by Robert Lacey
The son of King Faisal did not see it that way. The Al-Faisal (sons of Faisal) conduct themselves as aristocrats inside an already aristocratic clan. The news of Turki’s resignation became public in December 2006, not much more than a year after he had started the job. Graceful to the end, the retiring ambassador declined to go into details. He insisted that he was leaving for personal, not political reasons, and with the full agreement of the king. But what was certain was that in just eighteen months, two senior and very talented princes—among the most able in the family—had given up on the unpalatable job of trying to represent Saudi Arabia in America.
. . .
If 9/11 took the special out of the U.S.-Saudi “special relationship,” the U.S. invasion of Iraq killed it stone dead—for the time being, at least. Oil for security had always been the basis of the pact, but Iraq produced the very opposite of that. From being a guarantor of safety, George W. Bush’s United States turned out to be a provider of chaos and jeopardy.
Oilwise, in 2002 Saudi Arabia ceased granting the discounted shipping rates with which it had for decades favored the successor companies of Socal, Texaco, Esso, and Mobil, the four U.S. oil majors that had made up the original, prenationalization components of Aramco. U.S. companies now had to pay the same price as everyone else, and the Kingdom rapidly ceased to be the United States’ foremost oil provider. By 2006, that honor went to Canada, at 2.3 million barrels per day, followed by Mexico at 1.7 million. At 1.4 million barrels per day, Saudi Arabia competed for the honor of third place with that other good friend of the United States, Venezuela.
Oil was the main item on the agenda when Bush and Abdullah met at Crawford, Texas, for a second time, on April 25, 2005. Scarcely noticed in the months following 9/11, the price of oil had started to creep upward. The invasion and chaos in Iraq had intensified that trend, so that, at $55 a barrel, a gallon of gas was costing $2.42 in the United States, well on its way to double the $1.41 level when the two men had met three years earlier.
This second encounter became notorious for the picture of the two leaders walking hand in hand as Bush shepherded Abdullah through his garden to the ranch building where they were to meet—the weird intimacy of the gesture being so obviously at odds with the two men’s clash of interests that it seemed to sum up Bush’s cluelessness. Bush wanted Saudi Arabia to use its pumping power to flood the world market and bring down the price per barrel, but Adel Al-Jubeir, Abdullah’s spokesman, pointed out the fallacy in that. The Kingdom could send a million or more extra barrels to America tomorrow, he said, but America did not have the refineries to process it. Saudi Arabia had been investing in new production, but the West—and America, in particular, had not been building refineries to match.
So the other half of the equation did not work either. America could not guarantee security and the Saudis could no longer guarantee cheap oil. It seemed scarcely surprising when, ignoring the media furor over the Al-Yamamah deal, the Kingdom turned back to Britain in 2007 to provide its new generation of high-tech fighter combat aircraft, a long-term contract worth some $40 billion, thus locking out U.S. manufacturers for the foreseeable future. “You go Uruguay” had come about with a vengeance—though the special relationship had an ally at its heart that might not have been expected.
“Why can’t I send more of my sons to study in America?” asked King Abdullah when he welcomed Michael Chertoff, the U.S. secretary of homeland security, to his farm at Janadriya in the spring of 2008. By “sons” the king was referring to the thousands of young Saudis who had been denied visas to study in the United States in the aftermath of 9/11.
The American security czar shifted uncomfortably and was just starting to explain how his government had certain concerns about the dangers posed by young Saudi males, when the king cut him short.
“Thank you very much, Mr. Secretary,” he said. “But think about this. Do you imagine that America can possibly be more concerned about the radicalizing of my sons that I might be?”
Chertoff was one of a miniflood of American visitors that spring, including President Bush, who flew on to the Kingdom after attending celebrations in Jerusalem to mark Israel’s sixty years of existence since 1948. In Riyadh there was another celebration—the seventy-fifth anniversary of U.S.-Saudi diplomatic relations, which had started with the signing of the oil contract in 1933. It was called the Oryx summit, because two of Arabia’s native antelopes were being sent to the National Zoo in Washington.
