“Everybody Has a Price”
IN LATE NOVEMBER 2001, Prince Bandar was on retreat in his palatial McLean residence on Chain Bridge Road celebrating Ramadan with his family and occasionally one or two guests. Two Washington Post reporters were invited to join him for iftar, the Muslim breaking of the dawn-to-dusk fast. The two were preparing a series of articles about the impact on U.S.-Saudi relations of the September 11 terrorist attacks.1 Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers in the four passenger airliners used were Saudi citizens. The shock and horror of this fact were still being digested in both countries. Americans suddenly had a different view of the kingdom, one of a country whose religion was creating fanatics filled with hatred for the United States and bent on destroying it. The Saudi royal family and public were still living in a state of denial, accusing Zionists of being responsible for the attacks, or other Arabs using stolen Saudi passports. Nearly three months after the even, even Bandar still believed that half of the hijackers identified as Saudi nationals were not really Saudi.
Bandar and his guests sat at a small dining table in his exquisitely decorated Moroccan Room. The prince’s mood alternated between manic and depressive. His world had clearly spun out of control. U.S.-Saudi relations lay buried in the ashes of the Twin Towers in New York, where twenty-eight hundred Americans had just died. Though on the edge of despair over the new realities of his mission in Washington, the prince talked for eight straight hours, at times philosophical, at others analytical, but always remaining the principal actor in the unfolding U.S.-Saudi drama.
In Bandar’s mind, 9/11 was pure Greek tragedy. Everyone in both Saudi and U.S. intelligence agencies had known something was about to happen, but nobody could prevent it. Bandar supported CIA director George Tenet in his contention that he had been ringing the alarm bell loudly and clearly within the administration. For almost two months before the attacks, Tenet had sounded like “a broken record,” running around saying, “Guys, I can see it. I can feel it. It’s coming. It’s going to be preposterous. Let’s look out.”2 U.S. and Saudi counterterrorism officials had done everything they could, but they couldn’t quite put the dots together. Part of the problem for the Saudis was the lack of cooperation among U.S. security agencies—the CIA, the FBI, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). Still, the Americans had almost run some of the terrorists to ground, arriving less than four hours too late to intercept two of them.
If U.S. security agencies had failed by only four hours to disrupt the 9/11 plot, the Saudis had been off by years in understanding that Osama bin Laden, son of one of the richest construction magnates in the kingdom, was a menace to the world. Bandar said they had never taken him seriously. He had been just a “young misguided kid” with a big mouth and a lot of money. “Who cares? Not a threat to the system, not a threat to anyone.” When he had started doing “a few bad things,” like blowing up the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the Saudis had begun to take notice.3 They had tried to convince the Taliban government in Afghanistan, which only Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the United Arab Emirates ever recognized, to turn him over. But the Taliban had refused.
The prince did not explain why the Saudis themselves had rejected taking him in 1996 when bin Laden’s Sudanese hosts had offered to extradite him back home. “We never gave him the importance, or we never classified him as the danger that he turned out to be.” Bandar attributed this partly to sheer complacency and partly to a fragmented Saudi security system that apparently mirrored the American one. Also like the Americans, the Saudis had underestimated the danger because they “didn’t feel the threat inside the kingdom.” Instead, the kingdom had been focused on Saudi dissidents in London, Washington, and elsewhere. While these Saudis were regarded by foreign governments as dissidents with a right to free speech, in Riyadh they were viewed as terrorists who had to be silenced. They were not the Jeffersonian democrats they pretended to be, but Wahhabi retrogrades offering “one man, one vote, one time.”4
Bandar felt personally wounded when the U.S. media opened fire on Saudi Arabia in the wake of 9/11, portraying his homeland as a den of evil and a wellspring of Islamic extremism. The media outrage had only worsened when it was discovered that the White House had given permission for nine chartered planes to evacuate 160 people, mostly Saudis, including members of the bin Laden family, from the United States starting three days after the attacks.5 All the positive feelings toward the kingdom that he felt he had succeeded in generating among Americans during two decades of hard diplomatic work had evaporated overnight. The tens of millions of dollars spent on fancy Washington public relations firms had gone for naught. Saudi Arabia had lost the goodwill of “Joe Six Pack,” as he called the average American. The polls certainly confirmed this. Zogby International, a public opinion agency in Utica, New York, discovered in a December poll that 58 percent of Americans held an unfavorable view of the kingdom and only 22 percent believed it to be a good ally.6
Bandar felt Americans were refusing to see Saudi Arabia for what he believed it really was—a moderate Arab country with a half-century record as a faithful U.S. ally. He drew an analogy to the attitude of whites toward blacks as depicted by Ralph Ellison in Invisible Man, his classic study of racism in America. The prince kept returning to Ellison throughout the night. Americans were suffering from “the invisible man syndrome” when looking at Saudi Arabia. “If I can make you all feel guilty by remembering the invisible man story, I think you would take another look at us and see us in a different way than the first picture that comes to your mind. In other words, the reason you don’t see me is not because I don’t exist. You choose not to see me. What more can I say.”7
The kingdom was not the closed and mysterious “secretive kingdom” constantly portrayed in the American media. In the first place, there were forty to fifty thousand Americans living in the kingdom right then, and hundreds of thousands who had spent years working there and then gone home with fond memories. They certainly appreciated what the “real” Saudi Arabia was all about. The same was true of the general Saudi attitude toward America. More than two hundred thousand Saudis had gone to American colleges and graduate schools, and many of them considered America their second home. In fact, some hundred thousand Saudis owned homes or apartments there.
