by Robert Baer
On the personal side, Bandar used his influence to convince King Fahd to donate $23 million to the University of Arkansas’s new Center for Middle Eastern Studies, “a gesture of respect” for the Arkansas governor who had just been elected president. Clinton had been lobbying hard for the money since 1989, including a 1991 meeting with the Saudi ambassador and a November 1992 phone conversation with King Fahd only a week after he was elected president. The money finally came in two installments: an initial $3 million, followed by the balance two weeks after Clinton’s inauguration: Timing is everything. As he does at the end of every administration, perceived friend or foe, Bandar also invited each of the Clinton Cabinet members out to dinner at a restaurant of his choice, private or public room, depending on their willingness to see and be seen.
With the Bush II administration, Bandar retook the White House as spectacularly as when the British burned it in 1814, turning himself into a permanently visiting head of state. His long service in Washington makes him the dean of the diplomatic corps, but it’s his parties that everyone likes to talk about. In December 1997 Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter joined Bush Sr. at Bandar’s Potomac River mansion to help celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the prince’s marriage to Princess Haifa. Two years later, when Nelson Mandela visited Washington, the Bandars feted him at a party in the McLean mansion that lasted until one in the morning and included an after-dinner performance by singer Roberta Flack.
Then there’s Bandar’s famous Rolodex. In April 2001 Yasir Arafat called Saudi Crown Prince ‘Abdallah to complain after Israeli soldiers fired on a convoy ferrying officials of the Palestinian Authority. (Equal-opportunity favor-doers, the Saudis pick up Arafat’s hotel tab whenever his entourage overnights in Washington - generally at the Ritz-Carlton, where the Carlyle Group was holding its annual meeting when American Airlines 77 slammed into the Pentagon.) ‘Abdallah in turn called Bandar, who called Dick Cheney, who called Colin Powell, who once was Bandar’s racquetball partner. (Powell and Bandar came to know each other back in the late 1970s through David Jones, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and another of Bandar’s racquetball buddies.) Within an hour of Arafat’s call from Prince ‘Abdallah, Powell was reading the riot act to Ariel Sharon in Tel Aviv. Tinkers to Evers to Chance was never so efficient.
In mid-2002, word leaked to the press that the semiofficial Defense Policy Board, chaired by the durable cold warrior Richard Perle, had endorsed an assessment that Saudi Arabia wasn’t our friend when it came to terrorism. To be exact, the report called Saudi Arabia “central to the self-destruction of the Arab world and the chief vector of the Arab crisis and its outwardly directed aggression. The Saudis are active at every level of the terror chain, from planners to financiers, from cadre to foot-soldier, from ideologist to cheerleader.”
Again Powell was on the phone within hours, this time assuring Bandar - and, through him, his principals - that such apostasy was not the official stance of the Bush II administration. To reinforce the message, Bush II invited Bandar down to the family ranch at Crawford, Texas, an honor usually reserved for the heads of state: Think Vladimir Putin in chaps and spurs.
In what could have been a delicious irony, the Defense Policy Board security breach is suspected to be the work of master leaker and Saudi handmaiden Henry Kissinger, who would later briefly head the blue-ribbon commission charged with investigating the intelligence lapses that allowed 9/11 to happen. He had to resign before taking up his duties, little doubt because he had Saudis on his client list.
Bandar once told an American reporter that the phrase “don’t ask, don’t tell” might have originated with a verse from the Qur’an: “Ask not about things which, if made plain to you, may cause you trouble.” Maybe the verse should be carved over the front door of the State Department, too.
WHEN IT CAME OUT that Bandar’s wife, Princess Haifa, had made charitable contributions that may have inadvertently helped two of the hijackers get settled in San Diego, Powell visited NPR’s Morning Edition on November 28, 2002, to defend the prince and princess, although with faint praise.
“I have known Prince Bandar and Princess Haifa for many years,” Powell told interviewer Michele Kelemen, “and I think it most unlikely that they would do anything that would support any terrorist organization or individual. But let’s see what the facts are.”
