by Robert Baer
In another case, Lawrence Eagleburger, secretary of state in the Bush I administration, joined Halliburton’s board of directors while Dick Cheney was doing time as the company’s CEO.
Henry Kissinger heads up Kissinger Associates, which counts among its corporate clients Boeing and Atlantic Richfield/ARCO, as well as many others doing business in Saudi Arabia. Like Scowcroft, Eagleburger, Rumsfeld, Powell, and all the others, Kissinger won’t have his integrity questioned. He also won’t stop exploiting his ties to Saudi and other Arab leaders - all those years of shuttle diplomacy and Camp David confabs - or sucking on the massive tit of petrodollars. On the sunny banks of the Potomac, if you retire with a high enough title, you get to have it both ways. (Woe be to any lowly government functionary who dares to point this out. If there’s one thing the status quo hates, it’s a whistle-blower.)
So pervasive and intricate are the client ties to Saudi Arabia in Washington that the two people named to head up the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks - Kissinger and Vice Chairman George Mitchell, the former Senate majority leader - both resigned their positions before the hearings got under way, rather than divulge their own client lists. To find a commission head free of the client taint, George W. Bush finally nominated former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean, the president of Drew University, whose only lasting Washington connection is that he’s an alumnus of the same exclusive D.C. prep school that educated Al Gore and President Bush’s two younger brothers, Neil and Marvin. At the time he was nominated, it should be noted, Kean was also a director of Amerada Hess, the petroleum goliath that has joined forces with a Saudi oil company to develop Central Asian oil fields, but more about that in a few paragraphs.
Even Louis Freeh, the former FBI director, is said to have seriously considered an offer to work for the Saudis after he retired from the bureau in 2001. If so, he must have awakened every morning since 9/11 thanking God and fate that he instead took a job with MBNA, the credit-card giant.
At the corporate level, almost every Washington figure worth mentioning has served on the board of at least one company that did a deal with Saudi Arabia, and practically every deal with the Saudis grows opaque, lost in some desert sandstorm back near the well heads where all the money sprang from.
Until it was purchased by Northrop Grumman in late 2002, TRW counted among its board members former CIA Director Robert Gates and former Undersecretary of State and Ambassador to Japan Michael Armacost. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was, for many years, a board member of Chevron, which merged in 2001 with Texaco. Chevron Texaco is a partner with Saudi Aramco in both Star Enterprise and Motiva Enterprises. In the weird way of these interlocking corporate and government webs, oil is quite possibly being transported to the U.S., even as you read these words, via the oil tanker that Chevron named for Rice.
ChevronTexaco - whose board members include Carla Hills, former secretary of housing and urban development (under Gerald Ford) and former U.S. trade representative (under George H. W. Bush); former Louisiana senator J. Bennett Johnston, who made a specialty of energy issues in Congress; and former Georgia senator Sam Nunn, who served most notably as head of the Senate Armed Services Committee - also has joined forces with Nimir Petroleum to develop Kazakhstan oil fields thought to contain upward of 1.5 billion barrels of oil. Nimir, in turn, is owned by the bin Mahfouz family. A 1999 audit conducted by the Saudi government is said to have found that the National Commercial Bank, partially owned by the bin Mahfouz family, donated at least $3 million to charities, some of whose money may have found its way into bin Laden’s networks. One of the charities, Blessed Relief, counts ‘Abd-al-Rahman bin Mahfouz among its board members. ‘Abd-al-Rahman’s father, Khalid bin Mahfouz, couldn’t even enter the United States in the early 1990s because of an indictment and involvement in the BCCI international-banking scandal.
Elsewhere in the Riyadh-Washington interface, Nicholas Brady, secretary of the treasury under the first President Bush, and former George H. W. Bush assistant Edith Holiday serve on the board of Amerada Hess along with Tom Kean. Amerada Hess has teamed with some of Saudi Arabia’s most powerful royals to exploit the rich oil resources of Azerbaijan. In 1998 Amerada Hess formed a joint venture, Delta Hess, with Saudi-owned Delta Oil to exploit petroleum resources in Azerbaijan. Houston-based Frontera Resources Corporation joined the Azerbaijan hunt the same year, teaming with Delta Hess. Among Frontera’s board of advisers: Lloyd Bentsen, the former Texas senator, ex-secretary of the treasury, and 1988 Democratic vice-presidential candidate; and yet another former CIA director, John Deutch. (If ex-CIA directors didn’t exist, America’s corporate boards would have had to invent them.)
