by Steve Coll
Faisal dispatched Prince Turki at age fourteen to Lawrenceville School, a preparatory and boarding school for wealthy boys in New Jersey. To call the young Turki’s transition to prep school a culture shock would hardly do it justice. “I was alone,” Turki recalled years later. “I was extremely nervous… . As I entered the dormitory, I felt somebody’s hand slapping me on my backside.” A young man called out to him, “Hi. My name is Steve Callahan. Who are you?” Turki stood in stunned silence “because in Saudi Arabia, you never hit anybody on the backside.” Finally he offered his name. Callahan replied, “Oh. Like a Thanksgiving turkey?”9
In later years Turki rarely spoke in public, and more rarely still did he speak of his inner life, so it is difficult to know what impressions he had of America, traumatic or favorable or both, from Lawrenceville. Barely an adolescent, Turki had been sent oceans away from home, catapulted from an isolated kingdom of austere Islamic ritual to an American world of football, sex, and beer. At least his fellow Lawrenceville students had wealth, as he did. There were some other foreign students as well; Turki’s prep school classmates included a future president of Honduras.
Back in the kingdom, his father entered a tenacious struggle with his older half-brother, Saud, the first of Abdul Aziz’s sons to succeed to the throne after the great patriarch’s death. By taking many wives and siring many sons Abdul Aziz created multiple competing branches within the royal family. Confused power struggles erupted as soon as he was gone. Saud’s spendthrift ways exacerbated the trouble. The oil bubbled and the dollars began to flow, but Saud and his retainers managed to spend it all and then some on palaces, shopping sprees, and poorly managed development projects. In search of order, the family arranged for Prince Faisal’s appointment as crown prince. But Saud resented him, and in frustration Faisal resigned his office while Turki was still at Lawrenceville.
Prepped in the American East Coast manner, Turki matriculated at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., in 1964, a member of the same class as an ambitious, talkative boy from Hope, Arkansas, named Bill Clinton. In a rare breakdown of Clinton’s networking radar, he failed to seek out and befriend a rich crown prince’s son destined for power. (The pair met for the first time at the White House soon after Clinton became president.) Years later Turki told a reunion at Georgetown, referring to Clinton’s infamous claim that he had tried marijuana but never inhaled, “It wasn’t just the class that didn’t inhale. It was the class that tried to smoke banana peels. Do you remember that? I promise you, can anybody imagine smoking a banana peel? But those were the days.”10
On campus someone approached Turki during his freshman year and asked, “Did you hear the news?” Turki said he had not. “Oh, your father has become king.”
Saud had finally relinquished his crown. Georgetown’s dean called Turki in and asked if he wanted a security detail. Turki declined because, as he later put it wryly, “I’d never have anybody following me in those days, especially at Georgetown.”11
He left the university after his junior year. He said later it was because he was upset and disillusioned by the Arab defeat by Israel in the Six Day War of 1967. “You can’t imagine the state of total depression and sense of failure that struck the Arab world.” A few years later he finished his education in England. Turki found employment as a counselor in a government ministry before following his uncle as director of the GID.
