Inside the Kingdom

by Robert Lacey

  It was small consolation to Frank Gardner—and still less to Louise Cumbers, the widow of Simon—but the Saudis were very proud of their roundup rate. Early in the troubles, in December 2003, they had published the names of the twenty-six most-wanted terrorists, and within a year they had killed or captured twenty-three of them.

  Intelligence later revealed that Abdul Aziz Al-Muqrin and the other leaders of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula had not wanted to attack Riyadh in May 2003. Their local cells were not ready, they had argued in their intercepted phone calls back to headquarters: their men were not sufficiently trained, nor were they sufficiently numerous. But from his refuge in Waziristan, Osama had insisted.

  It was a grievous mistake, for the attacks of May 2003 turned a complacent giant into an implacable enemy. Girding his loins for a modern Sibillah, Crown Prince Abdullah angrily swore that every single “monster” would be brought to justice. Any that resisted would be killed out of hand. Prince Nayef may have blamed 9 /11 on the Zionists, but now his Ministry of the Interior went for the terrorists with ruthless efficiency. Following the inroads they had made in their most-wanted list, they rounded up another six hundred or so terrorist suspects, along with their bomb-making equipment, bomb belts, and thousands of weapons that had been stockpiled for a major campaign around the Kingdom.

  The same went for the general population. Until May 2003, the bearded, short-thobed young men who turned up and prayed so zealously in the local mosque had been viewed with benevolence and even approval by their neighbors. Their jihad in Afghanistan was generally supported. But their bombings on home territory changed all that. May 2003 was the Kingdom’s 9 /11. Ordinary Saudis looked at their salaries, their housing, and their children at school, and had no difficulty deciding on which side their interests lay. Feelings intensified after the attacks of November 2003, in which many of the victims were Arabs. Images of Muslim blood soaking black abayas were the final nails in the coffin of Al-Qaeda’s Arabian campaign.

  “That was when the Saudis really ‘got religion,’ ” says the U.S. diplomat David Rundell.

  Until the attacks inside the Kingdom, the attitude of the general population toward Al-Qaeda had been that of the Americans who let the IRA raise funds in Boston—“It’s not really our problem.”

  “They were not strongly in favor of what Al-Qaeda was doing in the wider world,” says Rundell, “but if three young guys with long beards moved in down the street, coming and going at odd times, no one thought to tell the police. That changed overnight. You had fathers taking their sons in to see trusted princes if they thought that the boy was going off the rails. This was partly to help the boy and partly to protect the family’s reputation. Family reputation counts for a lot here. Launching attacks inside the Kingdom—that was Bin Laden’s ‘own goal.’ ”

  The attacks also emboldened the government’s attitude toward the fundamentalists. So this was the worst they could do? There was a new toughness in official pronouncements. Appeasement was over—and that gave strength to those who would modernize. People were no longer so scared to be secular and started to hit back at those who had sought to bully them.

  “Get lost, you terrorists!” indignant women were heard to shout at religious policemen who ventured to correct their style of dress.

  Up in Buraydah, Mohammed Al-Harbi, the short-bearded chemistry teacher, felt encouraged to speak out again. When school convened on the Saturday following the first Al-Hamra bombing in Riyadh, he took the microphone at morning assembly to read out a government statement. Three of the bombers had already been identified, according to the Ministry of the Interior: they were connected to Osama Bin Laden, a force for evil whose followers were cancer cells in the body politic.

  The next day another teacher, long-bearded and short-thobed, took the microphone to address the assembled students. They should not waste their time listening to the news these days, was his message—nor should they listen to those who might offer their opinions on the news. People who presumed to judge and brand others as “evil” should be considered evil themselves. There was a certain hypocrisy in this, coming from an adherent of the fierce takfeer (excommunication) school, but the other long-bearded teachers all nodded in sage approval.

