by Robert Lacey
“Perhaps I did,” replied Mansour. “That’s what I believe. But I certainly did not tell people to try to change things with bombs.”
The distinction was lost on his interrogators, and Mansour went back to jail again—this time for more than two years.
The 1995 bombing of Riyadh’s National Guard center was the first act of terrorism in Saudi Arabia since Juhayman’s seizing of the Grand Mosque, and Osama Bin Laden praised it loudly from his base in the Sudan. It was evidence, he told a Pakistani interviewer, of a movement that would soon eliminate the House of Saud from the Arabian Peninsula. He also endorsed the still more lethal truck bombing of the Khobar Towers residential complex near Dhahran that came eight months later. The entire front of the building was torn away in a massive explosion whose shock was felt in Bahrain, across the water, more than twenty miles away. Nineteen U.S. Air Force personnel were killed, with 372 wounded.
Bin Laden had no direct connection with either atrocity. The four Saudis who were tried and executed for the Riyadh bombing were jihadis who had fought in Afghanistan, but they listed Bin Laden as only one of several opposition figures whose ideas had influenced them. The Khobar Towers attack bore clear hallmarks of Iranian involvement, and after five years of investigations the FBI issued indictments against thirteen members of a pro-Iranian organization that went by the name of Saudi Hizballah (“Party of God”). Osama was not yet a serious terrorist, but his strident declamations showed how his move across the Red Sea to the Sudan had helped him develop a new role. He had appointed himself chief tormentor and nemesis to the House of Saud.
Bin Laden had arrived in Khartoum early in 1992, and he got started at a fast clip, buying up several small farms by the Blue Nile to create for himself a mini-estate. On the weekends he would go down to the river to ride his horses, the very model of the successful businessman relaxing on his country acres. Transferring assets from Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, he set himself up in a nine-room office in the Sudanese capital, from which he ran a trucking company, a leather-tanning factory, a bakery, a honey and sweets-producing company, a furniture-making venture, and an import-export trading business. American investigators later discovered that many of these enterprises were registered in Luxembourg and Switzerland. Osama was still operating in the style of his brothers on the other side of the Red Sea—at the heart of his little conglomerate was a heavy-construction company.
The British journalist Robert Fisk came across the entrepreneur late the following year in a remote area that Bin Laden company bulldozers had connected to the highway running from Khartoum to Port Sudan. Dressed in a white thobe and gold-trimmed cloak, with the local children dancing in front of him and the grateful villagers slaughtering chicken, goats, and sheep, Bin Laden looked for all the world like a philanthropic Saudi sheikh.
“We have been waiting for this road through all the revolutions in Sudan,” declared one of the elders. “We had waited till we had given up on everybody—and then Osama Bin Laden came along!”
Osama enjoyed playing bountiful magnate in the land to which his father had come as a penniless Yemeni laborer in the 1920s. Sudan was where Mohammed the Builder had lost his eye playing soccer. Now his son was filling the role that his father had enjoyed with Ibn Saud, serving as constructor-in-residence at the court of Hassan Al-Turabi. Osama built highways and developed other business projects, not all of them successful, while secretly contributing to Al-Turabi’s plans for international jihad. For several years he was doing everything in Sudan that he might have hoped to accomplish in a properly directed Islamist Arabia.
Then in April 1994 the Saudi government publicly stripped Osama of his Saudi citizenship. All his bank accounts and Saudi assets were frozen, and Fahd also put pressure on his family. The Bin Ladens could not go on garnering the cream of government construction contracts while they included—and effectively provided shelter to—the government’s number one critic. They would have to decide. Within days of the government announcement, the brothers gathered in a solemn family conclave in Jeddah to issue a statement of “regret, denunciation, and condemnation of all acts that Osama Bin Laden may have committed.” They formally renounced him as a member of the family, and confiscated his share of the family fortune, which they placed in a supervised trust for his children.
In his subsequent accounts of his life, Osama Bin Laden would frequently refer to 1994 as a turning point, focusing on the arrests in Saudi Arabia that September of the Sahwah preachers Safar Al-Hawali and Salman Al-Awdah. It was the imprisoning of these two good and religious men, he would say, that convinced him of the Al-Saud’s perfidy. He made no public reference to the removal of his citizenship, nor to the statement by his brothers, but the renunciation must have hurt. For one thing, it cut him off from the source of his funds. Osama was compelled to scale back his businesses severely, firing dozens of his brightest young workers.
