Inside the Kingdom

by Robert Lacey

  “The Americans kept us shackled and blindfolded till the minute we walked down the aircraft steps, and we dreaded what was waiting. But the Saudis were sort of soft and gentle. They made us feel welcome. I remember my first meal in Al-Haier: whole chicken legs! In Guantánamo they never once gave us meat with bones. They were scared we might shape the bones into weapons.

  “In Al-Haier they let us phone our families, and mine came to see me a few days later. There were such tears. I scarcely gave a thought to my family when I went off to Afghanistan. But who stands by you when you’re in trouble? In the end you learn what really matters. The Interior Ministry brought me a new thobe to wear to meet my mother, and they paid for the family to stay in a hotel as long as they wished.”

  Khaled was an early beneficiary of what would develop into a sophisticated Saudi government redemption program.

  “I had to stand trial,” he remembers. “I was sentenced to fifteen months for having a false passport and leaving the country without permission. But when that was over, I was free. ‘We are going to help you,’ they said. A month later the government gave me a Toyota Camry and they got me my old job back as an electrical engineer. I was living in the world again.”

  The architect of this surprisingly liberal and progressive reform program is the interior minister’s son, the earnest and bespectacled Prince Mohammed bin Nayef. Resembling a combination of math professor and English vicar, the forty-eight-year-old prince does not look like a security director, but he has become something of a pioneer in terrorist redemption techniques. Bearded Guantánamo graduates flock beaming to the prince’s Sunday majlis in Riyadh, while human-rights delegations fly in from around the world to study the rehab program that now bears his name.

  “Everyone has a good thing inside him,” says the prince. “These young people have been sick. We view their problem as a virus in the brain.”

  The prince is no softy.

  “Security is a red line,” he says, “and no one should cross it. If you do, you must take your punishment. Every extremist in our program has been tried and convicted and has served his sentence. Among our detainees we have about 20 percent who refuse to change. They are the hard nuts who cannot be cracked. They have to stay behind bars until they can satisfy a court that they have corrected all their false beliefs. But we try to help those who are willing to be helped. We bring in psychiatrists. We bring in clerics to show them where they have misread the Koran. They have a lot of religion lessons. We bring in all the family—father, mother, wife, brothers, sisters. We try to transform each detainee from a young man who wants to die to a young man who wants to live.”

  Whenever a young Saudi is killed in a terrorist incident or blows himself up, the prince receives the grisly DNA evidence, then gets on the phone to the dead man’s family before the names are published.

  “I give them my condolences and those of the government. I try to explain to them that their son was a victim. He was taken advantage of by abnormal ideologists. We don’t want him seen as a hero, or any sort of idealized example to his family or tribe. They have lost a family member—we have lost a citizen. Some of them hang up. Sometimes they call back. We take care of all those families. We show an interest because those mothers and fathers are victims—and we know that if we don’t take care of them, there are others who will try to step in.”

  The families are the focus of Prince Mohammed’s program.

  “This is how our culture operates,” says the prince. “In the West a young man is independent of his family when he is eighteen. Here a man of thirty will do what his father or mother says, especially when the whole family is agreed. Some people say that our rehab program is too soft—that we should build a sort of Saudi Guantánamo to punish them. But that is just what Al-Qaeda would like. When people say we are spoiling these young men, that is music to my ears. If we used the old, harsh ways, then they would draw sympathy and the extremists would take advantage of that to try to get more people involved in terrorism.”

  The prince says he was saddened but not disheartened by the news in February 2009 that two of the graduates of the Saudi rehab program left the country soon after their release and went to Yemen to join active cells of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The Ministry of the Interior has published a “wanted” list of no less than eighty-five radical young Saudis who are thought to be outside the Kingdom.

