners did indeed win the contract; on November 14, 1961, they were awarded a $25 million deal. They signed a commitment the following summer, yet no work began. The Japanese proved unable to post a bond. Frustrated, the executive committee turned to a British company with proven railway experience, Thomas Summerson & Sons, to join Bin Laden in a new partnership. Two Summerson executives flew in to negotiate and joined British ambassador J. C. M. Mason in his Damascus apartment on the evening of February 18, 1963. “I spent some of the evening as Devil’s Advocate,” Mason recounted. Among the problems he cited were “the temperamental idiosyncracies of Bin Laden.”5
The Saudi construction magnate had annoyed the railway committee, whose chairman said “that Bin Laden was now fairly unpopular.” Syrian and Jordanian members seem to have resented how Bin Laden pulled Saudi royal strings and then underperformed on the work he won. He had become too powerful to challenge, however. The British executives were “quite prepared to ditch” Bin Laden, but they feared “the effect on eventual work in Saudi Arabia of making an enemy of him.” For his part, Bin Laden reportedly claimed “that Saudi support would be withdrawn from the project unless he had a share in it.”6
THE RAILWAY PROJECT fell apart a few weeks later. Crown Prince Faisal, too, appears to have been fed up with Mohamed Bin Laden; he pulled the contract from him “under severe reproaches,” according to a West German assessment.7 The Hejaz Railway was far from the only cause of Faisal’s frustration with Bin Laden. There was a sense emerging in at least some sections of the kingdom that Bin Laden promised too much, did shoddy work, and too often failed to finish on time. His wealth and privileges had also become exceptionally conspicuous. He owned three Beechcraft propeller aircraft as of March 1961—more than any other individual in the kingdom outside the royal family. He hired American pilots to fly him from one job site to another, sprawling encampments of laborers in the deserts over which he ruled. He worked energetically, but his improvised methods increasingly drew questions and complaints from the international consultants who were attempting, at the urging of Crown Prince Faisal, to inject the best modern engineering standards into Saudi building projects.
For the first time in Bin Laden’s long career, he had become a public figure of controversy, within the bounds of the kingdom’s heavily muted politics.
“We read on every occasion that construction projects in our country are opened up for bids—that Bin Laden’s office had a ‘lesser bid’ and got the project,” wrote Ahmad Mohamed Jamal in a front-page column in the Meccan newspaper Al-Nadwa on November 15, 1961:
This at a time when observers are screaming at that office’s slowness in carrying out the projects it had undertaken two, three or more years previously. They also scream to high heaven at the dispersal of the efforts of [Bin Laden’s] engineers, workers and equipment among numerous projects in distant cities and roads far apart in the kingdom. They scream, too, complaining about the lack of quality of the work, faulting engineering and inefficient organization of most of the asphalting operations.8
The larger problem was “the practice of giving the road projects in the whole of our country to one contractor.” Ultimately, Jamal concluded, the problem was not only the quality of Bin Laden’s work but also the quality of Saudi Arabia’s government:
Have mercy upon us, you responsible officials of the Ministry of Communications. Have mercy on our country; have mercy on our projects. Spare our roads from the sole contractor, from him of the “lowest bid,” from him whose previous project commitments are also paralyzed. Have mercy upon us, so that God may have mercy upon you.9
Accusations that pungent did not typically appear in Saudi Arabia’s heavily censored newspapers without government sanction. Faisal and his allies were one possible source of backing for this criticism; Saud had temporarily pushed Faisal out of the cabinet, and at the time the article appeared, the crown prince was fighting to restore his authority. His allies promoted him as a cure for government inefficiency and corruption. A new minister of commerce, Ahmed Jamjum, from a merchant family that competed with Bin Laden, sought to break the stranglehold on contracting at the self-dealing Ministry of Communications. Yet there was more to this than factional competition: the public criticism signaled a broad discontent with the quality and pace of the kingdom’s road-building program.
Highways in the early 1960s were a potent symbol of modernity. America’s interstate highway plan was now much advanced, and the big-finned Cadillacs and convertibles that streamed along those freeways from coast to coast seemed to epitomize American individualism and prosperity. John F. Kennedy, hatless and handsome, waved to crowds from an open sedan; in Hollywood films and television shows, the convertible was cool. The notion that a national highway network could speed up modernization had particular appeal in Saudi Arabia. For the kingdom’s heavily nomadic population, so long accustomed to freedom of movement, the automobile beckoned. The kingdom’s population was small—only about 4 million—and dispersed over vast desert territory. Highways were not only exciting; they were essential.
Faisal’s austerity budgets cooled the economy, but oil revenue continued to rise. By 1961 the government could afford a leap in highway construction—if only it could figure out how to build the roads efficiently. The kingdom announced plans for a network of highways totaling more than two thousand miles, but its bureaucrats fought to a standstill over how to let the contracts. An American road engineer, Harold Folk, hired as the kingdom’s chief development adviser, recommended European consultants who could oversee work by local builders to ensure it met international standards. Faisal returned to the cabinet in the spring of 1962 and embraced Folk’s goals, but he balked at the Europeans’ fees. Apart from his innate parsimony, Faisal shared the widespread fear within the Saudi royal family, grounded in experience, that Western consultants often jacked up their rates unscrupulously when they did business in the kingdom. “One Roadblock After Another” was the title of a confidential U.S. embassy report on the accumulating fiasco. Privately, Faisal pressed American officials for help. He wanted his government to create a proper highway department that would own a fleet of road-building machinery so that it would not be so dependent upon private contractors like Bin Laden. He appreciated all the consultants, he said, but the “problem was not finding out what needed to be done,” which he already knew, “but getting it done quickly.”10
Faisal also pressured Bin Laden. During the summer of 1962, he revoked Bin Laden’s dormant concession to mine gypsum north of Jeddah. The contractor had a “duty not to delay,” Faisal’s published royal decree declared, yet Bin Laden had nonetheless “shirked” his responsibilities.11
The most visible example of Bin Laden’s failure to deliver was his performance on the forty-five-mile mountain road linking Mecca with the resort town of Taif, a magnet for royal family vacationers. The road rose from the sandy flatlands near the Red Sea, twisting through steep, treeless, crumbly mountains, climbing almost five thousand feet. For decades the only way to traverse this distance had been on donkeys and camels; this was how Faisal and his royal train had often traveled it during the reign of Abdulaziz. By one contemporary Saudi account, it was Faisal’s idea to pave the road. West German engineers pronounced it a formidable job—about thirty tunnels would have to be blasted through the mountains, great mounds of debris removed, and difficult problems of grading overcome. The Germans wanted the work but feared losing out to “dumping bids” by a local contractor who would blithely underestimate the costs and degree of difficulty.12