His thoughts began to turn homeward, encouraged by visits from a succession of family members, including his mother—and by the pious young journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who had been asked by the Bin Ladens to see what he could do to get Osama back.
“One of his cousins rang me,” recalls Khashoggi. “He told me ‘Osama’s changed, he wants to come back.’ ”
Khashoggi’s task was to coax Bin Laden to give an interview in which he expressed some remorse and, ideally, renounced any commitment to violence. The family would then show that to the government in hopes it might prepare the way for a reconciliation.
“On the first evening, he started talking about Medina,” recalls Khashoggi, “saying how much he’d like to go back and settle there. He had a wife who came from Medina.”
The two Saudis were sitting around a sheet of plastic laid on the ground, leaning forward to pull chunks of lamb from a pile of rice, nostalgically enjoying kabsa, the Saudi national dish.
“We got onto the subject of the recent bombings,” says Khashoggi, “and this time Osama said he disapproved of them. I got out my tape recorder at once. ‘Shall I start taping?’ I asked. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Let’s talk tomorrow.’ ”
The next day Osama was in a negotiating mood.
“What will I get in return,” he asked Khashoggi, “if I give an interview?”
“I’m not here on behalf of the government,” replied Khashoggi. “I’m here to break the ice.”
During their time together, Khashoggi decided that Osama had become rather odd. He had forbidden his wives to do any ironing.
“ ‘Irons consume electricity,’ he told me, ‘and we must train ourselves to live without electricity. If the Israelis come and bomb the power plant here, we’ll be without water and power.’ ”
The eccentricity reminded Khashoggi of Osama’s home on Macarona Street, where the jihadi had once wanted to connect two rooms together.
“He just knocked a huge hole in the wall with a sledgehammer,” remembers Khashoggi. “He took away the debris, but he left the hole all unfinished and jagged.”
On the night before he was due to leave, Khashoggi tried to focus Osama’s attention on the mission.
“ ‘My flight is at eight tomorrow evening,’ I told him. ‘And I’ll be leaving for the airport at six. You can contact me anytime tomorrow and I’ll come over—right up until six. If you want to do the interview, I’ll forget about the flight and spend as much time with you as you want.’ ”
Khashoggi waited all the next day at the hotel. But the call never came.
CHAPTER 20
Enter the Crown Prince
On November 19, 1995, a few days after the terrorist bombing of the National Guard training center in Riyadh, King Fahd suffered a stroke. He was seventy-four years old. Like many a Saudi, he was overweight and he smoked. His deputy, Crown Prince Abdullah, now stepped forward to take over the day-to-day running of the Saudi government, and while his position in the family meant he had to be accepted, many outsiders feared the worst.
Throughout Fahd’s reign the black-bearded Abdullah had
been kept in the background by the king and the Sudayri brothers, making few public pronouncements, in part because of his notorious stutter. Abdullah’s lips would struggle silently beneath his thick black mustache, then he would lift his hand high and slap it down hard on his thigh: out would come the words in a rush. The story in the National Guard—which, several said, they had been told by Abdullah himself—was that the stutter went back to an occasion when the prince got on the wrong side of his father. The angry Abdul Aziz had his errant son locked up in a cell without light, so when the boy eventually emerged, his speech was permanently impaired.
The gap between intention and performance could be embarrassing. It caused some who met Abdullah to dismiss him as a simple man, and he rather cultivated the image of simplicity. Every Sunday evening he held a majlis to which the bedouin streamed by the hundred—“right out of the desert,” remembers Walter Cutler, who was U.S. ambassador to Riyadh twice in the 1980s. The crown prince sat in an ornate chair, the paramount chieftain gravely listening to his petitioners for more than an hour. Then he would kneel down to pray with all his guests, adjourning to the banqueting hall for a huge communal supper.
