CHAPTER 7

Strategic Asset or
Strategic Liability

BUSH’S DEFEAT BY CLINTON in the November 1992 election came as a great shock and disappointment to the Saudis, Bandar in particular. The American president he had been closest to had lasted only one term in office. He couldn’t understand why an American leader who had presided over victory in war would be repudiated so quickly by his own people, though he remembered that the same thing had happened to Winston Churchill at the end of World War II. He reminded Bush of that in an emotional letter he wrote the president the night of the presidential election.¹

The prince had flown to Houston to watch the returns and be ready to congratulate Bush on his reelection. Frederick Dutton, his closest political adviser, had warned him against going there, because it would brand him as blatantly partisan in an American presidential election, which was out of order for the dean of the Washington diplomatic corps. The prince didn’t care. Bandar told Bush that, win or lose, he was a “friend for life” and “one of my family.”² When Bush called to tell him he had lost, Bandar felt like he was being told about a death in the family.

Bandar had known Bush by then for twelve years, since he had become Reagan’s vice president. The prince had escorted him on his contentious trip in April 1986 to Saudi Arabia; they had even become stuck in the sand dunes together there on a desert ride.³ He had bonded with Bush in war, and their two families had grown close as well. Bandar had become a frequent and welcome visitor to the White House and the Bush summer home in Kennebunkport, Maine. When the Bushes had been in Saudi Arabia visiting U.S. troops during Thanksgiving in 1990, Bandar’s wife, Princess Haifa, had taken in their daughter, Dorothy, and her family, who were passing the holiday alone at the White House. Bandar was by then well on his way to earning the moniker Bandar Bush, which he would later inherit in the U.S. media.

At the same time, his relations with Bill Clinton had been rocky from the start. That was when Clinton was still Arkansas governor and in search of donations for his state university. He first approached the Saudi embassy in 1989 in connection with the University of Arkansas’s drive to raise twenty-three million dollars to establish a Middle East studies center. The Saudis had never given this large a donation to any American university and were uncertain why they should invest such an amount in what was to them a little-known institute located in a backwater state. “I don’t think even prophets knew that Bill Clinton was going to run for president, [much less] be elected,” said Bandar, reflecting back on this embarrassing episode in his career.⁴ But Clinton kept badgering Bandar. The king, at the prince’s request, had previously made a number of charitable donations to presidential causes, or those of their wives: In 1985, he had donated one million dollars to First Lady Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” antidrug campaign and offered several prize Arabian horses to the president.* In 1989, he had given another million dollars to First Lady Barbara Bush’s campaign against illiteracy. And the Saudis had given millions to help build presidential libraries. But the Clinton request was far more than the Saudis had ever had to deal with. Clinton may have thought he had a Saudi connection because Prince Turki, Bandar’s brother-in-law and the longtime Saudi intelligence chief, had been a Georgetown University classmate and a casual acquaintance. Bandar finally passed on Clinton’s request to the king, who, surprisingly, approved it. The request was then sent to the Saudi Ministry of Higher Education and various Saudi universities that were asked to make contributions.

By the time of Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, the University of Arkansas had received word that three million dollars was on the way. The fate of the other twenty million dollars remained unknown. Despite the war, Clinton kept pressing Bandar for an appointment to find out. Twice Bandar gave him one and then had to cancel it. On one of these occasions, he stood up Clinton and a university delegation when they were already in Washington because of war business. He simply forgot about a third appointment and saw Clinton only briefly. Bandar recalled listening politely and trying to put Clinton off by suggesting the University of Arkansas and Saudi universities first do a study outlining a collaborative proposal. Clinton had such a study already in hand and turned it over to Bandar, who dutifully sent it back to the education ministry in Riyadh and “forgot all about it.”⁵

Clinton’s request finally made its way through the Saudi bureaucracy after a year and a half, and the remaining twenty million dollars was approved in October 1992 on the eve of the presidential election. (The money would not be delivered until January 1994.) Bandar said he then purposely held off disclosing the news until after the election because he felt he would look “odd” doing it beforehand, as if he were voting for Clinton to win.⁶ So word of the gift had to await election results. The Democratic winner had already been told of the Saudi decision by the time King Fahd called on November 10 to congratulate him on his victory. Press reports at the time suggested Clinton was still soliciting the king for a donation, but Bandar said he was simply thanking Fahd. Clinton took advantage of the call to try to establish a personal tie with the Saudi monarch, knowing full well he was going to have major difficulties replacing Bush in the Saudis’ affections. He told the king he was aware he had just “lost a friend” in the White House and assured him he wanted “to be just as good a friend . . . as Bush.”⁷

