There is no doubting the sense of vulnerability of a country now unimaginably rich yet incapable of achieving security through wealth alone. Its rulers live with the nightmare that the covetousness of its neighbors might translate itself into attempted conquest. Conscious of the fate of nearby nations, they cannot but be ambivalent about economic and social modernization, which might undermine their traditional rule. Contemporary Saudi policy has been characterized by a caution that has elevated indirectness into a special art form. For if the Kingdom pursued a very forward policy, if it made itself the focal point of all disputes, it would be subjected to entreaties, threats, and blandishments, the cumulative impact of which could endanger either independence or coherence.
Thus there has grown up a style at once oblique and persistent, reticent and assertive. The Kingdom has maneuvered to keep itself out of the forefront of confrontation even when its resources have sustained it — as was now the case with the oil embargo. It has been skillful in avoiding the impression that its unilateral views are decisive. It has always striven to gain the protection of a consensus for which somebody else must assume the blame — at various times the Shah of Iran, the radical majority in OPEC, intransigent Israel. Something always has to be done by someone else before the Saudis can act. It is a marvelous way to avoid pressures and one absolutely consistent with the needs of the Kingdom.
Nor is it simply tactical expediency. The Kingdom has to navigate among certain fixed poles: a deeply felt friendship for the United States; a profound sense of Arab loyalty; a consciousness of internal and external danger. It is not Saudi Arabia’s fault that the requirements of these goals occasionally clash. In this sense the ambiguity of Saudi policy is imposed by events, not by preference.
There is thus no point in trying to sweep the wary rulers of the Kingdom off their feet. Most leaders’ vanity causes them to exaggerate their own significance; the Saudi princes under Faisal were immune to this temptation and they have not changed the basic pattern since. The opaque Saudi style is equally resistant to eloquence and to threats. To yield to either would imply a degree of latitude in decision-making that would invite endless repetition of foreign entreaties or demands. Much better to maneuver so that everything appears as the consequence of something outside Saudi control. Riyadh is not the place for scoring dramatic breakthroughs.
I understood little of this as my plane rolled to a stop near dusk in front of a modernistic arrival lounge flung on what a few short years ago had been a barren plateau. At the foot of the stairs was Omar Saqqaf, Minister of State for Foreign Affairs (Faisal reserved the title of Foreign Minister to himself). I had last encountered the urbane, worldly Saqqaf in Washington a few weeks earlier, meticulous in tailored Western clothes. Now he wore flowing white robes and Arab headdress and fingered worry beads. He led me between two rows of soldiers to the marble royal reception hall — an opulent room whose furniture was placed along the walls so that nothing obscured the view of the exquisite Oriental rugs covering every square inch of the floor. Small cups of bitter coffee were served to us by robed and turbaned waiters.
Riyadh, like Brasilia, testified to a conscious choice to move the center of gravity of the country inland. But unlike Brasilia, Riyadh had no great edifices or monuments of state serving as a symbolic focal point. The city was thus a Saudi bow to Western technology and a testimony to its ultimate irrelevance. An urban complex was needed; but in the Saudi scale of values it merited no central plan. Enormous palaces coexisted with hovels without either the charm of a traditional city or the nervous thrust of a modern creation. There was not even a royal palace; or rather, the royal palace was the private residence of the prince who was chosen to be the King. By 1973 very few ministries had as yet moved to Riyadh from Jiddah, and they made do in temporary concrete structures. Even when later the ministries became larger, sometimes verging on the gargantuan, they were thrown about as if at random, making it impossible to describe any part of Riyadh as the governmental center. It was the same with the residences of sheikhs and princes, which, hidden behind high walls, were cheek by jowl with the most ordinary dwellings; the royal family had, after all, been of Bedouin stock and lived in their austere traditional style before the colossal boom in oil wealth.
The edifice used as a state guest house in 1973 (it has since been replaced) was one of those accidents — at once out of scale and seemingly transitory. After a brief opportunity to get settled, I was taken to the King’s palace for a reception and dinner given for me by King Faisal — a signal honor.