“Most unlikely”? “Let’s see what the facts are”? Had the Bandarians broken ranks? Was the Bush administration sending a coded message? Perhaps, but Powell also might have been simply laying down a little cover fire for himself. In early March 2001 Princess Haifa hosted a lunch at her McLean digs for eighty of Washington’s most prominent women, including the wives of Donald Rumsfeld, Chief of Staff Andrew Card, Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, and Supreme Court justices Clarence Thomas and Anthony Kennedy. The guest of honor: Alma Powell, wife of Colin.
So it goes in Washington, but to me the greatest surprise of the whole affair wasn’t that Princess Haifa donated money that found its way to terrorists. Charitable contributions to the needy are an admirable obligation of Muslims, enshrined in the Qur’an; and Princess Haifa and her husband have Dumpsters of money to hand out. But how could anyone who counted not know that some of the money might end up with the soldiers of jihad? Let’s get serious: When was the last time we asked Saudi Arabia to account for anything? It’s just another sign that where Saudi Arabia is concerned, Washington stopped seeing the big picture long, long ago.
Whatever you think about Saudi charities - and I’ve already said that I think they might be overrated - they’ve been operating right under our noses for years. It’s like the 9/11 attacks themselves: No one saw them coming because no one wanted to look. In March 2002, half a year before the breathless revelation of Princess Haifa’s errant contribution, Treasury agents raided the northern Virginia headquarters of four Saudi-based charities: the SAAR Foundation, the Safa Trust, the International Institute for Islamic Thought (IIIT), and the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO). Also included in the raid was the local headquarters for the Muslim World League, an umbrella group funded by the Saudi government, which sent money and weapons to bin Laden. Gathering money scant miles from Bandar’s Potomac River mansion, all five charities can point to a long line of humanitarian causes they have aided and supported. Treasury officials and other experts can also point to a long string of alarming associations.
Testifying before Congress on August 1, 2002, Matthew Levitt, a senior fellow with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, noted that Tarik Hamdi, an IIIT employee, had personally provided Osama bin Laden with batteries for his satellite phone, a critical link in the stateless world that bin Laden inhabits. IIIT and SAAR are suspected of helping finance Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, home to some of the most accomplished suicide bombers in the Middle East. From 1986 to 1994, Muhammad Jamal Khalifa, brother-in-law of Osama bin Laden, ran the IIRO’s Philippine office, from which he channeled funds to al Qaeda. Only excellent work by the Indian police prevented another IIRO employee, Sayyid Abu Nasir, from bombing the U.S. consulates in Calcutta and Madras. (Madras gets a little personal: I used to work there.)
Interviewed by PBS’s Frontline about the problems with keeping track of Saudi money as it flows around the world, Prince Bandar said that the “money leaves Saudi Arabia, goes to Europe, and we can follow it; goes to the United States, America, and we lose contact with it.” A good thing, maybe, for the Bandars. Princess Haifa’s contribution to a Saudi who aided two of the September 11 hijackers added up to $130,000. Throw in $550,000 that a mysterious Saudi donated to a San Diego mosque that served as a forward base for the same two hijackers, and the money exceeds the roughly $500,000 the FBI estimates as the total cost of the 9/11 attacks. In other words, Bandar’s - or some other Saudi’s - “lost” money ended up paying for nineteen jihadis to massacre more than three thousand people. We’ll never know whether it was lost money that went where it was supposed to go until the Saudis decide
to assist with our investigation.
In October 2002 a U.S. delegation headed by Alan Larson, undersecretary of state for economic affairs, went to Riyadh, ostensibly to press the Saudis into increased surveillance of their countrymen’s charities and financial networks. But as Jeff Gerth and Judith Miller reported in The New York Times, the story didn’t end there: “In an illustration of the persistent quandary facing Washington, American and Saudi oil executives said Mr. Larson had another item on his agenda. He wanted to ensure, they said, that Saudi Arabia would pump millions of barrels of extra oil into the world market should there be a shortfall caused by an American-led attack on Iraq.”
Don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t know. Above all, speak no evil… and keep that oil flowing. The Saudis had it right all along.
