Inside the Kingdom

by Robert Lacey

  This isolation may explain his receptiveness to the approaches of a member of the Muslim Brotherhood while he was at school. A Syrian phys ed teacher recruited Osama and four other young pupils for after-hours soccer training, which soon developed into candlelit sessions of Islamic story-telling.

  “The Syrian was mesmerizing,” recalls one of Osama’s fellow students. “He was a born storyteller. But his stories got darker and darker. Osama seemed to like them, but it was too much for me—it caused me to leave the group. The teacher told us a story about a boy of our age who had come to God, but who had found his father standing in his way. This father was not a true believer—he would pull the prayer rug out from beneath his son, for example, when the boy tried to pray. As the teacher told us this tale, he built up the suspense: how this ‘brave and righteous’ boy determined that he would fight for the right to pray; how he got hold of his father’s gun; how he found the bullets; how he learned how to load the gun, how he made a plan. The story must have gone on for a full twenty minutes, with the candlelight flickering in the darkened room, and all of us sitting round with our mouths open. Then the climax came—the boy shot his father dead.

  “It was a deeply shocking story, because we are taught in Islam to love and respect our father in every situation, even if he is a nonbeliever. But the Syrian turned that teaching on its head. ‘Wallahi!’ he exclaimed, ‘the Lord be praised—with that shot, Islam was finally liberated in that home!’ ”

  CHAPTER 7

  Jihad in Afghanistan

  Ahmed Badeeb was a genial and roly-poly science teacher at Jeddah’s select Al-Thagr (the Harbor or Haven) school on Mecca Road; one of his pupils was Osama Bin Laden. But Ahmed, who held a master’s degree in secondary education from Indiana State University, moved on from teaching to join Saudi Arabia’s CIA, the General Intelligence Department (GID), or Istikhbarat, and one morning in the spring of 1980, he was called in by his boss, Prince Turki Al-Faisal. A high-ranking Pakistani general was arriving the next day to meet the king and the crown prince, explained Turki, and he wanted Ahmed to make all the arrangements.

  Ahmed did not attend the meeting with the crown prince, but he did join his boss afterward for dinner with the visiting general, Akhtar Abdur Rahman, who turned out to be head of Pakistan’s powerful military intelligence organization, the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence). The conversation was all about Pakistan’s beleaguered northwestern neighbor, Afghanistan, invaded a few months earlier by the Soviets. Muslim freedom fighters, the mujahideen, local Afghan warriors, were mounting fierce resistance, and Pakistan was supporting them.

  Three days later Ahmed received further instructions.

  “You have a task to accomplish,” said Prince Turki, handing him an envelope. “His Royal Highness [the crown prince] has agreed to help our Afghan brothers. We are going to buy them their first shipment of weapons, and you must take the money for them to Pakistan—in cash.”

  “In cash?” queried Ahmed.

  “In cash,” repeated the prince, handing him the crown prince’s letter, where Ahmed read the words “No trace.”

  “At the beginning,” explains Prince Turki today, “it was most important that the Russians should not be able to link the mujahideen to any national entity, neither to ourselves nor to Pakistan. We needed deniability. The plan was to use the money to buy Kalashnikovs and RPGs [rocket-propelled grenade launchers] for the Afghans, along with other old Russian weapons that the freedom fighters could have picked up from anywhere.”

  Ahmed Badeeb went to the bank and quoted an account number. He declines to say how many fresh $100 bills he requested, but he confirms that the sum was in the millions, and that he was able to lift and carry the money in one large carryall. Experienced couriers report that $2 million is the most that a reasonably fit individual can hang from one arm without staggering too obviously under the weight of the bills (nearly forty-one pounds).

  “What sort of job do you do, sir?” asked the teller curiously as he checked the account balance.

  “I’m a businessman,” replied Ahmed.

  Two days later he went back to receive the notes, each million packed in its own custom-made wooden box. Ahmed took the money out of the boxes, wrapped the bundles in metal foil from his kitchen, and enveloped the whole package in a black plastic garbage bag, which he carried as far as Karachi.

  “That bag’s too big to carry on the plane,” he was told at the domestic check-in for Islamabad.

