CHAPTER 1

Oil, Arms, and Allah

AN ANONYMOUS TIPSTER CALLED a reporter working for United Press International in New York City on the night of February 16, 1956, with the news that eighteen M-41 light reconnaissance tanks were being loaded onto a freighter at a pier in Brooklyn.¹ Destination: Saudi Arabia. At that time, there was no requirement for the president to notify Congress about arms sales abroad, and the process normally took place in total secrecy. The tanks were, thus, the first major item of military significance to come under scrutiny in the American press.

The next day, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Walter George, called for a congressional probe into what the Eisenhower administration was up to. George wanted to know why tanks were being shipped to an Arab country while the State Department had held up Israel’s request to purchase $50 million worth of American arms. The Israeli embassy in Washington asked the same question. Minnesota’s Democratic senator Hubert Humphrey demanded a “full scale investigation” of every shipment, “from tanks to wheat,” going to a Middle Eastern country. Jewish protesters began picketing the Brooklyn pier. Dwight Eisenhower, on vacation in Thomasville, Georgia, abruptly ordered the suspension of the tank shipment. The outraged Saudi ambassador to Washington, Sheikh Abdullah al-Khayyal, then demanded the delivery of the tanks for which the kingdom had already paid—$135,000 per tank. “It is the hope and expectation of Saudi Arabia that the United States will soon find a way of carrying out its commitment in the common interest of both countries,” he said. The press weighed in too. A Christian Science Monitor editorial under the title “No Arms to Saudi Arabia” called for a moratorium on all arms exports to countries bordering Palestine. The Washington Post called it “The Tank Fiasco” and said shipping the tanks would “have sapped the American moral position” in the administration’s effort to calm tensions between Israel and its Arab neighbors. “How could we have justified our refusal to sell arms to Israel if we had sent them to one of her adversaries?” the newspaper asked.

Eisenhower’s order to suspend the shipment lasted less than twenty-four hours. On the night of February 18, the State Department issued a one-thousand-word statement offering its justification for going ahead with the deal. The tanks were defensive and no threat to peace in the Middle East. Israel would get the $110,000 in spare parts for airplanes and military vehicles it was seeking, and the United States would give “most careful scrutiny” to the Israeli request for $50 million in jet fighters and other major weapons. The reasons behind the decision were spelled out in a secret State Department document a few days later: “If the shipment were canceled, it would unquestionably provoke the Saudi Arabians to the point where our future relations would be seriously jeopardized; they would probably proceed to buy arms from the Soviets; the negotiations for renewal of the Dhahran airbase would be difficult, if not impossible; and vital U.S. resources [oil] could be lost.”² The “tank battle” of 1956 was a harbinger of things to come, the first in a long line of confrontations over arms sales to Saudi Arabia between both Republican and Democratic administrations and pro-Israeli supporters in Congress that would tear at the fabric of the U.S.-Saudi relationship over the next fifty years.

Indeed, the controversy surrounding the tanks exposed all the explosive ingredients in what has long been called the U.S.-Saudi “special relationship”: Saudi demands for American arms and security guarantees and U.S. maneuvering for access to Saudi oil and land bases. Just who first coined the phrase “special relationship” regarding Saudi Arabia and when remains something of a mystery. Prior to World War II, American oilmen who discovered the vast wealth that lies beneath the Saudi desert sands always had such a relationship with the kingdom’s rulers. But the term came into vogue much later and has come to be used by historians and officials from both countries.*

As notable as the relationship itself is the fact that the same issues have bedeviled it from the beginning. Declassified government documents from the post–World War II period depict a long, painful process of both sides searching for the proper distance, or closeness, these two very odd bedfellows wanted to maintain. When the Saudis sought security guarantees and a formal alliance, the United States remained standoffish; when the Americans sought permanent facilities and open access to air bases, Saudi Arabia sought to keep its distance. (This tension grew much worse after the first Gulf War, in 1991. The U.S. Air Force, which had been given the run of Saudi facilities during the campaign to oust Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwait, stayed on for over a decade, until its presence became a highly contentious issue.)

