CHAPTER 2

Making of the Messenger

IN APRIL 1978, PRINCE BANDAR, then a twenty-nine-year-old pilot focused on becoming a top commander in the Saudi Royal Air Force, was on his way home from a visit to California and stopped overnight in Washington. He checked in to the fashionable downtown Madison Hotel, a favorite, high-priced haunt for visiting Saudis and a five-minute walk from the White House. There, he ran into his brother-in-law, Prince Turki al-Faisal, as he was crossing the hotel lobby on the way to his room.¹

After explaining that he had been on an air force mission in California and was homeward bound, Bandar remembered, Turki said to him, “You know, you came to me from heaven. I need you.”

Turki was leading the Saudi lobbying effort in Washington on the sale of sixty F-15 jet fighters to the kingdom, and he said he wanted to ask Bandar some questions about the issue. He took Bandar upstairs to a room filled with worried American advisers and public relations experts who began plying him with questions about the F-15 Eagle. Bandar knew the Saudis wanted the top-of-the-line jet fighters badly, but he had no idea about the controversy in Washington surrounding their sale to the Saudis. Why did Saudi Arabia need this particular aircraft? Where did it plan to base them? What did the Saudis plan to do with them? Turki, head of the General Intelligence Directorate but with no expertise in military affairs, had been unable to answer these questions. But Bandar, who was by then an F-5 squadron commander, could easily respond.

Saudi Arabia was a vast, oil-rich country and needed the F-15s to defend its resources and religious sites, he told the American advisers. The jets would be stationed in Dhahran, on the eastern gulf coast, to protect the oil fields; in Taif, on the west coast, to cover the holy sites in Mecca and Medina; and in Kham?is Mushayt, in the south, to deal with the threat from Marxist South Yemen. The prince had quickly figured out how to dodge the hot political question of whether the F-15 would constitute a threat to Israel. He had avoided discussing whether the jets would be stationed at Tabuk, the only air base within range of Israeli targets, a commitment that could have been seen as an infringement of Saudi sovereignty.

Bandar so impressed Turki and the American advisers that he was asked to stay on for a few days. The next day, Turki took Bandar to meet two key members of the Senate Armed Services Committee—Democratic senator John Glenn and Republican senator Barry Goldwater, both former pilots and favorable to the sale. Then it was on to two staunch opponents, Democratic senator Frank Church and Republican senator Jacob Javits. After two days of traipsing from one Senate office to another answering mostly hostile questions, Bandar had had enough. He found lobbying “boring work,” and he wanted to go home. His wife, Haifa, was waiting for him in Paris.²

But Turki had other plans for the pilot prince.

He had called Crown Prince Fahd and asked that Bandar stay on. Fahd had agreed, and Turki passed on the royal order. But Bandar didn’t believe him, or didn’t want to, anyway. “I said, ‘No, thank you. I’ve stayed two days just to help you as a friend and colleague.’ ”³ So Bandar continued on to Paris to pick up his wife, staying overnight there. As he was headed for the airport the next morning, he received a direct phone call from the crown prince himself. Bandar thought at first there was some mistake, since he had never known Fahd to call a jet fighter pilot directly like that, particularly one traveling outside the country. Fahd ordered Bandar to go back to Washington, where he found orders were indeed awaiting him: Help organize the lobby campaign to win the F-15 vote and “report to the White House.”⁴

Bandar had been to the White House only once before—as a tourist while training at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama in 1973. “I went to the White House, and Hamilton Jordan [Carter’s future chief of staff] took me in to see President Carter,” he said. “Suddenly, there I was sitting in the chief of staff’s office, and they take me to the Oval Office. I left really in a daze.”⁵ Carter asked him to work closely with Jordan, and so began what would become a legendary diplomatic career.

NOTHING IN BANDAR’S childhood or upbringing suggested he was destined to become a super-envoy in the service of king and kingdom. His memories of growing up were hardly pleasant. They centered mostly on his search for a place in the royal family and reflected a profound sense of alienation and loneliness.⁶ His birth on March 2, 1949, near Taif, a mountain resort village, was the result of a fleeting liaison between one of the most powerful Saudis in contemporary times, Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz, and a black-skinned, sixteen-year-old household servant, Khizaran, of Yemeni descent. He was not recognized officially by his father in his early youth. His royal family protector turned out to be his grandmother Princess Hussa, King Abdulaziz’s favorite wife, who took him in and filled his searching young mind with Saudi family lore. She also interceded to convince Sultan to recognize him.