RIYADH HOLDS UP a fistful of petrodollars, and Washington salivates. More and more, we’re seeing the dual result of that Pavlovian conditioning: an almost pathological unwillingness on the part of U.S. government agencies to stare reality in the face, coupled with a massive money grab by those who do see that the House of Sa’ud is on its last wobbly legs.
But to focus solely on money, or even money and oil, is to miss the full complexity of the story. The marriage of Washington and the House of Sa’ud is far more textured. It winds its way through geopolitics, World War II, and the sometimes myopic struggle to contain communism. Franklin D. Roosevelt plays a part, as does the eighteenth-century tribal chief Muhammad Ibn Sa’ud. So does another eighteenth-century Arab, Muhammad ibn ‘Abd-al-Wahhab and the archconservative thirteenth-century cleric Ibn Taymiyah. And so, finally, do the fruits of all the malignant seeds planted by Ibn Taymiyah: the Muslim Brotherhood.
To learn more about all this, I needed a history lesson and a tutor in the dark side of Islamic theology. I would have to travel to places that most Westerners would not willingly go.
Part II
Sleeping with the Devil
6. The Seduction
FROM THE CAPITAL of Arabia, the chief town of the Nejd, the center of the Wahhabis, and a tent just north of His Majesty’s palace, I send you greetings,” twenty-nine-year-old Thomas C. Barger wrote to his young wife, Kathleen, back in Medora, North Dakota, on the last day of summer 1938. “There have been fewer than four dozen Europeans here, and I don’t believe that many of them sent letters out.”
Geology had landed Tom Barger in Riyadh. To the west of the capital, located roughly in the center of the kingdom, lies the Arabian Shield, a volcanic mountain range with peaks as high as nine thousand feet, stretching from Jordan, in the north, all the way south to the Gulf of Aden. (The last Arabian volcanoes went dormant only seven centuries ago; broad black lava beds, known as harrahs, can still be seen running down the mountainsides toward the Red Sea.)
Eastward, as the Arabian highland drops toward the Persian Gulf, the underlying volcanic mantle gives way to sedimentary rock formed from the remains of ancient aquatic plants and animals, left behind from prehistory when seas covered this lower land. As the waters receded and the earth’s crust roiled and buckled, these sedimentary deposits were pushed deeper and deeper beneath the surface, and as that happened, the heat and pressure from above combined with the decomposition of the organic remains below to produce the fossil fuel we know as petroleum, black gold, oil.
Oil had been successfully brought out of the ground by drilling in 1859: Colonel Edwin Drake’s famous little well at Titusville, Pennsylvania. Eleven years later, John D. Rockefeller incorporated the Standard Oil Company in Ohio, and oil was primed to become the new fuel of the industrial revolution. Before the century was out, Russia had joined the U.S. as the world’s major producer. Indonesia, Romania, and Mexico all had fledgling oil industries by the start of World War I. Fighting was breaking out in Europe when oil was discovered in Venezuela and elsewhere in the Caribbean Basin.
Among the Persian Gulf states, Iran led the way. The first well there came in in May 1908. By 1913 a 135-mile pipeline tied the field to a refinery at Abadan, atop the Persian Gulf. The giant oil field at Kirkuk, in northern Iraq, was tapped in 1927. By 1935 it was delivering petroleum via a pair of six-hundred-mile pipelines to the Mediterranean coast at Tripoli in Lebanon, and to Haifa in what was then Palestine. Bahrain, the tiny island sheikdom in the Persian Gulf between Qatar and Saudi Arabia, came on-line in 1932 with help from the Gulf Oil Corporation. It was only a matter of time until eastern Saudi Arabia - geologically of a piece with western Iran, Bahrain, and southern Iraq - would join the party.
Tom Barger was part of the second wave of engineers and geologists sent by Standard Oil of California to make oil happen in Saudi Arabia. Working under a royal lease, the SOCAL team had already brought in the kingdom’s first well to produce oil in commercially exploitable quantities: Damman Well Number Seven, near Dhahran, begun on New Year’s Day, 1938. By September of that year, when Barger showed up in Riyadh, the prophecy was about to be fulfilled.