  In the days that followed, the Ministry of Education sent a circular to all schools. It was important to teach pupils about the dangers of extremism, it stated: pupils must understand the need for tolerance and the acceptance of others. So in the spirit of the circular, Mohammed posted an article on the school notice board—“The People of the Caves Are Going to Hell” by the liberal columnist Hamad Al-Salmi. By “People of the Caves” Al-Salmi meant the members of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan who were now sending gullible young followers to their deaths inside the Kingdom.

  But next day Mohammed found the article torn into pieces on the floor, and he was confronted aggressively by the teacher who had done it. The writer of the article, Al-Salmi, was a “secular,” said the teacher—no one but God was entitled to sentence anyone to hell. When Mohammed’s mobile started ringing day and night with threatening messages, he thought it was so much bluster—until he came into school one morning and found a neat bullet hole drilled through the window of his office.

  This was the point at which the young teacher decided to go to his headmaster and ask permission to bring in the police. But he discovered that his conservative opponents had already acted: they had framed charges that accused him of “mocking religion,” the first step toward an indictment for apostasy—for which the sentence was death.

  There were more than a dozen accusations that had clearly been gathered by his enemies on the teaching staff. He was accused of consuming alcohol in his chemistry laboratory and also of taking drugs. He was said to have talked positively about infidels and disrespectfully about religion. He had closed the classroom windows during a prayer call; he had refused to allow his pupils to leave the class to perform their preprayer ablutions; he had told them to shave their beards.

  “How could I do that?” Mohammed protested at his trial in the local shariah court. “I’ve got a beard myself.”

  “You call that a beard?” scoffed the hairy qadi, looking at the teacher’s neatly clipped goatee with scorn.

  Mohammed had not helped his cause by ridiculing the revered Abdul Aziz Bin Baz. “How does he know the earth’s flat if he’s blind and can’t see anything?” he was accused of saying, and he did not deny that he had said it. Nor did he deny having praised the kindness of Shia folk after a Shia had stopped to help him fix a flat tire on his way to school. He managed to fight off the accusation that he had learned to be a magician—certainly a death sentence, since practicing magic is held to be incompatible with Islam. But in the end his sentence was severe enough for the crime of “mocking religion”: forty months in prison and 750 public lashes in downtown Buraydah.

  The liberal media came to the rescue. Riyadh newspapers ran mocking coverage of the prosecution and ridiculed the verdict. Within days Prince Nayef had instructed the local governor to shut the case down—to the fury of the judge.

  “You were supposed to be killed,” he protested as he reluctantly let Mohammed go.

  As the bombs were going off in the Saudi capital, the columnist Hussein Al-Shobokshi wrote of his dream of a better place—of how, twenty years or so in the future, these dreadful shootings would be a distant memory. He imagined himself flying into Jeddah from Riyadh on Saudia Airlines (since this was a dream, the airline was privatized and the plane landed on time) to be met by his daughter, who would then be twenty-seven, qualified and working as a high-powered trial lawyer (female lawyers cannot at present appear, let alone speak, in the courts of Saudi Arabia).

  “How was the trip, Daddy?” his daughter asked, as she drove her car smoothly through the Jeddah traffic.

  “Great,” replied Hussein. “I attended the World Conference of Human Rights in Riyadh, where the Kingdom received a special award for the fairness and efficiency of its judicial s
ystem.”

  It was at this point that Shobokshi’s readers realized, if they had not before, that the dreamer had to be joking. Hussein Shobokshi is a larger-than-life character in his midforties, almost as broad as he is tall, his features adorned with black designer stubble. His father, Ali, was the enterprising journalist who rented his floodlights to assist the recapture of the Grand Mosque in 1979. In July 2003 Hussein was the host of his own popular cable TV show, with an equally popular newspaper column to match.

  “I went to congratulate our neighbor Fouad Tarshlo on his marriage to the daughter of Sheikh Golehan Al-Otaybi,” Hussein imagined himself saying from the passenger seat. “Then I flew up to Buraydah to meet the mayor, Reza Baqir.”

  The satire lay in the surnames. It was quite impossible to imagine a Hijazi (Tarshlo) being accepted into the family of a Nejdi Sheikh (Al-Otaybi); while a Shia (Reza Baqir) could not hope to get work in a Wahhabi stronghold like Buraydah as a street cleaner, let alone become mayor.

