“Trust but Verify”
STARTING IN 1985, THE SAUDIS were forced to begin looking elsewhere than the United States for their most advanced weaponry, and King Fahd put Bandar in charge of spearheading the search. The Saudis had enjoyed two stunning victories in hard-fought battles with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) over the sale of F-15s and AWACS. But Saudi good fortune, always dependent on White House resolve, was waning. Fahd asked Reagan for forty-eight additional F-15s during his state visit to Washington in February, but the president replied that while he supported the request, he didn’t think he could get Congress to support it.1 The king then warned Reagan that he would have to go elsewhere, and according to Bandar, Reagan said he understood and agreed. During the summer, the Saudis turned to Britain to purchase forty-eight Tornado fighters and thirty Hawk trainers in a deal initially worth four billion dollars but ultimately more than twenty times that amount.
The prince said the Saudis had also been interested in purchasing the U.S. Pershing, a mobile, intermediate-range, two-stage missile with a range of more than one thousand miles. The Pershing was a mainstay of NATO defense against Soviet forces in Europe, and the subject of endless U.S.-Soviet disarmament negotiations. “We asked for Pershings also, and America said no.”2 The request must have shocked the Reagan administration, since the Pershing was armed with a nuclear warhead, though it could be adapted to carry a conventional explosive as well. Bandar said the Saudi concern was countering the Soviet-built Scud missiles that both the Iranians and the Iraqis had modified to produce longer-range versions capable of flying up to six hundred miles. Both sides were firing them off at each other’s capitals. The Iranians started using their Scuds against Baghdad in 1985, and that triggered the Saudi search for missiles. “The Iranians at that time could have put a Scud right in the gulf and fired at our oil facilities with impunity,” Bandar explained. “His majesty’s feeling was ‘I must get a weapons system that I can [use to] hit deep into the heart [of Iran] and deter.’ ”3
The prince’s first mission was to obtain the Tornados, and Bandar later remembered the al-Yamamah, or “dove of peace,” contract as the easiest arms deal he had ever clinched.4 King Fahd sent Bandar in the summer of 1985 to Austria to seek out British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who happened to be on vacation in the mountains outside Salzburg. Bandar carried a letter from the king containing a formal request for the Tornado purchase. Without asking for the Saudi rationale or posing any other questions, Thatcher immediately replied, “You have a deal.”5 Their conversation about the purchase lasted just twenty-five minutes, and Bandar noted the difference between buying arms from the British, with no questions asked, and buying from the Americans, which required months of protracted battle with Congress. For Britain, it was a veritable bonanza, the biggest military sale in the country’s history, eventually worth eighty-six billion dollars for seventy-two jets, two air bases, and innumerable service contracts. Nonetheless, the al-Yamamah deal, which the Saudis paid for in oil rather than cash, would become the subject of much scandal later, with Bandar at the center of it.
The deal signaled the end of the U.S. monopoly on military jet sales to the kingdom—at least for the Royal Saudi Air Force’s most advanced aircraft—and the start of a new diversification policy for the Saudis. AIPAC had won its battle, but at a price dear to Israel’s own security—the loss of U.S. control over where in the kingdom the Saudis installed the weapons most threatening to Israel. AIPAC’s clout became clear in May 1986 when the Senate and the House voted overwhelmingly to deny the $354 million sale of even air-to-air missiles to the Saudis. This time, neither Reagan nor Bandar made any attempt to lobby for the sale; Reagan was out of the country when the vote was taken, and the prince was back home during the entire fifty days of informal and formal notification to Congress of the sale. The Saudis left the lobbying to six high-powered Washington public relations firms they were collectively paying $1.5 million a year to make their case.6 Their displeasure with the turn of events even prior to the vote was made known in the subtle, arcane ways for which the Saudis are famous: The day Vice President George H. W. Bush arrived in Riyadh for a visit, on April 5, Crown Prince Abdullah left for Dhahran to join King Fahd, who had also gone out of his way to be absent from the capital.7
Bush’s visit marked the only time the U.S. government has pushed Saudi Arabia to actually increase, rather than decrease, oil prices, a strange episode in the history of American oil diplomacy. Gasoline prices at the pump had hit a seven-year low in April, falling below one dollar, and the U.S. oil industry, for once hurting badly, was pressing Washington to do something. Bush’s mission was to jawbone the Saudis into cutting production so that prices would go back up. Bandar escorted the vice president around the kingdom and tried to smooth his meetings with a Saudi leadership already very unhappy with Washington. For those who held that Bush was Big Oil’s man in the Reagan administration, his mission to the kingdom was proof positive.