Abdullah took some delight in the comparative longevity of the two anniversaries, cupping his palms open in front of him, as if weighing the relative poundage of sixty or seventy-five years of friendship in the scales. He balanced his hands in the air for some time, moving them up and down—sixty, seventy-five—then grinned knowingly at the American delegation. The U.S.-Saudi split that Osama Bin Laden had hoped to accomplish had clearly not come to pass—and then, a few months later, came the presidential election of November 4, 2008, and the triumph of the new African-American U.S. leader with the oddly similar name.
Barack Hussein Obama’s transition team got a call from Saudi Arabia within hours of the candidate’s victory. Abdullah was due in New York just three days later for a special United Nations session of the Inter-Faith Religious Dialogue, which the king had initiated earlier that year in Madrid. His Majesty wanted to call and congratulate the new president-elect.
“Don’t call us, we’ll call you,” came the firm but courteous reply. It was a matter of protocol. If the king was arriving as a guest on U.S. soil, it meant that Obama should make the call to welcome him—and this way, the president-elect could prepare his agenda and have his interpreter beside him as he spoke.
The call came through within minutes of Abdullah’s landing at Kennedy airport on November 7. The king and his staff were in their limousines heading toward Manhattan.
“I have heard much, Your Majesty, about your preference for frank and plain speaking,” said Obama, who had clearly been studying his briefing notes. “That is the style that I appreciate and I look forward to the chance to talk together.”
The president-elect wished the Saudi king well with his interfaith gathering, and also with his participation in the G-20 gathering in Washington (Saudi Arabia ranks about seventeenth in the list of the world’s twenty most powerful economies, just behind Turkey and comfortably ahead of any other Arab country). The call went on for around seven minutes, and it finished with Abdullah expressing the wish that the two leaders might meet and talk face-to-face before too long—“Inshallah” (“If it be God’s will”).
“Inshallah,” echoed Obama, making use of the pious Islamic expression with which he was obviously familiar.
Later the king recounted some details of the conversation to a group of Saudis who had assembled to welcome him to Manhattan.
“I clearly heard him say ‘Inshallah,’ ” mused Abdullah to the little gathering.
“God willing,” he added wryly, “we shall make a Muslim of him yet.”
CHAPTER 32
Condition of the People
King Abdullah loves the French game of pétanque, also known as boules. He acquired the taste in the sandy boulevards of Lebanon, and he plays it for hours. He roundly defeated Prince Charles when Charles visited the Kingdom in February 2004—but in the rules of pétanque à l’Abdullah, the king always wins.
The game is played in the desert, where the players take their ease on cushions ranged around the walls of a tall, plushly carpeted, open-sided tent. Outside on the sand is laid a small square of green baize marked with black arrows, and the target ball is thrown out thirty feet or so into the desert.
One by one the players rise from their cushions to take their place on the green baize and toss their single boule, which has their name attached to it with tape. As in the normal game of boules, the aim is to finish up closest to the target, and it is permitted—in fact, it is rather encouraged—to knock your rivals out of the way.
When every other playe
r has thrown, the king steps forward, and this is where the normal game changes. For Abdullah has a deadly aim, he always throws last—and on at least one occasion he has been known to have two boules to throw. So that is why the king tends to win Saudi Arabia’s royal pétanque championship, and having won, he takes a little purse of gold and hands it graciously to the runner-up—since in this royal version of a plebeian game, the runner-up is, in a way, the winner.
Abdullah used to spend a lot of time camping in the desert with his falcons. Now he favors the comforts of his farm north of Riyadh, where he keeps his Arabian horses in neat white courtyards of hacienda-style stables. The huge picture window of his sitting room is arranged to give him a view of the animals as they graze around a lake. He likes to sit watching them on Thursday mornings, the beginning of the Saudi weekend. It is the one morning he gets some time to relax—though his staff are only happy when they see him emerge to take some exercise in his brightly colored, thick-soled athletic shoes. A daily walk and a daily swim help keep the Angel of Death at a distance.