But the Clinton White House would never forget where Bandar had spent election night and for whose victory he had been cheering. “When the Clinton administration came in, he was Bush’s son for all intents and purposes,” remarked Martin Indyk, who was dealing with the Middle East at the National Security Council at the time.⁸ Clinton aides were determined to shut him out of the White House and make his meetings with Clinton as few and far apart as possible. There was a kind of vendetta against the prince, a deliberate campaign to cut him down to size, or rank, to the mere ambassador he was. “The kind of easy access Bandar had [with Bush] was gone. I mean gone. He couldn’t get through the door,” boasted Indyk.⁹ Anthony Lake, Clinton’s first national security adviser, said the prince was treated with all due respect for his ambassadorial position, but nothing more. But both Indyk and Lake made clear they had not allowed Bandar to replicate with Clinton the “absolutely extraordinary relationship” he had enjoyed with Bush.¹⁰ Cutting the prince down to rank also meant ending the security detail with which the State Department had been providing him since the Gulf War, as well as his automatic access to underground parking there. The new frosty attitude extended beyond Bandar to the kingdom itself; Clinton did not bother to appoint a new ambassador for nearly two years after Chas. Freeman’s departure in August 1992.

The prince, for whom access to the White House was all important, insisted that nothing changed appreciably. He cited as proof his ability to become the first foreign dignitary to see Clinton after his inauguration. Clinton’s aides were anxious to emphasize that the new president’s priority was on domestic issues. So they rejected a request by Turkish prime minister Turgut Özal, who had been in a Houston hospital, to pay his respects to the new American president on his way home. But Bandar somehow snuck into the White House on January 26, which caught the attention of the media. “This is just to prove to you that I really have access,” the prince said, recounting the incident to dispel the image that he had lost his enduring pull during the Clinton years.¹¹

There were other reasons for Bandar’s cool reception at the White House initially. First, no crisis or big event brought the prince and Clinton together to bond them. Both were left on the sidelines of the biggest breakthrough in the Middle East peace process in contemporary times. While administration officials engaged in lackluster peace negotiations in 1992 and 1993, the Norwegian government and a private peacemaker, Terje Roed-Larsen, secretly arranged face-to-face meetings between Israeli and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) negotiators in Oslo. In early September 1993, the news finally leaked that the two sides had reached agreement on mutual recognition and a Declaration of Principles that included establishing an interim government, called the Palestinian National Authority, to run the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. News of the Oslo Accords stunned the world, particularly U.S. policy makers who had played no role in bringing them about.

The accords led to a historic signing ceremony on September 13 at the White House, where PLO chairman Yasser Arafat and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin shook hands before a crowd of three thousand star-struck admirers, including most of America’s past failed peace negotiators. Clinton and Bandar were reduced to acting like bridesmaids at the wedding of an extremely nervous couple, making sure both got to the altar on time and behaved properly. Both Rabin and Arafat threatened not to show up. Clinton had to nudge Rabin physically into a handshake at the last moment, and Bandar was tasked with making sure Arafat was dressed properly, which in the end he refused to do anyway. Bandar made one other contribution: a passage from the Koran for Clinton to cite in his speech: “If the enemy inclines toward peace, do thou also incline toward peace.”¹²

Bandar was also handicapped at the start of the Clinton administration by the kingdom’s dire financial straits. It was a highly embarrassing situation. Here was the world’s leading oil exporter unable to pay its bills, basically declaring bankruptcy, and seeking protection from its creditors. Bandar had been largely responsible for the unaffordable shopping spree the kingdom had indulged in at the end of the Gulf War, which had resulted in $30 billion in new and old, still-unfulfilled arms orders. By May 1992, the Saudis owed the Pentagon $16 billion. Bandar found himself seeking new terms on the U.S. payment schedule; he wanted to stretch out the payments from four years to ten and also stretch out the schedule for the purchase of the F-15s and C-130 cargo planes on order.¹³ Bandar didn’t want to cancel any of the contracts. In late December 1993, he called his three biggest U.S. arms creditors to a five-hour luncheon at his retreat in Aspen, Colorado, to discuss a way out. Most concerned were General Dynamics, with a $2.9 billion order for 315 M-1A2 tanks, and McDonnell Douglas, holding a $9 billion contract for seventy-two F-15s. Raytheon Corporation also had a big order for Patriot missiles and Hughes Aircraft Company for a computerized air-defense network. Bandar told their executives that the kingdom needed more time to pay and assured them that the kingdom’s cash flow problem was temporary.¹⁴ The payments and delivery schedules were stretched out, as none of these companies was about to lose the Saudi account.

