Quietly spoken but quick-witted and frank, he was charm personified. ‘I know that with such a trauma that you went through,’ he said, ‘it would take a lot from a person to revisit the place where he went through such a traumatic experience.’ With that out of the way, I was about to launch into some piercing questions when there was a loud click-clacking noise behind me and the whole crew turned to look. It was the prince’s wife, crossing the marble floor in her high heels – he had gathered his whole family to watch the interview, which I found strangely unnerving. It was time to dive in at the deep end.
‘This country,’ I began, ‘is quite different from most others in that it’s ruled by just one family. Can it really survive in the modern world like this?’
‘Yes’, replied the prince. ‘It’s ruled by a family, but it’s not governed by a family. There is a modern state and modern institutions and people are sharing in running this government.’
‘But you’ve got a predominantly young population,’ I countered, ‘and yet this is a country ruled – let’s be blunt – by unelected men in their seventies and eighties, and I think the king is ninety this year. Isn’t that a bit dangerous to have such a gap between ruler and ruled?’ It is, of course, precisely questions like these that put off most Gulf royals from ever doing interviews with journalists from the international media, preferring to stick to safe, structured, ‘on-message’ interviews with their own tame local journalists. But Prince Abdulaziz Bin Salman, to his credit, rose to the challenge and showed no sign of irritation.
‘Well, I remember Churchill was governing the UK in 1964,’ he replied, ‘and he was eighty-something.’
‘Although he was elected,’ I added.
‘I remember Reagan was pedalling down his eighties when he was—’
‘And he was elected,’ I interjected.
‘Yes, he was elected,’ conceded the prince patiently. ‘But in our case you could go and walk the streets of Riyadh and check how popular the king is, and that’s the very important aspect. Every king in Saudi Arabia lived and died for the idea that “I want to have a legacy which is being liked and loved.”’ This must sound absurdly delusional to anyone who has not visited this country, and yet I knew from a post-Arab Spring survey by the company Lexus Nexis that King Abdullah enjoyed extraordinarily high levels of popularity: over 90 per cent approval by those polled, compared to with under 5 per cent for President Saleh of Yemen (who was later ousted).
I asked him about unemployment, the great looming iceberg beneath the surface in Saudi society. ‘We are not hiding from these things,’ he replied. ‘Just look at any Saudi newspaper and you will see a big discussion about unemployment. I would suggest that any EU prime minister would prefer to handle the problems of the Saudi economy rather than attending to the problems they have.’
Finally, I raised the subject of the Shi’a, the minority concentrated in the country’s oil-rich Eastern Province, who feel marginalized and discriminated against, and who Sunni extremists don’t consider to be ‘proper Muslims’. The prince’s answer surprised me: ‘I would simply sympathize with many of their grievances.’
‘So you concede they do have genuine grievances?’ I pressed.
‘Some they have, and I would not be honest with myself, let alone with you, if I didn’t admit that. I’m very frank and forthright with myself.’ And he was. Remarkably so, for a Saudi royal. We left Prince Abdulaziz’s palace that night on a faint waft of frankincense, with too many topics still untouched, but with more answers than we ever expected to get.
There was one thing I still had to do before leaving Saudi Arabia and I was dreading it. The King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre in Riyadh was where I was brought late on the day I was shot in 2004 and where surgeons battled day and night to save me as my life hung in the balance, my perforated insides rent with massive internal bleeding. For seventeen days I lay there, much of the time in a medically induced coma, and I remember it as a time of fear, uncertainty and horror. I had long since been able to meet and thank Peter Bautz, the brilliant South African trauma surgeon who led the team that saved me. So I could have managed quite well for the rest of my life without ever having to go back there, but the programme makers were keen for me to return, and this was, after all, an opportunity to thank the place that had saved my life.