The first U.S. military mission to visit the kingdom dates back to December 1943, at the height of World War II, about ten months after President Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed that “the defense of Saudi Arabia is vital to the defense of the United States” and that the kingdom was therefore eligible for military assistance.⁴ The mission was led by Major General Ralph Royce, then commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East based in Cairo, Egypt. The mission was a major event because King Abdulaziz al-Saud, founder of modern-day Saudi Arabia, rarely allowed foreign military personnel into the kingdom.⁵ The king received his American visitors in the Red Sea port of Jeddah in proper royal splendor, marking the occasion with a banquet at which ten sheep were slaughtered and roasted and their eyeballs handed out as a delicacy. It was an austere affair with no alcohol served and no smoking permitted. But the austerity was offset by generous royal gifts—camel hair robes dotted with gold knobs and gold daggers for each of the eleven members of the American delegation and a gold-and gem-covered saber, plus a wristwatch with the king’s name inscribed on the face, for Royce. The American gift to the king seemed highly utilitarian by comparison: a radio transmitter and an offer of a plane ride, which was politely refused.⁶ It would have been King Abdulaziz’s first.

Nothing immediately came of the visit. But the outlines of an oil-for-arms grand bargain began to emerge early the following year. In February 1944, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes announced plans for the construction by American oil companies operating in the kingdom of a twelve-hundred-mile pipeline across Saudi Arabia to the Mediterranean coast.⁷ Then on March 7, Royce returned on a second visit bearing gifts of another kind on his DC-3 aircraft: three thousand pounds of rifles, ammunition, helmets, and, incongruously, blowtorches.⁸ Royce made the delivery the next day after locating the wandering monarch and two thousand of his companions in a desert oasis ninety miles north of the Saudi capital, Riyadh. The American general described his small planeload of arms as a token of bigger deliveries to come under the American wartime lend-lease program made possible by Roosevelt’s certification of Saudi Arabia as “vital” to U.S. interests. Just why this might be true was spelled out on October 27, 1944, by Secretary of War Henry Stimson in a letter to Acting Secretary of State Edward Stettinius Jr.: “The most important military interest in Saudi Arabia is oil and closely following this in importance is the right to construct airfields, the use of air space and the right to make aerial surveys in connection therewith.”⁹

King Abdulaziz’s first wish list for U.S. military assistance was long and varied—a mission to train a standing army and air force; air transport for the king and other high Saudi officials; training for Saudi pilots in the United States; uniforms for eleven thousand men; six C-47 transport aircraft; four bombers; the construction of a munitions plant and roads in the kingdom; radio communications equipment; and the training of doctors for the Saudi army.¹⁰ None of this was immediately forthcoming. In fact, nothing really happened to move the United States toward becoming the kingdom’s major arms supplier for the next six years. Even the historic first encounter between an American president and a Saudi king, aboard an American warship in Egypt’s Great Bitter Lake in early February 1945, did not produce much of substance. Roosevelt and Abdulaziz, one in a wheelchair and the other walking with a cane (Roosevelt gifted his backup wheelchair to the king), laid the basis for the later development of a partnership. But they did not announce any agreements and reportedly did not even talk much about arms or oil.

The main topic of conversation was growing international pressure for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, which the king vehemently opposed and Roosevelt was contemplating whether to support.¹¹ Still, Abdulaziz’s pro-American proclivity was already evident in his strong preference for working with American oil companies at the calculated expense of the British, whom he distrusted because of their dominating presence in the Persian Gulf Arab states flanking the kingdom. In 1933, he had granted Standard Oil of California (SOCAL), the predecessor of today’s Chevron, the right to prospect for oil in the kingdom. By the time of his meeting with Roosevelt, SOCAL had struck oil outside Dhahran, on the Persian Gulf in the Eastern Province, raising hopes for an oil bonanza. The king seemed to have no objection to American wartime plans to build the world’s longest pipeline across his kingdom at a cost of $150 million. Amid the first talk in Washington of dwindling domestic oil supplies, Secretary of the Navy William Knox told Congress in March 1944 that the war had made the U.S. government extremely anxious about oil. He pronounced what was to become America’s postwar oil policy, namely “to provide for acquisitions of oil resources outside the limits of the United States for the safety and security of this country.”¹²