It was like the majlises organized every evening around the country by the Al-Saud—with one important distinction. As the years went by petitioners had come to adopt ever more extravagant forms of deference to their princes, trying to kiss hands and even weeping and crying out in supplication. Abdullah would have none of it. Nick Cocking, head of the British military mission to the National Guard and military adviser to Abdullah through the 1980s, noticed, as the petitioners lined up in front of him, that the crown prince was carrying a slender bamboo camel stick. Whenever he detected an obsequious kiss or prostration in the making, Abdullah would reach out and tap the offending head, hand, or body part.
“You’re a man,” he would growl at the culprit, who was usually a besuited Lebanese, not a Saudi. “What are you doing groveling on the floor?”
In the bedouin tradition, Abdullah was profoundly egalitarian, and among those in the know he was reckoned to be both honest and reform-minded. It was remarkable how many of the fiercest opposition tracts of the 1990s exempted him from their attacks. Osama Bin Laden even had a dream about Abdullah, which he described to Abu Rida Al-Suri, one of his longtime jihadi companions. Walking in his dream around the Prophet’s city of Medina, Osama had heard the sounds of popular celebration and looked over a mud wall—to see the Saudi crown prince arriving to the joy of a happy and cheering throng.
“It means that Abdullah will become king,” said Bin Laden. “That will be a relief to the people and make them happy. If Abdullah becomes king, then I will go back.”
FRUIT OF RECONCILIATION
Crown Prince Abdullah was born of “enemy” stock. When, in 1921, his father, Abdul Aziz, finally captured the northern town of Hail, the power base of his greatest adversaries, the Rasheeds, he gave out food to the inhabitants and forbade all looting or killing. But the Rasheedi leader, Mohammed bin Talal Al-Rasheed, expected no such kindness, for he had refused to surrender with the citizens. He had withdrawn to Hail’s fort to keep on fighting, and he had heard the tales of Ibn Saud’s vengeance when he was crossed.
So when, after his capture, servants came telling him to wash and bathe for a great occasion, the Rasheedi chieftain feared that this must be for his own execution. He put on his best robes to meet his death with dignity, but he found himself being led into Ibn Saud’s majlis and being set in the place of honor.
“Sit here beside me,” said Abdul Aziz, rising to embrace and to kiss his former enemy. “The time for death and killing is past. We are all brothers now. You and yours will come to Riyadh to live with me as part of my own family.”
So the Rasheedi princes came to live in Riyadh where they had once ruled, and from which they had been expelled in 1902 by Abdul Aziz. Conciliation was a controlling technique at which the Al-Saud excelled.
“Let us treat our foes with mercy,” the Saudi ruler used to say. “When they punished us, it stirred us to revenge.”
It also made sense, of course, to keep such bitter enemies close at hand and under supervision.
Three Rasheed women had been widowed by the fighting, and Abdul Aziz took special care of them, giving one to his younger brother Saad, and the second to his eldest son, Saud bin Abdul Aziz. He took the third widow, Fahda bint Asi Al-Shuraim, of the Shammar tribe, as a wife for himself. Fahda came to live with him in Riyadh, and two years later, in 1923, she gave birth to a son, on whom his proud father bestowed the name Abd’Allah—“Slave of God.” The boy was the fruit of reconciliation.
It was as a reconciler that Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz first made his mark on his family. As the Al-Saud splintered in the late 1950s under the challenge of Arab nationalism and the charismatic Gamal Abdul Nasser, a group of radical young princes flew to Cairo and called for constitutional democracy.
“In our country,” complained their leader, Talal bin Abdul Aziz, “there is no law that upholds the freedom and rights of the citizen.”
Idealistic and liberal, Talal was the family maverick—the Ralph Nader of the Al-Saud. He had served as communications minister in the 1950s and later as finance minister under the controversial King Saud. Subsequently he would serve as a special envoy for UNESCO. Abdullah was close to Talal both in age and ideas, and there was a sense in which, as the elder half brother, Abdullah had played godfather to the rebellious “Free Princes.”15 He had a deep, almost simplistic radicalism about his politics, and while in religion he had to be rated a solid Wahhabi (one of Abdullah’s strengths as a reformer was that he could never be dismissed with the damning putdown of “secular”), he sniffed at extreme ideas that came, as he put it, “from the dryness of the desert.”