In the midst of this major financial crisis, Bandar made the situation worse, in a bid to salvage the kingdom’s rocky standing with the Clinton administration and reestablish his access to the White House. The prince’s power and influence at the royal court depended on that precious asset. The first opportunity to wedge his way back through the White House door came in mid-1993, when Clinton needed to secure the political support of Washington State for his reelection by boosting the fortunes of the Seattle-based Boeing Company. Boeing was pressing the administration to lift its economic sanctions on Iran so that it could sell commercial aircraft there, as well as to Saudia, the civilian Saudi Arabian airline. However, Clinton didn’t want to change U.S. policy toward Iran. So Indyk, who had sought to isolate Bandar from the White House, found himself turning to him for a solution. After all, the Saudis had no interest in seeing U.S. sanctions on Iran lifted, either.

Saudia Airlines had drawn up a six-billion-dollar modernization program in 1989 that called for the renewal of its entire fleet of sixty airliners. The plan foresaw the state company obtaining 60 percent of its new aircraft from U.S. companies and the remainder from European ones, mainly Airbus. But after Clinton’s election, the king came under enormous pressure to recalibrate this formula totally in America’s favor. Clinton sent Secretary of State Warren Christopher, Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown, and Secretary of Transportation Federico Peña, one after another, to Riyadh to plead with Fahd. Bandar himself was set up for a staged “chance encounter” with Clinton during a meeting with other officials at the White House in July 1993 so that the president could press him to lobby the king on the six-billion-dollar deal.¹⁵ Indyk had called Bandar in to discuss Clinton’s political dilemma. “What if we get the king to buy all American aircraft and stop any sale to the Iranians. That would do the trick,” suggested the prince.¹⁶

Bandar flew back to Riyadh immediately and brought back good news: Saudia would buy 100 percent American. Clinton called up Fahd to thank him profusely. Later, Bandar explained the king’s decision by saying he had felt he needed to say “Thank you to our friends in America” for their help during the Gulf War. But Clinton turned the sale into practically the sine qua non for Saudi favor at the White House, telling the king that the plane sale was “something personally important to him” and his reelection chances.¹⁷

The problem was how to finance the six-billion-dollar purchase given Saudi Arabia’s massive debt burden, low oil prices, and a ten-billion-dollar budget deficit. This turned out to be a huge problem. Clinton finally solved it by getting the U.S. Export-Import Bank to guarantee loans for the entire amount. It was the largest underwriting of an American sale abroad ever made by the bank. Bandar said the bank’s guarantee was extremely important to the Saudi government because it was a sign of official American confidence in the debt-ridden Saudi economy. Still, the Saudia deal added six billion dollars to the Saudi government’s foreign debt and continued to be an issue in the U.S.-Saudi relationship for nearly two years.

On February 16, 1994, Clinton and Bandar together made the announcement at the White House amid much feting of the U.S.-Saudi alliance and its future. Finally, the prince had his presidential photo to prove back home his good standing at the White House. But careful listeners sensed the two were talking about different deals. Clinton confidently announced that Fahd had told him the kingdom was buying “the entire replacement fleet” from Boeing and McDonnell Douglas. Noting that this would assure tens of thousands of jobs for workers in half a dozen Western states, the president hailed the news as “a gold medal win” for America.¹⁸ Bandar, who had actually written Fahd’s letter to Clinton and thus knew precisely what it contained, said something different. The king had only agreed to start negotiations with the two companies and for “a substantial number of aircraft,” not necessarily Saudia’s entire fleet. (A final agreement was not reached until November 1995.) Still, the prince was full of praise for American leadership in the new post–Cold War era, noting that as the world’s only superpower, the United States was truly “the only game in town.” Saudi Arabia, he assured Clinton, was “determined to be a strategic asset and not a strategic liability.”¹⁹

