“You Came a Long Way”
CARTER’S FAILURE TO RESOLVE the Iranian hostage crisis produced an overwhelming victory in 1980 for his Republican opponent, Governor Ronald Reagan, whom none of the top Saudi royals had ever met. None, that is, except Bandar. “So it was decided maybe I should go and make contact with him,” Bandar recollected.1 The prince needed a cover for being in Washington and quickly engineered one. He would attend the National War College on the banks of the Potomac and use this as his excuse for being within a mile of the White House. Despite the fact that the college had no program at that point for training foreigners, Bandar used his connections to the U.S. Air Force and called upon General David Jones, whom he had come to know both in Washington and Saudi Arabia and even played squash with. Appointed under Carter, Jones was still chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in early 1981. The prince asked Jones if a way could be found for him to attend the college. Jones obliged, jury-rigging an air force officers program for just three foreigners—one from the Arab world, one from Israel, and one from Brazil. Bandar, of course, was Jones’s pick to represent the Arab world.
In the end, the ruse was not necessary, and Bandar never attended the college. Three months after Reagan took office in January 1981, his secretary of state, Alexander Haig Jr., made his first swing through the Middle East to drum up support for the president’s hallmark crusade against the Soviet Union and communism. While in Riyadh on April 6–7, Haig discovered the Saudis cared a lot more about the unresolved Palestinian issue and the pending sale of AWACS than they did about Reagan’s communist menace. During a late-night talk with crown prince Fahd, the secretary of state discussed the difficulties facing the sale and suggested that “maybe Prince Bandar could come back and help [them] with Congress” the way he had with the F-15s. Fahd readily agreed.2 This time, Bandar would return with an official royal mandate as chief Saudi lobbyist. In late August, Faisal Alhegelan, who in mid-1979 had replaced Ali Alireza as the Saudi ambassador in Washington, officially informed the White House that Bandar had been chosen to head up the Saudi end of the lobbying campaign “in a way guaranteeing progress and the best of results.”3
Selling AWACS to Saudi Arabia had not been Reagan’s idea, carried over from Carter’s negotiations and championed by his ambassador in Riyadh, John West, as it was. To West and others, including General Jones, selling the aircraft to the Saudis seemed obvious, a golden opportunity for the Pentagon to fulfill its cherished dream of establishing an “on the ground” presence in the kingdom. Carter had never formally committed to the sale before leaving office, but his secretaries of state and defense, Edmund Muskie and Harold Brown, assured the incoming Reagan administration that they had all been “favorably disposed toward an eventual future sale of AWACS.”4 Carter even proposed a “joint representation” by officials of the two administrations to the Saudis. Though Reagan’s transitional team declined the offer, a few months after arriving in office, the new Republican administration enthusiastically embraced the Carter proposal. For Reagan, the rationale was simple: “It was important to strengthen ties with this relatively moderate Arab country, not only because its oil exports were essential to our economy, but because, like Israel, it wanted to resist Soviet expansionism in the region.” The Saudis needed the help of a great power to defend their oil fields, and “to put it simply, I didn’t want Saudi Arabia to become another Iran.”5 Reagan clearly was determined to demonstrate that he, unlike Carter, would stand by America’s allies. He was using the AWACS as a symbol of the U.S. commitment.
To consummate the deal, Reagan had to square off directly with Israel’s prickly prime minister, Menachem Begin, and his powerful ally in the United States, AIPAC.6 Israel regarded the super-sophisticated spy aircraft as a real problem for its security, arguing that the Saudis would be able to track land and air movements throughout the Jewish land. There were other items as well in the Saudi arms package that worried the Israelis. Reagan was breaking Carter’s promise not to sell enhancements to the F-15 that would make the jet fighter potentially a long-range attack aircraft, not just a defense one. Washington was proposing to sell fuel tanks to extend the F-15’s range as well as AIM-9L Sidewinder missiles to make it more deadly in aerial combat. In addition, the package included Boeing 707 aerial refueling tankers for the AWACS. Altogether, it was worth a whopping $8.5 billion.