  “Having Al-Qaeda in Yemen is obviously very dangerous,” says Prince Mohammed. “It is like having Afghanistan along our southern border. There are four hundred miles of mountains where terrorists can slip across and be in Jeddah or Riyadh or Abqaiq [Aramco’s principal petroleum processing plant] in a matter of hours. It is a major security threat. But we are ready for them. That is our job. The reason why they have all gone abroad is because our security is so tight at home. Nowadays they know that it is us, not them, who can count on the support of the community—and that is the battle that really matters. We are building a national consensus that extremism is wrong. In the last few months we have had nine young men surrender themselves because their families brought them in. Whoever wins society will win this war.”

  In fighting its war, the Ministry of the Interior has resorted to a novel tactic—marriage. No Saudi official will admit on the record that the Kingdom’s terrorist problem might boil down to sexual frustration, but if a social system bans hot-blooded young men from contact with the opposite sex in their most hot-blooded years, perhaps it is hardly surprising that some of them channel this frustration into violence. One cornerstone of the extremist rehab program is to get the “beneficiaries,” as they are called, settled down with a wife as soon as possible. The Ministry of the Interior pays each unmarried beneficiary 60,000 riyals (some $18,000), the going rate for a dowry, or bride price. The family arranges a marriage, and whenever he can, Prince Mohammed turns up for the wedding.

  When Khaled Al-Hubayshi was released from Al-Haier prison early in 2007, he wasted no time finding himself a bride at government expense.

  “The government has been good to me,” he says. “So why should I not be good to the government?”

  Today Khaled lives in Jeddah in a well-appointed apartment filled with stylish furniture, a flat-screen television, and a coffee machine on which his wife brews him a brisk cappuccino every morning. Afghanistan and Guantánamo are distant memories. He then gets into his government-purchased Toyota Camry and drives off to the electrical company, the very model of a settled, hardworking Saudi citizen.

  But not every young Saudi who went to Guantánamo ended up so happily.

  Yasser Al-Zahrani grew up on a rambling farm on the Taif Plateau, overlooking Mecca. There were sheep and goats; he learned to ride horses, and he loved playing football on the faded green Astroturf pitch in front of the house. His name came from the Arabic word for “easy,” as he was an easy delivery for his mother, the elder of his father Talal’s two wives.

  “He was a funny guy,” remembers one of his cousins. “He had a lot of friends. Yasser could make a stone laugh.”

  The boy was a good student, so his father had not expected the phone call he received in 2001, a few weeks after September 11. Calling from Karachi, Yasser explained that he had broken off his computer and English studies in Dubai. He wanted to help the Muslims. Like many pious young Saudis, Yasser saw 9 /11 as the start of a new jihad. He was already on his way to Afghanistan.

  “I was surprised,” remembers Talal, a black-bearded colonel in the Mabahith, “but I was accepting. Yasser told me it was his duty to God. He knew that he had to go.”

  Then a few months later the phone rang again. It was a Saudi official calling to tell Talal that his son was being sent to Guantánamo—one of several dozen young Saudis who had been handed to the U.S. authorities by troops of the Northern Alliance following the epic battle of Janji.

  “ ‘Get up, you shit!’ ‘Shut the fuck up!’ We learned a lot of English swear words,” remembers Abu Fawwaz, a friend who was captured alongsi
de Yasser after Janji. “The Americans seemed to enjoy waking us up in the middle of the night, or interrupting our prayers. I suppose they needed revenge for 9 /11. They made us stand in line for an hour—forbidden from going to the toilet. Men peed where they stood. They tried to frighten us with dogs. Before we flew to Guantánamo they shaved off our hair and beards. That was the signal that told us we were going to travel—when the soldiers came round with the electric clippers.”

  Yasser and Abu Fawwaz arrived in Cuba in the same early weeks as Khaled Al-Hubayshi. The U.S. government records of Yasser’s interrogations reveal that he misled his captors—he failed to tell them it was the attacks of 9 /11 that inspired him to go and fight jihad. He told them he arrived in Afghanistan before 9 /11.

