by Robert Lacey
“History teaches us the American track record in adventures like this,” says a veteran Saudi diplomat. “They dive in without thinking, then they cut and run, leaving the mess to others.”
But there were existing commitments to consider. Since the mid-1990s the U.S. Air Force had built up the Prince Sultan Air Base at Al-Kharj, south of Riyadh, to become the linchpin of its Middle East air command. Enforcement of the no-fly zone over Iraq had been coordinated from here, as had the 2001 attacks on Afghanistan. In 2003 the U.S. military was counting on Al-Kharj as the command center for its attack on Iraq.
Abdullah did a deal through his chameleon ambassador. The United States could go on using Al-Kharj and some other bases for the duration of the war, it was agreed, on a basis of strict military secrecy—after which the Americans must pack up their belongings and be gone. The U.S. campaign of “shock and awe” that overwhelmed Iraq in a few short weeks after March 20, 2003, relied heavily on Al-Kharj and also on the northern Saudi airports of Ar’Ar and Tabuk—U.S. Special Forces teams took off from these two bases near the Iraqi border for their undercover operations inside Baghdad and other cities.
But once the invasion was completed, American transporters flew in to start dismantling and shuttling U.S. Air Force assets eastward piece by piece, to the French-built Al-Udeid Air Base, in the Gulf state of Qatar. By the end of September 2003 there was not a single U.S. soldier, tank, or plane left on the soil of Saudi Arabia, apart from a few long-term military trainers. Abdullah had finally distanced the Kingdom from Bush’s America as he had long wished—and, in the process, one of the principal demands that Osama Bin Laden had made in attacking the twin towers two years earlier had also been met. Saudi Arabia had helped brew the poison that was 9 /11. Now Iraq would have to drink it.
CHAPTER 31
End of the Affair
Prince Bandar bin Sultan liked to compare the long-standing U.S.-Saudi relationship to a Catholic marriage. There might be rows and dalliances, he would say with a twinkle—he had known his share of both—but the marriage would go on forever. Then in the spring of 2004 his nominal boss, Prince Saud Al-Faisal, the long-serving and normally somber foreign minister, out-twinkled his cousin with a new definition.
“It’s not a Catholic marriage,” Prince Saud told David Ottaway of the Washington Post. “It’s a Muslim marriage.” The Muslim husband is allowed up to four wives, providing that he treats them all with fairness—so that would be Saudi Arabia’s new course in the difficult days that followed 9/11. The Kingdom was not seeking a divorce from America, just looking for some extra partners.
The first of these was China, a country with whom the Kingdom had not even maintained diplomatic relations when Bandar went to Beijing shopping for CSS-2 missiles in 1985. A few years later the first Communist Chinese ambassador arrived in Riyadh—part of the international alliance amassed against Saddam in 1990-91—and the relationship grew closer through the 1990s as Saudi Arabia increased its oil exports to Japan, South Korea, and other countries in Asia. By the early 2000s the Kingdom had become China’s principal supplier of crude oil. It was a coincidence that Ali Al-Naimi, the Saudi oil minister, happened to be in Shanghai in September 2001, just eight days after the Al-Qaeda attack on America, but what he chose to say there was not. Saudi Arabia, he declared, wished to build a “strategic relationship and partnership” with China “at all levels.”
In 1998 Abdullah had made China one of his earliest destinations after he assumed more power as crown prince, and when he became king he pointedly made Beijing, not Washington, the object of his very first foreign visit. The king landed in January 2006 with a mixed delegation of Saudi men and women—another first—and promptly got down to business, laying plans for a massive $3.5 billion refinery to process high sulfur Saudi crude and discussing the provision of Saudi oil for a new Chinese hundred-million-barrel strategic reserve.
A few weeks later, China’s president, Hu Jintao, returned the visit. Hu was on his way back from Washington, where the White House greeter had addressed him using the wrong title, welcoming him in Chinese as President of Nationalist China (Taiwan), and where he had also suffered the indignity of being heckled at his press conference. In Riyadh there were no protocol mishaps—and certainly no risk of hecklers. There was, furthermore, a curiously genuine warmth as two inscrutable and proudly non-Western cultures took their mutual measure. Both were on the rise. Both were seeking to modernize. Both were authoritarian and secretive—and both had had to endure patronizing lectures on that account from the know-it-all West. Speaking to the Majlis Al-Shura, Hu pointed out how China’s relationship with Arabia went back a lot further than that of the United States. Two thousand years earlier, even before the time of the Prophet, the ancient Silk Road had linked China with the Middle East.
