by Robert Lacey
Bush invited the crown prince to the White House, to Camp David, to the Kentucky Derby, and, the ultimate honor, to his ranch in Crawford, Texas, but Abdullah rebuffed every offer. In desperation, Washington suggested the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York—a flattering reference to the 1945 meeting between FDR and Abdullah’s father that had established the famed “special” relationship. Abdullah was unimpressed. He even declined to be shifted when George W.’s father put in a personal phone call to reassure him that his son’s “heart was in the right place.”
The crown prince had been stoking his anger since the spring.
“Don’t they see,” he had asked in a visit to Morocco that June, “what is happening to Palestinian children, women, and the elderly?”
Now his message was complete, and the time had come to deliver it. “I reject people who say that when you kill a Palestinian, it is defense; when a Palestinian kills an Israeli, it’s a terrorist act.”
The crown prince picked up the phone and asked to be put through to his ambassador in the United States.
As it happened, Bandar bin Sultan had been away from the phone that warm August night—he was taking a break at his home in Aspen—and by the time he got the message it was too late for him to call Riyadh. When uncle and nephew spoke the next day, George W. was on television, handling questions on the Middle East at a news conference. The two Saudi princes, one in Riyadh, one in Colorado, watched the president speaking in Texas—and Abdullah grew angrier than ever at the American’s total acceptance of the Israeli point of view.
“If the Palestinians are interested in a dialogue,” said the president in the apparently reasonable tone he reserved for his most provocative statements, “then I strongly urge Mr. Arafat to put 100 percent effort into solving the terrorist activity, stopping the terrorist activity. And I believe he can do a better job of doing that.”
The disdainful use of “terrorist activity” to describe the battle that Arabs saw as a fight for justice caused Abdullah to explode for the second time in twenty-four hours. He characterized this phrase in the same way as he did “Israel’s right to defend itself ”—as a disingenuous simplification.
Bandar must get to see Bush at once, instructed the crown prince, and within hours the ambassador had managed to get a message to Colin Powell, the secretary of state, and to Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser.
“We believe,” went the message, “there has been a strategic decision by the United States that its national interest in the Middle East is 100 percent based on [Israeli prime minister] Sharon.”
If this was America’s decision, it was her sovereign right to make it. But it was Saudi Arabia’s sovereign right, declared the crown prince, to pursue her own course in response to that.
“Starting from today, you’re Uruguay, as they say.” This particular phrase was contributed by Bandar, deriving from his version of a knock-knock joke that ended with the punchline, “You go Uruguay, and I’ll go mine.” He had taken notes while Abdullah spoke to him on the phone, then amplified his uncle’s thoughts, as he used to do with Fahd’s, to craft a message that would, in his opinion, press the particular buttons of his listeners.
“A government that doesn’t keep its finger on the pulse of what its people are feeling will not survive,” continued the message, which ran, in the end, to twenty-five pages of Bandar’s notes. “Look at what happened to the Shah. Sometimes we come to a crossroads; we have to make choices, and we are not afraid to make the strategic shift that our own interests dictate.”
It was a firm and extensive warning, and to emphasize the point, Abdullah picked up the phone again. He ordered General Salih bin Ali Al-Muhayya, the Saudi chief of staff, who had arrived in Washington the previous day for the annual review of Saudi-U.S. military collaboration, to return to Riyadh immediately. The general was instructed not to meet with any Americans. A delegation of some forty senior Saudi officers who were flying to join Muhayya were ordered off their plane. The annual review was canceled.
“That’s the moment the U.S. knew they had a problem,” remembers one of the Saudis involved.
“Hey, you guys scared us,” said Powell to Bandar.
“The hell with you,” replied the prince. “We scared ourselves.”
The Saudis had expected that the White House would take four or five days to get back to them. In the event, George W. Bush’s personal, two-page letter of conciliation arrived in less than thirty-six hours—and it was a revelation.
“What came through,” commented one surprised Saudi, “was the humane part of George W. He was very, very positive.”
Writing warmly, the president totally accepted Abdullah’s point about the blood of innocent people—“Palestinian, Israeli, Jewish, Christian, or Muslim”—and he told the crown prince that he rejected the humiliation of individuals, which the Saudi leader took to be a response to his complaint about the Israeli soldier’s boot. Most important of all, the president set down quite explicitly his acceptance of the “Two-State Solution”—the creation of a viable Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
This was new—“groundbreaking,” felt the Saudis. No U.S. president had given such a strong commitment before, and it staked out a U.S. position that was clearly different from that of Sharon. Bush’s letter had “things in it,” according to someone who saw it, “[that] had never been put in writing. He wrote constructively about the status of Jerusalem and the settlement of the refugee issue. He actually said, ‘I support two states.’ ”
The letter offered the prospect of a peace settlement with which the Saudis could live, and Bandar carried it back to Riyadh to discuss its contents personally with Abdullah. The U.S. president had even expressed a willingness to take a more active role in the peace process himself.
