Inside the Kingdom

by Robert Lacey

  Abdullah constructed a double identity just as Fahd did—and, indeed, as all Saudi princes do—by presenting his people with the image of a traditional, stern, and formal desert authority figure, while acting totally otherwise in private. But whereas Fahd’s private persona involved Mediterranean yachts and casinos, Abdullah’s hidden world involved hours splashing in the swimming pool with his children. Struck by the elegant freestyle stroke of Abdullah’s daughter Reema, Nick Cocking’s wife, Anna, asked her the name of her swimming coach. With a smile, and a perfect accent, the little girl answered, “My father, of course.” Abdullah made sure that all his children learned English.

  He liked splashing in the pool by himself, swimming a daily set of lengths that was part of his self-improvement regime. Another aspect involved speech-therapy lessons with a series of specialists who were flown to Riyadh and worked with him on exercises that eventually all but eliminated his stutter.

  “I remember a speech that he gave [in Arabic] in London at the Mansion House,” says Nick Cocking. “Now that’s a pretty intimidating venue. He was totally fluent—word perfect.”

  In his younger days Abdullah shared in the distribution of land grants and cash that Abdul Aziz, Saud, Faisal—and particularly King Khaled—spread around the royal family. But he did not elbow his way into profits in the way that many of his half brothers did.

  “Abdullah never pocketed a direct government commission himself,” says one insider. “Of that I am quite sure. He is not badly off. He lives like a prince. But he is certainly the least wealthy of the senior sons of Abdul Aziz—the brothers who are over seventy.”

  The crown prince was no innocent. He understood the temptations of patronage and he tried to channel them in constructive directions.

  “He would study all the National Guard contracts very carefully,” remembers Abdul Rahman Abuhaimid. “He always insisted, when it came to foreign governments, that they should be pushed to give something extra at their own expense—training or education to transfer skills to local Saudis. And he was constantly on the lookout to close all the doors and windows against corruption. ‘Do you think,’ he would ask, ‘that there is anyone we know who is linked in on this?’ ”

  Cracking down on corruption and overpricing became Abdullah’s hall-mark. “Trop!” “Too much!” he would say, deploying his best Lebanese French as he studied almost any contract, and the papers would go back to be renegotiated. Legend had it that the crown prince would allow his four wives a new car only every two years, and that he sat down with his sons once a week to go through their bank accounts. His sons deny the truth of that, but most of them are low-key in their appetites and spending patterns.

  “I was in first class, going from Riyadh to Jeddah,” remembers a Saudi newspaper editor, “when I saw one of Abdullah’s sons walking through, going back to sit in the business cabin. I offered him my seat and he refused. Imagine one of Fahd’s sons not traveling right up front with an entourage of ten. Few people know who Abdullah’s sons are—and he tells them to keep it that way.” (The same is true of Abdullah’s daughters.)

  Abdullah has tried—with varying success—to apply that principle across the entire royal family, and certainly today the British staff who work for Saudia, the national airline, at London’s Heathrow Airport bless his name. Gone are the last-minute crises as princes—and friends of princes—turn up at the check-in desk without reservations, requiring that ordinary mortals get turfed off the flight. Abdullah ended the special flying privileges for most of the royal family soon after he took power.

  Abdullah’s proper taking of power, however, took time and involved quite a fight. Until 1995 the crown prince’s stutter was symbolic of his limited influence at the top of the family. Fahd and his eldest Sudayri brothers all got on with running the country as they wished. Abdullah was never part of their inner circle and the brothers found it hard to change their ways after Fahd’s stroke.

  “They could make things difficult for Abdullah,” recalls a royal adviser. “They might ‘forget’ to tell him things and just go on running the show in their own way.”

  Fahd made something of a recovery, and the Sudayris forced Abdullah formally to return the powers of regency he had assumed. When the king had a second and more severe stroke in 1997, they played down its significance, but the sad truth of Fahd’s condition was difficult to ignore. The king could speak only haltingly, and it was embarrassing when he was wheeled in to preside over family dinners.