“Regarding history as a mirror,” said the president, quoting an old Chinese proverb, “we can understand what will be rising and what will be falling.”
This oblique reference to the world’s shifting balance of power was echoed in the rest of Hu’s speech. Rather than invading one another, he declared, nations should pursue dialogue, opposing “the use of force, or threatening each other with force at random.” Sovereign states had the right to choose their own social and political systems, and each should respect the choice of the other. Without once uttering the word America, Hu laid out a worldview refreshingly different from that of George Bush, who had recently expressed his ambition to end what he described as his country’s “addiction” to oil imports, especially from the Arab Middle East. China had no hang-ups: it was unashamedly eager for Saudi oil.
Oil for security had always been the basis for the U.S.-Saudi “special relationship.” Now this was echoed in the new Sino-Saudi marriage—with the possibility of a sinister twist. Official reports described the signing of a “contract on defense systems,” which analysts presumed to refer to the Kingdom’s stock of fifty to sixty aging Chinese CSS-2 missiles purchased two decades earlier by Bandar and Khaled bin Sultan. These medium-range weapons had been designed to deliver nuclear warheads, and the years since 1985 had seen Saudi Arabia’s closest Muslim ally, Pakistan, become a nuclear power—operating secretly, it was widely presumed, with China, since Pakistan and China were both worried about India’s long-standing nuclear capability. Saudi Arabia, for its part, was worried about Iran and its development of nuclear technology. So it seemed obvious that the three nations should find ways of collaborating, preferably in some arm’s-length fashion.
When the nuclear suggestion was put to Saud Al-Faisal he mustered all his authority as the world’s longest-serving foreign minister to reject the suggestion that the Kingdom had any access to the bomb.
“We think it is stupidity incarnate because these weapons will not give security,” he said in March 2004. There was “absolutely no truth” to reports that Saudi Arabia was pursuing the nuclear option.
But the Kingdom deliberately deceived the world and its closest ally to acquire and install China’s missiles—and defense, after all, is the gravest matter of life and death. It would be foolish not to keep the country’s stock of CSS-2 East Wind missiles in updated working order, and it would not be difficult for Pakistan to hold a matching stock of nuclear warheads on behalf of its wealthy Muslim ally, thus providing the Kingdom—and indeed Pakistan and China—with some element of deniability. The state of Israel continues to deny that it is a nuclear power. So why should the Saudis tell the truth?
Wife number three was also recruited from the very top of America’s list of foes. The Soviet Union had been the first country in the world to recognize Abdul Aziz’s conquest of the peninsula in 1926 and was the only foreign government that could claim the distinction of having given oil to Saudi Arabia: in the days of the Great Depression a Russian tanker delivered to Jeddah some £30,000 worth of petrol for which the poverty-stricken Saudis never managed to scramble up the cash. Through the Cold War the godless Soviets became one of the ritual devils that Saudi for
eign policy statements loved to stone, and relations did not thaw greatly with the collapse of Communism. The two countries had been energy competitors for years, vying alternately for the position of the world’s largest oil producer. The Saudis resented the way Russia declined to join or cooperate with OPEC, but happily enjoyed the enhanced oil prices produced by OPEC’s production restraints.
Then America invaded Iraq, and suddenly Moscow became the object of another of Prince Abdullah’s pioneering foreign visits. The competitors discovered that they were really collaborators, controlling between them no less than 26 percent of the world’s known oil reserves and 31 percent of the gas. Since his accession to power in the late 1990s, Abdullah had been pursuing an ambitious pet project, his Oil and Gas Initiative, intended to encourage foreign investment in the development of new Saudi energy resources, including petrochemical and desalinization plants. Negotiations had not gone well with the largely American-led consortiums, particularly after 9/11, and had been broken off in the weeks following the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which, in the eyes of many Arabs, had been about nothing so much as the forcible laying of American hands on Arab oil. In January 2004 it was announced that Lukoil, a private Russian energy enterprise, along with some Chinese and European oil companies (Sinopec, Eni, Rep-sol YPF, Royal Dutch Shell, and TotalFinaElf) would now fill the space left by Exxon Mobil, Phillips, Marathon, Conoco, and Occidental.