The Saudi view of the burgeoning partnership was spelled out a few years later by the king in a private conversation with U.S. Assistant Secretary of State George McGhee. The meeting took place in May 1950, but the substance of their conversation only became known twenty-eight years later, when the State Department allowed it to be declassified.¹³ It is a remarkable document. Abdulaziz unburdened himself of his most intimate fears for the safety of the House of Saud. However, his primary concern was not the one haunting Washington at the time, namely communist expansionism. Rather, he feared an imminent attack by the forces of the Hashemite royal families ruling in Jordan and Iraq; they had a grudge to settle after being driven out of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina by the al-Sauds in the 1920s. To deal with the Hashemite threat, the king wanted to enter a formal military alliance with the United States and obtain arms urgently on a grant basis. The British had already offered such an alliance, but he didn’t trust them because they were the main backers of his Hashemite enemies. That was why, he told McGhee, he had given an exclusive oil concession in the kingdom to American companies and not allowed their British counterparts to share in the prize. And he had allowed the United States to build and use the air base at Dhahran “to show that Saudi Arabia’s security should be of vital concern to both countries.”¹⁴

In effect, Abdulaziz was outlining the oil-for-security pact the two countries would eventually put in place as the keystone of their relationship. But at that point, McGhee didn’t know quite what to say to pacify the anxious Saudi monarch. What he did tell him could hardly have pleased. “An old style treaty of alliance” with Saudi Arabia was “contrary to our traditions,” but the United States was “deeply concerned with the security of Saudi Arabia and will take immediate action at any time that the integrity and independence of Saudi Arabia is threatened.” At the same time, the United States already had numerous commitments to defend other countries against the rising communist menace and didn’t have unlimited resources. The best the United States could offer was a “treaty of friendship” that could include a program of military aid and financing for Saudi arms purchases if the kingdom agreed to a long-term arrangement granting the U.S. Air Force the use of the Dhahran airfield.¹⁵

The struggle over U.S. access to this airfield throughout the 1950s foreshadowed another to come in the 1990s when the Pentagon would press to keep troops and aircraft in the kingdom. Built by American engineers during World War II, Dhahran gained an aura of strategic importance after the war because of its proximity to the Soviet Union—“in B-29 bomber range of Russian oil targets,” as one press report put it.¹⁶ The U.S. Air Force also coveted the airfield as the eastern anchor of the postwar chain of bases it was building across the Middle East. For the Saudis, the airfield was the only bargaining chip other than oil they possessed in their dealings with Washington for military aid. Contentious negotiations begun shortly after McGhee’s encounter with Abdulaziz at first produced only a six-month extension for U.S. use of the field. “That way it [Saudi Arabia] can ask for more concessions when the next renewal comes up,” surmised an Associated Press dispatch from Cairo on February 25, 1951. Four months later, on June 18, the two governments finally signed a longer-term agreement. The United States could continue using the Dhahran air base “for maintenance, repair and other technical services of U.S. government aircraft” for another five years in return for the provision of arms and military training so that Saudi Arabia “may maintain its internal security and its legitimate self-defense or participate in the defense of the area of which it is a part.”¹⁷

Once again, though, few arms were forthcoming. The Saudis had to wait yet another four years to use access to the Dhahran air base to pressure Washington to fulfill its promises. In February 1955, King Saud bin Abdulaziz, who had taken over upon Abdulaziz’s death two years earlier, signed an agreement with President Eisenhower during a state visit to Washington, amid great professions of everlasting friendship and cooperation. The terms were the same: another five years for the U.S. Air Force in Dhahran and another promise of U.S. military assistance and arms for the Saudis.¹⁸ This time, some arms at least did begin to flow—the eighteen tanks that caused such a media commotion in February 1956. The same month, the Pentagon confirmed that it had also secretly turned over nine B-26 bombers to the Saudis two years earlier. And the media made a second discovery on its own in May of that year of another shipment of munitions and spare parts, raising more cries of perfidy from Israel’s supporters in Congress.¹⁹ Two years later, the Pentagon quietly transferred to the Saudi Royal Air Force sixteen F-86F Sabre fighter bombers from excess supplies in U.S. inventories in the wake of the Korean War.²⁰ U.S. willingness to provide top-of-the-line aircraft was fast becoming the litmus test of the relationship for the Saudis.