The AWACS debate has become a classic case study of clumsy lobbying by the White House in pursuit of foreign arms sales. At most, the process was supposed to last fifty days in two phases—twenty days for the informal notification of a pending sale to Congress and then thirty more for debate before a vote. For the AWACS, the White House managed to drag out the controversy for nearly nine months.7 After announcing its intention to make the sale in early March, the administration did not formally submit the request until October 1 because it knew that a majority of senators opposed the deal. In fact, more senators were against the sale than for it until the last moment. In the end, it only passed by a two-vote margin. Just hours before the vote of October 28, Reagan wrote to friends that the “count looks about even” and that he was praying to God for success.8 Reagan found himself obliged to commit his personal prestige and presidential authority in matters of foreign policy in order to round up enough votes. He met personally with half the Senate’s members before the debate was over. Even then, if Senator William Cohen, a Republican with a Jewish father, had not changed his mind at the last moment, the sale would probably have been defeated.9 The crisp slogan created by Bandar’s politically savvy adviser Frederick Dutton to rally support seemed to say it all: “Reagan or Begin.”*
The Senate vote was so close that the sale might well have been defeated—thereby crippling U.S.-Saudi military cooperation as AIPAC intended—had Israel played its hand better. Instead, Begin did everything possible to antagonize Reagan personally throughout the summer and fall of 1981. First, the Israeli leader in early June ordered a spectacular air raid on the Iraqi nuclear reactor near Baghdad without consulting, or even informing, Reagan beforehand. Then, he further infuriated the U.S. president with his performance during a trip to Washington in September. While feting the Israeli prime minister at the White House, Reagan asked him explicitly not to lobby against the AWACS sale while he was in the country. Begin promised Reagan he would not. But once outside the White House gates, the Israeli leader did just that.11 Reagan felt betrayed, and he let Begin know it. The struggle over AWACS really did become a question of “Reagan or Begin.”
Bandar played the same role he had during the Senate debate on the F-15s, answering questions patiently and at great length from senators about the Saudi rationale for wanting to purchase the AWACS. He also sought to allay fears regarding Saudi stability and reliability as an ally, showing a picture to wavering senators of his grandfather, King Abdulaziz, and Roosevelt at their 1945 meeting aboard the American president’s ship in Egypt’s Great Bitter Lake. Once again, the prince attracted attention and praise from the media, who were fascinated by his skills at social networking. Reporters had never seen anything quite like the thirty-two-year-old Saudi pilot, not even an accredited diplomat but negotiating with the White House and Senate leaders and referring casually to Secretary of State Alexander Haig as Al and Reagan’s national security adviser, Richard Allen, as Dick.12 Bandar turned his home on Kalorama Street in northwest Washington into a reception center, impressing everyone with his polite, nonroyal approach to America’s political “commoners.” Newsweek noted that he had “dazzled senators with his grace, wit and charm” and that he had taken up regular squash playing with Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Jones. With the former pilot and astronaut Democratic senator John Glenn, he mimicked aerial dogfights as if they were “old pilot buddies.”13 Stories were devoted to his lobbying activities, which included a weekend trip to see Republican Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker Jr. at his home in Huntsville, Tennessee.14
But Bandar’s main input was negotiating on behalf of the Saudi government the terms of a compromise deal regarding the degree of U.S. control over, and presence on, the aircraft. These negotiations required him to work closely with Baker, as well as with Reagan’s chief of staff, James Baker III. The experience created personal bonds that would serve him well later on, particularly those with the White House chief of staff, who would become President George H. W. Bush’s secretary of state. At one point, Bandar was negotiating directly with Reagan himself, or at least relaying to him King Khalid’s message that Saudi Arabia could not accept joint U.S.-Saudi command of the AWACS.15 In the end, Bandar helped work out terms acceptable to the Saudis, which were contained in a presidential “letter of certification” specifying various conditions under which the sale would go forward. These included sharing of information with U.S. authorities and various safeguards to block third parties from access to the AWACS. For all the maneuvering by opponents to the sale, the Senate pretty much ended up approving the same package of AWACS, F-15 enhancement equipment, and missiles that Reagan had submitted in the first place. And, unlike Carter during the F-15 vote in 1978, Reagan retained the option to upgrade the package at a later date.16
The successful AWACS sale set the stage for a new level of military cooperation between the United States and Saudi Arabia, putting the U.S. Air Force on the ground visibly in the kingdom for the first time since its expulsion from Dhahran in 1962. A blockbuster story just days after the vote described the Pentagon’s “new grand strategy for the Persian Gulf,” which involved plans for surrogate bases “equipped and waiting for American forces to use.”17 The United States would build a state-of-the-art command, control, and communications system; an integrated air defense umbrella over the kingdom; and even a Central Command headquarters. Basically, U.S. and Saudi defense planners were turning the kingdom into one big land-based aircraft carrier that the U.S. Rapid Deployment Force, created by Carter at the end of his administration, could use when called upon to defend the Arab states of the Persian Gulf. The Saudis would even pay for the necessary infrastructure.
