Inside the Kingdom

by Robert Lacey

  This optimistic Saudi view of the United States as a generous and detached power that was somehow more moral than the rest of the world neatly chimed, of course, with America’s own exceptionalist image of itself. The loss of innocence over subsequent years would provide both sides with a succession of painful and poignant moments. The first came in February 1945 when Abdul Aziz traveled up the Red Sea for his first-ever encounter with a Western head of state, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had come to Egypt following the Yalta conference. It had been a hopeful and novel jaunt up from Jeddah for the Saudi party on board the USS Murphy, the king’s cooks and coffee servers slaughtering sheep on the deck of the destroyer, while his sons enjoyed the titillating sight of Miss Lucille Ball cavorting in various states of undress, courtesy of the movie projector in the crew’s quarters.

  But then FDR sprang his bombshell—he invited the Saudi king to help him secure a home in Palestine for the Jewish people. The Jews of central Europe had suffered most terribly at Hitler’s hands, the president explained, and he felt a personal responsibility to help them—he had committed himself indeed to finding a solution to their problems. Did the king of Arabia have any suggestions to make?

  The king certainly did, and he based his proposal on simple bedouin principles.

  “Give them [the Jews] and their descendants,” he said, “the choicest lands and homes of the Germans who oppressed them.” There was no reason why the Arab inhabitants of Palestine should suffer for something the Germans had done. “Make the enemy and the oppressor pay,” he said. “That is how we Arabs wage war.”

  Jewish immigration into Palestine had been a major and universal Arab grievance since the 1920s, with Britain attracting most of the blame, since London administered the Palestine mandate and had been the architect of the Balfour Declaration, which first expressed “favor” toward the prospect of a “national homeland” for Jews in the Middle East. Now, it appeared, the United States was also an endorser of the Zionist project, though as he said good-bye to Abdul Aziz, Roosevelt promised the Saudi king that “he would do nothing to assist the Jews against the Arabs, and would make no move hostile to the Arab people.”

  FDR’s successor, Harry Truman, broke this pledge in Saudi eyes when America supported Israeli statehood at the United Nations in 1948. Dwight Eisenhower was judged more evenhanded. Following the attempt of Britain, France, and Israel to seize the Suez Canal in 1956, Eisenhower sternly compelled the three conspirators to withdraw their forces. But this humiliating illustration of where postwar power lay prompted some creative thinking in Jerusalem. Nine years later, the purposeful marshaling in Washington of what would become known as the Jewish lobby helped ensure U.S. acquiescence and effective support for Israel’s 1967 conquest of Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza in the Six-Day War. When Egypt sought revenge six years later, taking Israeli troops by surprise as they marked the ceremonies of Yom Kippur 1973, Richard Nixon threw the weight of U.S. armaments behind the defense of Israel. In the twenty-eight years since FDR and Ibn Saud met, America had moved from tentative patron to firm guarantor of the Zionist project. As the Saudis saw it, Israel had become America’s fifty-first state.

  Publicly King Faisal bin Abdul Aziz reacted in fury, launching the Arab oil boycott of 1973. But in private it was a different matter. U.S.-Saudi relations were embedded in many fields—Aramco was America’s largest single private overseas investment anywhere in the world. Throughout the oil boycott and Faisal’s vehement protests at U.S. support for Israel, two U.S. military missions remained stationed in the Kingdom, training the Saudi Army, Air Force, and National Guard, while the king and his agents deployed the country’s profits from the anti-U.S. oil embargo to finance the Safari Club’s pro-U.S. activities in Africa. When it came to sheer, bottom-line survival, where else could the House of Saud turn but to America?

  “After Allah,” Faisal had told President Kennedy in 1962, “we trust the United States.”