Didn’t Americans realize, Bandar wondered, that other than Great Britain, Saudi Arabia was the closest ally the United States had enjoyed anywhere in the world since World War II? The U.S.-Saudi alliance was not just by chance. The two countries were natural allies, each a superpower in its own right complementing the other. The United States was the world’s greatest consumer of oil, and Saudi Arabia was its leading oil producer. The two countries were inextricably chained together by their common dependence on, or “addiction” to, petroleum. And it was American companies that had discovered that precious commodity and then built Saudi Arabia into the oil power it had become.
The U.S. media deliberately ignored all this positive history, he claimed. Whenever they bothered to examine the kingdom, which happened about once a decade, they painted a very damning picture, like Ellison’s white Americans looking at blacks. The Saudi government was depicted as inherently unstable, the king awaiting the same fate as the shah of Iran at any moment. The kingdom was pictured as teeming with unhappy people afflicted by either an excess of wealth or unemployment and religious intolerance. And all Saudi youth were seen as worshipping bin Laden, whom they held to be the Muslim version of the Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara, who had died fighting in the mountains of Bolivia. “If it’s true bin Laden is so charismatic and has such great followers,” Bandar summed up, “why is he staying in Afghanistan in a cave? Come home and lead because you cannot stop the people. Look what happened in Iran.”8
According to Bandar, the American media had it all wrong. The al-Saud family was not detached from society, nor was the king about to join the shah in the dustbin of history. The al-Sauds knew their people. They worked hard to keep their finger on the pulse of “downtown Riyadh.” If the House of Saud had ruled for the better part of three hundred years, it was precisely because it had learned how to handle a profoundly conservative society and at what speed to move in bringing about change. Change had always come from the top, not the bottom, of that society. The al-Sauds had been the driving force for modernization, whether it was the introduction of television, schools, education for girls, or a modern welfare system. The family had lavished four hundred billion dollars on building the infrastructure of a modern state and nation. It had done this while at the same time managing to keep the loyalty of the Wahhabi religious establishment, which had opposed much of the change that had taken place. “It has not stayed in a leadership position from 1747 until now by being politically dumb. They know when to duck. They know when to move.”9
The prince bristled at the American media depiction of the al-Sauds as both “repressive” and “corrupt.” He cited as evidence of a general Saudi acceptance of royal rule the fact that nearly all Saudis who went abroad for higher education came back home and willingly so. There was no exile Saudi community anywhere in the world. They didn’t want to live in Western or even other Muslim countries. There were Irish Americans, Italian Americans, and even Egyptian Americans, but there were no “Saudi Americans” because none wanted to stay in the United States. Nor was there any evidence of a groundswell of discontented Saudis inside the kingdom, as had happened in Iran prior to the shah’s overthrow. In Bandar’s eyes, the al-Sauds had to be doing something right, or at least right enough to avoid an Iranian-style popular uprising. “If the demonstrations we saw in 1977 and 1978 in Tehran take place in Saudi Arabia, we do not have one quarter of what the shah had as a security force to maintain law and order.” He wanted to know why Americans were not asking themselves the reason there had been no mass demonstrations in Riyadh such as the world had seen in Tehran? Either the kingdom had twenty million “stupid people who are drugged,” or “maybe they are satisfied more than people think.”10
As for charges in the American media that the al-Saud family was hopelessly bogged down in corruption, Bandar had few apologies
to make. He had amassed his own considerable fortune while serving as ambassador in Washington and maintained a lifestyle
way beyond those of most of his princely peers. He had eight palaces, estates, ranches, and apartments in four countries;
flew the world in his own custom-designed Airbus; kept a retinue of friends to accompany him; and employed a private security
force that most senior Saudi princes could not afford. If he talked like an American redneck, he lived like a king. When asked
about one or another estate, he would say it was a gift for his services to the king and kingdom. He unabashedly defended
his controversial comment during a PBS Frontline interview in late September 2001 that the al-Sauds had probably siphoned off $50 billion for themselves over the years.11 This might well have been a tender subject for the prince, since both he and his father, Prince Sultan, had become prime
examples for Saudi dissidents and al-Qaeda of the rampant corruption in which the House of Saud was soaked. But the prince
refused to recognize there was any problem. The kingdom had spent $350 billion to $400 billion in building a modern Saudi
state and nation, and if $50 billion of that had been lost through corruption, “so what?” The Saudis had their own form of
political patronage that was no worse or better than the American equivalent. “Take away certain words, and we do nothing
differently.” Both produced corruption, which was just part of human nature, dating back to Adam and Eve. “I can buy you.