On a bright, crisp day we duly pulled up at this ultra-modern hospital to be met by a beaming Saudi official. ‘Welcome back, Mr Frank, we are so pleased you made it,’ said Hamoud Al-Otaibi, the hospital’s head of communications. I was not sure if he was referring to this return journey or my survival. We moved down the spotless corridor where my wife and her brother would have been taken on the night they came straight here from the airport and their flight from London. ‘We’ll go straight to the Intensive Care Unit,’ said Hamoud. ‘In fact, we even have your old room vacant. Here it is – number 27.’ I paused outside that grim, darkened room, with its breathing apparatus and bank of gadgets above the bed, as distant memories began floating back to me. I could see myself lying here, hooked up to drips and drains, waiting day after day to be transported back to Britain, getting wheeled constantly into the operating room for one emergency surgical procedure after another, my wife signing countless forms. I remembered coming out of sedation, seeing her anxious face giving me the terrible, terrible news that Simon Cumbers, my cameraman, had not survived the attack. I also remembered telling her it wasn’t safe for her to be in Riyadh. And indeed it wasn’t back then. A band of criminals had smuggled themselves into another hospital, disguised as women in black abaaya cloaks, to finish off a patient they had wounded earlier. She even practised pulling a sheet over me in case anyone tried the same thing here.
‘Thank God those days are behind us,’ said a voice from behind me. It was Torbjorn Wetterberg, a Swedish senior consultant surgeon who had been part of the team that worked on me. ‘I was the head of ICU at that time,’ he reminded me, ‘and I was actually on call the night you came in.’ His quiet Scandinavian drawl sounded familiar now and I remembered him and Bautz hovering over my bed like spectres, discussing what procedure to do next. ‘It’s so great to see you back in good health,’ he said. ‘When we brought you here you were really desperately ill. If I’m honest, we didn’t think you would make it. Your body temperature had fallen so far your colour was more like my lab coat’ – he rubbed his white medical coat – ‘and you had so many bullet holes, eleven, that you were bleeding from everywhere. We gave you masses of blood plasma, but as fast as we put it in it was coming out.’
‘You mean’, I interrupted him, ‘it was like filling a bath without the plug in?’
‘Exactly. But then we tried this new clotting product and it saved you. It was a bit of an experiment because we hadn’t used it before on an extreme trauma case like yours, but it worked, the bleeding stopped.’
I remember having hallucinations about male nurses arguing over who would give me a blood transfusion. In my befuddled state, pumped full of sedative, I thought I saw someone struggling in with great buckets of blood they wanted to pour into me, then storming off in a huff without giving it to me, leaving me thinking: this is not good.
Now the hospital staff were pulling up my medical notes, after very professionally asking my written permission, and there was a photo of me in that bed, all yellow and jaundiced, with a scrubby moustache that must have sprung up while I was under sedation. I really didn’t recognize myself. An American nurse came up to me. ‘I remember you,’ she said with a gentle smile, and I thought I remembered her too, a soothing, calming presence in a world full of fear and confusion.
We posed in the ICU for group photographs, with me standing up with the aid of my zimmer frame. I had deliberately worn my leg calipers under my trousers that day with exactly this moment in mind, wanting to show everyone at the hospital how far I had come since I had left them, pitifully weak and immobile, on a gurney. ‘Actually this is great for us,’ said Dr Wetterberg, ‘because it�
��s not often we get to see someone come back to us who is so visibly improved.’ We then filed into the CEO’s office, where, with typical Saudi generosity, the hospital seniors presented me with a beautifully made leather briefcase and a crafted glass souvenir of the building. I felt cheap for not having brought them anything, so I used a marker pen to write an inscription in Arabic on a large piece of white card. ‘I thank you with all my heart,’ it read, ‘and on behalf of my wife, my family and the BBC for saving me. My life was in your hands and you triumphed.’
My return to Saudi Arabia, nine years after I left the country in such a dire state, was for me, personally, a form of closure. I had long dreamed of going back; now I had been back. Had I felt afraid to return? No. I won’t deny it was made a lot easier by knowing that the Ministry of Interior had people watching my back – if only we had been given such protection in Riyadh when we really needed it nine years ago. As the departure date for this trip had approached, I had wondered if the sight of Saudi men walking past in the street, dressed exactly as my would-be killers had been dressed and reaching into their pocket for something, would trigger some terrible flashback or set off a panic attack. But no, it had generally been quite a calming, healing experience to be back, especially to be on the receiving end of so much hospitality and generosity in a tribal place like Najran.