At the time, the Saudis were in an all-out price war with other members of the thirteen-nation Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), which were overproducing and selling below the group’s mandated prices. To show they had the muscle to mainstain discipline in and control over OPEC, the Saudis had decided in October 1985 to pump an extra million barrels a day at a discount price of three dollars per barrel. Their idea was to punish OPEC’s cheaters and force them to cut back their production and adhere to official prices. But the immediate effect was to flood the market and send oil prices plummeting first to twelve dollars a barrel and then to ten.8
Bush was finally granted a meeting with Fahd, but he had to fly to Dhahran to see him. During their two-and-a-half-hour meeting,
Bush bemoaned the free fall in oil prices, telling the king it had become a threat to U.S. national interests, by which, of
course, he meant specifically a threat to the U.S. oil industry. Here was an attempt at official U.S. price-fixing if there
ever was one, though Bush denied he had come to Saudi Arabia on a “price-fixing mission” and insisted he was rather trying
to reestablish “stability” in the chaotic oil market.9 However, the king was more worried about Saudi clout over OPEC than low gasoline prices in America, and the two leaders reached
no agreement on a desirable price for oil, mostly because the Saudis had just begun playing hardball with their OPEC rivals.
Four months later, though, OPEC agreed to cut production by a huge five million barrels a day, and the price rose quickly
to seventeen dollars a barrel. The evidence suggests that the Saudis were acting far less to please Washington than to show
who was boss of OPEC.10
HAVING BEEN REBUFFED by Congress, the Saudi leadership remained determined to obtain missiles. Bandar argued that the kingdom had no choice other than to turn to communist China, because no Western European nation produced an intermediate-range missile, and the Saudis did not want to deal with the Soviet Union. That, he said, “would have really alienated our American friends.”11 As events turned out, the Saudi decision to seek Chinese missiles not only seriously alienated the Reagan administration, but also brought Saudi Arabia to the brink of war with Israel, or at least the closest the two nations have ever come to open hostilities. That China should have been the cause came as no small surprise to both U.S. and Israeli intelligence services, which were caught flat-footed. Still, Saudi Arabia and China shared some natural affinities. Though communist in ideology, China was ruled by a similarly secretive autocratic elite with no tolerance for Western-style democracy and a strong sense of being the center of an ancient civilization and culture. But the Saudis had no relations of any kind with China, recognizing its rival Taiwan instead. So Fahd decided to use Bandar, the same way President Nixon had Henry Kissinger, to make a series of secret trips to Beijing.
Bandar’s opening to China began, ironically, in Washington right under the nose of the Reagan administration. In the spring of 1985, Bandar casually mentioned to the Chinese ambassador, Han Xu, that Saudi Arabia was interested in buying missiles from his country.12 To say the least, the ambassador must have been astounded by the request and even more so by the prince’s offer to go personally to Beijing to discuss the matter if the Chinese agreed. Bandar wanted a “yes-or-no answer,” but not surprisingly the ambassador came back with an ambiguous reply. Bandar agreed to further talks, and the two ambassadors concocted what seems in retrospect a highly unlikely cover story for their ongoing contact. Bandar would go with a large Saudi delegation to Pakistan to discuss cooperation with China in the development of their petrochemical industries—a subject the prince knew nothing about. In Islamabad, during a brief walk in the garden of the Chinese embassy with the head of the delegation, Bandar was given a short message: “Yes” to the missiles and “Come to Beijing to discuss the details.” A few weeks later, Bandar embarked on the first of three secret and two public trips he would make to the Chinese capital, to discuss first missiles and then the opening of diplomatic relations between China and Saudi Arabia. He dealt directly with Prime Minister Zhao Ziyang and, when Zhao was removed in 1989 after opposing the use of force to crush the pro-democracy student demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, with Communist Party strongman Deng Xiaoping.
