Michael Pochna flew out a few weeks later to try to put something specific together. He suffered through the usual long waits and chaotic scheduling before he received an audience with Salem. He pitched a Swiss company that could set up a factory in Saudi Arabia to manufacture pre-stressed concrete and modular housing, which could then support the Bin Ladens’ construction projects.
“Well, I’m not interested,” Salem said. “What else have you got?”
A silence followed, Pochna recalled, as he tried to come up with another idea. Salem then spoke.
“I think the future is telephones,” he said.
Pochna readily agreed, even though he had not previously given the subject any thought. They talked some more. Pochna made some calls to one contact he had in the American telephone industry. It became clear that Salem was thinking very ambitiously. He wanted nothing less than to win a contract from the royal family to build the kingdom’s first modern telephone network.
“My father built the roads,” Salem said. “I will build the telephones.”3
His vision was rooted in his global lifestyle. Salem and his generation of Bin Ladens were innovators of the jet age; they hopped effortlessly from Jeddah to Cairo to Corfu to Paris to New York and back again, sometimes in the course of just a few days. The more they moved around, however, the more they wished to stay connected. Salem lived at the center of a spinning family wheel, perpetually in motion. He could not bear to be out of touch—with Randa, or his European and American girlfriends, or his pilot friends, or his mother, or his brothers and sisters, or his royal patrons, or, if it was truly necessary, his business partners. In the 1970s, his and his family’s need for telephones with global reach far out-paced the technology’s development. Telephone service was particularly dire inside Saudi Arabia, where there were only a few tens of thousands of unreliable phone lines. When he was grounded in Jeddah, Salem resorted to flirting with his overseas girlfriends by telex from his Bin Laden Brothers office.
The idea that the world economy might be rapidly connected together and speeded up by affordable, border-crossing voice communication was barely understood or discussed in this divided era of the late Cold War. Russia and its East European clients lay firmly isolated behind the Iron Curtain. China was cut off and staggering after its dark period of Cultural Revolution. Even in the West the development of international satellites and telephones had only begun. Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke’s pioneering essay “Extra-Terrestrial Relays,” which first imagined the possibility of global satellite communications, had been published just three decades earlier, in 1945. Sputnik’s launch inaugurated the military satellite age in 1957, but missile and space races between the United States and the Soviet Union dominated the technology’s initial evolution. Governments and sclerotic monopolists controlled the major phone companies in America and Europe. There were no cell phones yet, and the only mobile satellite phones available to consumers were bulky and difficult to operate. The few global phones available usually required a user to identify his location and then call through a patchy private network. These devices improved incrementally every few years, but only a very passionate and very wealthy user (and Salem was both) could find them at all appealing.
It was often easier in these years for Salem to chat with friends and family while he was flying his airplanes than when he was moving around on the ground. Salem installed high-frequency radios in his private planes, at a price of about thirty thousand dollars each—these radios enhanced safety during transatlantic flights, but they also allowed him to connect to various telephone networks while he was up in the air. In Europe, he would call in from the cockpit to a company called Stockholm Radio. For a steep price, its operators would then route him into the Swedish phone system, through which he could connect to just about anyone in Europe. Salem so often called Stockholm Radio—and a similar firm in Houston, Texas—that the operators often just asked him for the name of the friend or sister he wanted to reach, since they already had all his numbers on hand. While flying over San Antonio or Houston, Salem would call down to friends in their houses below and tell them to come outside and look up in the sky. He would flash his jet’s lights and shout into his mobile telephone: “Do you see me? Do you see me?” On gliding trips in Europe, he would call his favorite sister in Montreaclass="underline" “Randa! I’m over the Alps at twelve thousand feet! Do you believe this?” Flying between European capitals at night, he would talk for hours with his girlfriends while the Stockholm operators listened in sympathetically. If he was bored and his friends were asleep, he would call the Stockholm operators from his plane and play songs on his harmonica.4
“There’s a lot of money in phones,” Salem told his German friend Thomas Dietrich. He knew this because he and his family spent such vast sums of money on international phone calls. When he checked out of European hotels, he usually owed more for his phone bill than for his room and meals. He would call at night just to talk “and he would fall asleep, on an international call,” Dietrich recalled. “And when you hang up, he calls back and says, ‘Why are you hanging up?’” Dietrich learned that even if they were staying in the same hotel, it made much more sense to call Salem on the phone than to try to visit his room “because when you visit him, he sits in front of the TV and talks on the phone—he will not talk to you…In the day, he slept and was on the phone. And in the night, he was on the phone.”5
SALEM FOUNDED Bin Laden Telecommunications in 1975. He owned 51 percent. Lansdowne Ltd. owned 15 percent; the rest ended up with Salem’s bankers, the Bin Mahfouz family. The company operated at first from a modest residential villa in Jeddah. It possessed the air of whimsy that seemed to swirl around Salem like fairy dust.
Although he had virtually no prior experience in business, Rupert Armitage, Salem’s guitar-playing schoolmate from Copford Glebe, was soon appointed the company’s managing director. Salem and Rupert had fallen out of touch after school until they bumped into each other in the wee hours at a nightclub outside Rome, where Rupert was working as a bar manager and Salem was partying with a son of Lord Carrington, the British politician who was then his country’s foreign secretary. They jammed with their guitars that night, and six months later, Salem asked Rupert to come to Jeddah to give him additional lessons. Hunnewell and Pochna found Rupert to be a bit of an adventurer, and an unlikely telephone company executive, but they thought he was intelligent and reliable, and he was clearly trusted by Salem, so they accepted him.6
Their business at first centered on the sale in Saudi Arabia of American-made speed dialers for rotary telephones. These were primitive devices that allowed a user to program the numbers of friends or family and then dial by pressing a single button; they cost about one hundred dollars in the U.S. but sold at a brisk clip for three times that much in the kingdom. Lansdowne won an exclusive agency to sell the dialers in Saudi Arabia, and it turned out that every prince with a palace and a long list of brothers, sisters, aunts, and uncles wanted to have one. They soon branched out into other telephone equipment, such as private exchanges that allowed a palace to have dozens of separate lines. The kingdom still did not have a decent national telephone network, but the royal family wanted the latest and best equipment in their homes, even if the lines crackled or broke off when they punched the blinking buttons.