As in the declining days of Fahd, there is a whole power structure around the king that is hugely concerned to keep their patron alive—though in Abdullah’s case they are joined by most of the Saudi population.
“He is our Muawiyah,” says Hala Al-Houti, thirty-four, a Jeddah business executive, one of the new generation of Saudi working women. “We can only hope he never loses hold of the thread.”
The early caliph Muawiyah, who had been a scribe to the Prophet, once said that he would not draw his sword where a whip would suffice, nor use a whip where his tongue was enough—and that if he should ever find himself connected to his people by just a single strand of hair, he would never allow it to snap. As the people pulled, so he would give way with them; only when they relaxed the thread would he try to pull them gently in the direction that he thought it best to go. Governance Muawiyah-style was a delicate matter of mutual respect, and it is a mark of the Saudi school system that while it signally fails to teach its children how to think for themselves, it does instill snippets of classical learning like this.
The modern Muawiyah keeps in touch with his people from his book-lined study in Riyadh. Above his desk hang some richly embroidered black-and-gold Koranic inscriptions, of which his favorite comes from the “Thunder” sura: “God will never change the condition of a people until they change it for themselves.” This is the basis for Abdullah’s belief in bringing changes to Saudi society.
There is also an entire wall full of television screens—one huge flat screen, surrounded by twenty or more satellite monitors, all displaying the channels that the Saudi population are watching at that moment. Each monitor has a number, and if something catches the royal eye, Abdullah presses that number on the control pad beside him. Instantly its sound becomes live and the image switches to the main screen. Sitting alertly in front of his video bank, this eighty-six-year-old Arab could be navigating the starship Enterprise. He puffs on an occasional Merit cigarette as he samples what his people think.
To back up the king’s personal sampling, full-time teams of researchers watch all the TV channels systematically and write daily digests that are read out to Abdullah every night. Parallel teams monitor the published press and also the radio, particularly the grievances on the call-in shows, while a fourth, rather more geeky group, scans the ferocious and often hostile fundamentalist bloggers and websites. Together they make up a quartet of polling outfits to rival that of any U.S. presidential candidate. Early in 2008, for example, the teams warned Abdullah of the grassroots anger engendered by widespread inflation. Dr. Mohammed Al-Qunaybit, an eloquent Shura member and newspaper columnist, appeared on television to express his vivid disappointment with virtually every area of the king’s domestic policies.
“The king’s advisers,” said Dr. Al-Qunaybit, “are creating a cloud of confusion around him.”
Dr. Al-Qunaybit was only saying what most people were thinking, and his case was strengthened when Hashim Yamani, the commerce minister, was questioned about the rising cost of rice. Once an exotic foreign delicacy, rice (and particularly basmati rice) has become, with prosperity, the staple of every Saudi meal, but the minister dismissed the question with the insouciance of Marie Antoinette.
“There are nineteen types of rice,” he responded. “And it is not compulsory for people to eat the most expensive.”
The Saudi system may not be democratic, but it usually seeks to be responsive. Abdullah acted quickly to increase food subsidies and raise government salaries, then brusquely sacked the minister of commerce. But he also let it be known that the people’s tribune, the eloquent and critical Dr. Al-Qunaybit, should moderate his acerbic tone for a spell. In Saudi Arabia it is the king, and the king alone, who throws the last ball.
One day late in 2006, Mahdi Al-Mushaikhis, an engineering student in the Eastern Province, came to his uncle Fouad in a troubled state. Some of the young man’s relatives had been receiving strange phone calls about his fiancée. The couple had been together only a few months. They had signed the milka, the formal plighting of the troth that permitted private time together and sexual relations, and until that moment Mahdi had felt very happy with his future wife. But the phone calls suggested she had been with other men. If that was the case, Mahdi did not wish to proceed to full marriage.