In fact, planning on a grand design for building a U.S. security umbrella over Saudi Arabia had begun as early as 1974 when the two countries had established a Joint Commission on Economic Cooperation; its military subcommittee had even outlined the sequence in which the Saudis would obtain ever-more-sophisticated aircraft, starting with the F-5s and ending with the AWACS. The Saudis would also build a series of “military cities” that U.S. forces could use if needed to protect the kingdom.18 Work on building the infrastructure of the security umbrella had begun in the mid-1970s with the signing of over eight billion dollars in military construction agreements.19
The “new grand strategy” story was flatly denied by the Pentagon, but West had made it clear in his diary back in October
1980 that such a deal had indeed been worked out, and approved by top Saudi leaders as a result of the quick dispatch of AWACS
that month.20 The final proof of the story’s accuracy would come during the first Gulf War, in 1990–91, when Saudi Arabia accommodated
hundreds of thousands of U.S., Western European, and Arab soldiers and hundreds of aircraft in preparation for the ouster
of Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwait. Bandar noted that the first U.S. Air Force contingent to arrive became operational within
six hours—not the forty-eight hours the Pentagon had anticipated—because “all our facilities” had been built to U.S. specifications,
even the secret underground command post at the Dhahran airport.21
AMERICA’S GROWING MILITARY presence inside the kingdom starting in the early 1980s coincided with an upsurge in Saudi religious activism. The main cause of this Wahhabi awakening, however, was not the new American footprint on the Land of the Two Holy Mosques. Rather, it was the challenge from the Iranian revolution led by that country’s supreme Shiite religious leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who was out to overthrow the Sunni Saudi monarchy. As if the Iranian challenge was not enough, the al-Sauds had to deal simultaneously with the fallout from the 1979 takeover of the Holy Mosque in Mecca by Wahhabi fanatics who questioned the royal family’s religious credentials for leadership. These two events convinced Fahd, who became king in June 1982 upon the death of Khalid, that he had to reinvent himself and reshape his image.
Fahd had won a well-deserved reputation for being something of a playboy and pleasure seeker as a young adult, and his reputation for “excess” was embodied in the marble and gold replica of the White House he had built in Marbella, the coastal summer playland of the Spanish rich that he frequently visited. But Fahd was also a chief architect of the modern Saudi state and even an aspiring religious reformer. A year after ascending the throne, he boldly proposed that the kingdom’s Wahhabi establishment reexamine some of its interpretations of the Koran, a practice known as ijtihad, to accommodate the needs of modern Saudi society. He immediately ran into stiff opposition, however, and did an about-face.22 Instead of pushing for badly needed religious reform, Fahd sought to reassure the Wahhabi clerics of his religious credentials by pandering to their fundamentalist demands. He also postponed for a decade a plan to introduce a Basic Law of government that was supposed to modernize the kingdom. When finally promulgated in 1992, it instead declared the Koran the law of the land.
Fahd sought by all means to transform himself into a paragon of Islamic virtue. He staunched criticism from Wahhabi clerics by giving free rein to their morality police, known as the mutawwa’in, whose mission it was to ensure rigid adherence in public to fundamental Islamic precepts, particularly strict separation of unmarried men and women. Westerners, and even visiting foreign reporters, often had unpleasant run-ins with these bearded, humorless guardians of the faith, and during Fahd’s reign little was done to curb their excesses. They would even try to separate American male and female reporters eating together in restaurants. The king also turned over to the Wahhabi establishment control of the education system and its curricula, which resulted in a plethora of university graduates steeped in Wahhabi fundamentalism and hostile to any kind of reforms, Western culture, and even other Islamic sects. To make clear his own commitment to defending Islam against all foreign threats, Fahd decided in 1986 to change the title of Saudi monarchs from “king” to “custodian of the Two Holy Mosques.”
