Mohamed Bin Laden worked side by side on these classified projects with the American and British militaries. By 1966 American attempts to appease Nasser had yielded to a policy of arming Saudi Arabia against Egyptian incursions from Yemen. Washington signed a Military Construction Agreement with Faisal under which the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers pledged to design and help build about $100 million worth of military facilities near the kingdom’s borders, including in Asir. Flight logs documenting Bin Laden’s private trips during 1966 and 1967 show that he occasionally gave rides to U.S. Army personnel. In this same period, Britain agreed to sell Saudi Arabia jets, missiles, radar, and electronic warfare equipment. London supplied thirty-four Lightning jet aircraft, twenty Jet Provosts, as well as Hawk and Thunderbird missiles and related radars. The missiles were installed secretly at Khamis Mushayt, Jizan, and Nejran, where Bin Laden was simultaneously at work on roads and airfields. Faisal, in effect, employed Bin Laden as the Saudi civil engineering arm of a covert program, bolstered by British and American arms supplies, to defend the kingdom in a guerrilla war against leftist revolutionaries. It was precisely the sort of alliance that the Bin Laden family would participate in later in Afghanistan.7
Faisal’s massive construction program in Asir reflected the degree of nervousness the king and his Western allies felt about Nasser’s continuing drive to overthrow the Al-Saud. Faisal supplied money and arms to royalist Yemeni forces opposed to the Egyptians. Nasser replied by sponsoring terrorist attacks inside Saudi Arabia. On November 18, 1966, a cell of Yemeni infiltrators set off bombs at the Riyadh palace of Prince Fahd, then the Saudi interior minister. Eight days later, three more bombs exploded, including one at a hotel used by American soldiers. The next month infiltrators bombed the home of a Saudi religious leader in Nejran. Faisal’s security police made arrests and concluded that the terrorists were Yemeni nationals who had been trained by Egyptians. The king launched a crackdown to prevent what a then-classified British report called “terrorist infiltrators and saboteurs” from disrupting the annual Hajj pilgrimage. The Saudis forced several Yemenis to read out confessions on national television, one of the earliest political uses of the Saudi broadcasting network, which had only recently been inaugurated by Faisal.8
The thousands of Yemeni laborers in Saudi Arabia became a suspect class because of these terrorist attacks. Many fled or were deported. It was a measure of his full incorporation into the Saudi kingdom that despite his deep Yemeni roots, Bin Laden was not only regarded by Faisal as an entirely loyal subject, but was trusted to build facilities designed to defend his adopted country against his native one.
IN LATE 1966, Mohamed Bin Laden joined the jet age. To fly the international distances that his work now required, he purchased a Hawker Siddeley twin-engine jet aircraft. It cost more than a million dollars but would allow him to travel more easily to Dubai or Jerusalem. Around this time he also broke ground on a new compound of houses on the refurbished highway between Jeddah and Mecca, where he owned acres of open land in a section of Jeddah’s suburbs that was then most fashionable. At Kilo 7, seven kilometers toward Mecca from the Red Sea, Bin Laden designed what would become, in effect, a small subdivision of suburban homes, one for each of his wives and some for his ex-wives and their children, along with a mosque and business offices. Bin Laden still worked hard, but he was spending some of his wealth to live and travel in finer style.9
The private-jet purchase proved complicated, however. Bin Laden had to locate pilots who could be trained and certified on the Hawker in England and who would then be willing to work for him in Jeddah. Also, since the new jet could not land on the desert airstrips that Bin Laden visited frequently in Asir, he would need to expand his roster of pilots, so that one might be available to fly the desert-capable Twin Beech while another flew the Hawker jet.
In the summer of 1966, Gerald Auerbach, a veteran of the United States Air Force who had flown B-47s for the Strategic Air Command, the American reconnaissance and nuclear bombing force, temporarily joined Bin Laden’s crew. (A former U.S. Navy pilot named Tom Heacock had fallen ill and returned to the United States.) Auerbach was a meticulous pilot who enjoyed flying Mohamed around the desert. Bin Laden asked him to stay on as one of his permanent pilots. Auerbach’s TWA supervisor told him the change would be okay but that he would lose seniority, because it was TWA’s policy not to pay Bin Laden’s pilots as much as those who worked commercial flights. Auerbach told Bin Laden about the problem, but Mohamed declined to make up the difference in his salary. It would prove to be a fateful decision.
In June 1967, a new American pilot turned up in Jeddah—Jim Harrington, a former fighter pilot in the U.S. Air Force, a sandy-haired man around forty years old. Auerbach decided to leave Bin Laden but agreed to train Harrington. “I took him out to some of the nastiest strips that we went into,” Auerbach recalled. These included “dry riverbeds” and other makeshift landing areas in Asir with nothing but sand and rows of rocks to mark the runway.10
Harrington hadn’t flown for several years and he “was rusty.” Auerbach told their mutual supervisor: “I’m a little worried about him. This isn’t routine flying.” But the supervisor checked Harrington out and declared him ready to go, Auerbach recalled. In July, Harrington took over the Twin Beech and began shuttling with Bin Laden to and from Asir. Auerbach returned to Saudi commercial work.
Bin Laden was at work on the highway extension from Abha to Nejran, a road that climbed through high elevations before falling back down to a desert plain just above the Yemen border. His crews had cut the road about forty miles toward Nejran, and they had set up work sites at a small town called Oom. This was where Harrington landed the Twin Beech when Bin Laden flew down from Jeddah.
Gerald Auerbach bumped into Harrington that summer and asked how he was doing. Harrington said that everything was fine but that Bin Laden had “built a strip up in this Oom area and it’s really hard. It’s high elevation and it goes up a hill. It’s not really good.” Bin Laden’s crews had used their bulldozers and graders, and cleaned off a section of desert about a thousand yards long, not a particularly long runway. The strip was on a ridge shaped like half of a bowl, so it was difficult to bank or turn to the sides while descending or ascending; you had to fly straight in and straight out, and you had to land uphill and take off downhill. The higher elevation also was an issue because in thinner air, less oxygen ran to the aircraft’s engines, which could cause them to lose power.
“Well, just tell him,” Auerbach told Harrington, as he later recalled it. “You’re in charge. You pick a place and say I want the runway here, and he’ll do it for you. He’ll do it that way. Tell him this is not safe.”
“Oh, I can do it,” Harrington said, meaning he could handle the landings at Oom. “I can do it.”11
On September 3, 1967, one of Mohamed Bin Laden’s long-serving drivers, Omar, rode out to the airstrip with a car to await his sheikh’s arrival. He saw the Twin Beech descend in clear daylight. As it made its approach over the landing area, about 150 feet in the air, a heavy crosswind blew. Harrington probably found his plane pushed out of alignment with the makeshift runway and then tried to pull up at full power, to ascend out of the bowl and go around to try again, according to what Gerald Auerbach later concluded. Auerbach, who led a team of investigators to examine the site, described what probably happened that morning after Harrington pulled back hard on the Twin Beech’s throttle: “The ground is climbing. At his speed, to keep flying at that altitude, he would have had to be able to climb four or five hundred feet a minute to get out. He couldn’t turn…The airplane didn’t have that climb capability, and he ended up stalling it.” Because of the thin mountain air, his engines couldn’t deliver full power; this exacerbated the chance of a stall. Additional gusts of wind may have made matters worse.