by Robert Lacey
“ ‘The jihad has started,’ they were saying. ‘There is more to come.’ They were all very supportive and content with the attack on New York, and were clearly very happy that it had been done by Saudi hands—or so they assumed. It was like their football team had won.”
Mohammed, a small, neat-bearded man, rather enjoyed tweaking his colleagues and provoking arguments with them, particularly on religious matters.
“They used to tell me that I was not qualified to discuss religion. ‘You have no marks of a religious person,’ they’d say—meaning that I trimmed my beard instead of letting it grow long and bushy, Salafi-style. They were all quite nice and friendly about it in those early days. They gave me books and tapes to educate me.”
But now the argument grew more pointed.
“Let’s put religion on the side, for the moment,” Mohammed would argue. “Let’s agree that an educated nation like America should be respected. Think how much money it took to build those towers. It is haram [shameful] to wreak such destruction.”
His colleagues shrugged their shoulders.
“That is the money of kuffar [infidels],” they replied.
“Don’t three thousand lives count for anything?” Mohammed asked.
“They’re not Muslims.”
“But don’t you feel sorry for all those people?” the chemistry teacher persisted. “I feel very sorry for them.”
“Why don’t you ever express sorrow for the Palestinians?” came the reply.
“Because the Palestinians have had a hand in their own destiny,” replied the chemistry teacher. “Those people in the towers were helpless.”
When he got into the classroom, Mohammed continued the discussion with his pupils and found them apparently accepting of his arguments. But in the weeks that followed, he discovered that his teaching colleagues were going behind his back to cross-examine his students, taking notes of what he had said.
“ ‘What did he tell you?’ they’d ask my pupils. ‘Don’t listen to him. He’s not in the correct path.’ ”
A little less than a month after 9/11, U.S. and UK forces invaded Afghanistan. At once feelings in the Buraydah staff room grew more strained. As news reports came in, Mohammed openly celebrated the defeat of the Taliban, whose intolerance he had always deplored.
“I am getting worried about you,” said one of his bearded colleagues with feeling. “I am getting very worried about the secular thoughts in your head.”
Mohammed understood the coded message.
“He was trying to sound friendly and concerned. But I knew that he was issuing a warning—a very serious warning. If an Islamic court finds that your thoughts are ‘secular,’ they take that to mean that you’re a Muslim who has renounced the faith, that you’re an ‘apostate.’ And the penalty for apostasy is death.”
Robert Jordan, meanwhile, was trying to get established as America’s ambassador to Riyadh—which included the presentation of his credentials in a bizarre ceremony at King Fahd’s palace beside the Red Sea.
“I had three hours’ notice to get to the airport with my documents. When I got there, I discovered sixty or seventy other ambassadors, the majority of the diplomatic corps, none of whom had been officially presented. We all flew down to Jeddah on the plane together—what a target that would have made for Al-Qaeda.
“King Fahd was pushed out in a wheelchair with a great deal of pomp and ceremony. It was a cool winter’s afternoon. The ceremony was out of doors, and we each went up to meet him, one by one, to present our papers. It was very sad to think that at this critical moment, Saudi Arabia should be looking to an invalid as its king.”
March 2002 was the twenty-year anniversary of Fahd’s accession, and all Saudi schoolchildren were instructed to compose a letter of thanks to him. Ahmad Sabri, fifteen years old, sat in his Jeddah classroom, determined not to be a puppet. Suddenly he knew what to write: “Thank you, oh great and kind King Fahd, for the Kingdom’s many wonderful things that improve the quality of our life—for the beautiful roads without pot-holes or repair sites, for the good schools, for the planes that always arrive on time . . .”
His teacher picked up the sheet of paper and studied his bright young pupil’s list of sarcasms.
“Ahmad,” he asked, “do you want to get into trouble?”
Ahmad pulled back his paper hurriedly and started to scribble the flattery that was required.