Here, too, the trail gets complicated. Delta Oil was formed in the early 1990s by fifty wealthy Saudis, including Crown Prince ‘Abdallah, according to a May 1999 report by the U.S. embassy in Riyadh. The greatest among equals, though, appears to be Muhammad Husayn al-Amoudi, a Saudi who operates out of Ethiopia, where he oversees a conglomerate with tentacles in construction, banking, oil, and mining. The al-Amoudi and bin Mahfouz families have formed several partnerships, including Delta-Nimir, an oil venture that joined forces with Unocal in 1994 to develop oil fields in Azerbaijan. Like the bin Mahfouz clan, the al-Amoudis have been accused of giving money to Osama bin Laden, in this case through the family-controlled Capitol Trust Bank of London and New York.
We’ll probably never sort out whether Saudi Arabia’s charities knowingly funded bin Laden. In all probability, they were a lot like American-Irish pub keepers in New York, handing around a tin can for the IRA: Most of the money ended up feeding orphans and widows back in the old country, but some of it no doubt ended up buying guns and explosives. That doesn’t let anyone off the hook, though. The Saudi government and Washington never demanded an accounting, letting the believers among the Al Sa’ud and the Wahhabi militants send money to bin Laden through unwitting fronts. If it was easy money for the faithful in Washington, it was easy for the faithful in Riyadh and Jeddah, too.
EVEN WASHINGTON’S COMMONERS started to look at Saudi Arabia as their supplemental 401(k) plan. Aware that government bureaucrats can’t retire comfortably on a federal pension, the Saudis put out the message: You play the game - keep your mouth shut about the kingdom - and we’ll take care of you, find you a job, fund a chair at a university for you, maybe even present you with a Lexus and a town house in Georgetown.
Walter Cutler, former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, is president of the Meridian International Center in Washington. Established to “promote international understanding,” according to its website, the center has been generously supported by Saudi donors. Board members include a who’s who of Congressional and Cabinet wives: Mrs. Spencer Abraham, Mrs. Ken Bentsen, Mrs. John Breaux, Mrs. Jon Corzine, Mrs. William Frist, Mrs. Charles Hagel, and Mrs. Patrick Leahy, to parse only the first half of the alphabet.
Edward S. “Ned” Walker, Jr., a former assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs in the Clinton administration and an ambassador to Tel Aviv and Cairo before that, presides over the Middle East Institute, also in Washington. Founded in 1946 to promote understanding of the Arab world, the institute operated in 2001 on a budget of $1.5 million, $200,000 of which came from Saudi contributors, according to Walker. The institute’s board chairman is Wyche Fowler, Jr., the former Georgia senator and ambassador to Riyadh in the second Clinton administration. Other board members include former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger and former FBI and CIA Director William Webster.
American journalists have provided example after example of American diplomats and other State Department officials who left their Middle East posts, signed on with some Saudi-backed entity or another, and began carrying the party line to op-ed pages, learned conferences, and anywhere else that would have them. Why not, with the Kissingers, Scowcrofts, Powells, and Carluccis setting such a splendid example? The little people need to eat, too. They eat less, but the rules are the same: See no evil. Hear no evil.
Speak no evil.
Prince Bandar, Saudi Arabia’s longtime ambassador to the United States, once told an associate that he is careful to look after American government officials when they return to private life. “If the reputation then builds that the Saudis take care of friends when they leave office, you’d be surprised how much better friends you have who are just coming into office,” Bandar observed, according to a Washington Post source. When you’re rich and arrogant enough, you can buy the luxury of candor.
Just to make sure no one is tempted to complain too much, Saudi Arabia keeps possibly as much as a trillion dollars on deposit in U.S. banks - an agreement worked out in the early 1980s by the Reagan administration, in yet another effort to get the Saudis to offset the U.S. budget deficit. The Saudis hold another trillion dollars or so in the U.S. stock market.