But as a journalist with a lifelong interest in the region, this trip was far more than that. I hoped that our sixty-minute BBC documentary film, which went out on primetime UK TV on 10 April 2013 and then internationally on BBC World, went some way towards explaining the mysteries and myths of this much misunderstood country. Most importantly, we felt, it began to address the key question of how arguably the most important Arab country had so far resisted the upheavals of the Arab Spring.
On a hot, sultry Jeddah afternoon, I sat on a rooftop, in fact the one on the cover of this book, above the maze of backstreets in the Balad, the city’s historic old quarter, and attempted to sum up my thoughts on-camera. ‘So just why hasn’t Saudi Arabia succumbed to the sort of regime change that has swept across so many other countries in the Middle East?’ I asked rhetorically as Nik’s camera swung expertly up off the street below to focus on my face. ‘After all, there is unemployment here, and corruption too, as well as other grievances. The state,’ I continued, squinting into the setting sun, ‘is rich enough that it can afford to cushion much of the population against economic hardship. Then there’s the loyalty factor. Saudis may grumble about certain ministries or individuals in government, but they retain enormous loyalty and affection for the figure of their king. And, there’s the fear factor. The state is all-powerful, it has eyes and ears everywhere, and public, political protests out on the street are simply not tolerated.’ I could have added other reasons, too: like the fact that many people had told me that Saudis simply haven’t got the energy or the willpower to protest; or that they fear the unknown alternative to rule by the Al-Saud; or that many, especially in the conservative, central Najd region, believe that to protest against their rulers, who have the blessing of the religious clergy, would be against Islam.
Saudi Arabia was clearly a better place than it was back in the dark days of the insurgency in 2004. Thanks largely to online social media like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, Saudis are now becoming exposed to real ideas, real news and real entertainment. They are also enjoying a sense of fun previously unfamiliar to this country, thanks to the brilliantly observed comic sketches and creative wit of young Saudis like Fahad Al-Butairy. If that is the Saudi version of the Arab Spring, then it must surely be a positive thing. Whether the country will continue to escape violent upheaval is harder to say. There are pressures building beneath the surface, especially when it comes to youth unemployment, that could one day prove critical. But in the eight short decades since it was founded as a nation, Saudi Arabia has survived a royal assassination, the invasion of its neighbour Kuwait, followed by the Desert Storm war, an oil price slump to nine dollars a barrel, and a murderous Al-Qaeda insurgency that cost hundreds of lives. This country, I concluded, may be more resilient than we think, and for my part, I was truly happy to be back in it.
On a cold North Sea beach in Holland, aged eight.
School races: I loved the freedom of cross-country running.
With my parents, Grace and Neil – both keen walkers right into their eighties – in the Dordogne in 1987.
The Exeter University Arabic class of 1984: Peregrine is on the far right.
Professor Shaban: often he would smile and scowl at the same time.
On the ferry crossing Lake Nasser to Sudan, 1983.
With Yemeni magician and friends in Hajjah, 1985.
Christmas Day, 1982 – on the Nile, with Ali the inebriated boatman and Hamish, who overdid the hubbly-bubblies.
The traditional gold nose-ring still worn by women in Egypt’s Bahariya Oasis in 1982.
Smoking a shisha at a truckstop in Jordan, 1986: having always hated cigarettes, I developed a curious fondness for the waterpipe.
Yemeni villagers: we got used to seeing every adult male carrying a machine gun for protection.
Ahmed, Umm Layla and their daughter – my surrogate family in Cairo, 1983.
Old Jeddah: once I knew my way round its backstreets this became my favourite Arab city.
A tribesman from the Asir Mountains: they looked and dressed like no other Saudis I had met.
main: In Manama for my first business trip to the Middle East, 1989.
bottom, left: With Saudi friends Tareq and Omar in Jeddah.
In my beloved Mustang in Bahrain: it eventually overheated and caught fire.