THE FIRST TEST of this commitment came within months. Bandar found himself at serious odds with the Clinton administration over the breakout of civil war in newly united Yemen, on the kingdom’s ill-defined western border. Until 1990, the country had been divided between North Yemen and South Yemen and ruled by two separate governments. The north was dominated by conservative Islamic tribes, and the south was ruled by Soviet-backed socialists and communists. Then, the two parts formed a fragile union. But in May 1994, remnants of the communist-led South Yemen announced they had had enough and were seceding. The larger and militarily more muscular north, under the wily president Ali Abdullah Saleh, decided to use force to crush the secessionist movement. The Saudis, still smarting from Yemen’s support of Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War, jumped in on the side of the southern rebellion. This seemed an exceedingly strange choice for an Islamic fundamentalist monarchy, but the House of Saud had always been nervous about a unified Yemen on its border, because as such it became the most populous nation on the Arabian Peninsula. Other factors were a nagging border dispute and constant clashes with Yemeni tribesmen. A divided Yemen would clearly be less of a challenge to the House of Saud.

In Saudi Arabia, responsibility for foreign policy is divided into fiefdoms among the most powerful princes, and Yemen belonged to Bandar’s father, Defense Minister Sultan. He was the principal advocate for what turned out to be the disastrous Saudi policy to back the communist-led rebellion. Not only were the rebels crushed by Saleh’s northern army within less than two months, but the Saudis found themselves squarely on the opposite side of the Clinton administration in the Yemeni family feud. Clinton wanted to keep Yemen united, and he saw no good reason why the United States should recognize a reconstituted independent, socialist South Yemen.

In terms of U.S. domestic politics, there was one delicious irony at play in this otherwise obscure battle over distant Yemen’s fate. The main U.S. company operating in northern Yemen was Hunt Oil of Houston. By discovering a respectable oil deposit there in 1984, Hunt had single-handedly put the nation on the world’s map. A decade later, it had reserves estimated at 4 billion barrels (compared with Saudi Arabia’s 260 billion barrels) and was producing 350,000 barrels a day. The owner was Ray Hunt, and he and his family had been major financers of President George H. W. Bush’s two presidential campaigns. This was why Bush, as vice president, had bothered to stop in Yemen on his trip to Saudi Arabia in 1986; the only site he had visited outside the capital had been Hunt’s new refinery. Clinton was therefore acting to protect the interests of his Republican predecessor and Bush’s financial backer.

The diplomatic battle over Yemen occurred largely before the U.N. Security Council. Bandar was sent to lead the Saudi charge. He wanted to get the council to press for a halt to the fighting so that the embattled southern rebels could gain more time to maneuver for recognition. The prince more or less wrote the Security Council resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire and the opening of negotiations between the north and south to find a peaceful solution. It was considered a major success for Bandar when on June 1, 1994, the council unanimously adopted a resolution demanding an end to the fighting without any mention of Yemen’s unity. But events on the ground quickly made Bandar’s artful diplomacy irrelevant. The same day that the U.N. resolution passed, northern forces began a siege of the rebels’ last stronghold, in the southern capital of Aden, and by early July the secession was crushed.

Bandar lobbied hard for U.S. support, including in meetings with Clinton himself. But the president would have none of it. He sent his chief of staff and close friend, Thomas McLarty, on a secret trip to Riyadh to explain the U.S. position and press Fahd to change his own in favor of a united Yemen. McLarty proved a hit with the king, regaling him with hilarious stories about Clinton. But neither leader changed the mind of the other.²⁰ Bandar kept chasing Clinton around the world trying to persuade him. The prince showed up at a G-7 summit in Naples in early July to lobby the president to get the G-7 members, the world’s major industrial powers, to intervene on behalf of the southern Yemeni rebels. By that time, the secessionist movement was over, and Bandar was tilting at windmills and looking more than a little foolish.²¹ The only token Bandar extracted from Clinton was standard “reassurances” of the U.S. commitment to Saudi security, as if that were the main issue.²²

ON OCTOBER 7, 1994, Saddam Hussein suddenly moved ten thousand additional troops, including some of his elite Republican Guard units, close to the Kuwait border. Altogether, there was an Iraqi force of fifty thousand within striking distance of Kuwait City. The buildup set off alarm bells throughout the Persian Gulf and Western capitals. Clinton ordered the mobilization of thirty thousand U.S. troops and sent an aircraft carrier group and hundreds of warplanes into the gulf. Saddam quickly backed down and even decided to finally recognize Kuwait’s sovereignty and borders in hopes of getting U.N. sanctions on his country lifted.