It was certainly the worst of moments to have a head of state who was incapacitated. But one of the several good things that emerged from 9/11, for Saudi Arabia at least, was that Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz finally became a ruling crown prince—if partly through default. Refusing to accept Saudi responsibility for what had happened, some of Fahd’s Sudayri brothers literally lost the plot in the dark undergrowth of their conspiracy theories.
“It is enough to see a number of congressmen wearing Jewish yarmulkes,” remarked Sultan, the deputy crown prince in June 2002, “to explain the allegations against us.”
“We still ask ourselves,” added his brother Nayef a few months later, “who has benefited from the September 11 attacks? I think that they [the Jews] were the protagonists of such attacks.”
Crown Prince Abdullah was not averse to blaming the Zionists. But he was first among the senior sons of Abdul Aziz—the topmost princes who mattered—to accept the Saudi role in 9/11.
“We showed him the dossiers,” remembers Robert Jordan, “with the details of who was on the planes, the actual comings-and-goings of all these young Saudis, their photographs, the shots from the airport security cameras. I suppose you could dismiss all that documentation as the most incredible hoax. Otherwise you had to take it seriously.”
Abdullah did. As commander of the National Guard, he knew the exact significance of each tribal and family name on the 9/11 roll call: Al-Ghamdi, Al-Hazmi, Al-Haznawi, Al-Mihdhar, Al-Nami, Al-Omari, Al-Shehri, Al-Suqami, Hani Hanjour, Majed Moqed.17 Abdullah knew the heads of many of these families. He made phone calls to check. He spoke to the relatives. He took it all very personally. In his simple, emotional way he looked on each of the young men as one of his sons, and his eyes welled up as he looked at their photo-booth photographs.
The crown prince was convinced. Saudi Arabia had a problem, and as the crisis evolved, the need for rapid decisions also solidified his power. On 9/11 itself he had gone into a huddle with Ali Al-Naimi, the long-serving oil minister, to agree that Saudi oil production be increased to its ceiling to avoid an energy crisis—the most important decision that the Kingdom could take that day, and perhaps, in itself, a certain signal of remorse. In his pre- 9/11 jostling with Bush, Abdullah had taken decisive control of Saudi foreign policy. Now he took firmer charge of domestic policy as well.
Robert Jordan was impressed. Unlike any other ambassador, America’s envoy had a standing appointment to sit down with the Kingdom’s ruler on a regular basis, when the two sides went through a comprehensive state-of-the-relationship discussion through translators, with a TV camera and microphones recording every word.
“I found Abdullah rather austere, and also slow to speak,” he recalls. “But he was always listening. He was learning. He was clearly seeking to make wise choices. He was a surprisingly emotional person. He seemed to form a lot of his judgments on the basis of how much he liked the person with whom he was dealing. And he was also, obviously, getting besieged with conflicting advice from different sections of the family.”
Much of Jordan’s time was spent shepherding a succession of worried officials sent from Washington to locate and plug the holes through which the United States felt that her principal Arab ally had let her down.
“They were difficult days,” recalls Jordan. “Very painful. They were so angry that we were so angry with them. I remember George Tenet [head of the CIA] came out to Riyadh. He was furious, very aggressive. I remember one meeting with Mohammed bin Nayef. He really got in the young prince’s face.”
Mohammed bin Nayef, the studious son of the in
terior minister, had been given the responsibility for counterterrorism.
“In the very earliest days,” says Jordan, “the Saudis wouldn’t share the ‘pocket litter’ with us—the debris found in the suspects’ pockets, the speed-dials and such like, the messages on their mobile phones. That was back in the days of the Al-Khobar [Towers] bombing. Eventually they relaxed enough to let us listen in on their interrogations. Our people were allowed to look through a one-way mirror and pass along the questions we needed to be asked.”
The trouble was that the FBI, which was charged with taking the lead in all this, was not really in a position to conduct many direct interrogations.