You can buy me. Everybody has a price. It depends how much.”12
IN JANUARY 1996, a story appeared on the front page of the Washington Post explaining the internal workings of Saudi corruption. At that time, a lawsuit involving a former communications minister, Alawi Darweesh Kayyal, had become public knowledge and the talk of the kingdom. Kayyal had allegedly cheated his dying business partner out of $150 million the two had purportedly accumulated in bribes and commissions from foreign companies to secure government contracts. It was the first time any Saudi minister had been put through such a public ordeal and hauled before a court on corruption charges. The London-based Islamic opposition was at the time regularly lambasting the royal family for its various exploitative schemes. But U.S. and other Western diplomats stationed in the kingdom had also become extremely concerned that corruption had gotten out of hand and risked affecting the House of Saud’s political stability. “The Saud family is not mending its ways,” said one State Department official.13 Bandar and his half brother General Khaled had been named in two lawsuits filed in U.S. courts. The story cited press and diplomatic reports that estimates of their commissions on the $30 billion al-Yamamah arms deal with Britain in the mid-1980s “begin in the hundreds of millions of dollars.”*14
Royal corruption thrived on arms deals, land sales, and shell companies. Commissions were theoretically limited by Saudi law to 5 percent on nonmilitary sales and barred on military sales. But according to Saudi and U.S. specialists quoted in the story, commissions on arms deals could run as high as 40 percent “of the notional contract value,” though they were much lower on multibillion-dollar ones. The article went on to explain how Saudi shell service companies were used to circumvent U.S. anticorruption laws by laundering bribes and commissions as “salaries” to one or another prince. Two cases in U.S. courts in the early 1990s involved Americans who alleged they had been fired from U.S. firms doing business in Saudi Arabia because they had blown the whistle on what they regarded as illegal commissions paid through such shell companies. They had named both Bandar and Khaled in their suits as two of the princes involved in these schemes. The lawsuits were eventually settled out of court and therefore the allegations were never adjudicated.
But the most widespread form of Saudi royal corruption involved the seizure of emiri, or “royal,” lands for public or real estate projects. The government would register the land in the name of one or another prince, who would then sell it back to the government or to developers at a highly exorbitant price. The biggest such land deal of the 1980s, at the height of the oil boom, involved Riyadh’s new international airport. It was touted at the time as the biggest and most modern anywhere in the world. The government had put the official cost at $3.5 billion, but diplomatic and other sources believed it was closer to $6 billion. Neither of these figures, however, included the cost to the government of purchasing ninety-four square miles of desert land for the project. U.S. government sources estimated the cost to be an astronomical $16 billion. The land had been registered in the names of a large group of princes, including Sultan, who in addition to being defense minister was also head of the Saudi civilian aviation authority. The Post story quoted a former State Department official as describing the land grab as “$16 billion in pure corruption.”15
Bandar’s defense of the $50 billion corruption figure, which he mentioned again during his outpouring that Ramadan night in November 2001, was twofold.16 First, he argued that the kingdom hardly had a monopoly on the problem and that criticism from the United States was a case of the proverbial kettle calling the pot black. Look at media stories about the Pentagon paying $600 to U.S. companies for a single toilet seat, he said. Look at the national guard, which could not account for billions in spare parts. Look at the U.S. military budget: The Pentagon presented Congress with a budget request for, say, $100 billion, but senators and representatives insisted on their pet projects, which increased it to $140 billion to please one or another constituency. Wasn’t this excess $40 billion in U.S. military expenditures just a form of corruption made legal by congressional approval? Members of Congress regularly dipped into the U.S. government pork barrel to stay in office. Appropriation bills were loaded down with pork for constituents back home. Senators and House members all supported one another’s pork projects, asked and did favors for one another. Where was the line between favors and corruption, anyway, in a political system dominated by special interest groups, lobbyists, and donors to presidential and congressional campaigns expecting returns on their investments?
Bandar wanted to know whether the favors asked of him by various U.S. presidents, senators, and representatives should be labeled acts of corruption or were just par for the American political course. On which side of the line did a donation to the charity or pet project of an American president, or his wife, fall? “Every library of any president I know of, Republican or Democrat, we contributed to. Now is that corruption? Is that payoffs? I don’t know. Is it better when Coca-Cola or Lockheed contribute? I don’t know.”17 It never seemed to occur to the prince that the behavior of a foreign diplomat in Washington should be any different from that of an American politician.