Bandar described the episode as one of the rare “bonding” occasions for him during the eight years of the Clinton administration, as the U.S. and Saudi governments worked in tandem to counter the new Saddam threat. Clinton made his sole visit to the kingdom to show U.S. support and hold his only face-to-face meeting with Fahd. For a brief moment, the two countries were comrades in arms as they had been during the Gulf War. The king awarded Clinton the kingdom’s highest honor, the King Abdulaziz Medal, and the two leaders lavished high praise on the U.S.-Saudi special relationship. Later, the king let it be known that he was pleased Clinton had asked his advice on the peace process and that he had found Clinton a lot warmer than Bush, whom he described as “rather distant.”²³

But the episode ended by bringing into the open seriously conflicting views on gulf security. The Pentagon sought to revive its old plan, rejected three years earlier, for pre-positioning supplies throughout the Arab gulf states to counter future threats. Secretary of Defense William Perry made public in mid-October that the United States wanted to store enough war matériel, including tanks and aircraft, to equip an entire division. Equipment for one of the division’s three brigades would be housed at King Khalid Military City in Saudi Arabia. The plan would also require periodic joint training exercises with U.S. forces.²⁴ Perry presented the plan to Fahd personally and even had the nerve to ask the kingdom, at that point fighting bankruptcy, to foot most of the five-hundred-million to one-billion-dollar storage cost.

Once again, the House of Saud said no to the American gulf security plan. The Saudis did not want to escalate the American military presence in the kingdom and did not have the money to pay for it, anyway. Sultan reminded Perry that they were struggling to pay for the thirty billion dollars in arms on order already.²⁵ In the end, the Clinton administration pushed ahead with its gulf security plan without Saudi Arabia, dividing up equipment for the three brigades in Qatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. Bahrain had already become the Persian Gulf base for the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet. But the proposed centerpiece of the plan, Saudi Arabia, was missing. It intended to limit its association with the United States in regional security matters to the Southern Watch operation over Iraq. This was now becoming more of a challenge because, in the wake of Saddam’s military feint toward Kuwait, Clinton had decided the United States would enforce a ban on operations in southern Iraq not only by Iraqi aircraft but by its elite army units.

In his reflections on this 1994 mini-crisis over Iraq, Bandar was highly critical of Clinton. “We all decided we are not going to allow Saddam Hussein to jerk us around. He cannot decide when we mobilize, or when we don’t, or when we bring troops,” Bandar said.²⁶ But according to the prince, Clinton had failed to come up with any strategy to contain Saddam or deal with his tantrums. “We were waiting for America to come with this policy that has a strategic objective, where everybody knows where to play in it,” he said. “That policy never came.” He never acknowledged that the kingdom had wanted no part of the proposed U.S. containment strategy and had rejected the role Washington had asked it to play. For the prince, the denouement of the crisis was that U.S.-Saudi relations went on “autopilot,” with each country “doing their own thing.”

Bandar never offered any explanation for the Saudi rejection of the U.S. gulf security plan. He might well have cited domestic pressures, but like all Saudi royals he refused to wash the kingdom’s political laundry in public. Yet the kingdom at the time was seething with religious discontent, and the main reason was the residual American military presence. Less than a month before Saddam’s saber-rattling exercise on Kuwait’s border, Wahhabi militants mounted a street protest in Buraydah, a stronghold of religious conservatism and the hometown of Sheikh Salman al-Audah, a leader of the Islamic Awakening. A series of gatherings outside his mosque came to be called—at least by the Wahhabi opposition—the Buraydah Uprising, a bit of hyperbole but no small matter in Saudi terms. It had been sparked by the arrest on September 9 of Sheikh Safar al-Hawali, another mover and shaker of the Awakening.

The Buraydah demonstrations went on for three days, and when al-Audah, too, was arrested, there were more street protests and an invasion of the Buraydah governor’s house by the sheikh’s partisans.²⁷ The kingdom had not witnessed demonstrations of this magnitude before, and they shocked the royal family into action. Already the fiery sermons of al-Audah and al-Hawali, criticizing the Saudi alliance with America, had been gaining an ever-wider audience. Even Saudi participation in the Middle East peace process was under attack. There was no local press coverage of the Buraydah Uprising, but foreign diplomats estimated that five hundred of al-Audah’s followers had occupied the governor’s mansion, while the opposition claimed that up to eight thousand had participated in the street protests and thirteen hundred had been arrested.²⁸