On Bandar’s first trip to Beijing, in July 1985, much of his time was devoted to parrying Chinese insistence that the Saudis cut diplomatic relations with Taiwan as part of the deal. “We told them we cannot have a deal like that. If we change our relationship with Taiwan, it will have to be our decision, not imposed on us. We just got stuck on that point for a long time.”13 He recalled that he finally broke the stalemate by asking the Chinese whether they really wanted the Saudis to sell their friends so cheaply, suggesting that Saudi diplomatic relations with China might well be “sold” one day for a higher price. At that point, the Chinese backed off, and the missile deal was concluded with the understanding that the Saudis would maintain their ties with Taiwan for the time being. The Chinese ability to keep Bandar’s visit a secret was put to a severe test by the presence in a neighboring guesthouse to the Saudi one of an Iranian delegation, but it never discovered he was there.
On another of his secret missions, in early July 1986, Bandar was taken to see the factory near Xi’an, in Shaanxi Province, where the East Wind CSS-2 missiles were manufactured. Again, he was posing as a Saudi petrochemical salesman. The factory was located near the site of China’s famous tomb housing thousands of terra-cotta soldiers and horses dating back to the third century B.C. The Chinese took the whole Saudi delegation to visit the statues. Then afterward, while other members were resting, Bandar was driven alone to the complex for a quick tour and briefing. By pure chance, the New York Times correspondent in China, John Burns, happened to be passing through Xi’an on a motorcycle trip with a friend. The police stopped and detained the two for two days. Burns was subsequently expelled from China on suspicion of espionage. According to Bandar, the Chinese thought Burns was spying on their Saudi visitors because “the only thing they were hiding at that time was my visit around Xi’an.” Bandar and the Chinese were so convinced that Burns was on to the prince’s secret visit that they concocted a press release in case the Times published a story.*
The missile deal laid the groundwork for later diplomatic and economic relations with China that would eventually become a counterbalance to Saudi dependence on the United States. Bandar was not the only one involved in forging the kingdom’s first opening to a communist power. So, too, was his half brother General Khaled bin Sultan, who was head of the Saudi Air Defense Forces in the mid-1980s. Khaled would later become co-commander with U.S. general Norman Schwarzkopf of the coalition forces assembled to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait during the first Gulf War, in 1990–91. Khaled worked out the details of the missile purchase in secret meetings held between December 16 and 23, 1986, at a Saudi air base with Lieutenant General Cao Gangchuan, deputy chief of the People’s Liberation Army’s general staff. Khaled made four secret trips to China himself starting in February 1987. In his own account of the Saudi rationale for acquiring the missiles, the general put as much emphasis on the kingdom’s need for a deterrent against Israel as against Iran, because of the Israeli nuclear capability.14 Bandar never mentioned Israel. The two accounts of these sometime rival brothers make clear that there was a lot of traffic between Beijing and Riyadh for almost three years without the CIA, or any of the other fifteen U.S. spy agencies, ever becoming aware of its real purpose.† The deception was completely successful, and Bandar, the linchpin of the U.S.-Saudi relationship, had initiated and carried it off at the same time that he was working secretly with Casey and the CIA on various covert operations.