SOCAL, one of many offshoots of the court-ordered 1911 breakup of Standard Oil Company, would go on to become a principal in Aramco - the Arab-American Oil Company, formed to exploit and manage Saudi oil, the world’s largest depository. Tom Barger would rise to CEO of Aramco in 1961, a post he would hold until 1969. And oil would upend almost everything about the capital, the kingdom, in some ways the entire Muslim world, and of course, the Western world, too, because oil, the West, Islam, and Saudi Arabia can never be wholly separated.
It is amazing to think how new Saudi Arabia is, given the hold that it has on the Western consciousness and the wallet of the industrial world. The Saudi Arabia that Tom Barger flew into in 1937 had been a united kingdom for only five years. As late as the mid-1920s, the vast interior of the Arabian peninsula existed in almost total isolation from the rest of the world - a place characterized not by oil and its riches but by poverty, religious xenophobia and fanaticism, and, at its heart, an almost impenetrable desert culture.
The Arabian coast had long been known to traders. A thin trickle of European explorers had tackled the peninsula’s vast arid reaches in the nineteenth century. The holy sites at Mecca and Medina had been subjects of fascination in the West for centuries, but it wasn’t until 1865 that the coordinates of Riyadh, the future capital of the future kingdom, were fixed on Western maps.
Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and the African Muslim states of Algeria and Morocco were all undergoing modernization to one degree or another in the years after World War I. Kuwait, on Arabia’s northeastern border, had been packed with colonial intriguers for decades. Not so Saudi Arabia: It remained as it had been for centuries, a medieval Arab society rent by internal and external aggression.
Ibn Sa’ud had seized Riyadh on January 15, 1902, with an army of fewer than two hundred warriors and a raiding party of forty men. He was then in his early twenties. Intent on restoring a family dynasty that had been waxing and waning since the eighteenth century, he would spend the next two dozen years doing battle on all sides - against the dying remnants of the Ottoman empire, against competing Arab rulers, especially the Hashemites in Jordan, and finally, against his own supporters when they wouldn’t honor his authority. He won control of Mecca in 1924 and of Medina the following year. Both had been part of a short-lived ancestral realm.
By 1927 Ibn Sa’ud sat atop a dual kingdom that covered most of the peninsula. Five years later, he combined the two parts into a single realm and named it for his family: Saudi Arabia. But even as first-world oil interests came calling, his capital remained an unelectrified city of some thirty thousand deeply isolated people, surrounded by a mud wall and almost never visited by foreigners.
Ibn Sa’ud’s offspring, and their offspring, would become some of the world’s richest people, famous from the casinos of Monte Carlo to the brothels of London for their profligacy; the lords of billion-dollar palaces, owners of the best thoroughbreds and yachts, donors of university chairs and college laboratories, buyers of influence in every capital of the West, ready to whisk around the world at a mom
ent’s notice on fleets of private jets. In the mid-1930s, though, during the dark years of the Great Depression, the king’s minister of finance, Shaykh ‘Abdallah Sulayman, was still hauling the national treasury around in a tin trunk. Revenues from taxes on livestock, cereals, fruits, trade, and other commodities, as well as other royal prerogatives, went into the trunk for safekeeping. When the king decided on an expenditure, he would write the recipient a chit, which ‘Abdallah would, in due course, redeem from the trunk. When the trunk ran dry of riyals, ‘Abdallah would simply disappear until the stores were built back up.
It was the many barren periods within the royal trunk that led ‘Abdallah and his king to agree so readily to exploration terms clearly favorable to Standard Oil of California. The agreement granted SOCAL “the exclusive right, for a period of 60 years, to explore, prospect, drill for, extract, treat, manufacture, transport, deal with, carry away, and export” oil and oil products in an area of over forty thousand square miles, twice the size of France.
In return, the company promised to provide the Saudi government with an immediate loan of £30,000 gold or its equivalent (about $1.56 million in 2002 U.S. dollars), an “annual rental” of £5,000 gold, and an advance royalty of an additional £50,000 gold ($2.6 million), plus an identical payment once oil had been discovered in commercial quantities, as well as ongoing royalties when the business expanded. Acting on the king’s behalf, ‘Abdallah Sulayman signed the pact on May 29, 1933. The first two SOCAL geologists arrived four months later.