  “I had dinner,” wrote Shobokshi, “in a smart new restaurant in Al-Shumaysi.” This was the puritannical Riyadh neighborhood next door to Mansour Al-Nogaidan’s Al-Suwaydi, now notorious as the site of Frank Gardner’s shooting.

  “Hurry up,” Hussein told his daughter. “I want to get home to watch the television. The minister of finance is on tonight, getting grilled by the Shura members on all the details of the budget.”

  Perhaps it was this final fantasy that went a step too far. When the Saudi budget is published every year, no less than 40 percent (166.9 billion riyals in the budget for 2008) is labeled “Other Sectors,” which includes defense, national security, intelligence, direct investment outside the country, and, most interesting of all, how much of the national pie is paid into the coffers of the royal family.

  Hussein Shobokshi himself reckons it was his religious imaginings that got him into real trouble. Toward the end of his “dream” he expressed his intention of going to the Grand Mosque in Mecca to listen to the teachings of a learned member of the supreme ulema, Sheikh Taha Al-Maliki. With a name like that, the sheikh could only be a Sufi.

  The call came within hours—from Hussein’s editor in chief.

  “I’ve had ten calls already,” he said, “from the Ministry of Information.” Shobokshi was banned from being published, with immediate effect, and when he got to the TV studio, he discovered a message canceling his talk show—plus an in-box jammed with angry e-mails.

  “Know your limits or you will be punished by God and by his followers on earth,” threatened one. Others called him a goat and a cow—and one wished him cancer. This was clearly not the moment to be jumping too heavily on the toes of the Kingdom’s religious and social prejudices. Bombs were still going off in Saudi streets, and there was also a practical legacy of the many young terrorists who had been captured—a lost generation with which both America and the Kingdom had to deal.

  CHAPTER 27

  Prodigal Sons

  By the autumn of 2003, Khaled Al-Hubayshi had been imprisoned for twenty months inside the wire cages of Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. As he had feared two years earlier, listening to the 9 /11 attacks on his little Sony portable in Kabul, the Yanqees had hit back.

  “The Afghans threw the foreign jihadis out of town almost at once,” he remembers. “They could see what was coming—in fact, they saved our lives. We were across the river, watching the bombs fall on the town. The explosions were like fireworks, but incredibly loud. It was overwhelming. There were missiles coming in as well as bombs. The Americans knew exactly what they were aiming for. When we got up next morning and went into town, our guesthouse had simply vanished. All that was left was a crater. It makes you wonder why, if they knew things like that, they didn’t send in special forces quietly to capture Bin Laden and take out the camps. As it was, they made their all-out attack and they missed him.”

  Al-Hubayshi joined the hundred or so Al-Qaeda loyalists who retreated to Tora Bora, Osama Bin Laden’s fortified cave complex in the mountains southeast of Kabul. The general presumption was that the holy warriors would load up their guns, rally round their leader, and defend this last stronghold to the death. But on December 7, 2001, Osama announced that he was leaving.

  “He deserted us,” remembers Al-Hubayshi bitterly. “After five weeks his people came round telling us to make our way to Pakistan as best we could and surrender to our embassies there. We had been ready to lay down our lives for him, and he couldn’t make the effort to speak to us personally. Today I think that I was made use of by Bin Laden—exploited, just like all the young kids who went to jihad. What did he care when he sent us over the horizon to die? He was as bad as the religious sheikhs back in Saudi who preached jihad in their sermons every Friday. How many of them ever sent their own sons to Afghanistan?”

  For six days the young Saudi and some thirty companions—Saudis, Algerians, and Moroccans—wandered through the desolate mountains of the Hindu Kush, barely surviving on dates and melted snow.