Access to the Dhahran airfield was the key for the United States. In 1961, a year before the current five-year extension was to expire, King Saud stunned U.S. diplomats by refusing to renegotiate the agreement. The 1,332 American airmen stationed at Dhahran and the ten U.S. Air Force transport aircraft housed there would have to leave when the access agreement expired in April of the following year.²¹ The message was broadcast on Radio Mecca on March 16, 1961, after three days of negotiations had failed even to produce an agreement on a joint statement. The king a month later explained that his decision had been motivated by U.S. assistance to “the so-called Israel,” which he saw as an affront to Arabs and Muslims.²² But an internal State Department memorandum blamed the king’s “precipitous action” on what it called “the shaky internal position of his recently formed government.” It revealed that Saud had sent a message explaining that he had to abrogate the agreement “to quiet his opponents both inside and outside Saudi Arabia.”²³ Principal among them was a group of liberal royals known as the Free Princes, led by Talal bin Abdulaziz, who was demanding political reforms and, having fled to Cairo to seek Egyptian protection, the removal of the Americans from Dhahran. The State Department memorandum did acknowledge, however, that “the very presence of United States military personnel in Saudi Arabia, even though unarmed, had long been a target of Saudi and Arab nationalists.”²⁴ In fact, Crown Prince Faisal bin Abdulaziz in December 1960 had informally suggested that the United States “voluntarily” give up its right of access to the air base.²⁵*

The Saudi decision to kick the U.S. military out of Dhahran came just as the kingdom was mobilizing its Islamic credentials to create a countervailing political force to Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s populist socialist leader, who was seeking to rally the Arab world behind his leadership under the mantras of Arab nationalism and pan-Arabism. The kingdom had become the main refuge for thousands of Egyptians belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood who were fleeing Nasser’s bloody crackdown on this militant Islamic movement. The Saudis never allowed the brotherhood to operate inside the kingdom as an organized group. But they did permit its members, far better educated than their own citizens, to take up newly established jobs in the ministries of education, justice, and religious affairs. They were allowed, too, to organize and staff a new religious university in Medina, which would become the main center for indoctrinating foreigners in what would become an explosive mixture of Saudi Wahhabi fundamentalist doctrines and brotherhood political activism. These Muslim Brothers and their followers would become the foot soldiers of the Saudi kingdom’s religious war against the Arab world’s Nasserites, communists, and socialists.

The tension between Nasser and the House of Saud reached a new height in 1962 with the onset of civil war in Yemen on Saudi Arabia’s western border. Egypt committed arms and soldiers to rebel Yemeni socialist republicans, while the Saudis backed the Yemeni royalists in their struggle to stay in power, sending arms and volunteers. In May of that year, Nasser established the Arab Socialist Union as Egypt’s ruling party, with socialism as its doctrine. The same month, in response, the Saudis and their political allies from across the Islamic world established the Muslim World League at a meeting in Mecca, officially raising the banner of pan-Islamism against Nasser’s “narrow [Arab] nationalism.”²⁷ Among the twenty-one signers of the league’s initial declaration was the Egyptian Said Ramadan, a key Muslim Brotherhood figure married to the daughter of the movement’s founder, Hassan al-Banna. Ramadan was also secretary-general of the World Muslim Congress and director-general of the Islamic Center in Geneva. He was to play a seminal role in spreading Muslim Brotherhood influence worldwide. Because of their superior educational qualifications, the Egyptians would again serve as the mainstay of the new organization’s bureaucracy.

