By Evan Thomas and Christopher Dickey Newsweek November 19, 2001

America’s long relationship with Saudi Arabia, home to most of the hijackers, is a tale
of money, oil, personal ties, and access. A NEWSWEEK investigation

The call came at about 10 on the night of Sept. 12,
some 36 hours after the terrorist attacks in New York,
Washington and Pennsylvania. On the telephone was a
high-ranking CIA official (probably the director, George
Tenet), and his news was all bad: American intelligence
believed that possibly as many as 16 hijackers came from Saudi
Arabia.

“I FELT AS IF THE TWIN TOWERS had just fallen on my head,”
recalled Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to the United
States. The ebullient prince knew that Americans would immediately
blame Saudi Arabia for contributing so heavily to Al Qaeda’s suicide
squad. Bandar has spent the past 28 years carefully-and
successfully-cultivating U.S.-Saudi relations, but he could see that his
hardest work lay ahead.

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.

`BAD RULERS BUT GOOD ALLIES’

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.

`YOU ARE GOOD PEOPLE’

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.

`HUNKY-DORY’ WITH
THE CROWN PRINCE?

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.

`THE UNABOMBER WENT TO HARVARD’

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.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 18th, 2001 and is filed under opinion.