by Robert Baer
Robert Baer
Sleeping With The Devil
How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude
Table of Contents
Also By Robert Baer
Acknowledgments
Part I
Speak No Evil
1. We Deliver Anywhere
2. Circling the Drain
3. A Consent of Silence
4. Saudi Arabia - Washington’s 401(k) Plan
5. Pavlov and His Dogs
Part II
Sleeping with the Devil
6. The Seduction
7. The Honeymoon
8. Guess Who Came to Dinner
9. Trouble in Paradise
Part III
Going Down
10. Hard Landing
11. Kiss It Good-bye
12. In the War on Terrorism, You Lie, You Die
Epilogue
Index
Also By Robert Baer
See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA’s War on Terrorism
CIA’s Publications Review Board has reviewed the manuscript for this book to assist the author in eliminating classified information and poses no security objection to its publication. This review, however, should not be construed as an official release of information, confirmation of its accuracy, or an endorsement of the author’s views.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Commentary for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Oil: The Issue of American Intervention” by Robert W. Tucker that appeared in Commentary (January 1975). All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Commentary.
Robert Baer
Crown Publishers
New York
TO DANNY PEARL, in recognition of his courage and relentless search for the truth.
Acknowledgments
I WOULD LIKE TO THANK the Saudi experts, petroleum specialists, and Islamic scholars for keeping me on the right track. Thanks to their true expertise, I hope I managed to get the story right. I would also like to thank the numerous talented journalists - all newfound friends since leaving the CIA - whose interests in the Middle East coincide with mine. Our interminable discussions helped me immeasurably to understand the subject. Unfortunately, there are too many to mention by name. Finally, I would like to thank my many Arab friends who patiently tried to explain Saudi Arabia to me. The book could not have been written without them. I hope I got it right and they do not look at this as an anti-Arab or anti-Saudi book. As harsh as some of my views may appear, my sole intention is to attempt to explain why relations between Saudi Arabia and the United States have reached such a low point - and threaten to get worse. Again, as in See No Evil, this book would not have been possible without the research and editorial dictums of Rafe Sagalyn, Howard Means, Kristin Kiser, and Steve Ross, and support from Claudia Gabel, Amy Boorstein, Derek McNally, and Lauren Dong. But, of course, at the end of the day any errors, faulty judgments, and oversights that often pop up in a book like this are all my own.
The House of Sa’ud: An Abbreviated Family Tree
KING IBN SA’UD (also known as ‘Abd-al-‘Aziz) united Saudi Arabia into a single kingdom in 1932 and ruled it until his death in 1953. He had at least forty-three sons, eight of whom died before the age of twenty. Among the most prominent of the survivors:
SA’UD. Succeeded his father as king November 1953. Deposed November 1964.
FAYSAL. Proclaimed king November 1964. Assassinated March 1975.
KHALID. Named crown prince March 1975. Died of natural causes June, 1982.
FAHD. Named crown prince March 1975. Proclaimed king June 1982. Incapacitated by a stroke November 1995. King Fahd has seven sons, including his youngest, ‘Abd-al-‘Aziz (or “Azouzi”), by his favorite wife, Jawhara Al Ibrahim.
SULTAN. Minister of Defense and Aviation and chairman of Saudi Arabian Airlines, among other titles. Father of Prince Bandar, long-time Saudi ambassador to the United States.
TURKI. Resigned as head of Saudi intelligence just days before the September 11 terrorist attacks. The closest of the princes to the Taliban. Attended Georgetown University with Bill Clinton.
SALMAN. Governor of Riyadh for more than forty years and
de facto head of the Saudi charities some of whose money found its way into al Qaeda.
‘ABDALLAH. Named crown prince June 1982. Commander of the National Guard since 1963.
NAIF. Current Minister of Interior.