Fouad Al-Mushaikhis is a man to whom many in his family would turn for advice. A calm and sagely grizzled graphic designer in his middle forties, he is an activist among the Shia community in Qateef, in the Eastern Province, displaying all the self-composure of a man who went into exile with his fellow campaigners at the age of fifteen and had to parent himself through some very hard years. His right temple is scarred with a bullet mark, his personal souvenir of the 1979 intifada. Having returned to the Kingdom with his fellow exiles at the end of 1993, Fouad now mentors young Shia in the Qateef region, teaching them computer design at weekends and giving them personal advice.
“You must not be hasty. You must sit down and talk to her,” he instructed his nephew, who was nearing the end of his studies at the University of Petroleum and Minerals in Dhahran. But when Fouad met with the couple, he saw that the girl had been traumatized in some way. She was terrified to speak.
“Will you give me my rights?” she blurted out aggressively after Fouad had asked his nephew to leave the two of them alone.
“What I can promise,” he replied, “is that I will not pass on anything you say unless you are willing.”
And so, for the first time, the “Qateef girl” spilled out the sensational story that would provoke headlines around the world in the closing months of 2007—and would provide a metaphor for all that was wrong, and a few things that were right, inside King Abdullah’s Saudi Arabia. Before getting engaged to Mahdi, the girl confessed, she had been persuaded to hand over a picture of herself to a girlfriend who had passed it on to a male relative, a good-looking boy a year or so younger than them named Hassan, who would sometimes drive the two girls to the mall.
“Can I see her picture?” is a matchmaking ploy very common among young Saudis, so restricted in their opportunities to meet and date. Pakistani- and Indian-run picture studios do a roaring trade in Saudi souks—providing, in this case, a kitschy photograph that, as Fouad remembers it, showed the Qateef girl standing against a baby blue backdrop. The picture had been taken two years earlier. Her head was covered, and she was dressed demurely in a black skirt and orange top, posing beside a small plastic tree that had been copiously laden with every imagineable variety of plastic fruit.
The Qateef girl had never been alone with Hassan, she told Fouad, nor had she ever lifted her veil to show the boy her face. But after her family arranged her contract of marriage to Mahdi, she had started to worry about the photograph being in Hassan’s possession. Affection had flowered between the newly betrothed couple, and the girl had also discovered that Mahdi was fiercely possessive. She characterized her fiancé-husband as hemish, an Egyptian c
olloquialism that male Saudis sometimes apply to being fully “in charge” of their women. Not wanting to risk losing the man she now loved, she contacted her girlfriend to ask if she could get the picture back.
The girlfriend reported a complication. Hassan wanted to meet his picture pal one last time. He would hand over the picture, he promised, at City Plaza, a mini-mall a couple of hundred yards from her family home, but only if he could meet her privately. So being keen to get the whole thing over, the Qateef girl set off from home, walking the distance to the mall by the time agreed, around 9 P.M. that night.
She was not at all pleased with Hassan for compelling her to go through this, and as she turned left off her street and started walking along the main road she grew still more annoyed when a car slowed down to crawl alongside her, its three male occupants leaning across to make suggestive comments. As she hurried into the mall, she upbraided Hassan for tipping off the men, whom she presumed to be his cronies. But he swore he knew nothing—and he was as horrified as she was when they escaped together through the mall’s rear door, to find the men in their vehicle waiting there for them. As the couple drove away, they were followed by their pursuers, who, the moment that they were off the main street, overtook them and forced them off the road. A foolish escapade was turning into a scarcely believable true-life nightmare. At knifepoint, two of the gangsters forced their captives out of their vehicle and onto the floor in the back of their own car, where one sat in the middle with a foot planted firmly on each of them.