  “In four years of questioning, Yasser never told the Americans anything,” says his father admiringly. “That’s what his friends told me. He refused to speak unless he could have a lawyer. Nor could the Americans place a single charge against him. He was a person who had a will. Perhaps that is what brought him to his end.”

  In May 2006 Talal read a report about trouble in Guantánamo. Guards and prisoners had been fighting, and three prisoners had been injured. Two weeks later he received a call from Riyadh to tell him that Yasser was one of three prisoners—two Saudis and a Yemeni—who had “committed suicide.”

  “I just didn’t believe it. The coincidence between the three injuries and then the three ‘suicides’ was ridiculous. His friends have told me that Yasser was calm and optimistic. There was a program for the release of Saudi prisoners. Quite a lot had left already, and he was hoping to be in the next batch. Why would he not wait for that? I know my son’s personality—he would never commit the sin of suicide. He told me in his letters he was learning his Koran. ‘You know me,’ he wrote. ‘I have a lot of faith.’

  “The Americans claimed that the three men hanged themselves in different parts of the camp at the same time—but how could that be, with surveillance cameras everywhere twenty-four seven? We know that the guards were patrolling the cages every three to five minutes.”

  Abu Fawwaz, one of the numerous Saudis released and sent back to Riyadh before Yasser’s death, agrees.

  “There was no rope in those cages: there was no way you could hang yourself. Besides, Yasser went to Afghanistan seeking heaven. Suicide is the entrance to hell. He knew that.”

  When Talal got to Riyadh to claim his son’s body, he was met by three high-level officials of the Interior Ministry (in 2002 he had taken early retirement from the Mabahith to go into business).

  “They told me the American story that it was suicide, and they seemed to be telling me that I should resign myself to that—they made it very clear that they did not want a row. The government was working its hardest, they told me, to get the remaining Saudi boys home without a lot of fuss. I didn’t blame them, but I told them I did not have any comment. I needed to see my son’s body.”

  Talal went into the mortuary to say good-bye to his dead son, and what he saw there made up his mind.

  “I kissed the boy on the forehead. I had had my doubts before I saw the body, and now I was quite sure. I said, ‘I don’t accept any of this. I accuse the Americans.’ ”

  Yasser’s larynx had been removed.

  “Forensic doctors will tell you—if you hang yourself, you don’t break your larynx. The rope cuts into your throat higher up. But your larynx can get broken if somebody strangles you.”

  An autopsy by a panel of five Saudi doctors found marks on Yasser’s body that could have been signs of torture, and a wound to the chest consistent with some sort of fight. There were marks on the right shoulder from injections made while the young man was alive, but it was no longer possible to determine what had been injected into the body.

  “We know how the Americans provoked and insulted their Arab prisoners at Abu Ghraib. It was the same in Guantánamo. Yasser’s friends told me that the guards would stamp on their Korans and tear the pages. No wonder the Muslims were enraged. America has become an oppressor to us. They are as brutal and dominating as the Soviets.”

  Yasser’s beard had been torn out on the left side, as if in a struggle of some sort, and there were strange, dark red marks on his skin. The Saudi doctors requested the American authorities to send them the toxicity report that should have been made at the time of death: they wished to determine the amount of poison in the body, and they wanted the evidence from the surveillance cameras.

  For Talal and his family, there was even more compelling evidence that Yasser had not died by the sinful method of suicide.

  “When I saw his body in Riyadh,” says Talal, “he had already been dead for fifteen days, but he seemed like he was sleeping. He smelt fragrant. Then, at his funeral a week later, all his friends and family who went to kiss him said the same. He was not changed. By then his body had been cooled and warmed for two autopsies. Normally a body that old would smell decayed. My son did not commit suicide. He was a martyr.”

  Talal angrily discounts the idea that the fragrance might be from embalming fluid—and he also rejects the report on Yasser’s death by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) that was finally released in August 2008.

  “The report had three thousand pages,” he says, “and that was three thousand lies.”