On the compulsory one-to-ten scale of economic catastrophe, having the Saudis withdraw all their U.S. bank deposits and vacate the stock market is probably only a six, well below the Saudis turning off the oil spigot or having the spigot blown to bits - the ten-point, apocalypse-now disaster. But it all begins to suggest that someone might have someone else by the short hairs.
5. Pavlov and His Dogs
IN 1994 CIA headquarters brought me back to Washington after a two-year stretch in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, the remotest, poorest patch of hardscrabble on earth. Frankly, I was happy to come home and kick back for a while. I’d had enough of cold showers, military rations, and the bedtime lullaby of tank fire, and I needed a break before going to one more godforsaken part of the world. That is, until I started looking around Washington for a place to rent.
When I signed up with the CIA in [text omitted] I could afford Washington, even an apartment in Georgetown. Back then you could still go out a couple of times a week without having to spend the rest of the week eating pork and beans. This had all changed by 1994. Rents in Georgetown had gone through the ceiling. All the local places I had hung out in were gone, replaced by trendy French cafés, boutiques, and cigar bars. If you had a family and wanted to lead anything like a middle-class life in Washington, you were looking at Virginia’s exurbs, maybe an hour’s commute away.
I was about to give up and settle for someplace outside the Beltway when I happened on a house in Palisades, a neighborhood just outside of Georgetown. The house was on a month-to-month lease, but that didn’t matter. It was the perfect size: three bedrooms, two baths, and a lawn, more than adequate for me and my family. Better still, it was maybe five minutes by car to headquarters in Langley, Virginia. In fact, it was close enough for me to ride my bicycle to work: a straight shot across the Potomac River on Chain Bridge to Route 123, a hard pump for about half a mile up a hill, then an easy pedal right up to the CIA’s front gates. It not only saved buying a second car; I got a good daily workout in the bargain.
One night I was on my way home and noticed a convoy coming up Route 123 from the Potomac, led by a Chevy Suburban 2500 with flashing lights. At first I thought it was the president - he’s the only official in Washington who gets that kind of protection. But right before the convoy got to me, it turned in to a gated estate. The enormous iron gates opened, and in a second the cars disappeared down a tree-lined driveway. Only then did I notice that I was riding in front of the estate of Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. Because the limo windows were fashionably smoked, I could only guess it was Bandar coming home.
The next day I asked about Bandar’s status and was told that he alone of all ambassadors got official State Department protection. The Suburban must have belonged to State. Even back then, the incident seemed to encapsulate something important about Bandar, Washington, the CIA, and the peculiar relationship between Saudi Arabia and the United States. Here I was on my bicycle, a CIA official supposedly charged with protecting America’s national security, passed on the road by the Saudi ambassador with his U.S. government protection, who then pulled into his estate overlooking the Potomac - the best piece of property in Washington. Ten of my houses could have fit inside his.
But it was a lot more than that. Bandar could wander into the White House and around Congress for a chat anytime he liked. It took me weeks to get an appointment with a low-ranking staffer in the National Security Council, and I’d be lucky to get even a few minutes. Bandar was an A-list Washington party guest. He could pass a sensitive message to anyone in the government or the press whenever he liked - on the opening night of the Kennedy Center; at a sit-down dinner in the house of Katharine Graham, the late publisher of the Washington Post; or at the Cosmos Club. Bandar was a Washington player; I - the CIA - wasn’t.
Bandar’s convoy, his sprawling house, the special access, the no-limits lifestyle: They were all a constant reminder of the way Washington really ran. Forget the crap about democracy, about the capital of the free world. Washington was a company town, and Bandar had a seat on the board. If you wanted to move into even the outer reaches of his orbit, you had damn well better play by his rules.
EVERY ARRANGEMENT as cozy as the U.S.-Saudi embrace needs someone with a foot in each camp: well connected at either end of the line, able to move comfortably in two cultures, expansive enough to make people seek out his company yet attentive to all the details that get results at the end of the day. For the Washington-Riyadh axis, that person is Bandar bin Sultan bin ‘Abd-al-‘Aziz. Prince Bandar ranks low on the royal-gene charts - although his father is the Saudi defense minister, his mother was a mere house servant - but Washington has always cared more about money than bloodlines.