  “Not at all,” he insisted, cavalierly jiggling the bag up and down, trying to give the impression that it was filled with party balloons.

  When the bag went through the X-ray machine, the kitchen foil bounced back a plain image, and when the security guard asked to open the bag, Ahmed told him there was sensitive film beneath the black plastic. Producing his diplomatic passport, he decided that the time had come to ring General Akhtar.

  “Your people are giving me a hard time with the documents,” he said.

  “You have arrived so quickly!” said the general in surprise—scarcely a week had passed since the dinner.

  Badeeb’s destination was the home of Pakistan’s president, Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq.

  “It was a very humble, very simple place,” Ahmed remembers. “A small villa with only three or four rooms. The president was just getting ready for the maghreb [sunset] prayer, and we prayed it together.”

  Badeeb had met Zia-ul-Haq the previous year when he carried a message from Saudi Arabia requesting that Pakistan should not hang the deposed prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, sentenced to death on corruption charges. That request was not granted, but his current mission met with more success. The Saudi sat with the president late into the night discussing the problems of Afghanistan and Pakistan, while Zia’s small son zoomed around the room on a little bicycle.

  “I have brought the amount you requested of His Majesty,” said Badeeb.

  “Give my thanks to His Highness,” replied Zia. “Please tell him I will come for umrah [small pilgrimage] very soon.”

  Meanwhile, in an adjoining room, five generals of the ISI had opened Badeeb’s bag and were toiling away, counting every one of the crisp $100 bills.

  Osama Bin Laden could not wait to get to Afghanistan. Within two weeks of the Soviet invasion the twenty-two-year-old was visiting Peshawar, the atmospheric town on the Pakistani side of the border where the bearded mujahideen loped down the streets with their Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders. Returning to Jeddah inspired, Osama lobbied wealthy friends and relatives to raise what one associate described as a “huge” sum of money to support the mujahideen.

  There were not many devout young Muslims who could afford to drop their studies to fly to Pakistan on an impulse, and some historians have doubted whether Bin Laden traveled to Peshawar at such an early date. But there is no evidence to contradict his story. Osama certainly had the funds to take him just about anywhere in the world, and if his personal wealth was exceptional, his impulse was not. The plight of the invaded Afghans woke an immediate and powerful response in a society where outrage was habitually rationed. Here was an injustice where protest could be permitted—encouraged even—by the Saudi government, which had had no diplomatic relations with the atheistic Soviets since 1938.8 Better that anger should be directed into jihad abroad than into Iran-style revolution at home.

  With the government’s blessing, the Friday pulpits took up the cause. Newspapers reported Communist atrocities against innocent Muslims—while their columnists ignored the “red lines” that restrained their aggression on other issues. Charities were created. Collection boxes appeared in supermarkets and mosques, and Saudi schoolchildren were encouraged to raise money for the poor Afghans.

  “People became very generous with their money,” remembers a government minister of the time. “It was an inspiring and romantic idea that people wanted to help—those few brave men in the mountains resisting the mighty Soviet Union.”

  Religion was the catalyst. Early
in the 1980s Rafiq Hariri, then CEO of the construction company Saudi Oger, astonished the Washington Post reporter David Ottaway by smuggling him into the Muslim-only area of Medina, where he proudly showed off the massive Koran printing plant he had been commissioned to build for the government. It was by far the world’s largest. Hundreds of machines stood ready to churn out tens of millions of Korans in multiple languages with commentaries approved by Bin Baz and the Saudi ulema. It was part of the Kingdom’s worldwide missionary effort to combat the Shia teachings of Khomeini’s Iran, and particularly in Afghanistan, where it would ensure that young Afghans were fortified against Marxism with “the true Islam.” Korans and textbooks would be distributed free to the madrasas (schools) inside Afghanistan and along the Pakistani border.

  Less than six months after the Soviet invasion, the Saudi foreign minister, Saud Al-Faisal, the elder brother of Turki, announced that fund-raising among ordinary Saudi citizens had accumulated no less than 81.3 million Saudi riyals ($22.1 million). In May 1980, Saud handed a check for that amount to the secretary general of the Islamic Conference in Islamabad. The money was destined for Afghan refugee relief. But by that date his brother Turki’s General Intelligence Department had already secretly disbursed a great deal more than that—on weapons.