One practice Bandar was particularly proud of was lavishing attention on high-ranking American officials, mostly secretaries of state, presidents, and vice presidents, as they were leaving office at the end of an administration. This was carefully calculated to impress both those departing and those arriving. “If the reputation builds that the Saudis take care of friends when they leave office, you’d be surprised how much better friends you have who are just coming into office.” So he would regularly dine the outgoing ones and invite them to go bird hunting on his estate in Glympton, England, or use his Hala Ranch, outside Aspen.* “I have never thought of all these things as corruption.”18
He also invested in the Carlyle Group, in which Bush Sr. and former secretary of state James Baker—two of his closest American friends—just happened to be a partner or adviser. During most of the 1990s, Carlyle owned BDM International Inc., a defense contractor whose subsidiary, Vinnell Corporation, had trained and supported the Saudi national guard since 1975. The company was also responsible for managing the Saudi government’s “offset program,” under which U.S. companies doing business with the Saudi military were supposed to invest 35 percent of earnings from every sale back into the Saudi economy. The prince would not say how much he sank into Carlyle, but wealthy Saudis around Prince Sultan, the defense minister, were encouraged to invest in Carlyle as a favor to the elder Bush.19
Bandar insisted his involvement was a favor not to Bush, but to himself. He had turned a handsome profit on his investment,
and if he hadn’t, he would have taken it out even though Bush and Baker were part of the company. “For Bandar bin Sultan to
put money in Carlyle surely is not to buy his way to the Bushes or the Bakers, because I know them. They are my friends.”20 He couldn’t be accused of bribing them because they were out of office when he became involved with Carlyle. To him, the
engagement of Bush and Baker in Carlyle was pretty typical of the Washington scene; scores of former senators and representatives
had gone to work for firms and industries that had once courted them in Congress for favorable legislation. This was Washington’s
famous revolving door between government and business at its best. “To us, that sounds logical,” he remarked. “To you [in
the media], it smells funny.”21
BANDAR’S SECOND LINE of defense against accusations of massive royal corruption was that the American media misunderstood how the Saudi system of political and social patronage functioned. The al-Sauds had their own trickle-down theory of economics, combining noblesse oblige with religious and social obligation. It was true, Bandar admitted, that Saudi princes received royal allowances, but these handouts should not be exaggerated. Most were $1,000 per month or less.* The Saudi billionaire Prince Waleed bin Talal publicly called for the abolition of the royal allowances in November 2001, disclosing that his own family received $180,000 a year.22 Bandar defended the practice, arguing that all rich royals felt obliged to dole out a lot of their wealth to scores, if not hundreds, of retainers and petitioners. He cited as one example his own driver, for whom he had bought homes for his two wives and paid for the whole family to go on vacation in London. But he was also constantly handing out small amounts to supplicants who showed up at his gate—students, the needy, and the sick.
The al-Sauds, he pointed out, also looked after all Saudis through an extensive government-provided social welfare system. Unlike in the United States, there were relatively few poor people in the kingdom, and they had access to free health care, education, and other services. Bandar found the American attitude toward its own poor by contrast appalling. How could forty million people go uninsured in the richest nation in the world? How was it possible that nobody would help the guy sleeping on the street outside the Saudi embassy in Washington? Whose responsibility was he, anyway?
Had the Saudi oil bonanza corrupted the House of Saud to the point that Washington should be concerned? Bandar was ready to concede that the kingdom’s enormous oil wealth had indeed exercised a corrosive influence on Saudi society. The U.S.-Saudi relationship hadn’t escaped, either. “There are too many opportunities for too many people to get rich or make a lot of money on the side.” There had been too many “tips” given and too many “favors” granted by both Saudis and Americans. The “incredible windfall” from the discovery of an ocean of oil beneath the desert had made it too hard to resist multiple temptations. Yes, there was too much money in the relationship. Both countries had become addicted to and corrupted by oil in different ways. “I think we have been corrupted by each other.”23
Bandar argued, however, that there was a different cultural attitude in Saudi Arabia toward how to deal with corruption, one
that seemed nicely exculpatory of royal family excesses. “To expose somebody who does something wrong in the government here
[in America], the higher the better, and the more ‘obligation’ within your culture that their hides not be protected.” By
contrast, he claimed, the Saudi attitude was more forgiving and less demanding of exposure. He quoted a verse from the Koran:
“Have mercy on the high and mighty people who have been humiliated.” The Saudi high and mighty did fear public humiliation,
and this helped to curb excessive corruption. But in his mind, there was a distinction to be made between acceptable and unacceptable
corruption. It depended on whether one party was exploited or an injustice committed. The rich could afford to bribe one another,
and thus it was a lesser sin. There was a difference between a bureaucrat asking a cabdriver earning three hundred dollars
a month for a hundred-dollar bribe to get his license and a millionaire who shelled out one thousand dollars for one. The
former was unacceptable, but the latter, “It’s OK. It’s not going to hurt him.”24
BANDAR TALKED AS if lost in a stream of consciousness, jumping from one topic to another as he offered his guests juices, tea, and coffee but no alcohol. He described the phases he went through as Americans turned on Saudi Arabia with a vengeance. It didn’t happen immediately. There was an initial phase of offering condolences, as when someone in the family dies and relatives and friends gather to grieve together. This lasted for about a week. Then came a second period consumed by a scramble to identify the nineteen known hijackers and a hunt for other terrorists possibly still at large. The reason President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were kept in separate locations for a long time after the attacks was that, according to Bandar, a spate of intelligence reports claimed that an al-Qaeda operative was on the loose armed with a “dirty bomb”—a device containing radioactive material that can be dispersed by setting off a conventional explosion to make much of an entire city unlivable. It was not clear whether this terrorist was headed for Saudi Arabia or the United States, so the manhunt was under way in both countries.* For the Saudis, it was a nightmare scenario. If such a bomb went off with the spotlight already on the fifteen Saudi hijackers, the presumption might well be that this terrorist, too, was Saudi. In fact, CIA, FBI, and Saudi officials shortly would be looking for a Saudi-born naturalized American, Adnan el-Shukrijumah, who they feared had obtained radioactive material at a Canadian university before entering the United States.