Bandar’s early difficulty in bonding with his father is widely thought to have had a lasting impact on his psyche and to explain his prodigious drive to prove himself throughout his career, first as a fighter pilot and then as a diplomat. He readily admitted to suffering from the stigma of being a bastard child and living apart from the brood of thirty-two half brothers and sisters belonging to Sultan’s official wives. It made him feel “a bit aloofish” because, he said, “you don’t have anybody to fool around with on a daily basis.”⁷ He also wished he could live with his father, and he remembered fondly his mother’s efforts to make him “a boy instead of being a mother’s boy” by taking every occasion to get him included on hunting trips with Sultan or at his court just listening to him talk with others.

Bandar spent most of his preteen years in Riyadh before the oil boom and before that desert capital, almost hermetically sealed off from foreigners, had any modern buildings, sprawling marble palaces, or even macadam roads. He remembered making his own toys and playing barefoot in the city’s dirt streets. “We didn’t have electricity in every room in the house I grew up in.”⁸ He took no trips abroad for summer vacations, though he was once sent to work on a farm in England, while his half brothers enjoyed the French Riviera. His first encounter with television came during a visit to an American oil company compound in Dhahran.⁹ Recounting his early childhood, Bandar clearly relished its fairy-tale quality; he once likened himself to a “peasant prince,” the Saudi commoner who had to struggle and grovel before finding a place in the House of Saud.

To the extent that Bandar thought about the larger world before going off at age seventeen for pilot training in England, it was about the struggle for national liberation under way in Algeria and the plight of the Palestinians. Both were pan-Arab causes that served as national ones for many Saudis, too. His earliest political memories involved weekly visits to the offices of the Algerian and Palestinian nationalist movements in Riyadh to make collective school donations.¹⁰ But young Bandar could not understand why all Arabs were expected to show solidarity for these noble causes while at the same time they were so bitterly divided between supporters and opponents of Egypt’s fiery leader, Nasser, over what constituted politically correct pan-Arabism. Before leaving for England in 1966, Bandar, like many young Saudis, secretly admired Nasser because he believed Egyptian propaganda that Nasser had single-handedly forced France, Britain, and Israel to withdraw their forces from the Suez Canal in 1956. He had no idea of President Eisenhower’s pivotal role in their decision to retreat.

Bandar ascribed his decision to become a fighter pilot partly to his early exposure to the stream of Saudi military officers who began visiting his father’s home after Sultan became defense minister in 1963.¹¹ In the civil war that had broken out in neighboring Yemen the year before, the kingdom was backing the royalists against upstart republicans supported by Nasser. A wave of patriotism swept the royal family, and Bandar, then thirteen years old, was carried away, too. He also desperately wanted to prove his worth to himself and his father. He concluded that the only way he could do so was to become a fighter pilot, the most prestigious career for anyone in the royal family. “When you’re flying an airplane, it doesn’t matter who you are. An airplane doesn’t know if you’re Prince Bandar or not. Either you know what you’re doing or you don’t. If you know, you live; if you don’t, you kill yourself. I was not wise enough and smart enough to think about the risk.”¹² Bandar felt that success would show other Saudis that he had real talent and guts of his own, and that he was not dependent solely on being the defense minister’s son. Of eight princes in his peer group who went into the military in the mid-1960s, Bandar was the only one who succeeded in obtaining his wings.*

Bandar’s political awakening came shortly after he arrived at the British Royal Air Force College at Cranwell, England’s elite pilot-training academy.¹³ The occasion was the third Arab-Israeli War, which broke out on June 5, 1967, and exposed him to the wide gap between Arab rhetoric and battlefield reality. The next day, he and other Saudis there tuned in to the Voice of Cairo and were ecstatic to hear that the Arabs were winning and had already shot down three hundred Israeli aircraft. Bandar ran around the halls of the college boasting to the English cadets and teachers that “one more time the Arabs will show you.” At that point, he still believed the Arabs had scored a major victory in 1956. That night, he watched the news on the BBC. “I got the shock of my life. I can’t believe it. I saw things I didn’t know. I didn’t see. The Israeli army took over the Sinai, all of it!”¹⁴ It also took over East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights in just the six days the war lasted. Bandar locked himself in his room for two days, becoming more and more depressed at the news, which finally included Nasser’s offer to resign.