By then Turki’s father lay dead of an assassin’s bullet. Two years after he shocked America by leading the anti-Israel oil boycott that sent global energy prices soaring, King Faisal was murdered by an aggrieved, deranged cousin. His killing had roots in the kingdom’s struggles over modernization. In 1965, Saudi television debuted, and Wahhabi radicals stormed a government studio in violent protest. One of the protestors, a cousin of King Faisal, died in the shootout. A decade later, on March 25, 1975, the victim’s brother leveled a pistol at the king during a local festival and shot him to death in apparent revenge. Turki had lost his father to a terrorist act at least partially derived from Saudi Arabia’s attempt to marry postindustrial development with regressive Islamic orthodoxy. “It was,” Turki said later, without elaborating, “the most painful thing.”12
AS PRINCE TURKI took charge in the late 1970s, the Saudi intelligence service was in the throes of a massive expansion. Gushing oil revenue poured into every bureaucratic nook and cranny in the kingdom. Saudi Arabia’s five-year government budget from 1969 to 1974 was $9.2 billion. During the next five years it was $142 billion. Just a generation removed from nomadic poverty, the kingdom was on a forced march to the computer age. Turki wired up the General Intelligence Department offices inside the kingdom and in thirty-two embassies and consulates abroad. All the software, however, failed to detect the violent plot by the crazed Juhayman al-Utaybi to seize Mecca in November 1979. With its echoes of the Ikhwan revolt put down by Abdul Aziz, the Mecca uprising rattled all of the Saudi security agencies. It also helped convince the royal family that it needed to invest heavily in spies and police.13
Not only the Saudis worried. After the Shah of Iran’s fall, the American intelligence community feared the Saudi royal family might be next. The CIA station in Jedda tried to improve its reporting on the kingdom’s opaque internal politics. The Mecca uprising only emphasized how little the agency knew about Islamic radicalism on the peninsula. One way to deepen access was to cozy up to the Saudi spy service by providing technical assistance. After 1979 the CIA’s station in Saudi Arabia redoubled its efforts to recruit sources in the kingdom unilaterally. At the same time, as part of its official liaison, the CIA helped GID with its computer system and also with a sensitive program to capture electronic intercepts from Soviet sources.14
Turki and his aides traveled to Langley as well as European and Arab capitals to study how other intelligence agencies were organized. As he built GID, he copied the CIA’s blueprint. Prince Turki was the agency’s non-cabinet-level director. Immediately beneath him were half a dozen directorates. As at Langley, one of these was the Directorate of Operations, which carried out covert action and liaisons with foreign intelligence agencies. Turki also organized a Directorate of Intelligence, which produced classified reports for the Saudi royal family about security issues. His Directorate of Intelligence even circulated a daily intelligence digest for the Saudi king and crown prince, mirroring the President’s Daily Brief circulated at the White House by the CIA.15
His impeccable English, his polite manner, his sly humor, his elegant taste for luxury, his serious reading of history, and, above all, his rare ability to navigate between Saudi Arabia and the West—and to interpret each for the other—helped ingratiate Prince Turki with the Americans. He was an unassuming man who spoke softly but with a sweeping, cogent confidence. One Arabic-speaking CIA officer who worked with him described Turki as the most accomplished, nuanced interpreter of the English language into Arabic that he had ever met. Turki consumed Western news sources voraciously. He became a regular delegate to the annual gatherings of the international elite in Davos, Switzerland, and other off-the-record conferences devoted to finance, strategy, and the global balance of power. At the same time some at the CIA recognized that Turki was a master manipulator. “He was deceitful,” recalled Clair George, a senior officer in the CIA’s clandestine service who eventually ran the agency’s Directorate of Operations. The scale of wealth Turki seemed to acquire on the job stunned his American counterparts. As George put it, “You’re not going to find somebody to run their intelligence service who hasn’t stolen a lot of money.” Of course, in the Saudi system, there were no clear lines between government funds, royal wealth, and private wealth. All the senior princes in the kingdom enriched themselves. Turki used GID’s funds not only to live well but to recruit American and European friends willing to defend Saudi interests. When CIA station chiefs, State Department diplomats, or MI6 officers with experience in Saudi Arabia retired or left government service, many landed on the GID payroll as Turki’s well-paid
private consultants, his eyes and ears in Washington, London, and elsewhere. Turki also systematically subsidized intelligence services in poorer Arab countries, buying information and allies.16
Ahmed Badeeb and his brother Saeed were two of Turki’s key aides. Their father had been a modestly successful merchant in Jedda. Ahmed Badeeb was an energetic operator, working as Turki’s advance man, bag man, and operational surrogate. Saeed was milder, bespectacled, and bookish. He earned a Ph.D. at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., during the early 1980s and then returned to his post as chief of the GID’s Directorate of Intelligence. He wrote his doctoral thesis on Saudi relations with Yemen and Egypt, and published a book about Saudi relations with Iran. Both Badeeb brothers interacted regularly with CIA counterparts.17
The Saudi royals, so hostile to Marxist atheism that they did not even maintain diplomatic relations with the Soviets, had quietly collaborated with the CIA against Moscow for decades. During the annual hajj season (the pilgrimage to Mecca made in the twelfth month of the Muslim year), the Saudis arranged for CIA officers to interview Muslim pilgrims from Soviet Central Asia about conditions back home. During the 1970s, when CIA covert operations were inhibited by scandals in Congress and caution at the White House, Turki’s GID joined Britain, France, Morocco, and Iran to form a “Safari Club” that worked covertly against Soviet-backed Marxist movements in Africa.18
When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, Turki quickly reached out to Pakistan. The ISI’s Akhtar flew to the kingdom within weeks and met with Turki and Ahmed Badeeb at a restaurant in Riyadh. Akhtar carried a message from President Zia warning that Saudi Arabia itself faced danger if the Soviet incursion wasn’t checked. Soon Badeeb began his shuttle to Islamabad and Peshawar, sometimes hauling his wooden boxes of cash.