  This neatly encapsulated the Saudi balancing act—but staying upright on the tightrope depended on keeping quiet about the friendship to those who might find it offensive at home. Successive Saudi kings chose to downplay the alliance to the average Saudi man-in-the-mosque, whose Fridays were regularly inflamed by pulpit warnings against the Western shaytan (Satan), laced with unashamed doses of anti-Semitism. To his dying day King Faisal believed implicitly in the anti-Jewish forgeries The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and funded modern republications of its fabrications. In Washington, meanwhile, U.S. administrations who were courting the Jewish vote tended to restrict White House appearances by bearded Arabs in headdresses, particularly near election time.

  “There goes New York State,” remarked President Kennedy in January 1962 after photographers had caught him visiting the ailing King Saud in Palm Beach.

  The more intimate and intertwined the U.S.-Saudi relationship grew, the more it became, for both sides, a friendship that could not afford to own its name.

  The summer of 1981 saw the arrival in Washington of Prince Bandar bin Sultan, a self-assured young Saudi Air Force squadron commander, sent to ease the passage through Congress of a massive Saudi arms deal. U.S.-Saudi collaboration had been proceeding smoothly both in Afghanistan and with the undercover campaigns of the Safari Club, but the Kingdom’s security had been compromised closer to home. Iraq’s emerging dictator, Saddam Hussein, had thrown the first of his aggressive foreign policy surprises when he attacked Iran the previous September. If his gamble failed, the ayatollahs might extend their power westward, and Riyadh needed to know what was going on over the Iraqi horizon. The answer lay in AWACS—America’s recently developed airborne warning and control system.

  Deriving its intelligence from a huge radar dish tacked on top of a Boeing 707, the AWACS system was capable of tracking 240 hostile aircraft simultaneously and directing fighters to intercept them. Patrolling thirty-five thousand feet above the oil fields, the “flying mushroom” could give the Saudi Air Force a twenty minute advantage over intruding enemy aircraft—time for an F-15 to make at least one extra pass. Lacking AWACS patrols, Riyadh had been humiliated even as Bandar arrived in Washington that June when Israeli fighter-bombers flew hundreds of miles to and fro through Saudi airspace to destroy Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor at Osirak, near Baghdad. Osirak made the Kingdom even more determined to acquire AWACS—while, as Israel saw it, the intelligence planes would give a dangerous combat edge to a potential enemy. On Capitol Hill the Israel lobby vowed to fight the purchase every step of the way.

  Bandar bin Sultan already had some experience of the ways of Washington. Three years earlier he had been seconded from his flying duties at the suggestion of his brother-in-law Turki Al-Faisal to serve as a military attaché to the Saudi embassy, lobbying for the purchase of the F-15 fighter.

  “My vote will cost you $10 million,” he was told at the time by Senator Russell B. Long of Louisiana, who unashamedly explained the system perfected by his father, Huey “King Fish” Long, the legendary governor of Louisiana: “I want you to assure me that your government will deposit $10 million in a bank in my town, and before you do that, let me know so that I can tell the bank president. . . . He will pay for my reelection. You can then draw your money back anytime, once I have been reelected.”

  It was no problem at all for the Saudi Ministry of Finance to shift $10 million from New York to Louisiana—and Saudi Arabia had a great deal more than that on deposit in the Chase Manhattan Bank. Keen to help a wealthy customer, the bank’s chairman, David Rockefeller, had promised to use his influence to pull in the votes of several senators. But as the weeks went by, Bandar got the impression that Rockefeller was treading water.

  “What do you suggest?” asked his uncle the crown prince on the phone.

  “You can order the finance minister to move $200 million from Chase Manhattan to J. P. Morgan,” replied Bandar.

  “Next day,” recalls Bandar, “David Rockefeller called me at eight in the morning. I was asleep.
He called me at nine; I was busy. He called me at ten; I was out. At four o’clock in the afternoon, the hotel reception phoned me to say that a Mr. Rockefeller was in the lobby.”

  It was once said that becoming president of the United States would have represented a demotion for David Rockefeller. Now the arch networker had apparently traveled from New York to Washington to court a thirty-two-year-old fighter pilot. Bandar recalls keeping the banker waiting till six, then telling him he was too busy for a meeting—he was on his way to the Hill to work on the votes he had been promised.