The Reagan administration became aware of Bandar’s masterful deceit only in early 1988. Assistant Secretary of State Richard Murphy confronted Bandar on March 6 with U.S. satellite pictures of the missile sites in the Saudi desert and demanded an explanation. By then, half of what was later determined to be the purchase of fifty Chinese East Wind CSS-2 missiles and nine launchers had already reached Saudi Arabia. Late the previous year, they had been smuggled in by ship and mixed together with Chinese missiles headed for Iraq under another ruse, to avoid Iranian interception. The Saudis had asked the Chinese to deliver the weapons to a Saudi port so they could be taken overland to Iraq to avoid possible Iranian detection and attack. What the CIA never discovered until it was too late was that upon the arrival of the Chinese arms in the kingdom, the shipment had been split up and sent in two different directions: The Iraqi Silkworm missiles had been hauled overland to Iraq, while the CSS-2s had been trucked southwest to a site in the kingdom’s desert Rub‘ al-Khali “empty quarter.” When the CIA had first begun asking questions about the activities under way there, Bandar had told the agency that the Saudis were building a huge new “ammunition depot” to keep their munitions far from populated areas for safety’s sake.15
The Washington Post broke the story on March 18 after Bandar tipped the newspaper off to avoid having it appear in the rival Washington Times first. The prince was convinced the Israelis had leaked the news to the Times. The Post article made the point that the missiles had a maximum range of twenty-two hundred miles, making them capable of reaching “any part of the Middle East with a nuclear warhead.” (Later reports said they had less than half that range.) Both China and Saudi Arabia were quick to provide Washington with assurances that they would never carry such warheads, but the missiles were so inaccurate that doubts remained in U.S. intelligence circles about their ability to come close enough to hitting a target with only conventional explosives.16 A week later, a top aide to Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir let it be known that the “possibility always exist[ed]” that Israel would strike the Saudi missile site if the United States failed to deal with the problem. He noted that Israel had “a tradition of not standing by quietly when there [was] a real threat against it.”17 The message was not lost on Bandar, who felt the political temperature rising fast and the heat suddenly concentrated on him.
Reagan, who was furious, gave the Saudis three options—ship the missiles back to China, dismantle them temporarily and negotiate terms for their use, or allow U.S. monitors to be stationed at the launching site. The king refused all three. “Things were tense,” Bandar recalled. “We were not talking.”18 Then, when the Israeli air force began maneuvers suggesting it might be preparing to strike the missile site, Bandar approached Reagan’s national security adviser, Colin Powell, who was by then a good friend and another of his racquetball regulars, for help.
Powell thoroughly chewed Bandar out for causing the crisis in the first place and said the missiles were causing the Saudis more trouble than they were worth.19 Bandar reiterated the threat his country perceived and reminded Powell that the Saudis had asked the United States for missiles and been turned down. He also assured Powell they would not be used offensively against anybody in the region, only to defend against an attack on the kingdom. Powell told Bandar he would relay the Saudi message to the Israelis and get back to him. The same afternoon, Bandar learned from Riyadh that Saudi radar had picked up a huge Israeli air force maneuver. He went immediately to see Powell and reminded him to tell the Israelis that Saudi Arabia had no incentive to fight, but that if attacked, it would have no option but to retaliate.
Powell passed the Saudi message on to Reagan and Israel, but the Israelis would give Washington no commitment not to bomb. Uncertain whether Powell was telling the truth or using the Israeli evasiveness to pressure the Saudis into giving up the missiles, Bandar relayed to King Fahd that the United States had been unable to obtain any commitment from the Israelis not to attack. In response, the king ordered the entire Saudi air force to move north and to do it in such a way that the Americans who were on training missions in the kingdom were aware of it.
At midnight Washington time, Powell called Bandar demanding to know why the Saudi air force was on the move. The White House security adviser warned that the Saudi action could lead to a disastrous miscalculation by one of the two countries, to which Bandar replied again that his country had no incentive to initiate hostilities with Israel, but would retaliate if attacked. Powell asked Bandar to come over to his home for more talks. In the meantime, he called the White House and Israel to discuss a way out of the looming confrontation. Finally, Bandar recalled, both countries agreed to back off and announce that their air forces were just engaged in “night exercises.”
“We came to the brink,” Bandar said.