Bandar graduated from Cranwell in 1969 and the following year began a series of training courses in the United States to become lead pilot for the U.S.-built F-5 Freedom Fighter aircraft, the first of which began arriving in Saudi Arabia in 1971, to become the Royal Air Force’s main multipurpose jet fighter for the next decade. Bandar has never forgotten his first day in America as he made his way to Lackland Air Force Base, outside San Antonio, Texas. While changing planes at the airport in Dallas, he encountered a rowdy group of football players belonging to the Dallas Cowboys team. They were attracting a lot of attention as they passed through the terminal, and what caught the prince’s eye in particular were their “magnificent” cheerleaders.¹⁵ From that time onward, Bandar was an avid Dallas Cowboys fan, a devotion that remained unshaken even after he took up residence in Washington, hometown of the Redskins, the Texas team’s main opponent in the National Football League.

For the next seven years, Bandar concentrated mind and energy on making himself the best F-5 fighter pilot in the Saudi Royal Air Force. He attended officer school at Maxwell Air Force Base, in Montgomery, Alabama, and later took courses to become a pilot instructor at Randolph Air Force Base, in Universal City, Texas, and Williams Air Force Base, outside Phoenix, Arizona. He became not only a squadron commander and a trainer of other pilots but the kingdom’s chief acrobatics flyer at air shows for the royal family and Saudi public. His skill as a stunt pilot gave him the greatest joy because, as he noted, “it really appealed to [his] ego and self-satisfaction” to know that he could fly a hundred feet above the ground and roll the aircraft 360 degrees without killing himself.¹⁶ He felt his ability to execute such a daring maneuver provided proof of his personal accomplishments and made it clear that he was not relying on his status as son of the defense minister to get ahead.

The young prince’s love for risk taking, however, eventually put an end to his flying career—at least as a fighter pilot. In 1977, the year before he first became entangled in Washington politics, he crash-landed his disabled F-5 during an air show in Abha, the capital of Asir Province, in southwestern Saudi Arabia. The jet’s landing gear failed to come down, and he probably should have ejected from the aircraft. Instead, Bandar executed an emergency landing, hitting the runway hard and seriously injuring his back. The injury was destined to become a lifelong problem requiring repeated operations. At the time, Bandar refused to allow the accident to deter him from pursuing his air force career and kept his sights on going back to the United States for ever more advanced officer training. Crown Prince Fahd and President Carter had their own designs on him, however.

EVER SINCE COMING into office in January 1977, the Carter administration had focused on three issues—a national energy policy to cope with escalating gasoline prices and growing dependence on foreign oil; the launch of a Middle East peace process; and the sale of billions of dollars in arms to Middle Eastern countries, particularly Iran and Saudi Arabia. Washington policy makers generally felt that Saudi Arabia had the United States over the proverbial oil barrel. State Department secret documents from this period certainly reflect this assumption. “The Saudi role in oil prices and supply is crucial in both the short and long term,” said one briefing paper prepared for the incoming Carter administration. “It alone has the capacity to ensure that sufficient oil supply is available to meet essential world demand in the 1980s.”¹⁷ The Saudis were already producing more than nine million barrels a day and had plans to expand their capacity to twelve million. Israel’s supporters in Congress were convinced Carter was ready to make deals at the Jewish state’s expense to solve his energy problems.

Arms sales to the Middle East were just as problematic. Legislation passed in 1974 gave Congress for the first time a veto power and obliged the president to inform Congress of pending sales of $25 million or more thirty days in advance. Carter had first fought with Congress over the sale of seven Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) aircraft to Iran and was facing a similar battle over his plan to provide Saudi Arabia with the F-15 Eagle fighter jet. At that point, the United States had made only one major aircraft sale to the kingdom—the F-5 Freedom Fighter. But as oil prices and Saudi earnings began spiraling upward in the wake of the 1973 Arab oil boycott, so, too, did the Saudi appetite for American arms, increase—from $300,000 to $2.2 billion in just one year.¹⁸ Then, between 1974 and 1978, the Saudis signed up for $16 billion more, plus nearly another $10 billion in military construction projects.¹⁹ The kingdom had become a huge market for U.S. arms manufacturers and contractors. However, Congress was becoming increasingly critical of the U.S.-fueled arms race between both Israel and its Arab neighbors and Iran and Saudi Arabia. Every country in the Middle East wanted the latest model aircraft, with the most sophisticated avionics, bombs, and missiles in the American arsenal. The AWACS sale to Iran had proved particularly controversial. While it was finally approved, and though the planes were never delivered because the shah was overthrown in 1979, Congress as a whole questioned the justification of each and every aircraft, missile, and bomb.²⁰