Elsewhere, CIA officials were tracking down reports that two Pakistani nuclear scientists had discussed with Osama bin Laden the use of such weapons and even shown him a cylinder filled with radioactive material. The Saudis were terrified that a dirty bomb might be used to close down one or more of their oil facilities or even to take over the Holy Mosque in Mecca. The CIA had told the Saudis that one of the two Pakistani scientists, whose family name was Khan, might be on the way to Saudi Arabia.† Saudi officials took the threat seriously enough to make a study of how they would go about cleaning up the Holy Mosque if a dirty bomb was exploded on its premises.27
In the post-9/11 atmosphere, anything seemed possible. Bandar was living on pure adrenaline, with little sleep for weeks at
a time and the ultimate catastrophe of a dirty bomb explosion looming in his mind. The stress became so great that the prince
came to the verge of a mental breakdown and had to check in to Sibley Hospital for five days to recover, neither the first
nor the last time he would be hospitalized.28
FOR BANDAR, THE most agonizing phase of the 9/11 fallout began about a month after the event, when the U.S. media turned with a vengeance on Saudi Arabia, and the prince realized he had a public relations disaster on his hands. The extent of the crisis came home to him when he began receiving letters from American veterans of the first Gulf War who were returning medals the Saudi government had doled out in appreciation of their service to the kingdom. One veteran wrote him, “I cannot wear a medal from people who are killing my people.” That letter shook Bandar “more than ten senators attacking me on TV.”29 If the half million U.S. soldiers who had fought to defend Saudi Arabia and then liberate Kuwait felt the same way, then the kingdom was in real trouble. It was losing whatever popular support it had had in America.
Bandar’s predicament was only made worse by statements of denial coming from senior Saudi officials. In late November, Saudi interior minister Prince Naif publicly took issue with the notion that nineteen individuals could possibly have acted alone to carry out the multiple attacks, saying, “I think they [Zionists] are behind these events.”30 Then, the Saudi billionaire Waleed bin Talal donated ten million dollars toward the relief efforts under way around the fallen Twin Towers, but suggested the terrorist attacks were the result of America’s biased stand toward the Palestinian cause. His remarks caused New York mayor Rudy Giuliani to return the gift.
Bandar tried to combat the tide of furor rising against the Saudis by mounting a public relations campaign highlighting the value of Saudi-American cooperation throughout past decades. He hired Qorvis Communications on a two-hundred-thousand-dollar-a-month retainer to run a yearlong campaign to restore the Saudi reputation. The PR effort cost close to four million dollars. It included full-page ads placed in newspapers in major U.S. cities expressing Saudi grief over 9/11 and reminding Americans of the two countries’ close cooperation over almost six decades, dating back to the days of President Franklin Roosevelt. The purpose of the campaign, according to one Qorvis official, was to answer the question in the minds of millions of Americans regarding whether “Saudi Arabia is a friend or foe. A lot of people don’t know.” The newspaper ads stressed, “The People of Saudi Arabia: Allies Against Terrorism.”31
Bandar was mortified when copies of these ads were returned to him with hostile comments attached. One reader wrote, “You hypocrites, you kill our people and you come and put an ad to pay your condolences!” The reader gave his address. So the prince had him tracked down and talked to him on and off for three days in an attempt to change his views. He also conducted his own personal PR campaign, appearing on numerous news and talk shows to answer questions. But he had a strong sense of futility, as if he were a fighter pilot engaged in a deadly air battle and “running out of airspace, airspeed, and ideas.”32 Bruce Riedel, Bush’s Middle East expert, used the same analogy. “The space was too small for Bandar to operate in any longer.”33
Part of the new Saudi “image” in America was that of a country refusing to cooperate with U.S. authorities in combating the rising menace of terrorism in the American homeland. The Saudis had balked at giving the FBI or CIA any information about the fifteen Saudi hijackers and denied requests to interview their families. Their embassy in Washington likewise offered no help to reporters, insisting that no Saudis could possibly have been responsible. Even in late November, Bandar was not ready to concede that all the fifteen identified by U.S. authorities as Saudis were in fact Saudis. Their passports might be Saudi, but this didn’t mean they necessarily were.34 The persistence of Saudi denial only served to fuel American outrage. The Saudis were also being castigated in the media for refusing to freeze the bank assets of private Saudi financers of al-Qaeda, a charge many U.S. government agencies were making privately to reporters. Even Saudi textbooks came under attack for their anti-Christian and anti-Jewish biases. To his enormous frustration, Bandar found himself fighting a propaganda war on half a dozen fronts simultaneously and losing on all of them.
The initial Saudi lack of cooperation did extensive damage to an already badly frayed relationship. Bush took the attitude that America’s friends around the world were either with the nation or against it. There could be no partial cooperation. Bandar felt he was boxing with shadows in his quest to convince the U.S. media that the Saudis were indeed fully cooperating. Bush, Powell, and CIA chief George Tenet would publicly affirm that they were satisfied by the level of Saudi cooperation. The president even called Crown Prince Abdullah in late October to tell him that he was “very pleased” with the state of Saudi cooperation and that he “strongly disagreed” with media reports to the contrary.35 But their aides would imply quite the opposite when talking to reporters. The prince found himself at a loss to cope with this official-unofficial dichotomy among administration spokespeople.
