by Robert Lacey
It was the first of Al-Qaeda’s international spectaculars, and a chilling demonstration of the organization’s ability to orchestrate histrionic attacks at a distance of thousands of miles. Osama Bin Laden’s string of threats from Afghan tents and caves no longer seemed so windy or rhetorical.
The atrocity demanded a response from the American government, which had been virtually paralyzed that summer by the revelations of the affair between the president, Bill Clinton, and Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern. When Crown Prince Abdullah went to Washington in 1998 for his first visit as the de facto Saudi ruler, he was dismayed that two-thirds of his meeting with the president was consumed by talk of the scandal. Abdullah could not understand how the leader of what was now the world’s only superpower could be in such straits over an extramarital affair.
“You are the rock,” he said with concern as the two men parted. “The mountain is not swayed by the breeze.”
Many Saudis saw significance in the fact that Ms. Lewinsky was Jewish. The intern’s relationship with the president had involved Clinton unzipping his trousers to receive oral sexual favors from Ms. Lewinsky, and this impressed many as neatly symbolizing Jewish influence on the American centers of power.
On August 20, 1998, Operation Infinite Reach launched thirteen Tomahawk missiles against a suspected chemical weapons factory in Sudan, which turned out to be an innocent pharmaceutical plant, while seventy-five cruise missiles were fired from U.S. warships in the Indian Ocean in the direction of the recently built terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. The error of intelligence concerning the factory, coupled with the total failure of the missiles to reach a single member of the terrorist leadership that was their target, showed how ill-prepared and ill-equipped the United States was for the challenges of the new age of terrorism. It also gave Bin Laden the international stature he had sought for so long.
“By the grace of God, I am alive!” he exulted in a crackling wireless transmission.
As he gave thanks to God for his escape, however, Osama read out the name of one Saudi who was not so fortunate—Saleh Mutabaqani, a young man from a prominent Jeddah family who had been training fighters in one of the camps. Saleh was the solitary Saudi casualty, and Bin Laden proclaimed the young man a martyr.
“I remember meeting Saleh after he first came back from the war against the Soviets,” recalls his cousin Mustapha. “He was a very cool guy, very peaceful. He seemed very soft—and also holy. I told him the bad jokes that I liked to say in those days, and he just did not react. It was like he was from another world. Later we heard that he was the head of a group, that he could make bombs, that he could strip and fix a machine gun in the dark—that he could do things you would never have guessed. Lots of people talk about fighting for God. Saleh really did it. The government took away his passport around that time, but somehow he went back.
“It was a shock to all of us when Bin Laden announced Saleh’s name as a martyr on CNN. The press came asking questions. But the family said it must have been some mistake of spelling—they said they didn’t know who he was.”
In the middle of September 1998, Prince Turki Al-Faisal was once again circling in a plane over Kandahar airport. Three months earlier he had brought a religious sheikh to reinforce his mission. This time he brought along more earthly “muscle”—General Naseem Rama, the head of Pakistani intelligence. If Mullah Omar got awkward, he would have to face down his principal boss and official paymaster.
“We’ve been waiting for you,” said the prince as he picked up his tea in the same Kandahar guesthouse he had visited in June. “You gave us your word that you were going to deliver Osama Bin Laden to us.”
Unfailingly gentle in his speech, Prince Turki Al-Faisal can also direct his gaze with an intensity that is intimidating. He has the hawklike features and piercing eyes of his father, King Faisal—and he evidently disconcerted Mullah Omar, for the Taliban leader gave him no answer. Instead he stood up abruptly and left the room.
It was a long twenty minutes before he returned, and as the intelligence chief waited, sipping tea with his fellow spymaster, he wondered who the Taliban leader was talking to behind the door—the cohorts, he later concluded, of Omar’s shura (advisory council).
“There must have been a translator’s mistake,” said the one-eyed mullah unapologetically as he reentered the room. “I never told you we would hand over Bin Laden.”
Now it was Prince Turki’s turn to be disconcerted.