  Since taking charge of Saudi foreign intelligence in 1977, Prince Turki had doled out large sums of money for the fighting of covert wars. In the mid- 1970s, Saudi Arabia had become a founding member of the Safari Club, the brainchild of Count Alexandre de Marenches, the debonair and mus tachioed chief of France’s CIA, the SDECE (Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage), suppliers of the CS gas that finally ended the Mecca siege. Worried by Soviet and Cuban advances in postco lonial Africa, and by America’s post-Watergate paralysis in the field of undercover activity, the swashbuckling Marenches had come to Turki’s father, King Faisal, with a proposition.

  “His idea was,” recalls the prince, “that since our American friends were off the playing field, as it were, and could not launch undercover operations at this critical time, we should get together a group of like-minded countries to try and keep the Communists out of Africa with money, arms, soldiers—any sort of skullduggery. Calling it the ‘Safari Club’ was a sort of joke by Marenches, but the aim was deadly serious.”

  The French spymaster had it all worked out. His SDECE would supply the technical equipment and expertise; Morocco and Egypt would supply arms and soldiers; Saudi Arabia would supply the money. Marenches also invited the Shah to join—which led to the premature revelation of the club’s activities when the Iranian leader fled from Tehran in 1979 without destroying his papers. By then, however, the Safari Club already had an impressive list of achievements to its credit. In March 1977 Moroccan troops (paid and armed by the Saudis) had fought off a Cuban-Angolan attack intended to oust Mobutu Sese Seko from Zaire; Somali president Mohammed Siad Barre had been bribed out of the Soviet embrace by $75 million worth of Egyptian arms (paid for again by Saudi Arabia); and Saudi money had enabled both Chad and Sudan to keep Libya’s Muammar Al-Qadhafi at bay.

  “We did it for America,” remembers Prince Turki, “but we also did it, obviously, for ourselves. From the earliest days Saudi Arabia had always looked on Marxism as anathema to human well-being, and also to religion. We saw it as our job to fight against Soviet atheism wherever it might threaten.”

  Now Marxist ideology and Russian arms were threatening Afghanistan—and the whole Gulf region. Zia-ul-Haq had a dramatic-looking red triangle that he would place on the map of Afghanistan to show how the Soviets were seeking to drive a wedge through the region to push south and achieve the historic Russian goal of a warm-water port. The Pakistani president got out his triangle for the benefit of William Casey, Ronald Reagan’s newly appointed head of the CIA, when he arrived in Islamabad in 1981, but Casey had no need of the lesson. Jimmy Carter, the outgoing president, had laid down U.S. policy a year earlier in his State of the Union address, a few weeks after Russian tanks had rolled into Afghanistan: “Let our position be absolutely clear. An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”

  Early in February 1980 Carter agreed to a covert program that would put his doctrine into practice—a secret agreement that Saudi Arabia and the United States would match each other, dollar for dollar, to fund an undercover guerrilla campaign in Afghanistan that would hand the Soviets “their own Vietnam.” The two countries would eventually spend more than $3 billion each, according to Rachel Bronson, an authority on U.S.-Saudi relations, in a collaboration that would turn out to be world-changing. It was a partnership that could hardly have been imagined half a century earlier, when America and Saudi Arabia, so remote and so dramatically different from each other, had first drifted into contact.

  CHAPTER 8

  Special Relationship

  It was no coincidence that American geologists started arriving in Saudi Arabia in the depths of the Great Depression. Abdul Aziz needed the money. By 1931 the worldwide recession had cut the annual flow of pilgrims, his chief source of income, from 130,000 to fewer than 40,000. Previously the Saudi king had sniffed at the Gulf sheikhs of Bahrain and Qatar who sold off the mineral rights in their territories. Given the choice, he would have preferred not to have infidel foreigners snooping around his lands. But with no money to pay the tribes, he swallowed his pride. Tribal loyalty was the basis of his power. Things had become so bad, he confided to one British diplomat, that he could no longer entertain the chiefs as custom required. He had had to restrict their visits to the time of the Eids (the two Muslim feast days following Ramadan and the Hajj).

