Bandar might have had another, deeper worry, though not one he would ever confess, certainly not to a Western journalist. If so many members of the suicide squad were Saudi citizens, how many more of them might be out there, ready to give their lives to Allah? And was their real target not the United States, but the rigidly autocratic, flamboyantly corrupt and faithfully pro-American House of Saud, the royal family to which Prince Bandar, son of the Defense Minister Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, has devoted his considerable wiles and energy to explaining and defending for so long?
The answer should be of deep concern to every American. A group of Saudi dissidents (the CIA now says 15 of 19 hijackers) may be mainly responsible for the murder of some 5,000 Americans, but the United States and Saudi Arabia are inextricably tied together. The reason for this deep relationship, in a word, is oil. (“And what is wrong with that?” exclaimed Bandar’s boss–and cousin–Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal as he sat, in his flowing robes, talking to a pair of NEWSWEEK reporters last week at Bandar’s imposing guest house on his McLean, Va., estate.) Saudi Arabia has 25 percent ofthe world’s oil reserves. Though the Saudis provide less than 10 percent of America’s oil, they keep the price of oil stable by regulating their output to the world. If the House of Saud falls–still a remote possibility–it is unthinkable that a radical Islamic regime would be so attentive to fueling the American economy.
No Arab nation has been as reliable a friend to America over such a long period of time as Saudi Arabia. The Saudis, says one dissident living in Washington, are “bad rulers but good allies.” Indeed, by allying so closely to the United States, the Saudi rulers have put themselves at risk. Yet ever since September 11, the desert kingdom has taken a drubbing in the American press. Leaks from unnamed government officials accused the Saudis of stonewalling the investigation into the hijackers. Worse was the allegation, most luridly put by an anonymous U.S. “intelligence official” in a widely read Seymour Hersh expose in The New Yorker, that the Saudi regime had “gone to the dark side.” On op-ed pages in newspapers all over the country, indignant pundits picked up the refrain, accusing the Saudis of paying blood money–of secretly funneling funds to Al Qaeda to persuade Osama bin Laden & Co. to take their terrorism elsewhere.
“Totally ridiculous!” insisted Prince Saud in his interview with NEWSWEEK. “From the beginning we have tried to track the money and gotten very little cooperation.” The Saudi foreign minister blamed Western banks for hobbling the investigation. The truth is elusive: the Saudi government has traditionally not wanted to look too closely at the vast amounts of money–about $600 billion invested abroad–flowing around the extended Saudi royal family, which numbers about 5,000 princes. Corruption in high places is partly what has riled bin Laden and other Islamic fundamentalists, but reform is no easy matter. A crackdown could start feuds between royals who might feel unfairly singled out in a system where rake-offs have long been a way of life. The question is whether some of those wealthy Saudis have been not only padding their Swiss bank accounts but funding a radical Muslim jihad abroad. Why, one might wonder, would some Scotch-drinking, Ivy League-educated, thoroughly Westernized merchant princes secretly support a movement that wants to return the Middle East to the 12th century? As a hedge, perhaps–a down payment on Paradise, in the cynical but fearful manner of Italian princes who bought indulgences in pre-Reformation Rome. Unraveling motivations and means is always a tricky business in a part of the world where duplicity and ambiguity are cultural norms.
President George W. Bush has suggested to Americans that there is no longer any room in his world view for other countries to play such games. Last Saturday, in his first speech at the United Nations, the president laid out more clearly than ever before his “Bush Doctrine”: the idea that nations have a stark choice between taking America’s side or harboring terrorists. “There is no corner of the earth distant or dark enough to protect them,” Bush said. Fairly or not, Saudi Arabia continues to be regarded as just such a murky place. Although the Bush administration last week announced that it had zeroed in on two financial networks that support Al Qaeda, investigators may never know the true level of involvement by individual Saudis in funding the terrorists.
The Saudis have been more forthcoming on helping to investigate the hijackers themselves. A senior U.S. intelligence official told NEWSWEEK that after September 11 the Saudis quickly confirmed the identities of the hijackers, interviewed family and neighbors, and shared the information with the CIA and FBI. The Saudis did not advertise their cooperation, however. To the Saudis, President Bush’s “you’re either with us or against us” rhetoric may play well with American voters, but it does not reflect reality in the Middle East. The royal family cannot afford to be perceived by the restless Arab “street” as being too cozy with Uncle Sam. Indeed, in the view of some Saudi insiders, the perception of friction between Riyadh and Washington could turn out to be useful disinformation. “Saudi Arabia is going to be the key” to tracking down terrorists, says a close adviser to the royal family, “and the fact that we’re being criticized may actually make the job easier.”