“But, Mullah Omar,” he expostulated, “you did not say this only one time!”
Only six weeks previously, he pointed out, in the month of July, Omar’s principal adviser, Mullah Wakil Ahmed Mutawwakil, had traveled to Saudi Arabia for the express purpose of working out the Islamic formalities of Bin Laden’s return with the Saudi government and to negotiate the terms of the handover.
It was just two weeks after that, however, on August 7, 1998, that Bin Laden had launched his lethal attacks on America’s East African embassies, and that had clearly changed the situation. By several accounts, Mullah Omar had been furious with his guest for taking such drastic action without even extending the courtesy of informing him. But the Taliban chief was trapped by the enthusiasm with which the community of radical Muslims around the world, and particularly in Kandahar, had greeted the twin attacks. How could the leader of Afghanistan’s Islamic revolution now disavow the man who had become the most admired jihadi on earth?
“Why are you doing this?” he blustered angrily at Prince Turki. “Why are you persecuting and harassing this courageous, valiant Muslim?”
As he played for time, the Taliban leader was effectively admitting his lack of maneuvering space over the surrender of Bin Laden—and that America’s attacks on Afghan targets had cornered him still further. At least twenty Afghans had been killed by the Tomahawk missiles. Omar could not now do a deal with their murderers. Nor could he meekly present Turki, America’s surrogate, with the jihadi hero that America had tried, and failed, to assassinate.
Turki wondered if the Taliban leader was on drugs as Omar sweated and his voice grew ever shriller.
“He looked ill,” remembers the prince. “It was clearly the strain of the moment. He was being called to account—and in front of his patron in the Pakistani ISI. I have thought about that moment a lot, and I am sure it was the American action that had pushed him to go back on his word.”
Bin Laden, exclaimed Omar, was “a man of honor, a man of distinction.” There had always been an element of awe in the simple mullah’s attitude toward the wealthy, world-traveled Saudi warrior—gratitude, almost, that this Islamic champion should have chosen Afghanistan for his base. “Taqwa,” the code name that the Taliban would later assign to Bin Laden, means fear or reverence for God.
“Instead of seeking to persecute him,” proposed the Afghan leader, “you should put your hand in ours and his, and fight against the infidels!” America, he insisted, was the great enemy of the Muslims.
This was getting into dangerous territory, and, sure enough, the mullah stumbled over the boundary. The hospitality that Saudi Arabia gave to U.S. forces, he declared, meant that the Kingdom was, in effect, “an occupied country.” Bin Laden himself could not have put it more offensively—and as he heard it, Prince Turki felt sure that Bin Laden himself must have fed this sort of thinking directly to Omar.
“I am not going to take any more of this,” the prince announced furiously, rising to his feet and making for the door. “But you must remember, Mullah Omar, what you are doing now is going to bring a lot of harm to the Afghan people.”
Within days the Saudi chargé d’affaires was withdrawn from Kabul—it was the end of official Saudi relations with the Taliban. But it was also the end of the last and best practical chance to protect the world from the destructive anger and ambition of Osama Bin Laden.
CHAPTER 23
New Century
For long periods in the 1990s, according to Prince Bandar bin Sultan, relations
between the United States and Saudi Arabia had lapsed into stagnation. “Autopilot” was how the former F-5 squadron leader described the condition. Even before the paralysis induced by the Lewinsky scandal, Bandar told David Ottaway of the Washington Post, the United States and the Kingdom were largely ignoring each other. The two countries just shrugged their shoulders and got on with “doing their own thing.”
The Saudi ambassador blamed the problem on the elusive and political character of Bill Clinton himself. Dealing with this U.S. president, he complained, was like dealing with Yasser Arafat—you never knew if he was saying yes or no. The Saudis had devised the word la’am to characterize the slipperiness of the Palestinian leader, a running together of the Arabic words la (no) and nam (yes) because Arafat was forever saying both at the same time. The same went for President Clinton, in the opinion of Bandar—who was speaking, by the mid-’90s, with the authority of the longest serving foreign ambassador to Washington, the dean of the diplomatic corps.
