A Long And Varied Career Has A bin Laden Connection

By Steve Bigham

Ted Farrell’s career has taken him to every corner of the globe. His bosses have included the US government, General Motors, and the father of Osama bin Laden.

Mr Farrell, 77, is an advertising salesperson at The Newtown Bee and was overheard this week telling tales about his lifelong travels. In the late 1970s, Mr Farrell found himself in Saudi Arabia building swimming pools for ARAMCO, the largest oil drilling company in the world.

 One day, he received a call from the Red Sea Consortium, a company working under the auspices of the bin Laden’s father, one of Saudi’s richest and most powerful men, although originally from Yemen.

“They were building compounds for workers and for ordinary residents of the city of Jedda. Bin Laden was a friend of King Fahad and King Saad, the original king of Arabia. I was hired by bin Laden to finish off the exterior of some 400-500 apartments,” Mr Farrell said.

Osama bin Laden, believed to be the wealthy mastermind behind the September 11 terrorist attacks, is believed to be 45-years-old. In those days, he was in his mid-20s.

“I never met Osama because he never got his hands dirty. His brothers did. All 24 of them,” Mr Farrell said. “His father knew the kings so that enabled him to get his hand in their pocket. The Saudi government gave bin Laden whatever he wanted.”

The bin Laden family is said to have made its money in Saudi’s oil-fueled construction industry, building everything from roads and housing to million-dollar palaces. There are said to be some 5,000 palaces in Saudi Arabia.

The Woodbury resident’s career picks up in the 1950s when he was a young lawyer working for the US Senate crime committee. He often talks about his work on the famous Kefauver crime committee, which investigated organized crime in interstate commerce.

“Everyone in the Mafia was scared to death of us,” Mr Farrell explained.

In 1952, Mr. Farrell left the law field and joined Time, Inc working for Life Magazine and Time Magazine as an advertising salesman.

“I worked there until 1970, then I went into the motor home industry working for Winnebago Industry and General Motors,” Mr Farrell explained.

Winnebagos have always been big sellers in the Middle East as wealthy oilmen trek out into the desert to do falcon hunting.

“They stayed in tents until they found out they could have motor homes with air conditioning,” Mr Farrell said.

During WWII, Ted attended engineering school at Texas A&M and his education had him earmarked to be a part of the allied invasion of Japan as an artillery officer. Of course, the atomic bomb drops of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended those plans.

“That atomic bomb may have saved my life,” Mr Farrell said.

He later landed a job as a construction engineer in ARAMCO (Arabian American Oil Company). It was while in Saudi Arabia that Ted learned something that many Americans are just learning now.

“When I arrived there, a man explained to me that the people there were different from us. We are a different breed as far as they’re concerned. A lot of people don’t realize that Muslims consider us to be infidels,” he said.

Of course, Osama bin Laden has taken an extremist view and his ideologies have gotten him kicked out of Saudi Arabia. Today, he hides in caves in the mountains of Afghanistan. The United States and its allies have vowed to smoke out the terrorist and his Al-Qaeda followers.

In the 80s, Mr Farrell continued in the construction business, spending time in Nigeria, Sri Lanka, and Iran.

He eventually made his way to Connecticut where, after a brief stint in the modular home construction field, got back into the advertising business working house publishing and private publishing consortiums. He started a magazine called Contractors Marketplace soon after, then ran into R. Scudder Smith in 1997 and Mr Farrell has been working for The Bee ever since.

Mr Farrell was born in New York City in 1924. His wife of nearly 50 years, LuLu, died in 1999.