The actions of others confirm that the two countries were indeed close to war. Reagan issued a public warning to Israel not to make a preemptive strike, making it clear that he was “totally opposed to any such thing.”20 Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak sent what was described as an “urgent message” to Reagan asking him to intervene and warning that an Israeli strike would “blow up peace.”21 The Israeli air force did engage in low-level bombing practice runs, and U.S. intelligence officials were telling reporters they could be in preparation for a preemptive strike.22 Reagan officials were sufficiently concerned about a possible clash to move quickly to obtain guarantees from both the Saudis and the Chinese that the missiles would never be armed with nuclear or chemical warheads. Powell’s own recollection was that the situation was “every bit as tense” as Bandar had described it, but he still judged the two countries “well short of actually going to war.”23
One casualty of the Chinese missile saga was the U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia at the time, Hume Horan. One of the State Department’s most seasoned Middle East hands and a fluent Arabic speaker, Horan was caught in the cross fire between Washington and Riyadh in what he later regarded as the most serious crisis in U.S.-Saudi relations prior to 9/11. The State Department first ordered him to see Fahd immediately and convey U.S. “surprise and disapproval” regarding the missile purchase. He did as instructed, to the great displeasure of the Saudi king, whom Horan described as “furious with him” over the reprimand. The king bluntly told him “to keep my nose out of it.”24
No sooner had Horan delivered the formal U.S. protest than he received a directive to disregard his earlier instructions,
but it was too late. Fahd was so furious he asked for Horan’s removal. By the end of March, he was gone. According to U.S.
Middle East historians, it was the first time since the United States had established diplomatic relations with the Saudi
kingdom in 1933 that an American ambassador had been fired at Saudi request.25 Horan said the Saudis had already been suspicious of him because he spoke fluent Arabic. In addition, his father was Persian
and had been a foreign minister under the deposed shah. His Persian pedigree was “offensive” to the king. Bandar had never
liked Horan and had stayed away from the ceremony at the State Department marking his departure for Riyadh in mid-September
1987.26 The prince had thereafter pressed for his removal at the State Department and the White House. In the end, Washington had
bent as much to Bandar as to the king, in Horan’s eyes. He believed his removal marked a turning point after which the clout
of all future U.S. ambassadors to the kingdom was seriously diminished. “It hardly mattered what an American ambassador said
or wrote back out there. U.S.-Saudi relations were handled by Bandar here [in Washington]. The U.S. ambassador’s influence
ended in Riyadh.”27
BANDAR’S ACCOUNT of his impact on the shaping of America’s Middle East policy during the Reagan years does not jibe with those of others involved. One of the biggest shifts to occur was the United States’ decision in December 1988 to formally recognize the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as a legitimate voice in the peace process. America had long insisted that the group recognize Israel’s existence and renounce terrorism as preconditions for any kind of dialogue with Washington. On the other hand, Reagan was hamstrung in moving forward with his own proposal for a settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict without having a Palestinian partner in the negotiations. The so-called Reagan plan, announced in September 1982 immediately after the PLO departure from Beirut, had called for the creation of a self-governing Palestinian authority over the West Bank and the Gaza strip that would be in association with Jordan. Israel and Jordan were supposed to negotiate the details without PLO participation.