The worst foreign threat for Fahd came from neighboring Shiite Iran, presaging the intense Saudi-Iranian rivalry for regional leadership that continues today. Tens of thousands of Iranian Shiites, who took advantage of the annual pilgrimage to Mecca after the Iranian revolution in 1979, spread Iran’s anti-American and pro-Khomeini message and staged demonstrations challenging Saudi Arabia’s claim to be sole custodian of Islam’s holiest sites. Clashes between these pilgrims and the Saudi police for a while occurred annually and culminated in the death of more than 400 people, 275 of them Iranians, in July 1987. The Iranians even planned to seize control of the Holy Mosque and declare Khomeini leader of the Muslim world after the ayatollah denounced the al-Saud family as “devious,” “ungodly,” and “not worthy of being in charge” of the holy sites.23 In response to the Iranian provocations, the Saudis for some years banned Iranian pilgrims altogether and then sharply limited the number allowed to come into the kingdom on pilgrimage.
The Saudis had to contend with Iranian military provocations as well. On one occasion in June 1984, Iranian American-made Phantom jets ventured into Saudi airspace, probably seeking to attack Kuwaiti or Saudi oil tankers headed for Iraq. The Saudis decided to respond with strong backing from the United States. They sent two F-15s, guided by a U.S.-manned AWACS, to intercept the Iranian jets and shot down two of them. The Iranians launched more Phantoms as if planning to attack the kingdom, but then recalled them, possibly because they feared provoking U.S. retaliation. Bandar was delighted with the Saudi performance and issued a sharp warning to the Iranians from Washington that the kingdom was determined to defend itself and its interests in the gulf.
The United States would eventually put American flags on Kuwaiti tankers and provide military escorts for them. The Saudis, anxious to avoid inciting the Iranians any more than necessary, never accepted U.S. naval escorts. They did, however, sever their diplomatic relations with Tehran until Iran finally sued for peace with Iraq in 1988. By then, the Iranian model of Shia theocracy had lost its luster throughout the Sunni Islamic world. But the Saudi distrust of Iran and its imperial ambitions has endured ever since, and it explains the sharp Saudi reaction to Iran’s bid to extend its political influence westward into Sunni-dominated Arab lands in the wake of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.
The Iranian religious challenge evoked a different response than did the military threat. Fahd set out to spread the Wahhabi message worldwide to counter it. He built a huge publishing house in Medina to produce tens of millions of copies of a Saudi-approved Koran in a bid to make it the standard version for the entire Islamic world. Starting in 1985, they were handed out as gifts to every pilgrim coming to Mecca and sent to Saudi embassies around the world for further distribution. This version remains less controversial, however, than the Noble Koran, upon which the top Wahhabi religious authority, grand mufti Sheikh Abdulaziz bin Baz, bestowed his official blessing in 1983. The commentary accompanying the opening verse makes clear that those who earn Allah’s anger include people “such as the Jews” and those who have gone astray, “such as the Christians.”24
The Saudi drive to export its religious influence eventually reached the United States and the heart of Washington, where the Saudi embassy became the main supporter of the Islamic Mosque and Cultural Center on Massachusetts Avenue. In November 1980, a group of pro-Khomeini Iranian activists had seized control of the site and ousted its Egyptian (Sunni) imam. They held on to the mosque until early 1983, when Washington police finally ousted them. The Saudis then moved in to appoint their imam, and Bandar eventually became chairman of the mosque’s governing council.
In the turbulent decade after the Iranian revolution, the U.S. government welcomed this new Saudi religious activism, viewing it as a badly needed counterweight to help contain Iran’s drive to expand its religious and political influence. The Saudi export of Wahhabi Islam would eventually develop into an impressive soft power that the House of Saud could extend across the Muslim world far beyond its limited military might.25 The kingdom not only became the Islamic world’s number-one publisher of the Koran, but also sent out thousands of missionaries and built hundreds of mosques, schools, and cultural centers around the world to combat Iran’s revolutionary Shiite message. Before long, this international activism took concrete form in a jihad aimed at the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, which had begun the same year as Iran’s revolution.
As in Washington, Afghanistan became a cause célèbre in Riyadh, fueling Wahhabi zeal to new heights and offering a concrete
outlet for thousands of young Saudi mujahideen, or “holy warriors,” eager to perform what was regarded as a religious duty.
Starting in the early 1980s, the Saudi government provided several billions of dollars in arms and other assistance to the
cause of freeing Afghanistan from godless communists. Reagan, of course, was careful to call them “freedom fighters” rather
than “holy warriors.” But he bestowed the White House’s official blessing on their Islamic fervor whenever their turbaned
leaders came to Washington to rally Congress and the American people to the cause. No Reagan administration official, neocon-servative,
or Washington think tank paid any attention to the potential consequences of stoking the fires of Islamic militancy for the
sake of Soviet rollback.