Israel’s supporters, led by the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), were ramping up to kill, or emasculate, any sale of advanced aircraft to hostile Arab countries. AIPAC literature termed the F-15 Eagle “the most advanced air-superiority fighter in the world” and claimed it would enable Saudi Arabia to “strike deep into Israel.”²¹ Carter, however, had inherited secret pledges made in 1976 by the Ford administration to sell Saudi Arabia the F-15s as a replacement for its aging British Lightning interceptors. The president had reaffirmed this pledge to Crown Prince Fahd during his visit to Washington in May 1977, but then dragged his feet. Not until February 1978 did he notify Congress, at first informally, that his administration intended to sell sixty of the aircraft to Saudi Arabia, balanced by the sale of seventy-five F-16s to Israel and fifty F-5Es to Egypt, all in one package deal. He then waited until April 28 to formally notify Congress, thereby setting the clock ticking on the thirty-day window it had to veto the sale. Such was the tricky political landscape Bandar entered when he was ordered by Fahd to return to Washington.

Bandar proved a quick study of the rough-and-tumble politics there, thanks to a set of excellent American tutors, in particular Frederick Dutton, who had served as President John Kennedy’s special assistant for intergovernmental affairs and assistant secretary of state for congressional affairs; John West, a former South Carolina governor and Carter’s ambassador to Riyadh; and David Long, a State Department Middle East specialist and professor of international affairs. Dutton was a Washington political pro who had worked on five Democratic presidential campaigns. He was so close to the Kennedy family that he rode in the ambulance carrying Robert Kennedy to the hospital after he was fatally shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles in 1968. Kennedy’s death put an end to Dutton’s aspiration of working at the White House, and through his connections with Mobil Oil, he began working first for the Saudi Oil Ministry and then for the Foreign Ministry. While Dutton served as a political adviser, his wife, Nancy, began doing legal work for the Saudi Foreign Ministry in Washington.*

Bandar first met Dutton at the Madison Hotel during his stopover in April 1978, and Dutton taught him Washington politics, especially how to deal with the Israeli lobby. Bandar was fascinated by AIPAC and its workings. He wanted to adopt its tactics in dealing with Congress, inverting its goals to create a countervailing Arab lobby. Carter’s staff had early on conducted a detailed study of the Jewish lobby that carefully noted that AIPAC could count on sixty-five to seventy-five votes in the Senate whenever it needed them. The study proposed a strategy of dealing with this formidable challenge largely through making personal contact with as many of these senators as possible.²² Dutton also encouraged Bandar to make as many overtures to Congress as possible, but believed strongly that the White House and the president himself had to take the lead in pressing for Saudi arms sales in Congress and making it a matter of U.S. strategic national interest.

While the Duttons were busy promoting Bandar’s career in Washington, John West was playing the same role for the young prince at the royal court. West was a Southern governor like Carter and an early supporter of his campaign for the presidency. The two were close friends, and West sent Carter handwritten, insightful letters once a month during the four years he served as the American ambassador to the kingdom, recounting in these dispatches and a separate daily diary his dealings with the royal family. West had regular access to Crown Prince Fahd and other senior Saudi leaders and used it frequently to make the royal family aware of Bandar’s exploits in Washington and to urge that the young prince be given more and more responsibility for representing Saudi interests.