Buraydah was a sign of the times. In the mid-1990s, the House of Saud found itself under serious religious assault both at home and abroad. Militant preachers were challenging in their weekly sermons not only its authority but that of the official Wahhabi establishment supporting it. A bitter religious and political war was under way between radical and official Wahhabi clerics. For the first time, there was a steady drumbeat of criticism in cassettes, bulletins, and broadcasts from Islamists based in London. Six radical scholars and clerics had set up the Committee for the Defense of Legitimate Rights (CDLR) in May 1993. Several of its members, led by Mohammed al-Masari, had fled to London, where the CDLR became a major thorn in the side of the al-Saud family, flooding the world’s newsrooms, and later Internet sites, with news about its corruption, infighting, and intrigues. It published a monthly news bulletin, the Monitor, filled with similar stories and the latest scandals. The committee even called the House of Saud un-Islamic and therefore deserving to be overthrown. To the great annoyance of the Saudi royals, the British government refused to silence the CDLR’s voice.

Yet another broadside against the House of Saud was building up from another quarter—Osama bin Laden, the wayward son of one of the kingdom’s wealthiest families and strongest supporters of the al-Saud monarchy. The Bin Laden Company did billions of dollars in construction business with the government. The family’s one black sheep, Osama, the Afghan war hero, had slipped out of the country in 1991 after the king rejected his offer to lead another jihad, against Saddam Hussein’s army in Kuwait. He had taken up residence across the Red Sea in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum. The Saudi government stripped him of his citizenship and froze his assets in April 1994, but this did nothing to halt his ever-more-radical pronouncements and activities. Osama championed the cause of the Awakening sheikhs after their arrest in September 1995. The following August, he sent an open letter to Fahd demanding an end to the American military presence in the kingdom. “Your kingdom is nothing but an American protectorate and you are under Washington’s heel,” he told the king.²⁹

On November 13, 1995, the political agitation roiling the kingdom took a far more ominous turn. At eleven thirty in the morning, a powerful bomb went off in a parking lot outside the Saudi Arabia National Guard training center in Riyadh, where scores of U.S. military and civilian advisers were working. The blast killed five Americans and wounded thirty others, many of whom were eating lunch at a snack bar outside. The perpetrators were hitting a perfect symbol of the U.S.-Saudi alliance. The Americans were there as a result of a $5.6 billion program run by the U.S. Army Materiel Command and Vinnell Corporation to modernize, train, and equip the national guard, commanded by Prince Abdullah, who would become king in 2005. Press reports noted that there were about five thousand U.S. military personnel working in the kingdom, mostly in Dhahran or Riyadh, and that one thousand were employees of either Vinnell or its parent company, BDM International Inc., based in McLean, Virginia. The reports made clear that neither the companies nor the U.S. and Saudi governments welcomed the spotlight being placed on the American military presence.³⁰ This, of course, was precisely what the bombers had intended and achieved.

Two unknown groups, the Islamic Movement for Change and Tigers of the Gulf, took credit. The first had threatened in the spring of 1994 to attack U.S. military personnel unless all were withdrawn by June 28. Speculation spread that either Iraq or Iran was behind the bombing. In great secrecy, Saudi security agencies tracked down and arrested four Saudis who “confessed” to the plot. Announcing their arrest in April 1996, Saudi interior minister Prince Naif bin Abdulaziz also made public their confessions. They were summarily executed the following month, but not before Naif had rejected a formal U.S. government request that the FBI be allowed to interview them. This incident would prove to be the first of many sore points that would come to mar U.S.-Saudi cooperation in the war on terrorism.

What we know about the four terrorists stems entirely from their confessions, or more precisely the official Saudi version of them. They were apparently all hardened veterans of the Afghan jihad, but they gave no indication that they were part of or acting under orders from al-Qaeda. They said that they had been influenced by the writings of bin Laden but also those of CDLR leader al-Masari. What was far more surprising was their mention of a then-obscure Palestinian Jordanian cleric by the name of Abu Muhammed al-Maqdisi, who would later gain fame as the spiritual mentor of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the first leader of al-Qaeda fighting the U.S. occupation forces in Iraq.