Abdullah was not prepared to break family ranks. For much of the 1950s he had steered clear of his siblings’ squabbling, effectively exiling himself to Beirut, where he had picked up a love of card games and playing boules, along with some passable French. So when the quarrels reached their climax, it was to Abdullah that the family turned. Faisal and Fahd persuaded him to use his closeness to Talal, and also his neutrality, in the cause of peace.
“I wish Talal had never left,” said Abdullah in Beirut in 1962, “and now I wish he would return.”
He sympathized with many of his half brother’s complaints, but he placed family unity above them.
“Talal knows full well,” he said, “that Saudi Arabia has a constitution inspired by God and not drawn up by man. . . . True socialism is the Arab socialism laid down by the Koran.”
The early 1960s were perilous years for the Al-Saud. Ten years after the death of Abdul Aziz, a succession of family disputes was threatening to tear his achievement apart. A century earlier the so-called Second Saudi State had disintegrated in dynastic quarreling, creating the vacuum into which the Rasheeds had moved. Now the physical fruit of the Rasheed reunion made sure that the same did not happen again. The solidity of Abdullah played a crucial role in pulling the clan through. In 1959 he accepted the invitation of Faisal, then crown prince, to come home and take command of the National Guard, the tribal force of bedouin levies. Abdullah kept the Guard loyal in the power play that ended in November 1964 when Faisal replaced his brother Saud as king, and he then used his closeness to Talal to help negotiate the peaceful return of the Free Princes as well.
Commanding the National Guard became the cornerstone of Abdullah’s power and identity. With no full blood brothers, he was something of a loner in the family, many of whom viewed his radical soul mates like Talal with suspicion. But the National Guard was like a family in its own right, with military might and a patchwork of nationwide patronage that gave Abdullah the punching power of several princes—more than enough, as it turned out, to keep the Sudayri Seven on their toes.
At the time of this writing Abdullah ibn Abdul Aziz—King Abdullah since 2005—has been commander of the National Guard for more than forty-seven years, his tough public p
ersona perfectly reflecting the character of a tough tribal force. The original function of the Guard was to enlist the loyalty of the tribes to protect the royal family against any threat—including, in the last resort, a threat from the country’s other armed forces. The Guard was founded at a time of suspected military coups, so its first bases were sited close to Riyadh and the major cities. The idea was that the Guard could block hostile forces coming from the more distant army and air force bases on the borders. Its anti-aircraft weapons were designed to shoot down Saudi fighter planes. Its antitank rockets had to be good enough to take on the Saudi Army.
Nick Cocking tried to incorporate some of these basic but politically sensitive objectives into a National Guard mission statement that he drafted soon after he arrived in Riyadh in 1984—and received his only rebuke in eight years of happy collaboration with the crown prince. “Please tell the brigadier,” came the message, “not to write about things that are not his business.”
Without putting anything on paper, Abdullah had developed his own mission statement for his “White Army,” whom he dressed in khaki. What the crown prince wrought with the National Guard over the years revealed a man of more complexity than his exterior suggested.
“He saw the Guard primarily as a way to develop and educate Saudis,” says Abdul Rahman Abuhaimid, who supervised the Guard’s civil works with the rank of deputy commander for twenty-four years. “Our hospitals, our schools, our housing, our training—everything had to be the very best. He would insist on testing the prototypes for the various housing units to make sure that families would be happy in them.”
Under Abdullah the National Guard became a reasonably competent fighting force, but its military aspects often seemed less important to him than its civilian infrastructure and social development—the creation of his own ministate to standards that he could not, at that moment, extend throughout the country. The Guard’s local, part-time territorial levies remained tribally based, but Abdullah insisted that tribes should be mixed inside the full-time professional Guard regiments, and that each base should feature active adult-education units. Today the hospitals of the Saudi National Guard are modern, clean, and bright—anything but tribal. One of them, in Riyadh, is the world’s leading specialist center for the separation and rehabilitation of conjoined twins. It is an unpublicized hobby of Abdullah’s to go to the center to spend time with the separated twins and their parents, whom he flies to Riyadh from all over the world at his own expense.