Bandar claims that he played a central role in convincing Reagan to recognize the PLO, and that it was the quid pro quo he extracted from the White House for Saudi funding of CIA anticommunist covert operations around the world. Specifically, he says the Saudis agreed to fund the contras after Congress cut off money for them in 1984 in return for U.S. recognition of the PLO. The outlines of the deal were sketched in his mind when Bud McFarlane, the national security adviser, came to him asking for help with the contras, and Bandar proposed to King Fahd that the Saudis make this demand. Fahd gave Bandar a green light to make a “deal,” and Bandar claims he went back to Riyadh with a letter signed by Reagan recognizing the PLO as the sole Palestinian representative in peace talks with the authority to veto anything.28
To date, however, no evidence has come to light to substantiate that Reagan made any such deal. Based on what is known, the breakthrough came about only after enormous U.S. and international pressure had been brought to bear on the PLO and Yasser Arafat to accept the existence of Israel. According to Nicholas Veliotes, an assistant secretary of state at the time, the effort began as early as 1981, just after Reagan came into office, and had nothing to do with Saudi funding for the contras. Veliotes said that he launched the initiative with Reagan’s approval, but that it was scuttled after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June 1982. Veliotes worked through a private intermediary to avoid direct contacts with the PLO. Bandar played no role, he said, but the Saudi government did act to assure the PLO of the bona fides of Veliotes’s chosen intermediary.29
Bandar did become involved later, according to Veliotes, when the United States was seeking Arafat’s approval of the Reagan plan. In April 1983, Arafat had finally agreed to support the plan, but then said he needed the approval of the PLO National Council, which was meeting in Kuwait at the time. So Arafat flew there ostensibly to confirm the council’s acceptance of the plan. When the time came for a vote, Veliotes had Bandar on one telephone line and Hasib Sabbagh, a close friend of Arafat, on another. Both were in direct contact with Palestinians attending the meeting. Bandar reported that the council had approved the Reagan plan, but Sabbagh told Veliotes it had been turned down, and Sabbagh was right. According to Veliotes, Bandar had heard what he hoped to hear and had totally misread Arafat, who was in the process of ensuring that the meeting actually disapproved PLO acceptance of the Reagan plan. For Veliotes, Bandar’s “bad judgment” was part of a more general problem in dealing with the Saudis as brokers. “You had to be very careful when they told you X told them something, say Arafat, whether it was really what Arafat meant, or what he had really told the Saudis, or what the Saudis wanted us to hear.” Veliotes felt this problem was compounded by doubts about whom Bandar was speaking for, himself or the king. “You were never quite sure whether you were talking to Bandar the wing commander or Bandar the Saudi prince who was representing the royal apparatus.”30
In its final months, the Reagan administration did recognize the PLO as a result of seven years of on-again, off-again talks through various intermediaries. Neither Bandar nor other Saudis played a noticeable role. Instead, Sweden’s foreign minister, Sten Andersson, served as a key mediator between the PLO and Washington.31 The issue of U.S. recognition came to a head in November 1988 when Arafat applied for a visa to attend a U.N. General Assembly session in New York. Blaming Arafat for the lack of progress in the peace process, Secretary of State George Shultz personally refused his request. A diplomatic commotion ensued over the U.S. right to take such an action. But it got results. At a Geneva press conference on December 14, Arafat proclaimed the magic words: The PLO “totally and absolutely renounce[ d] all forms of terrorism including individual, group and state terrorism” and agreed that all parties to the Middle East conflict had a right “to exist in peace and security, including the state of Palestine, Israel and their neighbors.”32 The United States then recognized the PLO, but Israel was still not ready to talk to Arafat, and the impasse dragged on into the first Bush and then the Clinton administration.
In the end, while no documents proving Bandar’s assertion of a contras-for-PLO deal have come to light so far, there may have
been an implicit one, as suggested by the testimony of a Palestinian American businessman, Sam Bamieh. He was called to testify
before the House Subcommittee on African Affairs in the summer of 1987 about secret U.S. funding for the Angolan anticommunist
movement, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, led by Jonas Savimbi. Bamieh informed the panel that he
had met then crown Prince Fahd at his home in Riyadh in November 1981 and been told that in exchange for the American AWACS,
the kingdom was ready to fund “anti-communist movements around the world.” Fahd had promised to do “whatever” the Reagan administration
wanted the Saudis to do.33 Bamieh also testified that Bandar had been put in charge to make sure it happened. He had met the prince in February 1984
in Cannes, France, where they had discussed setting up a shell company to funnel funds to anticommunist rebels not only in
Angola but also in Afghanistan. Bamieh said that Bandar had told him that even as they were meeting, Fahd was discussing the
same issue with CIA director William Casey aboard his royal yacht. The Saudis, Bamieh told the House hearing, had already
provided Morocco with fifty million dollars to train Savimbi’s guerrillas, who were seeking the overthrow of the communist
government in Angola.34
ONE OF THE more ironic twists to Bandar’s activities in Washington during the Reagan years was the time and energy he spent opening up Saudi relations with the United States’ chief Cold War adversaries, the Soviet Union and China. Bandar claimed to have been the secret envoy King Fahd used to initiate a dialogue with both. The opening with China came first because of the missile agreement and because China supported the Saudi position on Afghanistan.35 Bandar oversaw the first step on the road to full diplomatic relations between China and Saudi Arabia in Washington, where in November 1988 he signed an agreement with the Chinese ambassador allowing the two nations to open trade offices in each other’s capital. The Saudis still kept their ties to Taiwan for a while, but informed the Taiwanese of their intention of switching sides shortly. Bandar said both he and his half brother Prince Khaled had argued at the royal court for establishing ties with Beijing “because the Chinese were really treating us very well.”36 Bandar particularly appreciated that “they never forget their friends.” The best example of this was the near veneration in which the Chinese still held Henry Kissinger for his role in Richard Nixon’s opening up diplomatic relations with China nearly two decades earlier. The Chinese were treating Bandar the same way, maybe even better.37 China and Saudi Arabia formally opened up diplomatic relations on July 21, 1990. Bandar planned to fly to Beijing ten days later for a vacation, but the first Gulf War broke out.
