Inside the Kingdom

by Robert Lacey

  His surprise announcement provoked disrespectful ribaldry. “His Majesty says ‘Don’t Call Me Your Majesty,’ ” ran the imagined headline of an imaginary Saudi newspaper, while foreign humor concentrated on the Ministry of Information’s decision to upgrade the translation of khadem from humble “servant” to the more pompous “custodian.” To American ears the result was quite the opposite, since “custodian” conjured up the image of a downtrodden man with a mop and a bucket. A cheeky young U.S. diplomat seized on these janitorial connotations to draw a cartoon that depicted a forlorn-looking king kneeling on the floor in a sleeveless vest and ragged pants, scrubbing away while a long-bearded cleric supervised him sternly.

  “Be careful, Fahd,” the imam was saying. “Mind that you clean the place properly!”

  The point of the cartoon, which hung in a private office in the U.S. consulate in Jeddah for many years, was to wonder who was pulling the strings in Saudi Arabia. The more complex challenge, which involved the essence of Saudi survival, then and now, was to work out how religion could “ground” a fast-changing society with the heavy anchor it needed in a world of flyaway secular tendencies. The ancient and modern contradictions in King Fahd’s character were easy to laugh at, but they were the contradictions that lay at the very core of the Saudi soul.

  CHAPTER 11

  Into Exile

  King Fahd liked to start his meetings with a lengthy soliloquy. He would launch into a cascade of thoughts and meditations that could go on for as long as forty minutes, spitting out ideas and volubly soaring with riffs and jinks that displayed the nimbleness of his mind. The royal speeches struck one British ambassador as resembling the diatribes delivered by the soapbox orators at Speaker’s Corner in London’s Hyde Park—except, of course, that no one in Saudi Arabia was allowed to stand up and deliver speeches in the street. King Fahd was the only soapbox orator in his Kingdom.

  The king had another, more practical, speech that he liked to deliver to his provincial governors, less a diatribe than a briefing. Since the days of Abdul Aziz the Kingdom had been administered by local emirs who operated as regional mini-kings, sitting in majlises, hearing grievances, settling disputes, and passing on the regulations that arrived from Riyadh. In the early days these viceroys had often been trusted chieftains and magnates from local tribes, but as the Al-Saud multiplied, increasing numbers of the family were dispatched from Riyadh to the provinces—and were treated, on the whole, to a warm reception. People liked the idea of taking their problems to a prince who could pick up the phone and get straight through to the king or one of his senior brothers.

  On this principle, Fahd dispatched his son Mohammed to govern the Eastern Province in 1984. Several years previously, immediately following the riots and bloodshed of 1979, he had tasked his American-educated younger brother Ahmad, the deputy interior minister, to come up with an emergency program of reform.

  “We noticed the difference in a year or so,” recalls Clive Morgan of the Saudi British Bank. “Money was clearly being spent. The Shia areas of Qateef and Sayhat had always seemed to me the poor relations of the Eastern Province. Now they started getting modern infrastructure—new roads, hospitals, and schools.”

  Fahd appointed the most successful and dynamic of his sons to take over where Ahmad left off. Deploying his own close family was a generally understood sign of the priority that the king attached to the job. One of the advantages of Fahd’s not having Wahhabism in his bloodstream was that he had no particular prejudice against the Shias.

  “If you see a poor man come into your majlis, try to speak to him before you speak to the other people,” the king told his son. “Never make a decision on the spot. Say you will give your decision later. Never sign a paper sending someone to prison unless you are 100 percent convinced. And once you’ve signed, don’t change your mind. Be solid. You will find that people try to test you.”

  Fahd was delivering his basic course in local leadership—Saudi Governance 101.

  “If you don’t know anything about a subject, be quiet until you do. Recruit some older people who can give you advice. And if a citizen comes with a case against the government, take the citizen’s side to start with and give the officials a hard time—the government will have no shortage of people to speak for them.”

  Fahd advised his son to get tribal disputes settled rapidly.

  “Try to solve the problem in your private presence, not in front of other people. Take the two men to your office and sit them down quietly. Embrace them warmly—and don’t let them leave until they have embraced each other.”