  The NCIS investigators described finding similarly worded suicide notes in the pockets of Yasser and of the two other men who died, as well as in the pockets of a number of other prisoners who did not die—proof, in the American view, of “a coordinated suicide pact.”

  “They have refused to show us this note that they say they found on Yasser,” says Talal. “Until I see my son’s handwriting, I will never believe that he took his own life. My family knows that he died fighting—he was a martyr.”

  The photograph that Yasser’s mother keeps on her mobile phone provides strange support for Talal’s faith. Lying on his stretcher beside the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina three weeks after his death and a journey from the other side of the world, Yasser Al-Zahrani does not look like a corpse. On the small screen he seems to be sleeping. Every so often his mother switches on the digital image and kisses it.

  “We prayed over him,” remembers his cousin Mohammed, “then we buried him in the famous cemetery beside the mosque, where many of the Companions of the Prophet are buried. All the Prophet’s wives, except Khadija, are buried there, and all his daughters. It was a distinguished funeral, with many hundreds of mourners.”

  The men fall silent at the memory, sitting on the patterned armchairs and carpet of the family majlis, quietly passing around the letters that Yasser wrote from Guantánamo—sheets of lined paper sent home via the Red Cross in Geneva. CLEARED BY U.S. FORCES has been stamped across the back.

  “I know I cannot bring him back,” says Talal. “But it will be his memorial if we can see Guantánamo Camp shut down. If there is no illegality there, as the Americans say, why have they situated the place in a foreign country?”

  Soon after Yasser went to Guantánamo, he sent his father a letter, to which Talal replied.

  “I told him, ‘My son, please be patient and wait. Try to help the investigators and the guards and everyone to come to know Allah.’ His friends told me he was doing that to the end. He was the imam—the leader of the prayers in his group. Whatever the Americans said to him, and whatever they did to him, Yasser always had one answer: ‘There is no God but God, and Mohammed is His messenger.’ ”

  CHAPTER 28

  King Abdullah

  On August 1, 2005, after years of disability and several months in intensive care, King Fahd finally expired. The career that started with such promise as the bright young technocratic prince had ended with a sad decade of lingering decline—and stagnation for his country. The partnership of brothers that has run Saudi Arabia since 1953 has always functioned best when there has been a strong leader to push the consensus along.

  “The Angel of Death was not kind to His Majesty,” says
one of his kitchen cabinet. “Nor to the rest of us. He should have come for the king ten years earlier.”

  Wrapped in a sheet, Fahd’s body was borne on a stretcher to the public cemetery, and buried there, according to Wahhabi custom, in an unmarked grave. Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz was finally king, and people exulted in the change of style.

  The royal court had witnessed an amusing pantomime that summer as the princes had been preparing for their holidays.

  “We are leaving very soon,” they would say, informing Abdullah of their destination, to which Abdullah would respond with a graceful nod and the wish that they might have an enjoyable time. He knew exactly what they wanted. It had been Fahd’s habit to hand envelopes containing literally millions of dollars to relatives heading on vacation, and following the old king’s death, one daring family member took it upon himself to remind the new king of that tradition.

  Abdullah gave him a withering look and said nothing. But a few days later a message went out to the family announcing the end of holiday handouts and urging the virtues of living within one’s means. The fleet of royal jets was cut from fourteen to five, and the provision of free ticket vouchers on the national airline was also curtailed. Invited to pick himself his own brand-new private jet, King Abdullah said he would continue using the one that had served him as crown prince.

  Journalists who caught wind of these economies naturally approved, even if it was not the sort of story that could possibly be reported in the Saudi press. Then the travel arrangements for the new king’s first state visits were made public. As in the past, announced the Ministry of Information, editors, reporters, and photographers would be very welcome to travel with the government party on the official royal planes, but these journeys would no longer be free. Editors would be guests of the king, but other media passengers would be required to pay the equivalent of the full first-class air fare—in advance.