Within months, Luksar, the joint venture formed by Saudi Aramco and Lukoil (with a $2 billion Russian investment) had gone to work, starting its first prospecting by the time Vladimir Putin arrived in Riyadh early in 2007. The Russian president set the tone for his visit with a speech delivered at the annual Munich Conference on Security Policy on his journey down from Moscow. Russia had had enough, he said, of the “unipolar world” created by America’s “almost uncontained hyper-use of force . . . airily participating in military operations” to impose its policies on other nations. “Who,” he asked, “is happy about this?”
Two days later Abdullah welcomed the Russian president to Riyadh, hailing him as “a statesman, a man of peace, a man of justice.” As befitted a man of peace, Putin offered Saudi Arabia a shopping list of Russian military technology—150 T-90 battle tanks, 100 attack and transport helicopters, 20 mobile air-defense systems, and a large number of armored personnel carriers, along with a proposal to help with the development of nuclear technology. To round off the warm and successful visit—Russia, it was noted, had always supported the cause of the Palestinians—Abdullah presented Putin with the Kingdom’s highest honor, the King Abdul Aziz Medal. At that date this medal had been presented to only two other foreign leaders, China’s President Hu and Jacques Chirac of France, who had led the United Nations campaign to halt Bush’s Iraqi invasion. It was difficult to think of a more satisfyingly anti-American trio.23
Catholic or Muslim, the old U.S.-Saudi special relationship had clearly become history, and a typically Saudi mix-up confirmed it. In July 2005 Prince Bandar bin Sultan resigned as Saudi ambassador to Washington, exhausted and disillusioned by what had become an impossible challenge. After inviting hundreds of friends and colleagues to a farewell party, he abruptly canceled it and vanished, as unpredictable in departure as he had been in his long tenure—to be replaced by his cousin and brother-in-law, Prince Turki Al-Faisal, the former intelligence chief who had been serving as ambassador to London since the departure of Ghazi Algosaibi. It was Turki who, more than a quarter of a century earlier, had first suggested that Bandar, then a young fighter pilot recently married to his sister Haifa, might do well in Washington as an advocate for Saudi causes.
When Turki arrived in the stand-alone, castlelike Saudi embassy beside the Watergate complex that September there was already a strategy in place for mending the broken relationship between the Kingdom and America—a “strategic dialogue” of U.S.-Saudi working groups to address the multitude of practical dislocations that had followed 9/11. These ranged from counterterrorism and business breakdowns to the strangling of U.S. visa procedures by the new Department of Homeland Security. Insensitive security restrictions had virtually extinguished the flow of Saudi students to U.S. universities and had also made entry into America an offensive and humiliating process for even the most respectable of Saudis. Six different working groups would be staffed by upper-level Saudi and U.S. officials who would meet face-to-face twice a year, alternately in Washington and Riyadh, and would maintain contact between meetings, hoping to build up the routine working relationships that had been neglected in Bandar’s years of “room at the top” diplomacy.
“Now we would know who to call,” explained a Saudi diplomat who was much involved in this reconstruction process.
On the public front, Turki accepted every invitation to appear on U.S. radio and TV shows, from Fox to NPR, calmly answering the most aggressive questions, including many about his own personal role in events—he was the Saudi official, after all, who had tried and failed first to contain, then to recapture Osama Bin Laden. Alongside this painstaking media campaign, for which he also recruited the onetime Salafi and campaigning journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the prince embarked on a grueling schedule of visits to grassroots America, accepting invitations to speak at universities and on the country’s rubber-chicken circuit of Rotary clubs and Kiwanis lodges, an unglamorous public diplomacy effort intended slowly to convert the views of the average American—“Joe Six-Pack,” as Bandar liked to call him.