  “I had just three hunded dollars in cash left, and my Kalashnikov. Then I threw away my weapon. I knew that we had lost. The Americans had been dropping leaflets offering big money for captured Arabs, and that’s what happened. Some Afghan villagers sold us to the Pakistanis, who passed us on to the Marines. They shackled us and put blindfolds round our eyes, then they kicked the shit out of us. They took us to Kandahar. And that was the end of Khaled James Bond.”

  Several weeks later and still shackled, Khaled looked around as his captors removed his blindfold at the end of a long plane journey through the night. It was January 16, 2002.

  “The weather was humid and the sun was high in the sky,” he remembers. “And we all asked the same question—‘Where is this place?’ Was it Turkey? Or Morocco? Were we somewhere in the Gulf? We knew that the plane had come down once to land in the course of the journey, and then had taken off again. The Marines were under orders. Straightaway they told us the line of the qibla [the direction of Mecca] so that we knew which way to pray—and we could work out north, south, east, and west from the sun. But they would not tell us where we were. So we searched for clues everywhere. We saw these strange white birds with webbed feet, and we noticed that the Hummers were painted the color of sand. We asked the Red Cross when they came after a month, but they said they were not allowed to give us information like that.”

  In the end a British MI6 interrogator let Khaled in on the secret.

  “When I asked where we were he pointed to the front of his hat, and I saw that it had ‘Cuba’ written on it.

  “ ‘You could have gotten that anywhere,’ I said.

  “ ‘As you like.’ He shrugged.

  “ ‘Cuba?’ I said. ‘Fidel Castro? Bring me some cigars!’ ”

  Khaled Al-Hubayshi was one of 137 Saudis detained at the Guantánamo Bay detention facility, starting in January 2002, and he needed all his breeziness to survive.18

  “At first it was all confrontation,” he remembers, “—sheer, 100 percent aggression all the time. They hit us round the head and shouted. We went on hunger strike and threw shit at them from our buckets. But after a month or so most of us quieted down. I tried to work out how long I would be in this place. I reckoned four to six years—fifty, sixty, seventy months. It was no good hoping for a short time.

  “So then I had to decide. Was I going to fight battles every day? You don’t have to love your jailer, but why not be human? Once we got to know them, quite a few of the Americans turned out to be very decent people. I still have their e-mail addresses. A lot of them told us they thought the war in Iraq was a dreadful mistake. And as for the Puerto Rican guards, they really hated the Americans. They saw themselves as Yanqee slaves. On the second anniversary of 9/11, they gave us the thumbs-up. At mealtimes they would get us special spicy food. ‘You are soldiers,’ they said. ‘You fought for your cause like anyone else.’ ”

  The U.S. guards were replaced by rotation every six months.

  “For the first week or so the
new arrivals were always uptight and strict. Basically, they were scared. Then everybody mellowed out. In the end I was almost grateful for my time in Guantánamo. I developed this motto: ‘You will find rocks and stones across your path in life, and you can trip over them if you choose. Or you can use them to build yourself a wall of success.’ ”

  Along with his homemade self-help slogan, Al-Hubayshi retains two enduring memories of Guantánamo.

  “All day long we heard the braying and mooing from the crazies in Block D, the mental-health block. It was the only way they could survive, poor things, to pretend they were cows and donkeys or whatever. They went quiet every night at nine o’clock exactly. That was when the orderlies arrived with syringes. Then I remember the day that Donald Rumsfeld came to visit. He walked right by all of us in the cages, but he never turned his head toward us once. The man did not look us in the eye. I could see it so clearly. He was too embarrassed. I reckon America’s war director was ashamed of what America was doing.”

  If the shock of the 9 /11 attacks brutalized official U.S. attitudes toward human rights, it had the opposite effect on the Saudi government.

  “I had heard horror stories about Al-Haier,” says Khaled Al-Hubayshi, referring to the notorious Ministry of the Interior prison south of Riyadh. “But when I got there I was amazed. It was a five-star hotel compared with Guantánamo.”

  After three and a half years in Cuba, Al-Hubayshi was included in one of the earliest batches of Saudis to be flown back to Riyadh, arriving in July 2005. He was driven straight from the airport to a cell in Al-Haier.