  For decades the Al-Saud had delegated their authority in the east to a tough old bedouin branch of the family, the Bin Jaluwi, notorious for their tendency to solve local difficulties with hearty lashings and the executioner’s sword. Mohammed bin Fahd—whose mother was a Bin Jaluwi11—would set a very different style. American-educated and smoothly charming, he was at that time the royal family’s most successful businessman. His rivals in the Saudi brotherhood of merchants alleged that Mohammed had taken unfair advantage of his royal wasta (influence or connections), but they were not averse to using a little wasta of their own. Many a Saudi fortune, royal and nonroyal, derived from the commission charged to foreign businesses in these hectic years of infrastructure building. It was perfectly legal to charge commission—it was compulsory, in fact. Any foreigner who wished to operate in the Kingdom had to share a proportion of his business with a Saudi partner—which effectively put local wasta up for sale.

  Now the king told Mohammed to hand the running of his business empire to his brother and sons and to devote his considerable energies to the cajoling of more government money into the east. Following the recommendations of his uncle Ahmad, Shia districts would benefit particularly. When the thirty-four-year-old prince arrived in Dhahran, he also brought an introductory sweetener from his father—a general amnesty for all Shia activists who had been detained since the 1979 riots. Hundreds of prisoners were released.

  Ali Al-Marzouq was one of them. He had been politicized by his experience in the riots and had wasted no time in joining Sheikh Hassan Al-Saffar’s IRO, the Islamic Revolution Organization—though he found, once he joined it, that the revolution of the title was intended to be spiritual.

  “The Sheikh always told us,” remembers Ali, “that our aim must be to seek peace, and that we must learn to handle confrontation, both with other groups and with individuals, in a nonviolent way. We must learn to be calm.”

  Ali became a dedicated disciple of his leader’s seemingly infinite pacifism. Some Westerners compared the tranquil and impassive Al-Saffar to Gandhi, whose philosophy he had studied. The sheikh looked rather like a Buddha as he sat straight-backed and cross-legged on the square cushions of his husayniya, wearing his turban and quietly teaching his followers. But Al-Saffar’s approach stemmed more fundamentally from the Shia tradition of quietism exemplified by Husayn at Karbala—the almost masochistic acceptance of whatever disaster life might throw one’s way.

  “We always tried to follow the example of Husayn,” says Ali. “Abu Hadi [“father of Hadi,” the pseudonym of Hassan Al-Saffar] told us that acceptance was the way. But we also wanted freedom—freedom to discuss and publish our new ideas about Islam. After the intifada [uprising of 1979] we talked a lot about freedom, and I decided that I wanted to seek freedom for myself, the true, personal, inside freedom that Islam can give to the mind and the spirit. I would become a religious guy.”

  Ali dropped out of high school and ran away to Kuwait, where there were seminaries that trained young Shia imams.

  “My father brought me back [Ali was one of nineteen brothers and sisters—all by the same wife]. He said he wanted me at home and, like a lot of parents at that time, he felt afraid for me and for my questioning ideas. That was a very nervous time. One day my father took all the books and magazines he could find out of the house and buried them in the sand.”

  In 1982 the nineteen-year-old Ali had go
ne “up the hill” to take a job at Aramco, whose main offices clustered on the Dammam dome around the oil well that had got the company started nearly half a century earlier. He worked in the transport department for a few months. But that Ramadan he took a holiday, traveling with a group of Islamic Revolutionary friends to the holy city of Mashhad, in northeastern Iran. Every evening they listened to lectures from Al-Saffar, who had fled the Kingdom soon after the intifada, along with the other leaders of the resistance movement. They made up a large and happy group of Shia Saudis, talking about home, fasting, and praying together through the rituals of Ramadan.

  “We didn’t plot or organize anything,” recalls Ali. “But the Mabahith obviously didn’t like Shia leaving the country to go and talk with Abu Hadi. They presumed we had signed on as agents for Iran. As I got off the plane in Bahrain coming home, I was arrested.”

  Saudi intelligence had a strong presence on the minuscule, theoretically independent offshore island that was in the process of being connected to the Saudi mainland by a six-lane causeway. The Mabahith were on the lookout for young Saudis who had taken Iranian money and might be willing to abet the ayatollahs’ openly hostile attitude to the Kingdom.