“On the day of 9 /11,” says Jordan, “the bureau had just five fluent Arabic speakers on its books, all of them prosecuting lawyers. ‘Legal Attaché’ is the title carried by the FBI man in any U.S. embassy. But the legal attachés exist to investigate and to set up prosecutions after the event. They are not there for prevention, or to gather intelligence—they are not detectives. I felt there was a profound need for a complete culture change.”
There were many areas for improvement, Jordan discovered. The FBI and CIA representatives in his rambling, sand-colored Riyadh embassy compound were scarcely speaking to each other.
“The CIA would ask me to chase the Saudis for the cell-phone records of some local suspect. They’d complain that they couldn’t get anything out of the Ministry of the Interior. So I’d go down to the ministry to jump up and down and make a lot of fuss, to be told that they had given that particular set of phone records to somebody in the embassy months ago—to the FBI man, who had kept the papers to himself! And this was happening twelve months after 9 /11.”
When he went back to Washington, the ambassador raised the problem with the CIA’s George Tenet and Robert Mueller, the FBI director. The two men promised better cooperation between their agencies, but below them the institutional disdain of their respective hierarchies was almost impossible to overcome.
“The FBI simply was not committed to sending its best and brightest overseas,” asserts Jordan. “The high-fliers stayed at home. They wanted to make their names in the domestic prosecutions. That was another part of the culture. As I was leaving Riyadh toward the end of 2003, one attaché was being disciplined for not being a very good officer, and his substitute only lasted two months.”
Another FBI man in Riyadh, the deputy legal attaché Gamal Hafiz, an Egyptian by birth, was accused of being “pro-Muslim” when he refused to go into a mosque wearing a surveillance wire. He resigned his position and sued the bureau.
“After 9 /11 we made a lot of noise,” says Jordan, “but you could argue that the Saudis did a better job on what really mattered. In the end I think that they were quicker than us in getting up to speed on the true priorities of counterterrorism. It was fairly soon after 9/11 that Prince Saud Al-Faisal [the foreign minister] suggested to Washington that we should set up a joint U.S.-Saudi task force to cooperate on terrorism—and he received absolutely nil response from the White House. Deaf ears. Quite extraordinary! It wasn’t until May 2004 that the president finally appointed Frances Townsend, and that was largely the result of Prince Saud doing the pushing.”
Meanwhile the crown prince took the issues raised by 9/11 to the country—or rather, to the country’s elite.
“We must pay careful attention,” Abdullah declared in a series of televised gatherings to which he summoned the religious sheikhs, the tribal leaders, the media, and the business community. “Something serious has gone wrong here, and we have to put it right. Those who govern [wali al-amr] need to work out a strategy for what has to be done.”
Each majlis nodded gravely, made some cautious suggestions, and went away to think. But one of the religious sheikhs came up with an extra point. Dr. Abdullah Turki, the learned member of the council of the ulema who had accompanied Prince Turki to Afghanistan to try to convince the Taliban to hand over Bin Laden, fastened on Abdullah’s use of the term wali al-amr.
“Those who govern,” he pointed out, included not only the king and the government, but also the senior ulema. From its earliest days the Saudi state had been a partnership between the political and the religious, and Dr. Turki suggested that at this moment of crisis the religious sheikhs needed to have more say in how the country was run.
It was a controversial claim, but it had a historical basis. In the very earliest years of the Saudi state, according to the Nejdi historian Ibn Bishr, it was the religious leader Mohammed Ibn Abdul Wahhab—“the Sheikh”—who had exercised ultimate authority, not Mohammed Ibn Saud, the secular ruler. “No camels were mounted and no opinions were voiced,” wrote the historian of the 1750s and ’60s, without the approval of the Sheikh. He meant Abdul Wahhab.
In 2001 the House of Saud no longer saw it that way.
“I was watching the meeting on television,” recalls Prince Turki Al-Faisal, “and when I heard that remark I wanted to shout out at the screen, ‘You are totally wrong! Will someone please stand up and tell him so!’ ”
No one spoke, so the prince sat down immediately to lay out his views in an article that was published a few days later.