  “Poor guy,” remembers one of his female relatives. “He’d give you that smile. It was sort of pathetic. He was only just hanging in there.”

  The king’s health depended on the drugs administered to him that day. A European ambassador remembers escorting a visiting minister from his country for a courtesy call. As they walked into the royal presence, a strange and indecipherable sound emanated from Fahd’s throat.

  “His Majesty is delighted that you have come all this way to visit him,” said the interpreter brightly.

  Another croak ensued.

  “His Majesty welcomes the chance to strengthen the ties that have always connected our two nations.”

  For television appearances the king was whisked around in a wheelchair that was hidden away when the cameras started rolling. It was an Orwellian pretense, but it reflected the mystique at the heart of any monarchy, and the particular reverence for seniority to which the Al-Saud had always subscribed.

  Abdullah chafed at the limits within which he had to operate, but as in the Free Princes crisis of 1962, he remained a loyal supporter of the family way.

  “If you’re staying in your brother’s house,” he would say, “you don’t change the curtains.”

  The crown prince had long been developing his own very definite ideas about what was needed to right the wrongs of the country—and they were very different from some of Fahd’s.

  “If you could have read the letters that he sent privately, brother to brother, to the king,” confided Abdul Aziz Al-Tuwayjri, Abdullah’s closest adviser, talking of the years before Fahd’s illness, “you would have thought that the crown prince was leader of the opposition.”

  But there was no hint of this in public—quite the contrary. In the autumn of 1998 Abdullah reached out to Azouzi, the twenty-five-year-old Abdul Aziz bin Fahd, to bring the young prince into the Saudi cabinet as a “minister without portfolio.” By virtue of the soothsayer’s prophecy, Azouzi effectively controlled access to his ailing father, and he became the crown prince’s direct channel to the king, securing Fahd’s signature on especially important documents. Whenever Abdullah undertook the presentation of ceremonial orders and medals to visiting heads of state, he would make clear that he himself did not belong to the ultimate, elevated level to which the visitor was being admitted. That honor was reserved for his beloved elder brother, the king.

  In the absence of fathers and mothers, elder brothers command absolute deference in Saudi society; respect for age is one of the pillars on which a tribal society rests.

  “After Saud became king, in 1953,” recalls a friend of the family, “Faisal would scamper to bring him his shoes, even though he felt contempt for what his elder brother was doing.”

  One of the sights to enjoy when Saudi princes get together is to observe how they shuffle instinctively into their order of precedence: they know their rank in the hierarchy and they stick to it, even where seniority is a matter of having been born only days apart. It would have been disrespectful for Abdullah to significantly alter his brother’s council of ministers while Fahd remained alive, and in any case the kingdom’s two most important ministries, Defense and the Interior, were operated as personal fief doms by Fahd’s full brothers, Sultan and Nayef—as, indeed, Abdullah retained permanent control of the National Guard.

  In this respect, Abdullah was complicit in his own helplessness. As the 1990s drew to close, the king and the crown prince were each handicapped in their different ways. Neither could give of their best—and
the Saudi curtains were in sore need of changing. Having briefly surged above twenty dollars per barrel at the time of the Gulf War, oil prices tumbled downward for the rest of the decade—in 1998 the price of a barrel of oil would sink to nine dollars.

  “We must all get used to a different way of life,” declared Abdullah in January 1999, proclaiming that the days of easy oil money were history. He announced a stringent austerity budget, cutting government spending by 16 percent, and urged Saudis to seek a way ahead “which does not stand on total dependence on the state.”

  “This was the first and only time in my life I saw a suicide,” remembers Dr. Ahmad Gabbani, a human resources director in Jeddah. “It was on the Medina Road. There was a wooden bridge over the road, and some poor guy had put a rope round his neck and jumped. I saw the body hanging there. People said that he was crazy. It is a deep sin if you are a Muslim to take your own life. But it turned out that the man could not find a job. He could not provide for his family.”