  In the spring of 1933 Abdul Aziz welcomed representatives of Standard Oil of California (Socal, later Chevron) to Jeddah. After spending a week or so playing them off against Britain’s Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC), whose surveyors doubted there was much oil in Arabia, he signed an exploration contract with the Americans for £35,000. It was a measure of the deal’s novelty that the already mighty U.S. dollar still carried little weight in the primitive barter-and-bullion economy of Arabia. Abdul Aziz wanted to be paid in gold sovereigns, which were duly shipped to Jeddah in a wooden chest that was placed for safekeeping, according to cherished Saudi legend, under the bed of his finance minister, Abdullah Al-Suleiman. Later that year Socal’s geologists started work in the east, and the king sent word that these non-Muslims should be greeted in his name and protected as honored guests.

  But not everyone welcomed the Christians.

  ABDUL AZIZ AND THE SON OF THE TIGER

  One Sabbath in 1933 Abdul Aziz was sitting in the baked-mud mosque a few steps away from his baked-mud palace in the heart of Riyadh. It was around noon on Friday, the moment when the male inhabitants of the town shuffled into the mosque for the principal prayer gathering of the week. The floor was strewn with thick and richly colored carpets, and the Saudi king’s sons sat around him as they listened to the sermon of Sheikh Ibn Nimr (“Son of the Tiger”), one of the great Wahhabi preachers of the day.

  The sheikh had taken as his theme some verses from sura 11 of the Koran—“Incline not to those who do wrong, or the fire will seize you. You have no protectors other than Allah, nor shall you be helped.” The sheikh was indignant at the recent appearance of non-Muslims in the Kingdom—he promised damnation to those who dealt with the infidels—and as the preacher developed his theme, Ibn Saud’s annoyance became more and more obvious.

  Suddenly the king interrupted the sermon. He told the Son of the Tiger to step down, and then rose to his feet to offer another set of verses, which he recited perfectly from memory: “Say to those that reject [your] faith,” he declaimed, citing the more tolerant words of the Koran’s sura 109, “I worship not that which you worship, nor will you worship that which I worship. . . . You have your religion and I have mine.
”

  “Live and let live” was Abdul Aziz’s sermon for the day.

  The U.S.-Saudi relationship may have been founded on money, but for Ibn Saud it always had a personal and even sentimental dimension. The first Americans he met were Christian medical missionaries based on the island of Bahrain. These doctors and nurses from the Reformed Church in America treated his soldiers on several occasions after 1911, and came across from the island quite regularly—their painstaking archives record the treatment of nearly three hundred thousand mainland patients in the course of Abdul Aziz’s reign. Thirty-five hundred of these patients required surgery, including the king himself, who summoned Dr. Louis Dame urgently to Riyadh in 1923 to operate on an alarming and painful “cellulitis of the face” that had caused one of his eyes to swell to the size of a baseball.

  Dr. Dame, who, like all the mission doctors, spoke Arabic, lanced the inflammation and solicitously attended the king and other members of the royal family for nearly a week. He was particularly caring toward the king’s aging father, Abdul-Rahman. Grateful and much impressed, Abdul Aziz insisted that the Reformed Church’s medical facilities should be matched and expanded by Socal when the oil company started work in the Eastern Province, and in 1936 Dr. Dame was recruited to help set up the service.

  Having pieced together his own independent kingdom largely on his own terms, Abdul Aziz now invited the United States to play, in some respects, the role of his colonial power. He felt no threat from idealistic Americans like Louis Dame, Christian missionary though he was, nor from the proliferating legion of Socal oil prospectors—booted and bearded pioneers who were pursuing their own mission of gushers and derricks. When it came to the political machinations that might be hatched by the government of these good-hearted men, the Saudi king took comfort from the fact that, as he candidly put it to one American visitor, “you are very far away!” His translator, Mohammed Al-Mana, later recalled the pleasure at court in 1933 as it became clear that Socal was outbidding Britain’s IPC for the oil concession, “for we all felt that the British were still tainted by colonialism. If they came for our oil, we could never be sure to what extent they would come to influence our government as well. The Americans on the other hand would simply be after the money, a motive which the Arabs, as born traders, could readily appreciate and approve.”