West took credit for convincing Fahd and Defense Minister Sultan to order Bandar back to Washington to lobby for the F-15 sale, telling them that the prince “was the best thing that had happened to the F-15 fight” and that he had to stay.²³ West himself returned to Washington to help Carter lobby and thus saw Bandar in action firsthand during the final chaotic weeks leading up to the F-15 vote. After Congress approved the sale on May 15, West wrote to Fahd heaping kudos on Bandar for his “boundless energy” and “utter politeness and courtesy” in dealing with members of Congress. “Prince Bandar evinced such enviable maturity as to rank him among prominent international statesmen and diplomats,” he told the crown prince.²⁴ He urged Fahd to award Bandar “a Certificate of Superior Merit.” And he asked Jordan to arrange for Carter to thank Bandar personally for his efforts. Earlier in April, Jordan had tried to do just that, but Bandar had refused out of concern that he would further alienate Saudi ambassador Ali Alireza, whom he had already miffed by seizing the initiative in the Saudi lobbying campaign.²⁵

Bandar remembered his first engagement with American politics as a struggle to convert his skills as a pilot—“counting my fighters, bombers, and air cover”—into new political ones that would help him navigate successfully in Washington. “If Dutton said AIPAC was the main danger, I said, ‘OK. Now I must get some jamming system to neutralize AIPAC so they don’t shoot down my airplane.’”²⁶ He learned to deal with aggressive reporters and discovered how to engage people he presumed would be hostile to him, like Jewish senators. He discovered that the White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon were competing power centers with conflicting views, each hiding information from the other.²⁷ He discovered Democratic senators and House members didn’t necessarily support a Democratic president. He was appalled to see congressional committees openly discuss what in Saudi Arabia would be regarded as top secret information, such as what avionics and missiles the F-15 would carry. “I was taken aback by the process. To me, it was too strange.” But he also became “fascinated by the organized confusion of Washington.”²⁸ Particularly fascinating was that a U.S. president would use a foreigner like himself to lobby the American Congress.

Bandar’s description of his exploits in Washington needs to be treated with some caution. He is a born storyteller, but one prone to easy hyperbole and self-aggrandizement. Often there is no way to confirm his account of events because other participants have died or will not comment. At other times, available documents do not substantiate his version, or he contradicts himself in the repeated telling of his tales. All of the characteristics for which he became known—such as a willingness to massage the truth to suit his personal glory and a penchant for manipulating people and engaging in freelance diplomacy—emerged at the start of his involvement in American affairs. But so did his desire to serve Saudi kings and American presidents. Long before he was dubbed Bandar Bush because of his almost filial relationship with President George H. W. Bush, the young Saudi prince made himself indispensable to President Carter and learned to parlay this into favor with his king and crown prince.

The battle over the F-15 sale was the first demonstration of the ingenuity, tenacity, and daring that Bandar naturally possessed. Dutton had explained to him how all American foreign policy was rooted in domestic constituencies. But Saudi Arabia didn’t have anything in America comparable to the Jewish community to muster support for the Saudi cause. So Bandar decided to create a constituency for the F-15 sale. He did this by contacting McDonnell Douglas, the F-15 manufacturer, and all other contractors, subcontractors, and labor unions that had a stake in the vote. He even mobilized union members’ families, “their cousins and the cousins of their cousins,” to flood Congress with telegrams and telephone calls in support of the sale.²⁹ At the same time, he became the White House’s “answer man” for every senator, influence peddler, and national newspaper and TV station asking questions about why Saudi Arabia needed the aircraft.

Three experiences in particular remained fixed in Bandar’s mind after lobbying for the F-15 sale. The first occurred in April 1978 and would prove of greatest benefit to his future diplomatic career. Carter’s congressional strategists asked that Bandar fly out to California to lobby its retired Republican governor Ronald Reagan, who was already weighing a run for the presidency.³⁰ Bandar had no idea who Reagan was, which, according to him, amused Carter to no end. The president thought Reagan might just back the F-15 sale because of his strong anticommunist sentiments and felt his endorsement would carry a lot of weight with conservative Republican senators.

Bandar didn’t have the foggiest idea either of how to contact Reagan, and he needed Dutton to fill him in on his career and political views. Through his U.S. Air Force contacts, the prince had befriended one person in California he felt might be able to help him: Thomas Jones, chairman of Northrop Corporation, the maker of the F-5s he had been flying back home. Unbeknownst to Bandar, Jones and Reagan were close friends. So when the prince asked if Jones could arrange for him to see Reagan on short notice, Bandar got a reply within half an hour. However, Jones told him he had to come to California immediately, because Reagan and his wife, Nancy, were about to leave on a trip to Iran to see the shah. So Bandar rushed west, reaching the Reagan home on the eve of their departure.