  “I had long hair, and the Bahrainis cut it off and stuffed it down my underpants. They also hit me round the head. But that was nothing to what the Saudis did when they got hold of me. The Mabahith kept beating and beating me on the soles of my feet. I couldn’t walk for a week. When they broke one stick, they brought a new one, and when the beating was over, they kept me standing up and awake day after day, night after night. They would not let me sleep. After ten days I gave in and signed what they asked for—a confession that I belonged to the IRO. Straightaway the beatings stopped and they let me go to sleep. That was the end of it. All they’d wanted was that piece of paper. I should have confessed on the first day.”

  In the course of two years in jail, Ali made many new Shia friends.

  “A lot of them had done nothing wrong. None of us had made any plans for bombings or shootings. We were not training or planning for violence. It was crazy to lock us up. At night in my cell I remember hearing men screaming for hours from the beatings. My cousin, the son of my father’s sister, lost his mind completely. They let him out early, but he has never been the same again. It was horrible. Shia are usually pretty quiet, conservative guys. But when we came out, it was hard to feel great kindness toward King Fahd and his son.”

  Mohammed bin Fahd faced an uphill task as he took up his Eastern Province duties in 1984, for the general bitterness that lingered from the intifada of ’79 had been assiduously stoked by pamphlets and broadcasts from Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian government. The ayatollah made no secret of his wish to discomfit Saudi authority, and he viewed the Shia worshippers in the Qateef area—around a third of the local population 12—as potential allies to his cause. In these years Radio Tehran broadcast regular appeals to Saudi Shias to rise in revolt against their princely “oppressors.”

  Khomeini particularly resented Saudi claims to the guardianship of the holy places. Since 1980, Iran’s now revolutionary pilgrims had been using their annual hajj to promote their cause in Mecca, smuggling in posters of the ayatollah and brandishing them outside the Grand Mosque while shouting derisive slogans. “Fahd, the Israeli Shah” was a favorite. These essentially political demonstrations offended Saudi sensitivities, and, indeed, the feelings of many other Muslims, who felt that the pilgrimage was not the place for advancing the Khomeini cult of personality.

  Then in 1986 a consignment of luggage from Tehran was found to include suitcases whose false bottoms had been packed with plastic explosives, and Mohammed bin Fahd was not inclined to take chances. How could he tell which of the local Shia were sleeping with the enemy? IRO followers inside the Kingdom started to feel the heat again, especially since their leaders, Sheikh Hassan and his lieutenants, were all living in Iran with the blessing and support of the Iranian government.

  “I heard that my friends were getting taken in for questioning,” remembers Ali Al-Marzouq, “and I was not ready for two more wasted years—so much time erased from my life. When I had been in jail before, I was not allowed to read. There were no books. I’d just sat there day after day with my mind going round. Never again—and in 1986 I had just gotten married. So I talked about it with my wife and we decided we would leave. We got fake passports, and drove up to Kuwait. From there we flew to Syria. We both knew it would be a long time. We cried from the bottom of our hearts as we were leaving, but once we had crossed the border I said, ‘OK. This is a new life.’ ”

  That did not prove the end of Ali Al-Marzouq’s travels. In August 1987 the Iranian demonstrations on the pilgrimage escalated one further and fatal step. Excited Iranians paraded through Mecca proclaiming “God is great! Khomeini is leader!” violating Islamic tradition by carrying knives and sticks beneath their pilgrim towels, according to Egyptian pilgrims who managed to escape the massacre that followed. A total of 275 Iranians, 85 Saudis, and 42 pilgrims of other nationalities were killed, most of them trampled to death in the pileup that resulted from the attempts by the Ministry of the Interior Special Forces to check the demonstration, which had been called by Mehdi Karrubi, Ayatollah Khomeini’s personal representative in Mecca. The Saudi government refused to condemn their soldiers’ actions. Preserving the peace at Islam’s greatest annual gathering was a responsibility they took very seriously. They had no doubt that the Iranian Shia were responsible for the tragedy—and Khomeini responded with fury. He denounced the House of Saud as murderers and called on all loyal Shia in the Kingdom to rise up and overthrow them.