The other body created by the Saudis to promote Islam as a basis for countering Nasser and his secular ideology was the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC). During the hajj in 1961, King Saud had first proposed forming some kind of Islamic league, an idea his successor, King Faisal, took up with a proposal four years later to create an Islamic Alliance. But it took Nasser’s defeat in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and an attempt by a crazed Australian Christian to set fire to al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem before anything finally happened. The attack, in August 1969, finally galvanized the whole Muslim world into heeding Faisal’s call for an Islamic summit. The event took place the following month in Morocco amid demands for the launch of a religious crusade to liberate the mosque from Israeli control. The only concrete result, however, was the creation of the OIC and a decision to establish its headquarters in Saudi Arabia. The binding glue was to be “Islamic solidarity.”²⁸ But from the start, the OIC was a cacophony of monarchs, emirs, and elected heads of state and government with widely different agendas, a body much less susceptible to Saudi influence than the Muslim World League.

The scholar Dilip Hiro credits King Faisal with providing the inspiration and energy in the timorous House of Saud for turning Islam into a driving force of Saudi foreign policy.²⁹ Faisal, in many ways the founder of the modern Saudi state, became king in 1964 and ruled until his assassination by a mentally deranged nephew in 1975. He had also served for years as the kingdom’s prime minister and foreign minister, had traveled widely, and was arguably the most worldly of the al-Saud kings, having represented Saudi Arabia at the founding of the United Nations in 1945. The entire Faisal branch of the al-Saud family was widely regarded as the most liberal and pro-Western. But Faisal was also dedicated to promoting Islam as a powerful policy tool, a kind of early version of what U.S. political scientists would later call a nation’s “soft power.” It was this power that would become such a serious problem for the United States after 9/11.

President Eisenhower also thought about mobilizing Saudi religious power. In his diaries in 1956, he mused over whether King Saud could be “built up” to become a spiritual leader of the Arab world to “disrupt the aggressive plans that Nasser is evidently developing.”³⁰ While admitting he did not know him, Eisenhower noted that the kingdom harbored the two most sacred sites in the Muslim world and that the Saudis were considered to be “the most deeply religious of all Arab groups.” The president did try to enlist Saud’s support for the so-called Eisenhower Doctrine, enunciated in 1957 in a bid to contain the spread of communism in the Middle East. But as a choice to champion the doctrine, or even run House of Saud affairs, Saud proved a disaster and was forced to hand over much of his power to Crown Prince Faisal the following year.

Numerous scholars have asserted that Eisenhower did more than muse about using Islam to counter first Nasser and then the Soviet Union, in its efforts to penetrate the Arab world. They assert that the Central Intelligence Agency was used to funnel money and support to the Muslim Brotherhood.³¹ Other scholars have documented the State Department’s use of Radio Jeddah in Saudi Arabia as part of its Cold War public diplomacy.³² On at least one occasion, Eisenhower met with twenty-four Muslim scholars and politicians from across the Middle East after they attended a conference on Islamic culture at Princeton University. Among them was the Islamic militant Said Ramadan.³³ The National Security Archive, a private research group located at George Washington University, established that the conference was organized and partly paid for by the State Department and the CIA.³⁴ What remains unclear about the meeting with Eisenhower is whether his previous visitor stayed on. The log indicates it was Allen Dulles, director of the CIA.*

By the mid-1960s, Washington’s attitude toward arms sales to Saudi Arabia had changed 180 degrees, as it had become public knowledge that the Soviet Union was providing Egypt with massive amounts of arms—jet fighters, bombers, tanks, destroyers, and even submarines. Nasser was not only gearing up for a hot war with Israel. He had unfolded the banner of Arab nationalism and launched a cold war against the monarchs of the Middle East, Saudi Arabia in particular. The arms sales competition in which the United States found itself was not just with the Soviet Union, however. In 1965, the United States had to engage in a vicious bidding war with its closest European allies, Britain and France, to win what was then regarded as a massive arms deal, involving not just aircraft but also a missile and radar defense system covering the entire Saudi kingdom.³⁵ The price tag was put at anywhere from $250 million to more than $500 million, and the centerpiece of the competition was which cutting-edge aircraft—the American Lockheed supersonic F-104G, or possibly the slightly less sophisticated Northrop F-5 Freedom Fighter; the British Electric Lightning; or the French Mirage—would become Saudi Arabia’s main fighter jet.