Bandar’s frustration was all the greater because in instances when the Saudis did offer to help, they found a thoroughly disorganized and standoffish American partner. U.S. authorities were throwing out names of suspects and possible financers of terrorism and asking the Saudis to check every one. They wanted Riyadh to arrest or interrogate individuals on the slightest pretext and to close down their bank accounts. When the Saudis asked the FBI or CIA for evidence of their wrongdoing, they wouldn’t divulge what they knew. The Americans would give the Saudis a suspect’s telephone number, but they wouldn’t share sensitive National Security Agency (NSA) transcripts of their electronic intercepts of his telephone conversations.
Sharing NSA intercepts turned into a major bone of contention. Just providing telephone numbers was a waste of time and energy in the Saudis’ eyes. Often the phone numbers belonged to mobiles that were being used overseas, not from inside the kingdom. Sometimes the numbers were not Saudi ones at all. Saudi intelligence officials would check out CIA or FBI leads only to discover that the presumed “bad guys” were perfectly legitimate. They also discovered that various U.S. intelligence services had collected different bits of information that they were not sharing with one another, let alone with the Saudis. Finally, the NSA did agree to hand over some of their tapes for analysis. Bandar said Saudi intelligence discovered that the suspects would use code words taken from Saudi falconry—such as references to Saudi wild and domesticated birds to make a distinction between international and domestic flights while they debated which was better to target for attack. As a result of Saudi access to the NSA tapes, several suspects were tracked down and apprehended by either American or Saudi officials.36
Tracking down suspected financers of terrorism proved just as exasperating for the Saudis. The Americans wanted the Saudi government to freeze bank accounts of various suspects, but provided no justification. The Saudis would track transfers out of accounts in the kingdom to foreign banks, but if and when they went through New York, that was the end of the trail. Their routings onward suddenly became a “privacy issue.” Bandar tried to explain to U.S. authorities that the Saudi government had privacy issues as well and could not just peer into bank accounts indiscriminately and without cause.
Ironically, probably the most important Saudi support for the United States in the weeks and months after 9/11 went largely
unreported in the U.S. media. The Saudis had only themselves to blame because they never sought to publicize it. The day after
the attacks, Abdullah summoned his oil minister, Ali al-Naimi, to discuss what the Saudis could do to quell fears of an oil
shortage and price hike. Security of supply was foremost in the minds of all Western governments at that point. Abdullah decided
Saudi Arabia would renege on its pre-9/11 commitment to the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries to cut its oil
production in order to bolster sagging prices. Instead, the kingdom would rush an extra nine million barrels to U.S. markets
to ensure ample supplies. For the next two weeks, the Saudis shipped out five hundred thousand barrels daily using their own
tankers.37 The surge had a dramatic effect. The cost of crude, which had been twenty-eight dollars a barrel in late August, dropped
to around twenty dollars within a couple of weeks. By mid-October, oil prices had declined to their lowest levels in two years.38
ON THAT NIGHT of Ramadan reflection in late 2001, Bandar was having serious doubts about whether the U.S.-Saudi relationship would ever be the same again. Perhaps he was just reflecting the angry mood back home among Saudi commoners and royals alike. In early November, Abdullah spoke for an entire nation when he blasted “the ferocious campaign” against the kingdom in America, which he claimed was nothing but an “expression of its hatred toward the Islamic system” and its religious practices.39 If nothing else, 9/11 had abruptly brought to an end the “autopilot syndrome” from which, Bandar felt strongly, both Riyadh and Washington had been suffering for most of the previous decade, with neither side willing to ask any hard questions. For example, maybe it was time for the U.S. military to recognize it had overstayed its welcome. Bandar began thinking out loud during his long monologue about how to transform the American military presence into a smaller and less-visible footprint.40 The message was clearly meant for the Bush administration, and the prince was using the Washington Post to convey it indirectly. Instead of U.S. warplanes being stationed on Saudi air bases, why not have frequent joint exercises—a week every three months, two weeks every six months, or two months every year? Anything was better than a permanent presence. The Americans were welcome in Kuwait. The U.S. and British aircraft could carry out the same missions from there, or Qatar, as they were from Saudi Arabia. Or why couldn’t the United States just rely on the aircraft carriers they had stationed in the Persian Gulf? Weren’t these floating air bases built precisely so that American power could be “over the horizon”?