BANDAR RETURNED HOME after the AWACS vote in October 1981, but again not for long. Secretary of State Haig was responsible this time for convincing the Saudis to send him back to Washington. At a meeting with King Khalid in Marbella in early February 1982, Haig revived the idea of Bandar’s attending the war college in Washington. By then a lieutenant colonel, Bandar was present at the meeting, and upon Khalid’s assent, he immediately headed back. This time, Bandar got as far as enrolling and attending for two weeks before the king changed his mind, naming him defense attaché at the Saudi embassy. Bandar was taken aback by this unexpected appointment. Anticipating a senior staff position within the Saudi Royal Air Force, he had been assigned instead to a job that was “usually a kiss of death for a career.” Bandar decided the king was putting him to some kind of test and accepted the position.26 As events would have it, the prince took up his new post just as Reagan was facing the first Middle East crisis of his presidency—Israel’s massive invasion of Lebanon, which began on June 6, 1982. The Israeli aim was to drive the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and its guerrilla army out of that country and, if possible, kill its leader, Yasser Arafat, in the process. One week after the invasion began, King Khalid died unexpectedly, and Fahd ascended to the Saudi throne. The new king’s private messenger was ready for duty.
Bandar’s account of his role in the torturous negotiations that finally led in late August to the PLO’s evacuation from Beirut is another example of his penchant for stretching the truth. Bandar claimed he was responsible for negotiating the complicated conditions under which Arafat and his guerrillas agreed to leave, but complained that “nobody gave us credit for it.”27 Indeed, neither Reagan nor his two secretaries of state during the crisis, Haig and George Shultz, give more than passing mention to Bandar regarding these negotiations in their memoirs, though the president did later acknowledge his role. Bandar traveled to Beirut repeatedly and dealt extensively with Reagan’s deputy national security adviser, Robert “Bud” McFarlane, in the initial search for a solution. Since the Saudis were presumed to have a lot more influence with Arafat than it turned out they did, reporters covering the war watched closely Bandar’s comings and goings for signs that Arafat might be preparing to leave.
Bandar’s chief memory of that long, hot summer ordeal was his confrontation with Haig at the State Department in mid-June. One of the issues at stake involved whether PLO fighters would be allowed to take their arms with them if they agreed to evacuate. The prince had taken on the role of intermediary and was trying to strike the best terms possible for Arafat. Bandar remembers that at one point he and Haig engaged in more or less an all-out shouting match.28
The prince argued that Arafat’s men should be allowed to leave with any weapons they could carry with them. Haig at first flatly refused, reminding the prince that the Israeli army had Beirut surrounded and that Defense Minister Ariel Sharon was poised to send his troops into the city’s heart to crush its resistance. Bandar thought Sharon’s threat to invade Beirut was an empty one, as the price in loss of Israeli soldiers would be too high.
In increasing exasperation, Bandar finally got up to leave, shouting as he did, “Tell Sharon to go away. There is no more discussion. I have nothing more to tell you!” As Bandar remembers, Haig at that point asked, “If I agree to this, do we have a deal?”
“We have a deal,” replied the prince.
Haig said he would get back to Bandar shortly. An hour later, he called him to formalize the agreement. Bandar called Fahd, who in turn relayed the tentative departure terms to Arafat. But the PLO leader then asked for U.S. protection of the ships that were to transport his eighty-five hundred fighters and personnel to Egypt, which was initially mentioned as their destination, though later it ended up being Tunisia.
Bandar said he thought Haig “was going to faint” when he told him, “ ‘We need the U.S. Navy to protect us from Beirut to Alexandria.’ ” The deal worked out, according to Bandar, was that the U.S. Navy would escort the ships halfway across the Mediterranean, and then the Egyptians would provide for their protection until they reached the port of Alexandria.