  Hassan Al-Saffar and the IRO had had no involvement in the Mecca tragedy, nor had any Shia from the east. But Khomeini’s incitement to revolt put them in an impossible position—they were forced to take sides.

  “We were not willing to be the tool of a foreign government,” remembers Sheikh Hassan today. “There were a number of people in authority in Iran who wanted to recruit us against the Saudi government. They came to us—they made quite a few approaches to us. But we told them that we wished to remain independent.”

  His aide Jaffar Shayeb did the political talking on the sheikh’s behalf.

  “We listened to what they said,” says Shayeb of the Iranians. “But we were never willing to be part of their games.”

  From the moment of his arrival in Iran, Al-Saffar had made clear his disagreement with the most radical of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s ideas—the doctrine that the ulema (religious scholars) are qualified not simply to advise the ruler, but to exercise government in their own right. This is the revolutionary concept—Khomeini’s own—that justifies Iran’s “government of the godly.” The executive power held by Iran’s clerics sets Iran apart from any Muslim government in history, and the doctrine was perceived as deeply subversive by the House of Saud. Sheikh Hassan Al-Saffar agreed with Riyadh.

  “This is not in the Koran, nor in the Prophet’s teachings in the Hadith,” he says. “The scholars give advice to the ruler. They do not rule.”

  Al-Saffar gave the order for his followers to leave Iran, and the Saudi Shia were once again on their travels. They could not stay in Iran, but they could not return home either. Late in 1987 the entire community of exiles started packing their bags and dispersed to Syria, Cyprus, London, and Washington.

  Ali Al-Marzouq was sent to Cyprus to coordinate the IRO’s press activities, where he and his wife survived on a meager stipend from the organization, plus whatever help their families could send them.

  “Sometimes the money arrived,” Ali remembers. “Sometimes it didn’t. If we were lucky, we could afford one chicken per month. My wife became very good at cooking biryani—with lots of rice.”

  Back in the Kingdom, meanwhile, Prince Mohammed bin Fahd continued with his program of Eastern Province reform and infrastructure building—though in the absence of senior Shia figures he could hardly accomplish the high-level talking and conciliation
for which his father wished. Saudi Arabia was not operating in a vacuum. It was living in a dangerous neighborhood where people and events outside its borders could have unforeseen consequences back home.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Dove and the East Wind

  When Prince Khaled bin Sultan was studying air-defense tactics in the early 1980s at the Air War College in Maxwell, Alabama, he regularly took part in war games. A few years later he found himself on the edge of the real thing. On June 6, 1984, the prince was flying in a helicopter over the port of Jubail in eastern Saudi Arabia when his radio picked up the voice of an Iranian fighter pilot who was talking excitedly to his base. The Iranian had just flown his F-4 fighter onto the wrong side of the “Fahd line,” the air frontier that the Saudis had defined down the center of the Gulf as the Iran-Iraq War heated up.

  The purpose of the Fahd line was to provide Saudi air defenses with more reaction time. Unauthorized planes that crossed the line would be shot down, Riyadh had warned, and this pilot had already been given two warnings. Alerted by their AWACS patrols, manned at that time by U.S. Air Force personnel, the Saudi Air Force had already put two of their own F-15 fighters in the air. When the Iranian ignored their requests and kept his plane plowing onward toward the Saudi coast—and the Saudi oil fields—the reaction was uncompromising. One of the F-15s shot the intruder down. The Iranian’s radio cut off as his fighter spiraled down into the sea.

  It was a crisp and effective Saudi victory, but it raised worrying issues. The dogfight was part of what became known as the “Tanker War,” in which Iranian planes menaced ships that were carrying oil not only from Iraq but from Iraq’s two major allies and bankers, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. This was a threat to the entire world economy—any trouble in the Straits of Hormuz could disrupt oil supplies for weeks—and King Fahd sent an urgent appeal to the White House. The Reagan administration responded promptly, shipping four hundred short-range ground-to-air Stinger missiles to Riyadh, along with an air force aerial tanker that could extend the patrolling and fighting distance of the Saudi fighter planes.