The 1965 bidding war, which lasted most of that year, was the first of many to come in which the three Western governments acted as super-salesmen on behalf of their national arms manufacturers. In May, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara wrote to Saudi defense minister Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz, urging him to buy American and select the F-5 over the F-104G because it would be easier for Saudi pilots to master. Britain sent its undersecretary of state, John Stonehouse, to lobby the Saudis, and France dispatched a senior Defense Ministry official to press its cause.³⁶ The personal involvement by McNamara was seen at the time as marking an “important shift” in U.S. arms sales policy. According to a May 31Washington Post editorial, the American government had previously carefully avoided becoming a major arms supplier to either Israel or its Arab neighbors. The new approach deliberately promoted the sale of arms to both sides to gain influence with their leaders while seeking to maintain a balance in the overall Arab-Israeli military equation. In the end, the Americans and the British, after tripping over each other, shared the prize: The Saudis bought both the British Lightning and the American F-5. But they also bought U.S. Hawks antiaircraft missiles and signed up for the Pentagon to begin building a radar defense system.

The Saudi thirst for the latest in modern aircraft became unquenchable as it became ever more affordable due to the country’s rising oil wealth. The amalgam of American companies working in the kingdom known as Arabian American Oil Company, or Aramco, had struck the world’s mother lode of oil reservoirs at Ghawar in the Eastern Province in 1956, and exports had begun to soar. Production nearly tripled to 1.3 million barrels a day between 1950 and 1960 and would grow to 3.8 million barrels a day by the end of the next decade.³⁷ Government income from royalties paid by Aramco doubled between 1963 and 1970 to $1.2 billion in current dollars.³⁸ The latter year would prove to be a turning point in United States oil production: the last year it would be self-sufficient in oil, leaving U.S. policy makers ever more sensitive to the strategic value of Saudi oil fields.

After obtaining the F-5 Freedom Fighter, the Saudis by early 1973 were pressing Washington to sell them top-of-the-line F-4 Phantom jets, which were by then the backbone of the Israeli air force.³⁹ At that point, no Arab country had been allowed to purchase the F-4, but the Saudis were determined to get twenty-four to thirty of them. Israel was just as determined to block the sale, arguing that the Phantom posed a direct threat because the aircraft had the range to strike at the Israeli heartland from Tabuk, in northwestern Saudi Arabia. Furthermore, the F-4 had strong political symbolism for the Israelis, for it demonstrated a U.S. tilt toward the Jewish state and against their Arab enemies. If the United States also sold it to Saudi Arabia, the F-4 could no longer have that symbolism. Suddenly, whether the United States would sell its most sophisticated aircraft had become a litmus test of which side it was on in the Arab-Israeli conflict. The outbreak of war between Israel and its Arab neighbors in October of 1973 put an abrupt end to the debate. Egypt’s success in breaking through Israeli lines along the Suez Canal, plus the Saudi-led Arab oil boycott of the United States, changed Washington’s attitude radically.

The Saudi decision to wield its oil weapon against America struck Washington like a lightning bolt. Few in the U.S. government or Congress had thought the Saudis would dare turn against their protectors. Yet the kingdom, for all its respect for the American role in creating Saudi Arabia’s oil fortunes, was caught up in the wave of nationalistic fervor sweeping third world oil producers. Libya, Iran, and Iraq were moving fast to nationalize their industries, and Saudi Arabia was feeling the pressure. During 1972, the Saudis had negotiated for a 25 percent share in Aramco, softening the blow to its American owners just slightly by calling it “participation” rather than “nationalization.” The year of the oil boycott, they insisted on a controlling 60 percent interest on the way to a complete takeover.

Other factors were doubtlessly at play. One may have been King Faisal’s sense of personal betrayal by President Richard Nixon, who had sent Faisal a message on October 14 pledging U.S. neutrality in the war. “Our policy at this time is not one-sided,” Nixon assured Faisal. “The U.S. is neither pro-Israel, nor pro-Arab: It is pro-peace.”⁴⁰ But when Israeli forces were in trouble, Nixon quickly rushed aircraft and tons of munitions to Israel and then pledged major long-term assistance. Nixon asked Congress to approve $2.2 billion in arms for Israel on October 19, and the next day the Saudi government announced a total oil boycott of the United States “in view of the increase in support for Israel.”⁴¹ By then, Egypt’s army had been routed by the Israelis.