Faisal’s palace was on a monumental scale. Preceded by two sword carriers, I was taken to a tremendous hall that seemed as large as a football field. Dozens of the distinguished men of the Kingdom (women, of course, being strictly segregated) in identical black robes and white headdresses were seated along the walls, immobile and silent. There was incense in the air, circulated by the air conditioning. What seemed like a hundred yards away on a slightly raised pedestal sat King Faisal ibn Abd al-Aziz Al Sa’ud, aquiline of feature, regal of bearing. He rose as I entered, forcing all the princes and sheikhs to follow suit in a flowing balletlike movement of black and white. He took one step toward me; I had to traverse the rest of the way. I learned later that his taking a step forward was a sign of great courtesy. At the time, I was above all conscious of the seeming eternity it took to reach the pedestal. His Majesty and I sat side by side for a few minutes overlooking the splendid assemblage while I reflected in some wonder what strange twists of fate had caused a refugee from Nazi persecution to wind up in Arabia as the representative of American democracy. Next, I was introduced around the room by the royal chief of protocol, walking past the lined-up dignitaries and shaking their hands as their names were given to me.
The King then took me to dinner. He and I sat at the head table at right angles to two long extensions along which Western clothes, looking strangely clumsy in this Arab environment, marked the few members of my party as intruders in the elegant uniformity of Saudi robes. It was like an eerily rehearsed symphony. When the King spoke, all was silent; my comments were drowned in a buzz of conversation. The silences for the King heightened my awareness in my first exposure to what throughout the Arab world, and in many more outlying regions, was immediately recognizable as Faisal’s standard speech. Its basic proposition was that Jews and Communists were working now in parallel, now together, to undermine the civilized world as we knew it. Oblivious to my ancestry — or delicately putting me into a special category — Faisal insisted that an end had to be put once and for all to the dual conspiracy of Jews and Communists. The Middle East outpost of that plot was the State of Israel, put there by Bolshevism for the principal purpose of dividing America from the Arabs.
It was hard to know where to begin in answering such a line of reasoning. When Faisal went on to argue that the Jewish-Communist conspiracy was now trying to take over the American government, I decided the time had come to try to change the subject. I did so by asking His Majesty about a picture on the far wall, which I took to be a decorative work of art. It was a holy oasis, I was informed — representational art being forbidden in Islam. This faux pas threw Faisal into some minutes of deep melancholy, causing conversation around the table to stop altogether. In the unearthly silence my colleagues must have wondered what I had done so quickly to impair the West’s oil supplies. I did not help matters by referring to Sadat as the leader of the Arabs. His Majesty’s morose reaction showed that there was a limit beyond which claims to Arab solidarity could not be pushed.
The King always spoke in a gentle voice even when making strong points. He loved elliptical comments capable of many interpretations, thus protecting himself against being quoted in contexts that he could not control and that might ultimately prove embarrassing. He conducted audiences by sitting in the center of the room with his interlocutor at his right and the interpreter facing them, while each side’s advisers were lined up along the walls beyond whispering range — indeed, given the siz
e of the room, barely within shouting distance — and thus effectively excluded from the conversation. In talking to me he would look straight ahead, occasionally peeking from around his headdress to make sure I had understood the drift of some particular conundrum.
All this was so unprecedented in my experience that at first it was difficult to find criteria for judgment. It was easy for a Westerner to make light of King Faisal’s standard rhetoric. But as I learned to know him I realized that he was a man of rare quality, highly intelligent, formidable, and yet wise enough never to display his strength. The imperatives of conviction and tactical expediency merged, so that he both believed in what he was doing and did what served his purposes. The speech on Communism and Zionism, however bizarre it sounded to Western visitors, was clearly deeply felt. At the same time it reflected precisely the tactical necessities of the Kingdom. The strident anti-Communism helped reassure America and established a claim on protection against outside threats (which were all, in fact, armed by the Soviet Union). The virulent opposition to Zionism reassured radicals and the PLO and thus reduced their incentive to follow any temptation to undermine the monarchy domestically. And its thrust was vague enough to imply no precise consequences; it dictated few policy options save a general anti-Communism.