The relationship between America and Saudi Arabia has long been a dance of veils. It has to be understood as an extraordinary and sometimes secretive web of connections–of money, power and personal loyalty. It is a tale of favors and I.O.U.s, high-stakes gamesmanship, genuine friendship and cunning manipulation. The story is best told through the man in the middle, the bluff, foxy Prince Bandar.
Bandar sometimes likes to play the country boy. “The first time I heard of Picasso, I thought it was a disease,” he says. But he quickly emerged as a shrewd operator in Washington, persuading Congress in 1981 to sell an AWACS air-defense system to Saudi Arabia, against the fervent objections of the powerful Israeli lobby. “He was this Air Force flyboy who smoked cigars and we liked because he was irreverent and totally different from other Arab ambassadors,” recalled Geoffrey Kemp, a national-security staffer in the Reagan administration. A regular at A-list dinner parties, Bandar loved the Washington game. In the secrecy-obsessed Middle East, relations between the United States and Arab countries were for many years the province of the CIA, and Bandar took to covert action with relish. He helped set up a kind of matching fund to arm the mujahedin fighting against Soviet rule in Afghanistan: for each million dollars the CIA contributed, the Saudis would kick in a million more. When Reagan’s rogue national-security staffer, Col. Oliver North, needed money to pay for arms for the Nicaraguan contras, and Congress refused to foot the bill, where did North go? To Prince Bandar, who secretly forked over $20 million as a gift from the Saudi royal family.
The true test of friendship came when Iraq’s Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, threatening neighboring Saudi oilfields. Bandar helped persuade a reluctant King Fahd to allow America to use Saudi Arabia as a launching pad for the liberation of Kuwait. And he attended to more personal details as well. That Thanksgiving, the then President George Bush and First Lady Barbara Bush flew out to Saudi Arabia to review the troops. Left behind was their daughter Dorothy, who had recently moved into the White House after a divorce. Bandar’s wife invited Dorothy and her children to spend Thanksgiving with her and her children at a farm in Virginia. When President Bush arrived in Riyadh, he took Bandar aside and embraced him. “You are good people,” the president said. Bandar claims that Bush had tears in his eyes. Visiting the Bush summer home in Kennebunkport, Maine, the Saudi ambassador was affectionately dubbed “Bandar Bush.” Bandar returned the favor, inviting Bush to go pheasant hunting at his English estate. (Since leaving the White House, Bush has also profited by acting as a kind of glorified door-opener for the Carlyle Group, an investment company that handles considerable Saudi wealth.)
Bandar’s reception in the Clinton White House was cooler–but only at first. The Saudi prince opened doors in practical fashion: he arranged for a Saudi airline to buy $6 billion worth of jets from Boeing. Before long, Bandar and Clinton were smoking cigars together. Fearing that the president might have too good a time with Bandar, who is described as a ladies’ man, some White House aides wanted to keep the president at a safe remove. Nonetheless, Bandar continued to perform unusual favors. He arranged for the Libyans to turn over for trial two intelligence officials suspected in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. When the Saudis balked at helping the FBI investigate the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers military barracks in Riyadh, Bandar smoothed the way, becoming so close to FBI Director Louis Freeh that Freeh considered working for the Saudis after he retired. And he served at times as a kind of informal emissary for the United States, preceding American secretaries of State or Defense as they traveled to Arab states. Bandar would helpfully explain the U.S. position to his Arab brothers–while picking up another chit from the grateful Americans.
Bandar became a kind of permanent Washington establishment. At the end of every administration, he would invite outgoing cabinet officers to dinner at a restaurant of their choice (some wanted to be seen, Bandar notes; some did not). The message was: ADMINISTRATIONS COME AND GO, BUT BANDAR IS A FRIEND FOREVER. “Washington is a cold town. Cruel,” he explained last week to a NEWSWEEK reporter, as he puffed on a Cohiba cigar at his house outside Paris.
