Their worries were justified. Bin Laden, as ever, insisted that he could do the job, and he won a deal worth more than $10 million in 1959; he pledged to finish the work by early 1961. He missed that deadline, however, and when a Swiss television crew turned up late that summer to film his work, they found Bin Laden and his workers stuck at a particularly steep section of the escarpment twelve miles west of Taif. Italian and Egyptian crew chiefs roared away atop German and American graders and bulldozers, but it was obvious that they were a long way from finishing. Months passed, and still Bin Laden could not complete the road. Great stores of dynamite were exhausted to dig tunnels and blast away the mountainsides. The road lay a short distance from Jeddah; for Mohamed’s young boys, it was another site of thrilling explosions, in this case to move mountains.13
Three years later, Bin Laden was still at it. Occasionally he would host Saud or Faisal at roadside banquets, where he would pull out maps to describe the wonder of engineering that he was attempting, but the plain fact was that Bin Laden was far behind schedule, and nobody could be sure what quality of road he would finally deliver.
By one account, Faisal and Bin Laden argued about the project, with Bin Laden insisting that it was a matter of personal pride that he should finish what he had begun, even if he had to pay for it out of his own pocket. This has a slight ring of mythmaking, but there can be no doubt that there were strains between Faisal and Bin Laden at this time, and Bin Laden may have had to bear substantial losses because of his delays. He had first established himself with the royal family and its retainers by handing out commissions and sharing revenue. With Faisal, who was the least corruptible of senior Saudi princes, perhaps by many orders of magnitude, what mattered was not money, but Bin Laden’s dependability, recalled Hermann Eilts, who knew both men when he served as American ambassador to the kingdom during the 1960s. Faisal knew that Bin Laden was not always as precise as his German or Swiss counterparts, yet he had been working in the kingdom faithfully for a long time, and “the point was, the roads were there.” Then, too, Faisal felt a “certain amount of national pride” that for all of the enormous technical challenges on a project like the Taif road, “a Saudi firm was doing it.” Faisal and Bin Laden were each pious workaholics devoted to Saudi Arabia’s advancement. The trouble between them would pass, and their alliance would only deepen as Faisal consolidated power during the 1960s.14
Bin Laden’s loyalty to Saudi Arabia was particularly at issue after late 1962, when Nasser inspired an Arab nationalist revolution in Yemen and then intervened in that country with tens of thousands of Egyptian troops, igniting a proxy war with Saudi Arabia. Nasser cranked up his propaganda broadcasts attacking the Al-Saud, launched aerial bombing raids on Saudi territory, dropped more than one hundred pallets of weapons along the Red Sea coast to encourage revolt, and conspired with sympathetic Saudi princes to overthrow the government in Riyadh. The years-long crisis that unfolded after Nasser’s intervention in Yemen was the most serious external threat yet faced by the modern Saudi kingdom. As he fashioned a survival strategy, Faisal would once again employ Bin Laden’s company and its vast fleet of construction equipment as instruments of Saudi defense and foreign policy—as the kingdom’s Halliburton.
PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY initially regarded Nasser as a modernizer who might lift Egypt out of poverty without succumbing to Soviet communism. Kennedy doubled American aid to Nasser’s regime, and even after Egyptian troops poured into Yemen and bombed Saudi towns, he urged Faisal to be patient as America tried to negotiate a compromise. This was a risky and even myopic strategy, as the Saudi government seemed to be cracking under Nasser’s pressure. King Saud, more erratic than ever, flirted with Moscow. The CIA reported that Saudi merchants were shifting money to Lebanon to protect themselves against a crisis. A group of self-styled “free princes” led by the influential Talal bin Abdulaziz decamped for exile in Beirut, where they held a press conference to announce that they were freeing their household slaves; the princes tacitly promoted themselves as a progressive Saudi government-in-exile. A desperate Faisal launched a publicity drive in the kingdom to improve his government’s image. He banned slavery and released his own household servants; Mohamed Bin Laden did the same, allowing the Saudi government to compensate him for their release. Faisal staged a rally in Jeddah and drove along its main streets in an open convertible. The crown prince presided over a festival of singing and dancing, and even seized on a campaign-style slogan: “We are your brothers!”15
Reports reached Faisal in early 1963 that Egyptian planes had dropped poison gas on Saudi-backed opposition forces in Yemen and on the Saudi town of Nejran, near the Yemen border. The Kennedy administration still counseled patience. Faisal blew up at a delegation from Washington. “He is evil,” Faisal declared of Nasser. “His desires are evil.” The Saudi royal family “opened our accounts in Swiss banks and others and gave him permission to take out any amount in dollars and sterling,” Faisal said, but still Nasser was unsatisfied:
What more does the man want? Obviously not our oil, as some people say; nor our money, because when he was a friend, he had easy access to it. Therefor it is obvious that he wants to satisfy his evil nature, his wicked instinct—to crush us…You are greatly mistaken to think you can subtly or gently guide Nasser back to the path of reasonableness or wisdom. The only way you can make Nasser listen to you or come around to your path is by sheer force…I know Nasser more than you do. I was his closest friend.16
Kennedy would eventually come around, but in the meantime, Faisal turned to Bin Laden to shore up his kingdom’s southern border. That autumn he pulled road-building and infrastructure contracts out of the highway department and handed them directly to Bin Laden; Faisal said he would “personally take care” of building roads in the war zone, with Bin Laden’s assistance. When Saudi inspectors flew down to look at Bin Laden’s work, they found it wanting, but he told them that “he and not the Road Department would decide” how to proceed. The department’s chief engineer regarded his work on the Yemen border as “a repetition on a smaller scale of the road fiasco that occurred in constructing the two modern highways leading north and southwest of Medina,” but there was nothing he could do about “royal intervention.”17
Faisal, the American embassy believed, had turned to Bin Laden “to ensure fast action on what he probably considers to be an urgent project for the defense of Saudi Arabia.”18 Also, with personal ties to Yemen, Bin Laden would be a credible figure locally as he raised a labor force and supervised construction. It was the beginning of a series of private contracts in which Faisal asked Bin Laden to build infrastructure to defend Saudi Arabia against the spillover from Yemen’s guerrilla war. Bin Laden’s laborers had to work at times in areas under direct bombardment. Later Bin Laden was joined in the region by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which delivered American and British missiles and military infrastructure to the southern frontier. This was a role that the Bin Laden family would play for the House of Saud, in collaboration with the United States, for many years to come.