Beach life in Bahrain, 1993. Peter, Disco Ron, me, Tracy, Samantha, Julius and James (my best man).
Disco Ron sampling Lebanon’s militarized ski pistes, 1992.
THE GULF WAR, 1991:
main: Kuwait’s northern oilfields ablaze.
top, left: In case of poisoned Scuds: practising wearing chemical protection kit in the Flemings Bahrain office.
centre, left: General Sir Peter de la Billiere, relaxing with a hookah.
bottom, left: On the Iraq–Kuwait border in 1991 at Captain Al-Otaibi’s outpost.
Amanda in the Wahiba Sands, Oman, 1993.
My official BBC mugshot, shown on television each time I was interviewed from Dubai; viewers never knew I was usually on the phone wearing swimming shorts.
With Sasha and Melissa on the Mount of Olives, Jerusalem, 2001.
In Cairo’s Islamic quarter with Raouf Ibrahim, the BBC’s invaluable driver.
Clockwise from top left: Judge Hamoud Hittar, tasked with trying to de-radicalize Al-Qaeda supporters in Yemeni jails; With Sir Wilfred Thesiger in Abu Dhabi in 1999. He hated the air-conditioning and only cheered up when we got out to the desert; Jabali tribesman, Dhofar, Oman 1997; Filming in Leptis Magna, Libya, in 2000. Our minder, Miftah, seemed incapable of smiling; With a relaxed Egyptian President Husni Mubarak after our interview in 2001; The BBC Cairo Bureau in 2001: Raouf, Jihan, Hala, Caroline Hawley, Azza and me.
Cairo skyline, our block at centre left: the wiring was somewhat pharaonic.
Omani Bedu women of the Bani Wahiba inspect our camera.
Osama Bin Laden: he initially chose the BBC for his first television interview in 1996.
Saddam’s torched yacht, Basra, 2003.
In a Pakistani village in the Tribal Territories near Peshawar, 2003; here we found the Taliban to be popular; the USA was not.
With the Riyadh bombing forensic investigators, 2003.
Phil Goodwin, me and Dominic Hurst at Shkin Firebase, south-east Afghanistan, 2003.
top, left: Yemen’s newly-formed Counter-Terrorist Unit, 2003.
main: Historic Sana’a: the Yemeni capital was like a living museum.
Simon Cumbers: murdered by Al-Qaeda on 6 June 2004.
top: My hour of agony: at first no one helped me as I lay bleeding from eleven bullet wounds.
bottom: The Saudi p
olice scooping me off the street and into their patrol car.
top: My Riyadh medical report and a photo of my torso taken on the night I was shot. Seeing this picture has made me realize how far I’ve come.
bottom, left: April 2005: my first day back at work and an emotional interview with Dermot and Natasha on BBC Breakfast News.
bottom, right: Back at my old desk at the BBC after five hospitals and twelve operations.
Meeting the Queen to receive my OBE in October 2005: I was wearing callipers and palace officials were terrified I was going to topple on to Her Majesty.
The Gardners back on the slopes: in a bobski with our daughters in Switzerland, April 2006.
Reporting in my wheelchair from an Israeli F16 airbase during the Lebanon War, August 2006.
Acknowledgements
To Dr Peter Bautz, my brilliant South African surgeon, for saving my life in Saudi Arabia and to all his team at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital in Riyadh. To Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, HM Ambassador in Riyadh, for going the extra mile to get me to hospital on the evening we were shot. To HRH Prince Salman Bin Abdulaziz Al-Sa’ud, Governor of Riyadh, for putting his city’s best medical team at my disposal. To HRH Prince Sa’ud Al Faisal, Saudi Foreign Minister, for arranging a flying ambulance back to Britain. To Frank Cross and his team at the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel for all their expert trauma care, and to the surgeons of Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. To Dr Gall, Almari Smit and Emma Linley at the Spinal Injuries Unit in Stanmore, and to my neurophysiotherapists, Julie Hicks and Leigh Forsyth, for patiently introducing me to the grim realities of my new life as a paraplegic. To every nurse who looked after me – well, almost every one.
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