This was the second time Faisal had personally witnessed the United States go back on a pledge to a Saudi king. Franklin Roosevelt had promised King Abdulaziz during their 1945 meeting that the U.S. government would take no decision about partitioning Palestine to establish a Jewish state “without full consultation with both Arabs and Jews” and in any case “no action . . . which might prove hostile to the Arab people.”⁴² Roosevelt died a few months later, and Harry Truman never bothered to consult Faisal. On the other hand, Nawaf Obaid, a Saudi security specialist, attributed Faisal’s decision in 1973 to a totally different cause—the powerful influence of the kingdom’s Wahhabi religious establishment, which was pressing for a show of Saudi support for Egypt to stave off another Arab defeat. Obaid concluded that “the primary motivation was to preempt internal dissent and satisfy the growing frustration of the Ulema [the kingdom’s powerful religious leaders].”⁴³

Whatever the reasons, Faisal’s decision brought about a full-scale change in the Saudi attitude toward the United States. The king had been of a totally different mind during the two years leading up to the war, seeking a formal military guarantee from the United States. He even sent a message to Nixon in the summer of 1972 proposing that “Saudi Arabia would guarantee to the United States a supply of oil necessary for its needs at a price it could pay for an absolute security guarantee.”⁴⁴ In October of that year, while attending a Washington conference, the Saudi oil minister, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, made public the Saudi offer of a guaranteed Saudi supply of oil, asking in return that the United States allow Saudi Arabia to invest in the U.S. oil industry.⁴⁵ The Nixon administration turned down all these Saudi proposals.*

In April of 1973, Yamani was back in Washington, this time with a radically different message: The kingdom was ready to use its newfound oil clout if U.S. policy toward Israel did not change.⁴⁶ Nobody was listening, which in retrospect is surprising. Washington by then had begun to realize the United States was becoming addicted to Arab oil. Domestic production had peaked in 1970, and foreign oil had become increasingly indispensable to satisfy the voracious appetite of gas-guzzling American car owners. Months before war broke out between Egypt and Israel in October 1973, the United States experienced its first real oil crisis. By June, two thousand gas stations had closed across the country because there was no gasoline available; one headline read, “U.S. Oil Nightmare: Worldwide Shortage.”⁴⁷

America had quickly become dependent on Arab, and particularly Saudi, oil and was already importing 27 percent of its total consumption. James Akins, the top energy specialist at the State Department, was warning Congress that the demand for crude oil was such that each year the country was consuming an extra one million barrels a day. Officially, imports from the Arab world and Iran in 1972 were just 15 percent of the total. But the U.S. government had deliberately downplayed the percentage by not including Middle Eastern crude shipped to the Caribbean for refining and then labeled as Latin American oil imports. “When we’re talking about our oil needs, we’re talking about one country—Saudi Arabia,” Representative John Culver, the Democratic chairman of the House Foreign Economic Policy Subcommittee, observed, to which the Washington Post added, “The implications of this stark fact are only now beginning to be taken into account by top U.S. officials.”⁴⁸

* The term may go back to testimony given at a 1973 hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee by James Akins, who was about to become U.S. ambassador to the kingdom. Akins said he was against any kind of formal alliance with Saudi Arabia but favored giving the Saudis “everything they want under a special relationship without actually formalizing ties.”³

* The Saudis would make the same suggestion in the same informal way when they wanted the U.S. Air Force to leave the kingdom in early 2002. This time the message came in an interview Prince Bandar gave to the Washington Post.²⁶

* In an effort to get to the historical truth about CIA involvement with the Muslim Brotherhood, I applied under the Freedom of Information Act in 2004 for all agency records from the 1960–63 period regarding its contacts with the group. Despite the passage of more than forty years, my request was denied because, I was told, the documents I sought would “relate to information concerning intelligence sources and methods.”

* Twenty-five years later, the Saudis would become major investors in the domestic U.S. energy sector without any guaranteed oil supply, except to the refineries and gas stations they had bought up in the United States.