Maybe the time had come to rethink the Southern Watch surveillance program over Iraq, too. Sooner or later, something bad was going to happen. An American aircraft was going to crash in southern Iraq. An American pilot was going to be captured. A U.S. air-launched missile was going to go astray and cause serious damage to the civilian Iraqi population. If an American pilot was captured, “do we go to war for that pilot?” he asked. “We’ve been lucky so far. Cut it and win. I think this administration can do it without being accused of running.” The message could not have been clearer, and it was coming from the most pro-American resident of the House of Saud.41
U.S. and Saudi military officials had been at loggerheads once again over the American use of the Prince Sultan Air Base. This time the cause was the U.S. drive to topple the Taliban regime and uproot al-Qaeda in Afghanistan in retaliation for 9/11. In the wake of the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing, in which nineteen American servicemen had died, the U.S. Central Command had moved all its aircraft from Dhahran inland to Prince Sultan Air Base for greater protection. The Saudis had allowed the Pentagon to build a super-sophisticated Combined Air Operations Center there to cover warfare anywhere in the Persian Gulf region. Now, the Central Command wanted to use it to orchestrate its air and ground war against the Taliban.
The Pentagon had decided to follow Bandar’s “don’t ask, just do it” approach on such matters. On September 22, an unnamed Pentagon military briefer told reporters the United States was going to use Saudi Arabia as its command center for forthcoming Afghanistan operations and was sending a top air force commander, Lieutenant General Charles Wald, to take charge. The news came as a shock to the Saudis, who had indeed not been asked, been consulted, or agreed. “No government likes to learn from the press that its territory is to be used by a foreign power to conduct offensive military operations against a third country,” noted Joseph McMillan, a former Pentagon officer in charge of its dealings with the kingdom.42
The Saudis found themselves in a serious bind. They were caught in the crosscurrents of the virulent anti-Saudi campaign under way in the United States and a Saudi backlash that had aroused nationalistic and religious fervor to new heights. Bandar disclosed that his government had taken a secret opinion poll in the wake of 9/11 and discovered that preachers in 6,000 in a sample of 11,200 mosques had initially come out in favor of the Taliban government and against the U.S. plan to overthrow it.43 At the same time, the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, was assuring Americans his government was ready to cooperate fully “not just to track down the criminals of the Sept. 11 attacks, but to exterminate the infrastructure that helps the terrorists.”44 Indeed, the Saudis withdrew diplomatic recognition of the Taliban government on September 25 and condemned its protection of bin Laden. And yet Saudi defense minister Prince Sultan was assuring his people that the kingdom would never allow “the presence in our country of a single soldier at war with Muslims or Arabs.”45 Faced with these conflicting signals, the Bush administration sent Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in early October to clarify Saudi intentions about American use of Prince Sultan Air Base. Bandar felt that the Americans made a mistake in asking the Saudis for permission instead of just going ahead quietly with their operations. “The Americans have this disease. They always ask questions, too many questions. Hence they might get the wrong answers.”46
When the Americans asked, the Saudis started asking questions, too. How many people did the Pentagon want to send to man the command center? Why so many? What were their duties? The Pentagon then asked for an increase in the number of flights by U.S. warplanes over Saudi airspace. The Saudis objected and demanded a reduction; it wasn’t the principle, but the large number. The Saudis finally agreed to an increase but with a caveat: If the flight was not time sensitive, the Americans should ask permission ahead of time.47 Behind this game of twenty questions lay pent-up Saudi frustrations over the U.S. Air Force’s misbehavior and misuse of its presence on the base. The Saudis felt they were being overbilled for the food they provided the four to five thousand Americans there. They had caught the Americans stealing electricity from the Saudi power grid and discovered that the air force was flying in people without obtaining visas for them, acting as if the base were American territory. These were small issues, but they had added up to one big irritation.48
The haggling led to bigger questions. The Saudis began asking themselves why the U.S. Air Force needed Prince Sultan Air Base, anyway. Wasn’t it far more distant from targets in Afghanistan than the three U.S. aircraft carriers then assembling in the Gulf of Oman for the operation? Wouldn’t planes flying out of Saudi bases require more aerial refueling? It didn’t make sense logistically. In the end, the Saudis did agree that the Pentagon could use the command center but insisted that warplanes on attack missions fly from the carriers or other gulf countries. These were the same restrictions they had initially placed on U.S. and British aircraft flying missions for Southern Watch to distance themselves from that operation and avoid Arab criticism. Bandar said the Saudis simply did not regard Prince Sultan Air Base as crucial to the success of the U.S. air campaign or understand the military logic of flying aircraft from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan.49 The Saudis were starting to go their own way.
In truth, Bandar was also worried about the ugly mood of revenge sweeping the Bush administration and the American public in the wake of 9/11. Had the terrorists come from London, the United States probably would have attacked the British homeland, Bandar said, adding, “and I don’t say that as a joke.” America was so bent on revenge and immediate action that it had become a danger not only to its enemies but to its friends and even itself. “This country is really dangerous. Why? Because you’re too big and you’re too powerful.” The prince felt the administration had to be handled very carefully, because in its rage it was ready to strike out in any direction, regardless of the consequences.50
Bandar had other beefs to air about American conduct and hegemony in the world. He was fed up with persistent U.S. government efforts to mold Saudi Arabia in the American image by trying to impose its values and culture. The Bush administration was already gearing up to make the export of democracy a signature element of its foreign policy, which would shortly become yet another bone of contention in U.S.-Saudi relations. Bandar argued that Saudi Arabia was profoundly different in its values and culture and that the United States had to accept and live with this. It was extremely conservative socially. Saudi parents accepted that their daughters should be educated, but they did not accept the idea of their going out on dates or appearing in public with unmarried men. It would be a long time before Saudi society came around to allowing Saudi women to drive.