In the days that followed Abdullah got in touch with other Arab leaders—the presidents of Egypt and Syria and the king of Jordan—to share the good news. He briefed them on his message, and on the personal reply that his protest had prompted. He summoned Yasser Arafat from a visit to South Africa to come and read both documents: when Abdullah felt stirred to action, nothing much stood in his way. He got Arafat to give a written pledge that he would meet Bush’s conditions for restarting peace talks.
“ ‘This is your last chance,’ we told him,” according to Bandar. “ ‘You can’t screw it up like you did with Clinton.’ ”
Arafat’s pledge was sent to Washington with the crown prince’s own response to Bush’s letter, and by early September Bandar was back in Washington, working out the details. On Friday, September 7, his U.S. counterparts seemed ready to move on a peace initiative, and over the weekend he discussed definite steps—a speech by Colin Powell, by Bush himself (the Saudis’ preferred option), or possibly both. Yasser Arafat was coming to the UN later in the month; Would Bush agree to meet him? The president did not like the idea.
“Arafat is a liar,” he complained.
“We know that he’s a liar,” responded the Saudis. No one in Riyadh liked Arafat. Cabinet members knew they were in disfavor when the king assigned them to escort the Palestinian leader on one of his regular fund-raising trips—“I had him once for nearly a week,” recalls one minister with a shudder. “All those kisses and licks!”
Bush should hear out what the Palestinian said, the Saudis counseled, then hold him to whatever he promised
“If he goes back on himself,” said Bandar, “we won’t trouble you with him again.”
“Suddenly,” remembered the Saudi ambassador, “I felt . . . that we really were going to have a major initiative here that could save all of us from ourselves—mostly—and from each other. . . . The happiest man in the world on Monday night was Bandar bin Sultan. I was in the swimming pool [of his palatial residence in McLean, Virginia] smoking a cigar. I gave myself a day off because I had worked the whole weekend. I had been to Saudi Arabia . . . out with the [Bush] response, back with our response. I worked on the weekend up
to three o’clock, four o’clock in the morning . . . I worked all Monday. And I said to my office, ‘Tuesday, I’m taking the day off.’ ”
Tuesday was September 11, 2001.
PART THREE
AL-QAEDA COMES HOME
A.D. 2001-2009 (A.H. 1422-1430)
If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.
—Guiseppe di Lampedusa, The Leopard
CHAPTER 24
Fifteen Flying Saudis
Prince Khaled Al-Faisal saw the smoke from the first hit pouring out of the tower on television.
“I was in a meeting in Riyadh with three other people,” he recalls. “The TV was on CNN, and when I saw the smoke coming out, I put the sound up higher. The commentator said that a small plane had hit the twin towers. I was just thinking that it looked like a lot of smoke for a small plane to make, when suddenly—Oh my God, what’s this?—I saw the second plane, a huge airliner, come flying sideways into the picture. I actually watched as that second plane flew straight into the tower and exploded.”
The broadcaster’s tone changed.
“It was quite clear to me,” says the prince, who was then governor of the southern region of Asir—from which, it turned out, four of the hijackers came—“that this could not be an accident. It was a deliberate attack. I turned to my companions and said, ‘Look at your watches. What’s the time? Everything is going to change. We live now in a different world from the one we inhabited an hour ago.’ ”
Then he added—“I only hope these men are not Saudis.”
Khaled Al-Hubayshi hoped the very opposite. On September 11, 2001, the young Jeddah-born jihadi was staying in an Al-Qaeda guesthouse in Kabul, holding his little Sony portable radio clamped against his ear. Like hundreds of other young extremists then training in Afghanistan, he was listening as reports came in of the very first plane hitting its target. They had all been told that “something” was about to happen.
“The leader of our guesthouse had told us to start listening to our radios a couple of hours before it happened,” he recalls. “He knew something was coming, but he did not tell us what it would be. He probably did not know himself. I later heard that the guys on the first Boston plane [Mohammed Atta and his team] sent back a message to report they had gotten through the airport security and were getting on board. So Bin Laden knew that the operation had started. As the news came through we could not believe it. Everyone was around the big radios cheering. We had never imagined that we had the power to hit America like that.
“But after a time, as I heard the stories of people jumping out of the towers, I began to wonder. All those thousands of civilians dead. What had this got to do with defending the Muslims? And then I started to think about my own survival—Am I going to stay? Am I going to fight?”
Like Prince Khaled in Riyadh, Al-Hubayshi realized that life could never be the same again.
“The moment we heard about the attacks on New York we knew, sure as hell, that the Yanqees were not going to take it lying down. They were going to come after us.
“Shit! I wondered. What’s going to happen next?”
Fouad Al-Farhan, a young student in Jeddah, had little doubt that the hijackers were Saudis, and when the names were released he tried to find out more about them—particularly the Al-Ghamdi boys, Ahmed, Hamza, and Saeed from Al-Baha, north of Asir.
“I had heard strange things about them,” he recalls. “One of them slept in a room with a view of a graveyard right outside his window—now why did he do that? It’s not natural. And the other was famous for coming out of evening prayers and pointing up at the sky. ‘You see that star?’ he’d say. ‘I can tell you that it’s not a star. It’s an American spy satellite. It’s looking down on us. It’s filming us right now.’