The trouble was that Bandar could not keep his fingers out of the pie. The flamboyant prince seemed to be only happy while being indispensable. Back in Riyadh, Bandar had taken charge of a recently-revealed but long-planned National Security Council on the U.S. model whose function, it soon turned out, was to keep the ex-ambassador at the center of events, giving him important reasons to jet to London, Beijing, and Moscow, still carrying messages for the king—and still traveling, quite frequently, on high-level missions to Washington.
For more than a quarter of a century, Turki’s full brother Saud Al-Faisal, the foreign minister, had accepted Bandar’s wholesale trampling on his personal bailliwick, but Turki was not so tolerant. He had been given charge of Saudi policy in Washington, only to discover his brother-in-law flying in regularly to cozy up to his old pals in the Bush administration.
It was not a matter of Turki’s personal embarrassment—which he denied on the record, and, indeed, off the record. He had no problem, he said, with Bandar or anyone else carrying personal messages for the king. He well understood how the Saudi system worked, and he had himself carried royal messages in his days as intelligence chief. But it was embarrassing for lesser Saudi officials when they went to see a senior U.S. official to be asked whether they were “with Bandar or with Turki?” There were serious matters of foreign policy at stake. As the Bush administration increased its drumbeat of aggression toward Iran in the autumn of 2006, Turki was arguing for calm, hoping against hope that war might be avoided.
“For the United States not to talk to Iran,” he said, “is a mistake.”
In this Turki was voicing the official policy set by his brother Saud, who, the previous year, had called for the United States to engage in talks with Iran rather than indulging in threats. The Saudi foreign minister pointed out that if the Bush administration was now alarmed by the increasing regional influence of Iran they had only themselves to blame for “handing over Iraq on a golden platter.”
Bandar bin Sultan, however, was saying something much more to the taste of his friends inside the White House, and in particular of Dick Cheney, whose confrontational instincts Bandar shared. The prince had supported the neocon attack on Iraq, and now he encouraged the United States to get tough with Iran—a message that the administration greatly preferred to being publicly lectured by the Al-Faisal brothers. George W. Bush knew what he wanted to hear, and if it came straight from Riyadh on a plane via an old friend who had just come from the king, it surely carried more weight than the disapproving comments of a locally
based ambassador whom he did not know so well.
This all came at the same time as a financial crisis in the embassy that spoke to the endemic Saudi confusion between public and private, along with the Kingdom’s deficiencies in administrative skills. For many years the large Saudi delegation in Washington had been running over budget, and Abdullah had ordered a cutback, in line with his attempts to impose financial discipline throughout government affairs. Bandar had blithely ignored the cutback—or had, rather, accepted the cutback, then made up the difference by deploying the lavish funds that poured monthly into his local Riggs Bank account from the Al-Yamamah project. The prince’s multimillion-dollar support for his country’s foreign service in Washington was one of the reasons he felt so confident in dismissing the accusations of corruption against him.
Turki Al-Faisal, however, had no Al-Yamamah slush fund. He did his best when he arrived in Washington to introduce economies—it was not difficult to conduct business in a less lordly style than his predecessor—but there were many commitments that he could not cut quickly. Qorvis Communications, the embassy’s principal public relations adviser, and other suppliers were owed large sums of money that had mounted up over the months. Turki’s appeals to Riyadh for help fell on deaf ears. Following budget overruns in both the intelligence service and the London embassy during the times of Turki’s tenure, Abdullah had a poor opinion of his nephew’s financial acumen. More important, he declined to back Turki in his turf war with Bandar.
The king held no special brief for his bumptious national security adviser. He would, on a later occasion, show no hesitation in slapping Bandar down when he felt that the prince had stepped out of line. But now Abdullah effectively took Bandar’s side, refusing to extend Turki, his designated and incredibly hardworking official representative, any sort of helping hand. Perhaps the king agreed with Bandar that the United States should exert some pressure on Iran. Perhaps he was quite happy that mixed messages should be delivered to America. Perhaps—and this is the most likely explanation—Abdullah simply chose not to make a decision between the two cousins and felt that Turki should “get over it.”