Clinton had also perfected the Arafat trick of extracting large sums of money from the Saudis while giving little or nothing in return. In 1989, as governor of Arkansas, long before his plans to run for president were even guessed at, Clinton approached Bandar for the unprecedented sum of $23 million to help the University of Arkansas establish a Middle East Center. To the surprise of Bandar, whose largest charitable contribution to that date had been $1 million to Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” anti-drugs campaign, King Fahd agreed, and the money was eventually paid. But the Kingdom had to wait two years after the departure of U.S. ambassador Chas Freeman in August 1992 for Clinton to appoint a replacement (the former governor of Mississippi, Ray Mabus)—and money was never far from the top of the president’s agenda. When Louis Freeh, the FBI director, attended a key meeting with Prince Abdullah convened in Washington in 1998 to pressure the Saudis into providing more help with the investigation of the Khobar Towers bombing, he was astonished that the president “raised the subject [of the investigation] only to tell the crown prince that he understood the Saudis’ reluctance to cooperate. . . . Then he hit Abdullah up for a contribution to the Clinton Presidential Library.”16
Wyche Fowler, the former U.S. senator from Georgia who had become ambassador to Riyadh in 1996 and was present at the meeting, contradicts this account. “Louis Freeh did a great job building up our intelligence links with the Saudis,” he says. “But in my opinion, his recollection on this is incorrect. President Clinton made no such request of the crown prince in our presence.”
As the Americans saw it, the problem lay in quite the opposite direction. It was a matter of Prince Bandar falling down on the job. By his own admission, the ambassador went into an emotional decline when his friend George H. W. Bush failed to secure reelection to the White House in 1992. That in itself was enough to create distance between Bandar and the new president. Foreign diplomats, and particularly senior diplomats like Bandar, were not expected to take sides in U.S. elections—let alone travel, as Bandar did in November 1992, to spend election night in Houston close to his friend George with the deliberate intention of demonstrating his personal support.
Bandar was unapologetic.
“There’s nothing more bonding than going to war together,” he said nostalgically of his Desert Storm days with Bush, Baker, Scowcroft, and Cheney. “I did have a very special relationship with President Bush.”
Bandar had medical problems. Two of his vertebrae had been crushed in a crash landing in his fighter days, resulting in nerve damage that nearly lost him the use of his right leg. He had to walk with a stick for a time. And in contrast to his ebullient exterior, the prince also suffered, Churchill style, from bouts of “black dog” depression that kept him away from Washington for months at a time. In the late 1990s the ambassador became known as “the invisible dean” for his failure to attend the functions that went with his diplomatic duties. He even failed to appear at his own embassy for Saudi National Day.
So through the crucial, final years of the twentieth century, when, we now know, Saudi Arabia’s terrorist mastermind was building up the infrastructure to launch his spectacular twenty-first-century attacks on America, the principal channel in U.S.-Saudi communications was out of action—or, to say the least, operating only intermittently.
This tale of failed potential should have ended with the success of George H. W. Bush’s son George W. in the election of November 2000. “Talk about a replay!” declared the delighted Bandar as he sat down again with David Ottaway to tick off the names of old friends returning from previous administrations—as vice president, Dick Cheney; secretary of state, Colin Powell; national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice; and even Paul Wolfowitz, whose Defense Department efforts in the Gulf War had made him, in the prince’s opinion, “more pro-Saudi than us.” After eight blank and largely wasted years, it was back to business as usual for “Bandar Bush.” Yet even as he celebrated, the ambassador had a nagging sense that it was all “too good to be true.”
1945: ZIONIST CONNECTION
In the autumn of 1945, a few months after he came into office, President Harry Truman held a meeting in Washington with William Eddy, the U.S. chief of mission in Saudi Arabia, and with other U.S. diplomats to the major Arab countries. There had been widespread anger in the Arab world at the favor that America was showing toward the Zionist effort to create a Jewish state in Palestine, and the diplomats had been assembled to explain the reasons for Arab opposition.