Bandar argued that societies were like human beings. Just as heart and kidney transplant operations were extremely difficult to perform without the body rejecting the new organ, so, too, were “cultural transplants” of the type Americans were seeking to engineer in Saudi Arabia. Saudi society had to be prepared carefully for change with an “antirejection medicine” just like a patient awaiting a heart transplant. The royal family was hard at work preparing a bedouin society for sweeping changes and had accomplished much already, whether it was introducing television, computers, education for girls, or jobs for women. “We are progressive compared to the society we live in, and you come and attack us for having a policy that creates bin Ladens!” Didn’t Americans realize that bin Laden also wanted to overthrow the House of Saud in order to return Saudi society to an eighteenth-century puritanical and backward form of Islam?51
Bandar felt his message was falling on deaf ears in America, and his task of explaining and defending Saudi Arabia before the American public had been made far more complicated by the new era of instant information and globalized communications. He felt CNN and C-SPAN had made his job impossible. Congressional attacks on the kingdom—a daily event in the aftermath of 9/11 —were seen and heard not only by millions of Americans but by thousands of Saudis as well. He was bombarded daily by telephone calls from home asking why some senator, columnist, or U.S. official was slandering the kingdom. Before, he had been able to serve as a filter and censor for what got back to Riyadh, but that was no longer possible in the age of satellite television, computers, and cell phones. “They get it raw, and boy oh boy, does it make life more difficult and less fun.”52
Bandar’s world had spun out of control. He had lost his sea legs on the Washington ship. His modus operandi of secret diplomacy and special relations with America’s political elite was suddenly useless in his struggle to turn the tide of anti-Saudi emotions washing across the United States. And there was nothing he could do, either, to stem the tide of anti-Americanism engulfing the kingdom or to stop Saudis from watching the unrelenting coverage of Israeli soldiers killing or beating Palestinian civilians, beamed into the kingdom by Al Jazeera. He was mystified as to why his own government, which in theory controlled the media, had not acted to block these broadcasts, which he felt were largely responsible for whipping up enmity toward America among Saudis and which were making his task of repairing the U.S.-Saudi relationship a nightmare.
On that emotion-filled Ramadan night, Bandar seemed at times even unsure of who he was as a person or what he represented. He felt culturally torn between two very different worlds and strangely detached from both. For whom did bicultural Saudis like him speak? He was not a “classic Saudi” in any sense. “We actually represent very little,” he commented at one point. From time to time, he had to remind himself, “I do not represent the people of Saudi Arabia.” Government policies, yes. The vox populi, certainly not.53 Who was he, then?
Bandar thought of himself as some kind of Saudi-American hybrid or perhaps “Jekyll and Hyde.” He was of the Saudi royalty but not wholly part of it because of his commoner mother. He preferred to think of himself as a “peasant royal.” He had devoted half his life to a career of piloting warplanes and then applied those skills to the task of diplomacy. He used the language of a jet fighter pilot when he talked about handling one or another diplomatic crisis. His time in Washington had deeply affected him, and the American culture he so readily rejected for his own people, he embraced with enthusiasm for himself. He realized he was a creature of American politics, which he admitted he thrived on and reveled in. He loved the rough-and-tumble of political combat in Washington, just as he relished that of American football. He had been a dedicated Dallas Cowboys fan from the day he first laid eyes on its “magnificent” players—and “great-looking” cheerleaders—at the Dallas airport in 1970. He had painted his private Airbus in Cowboys colors. Even after becoming ambassador and living in Washington, where the Redskins were heroes, he had stuck with the Cowboys. Bandar loved thinking of himself as an “outside insider,” whether it was the peasant royal, the fighter pilot diplomat, or the Cowboys fan in Washington.
But 9/11 had shattered this world. It had forced him to become the frontline defender in America of everything Saudi—politics,
culture, and religion. He felt that those fifteen Saudi terrorists had hijacked not only four airliners but the entire U.S.-Saudi
special relationship. They had forced upon him a mission impossible: He had to explain to America how the worst attack on
the United States since Pearl Harbor had nothing to do with his country’s defining religion, Wahhabism, castigated in the
U.S. media as the prime breeder of terrorism and the most intolerant, anti-American creed in Islam.
* Bandar was later accused of receiving $2 billion in payoffs from the al-Yamamah deal.
* He gave his good friend Colin Powell a replica of his old beloved 1995 Jaguar a few weeks after he retired as secretary of state in November 2004.
* Estimates of the number of Saudi princes vary from six thousand to ten thousand. A U.S. Embassy study in the late 1990s found the allowances ranged from $100 to $200 a month for grandchildren to $4,000 to $5,000 for most princes.
* The Washington Post wrote about this hunt for a dirty bomber in a story published on December 4, 2000.25 So, did CIA director George Tenet in his book At the Center of the Storm.26
† This was not the famous father of the Pakistani bomb, A. Q. Khan, who was later implicated in selling nuclear weapons technology to North Korea, Iran, and Libya.