  The Ministry of Finance refused to pay up on massive contracts that were long completed without dispute. Local businessmen trekked cap in hand around the ministries for month after humiliating month trying to secure payment for themselves and their foreign partners.

  “You’ve made enough money in the past,” they were told dismissively.

  In the middle of this recession, an acerbic and humorous little economist was trying to reform the Saudi telephone system. The pixielike Dr. Ali Al-Johani had been appointed minister of posts and telecommunications (PTT) three months before Fahd’s stroke and had concluded that the only way to improve was to privatize.

  “The PTT was a bazaar,” he remembers. “So many people were for sale. There were simply not enough lines to go around. Every new line, every new number went across the desk of somebody in the ministry and they put whatever price they wanted on it.”

  Al-Johani identified twelve senior officials who had to go. Six accepted his offer of a golden handshake, but six refused to budge, so he took their names to the crown prince, requesting their immediate dismissal.

  Abdullah was astonished.

  “Six?” he asked. “Just six? I’ll sign for six hundred.”

  Abdullah had long held a profound contempt for civil servants. Bureaucracy pressed his buttons. To suggest that a committee might be formed was a sure way to trigger the ire of the crown prince.

  “Prince Abdullah,” says Al-Johani, “can smell reform from miles away. He might not have known, at the time, the detailed economic benefits of privatization. But he knew that it meant giving greater freedom to Saudi citizens, and that it would give me greater freedom to change things for the better. That was good enough for him. Some of the nonroyal ministers complained that the government should not be surrendering control over such a major area of information, but that was not an issue for him, nor for Prince Sultan either. In every battle I have to say that those two men gave me their total backing.”

  The new minister soon discovered that he needed it.

  “I had opened the gates of hell. To start with, everybody wanted to be my best friend. Then when I did not give them what they wanted, they became my worst enemy—the tribes, the merchants, the families. They accused me of corruption, of course, but let me tell you, there are three hundred thousand Al-Johanis and not one of them got a job or a phone line because of me.

  “So that made enemies out of them, of course, my own people. They said I was a traitor, that I was not looking after my own. I came to feel I could trust no one. If I had an important document to take to the Council of Ministers, I would carry the draft myself down to the basement of the ministry building. There was one typist there I knew. I could rely on him to type it promptly without phoning someone or sneaking an extra photocopy.”

  The new minister held twice-weekly majlises, royal style, so customers could come and present their complaints. Discovering that the ministry had been holding back a huge stock of lines for its own purposes, Al-Johani gave away all but fifteen. He published a priority entitlement code for securing telephone service, starting with doctors, emergency workers, and sick children. Most daring of all, he got the crown prince’s backing to cut off the mobile service of princes and princesses who did not pay their bills.

  “They could not believe it, and they went to complain to the crown prince. He just told them they must pay their bills like everyone else.”

  It was a crucial change. Elite Saudis—royal and nonroyal—might take as many as a hundred mobiles to London for their family and entourage to use, calling freely, day and night, all over the world throughout their holiday.

  “We, the Saudi PTT, would have had to pay out tens of millions of dollars in foreign service charges,” remembers Al-Johani. “It would have been impossible to privatize if we had not made that reform.”

  A team of foreign consultants to the ministry told Al-Johani it would take twelve years to privatize the telephones.

  “ ‘So how come,’ I asked them, ‘Mrs. Thatcher did it in two?’ ”

  “You meet with the senior partners of these foreign consultants,” adds the sharp-toothed former minister, “and they shower you with wisdom that is music to your ears. You sign a contract to tap their expertise, and then you never see them again. They send you out beginners who can’t speak proper English and who serve you outdated information from the Internet.”

  In the middle of all this, Al-Johani started feeling feverish as the day wore on. He was diagnosed with leukemia—bone-marrow cancer. He flew to Seattle for chemotherapy, leaving the PTT in the hands of a succession of other ministers who had little time or inclination to do Dr. Ali’s job.