U.S. intelligence officials and political analysts knew virtually nothing about al-Maqdisi. However, these four young Saudis had carefully read his book Clear Evidence of the Infidel Nature of the Saudi State. And they had been deeply influenced by his notion that even Arab rulers and regimes could be declared kafir, or “infidel,” based on two considerations: failure to live up to Islamic sharia law and alliances with non-Islamic countries.³¹ The four young terrorists said they had deliberately targeted the American military mission to the national guard to demonstrate their displeasure with the kingdom’s reliance on the United States. Al-Maqdisi was having a tremendous impact on young militant Saudis by providing the religious justification and inspiration they sought for their twin jihads against the House of Saud and the United States. One of the four said he had visited the sheikh in Jordan “on many occasions.”³²*

The jihad against the House of Saud and its American ally was just warming up. Seven months later, on June 25, 1996, a massive truck bomb with an explosive force estimated at twenty thousand pounds of TNT equivalent went off alongside Khobar Towers, near Dhahran, which housed U.S. Air Force personnel involved in the Southern Watch program over Iraq. The explosion, larger than the one at the federal building in Oklahoma City, killed 19 Americans and wounded 372 others plus several hundred Saudis and third-country nationals.

The bombing led to an outpouring of criticism of U.S. intelligence for failing to recognize the terrorist threats facing the American military in the kingdom. In presenting his report on the bombing, House National Security Committee chairman Floyd Spence said that the intelligence available to the U.S. military was at that point “virtually devoid of specific knowledge of terrorist and dissident activity inside Saudi Arabia.”³⁴ This seemed extraordinary given the bombing at the national guard training center less than a year before, not to mention the religious turmoil sweeping the kingdom. One reason, according to FBI director Louis Freeh, was the Saudi failure to share what they knew, such as the arrest of a Saudi Shiite carrying explosives across the Saudi-Jordanian border two months earlier. The Saudi had told Saudi authorities that he had also been involved in surveillance of Khobar Towers.³⁵ There had also been myriad U.S. complaints about the lack of Saudi response to requests for better security around the towers.

The bombing put an abrupt end to Bandar’s complaint about U.S.-Saudi relations cruising along on autopilot. It marked the start of a decade-long battle over Saudi cooperation, or the lack thereof, in combating terrorism. This was to become a cancer eating away at the vaunted special relationship. The FBI and other U.S. security agencies complained bitterly, and ever more publicly, about the Saudi refusal to share information about the Khobar Towers bombing suspects. Even Freeh and Attorney General Janet Reno vented their anger in public. Bandar found himself in the middle of the crossfire between two old allies suddenly extremely wary of each other. One little-known terrorist group, Saudi Hezbollah, had taken credit for the bombing, but nobody was sure who they were or who might be behind them. The Saudis fairly quickly rounded up a large number of Saudi Shiites and eventually held about forty suspects. But they tenaciously refused to give the FBI access to them.

The reasons why provide important insights into the attitudes of both the Saudis and the Americans toward the looming war on terrorism that would become so all-consuming after 9/11. By November of 1996, there was considerable evidence of where the Saudi investigation was leading. The Saudis notified U.S. officials that month that they believed the bombing had been carried out with Iranian complicity. This still-tentative conclusion was based on information extracted from some of the Shiite suspects being held in Saudi jails.³⁶ By the following April, the U.S. investigation had progressed to the point of identifying the Iranian handler of the Saudi terrorists—Brigadier Ahmad Sherifi, a senior official in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. Sherifi had been in contact after the bombing with the Saudi driver of the getaway car, Hani Abd Rahim al-Sayegh, who had fled to Canada, where he was arrested. But U.S. officials said they were still not sure about the precise nature of the Iranian role. Or maybe they simply didn’t want to know.

The U.S. and Saudi governments each faced an awkward dilemma. If Iran were accused of masterminding the attack, the Clinton administration would come under enormous public pressure to retaliate. It already considered Iran the world’s foremost sponsor of international terrorism. On the other hand, the Saudis were worried that any U.S. retaliation against Iran would provoke the Iranians into attacking the kingdom because of its close ties to Washington and its proximity to Iran. In addition, Crown Prince Abdullah had just launched a diplomatic opening to Tehran that included an exchange of visits with Iranian president Ali Akbar Rafsanjani.³⁷ So both Clinton and Abdullah had reason to avoid fingering Iran publicly. Meanwhile, Freeh, who had sent 150 FBI agents to Riyadh to investigate the bombing, was pressing the Saudis ever more pugnaciously to come clean with what they knew.