Yet other accounts do not accord the prince such a central role. On June 25, Reagan announced what amounted to Haig’s forced resignation. Haig had strongly disagreed with other senior administration officials, even Reagan himself, about whether to stop the Israeli army or encourage it to press on into the center of Beirut. Nothing had been settled regarding PLO departure terms by the time of Haig’s resignation. Haig later took strong exception to Bandar’s portrayal of the argumentative tenor of their meeting and claimed he had never used the threat of the Israeli army moving into Beirut, because he wanted to be careful not to feed the Saudi “paranoia” that the United States was “pulling the Israeli strings.” He chalked up Bandar’s account of their meeting to his “impressive dramatic talent,” commenting that “he let his imagination run away with him on this one.”29
One central element in Bandar’s account was accurate, however: After nine more weeks of negotiations, the PLO fighters were allowed in the end to depart with their individual arms. They scattered in all directions—overland to Syria and by ships to half a dozen Arab nations. A few went to Egypt, but not under U.S. escort. In the end, the only U.S. protection covered Arafat’s personal departure aboard the Greek merchant vessel Atlantis, which sailed for Piraeus, Greece, on August 30 accompanied by a Greek, not an American, warship. The U.S. Sixth Fleet offered only general air coverage.30
In the U.S. media, the main hero of the day was not Bandar but Philip Habib, a veteran State Department peace negotiator who had come out of retirement in ill health at the age of sixty-two, risking life and limb under Israeli shells and gunfire in Beirut to negotiate the final conditions for the PLO evacuation. A week after the last PLO contingent left Beirut, on September 1, Reagan held a ceremony at the White House where he awarded Habib the highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. However, Reagan did mention years later, in a 1986 presidential certification to Congress required for the transfer of AWACS, that Saudi Arabia had played “a major and highly visible role” in attempts to bring peace to the warring factions in Lebanon in the aftermath of the PLO’s withdrawal, and he praised Bandar by name for his efforts.31 In The Reagan Diaries, finally published in 2007, the president praised Bandar again, writing that he had done “a great job” in helping to broker a cease-fire.32
Bandar’s relationship with Haig, the first of eight secretaries of state he would come to know intimately, was not always confrontational. Before Haig’s resignation, Bandar had scheduled a large dinner party in his honor. Upon learning of his unceremonious dismissal, Haig called Bandar and asked him to cancel the party. But Bandar invited the secretary and his wife to come anyway. After dinner, Haig vented his bitterness in private to Bandar about how he had been driven out of office by his enemies inside the administration.
“I’ve been had,” he lamented. “I shouldn’t have let them have me, but I’ve been had today. Foolish.”33
ON OCTOBER 24, 1983, Prince Bandar formally became his country’s ambassador to the United States. In Bandar’s recollection, his presentation of his credentials to the president on that fall day was anything but formal.34
Reagan cut short Bandar’s presentation to exclaim, “You know something? You came a long way. When I first met you, you were a young major in your air force. And now, you are an ambassador of your country to the United States of America.”
Not certain how to respond, Bandar decided to be sassy.
“Well, Mr. President, you didn’t do too shabbily yourself. When I first met you, you were an unemployed governor, and now you’re president of the greatest country in the world.”
The Reagan years would see the epic struggle of the Cold War reach its climax, and Bandar put himself at the center of the U.S.-Saudi joint effort to ensure that America came out on top, becoming involved in various CIA schemes to roll back communist influence around the world, from Africa to Afghanistan to Central America. Bandar the diplomat became Bandar the master covert operator.35
According to Bandar, the Saudis long harbored doubts about the tenacity of U.S. commitments to their third world allies and friends in America’s struggle against communism.36“Everybody says America always cuts and runs. America does not sustain a policy. America does not go all the way,” said Bandar, citing as a classic case the U.S. abandonment of Vietnam. Washington’s constant “flip-flopping” was a real problem for Saudi Arabia, since it tended to discredit America’s allies as well: “When you catch cold, we catch pneumonia.” When the United States abandoned the contra cause in Nicaragua, this raised questions about its willingness to stick it out in Afghanistan, which the Saudis viewed as their biggest commitment and primary battleground in the Cold War. “If the other side believes that you really are wavering or [you] give the wrong message through losing, say in Nicaragua, we pay for it,” Bandar noted. The only reason the Saudis willingly anted up for the contra cause in Nicaragua, he said, was to make sure that when Reagan said he was taking a stand there, that “he can stand.” The Saudi concern was not academic. One of the kingdom’s neighbors, South Yemen, was avowedly communist and providing facilities to the Soviets, and across the Red Sea there were thirty-five thousand Cubans in Ethiopia. “For us, it was important to modulate that picture [of flip-flopping] within our region by showing they [the United States] have staying power.”