Bandar’s account of his first meeting with Reagan may provide insights into the future president’s thinking about Saudi Arabia, though it may also illustrate Bandar’s occasional embellishment when telling a story.

“I sat down with Governor Reagan, and we chatted a little bit. Then I explained why we needed the aircraft. He said to me at the end of it, ‘Prince, let me ask you this question. Does your country consider itself a friend of America?’

“I said, ‘Yes, since King Abdulaziz, my grandfather, and President Roosevelt met. Until now, we are very close friends.’ ”

Then Reagan asked him a second question. “Are you anticommunist?”

“I said, ‘Mr. Governor, we are the only country in the world that not only does not have relationships with communists, but when a communist comes in an airplane in transit, we don’t allow him to get out of the airplane at our airport.’ ”³¹

Bandar was prepared for another lively discussion about the Saudi request for sixty F-15 Eagles. But there was none. “That was it. Two things were important. Are you friends of ours? Are you anticommunist? When I said yes to both, he said, ‘I will support it.’ ”

Bandar said he then asked Reagan if he would mind saying that publicly to a reporter from the Los Angeles Times whom Dutton had prompted to pose the question at the airport as the Reagans left for Iran.

“Do you support the sale of the F-15s to Saudi Arabia that President Carter is proposing?” the Times reporter asked, according to Bandar’s account.

“He said, ‘Oh yes. We support our friends and they should have the F-15s. But I disagree with him [Carter] on everything else.’ ” Bandar added that the Times went with the story the next day under the headline REAGAN SUPPORTS CARTER ON F-15S TO SAUDI ARABIA.

When Bandar got back to Washington, Carter’s people pummeled him with questions about how he had managed to get Reagan’s endorsement and even get it into the Los Angeles Times. “I didn’t know how big a hero I was in Washington,” recalled Bandar.³²

The only problem with Bandar’s version of these events is that there is no record that the Times, or any other major U.S. newspaper, carried a story of Reagan’s endorsement of the F-15 sale, then or later. However, on April 14, the Times did report in a two-paragraph story that the Reagans had left on a seventeen-day trip to the Far East and were stopping over in Honolulu, where the former governor was to address an auto dealers’ convention. There is no mention in John West’s daily diary of this event, either. It is, of course, entirely possible that the Times sent a reporter to the airport who asked Reagan about his views on the F-15, but that the newspaper did not think them sufficiently newsworthy to publish. Yet this is hard to believe given the media attention to the F-15 sales debate, and the fact that the newspaper did provide its readers with the much more mundane report about the Reagans’ trip to the Far East. Apparently, Bandar was not ready to allow the facts to get in the way of his telling a great story, which his version certainly was.*

His other two lasting memories of the F-15 battle involved lobbying the Senate. The first was of an encounter with Senator Russell Long, son of the infamously corrupt governor of Louisiana Huey Long and one of the Senate’s most powerful figures as Finance Committee chairman. When Bandar went to his Senate office, he was surprised by Long’s request to talk with no aides present.³³

“You want my vote, don’t you?” said Long.

Bandar said, “Yes.”

Long said, “It will cost you ten million.”

Before Bandar could decide whether to stay or leave, Long threw his arm around Bandar’s shoulder and eased him into a chair, commenting, “Did I shock you?” He then proceeded to reassure the young prince that he was not seeking the money for himself but for a bank in Louisiana that was one of the biggest financial backers of his reelection campaign that year. The bank, he told Bandar, needed to have Saudi Arabia’s central bank, known as the Saudi Arabia Monetary Agency (SAMA), ask to make a ten-million-dollar deposit there so that the Louisiana bank could be certified to do business abroad. Bandar agreed to ask his government to arrange the transfer. Whether SAMA in fact made the investment is unknown, but Long did vote for the F-15 sale and was reelected.*

His second memorable experience in dealing with the Senate was an appearance he was asked to make to answer questions about the F-15 sale. “Suddenly they invited me to address—think about it—the Foreign Relations Committee for the United States Congress for a luncheon, and I was to sit with them behind closed doors.”

In retrospect, Bandar said he understood the significance of that meeting, but at the time “it was almost like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”³⁴ He remembered in particular his exchange with Senator Frank Church, who was leading the opposition to the sale, over whether the Saudis intended to base the F-15s at Tabuk airport, in northwestern Saudi Arabia.