“I wanted to explain,” he says, “how, from the very first caliphs, the secular rulers have always been the executive rulers in Islamic history—the ultimate boss. It has been their job to exercise the power, while the job of the religious men—the sheikhs and the mufti—has been to give them advice. Never to govern. That is where Khomeini and the Iranian ayatollahs departed from true Islam. They put themselves in the position of supreme governmental authority, which is a totally new thing—completely un-Islamic and un-historical.”
A few days later another article appeared delivering the same verdict. Prince Talal bin Abdul Aziz, the former Free Prince, had a maverick reputation, but he ranked high in the brotherly pecking order. Younger than Sultan, Talal was actually senior to Nayef and Salman. More important, he was close to Abdullah and was known to share the crown prince’s view that too much undigested religion had led to takfeer, and to impressionable young Saudis committing mass murder in the name of Allah. The sheikhs and the ulema had very valuable advice to offer, wrote the prince, but it was no more than that—advice. They should not consider that they were among “those who govern.” Dr. Turki’s bid for a direct religious role in Saudi government was firmly slapped down, and the reverend doctor did not argue back.
So 9/11 finally settled who ruled whom in Saudi Arabia. After Juhayman, the 1980s had seen the clerics dictating the agenda in an almost Iranian fashion, with the Al-Saud anxious to appease them—no prince would have dared stand up in those days to contradict the say-so of a religious figure. In the 1990s the Sahwah (Awakening) sheikhs had claimed the right to lecture the government and to demand changes in accord with their religious beliefs, though that had landed some of them in prison. Now the arguments were over—so far as Crown Prince Abdullah was concerned. September 11 had shown what happened when religion got out of hand. Rulers must rule, and the religious must go along with that. The days were gone when no camels could be mounted and no opinions voiced without the say-so of the Sheikh and his successors.
CHAPTER 25
Fire
On March 11, 2002, a fire broke out at a girls’ school in Mecca, and as the flames spread, the girls and their teachers started running for the street. The girls were dressed in their school uniforms, but in their haste they did not have time to collect their abayas, their black outer gowns.
Guarding the entrance to the school were some bushy-bearded members of the religious police. When female education started in the early 1960s, King Faisal had surrendered girls’ schools to the supervision of the religious scholars—it was part of the bargain he had struck to get the innovation accepted. So all Saudi girls’ schools came under the Directorate of Girls’ Education, staffed predominantly by religious men, and this Monday morning, the men were not prepared to let their charges out unless they were wearing their abayas and veils.
The long, antique, Victorian-style skirts and long sleeves of the girls’ school uniforms were modest by most people’s standards, but that was not good enough for the male guardians of their morality. They kept the doors barred—it was standard directorate practice to keep their charges locked inside their buildings throughout school hours—and, according to eyewitnesses, three of the “holy ones” actually beat some of the girls who tried to force their way to safety.
As the panic-stricken pupils turned and headed back to their smoke-filled classrooms to retrieve their gowns, they jammed the route of the girls who were trying to escape. Confusion and terror reigned behind the blocked doors. To the disbelief of firefighters who arrived from Mecca’s Civil Defense Department, girls who escaped by one door were being bundled back inside by the mutawwa through another. They even prevented the firefighters from entering the building.
“We told them the situation was dangerous, and it was not the time to discuss religious issues,” said one Civil Defense officer, “but they refused and started shouting at us. Instead of extending a helping hand for the rescue work, they were using their hands to beat us.”
Desperate parents who tried to help were also turned away. Meanwhile, trapped inside the burning building, fifteen girls died and more than fifty others were injured.
The Saudi press has a long and dishonorable tradition of averting its gaze from unpalatable facts—and, to be fair, of having its gaze forcibly averted by the authorities. But the scandal of the Mecca fire was too much. Al-Watan (“The Nation”) had set up an incident team to cover precisely such emergencies: five reporters zeroed in on the officials and their flustered stonewalling, while another five gathered stories from survivors and eyewitnesses.