Prologue: The Doomsday Scenario
THE WHITE FORD PICKUP rolled quietly to a stop below Tower Number Seven, one of ten large cylindrical structures at Abqaiq that are used to remove sulfur from petroleum, or turn it from “sour” to “sweet,” in oil-patch jargon. A dirty tarp covered the cargo bed; extra-heavy shocks kept the bed from sagging onto the axle. To the east, across the Saudi desert, a hint of the morning sun peeked over the horizon. The truck driver, one of thousands of Shi’a Muslims who work the Saudi oil fields, cut the engine, checked his watch one last time, and began reciting verses from the Qur’an, memorized long ago. The lights of the world’s largest oil-processing facility twinkled all around him.
Three hours earlier, a fishing boat equipped with twin two-hundred-fifty-horsepower Evinrude engines had set out from Deyyer, on the southern coast of Iran. By dark, the boat had sprinted across the Persian Gulf to the Saudi port at al Jubayl. From there, the Iranian pilot had crept south, hugging the coastline, until he came in sight of the Sea Island oil-loading platform at Ras Tanura, forty-five miles to the northeast of Abqaiq. Now, with the water beginning to glow pink, he pointed the bow at Platform Four and slammed the throttle to full.
Just inland from Ras Tanura, at Qatif Junction, an Egyptian engineer - a Muslim Brother who had made the grand tour of militant Islam, from Cairo to Tehran - flicked on his flashlight and admired his handiwork. The Semtex was expertly crammed into and around every manifold, every valve, every last pipe junction. It was art, really, lacing it all together in a single charge: a work of beauty, of Allah’s great creation.
West of Abqaiq, in the foothills of the al Aramah Mountains at a small Bedouin encampment, a Saudi in his mid-twenties bent over a 120-mm Russian-made mortar for what seemed the hundredth time. A Wahhabi, descended from the religious zealots who brought the House of Sa’ud to power, he had been trained in munitions in Afghanistan by a man who was taught by the Central Intelligence Agency. Below him, at the base of the foothills, sat Pump Station One, the first stop on the oil pipeline that carried nearly a million barrels of extra-light crude daily from Abqaiq across the peninsula to the Red Sea port at Yanbu.
A pager vibrated lightly against his chest and went dead. It was time. The Al Sa’ud were coming down. The oil that fed their whoring and corruption would flow no more. Islam would be purified; the American devils, crippled; and their Israeli protectorate, cut free to die on its own. The world would have to take notice, and for the simplest of reasons: The global economy was fucked.
I’VE DOLLED UP the details and updated them, but I didn’t invent them. They come courtesy of people who studied the Saudi oil industry from the ground up. From the mid-1930s until well into the 1960s, Saudi Arabia was a branch office of America’s oil giants - a Republican internationalist’s fantasy. The United States remained secure in the knowledge that Saudi oil would always be there for us, under the sand, cheap, and as safe as if it were locked up in Fort Knox. We built Saudi Arabia’s oil business and, for our efforts, got full and easy access to its crude.
The first OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) oil embargo in 1973 took the bloom off that rose, but anxiety turned into full panic in the early 1980s, during the Iran-Iraq war, especially when it looked as if Iran might take the war to the Arab side of
the Gulf, including Saudi Arabia. With the nightmare of an Islamic prairie fire taking down the world’s economy, disaster planners in and out of government began to ask uncomfortable questions. What points of the Saudi oil infrastructure were most vulnerable to terrorist attack? And by what means? What sorts of disruptions to the flow of oil, short-term and long-term, could be expected? And with what economic consequences?
Almost to a person, the disaster planners concluded that the Abqaiq extralight crude complex was both the most vulnerable point of the Saudi oil system and its most spectacular target. With a capacity of seven million barrels, Abqaiq is the Godzilla of oil-processing facilities. Generally, the study groups posited a multiprong attack on Abqaiq, with severe damage to storage tanks and the large spheroids used to reduce pressure on oil during the refining process, and moderate damage to the stabilizing towers where petroleum is purged of sulfur.