But nothing he heard appeared to change Truman’s mind.
“I’m sorry, gentlemen,” said the president, summing up his position with the utmost candor, “but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism. I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.”
Truman was not quite correct. The U.S. Census of 1940 showed 107,420 individuals classified “white” who gave their “mother tongue” as Arabic, and census analysts reckon the real count of Arab-Americans at three times that. But the president’s political point remained. By the 1940s the Jews were organized politically in America in a way that the Arabs never were, and, to date, have never chosen to be. Today there are some 3.5 million Arab-Americans (a good number of them Christian), and their political clout does not begin to match that of the 6.4 million U.S. Jews. Following the hard-fought creation of Israel in 1948, every successive crisis in the Middle East would increase pro-Israeli feeling inside America—and then came the emergence of so-called Christian Zionism in the 1980s. Popular evangelists like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson preached that the return of Jews to the Holy Land had happened in accordance with biblical prophecy—“to stand against Israel is to stand against God,” proclaimed Falwell in 1981.
These Christian Zionist teachings were the foreign policy equivalent of “right to life”—a litmus-test issue by which American evangelicals made their decisions in the voting booth—and the support of Falwell and other Christian fundamentalists proved crucial to George W. Bush’s disputed election as president in 2000. Bush the Younger never endorsed Christian Zionism in so many words, but, as he came into office in 2001, the born-again Christian acted as if he believed it. One of his earliest and most warmly welcomed guests in the White House was Ariel Sharon, the hard-line Israeli prime minister notorious for turning a blind eye to the massacre of Palestinians when he was a general during the 1982 war in Lebanon. It was Sharon’s aggressive visit to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount in September 2000 that had largely provoked the new, bitterly violent Palestinian intifada, and the Bush administration appeared to endorse Sharon’s shoot-from-the-hip style. Asked about Israeli attempts to assassinate Palestinian leaders, Vice President Cheney said he saw “some justification in their trying to protect themselves by preempting.”
Such unconcealed favoritism was not what the Saudis expected of any U.S. administration—and certainly not from the son of the man who had come to their rescue in the Gulf War. In London, the Kingdom’s acerbic ambassador Ghazi Algosaibi wr
ote a column in the newspaper Al-Hayat speculating on the psychological complexes that “Little George” was evidently feeling toward “Big George.” These hang-ups had made the new president a menace to the whole world in record time, wrote the ambassador in comments that made it to the top of Fox News: “Little George” deserved a special medal—“the Prize for Turning Friends into Enemies Without Effort.”
The blunt speaking of Algosaibi had been disavowed in the past by his more diplomatic superiors, but not on this occasion.
“I did not make him a writer, I found him a writer,” Abdullah responded to the White House when it lodged a formal, high-level protest at the ambassador’s comments.
The crown prince was losing his patience with America.
The image on the TV screen was painful. An Israeli soldier was placing his boot on the head of a Palestinian woman, pinning her down to the ground. When he saw it on the night of August 23, 2001, Crown Prince Abdullah went ballistic.
“A woman being beaten by a man?” recalls one senior Saudi official. “He just felt this was the ultimate insult.”
Abdullah was sitting in the elegant, dark-paneled study of his home beside the Red Sea in Jeddah. On the walls were pictures of his father, some Koranic inscriptions, and a selection of the Orientalist paintings that he loved. Unusually for a Saudi palace, there was not a trace of gold, nor a chandelier in sight.
The crown prince’s rage boiled over.
“Is the blood of an Israeli child more expensive and holy than the blood of a Palestinian child?” he asked.
Like his subjects, Abdullah had been watching the cable news channels’ coverage of the Palestinian intifada, and he was dismayed at the round-the-clock images of tanks, tears, and suffering. Some people called it the “Al-Jazeera” or “CNN” effect, but it could also have been called the CPA (Crown Prince Abdullah) effect. The new American president had expressed the hope that the Saudi leader would come to visit him soon, but Abdullah refused to consider the idea. He was personally indignant, and he had little doubt what ordinary Saudis would think of him if he went.