A decade later, the prince was still peeved about the bad press Saudi Arabia had received for its secret funding of the contras. He was particularly rankled about the behavior of Reagan’s then national security adviser, Bud McFarlane, who had divulged the Saudi role to Congress in 1987 after insisting the Saudis keep it secret and promising he would do the same. Having arranged for the secret Saudi funding directly with Bandar, McFarlane had told him, “I’m a Marine. I will fall on my sword before I talk,” and Bandar had gone to the extent of lying to American reporters and editors. “We were hurt because we felt a trust was betrayed.”37
The Saudi sense of U.S. betrayal was nothing new, but the Nicaragua story was personal for Bandar. From the Saudi viewpoint, there was nothing illegal in their decision to send at least one million dollars a month to the contras after Congress cut off all U.S. funding in 1984. Altogether, the Saudis provided thirty-two million dollars. “We broke no U.S. law per se,” said Bandar, ignoring the fact that Congress had explicitly banned U.S. solicitations from other countries. “Why would I come and volunteer to do something for Nicaragua? I didn’t even care about Nicaragua. So it left a bad taste in people’s mouths. You are a very difficult ally to handle.”38
Nicaragua stands as a good example of the lengths Bandar was willing to go in order to stack up chips with the Reagan administration. It is also highly illustrative of the way Reagan’s byzantine CIA director, William Casey, turned the Saudis into a surrogate agent for U.S. covert activities that he wanted to keep hidden from Congress or carry out despite its explicit prohibition. Casey was extremely careful not to leave any paper trail in his dealings with the prince. For example, when Casey wanted to tap the Saudis for contra money, he never dealt directly with Bandar. “He always said that he had never discussed the contra deal with me, and he was telling the truth,” the prince said. “Once I asked a question about the contra aid, and he told me, ‘I cannot discuss this with you because we are forbidden to discuss this.’ ” Instead, Casey used a third party who shuttled back and forth between him and Bandar to discuss Saudi funding. “He knew what I would do. I know what he knew.” Bandar called Casey “a political enigma” (“He would have been a great CIA director in the 1950s at the height of the Cold War”) and too “dogmatic” in the pursuit of what he perceived as U.S. interests around the world.39
The dogmatism shared by Reagan and Casey toward defeating the Soviet Union and its allies anywhere in the world was further revealed in their attitude toward the Communist Party in Italy. The party was taking its distance from Moscow and promoting Eurocommunism, but to Reagan and Casey, a communist was a communist, with or without a “Euro” in front of the name, and all were a threat to America. So the CIA director enlisted Bandar, who confessed to knowing nothing about Italian politics, to carry out another “off the book” operation in the name of stemming the communist tide. Bandar looked back on that episode as somewhat surreal. “I close my eyes, and I see it, but it must have been in a movie. It cannot be real, but it was real.”40
According to Bandar, Reagan’s longtime friend and the ambassador to the Vatican, William Wilson, asked him to provide and deliver ten million dollars to help the Christian Democrats defeat the ascendant Communist Party in the local elections of May 1985.* Shortly before those elections, Reagan had given an interview to European correspondents in Washington in which he urged Italians not to vote for the largest Marxist party in the West. Bandar recalled that he packed up the Saudi “donation” in a suitcase, flew in his private Airbus from Washington to Rome, and drove in a Saudi diplomatic car to the Vatican Bank, where a priest came to the bottom of the stately building’s steps and relieved him of the bulging suitcase, no questions asked. The Vatican was responsible for dispersing the donation to the Christian Democrats, who in fact managed to edge out the communists by 4 percent of the vote in the local elections.
However, the veracity of Bandar’s enthralling account of this Italian caper on behalf of Casey could not be determined. Bandar has told this story to only four people, three of them from the Washington Post.42 Attempts to verify it for a series of articles on U.S.-Saudi relations after 9/11 proved impossible.43 The late Maxwell Rabb, U.S. ambassador to Rome in the mid-1980s, said he had never heard about Saudi funding of the Christian Democratic Party. But he did note that the Saudis were “very close friends” of the Christian Democratic–led government.44 Wilson, Reagan’s Vatican ambassador, also denied any knowledge of the event, commenting that if it had occurred, “it sure took place without my knowledge.”45 He said that he had seen Casey “often” and had rejected his request that CIA agents be assigned to the U.S. mission to the Vatican. Reagan’s national security adviser, McFarlane, also denied any knowledge of the Saudi role, but admitted that Casey didn’t let him in on “any of his Rome shenanigans.”46 Assuming it happened, unlike Nicaragua, Bandar’s Italian caper at least did not cost him, or Saudi Arabia, any embarrassment because it did not become known until years later.