Faisal combined religious intensity and diplomatic shrewdness — not for nothing had he been Foreign Minister of Saudi Arabia for years before ascending the throne. Religion gave him the inner strength to face Saudi Arabia’s perils and seek to overcome them with serenity. It also provided cohesion to a country moving, however fitfully, toward modernization, as well as protection against the covetous. It was one thing to tackle an ordinary statesman and to subject him to the normal pressures of diplomacy, which in the Middle East can be quite rough. It was quite another to seek to blackmail a holy man who placed himself above the battle. By his reputation for piety Faisal combined exaltation and anonymity, great influence and aloofness from the fray. Faisal managed the extraordinary feat of positioning himself exactly into the calm eye of the hurricane, though he never forgot the storms raging all around him. It took great skill and inward detachment.
Faisal deserved his reputation for rectitude. He was as honorable as he was subtle. He weighed his words scrupulously. He never spoke idly; each sentence had its significance, even if it took slower minds a while to catch on. We were fortunate that toward the United States Faisal maintained a feeling of genuine friendship — which we reciprocated — balanced by doubt about our acumen and ultimate steadiness. He was close enough to the Bedouin tradition to anchor essentially political acts in personal relationships. He was a man of his word; indeed, generally he delivered more than he promised. On the other hand, in thirty years in high office he had seen enough of the volatility of American politics not to entrust the future of his country without qualification to the unpredictable shifts of mood he had witnessed. Therefore he always hedged his bets, wherever possible in favor of the United States but not if that jeopardized the interests of Saudi Arabia as he understood them. Above all, he knew the weakness of his own country. He never sought the role of mediator because he was convinced that for all its wealth — and perhaps because of it — Saudi Arabia could not stand being made the formal arbiter of all crises.
When I understood him better, I found that it was easier for Faisal to act seemingly spontaneously than in response to a request. It enhanced his standing in the Arab world if he was able to say truthfully that no assistance had been requested and hence no promises had been made. This would not keep him from doing on his own — as a totally voluntary act, as it were — what supported our objectives. It then did not have to be reported to his brethren as a commitment or promise to the Americans. I made sure that he was always well briefed about our negotiations; frequently I stopped in Riyadh to inform him personally. After the first few meetings I never made a specific request. But often I found through other channels a helpful Saudi footprint placed so unobtrusively that one gust of wind could erase its traces.
King Faisal brought off a tour de force. Under his leadership his country was taken seriously but reserved the right to define its role. Whether he intended it or not, he made possible a revolution in world economics and an upheaval in the world balance of power by lending Saudi Arabia’s weight to the use of the oil weapon and turning the Kingdom into a major factor in world affairs. But he managed to present this revolution as a reluctant decision taken with a bleeding heart, an act imposed by the greed of others and the uncontrollable passions of the region.
And if one understood Saudi policy as the result of all the forces at work in the area rather than as the shaper of them, that perception was right. If the statesman acts as the helmsman in storm-tossed seas, Faisal performed masterfully in keeping his fragile bark always heading into the wind and having it emerge intact — no mean achievement when one considers the fate of countries all around him.
All these tendencies emerged when, following dinner, I sat down with Faisal for talks. Unlike Sadat, he was not a man for the dramatic initiative; his greatness was clothed in anonymity. I needed his goodwill for our Middle East diplomacy and I wanted to impress upon him that the oil embargo was a severe blow to our relations. The two levels of the conversation — what I wanted him to understand and what he was prepared to acknowledge — were not always the same. We warily circled each other like wrestlers before a match, studying each other’s moves without, in the end, ever going beyond this preliminary phase.