Restoring the pressure-reducing spheroids would require not much more than the installation of a series of temporary valves, to be replaced eventually by permanent ones. The storage tanks wouldn’t be much of a problem, either. A few repairs here and there, and you would have full-production capacity back in no time at all.
The stabilizing towers are another story. Sulfur and oil go hand in hand. The same eons-long processes that make one make the other. But until the sulfur is removed, petroleum is useless. To get from one state to the other - from sour to sweet - petroleum goes through a process known as hydrodesulfurization.
At Abqaiq, hydrodesulfurization takes place in ten tall, cylindrical towers. Inside the towers, hydrogen is introduced into the oil in sufficient quantities to convert sulfur into hydrogen sulfide gas, which then rises to the top of the structure, where it is harvested and rendered into harmless, environmentally safe, and usable sulfur.
But hydrogen sulfide is no everyday gas. Familiar to generations of high school chemistry students as the rotten-egg (or “fart”) gas, it is highly corrosive and potentially fatal to humans. As long as the gas is confined in the stabilizing towers, everything is fine. Blow the top off a tower, or a wide hole through it, or bring it crashing down by detonating a truck loaded with three thousand pounds of explosives at its base, and all hell breaks loose.
In the atmosphere, hydrogen sulfide reacts with moisture to create the acid sulfur dioxide. Once formed, the acid would rapidly settle on surrounding pipes, valve fittings, flanges, connectors, pump stations, and control boxes, and begin eating its way through everything like some bionic omnivorous termite. But the initial release of hydrogen sulfide would have far more serious effects because of what it does to humans.
The federal Agency for Toxic Substance and Disease Registry (ATSDR), a sister agency of the Centers for Disease Control, classifies hydrogen sulfide as a broad-spectrum poison - that is, it attacks multiple systems in the body. “Breathing very high levels of hydrogen sulfide can cause death within just a few breaths,” ATSDR reports. “There could be loss of consciousness after one or more breaths. Exposure to lower concentrations can result in eye irritation, a sore throat and cough, shortness of breath, and fluid in the lungs. These symptoms usually go away in a few weeks. Long-term, low-level exposure may result in fatigue, loss of appetite, headaches, irritability, poor memory, and dizziness.”
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) wing of the U.S. Department of Labor has established an acceptable ceiling concentration of twenty parts per million (ppm) of hydrogen sulfide in the workplace, with a maximum level of fifty ppm allowed for ten minutes “if no other measurable exposure occurs.” The more conservative - and less politically sensitive - National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health recommends a maximum exposure level of ten ppm.
A moderately successful attack on the Abqaiq facility’s stabilizing towers would let loose seventeen hundred ppm of hydrogen sulfide into the atmosphere. That strength would dissipate, but not quickly enough to prevent the death of workers in the immediate vicinity and serious injury to others in the general area - or to stop sulfur dioxide from eating into the metallic heart of the Saudi oil infrastructure. The toxicity also would deter the onset of repairs for months.
At the least, a moderate-to-severe attack on Abqaiq would slow average production there from 6.8 million barrels a day to roughly a million barrels for the first two months postattack, a loss equivalent to approximately one-third of America’s current daily consumption of crude oil. Even as long as seven months after an attack, Abqaiq output would still be about 40 percent of preattack output, as much as 4 million barrels below normal - roughly equal to what all of the OPEC partners collectively took out of production during the devastating 1973 embargo.
THE ABQAIQ SCENARIO was only one of many considered by the Reagan-era disaster planners, in part because Saudi Arabia’s oil system is so target-rich. Any oil extraction, production, and delivery system relies on a large, mostly exposed exoskeleton. Add to that the topography of eastern Saudi Arabia, where the vast oil fields are located - an ocean of sand broken by shifting dunes, all of it sloping gently into the Persian Gulf - and you have a security consultant’s worst nightmare. Taking down Saudi Arabia’s oil infrastructure is like spearing fish in a barrel. It’s not a question of opportunity; it’s a question of how good your bang men are and what you give them to work with.