“Suddenly, Church starts banging on the table. He said, ‘But Bandar, Prince Bandar, Major Bandar, whatever I should call you, Tabuk is only five minutes, five minutes from Israel. You could destroy those people in five minutes.’

“I didn’t know what to tell him. Suddenly, I thought a second and said, ‘Senator, please calm down,’ and everybody started laughing.”

Tabuk, he told Church, had been there thousands of years, and it was Israel that kept coming closer as its territory expanded with each Middle East war. “They [the Israelis] kept coming closer and closer to me, I said, ‘That’s the only thing I can tell you.’ And everybody started laughing again.”³⁵

Bandar’s personal contribution to the F-15 lobbying campaign is difficult to assess because the entire Carter cabinet became involved, along with a star-studded cast of political notables from outside. Carter, whose presidential authority and prestige were on the line, personally led the final push to block a veto, calling in a score of senators for visits and telephoning many others in the final days. The Saudis also lobbied hard. The king sent not only Turki and Bandar but his Princeton-educated foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, and two other American-educated cabinet ministers. They collectively put on a display of Saudi diplomatic panache never seen before in Washington.

West watched Bandar’s response to the new challenge of dealing with American politics with acute interest. The prince became “terribly concerned about the lack of coordination” in the lobbying campaign and basically took over the Saudi end of the effort, West reported.³⁶ Supporters and opponents of the sale buried senators in an avalanche of forty thousand telegrams and letters, and AIPAC was “around like an army,” according to West.³⁷ AIPAC sent every member of Congress a copy of Holocaust, a novel based on a television series that had just aired about the Nazi extermination of Jews during World War II, as a none-too-subtle reminder of the Arab threat Israel lived under.³⁸ The Saudis countered with full-page ads in major newspapers marking the observance of the American environmentalist movement’s Sun Day, in which they touted their financing of solar power projects in the United States. The media treated the slugfest between the Israeli and Arab lobbies over the F-15 sale as an unprecedented spectacle, noting with great interest the emergence of the Saudi-led Arab lobby as a new force on the Washington political scene.³⁹ Bandar was learning how to operate in an environment that was the polar opposite of the highly secretive Saudi political culture.

The hero of the day in the U.S. media’s eyes, however, was clearly Carter himself, though the vote seems never to have been in serious doubt. The White House knew two days before the Senate showdown on May 15 that it had ample votes. West reported that Carter had “half a dozen or so in reserve.”⁴⁰ The Washington Post credited Senator Howard Baker Jr., the Senate Republican minority leader, with playing the key role in the final 55–44 tally and described the victory as “something of a first for Carter’s White House,” because it was the first time his administration had “plotted a sophisticated strategy to win congressional approval for a controversial policy.”⁴¹ The strategy it was referring to was Carter’s insistence on a package vote that included simultaneous approval for the sale of seventy-five F-16s to Israel, fifty F-5Es to Egypt, and the sixty F-15s to Saudi Arabia. The bottom line was that the Carter administration and its Saudi allies had prevailed over AIPAC in a pitched battle, and Congress had faced “the new facts about Saudi Arabian oil and dollar power.”⁴² Carter’s tenacity had also thoroughly impressed the Saudi royals. “They cannot refuse the president anything now because of the stand he has taken,” Bandar assured West.⁴³ Before long, Carter would be asking plenty of the Saudis, including their help in getting him reelected.

* His half brother Khaled left the same year he did for England to attend Sandhurst Military Academy and become an army officer. Khaled would rise to become co-commander of the coalition forces with U.S. General H. Norman Schwarzkopf during the 1991 Gulf War and then assistant defense minister to his father.

* The Dutton team became part of Bandar’s inner circle, Frederick earning the sobriquet Fred of Arabia in the Washington press corps. He remained Bandar’s chief political adviser for twenty-seven years, until his death at the age of eighty-two in June 2005. Nancy was still working as the Saudi embassy’s legal adviser in late 2007.

* Unfortunately, by the time I discovered in the fall of 2006 that there was no Los Angeles Times story to substantiate Bandar’s account, the only other two people who could have, Ronald Reagan and Frederick Dutton, were both dead.

* Long’s version of this encounter is destined to remain unknown since he died in 2003.