  “In fact,” he recalls without too much malice, “one of them certainly wanted my job.” On his return, he resumed his battle, couriering bone-marrow samples to Seattle every week or so.

  “The chemo and the immune drugs had a very bad effect on my temper. I’ve never been easy to work with. I can’t tolerate fools gladly, and I hate being obstructed—I have to admit it. There was only one way to do things, and I was the only person who knew what that was.”

  In the end, the academics and administrators who made up the board of the newly privatized Saudi Telecoms Company said they could not work with Al-Johani anymore. He treated them like the petty bureaucrats he believed them to be, and they had no further wish to be snapped at. They presented their combined resignation to the crown prince, and Abdullah summoned Dr. Ali. The battle was over, he said; the day had been won. The prince made Al-Johani a minister of state with cabinet responsibilities for three years, while Prince Sultan made him a present of his most valuable and handsome white bull camel.

  Saudi telephone lines had been liberated, blazing a fresh trail for the congenitally centrist and risk-averse Saudi government, which now edged toward a new economic style. Fahd’s long-serving finance minister, Mohammed Aba Al-Khail, had started slow negotiations for Saudi Arabia to join the World Trade Organization, but the economic team that Abdullah recruited brought fresh energy to the bid.

  “We saw WTO accession as a vehicle for domestic reform,” recalls one of the team. “We could use the new regulations as a pretext. The business establishment was wary of change. But now we could go to them and say, ‘Look guys, sorry. These are the rules. They come from the outside.’ It was a whole change of philosophy.”

  Abdullah announced the creation of a new Supreme Economic Council to streamline economic decision making. But this could provide no immediate help to the growing numbers of young Saudis who could not find jobs at the end of the 1990s. Youth unemployment was a tragedy. The unrestricted entry of cheap foreign workers had flooded the Saudi labor market with millions of third-world workers who were willing to live in primitive camps and to work for seven hundred riyals ($190) per month. This was a third of the amount on which a Saudi could survive, and the logical solution—that young Saudis should be trained to work as managers—was handicapped by the rising generation’s embarrassing deficiencies in education,
particularly when it came to practical knowledge and independent reasoning skills. The teaching of math, science, and English in Saudi schools had been drastically reduced in the early 1980s to make room for the extra religious classes that featured learning by rote—the post-Juhayman backlash had almost guaranteed the production of more Juhaymans.

  The days of the oil boom seemed very distant. Most young men leaving school or graduating from university took it for granted that the next two or three years of their life would be “dead,” with no prospect of work. Hanging out in shopping malls or driving aimlessly around the streets of Jeddah or Riyadh without the cash to buy new clothes, let alone to finance marriage, was a depressing existence. Small wonder that the vision of jihad in foreign lands offered purpose and excitement that attracted many a frustrated young “Angry Face.”

  CHAPTER 21

  The Students

  Islam’s triumphant ousting of Communist Russia from Afghanistan in 1989 did not bring peace to the Afghan people. On the contrary. Scarcely missing a beat, resistance to the foreign enemy morphed into a bitter and bloody civil war.

  “After the Russians left, they just turned on each other,” recalls Ahmed Badeeb, chief of staff of Prince Turki Al-Faisal’s General Intelligence Department, the Istikhbarat. “There seemed no way that we could stop them fighting. They were all as bad as each other. We cut off the payments we had been making to them, but they just went on feuding. I remember that we once made a really major effort. We put all the leaders on a plane and flew them to Mecca for a peace conference. We actually opened up the Kaaba and took them inside so they could swear reconciliation to each other—right in the very heart of Islam. It was a truly exceptional gesture, very moving, with lots of embracing and tears. Then, as they were coming back out down the ladder—before their feet had even touched down on the floor of the mosque—I got a call saying that one of them must have given orders to shell Kabul because the electricity station had just been hit. ‘Shame on you,’ I said, as I took them all out to the airport. ‘You are devastating your own country.’ ”