Ever since he was named the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. in 1983, at age thirty-four, Bandar has been winning friends and influencing people for the Al Sa’ud. A daredevil fighter pilot in his younger years, a Muslim with a taste for single-malt scotch and Cuban cigars, and an envoy with an always open wallet, Bandar has proved himself a franchise player, working both the public and private sides of diplomacy. As the Saudi military attaché to the U.S., he scored a stunning coup in 1981 by convincing Congress to approve the sale of AWACs early-warning aircraft technology to Saudi Arabia, over the near-hysterical objections of AIPAC, the powerful Israeli Washington lobby. Later, as ambassador, Bandar paid down the kingdom’s debt by secretly placing $10 million in a Vatican City bank as reported in 2002 by the Washington Post. The money, deposited at the request of then CIA director William Casey, was to be used by Italy’s Christian Democratic party in a campaign against Italian communists. In June 1984 Bandar ponied up the first of $30 million from the royal family so Oliver North could buy arms for the Nicaraguan contra rebels.
It’s on the personal front that the affable Bandar truly shines. When George H. W. and Barbara Bush flew to Saudi Arabia in late November 1990 to visit the troops massing there to take Kuwait back from Iraq, Bandar’s wife, Princess Haifa, invited the Bushes’ newly divorced daughter, Dorothy, and her children to celebrate Thanksgiving at Bandar’s Virginia farm. When the president and Bandar met in Riyadh several days after Thanksgiving, Bush is said to have embraced the prince with tears in his eyes, proclaiming, “You are good people.” (The tears are by Bandar’s own account.)
A visit to the Bush summer home in Kennebunkport, Maine, earned the prince the affectionate family sobriquet “Bandar Bush.” Bandar reciprocated by inviting Bush to hunt pheasant on his estate in England. For good measure, Bandar also contributed an even $1 million to the construction of the Bush Presidential Library in College Station, Texas. At Bandar’s suggestion, King Fahd sent another $1 million to Barbara Bush’s campaign against illiteracy, just as he had donated $1 million to Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign against drugs.
Prince Bandar is not the only Saudi with an acute interest in presidential libraries and the like. Back in October 1983 Adnan Khashoggi - the arms merchant and future Iran-Contra middleman - footed the $50,000 bill at a New York City benefit for Jimmy Carter’s presidential repository in Atlanta. Six months earlier, the former president and future Nobel Peace Prize winner had sung th
e kingdom’s praises at a Saudi trade conference held in Atlanta. Much more recently, in late 2002, Prince al-Walid kicked in $500,000 to help launch the George Herbert Walker Bush Scholarship Fund at Phillips Academy, Andover - alma mater to George W. Bush as well. A year earlier, you’ll recall, Rudy Giuliani had turned down Prince al-Walid’s attempted $10 million gift.
Press accounts portrayed Bandar as largely on the outside during the Clinton years, passing melancholy weeks locked up in his humble Aspen mountain cabin (fifty thousand square feet, thirty-two rooms, sixteen bathrooms, assessed value $55 million). It’s true that the two men have differences of style: Bandar is proud of his flyboy military past; every time Clinton tries to march on a parade ground, he looks as if he should be carrying a saxophone, and the thought of him hunting anywhere is plain scary. Clinton had his own back-door connection to Riyadh: a friendship with Prince Turki, the former head of the Saudi intelligence service, dating back to their undergraduate days at Georgetown University. But it’s just as likely that White House aides worked hard to keep the president and Bandar apart. The last person Bill Clinton needed to spend more time with was a fabulously rich Arab with a wandering eye.
But Bandar was still his usual useful self. Newsweek reported that he played a role in convincing the Libyans to turn over two of its citizens suspected in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. The magazine also wrote that Bandar helped to break down Saudi resistance to the FBI’s investigation of the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers - an odd interpretation, since the investigation lingers on over a half decade after nineteen servicemen died there.