  “I’m going to stay here in Washington,” promised Rockefeller, as Bandar remembers it, “until I get you all the votes you want.”

  “Every night for three days,” according to Bandar, “he would call me and tell me ‘I’ve got Senator so-and-so.’ About three days later when he’d got all the senators he’d promised—and two more—I told our Finance Ministry to move the $200 million back to Chase Manhattan.”

  Today David Rockefeller says there are “a rather large number of factual inaccuracies” in Prince Bandar’s recollection. He calls the tale “preposterous,” and questions the mechanisms by which the Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority could, hypothetically, have switched funds in the casual way that the prince suggests. But he agrees that he met with Bandar, and also with Turki Al-Faisal and the Saudi ambassador at the time, Ali Alireza, in the Saudi embassy in March 1978, two months before the sale of the F-15s was approved in Congress.

  Smiles, gifts, and smoothly conveyed threats—it was the classic strategy that the Al-Saud had deployed for generations. It had worked with the bedouin. Now it may have worked just as well with American politicians. In European terms, the young pilot’s relentless pursuit of his goals was pure Machiavelli—and that added an extra dimension to the nickname that Bandar soon acquired in DC’s corridors of power: “the Prince.”

  Little did Washington realize how precarious that princeliness was. Bandar was born as the result of a brief encounter between Prince Fahd’s full Sudayri brother Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, the swaggering Saudi defense minister, and a servingwoman, a black slave. The boy was kept at arm’s length by his father for much of his childhood.

  “I was conceived out of wedlock, and my mother was a concubine,” Bandar would say frankly in later years, explaining how, by custom, if a slave “gets pregnant and you acknowledge it before she has the baby, then it is automatic freedom from slavery. But you still have to deal with the cultural realities; you’ll always be the kid who’s a different color, whose parents never got married.”

  Young Bandar had an African appearance, with darker skin and black, frizzy hair. In this, his looks were little different from those of many Arabians—Arabs and Africans have been crisscrossing the Red Sea since time immemorial. But this has not eliminated racial prejudice in Saudi Arabia. On the contrary—some Saudis practice the most unashamed (and un-Islamic) ethnic snobberies, discriminating on the basis of skin darkness and facial features, right down to the flatness of a man’s nose. Bandar’s nose was definitely flat, so when it came to choosing falcons on a hunting expedition, he remembers getting the last pick—a scruffy bird with mottled black and brown feathers at which everyone laughed.

  But the boy’s scruffy champion outperformed the nobler specimens—and that proved a metaphor for his own scrappy and defiant attitude to life. Hearing that King Faisal’s beautiful daughter Haifa was unhappy with her father’s choice of husband for her, a much older prince, Bandar put in his own bid, and he won her hand. Determined to be a fighter pilot despite the indifference of his father, who, as defense minister, could have fixed the deal with a flick of his pen, Bandar made his own arrangements, faking his date of birth to secure early admission to the Royal Air Force College at Cranwell.

  The fact that Bandar’s mother was not of royal or tribal lineage theoretically relegated her son to second-rank royal status. Bandar’s own generation, the more pedigreed grandsons of Abdul Aziz, referred to him behind his back as “the son of the slave.” But the slur seems to have inspired him to overcome the disadvantage of his birth. Hugely energetic, overflowing with charm, and rubber-ball irrepressible, Bandar had been brought up in the household of his powerful aunt Lulua bint Abdul Aziz, Sultan’s full sister, then in the home of Hissa Al-Sudayri herself. Through these forceful women, Bandar got the chance to know, and to impress, his uncle Crown Prince Fahd.

  Fahd took a shine to his able young nephew, making him ambassador to Washington in 1983 and giving him primary responsibility for fostering the U.S.-Saudi relationship. In many ways Fahd fathered Bandar better than Sultan—and Bandar returned the compliment, growing closer to Fahd than some of the crown prince’s own sons. Walter Cutler, the two-time U.S. ambassador to Riyadh who met Bandar regularly through the ’80s, cannot recall a single meeting that was not interrupted at some stage by a call from the crown prince—after 1982, the king.