“So, based on what I can discover, my explanation of 9/11 is down to defective human mechanisms—wackos. And every human society has wackos. But we have to accept that most of them were Saudi wackos. Fifteen out of nineteen. We cannot shift the blame. If you subject a society to all those pressures—the rigid religion, the tribe, the law, the traditions, the family, the police, and, above all, the oppressive political system in which you can’t express yourself—you are going to end up with wackos. And if you then present them with the doctrine of takfeer, the idea that all their problems come from outside themselves, and that you should try to destroy people who do not share your own particular view of God, then you are going to end up with some folks who are very dangerous indeed.”
As someone who had himself committed terrorist acts, Mansour Al-Nogaidan knew the perils of takfeer. He had been speaking out against it for months. After his latest release from jail, his friends had found him a mosque in Riyadh where he was well looked after. It was a cushy billet. But Mansour had a new gospel to propagate. While reflecting in jail on the rigidity of the Wahhabi religious establishment, he had come to be offended by their refusal to accept any questioning—and that was not a criticism that the elders of his local community wanted to hear. They forced him out. Moving on to a career in journalism, the ex-imam was similarly outspoken. Not content with reading outside the red lines, he insisted on writing outside them and started to make a name for himself as an outpoken columnist.
When it came to 9 /11, however, Mansour had to confess that he was nonplussed. He was visiting his family in Buraydah when he saw the strike against the second tower live on television, and he found himself lost for words. He just stared blankly at the horror on the screen, appalled and silenced by the biblical smoke and destruction.
“I was shocked to my core. I didn’t know what I thought for three days. Where had it come from? It just defied human thinking.”
The demon center forward had scored a goal the crowd would never forget. Like Juhayman Al-Otaybi, Osama Bin Laden astonished his enemies with a coup for which no one was seriously prepared. Twenty years earlier Juhayman’s anger had transformed the Kingdom. Now Osama Bin Laden’s astonishing assault on America’s sovereignty and sense of security would transform the world—and America in particular.
“When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world,” George W. Bush had declared to the voters of Iowa the previous year. “It was Us versus Them, and it was clear who ‘them’ was. Today, we are not so sure who the ‘they’ are.”
Clarity was restored by 9 /11. Once more there was something of which America, the greatest power in the history of the world, could feel com fortingly afraid. As Gore Vidal remarked, “We desperately want a huge, dangerous enemy.”
Bin Laden attacked America for playing two ends against the middle. By financing Islamic extremism in Afghanistan in the 1980s and allying with the House of Saud while also supporting the Israeli cause at the expense of the Arabs, Washington had sent a conflicted foreign policy message that managed to provoke more death and destruction in the mainland United States than forty-five years of Cold War. America was the “far Satan,” in Osama’s eyes, because it was the patron and supporter of the Al-Saud, the “near Satan” that was his ultimate target. Understandably wounded and angry as they surveyed the smoking ruins of downtown Manhattan, few Americans could see that it was through the selection of contradictory friends that their successive governments had picked themselves this lethal foe.
Riyadh was suffering from an equivalent denial, as Robert Jordan, George W. Bush’s Texas lawyer, discovered when he arrived a few weeks after 9/11 to take up his post as U.S. ambassador.
“Many senior princes believed it was a Jewish plot. Nayef [the interior minister] actually said it was a Zionist conspiracy in a public statement. Even Abdullah was suspicious. They had latched onto this report that three thousand Jewish employees had not gone into work that day. It was an urban myth that has since been discredited, but at the time it was the only way they could make sense of it.”
“Ana ma talabtah, bas Allah jabha”—“I didn’t ask for it, but God brought it,” was the attitude of many Saudis.
“To accept that Saudis
were major players in 9/11,” remembers the Arab News editor Khaled Al-Maeena, “was like accepting that your son was a serial killer. You had to refuse to believe it.”
The irony of the Jewish conspiracy theories was that a group of Arabs—and no one but Arabs—had finally hit the enemy in a way that was quite extraordinary. In terms of organization, surprise, and daring, 9 /11 was an aggressive and murderous stroke of sheer brilliance. Why, if you were a proud and upstanding Arab, would you want to hand the credit to the Zionists?
“That was typical Arab victim talk,” says the Jeddah journalist Somaya Jabarti. “When we engage in conspiracy theories we are disempowering ourselves. We are guilty of passive thinking, saying that someone else is always responsible.”
“Bin Laden was evil and murderous,” says Prince Amr Al-Faisal. “As a Muslim I fiercely and totally condemn what he did. But the Saudis are daring people, and it is not surprising that one of the most daring terrorists in the world should be a Saudi. As many Muslims saw it, the falling of the twin towers was a lesson to the pride and complacency of the Americans. It gave them just a little taste of what the Muslims have been going through.”
Out in the Saudi heartland most people agreed. When Mohammed Al-Harbi, then a twenty-five-year-old chemistry teacher, went into school in Buraydah on the day after 9/11, there was a happy buzz in the staff room.