On the other hand, another Casey covert operation undertaken that same year involving Bandar backfired badly, causing the prince a lot of grief at the royal court. The operation was aimed at no less than the assassination of Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, the spiritual leader of Lebanon’s newly formed militant Shiite group Hezbollah, or Party of God. On March 8, 1985, a massive car bomb blew up outside a mosque near his apartment building in the southern suburbs of Beirut, killing eighty people and injuring two hundred others. The bombing was particularly insidious because it took place as people were leaving the mosque, and many of the victims were worshippers. But Fadlallah escaped unharmed. The sheikh had come onto the U.S. radar screen because he was said to have blessed the bombers of the U.S. military barracks at the Beirut airport in October 1983, who killed 241 Marines. Bob Woodward, in his book Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981–1987, claimed that Casey and Bandar had met and conspired together to carry out the attack on Fadlallah, outsourcing the operation to a former commando in the British special operations forces, with the Saudis footing the three-million-dollar cost.47 Bandar emphatically denied that such a meeting ever took place or that the Saudis were involved in any way in the attempt on Fadlallah’s life.*
Bandar had good reasons to deny Woodward’s account, namely his own credibility at the royal court and the fate of his career. Crown Prince Abdullah, who had a special interest in Lebanon, had apparently never been told that the Saudis might have been involved in the Beirut fiasco. After Woodward’s account appeared in October 1987, Abdullah, according to a story in Mideast Markets, blocked Bandar’s hopes for leaving Washington to become the king’s national security adviser.49 If King Fahd withdrew him from Washington, it would appear to be an implicit confirmation of Saudi involvement and raise questions about official Saudi denials.†
For all his involvement in U.S. Middle East and Cold War policies during the Reagan years, Bandar’s standing with the elderly president was never intimate. Over the eight years Reagan was in office, the president mentioned in his diaries dealing with the prince on just ten occasions, often merely to receive messages from King Fahd. Playing on Reagan’s hatred of communism, Bandar did try several times to talk him into making a deal to wean Syrian president Hafez al-Assad from his dependency on the Soviet Union. Bandar told Reagan that Assad wanted “to trade the Soviets for U.S. help and influence.” But the president turned him down because he feared Bandar’s proposal would require the United States’ “separating [itself] somewhat from Israel,” and that, said Reagan, was a “no can do.”50
Bandar was closer to Reagan’s wife, Nancy, and he was reported to have used his access to her to try to influence U.S. foreign
policy, and at one point even Reagan’s appointment of his national security adviser. When the president was considering in
October 1983 whom he should name to replace William Clark, he wavered between Bud McFarlane and his ultraconservative and
highly outspoken U.N. envoy, Jeane Kirkpatrick. In the end, he chose the former. Asked about reports that he had weighed in
with Nancy in favor of McFarlane, Bandar conceded he had made his views known “to certain people,” but said he felt this had
been “a minor fact in the decision, to be honest.”51 Still, the Saudi ambassador’s having tried to influence the outcome of Reagan’s choice seemed an intrusion into U.S. foreign
policy way beyond what was appropriate for an Arab, or any other, foreign envoy to Washington.
* Dutton wanted to create bumper stickers with that slogan, derived from a statement by former president Richard Nixon published on October 4 that criticized opponents of the sale. They had “fallen into the trap of forcing members of Congress to choose between Reagan and Begin.”10
* Bob Woodward wrote in his book Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981–1987 that the elections in question occurred in May 1985 and that the Saudis provided two million dollars.41
* Woodward has stood by his assertion. In an interview on PBS’s Frontline in October 2001, he said the Casey-Bandar meeting took place during “a stroll in the garden” at the Saudi embassy residence in McLean, Virginia. They agreed that the Saudis would “put up the money to hire some professionals to go and try to car-bomb Sheikh Fadlallah.” Casey kept the operation so “off the books” that even Reagan did not know about it, according to Woodward.48
† The Mideast Markets story is interesting because it constitutes the earliest report that Bandar, after only four years as ambassador in Washington, was aspiring to become the king’s national security adviser. It would be nineteen more years before he achieved this goal.