Turki believed that the Soviet invasion signaled a drive by Moscow to establish strategic parity with the United States in the Middle East. Until recently arms sales had been the communists’ primary calling card in the Arab world. Now the Soviet Union was looking to gain more influence over oil prices and supplies. Occupying Afghanistan was not per se a Soviet objective, he concluded, but a step toward increasing its power in the region through proxy communist parties and leftist movements. Geographically, Turki thought, Pakistan offered the best path to confront Soviet ambitions. Aid to the Afghan rebels channeled through Pakistan’s army and intelligence service would also helpfully strengthen Pakistan as a regional ally after the devastation of its war with India in 1971.19
Turki reached a formal agreement with the CIA in July 1980 to match U.S. congressional funding for the Afghan rebels. Each year the Saudis sent their part of the money to their embassy in Washington. The Saudi ambassador in Washington, Bandar bin Sultan, then transferred the funds to a Swiss bank account controlled by the CIA. The agency used its Swiss account to make its covert purchases on the international arms markets. Langley’s Near East Division, which handled the Saudi liaison, had to continually haggle with Turki’s GID over late payments. Once the money was pried out of Riyadh’s treasury and transferred to Washington, Bandar would often hold on to the funds for weeks. Near East Division officers speculated that Bandar used the delays to enrich his embassy or himself with “the float,” the millions of dollars of interest that piled up daily from the Saudis’ enormous mujahedin-bound bank deposits.20
Turki took a personal interest in the Afghan program, traveling to Pakistan up to five times a month. Turki “did not object [to] entering into Afghanistan,” Ahmed Badeeb recalled. The Saudi prince made a favorable impression on Pakistan’s ISI brigadiers, his main partners on the Afghan frontier. “Although his character was formed by his aristocratic upbringing, he was the most humble and modest Arab prince I ever met,” recalled Mohammed Yousaf, who directed ISI operations for four years during the mid-1980s. “His education and experience in the West made him completely free of the common Arab prejudices toward non-Arabs.”21
ABDURRAB RASUL SAYYAF became the Saudis’ most important client among the mujahedin rebels. A hulking former professor of Islamic law at Kabul University who maintained a long white-flecked beard, Sayyaf had lived for years in Cairo, where he acquired florid and impeccable Arabic. Crackdowns by the Afghan secret police, including a lengthy prison sentence, forced him into exile in Pakistan.
As Prince Turki’s GID began to penetrate the Afghan jihad in 1980, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, an alliance of Muslim governments, held a major summit in Saudi Arabia, in the resort town of Taif. The Saudis wanted the conference to condemn Soviet interference in Afghanistan. Yasser Arafat, then backing many leftist causes, planned to speak in Moscow’s defense. Afghan rebel leaders flew in from Peshawar to appeal for their cause. Ahmed Badeeb was assigned to select just one of the mujahedin leaders to make a speech, right after Arafat, attacking the Soviet invasion as an affront to Islam.
Several Afghan rebel leaders spoke passable Arabic, but Badeeb found that Sayyaf, then an assistant to another leader, was by far the most fluent and effective. “We chose him to give the speech,” Badeeb recalled later. Immediately, however, the Afghan leaders began to “fight among themselves. Unbelievable guys… . Everyone was claiming that he represents the Afghans and he should give the speech.” The scene became so unruly that Badeeb decided to lock all of them in a Taif prison until they agreed on a single speaker.