  Bandar deployed his charm similarly in the Reagan White House, where he ingratiated himself with Nancy Reagan and, with a shrewd eye on the future, became the occasional racquetball partner of a rising young soldier with political ambitions, Colin Powell. Reagan’s muscular and robustly anti-Communist foreign policy matched precisely with the Saudi view of the world—and made the Kingdom a valued ally when Congress explicitly blocked such ventures as U.S. funding for the anti-Marxist Nicaraguan contras. Following a personal request by Ronald Reagan to Fahd over breakfast in the White House in 1985, Bandar set up the channels to get funds wired to the contras to the tune of $1 million and later $2 million a month, using bank account numbers supplied to him by Reagan’s national security adviser, Robert “Bud” McFarlane. The account itself had been set up in Switzerland by the deputy director of political-military affairs in the National Security Council, Oliver North.

  When the Iran-contra scandal broke, the Walsh Report revealed that Saudi Arabia had secretly channeled a total of $32 million to the contras on Reagan’s behalf. But that was small beer compared with the sums the Kingdom was dispensing in other areas. In Angola, Ethiopia, the Sudan, and Chad, the Safari Club kept up its anti-Marxist activities—with more vigor, if anything, in the absence of the Shah. And then there was Afghanistan.

  “You are not alone, Freedom Fighters!” proclaimed Ronald Reagan grandly in his 1986 State of the Union address, promising that America would provide “moral and material assistance” to those who fought against Communism in Afghanistan, Angola, and Nicaragua.

  America certainly did its part. But doing the sums, it is now clear that through the eight years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, 1981-89, Saudi Arabia actually provided more material assistance to the world’s varied assortment of anti-Communist “freedom fighters” than did the United States, thus hastening the end of the Cold War and helping accomplish the downfall of the “Evil Empire.” For America it was a very good return on thirty-five thousand gold sovereigns.

  CHAPTER 9

  Dawn Visitors

  In the early 1980s, Fawzia Al-Bakr became one of the first Saudi women to write in the newspapers under her own name.

  “Women used to hide behind bylines like Bint al-Badia [‘Daughter of the Desert’],” she remembers. “I thought that was stupid. I had nothing to hide.”

  Twenty-one years old and a teaching assistant at the University of Riyadh, the forthright Ms. Al-Bakr delivered her views through a weekly full-page column in the relatively conservative newspaper Al-Jazeera.9

  “I wrote about women and freedom and things like the wrongness of modern men having more than one wife. I argued the need for civil organizations in Saudi Arabia to advance human rights.”

  Al-Bakr never went into the Al-Jazeera office—there were no facilities for women to work there—and she never met the male editor of her page. She was planning to do so, but one morning in June 1982 when she was organizing exams at the university, she was summoned to the principal’s office. Two men in thobes were waiting for her, with a woman, who asked politely if they could escort her to he
r home. It was her first contact with the fabled Mabahith, literally “the detectives,” Saudi Arabia’s secret police.

  The Mabahith are a department of the Saudi Ministry of the Interior, so vast and pervasive in their watchfulness that secret is scarcely the word for them. They have woven themselves into the very fabric of Saudi life. There is a Mabahith informant praying in every significant Saudi mosque, ready to make a phone call should the imam’s sermon get too fiery, nor would any university faculty be complete without its careful listener by the coffee machine. The proudly worn badge of the Interior Ministry’s security forces actually depicts a huge, staring eye—though in 1979 they had been caught out by both the eastern intifada and by the seizing of the Grand Mosque. It was not entirely their fault—they had captured the “Mahdi” himself before the seizure, after all, only to be told to let him go—but it had spurred them to redouble their intelligence gathering, with mixed results. While the intensified border patrols of the ministry had not picked up many militants, they had gathered a rich harvest of alcohol smugglers. The price of black-market whisky in Jeddah had exploded from one hundred dollars to as much as four hundred dollars per bottle.