Bandar found himself caught in a very sticky wicket. He knew what Saudi security officials had discovered and concluded. But he didn’t want to convey that information to the Clinton administration formally and officially. He later summed up the Saudi attitude by quoting a verse from the Koran: “Ask not about things which, if made plain to you, may cause you trouble.”³⁸ So the prince had a number of “unofficial” meetings with Clinton’s national security adviser, Anthony Lake, devoted to trying to convince the Clinton administration of the wisdom of this Islamic adage. The two would meet in downtown Washington’s Bombay Palace Restaurant, where Bandar would drink martinis while Lake refrained to keep a clear head. Lake pressed Bandar time and again to be more forthcoming, while Bandar tried to explain why the Saudis could not: “He made it clear, at least indirectly, that the reason why they were not being forthcoming was that they were concerned that, if we discovered the Iranian hand in the death of Americans, we would then of necessity retaliate against Iran in some form,” Lake recalled.³⁹

Lake frankly admitted that he would indeed have recommended that the United States retaliate. And he realized Bandar feared that American retaliation would amount to putting “a stick in the hornet’s nest while not destroying the nest” and so was keeping the Clinton administration just enough in the dark to avoid the Iranian bee sting. “Since we didn’t know the nature of the [Iranian] involvement, we didn’t know what the response would be. We weren’t about to share with the Saudis any planning we were doing, for obvious reasons,” he explained. As a result, Lake could not assure Bandar that the Iranians would not retaliate against Saudi Arabia. “It was a frustrating dance on both sides.”⁴⁰

Martin Indyk, who dealt with Saudi Arabia extensively as assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, found “the dance” to be pure vintage Bandar—coldly calculated to neutralize both the United States and Iran. While the Saudis wouldn’t share their information with Washington, they did take it to Tehran to blackmail the Iranians, suggesting that if Iran did not cease its terrorism against the kingdom, the kingdom would give the Americans all the specifics about the bombing suspects they needed to justify retaliation. Denial of those specifics to Washington kept the United States from acting, while the threat of handing them over stopped Iranian terrorism. “It was a perfect Bandar formula.”⁴¹

In My FBI, Freeh recounted his enormous frustration over his inability to gain access to the Saudi bombing suspects. The main culprit in his view was not the Saudis, but Clinton himself. Bandar had told Freeh that the only way the FBI was going to get that access was for Clinton himself to ask for it. The president finally got his chance when Crown Prince Abdullah visited Washington in September 1998. But Freeh maintained that Clinton never really pressed the issue. “Bill Clinton raised the subject only to tell the crown prince that he understood the Saudis’ reluctance to cooperate and then he hit Abdullah up for a contribution to the Clinton Presidential Library.”⁴² After that, Freeh said, he went to former president George H. W. Bush and asked him to intercede on his behalf with Abdullah, and Bush did. Clinton heatedly denied Freeh’s version of the Abdullah meeting and his judgment that Clinton had been a slacker in pursuing the Khobar Towers investigation. Clinton spokesman Jay Carson said that Freeh’s account is just one of the “untruths in a book that’s full of them.” Daniel Benjamin, a Clinton counterterrorism official, said that Freeh was “factually wrong” and that the president had pushed Abdullah “quite hard” at their meeting.⁴³

Wyche Fowler, Clinton’s ambassador to the kingdom, provided yet another version of this tawdry episode. He said he had personally asked Abdullah for U.S. access to the suspects three or four months before the crown prince’s Washington visit. His answer had been “It will be done.” But it hadn’t gotten done before his arrival. So Fowler and Freeh had gone together to see Abdullah at Bandar’s residence in McLean and been told again, “We’re going to do this.”⁴⁴ Whether Clinton had pressed the issue, Fowler certainly had.

The “access” for FBI agents, such as it was defined finally, happened a few months later and was limited to an indirect interrogation of the suspects. The agents watched through a one-way mirror as Saudi interrogators submitted their questions. But it was enough for Freeh. On his last day in office in June 2001, he announced the indictment of thirteen members of “pro-Iran Saudi Hezbollah” in a conspiracy to drive the United States out of the kingdom.⁴⁵ Freeh thanked the Saudis for “a genuine commitment to solving the case, despite the inevitable challenges, sensitivities and occasional setbacks that are inherent in complex international investigations.”⁴⁶ The truth seems to have been that neither Clinton nor Abdullah had any appetite for a confrontation with Iran, each for his own reasons.

* Reagan had to refuse the horses because of government-imposed limitations on the value of gifts to a president.

* A decade later, a U.S. Army “atlas” of militant Islam concluded he was “the most influential living jihadi theorist.”³³