The Saudi prince was not always jolly himself. At times, he seemed weary, out of sorts. He was spending more and more time at his 50,000-square foot house (55 rooms, 26 bathrooms) in Aspen. Bandar had reason to be anxious: his standing may have been high in Washington, but at home it was slipping. Bandar is a member of the Sudeiri clan, the sons and grandsons of the favored wife of the late King Abdul Aziz, who first cemented the Saudi friendship with FDR in the 1940s. The Sudeiris have long held most of the powerful jobs in the kingdom: the ministers of Defense and Interior, the governor of Riyadh, the royal throne itself. The Sudeiris are very Westernized: well traveled, worldly in their tastes. They officially adhere to the strict Islam practiced by Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi sect, but they have also sampled the night life of London and Paris. To their purist foes at home they are munafaqeen–hypocrites. But King Fahd was enfeebled by a stroke in 1995, and real power now lies with his half brother, Crown Prince Abdullah. A more austere figure, less enamored with the West, Abdullah has signaled his disapproval of the corruption that helped deplete the kingdom’s cash reserves as oil prices dipped in the 1990s. Bandar insists his relationship with the crown prince is “hunky-dory,” says an adviser to the ambassador.
Bandar has in any case been careful to do Abdullah’s bidding, especially in the fraught arena of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Until recently the Saudis had not been deeply involved. Though the Saudis pay Yasir Arafat’s bills at the Ritz Carlton Hotel when he comes to Washington, Abdullah “disdains” the Palestinian Authority leader because of his indecision and ingratitude, says a former high U.S. official. But when violence between Israel and the Palestinians began to rile Arab public opinion earlier this year, Abdullah became impatient with the Bush administration’s unwillingness to step in. At the end of August, Abdullah dispatched Bandar to deliver a harsh message from the Saudis: if the United States continued to permit Israel to wage war on Palestine, Saudi Arabia would have to heed Arab public opinion. Some diplomats suspected that the Saudis might terminate America’s military presence in Saudi Arabia. The 5,000 American troops stationed on Saudi soil are a hangover from the gulf war, kept there, said one high-ranking Saudi diplomat, by “inertia.”
The message, delivered at the end of August by a subdued Bandar to national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice, was a wake-up call. Bush responded by promising to promote a Palestinian state and protect the rights of all religions in Jerusalem. Then came September 11.
In the early days of the crisis, Bandar seemed his old self. He gave interviews to leading newspapers and appeared on “This Week with Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts” to extol the fact that Saudi Arabia had cut its diplomatic ties to the Taliban. But then Bandar seemed to disappear. Diplomatic sources say he was yanked home by his masters in Riyadh. The Saudi voice went silent in Washington, and a hostile press began to gear up.
Last week the Saudis staged what was, for them, a PR offensive. The Saudi royal family’s foreign-affairs adviser, Adel al-Jubeir, made the rounds on Capitol Hill and briefed reporters. He said that contrary to published reports, the Saudis have detained hundreds of suspects in the September 11 attack. Al-Jubeir seemed to want to marginalize the Saudi men identified as hijackers. A couple of them were “mentally unstable,” he pointedly observed. He scoffed at the notion that the strict fundamentalist curriculum of Saudi schools had made its graduates want to die for Allah. The schools had produced about 300,000 graduates. The fact that 15 of them (mostly well-educated members of the middle class) went on to become terrorists is “an accounting error,” he said dismissively, adding, “The Unabomber went to Harvard.”
Bush administration officials insist that they are content with Saudi cooperation in the investigation. The president himself cautioned his aides not to try to meddle in Saudi society by protesting against strict Islamic teaching in the Saudi schools. “We didn’t go to the American Methodists about [Oklahoma City bomber] Tim McVeigh,” Bush reminded his staffers.
Yet both sides are keeping a cool distance. When the White House announced that President Bush would not meet with Yasir Arafat at the United Nations last weekend, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud was caustic. He declared that his government was “angrily frustrated.”
The circumstances change, but the intricate dance between the two nations goes on. American intelligence officials are anxious about the annual hajj, the pilgrimage of millions of devout Muslims to the holy shrines at Mecca and Medina. If bin Laden is looking to start a civil war in Saudi Arabia, the hajj three months from now might be the perfect opportunity. Prince Saud insisted he was not worried about unrest. The Saudi princes have no choice but to believe that the lid will stay on. Some 27 years ago, in the summer of 1974, Prince Bandar received a call from his embassy: President Nixon, impeached in the Watergate scandal, would be resigning the next morning. Bandar recalls that he arose full of apprehension, expecting to see tanks and soldiers in the streets. Instead, he was surprised to see Americans calmly going about their business. Nixon was allowed to fly off to retirement in San Clemente, Calif. Bandar did not need to add that if Saudi princes are overthrown, they expect to meet a different fate.
CORRECTION
In our Nov. 19 story “The Saudi Game,” a 1974 photo of President Richard Nixon shaking hands with the Saudi king was incorrectly captioned. It was King Faysal, not King Khalid.