After six hours of jailhouse debate, the Afghans accepted Sayyaf. Badeeb then decided that his client needed a better stage name. As he recalled it, Sayyaf had been introduced to him as “Abdul Rasur Sayyaf.” The first two names, he said, translated to Saudis as “Slave of the Prophet,” suggesting that Sayyaf’s ancestors had been indentured servants. By adding “Abdur” to the name Badeeb altered its meaning to “Slave of the God of the Prophet,” suggesting religious devotion, not low social status. For years Badeeb was proud that Saudi intelligence had literally given Sayyaf his name.22
An emboldened Sayyaf returned to Peshawar and formed his own Afghan rebel party, drawing on Saudi cash. Sayyaf promoted Wahhabi doctrine among the rebels and provided GID with access to the war independent of ISI control.
Sayyaf also offered GID a means to compete for Afghan influence against Saudi Arabia’s wealthy Wahhabi clerics. Sheikh Abdul bin Baz, the head of the kingdom’s official religious establishment and a descendant of the Wahhabi sect’s founder, had his own mujahedin clients. Bin Baz managed charities that sent millions of dollars and hundreds of volunteer Arab fighters to help an austere Afghan religious leader, Jamil al-Rahman, who had set up a small Wahhabi-inspired “emirate” in an isolated valley of Afghanistan’s Kunar province. Badeeb saw Sayyaf as the GID-backed alternative to this and other rival Wahhabi groups.
The Saudi spy service’s murky mix of alliance and rivalry with the kingdom’s Islamic ulama (scholars of Islamic law) became a defining feature of the Afghan jihad as it swelled during the 1980s.
Middle-class, pious Saudis flush with oil wealth embraced the Afghan cause as American churchgoers might respond to an African famine or a Turkish earthquake. Charity is a compulsion of Islamic law. The money flowing from the kingdom arrived at the Afghan frontier in all shapes and sizes: gold jewelry dropped on offering plates by merchants’ wives in Jedda mosques; bags of cash delivered by businessmen to Riyadh charities as zakat, an annual Islamic tithe; fat checks written from semiofficial government accounts by minor Saudi princes; bountiful proceeds raised in annual telethons led by Prince Salman, the governor of Riyadh; and richest of all, the annual transfers from GID to the CIA’s Swiss bank accounts.
Prince Turki said years later that GID often controlled who among the Afghans was authorized to receive the semiofficial and unofficial charity funds, but it was never clear how effectively the spy service oversaw the ulama-run charities. There was relatively little supervision during the early and mid-1980s, a lack of control that Badeeb later regretted.23
Even more ambiguous than the money trail was the legion of Saudis flocking to join or su
pport the Afghan jihad. It was rarely clear who was acting as a formal agent of the kingdom’s intelligence service and who was acting as an independent religious volunteer. To the Pakistani generals and American intelligence officers who came to know of him, no Saudi more embodied that mystery than Ahmed Badeeb’s former pupil from Jedda, Osama bin Laden.
MOHAMMED BIN LADEN migrated to Jedda in 1931 from a harsh, impoverished valley in Yemen. He arrived just a few years after Abdul Aziz and his fierce Ikhwan took control of the Red Sea coastline. Talented, ambitious, frugal, and determined, bin Laden cobbled together a construction business one project at a time during the sparse years of the 1930s and 1940s. He built houses, roads, offices, and hotels, and he began to cultivate the Saudi royal clan. In the tradition of Saudi and Yemeni sheikhs, bin Laden took multiple young wives. He ultimately fathered about fifty children. By the time his seventeenth son, Osama, was born in 1957 to a young Syrian wife, Mohammed bin Laden had established himself in Jedda, Medina (where Osama lived as a boy), and Riyadh. First under King Saud and then especially under Crown Prince and King Faisal, bin Laden’s construction firm became the kingdom’s lead contractor for such ambitious and politically sensitive projects as a new highway from Jedda to Taif and the massive refurbishment of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.24
Prince Turki’s father and Osama bin Laden’s father were friends, business partners, and political allies. Mohammed bin Laden “was a worthy man,” as Prince Turki recalled. “He was truly a genuine hero in the eyes of many Saudis, including the royal family, because of what he did for the kingdom. But he was always the construction man. When there was a job to be done, bin Laden would do it.”25 King Faisal appointed Mohammed bin Laden as his minister of public works. The king’s patronage crowned the bin Laden family with open royal support and ensured that their construction fortune would grow into the billions of dollars as the Saudi treasury reaped the oil profits stoked by Faisal’s OPEC gambits.