Establishing relations with the Soviets was much more complicated because of a long-standing Saudi decision not to have any ties until they withdrew from Afghanistan. Bandar recalled that technically Saudi Arabia never formally broke diplomatic relations, and that the Soviet Union was one of the first nations to recognize the present-day Saudi kingdom in 1932. But when the kingdom’s founding father, King Abdulaziz, discovered there was a single Soviet communist diplomat present in the country, he ordered him out of the kingdom. After that, relations remained frozen, first because the Soviet Union backed all of the Saudi monarchy’s radical Arab foes for three decades and then because in 1979 it invaded Afghanistan.
The Afghan cause was, of course, the keystone of Reagan’s anticommunist crusade and what drew U.S., Saudi, and Pakistani intelligence services into a tight alliance during the 1980s.38 The Saudis spent several billion dollars on arms purchases and economic assistance and agreed to match the Reagan administration dollar for dollar during the latter years of the struggle. It offered air tickets and official encouragement for thousands of young Saudis to go join the jihad against the godless Soviets. Among the most prominent holy warriors was Osama bin Laden, son of one of Saudi Arabia’s wealthiest construction magnates and the future leader of the terrorist organization al-Qaeda, founded in the last year of Reagan’s administration. But the Saudi who played the most instrumental role in the campaign to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan was Prince Turki, the American-educated head of the Saudi intelligence service.39 Bandar claimed he, too, played a crucial role at the very end by helping to convince Mikhail Gorbachev, the reform-minded Soviet president, to withdraw.
As with the Chinese, Bandar’s first contacts with Soviet diplomats took place in Washington. Initially, they had nothing to do with opening diplomatic relations with Moscow, as the Washington media first surmised. Bandar went to see the long-serving Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin on a courtesy call after his official appointment as Saudi ambassador in October 1983. At the time, Dobrynin was dean of the diplomatic corps, and that, said Bandar, was the sole reason for his visit. Bandar said he had no further contact regarding a diplomatic relationship until 1988. In February of that year, he went to Moscow, where he again met with Dobrynin, who by then had become Gorbachev’s national security adviser. The reason for his trip, he said, was a decision by Fahd and Reagan to press jointly for a Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.40
Bandar’s first talks took place with Gorbachev and his advisers together, during which the Soviet leader blustered that they had “better quit” or the Saudis would find themselves “in deep trouble.” To impress Bandar about Soviet intelligence on what the Saudis were up to in Afghanistan, Gorbachev said he knew they were providing two hundred million dollars annually to arm the Afghan mujahideen.
“I said to him, ‘You are absolutely wrong, Mr. President.’ ”
“He said, ‘I am not wrong. My information is solid.’ ”
“I said, ‘You are wrong. We are paying five hundred million, not two hundred million, and we’re willing to pay a billion if you don’t get out of Afghanistan.’ ”
At that point, Bandar recalled, Gorbachev asked him to go for a walk alone outside the meeting room. He thanked the prince for his warning, telling him he could now “use that as a club against his people.” According to Bandar, the Soviet leader assured him he would be out of Afghanistan by the following March. Indeed, on February 15, 1989, the Soviet Army began its withdrawal, and by the start of March it was complete.