I explained our Middle East strategy along the lines of my presentation to Sadat, omitting the tactical details. Faisal understood what I was saying well enough; his bearing indicated attention and sympathy. But his words, which would no doubt be communicated to other Arab leaders, including the PLO’s, were elegant restatements of a comprehensive program incompatible with our strategy. Peace with Israel was possible — an unusual acknowledgment for Faisal — but he immediately qualified the statement by making it conditional on Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 frontiers and the return of all Palestinian refugees to their homes, which in practice would mean an influx of over a million Arabs into pre-1967 Israel. Faisal elaborated the shape of that state: “There must be established in Palestine, by agreement, a mixed Jewish-Moslem state” — in other words, exactly the PLO platform. I objected that this was not possible. Faisal replied cannily: “Israel would withdraw the moment Israel saw that you would no longer protect it, cuddle it.” This was put forward regally, without intensity, but also without flexibility, as if Faisal’s role was primarily to lay down principles, not guides to action. With respect to the Arab-Israeli problem, Faisal put forward an attitude, not a program.
Matters became more complicated when we dealt with oil. Goaded on by Nixon, I was concerned with persuading Faisal to lift or ease the embargo. Had I understood the mechanism of oil pricing better, I would have realized that Saudi production cutbacks were more dangerous than the embargo since they critically affected world supply and therefore provided the precondition for the impoverishing price rise. My misapprehension made no difference. Faisal, who understood the pricing mechanism very well indeed, made clear that he would increase production when he lifted the embargo; indeed, he professed to be “red hot with anxiety to expedite this as fast as possible.” Unfortunately, Saudi Arabia was in an “embarrassed” position; it needed some proof of tangible progress before a proposal to sheath the oil weapon could be put forward to the other Arab states. Faisal, precisely because he was a friend of the United States, could not act alone.
The geopolitical approach having failed, I appealed to psychology. It was painful, I said, to be pressured by a friend. It was unseemly to yield to such pressure. Faisal turned the appeals against me by insisting: “I have suffered even more than you.” He suggested that the strain might give him a nervous breakdown. We could not be perceived to be giving in to blackmail, I argued. Faisal was equal to the occasion. He appreciated my “valid” explanations. But unfortunately Saudi Arabia did not h
ave a free hand since the decision was made jointly by all Arabs. “What I need is the wherewithal to go to my colleagues and urge this.”
I tried the route of compromise. If Saudi Arabia was not prepared to lift the embargo, perhaps it could ease its application. Faisal was all for compromise. Perhaps the happy medium could be agreed upon if we, unable to induce Israel to give up all its conquests and permit the return of the Palestinians, would announce this as an objective in the form of a United States demand on Israel. I gently turned this aside.
In our stately minuet we went through our paces but failed to harmonize our movements. Faisal had given no hostages to his note-taker.
And yet as he walked me to the door, he bestowed in a minute the blessing for our diplomacy that I had sought in vain in hours of complex talk. He did so cryptically, when records were no longer being kept, and yet in the hearing of the other princes, almost as if the most important sentence he uttered were an afterthought or a formal courtesy: “We pray to Almighty God that He will continue to grant you success in all these noble efforts. I spoke very frankly to Your Excellency because I respect your proven ability and wisdom.” Nothing Faisal said was idle; if he called the step-by-step approach “noble,” he meant to support our policy, albeit in his own complicated way. Nor was it mere politeness or flattery that he had given me — in front of his senior advisers — a personal endorsement despite my religious background.
Since Faisal could not be sure that I had got the point, two visitors called on me, one after the other, at the guest house within minutes of the end of my audience with the King. The first was Prince Fahd, then Minister of the Interior and generally considered the strong man of the Kingdom after Faisal. As I got to know Fahd better, I learned that he was less indirect than his half brother the King but equally subtle and intelligent. And he was a good friend of our country. He had sat in on the meeting with the King and was thus by conviction as well as occasion in a position to affirm all that the King, with the spotlight on him, had been reluctant to make explicit. The record of this meeting, being unannounced, did not have to be distributed to the Arab world. “I appreciate,” Fahd said:
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