Saudi Arabia has more than eighty active oil and gas fields, and more than a thousand working wells, but half of its proven reserves - 12.5 percent of all the known oil in the world - is contained in eight fields, including Ghawar, the world’s largest onshore oil field; and Safaniya, the largest offshore field in existence. One element that made Pearl Harbor such an attractive target in 1941 was so much American firepower, air and sea, boxed in such a small space. Even if a Japanese bomb missed its target, it was likely to find something worth blowing up. Tactically, the Saudi fields offer much the same sort of target environment. One scenario concluded that if terrorists were to simultaneously hit only five of the many sensitive points in Saudi Arabia’s downstream oil system, they could put the Saudis out of the oil-producing business for about two years.
Once it’s out of the ground or the seabed, Saudi oil moves through roughly seventeen thousand kilometers of pipe: from well to refinery, from refinery to onshore and offshore ports, within the kingdom and without. Much of that pipe is above ground. The buried part lies an average of three quarters of a meter below the surface, often in land occupied by nomadic tribes. A camel for transport, a spade, and a cordless drill are enough to sabotage a section of pipe. But if you want to step up the damage, there’s no want of explosives in the explosive Middle East. A sack of fertilizer, a bucket of fuel oil, and a stick of dynamite would do the trick.
The kingdom maintains a huge inventory of pipe, which makes a single saboteur no more threatening than a gnat, but multiple saboteurs operating in concert at broadly spaced intervals throughout the oil web would create a plague of gnats as unpleasant and diverting as - and far more destructive than - the clouds of gnats that settle on Sunday picnics. Pipes, though, are the least of the problems.
A typical Saudi oil well produces about five thousand barrels a day of runny gunk: an unusable mixture of oil, dissolved gases, sulfur impurities, and salt water pumped into the well to create sufficient pressure to force the gunk out. From the wells, oil is pumped to one of five gas and oil separation plants maintained by Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s state oil company. In vast, bulbous spheroids, a pressure step-down process releases most of the dissolved gases, while a second process takes out the salt water. The remaining sour crude is piped on to one of five stabilization facilities, where the pressure is further stepped down and oil is held in storage tanks pending desulfurization.
From a system engineer’s point of view, all this movement, from the well through the refining process, is a ballet of connectivity. The stabilizing towers where the sulfur is neutralized, the spheroids where pressure is reduced and other impurities are siphoned off, the storage tanks where the oi
l is held between processing and shipping are, in effect, cathedrals of the industrial process. Terrorists and saboteurs tend to view the world differently. To them, the architectural features of downstream production offer one very attractive thing: virtually unimpeded line-of-sight targeting, just like the World Trade Center towers on a clear day.
There’s also the distribution and delivery side. The Saudi oil system is divided into northern and southern producing areas. Northern oil gets refined at multiple locations, then piped to one of two terminals along the Gulf - Ju’aymah and Ras Tanura - and from there out to offshore loading platforms and mooring buoys located in water deep enough to handle oceangoing oil tankers.
All petroleum originating in the south is pumped to Abqaiq, about forty kilometers inland from the northern end of the Gulf of Bahrain, for processing, and from there on to Ju’aymah or Ras Tanura, or via the East-West pipeline over twelve hundred kilometers across the Arabian peninsula and the mountainous spine of western Saudi Arabia to the terminal at Yanbu on the Red Sea. (Another route out of Abqaiq, the seventeen-hundred-kilometer Trans-Arabian pipeline that runs to Sidon, on the Mediterranean coast in Lebanon, is mothballed as I write, as is the Iraq-Saudi pipeline, shut down in 1990 following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.)
Whatever the terminal, whichever the coast, the choke points are too many to count. At Ju’aymah the most likely point of attack would be the metering platform located eleven kilometers offshore. Four underwater pipelines feed crude oil and bunker fuel to the platform from onshore storage tanks. The platform, in turn, feeds five single-point mooring buoys, located still farther offshore, each capable of transferring 2.5 million barrels of oil and other fuel per day to tankers.