Was Bandar’s escalation threat as decisive as he claimed? He was clearly knocking at a wide-open door at Gorbachev’s reform-minded Kremlin. Peace negotiations sponsored by the United Nations had been under way for months and were verging on closure by the time of the Bandar-Gorbachev meeting. Transcripts of Soviet Politburo sessions from that period indicate that Gorbachev had resolved to leave Afghanistan by the fall of 1986, when he first stated that his strategic objective was to get out “in one, maximum two, years.”41 The documents reflect little opposition to a withdrawal among Politburo members. By the end of 1987, Gorbachev and Reagan were trying to resolve not whether Soviet troops would withdraw but whether U.S. aid for the Afghan resistance would stop when they left.42 In the end, the Soviets left with no U.S. assurance of a cutoff of that aid.
On April 14, about two months after Bandar’s talk with Gorbachev, the Soviet Union signed a formal agreement in Geneva committing itself to withdrawal. The pact was also signed by the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul and representatives from Pakistan and the United States. The Geneva signing ceremony excluded all the Afghan resistance leaders as part of a face-saving formula that also involved U.N.-conducted indirect talks between the Afghan mujahideen and the Soviets and their Kabul allies, to avoid humiliating face-to-face negotiations.
The Soviet departure from Afghanistan did not lead the Saudis to immediately reestablish their relations with Moscow. It would take another two years and the imperative need to win Soviet support at the United Nations for the U.S.-Saudi campaign to oust Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwait by force. Bandar spearheaded the negotiations, holding secret talks first with the Soviet ambassador to Washington, Alexander Bessmertnykh, and later in Moscow with Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze. The contacts had begun shortly after the Iraqis took over Kuwait in early August 1990. In the end, the Saudis basically had to bribe Gorbachev with a four-billion-dollar letter of credit to gain Soviet backing for a U.N. resolution authorizing the use of force against Saddam. They also had to agree to resume full diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and did so on September 17. Despite the Afghan war, Moscow was only about two months behind Beijing in establishing relations with Riyadh.
Bandar came away with one unique souvenir from his dealings with Gorbachev: a photograph of the Soviet leader and President Reagan with the words “Trust But Verify” written on it. Reagan had become famous for this adage and used it at a press conference, even speaking in Russian (“doverey no proverey”), at the U.S.-Soviet Iceland summit in October 1986. While Bandar was in Moscow in early 1988, he said, Gorbachev gave him one of only fifty copies made of a photograph of the two leaders standing together. The next time he saw Reagan, the prince showed him the picture.43
Bandar asked him, “Why do you think he gave it to me, Mr. President?”
“What did he tell you?” asked Reagan.
“He said, ‘I want you to know I’m a friend of your friend, too.’ ”
Reagan then picked up his pen and scrawled on the picture, “Prince Bandar, Trust But Verify.”
When Bandar next saw Gorbachev in Moscow after the attempted coup against the Soviet leader in August 1991, he showed him
the same picture. Gorbachev, too, picked up his pen and inscribed in Russian, “Doverey no Proverey.” Bandar kept this unique photograph on prominent display in his office at the Saudi embassy in downtown Washington.
* Many years later, when both Burns and I were covering the 1992–95 civil war in Bosnia, I asked him about the incident. He said he had had no idea that Bandar was in Xi’an at the time and had never been told his expulsion was linked to Bandar’s visit there.
† The Americans had been aware of Bandar’s trips to Beijing, but Bandar told them he had gone there to help Iraq by trying to convince Beijing to halt its arms sales to the Iranians, which had included deadly Silkworm shore-to-ship missiles. He told the Americans that China had agreed to sell the Silkworms instead to Iraq, and that Saudi Arabia was picking up the tab.