Mohamed Bin Laden had a will written on his behalf before his death, according to the account of a Saudi researcher, Adel Toraifi, who said he had read a copy of the document. It was reported to be about eleven or twelve pages, by his account, and was primarily devoted to issues involving Mohamed’s religious trust, or waqf. It also reportedly contained instructions on how his heirs should carry on with his charitable construction and public works in Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem, such as those he announced in his Jerusalem speech in 1964.8
The principal asset of Mohamed’s estate, however, was the Mohamed Bin Laden Organization itself, the family company in which Mohamed was the sole shareholder. Under Islamic law, his heirs automatically received fixed percentages. His four wives at the time of his death split one-eighth of the shares. (Former wives had no entitlement to inheritance; their children were expected to take care of them.) Nearly all the remaining shares were divided on a two-to-one basis among Mohamed’s twenty-five sons and twenty-nine daughters. Each son, including Osama, inherited 2.27 percent of the company’s shares, and each daughter received just over 1 percent, according to documents later filed in an American divorce case. In rough terms, then, Mohamed’s sons wound up sharing ownership of just over 50 percent of the company; his daughters shared ownership of just under 30 percent; and his widows owned most of the rest. There is no evidence that any of these heirs received large cash distributions at the time of Mohamed’s death; it is unlikely that he kept much of his wealth in bank accounts, and even less likely that he invested in securities. His heirs would have received his houses and his land and his cars, which they seem to have managed largely as communal holdings. Salem and Ali soon went on the company’s payroll, but the great majority of his other children had not yet reached adulthood, and it would be Salem, as eldest son and head of the family, overseen by the company’s board of trustees, who would determine the siblings’ stipends.9
There is no known record of the size of Mohamed’s estate at this time, nor would it have been easy to craft an estimate that would pass muster with Western accountants. Michael Pochna, an American investment banker who became a business partner of the Bin Ladens during the mid-1970s, said family members told him the estate was worth about $150 million at the time of Mohamed’s death. Gerald Auerbach, the pilot who worked with Mohamed in his last years, said he was told the Saudi government owed the Bin Laden company more than $100 million when Mohamed died. These appear to be reliable indicators of the estate’s approximate size, but unlike a fortune invested in stocks or bonds or actively traded real estate, Mohamed’s holdings could not be easily valued. He owned a great deal of Saudi land, some of which had been given to him as payment for past contracts, but the true worth of these tracts would have been difficult to determine. His company had some hard assets, mainly tractors and bulldozers and the like, but the firm’s value at the time of his death was inseparable from the massive government contracts it had recently been awarded, particularly the road from Jeddah to the Yemen border and related defense work. If the company failed to finish these projects profitably, its finances might decline. More broadly, Bin Laden’s fortune depended almost entirely on the patronage of the Al-Saud royal family; if this support disappeared, so would most of his firm’s income.10
The king called in some of the older Bin Laden sons and told them, “I am going to be your father now.”11 Saudi Arabia was in the midst of an undeclared war, and the Mohamed Bin Laden Organization was an important part of the kingdom’s defense capability. Faisal pledged to appoint several trustees to operate the family firm. This would guarantee the company’s continued access to government contracts, and it would also assure Faisal that work on his crucial infrastructure projects in Asir would proceed.
Faisal issued a Royal Ordinance in mid-September announcing these new arrangements. Bin Laden’s fortune “was mostly in equipment and in knowing that he could get the job done, because he had the equipment there, and he had the engineers,” recalled Faisal’s son Turki. The trust Faisal established would ensure “that the companies did not dissolve or go bankrupt or something, until they grew up and started taking over.” The length of this interregnum was not spelled out; the decision to hand the company back to the family would be made by Faisal, or his successor, when the time seemed right.12
The American government continued to try to convert Bin Laden’s death into a business opportunity for a U.S. company. The Commerce Department in Washington contacted major construction firms. A vice president of Brown and Root arranged to fly to Jeddah to open negotiations about a possible merger with the Bin Laden group, but the embassy waved him off, reporting that the “legal situation [is] not completely settled.” Still, the State Department remained alert: Bin Laden had run his company “in an entirely personal and centralized manner. The management vacuum created by his death may make it necessary for the heirs to bring in foreign management in order to keep the company going.”13
King Faisal asked Anwar Ali, the Pakistani-born governor of the kingdom’s central bank, to provide financial and management advice to the Bin Laden trustees, a relationship that guaranteed that the company would not falter for lack of government funds. The king also designated Mohamed Bahareth, a Jeddah businessman who operated mainly in the food industry, as the company’s leading trustee; Bahareth was a cousin of Salem’s mother, Fatima Ahmed Bahareth. His appointment ensured the primacy of the Bahareth cluster within the larger family clan, led by the matriarch, Fatima, a senior widow of Mohamed, and her three sons, Salem, Bakr, and Ghalib.14
AS A PIPE-SMOKING erstwhile rock musician in his early twenties, Salem was hardly the prototype of a Saudi authority figure when he returned from London, but he did not lack confidence or ambition. He was appointed, along with his half-brother Ali, to the board of trustees governing the family company, and he was given a title, managing director. From the start, however, he struggled with Ali and chafed at the committee’s authority. “He wanted very much to get back and get control of the trust,” recalled Francis Hunnewell, an American banker who became a partner of Salem’s a few years later.15
In the evenings, at his house in Jeddah, Salem held court for local Bedouin, to entertain grievances and claims as his father had done before him. Some petitioners had complaints involving land. Mohamed had marked the boundaries of his various land grants as best he could, but his decisions sometimes conflicted with grazing rights or other claims by nomads. Salem found himself besieged by Bedouin bearing obscure slips of paper purporting to document their rights. Some of his friends who visited from Lebanon or London watched in amusement and admiration as Salem gradually adapted to the role of Bedouin land judge, listening patiently in his formal desert dress, trying to render decisions in the idealized manner of a fair-minded but strong-willed sheikh. One of his friends recalled that admiring petitioners nicknamed him “The Gate of Justice.” Salem had few pretensions, and he embraced Arabia’s egalitarian rituals, joining his brothers cross-legged on the floor for family meals.16
He tried to take stock of his company’s road building. His father’s shadow hung over everything; the remains of the plane in which he had died were placed on display at one of the company’s Jeddah compounds. Salem was never much for the desert fieldwork and motivational speeches at which his father excelled. He stumbled in his early attempts at deal making. The Bin Laden organization failed to win the bid on a military cantonment in Asir that it had submitted in partnership with Morrison-Knudsen; the Saudi government now seemed uncertain about whether the firm could finish the job on time. The road the company was trying to finish in the United Arab Emirates proceeded slowly. Salem claimed his father’s Hawker jet and flew off to Dubai in the spring of 1968 to inspect the work.17