During thirty-five years at the Washington Post, I had occasion to write repeatedly about Saudi Arabia and its first royal ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan. My initial article appeared in October 1972 while I was covering the annual conference of the Middle East Institute in Washington. At the time, few U.S. officials or Washington think tanks were paying much attention to the Saudis. The prevailing viewpoint was that they needed Uncle Sam’s protection far more than the Americans needed Saudi oil. At the conference, Saudi oil minister Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani made an intriguing offer to the Nixon administration: If the United States would assure Saudi oil duty-free access to the U.S. market, the kingdom would guarantee an uninterrupted flow of crude to meet the nation’s needs. The proposal was rejected out of hand by both the Nixon White House and American oil companies. But for me the story triggered what was to become a career-long fascination with that distant kingdom so important to America because of its vast oil reserves and religious authority.
Over the following year, my Post colleague Ronald Koven and I wrote a series of articles about what we felt was a looming oil crisis, and we highlighted the implications of America’s growing dependence on Arab, and particularly Saudi, oil. One of those implications came to light in the spring of 1973 when Yamani warned in an interview with us that unless Washington changed its policy toward Israel and the Palestinians, the Arabs were going to wield their oil weapon to force a change. Of course, no one in Washington took him seriously. But when war broke out in October 1973 between Israel and its Arab neighbors, the Saudis led Arab producers in a boycott of the United States that caused enormous indignation and shock in the White House and Congress. Suddenly, Saudi Arabia was at the center of American attention, and suddenly the prevailing assumption changed: We needed them as much as they needed us.
In March 1978, the Post’s foreign editor, Peter Osnos, asked me to go with him on a visit to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia’s capital, even though I was then covering Africa and based in Addis Ababa. At that time, Saudi visas for American reporters were a rarity, and the newspaper was seizing on a Saudi invitation to take a peek inside the hidden kingdom. Little did I realize at the time that our visas were part of a Saudi public relations campaign under way in Washington to convince Congress to sell sixty supermodern F-15 fighter jets to the Saudis over the vehement objections of the powerful pro-Israel lobby.
Three years later, in 1981, I became the Post’s bureau chief in Cairo, Egypt, from where I traveled to the kingdom repeatedly over the next four years. I wrote scores of stories about the four-hundred-billion-dollar construction boom occurring there as a result of the quadrupling of oil prices after the 1973 Arab boycott and about the social, political, and economic problems stemming from the making of a modern Saudi nation out of a medieval bedouin society. I had occasion to visit many obscure corners of the kingdom, but the trip that left the most lasting impression was to the largest plant ever built for the publication of the Koran in the Muslim world.
At the time of my visit, in 1984, the King Fahd Holy Koran Printing Complex was brand-new. It is located on the outskirts of the pilgrimage city Medina, which non-Muslims are strictly banned from entering. But my host, the late prime minister of Lebanon, Rafik Hariri, had decided to run the risk of official Saudi religious wrath anyway. His company, Oger Saudi, had built the plant. Hariri wanted me to get a sense of his accomplishments as well as the new Saudi ambition to spread its religious influence around the world. So he smuggled me into Medina on his private jet and took me in his limousine across the city, after ordering me to lie down on the backseat to avoid being seen.
As I learned during the visit, the kingdom’s Wahhabi religious leaders were planning to take control of the Koran’s translation into multiple languages as well as the accompanying commentary on its verses. They also planned to hand out free copies to the two million Muslims who come from around the world each year to fulfill their religious duty to visit Mecca at least once in a lifetime. I still remember being awestruck as we wandered through the sprawling ground floor of the plant, which was filled with hundreds of printing machines that would shortly begin churning out tens of millions of copies a year. Later, I realized that I had been given the rare opportunity for a non-Muslim to witness one source of the kingdom’s enormous “soft power,” its ability as custodian of Islam’s most holy sites, in Mecca and Medina, to spread its puritanical brand of Islam to the four corners of the earth.
Starting in 1985, I was stationed in Washington for five years working as the newspaper’s national security correspondent. In that role, I occasionally accompanied Secretary of State George Shultz on his visits to the Middle East and also reported on some of the secret machinations of Prince Bandar. The prince was regularly conducting clandestine missions for President Ronald Reagan and Central Intelligence Agency director William Casey in their crusade to bring down the Soviet “evil empire.” As it turned out, Bandar was at the same time negotiating behind their backs with communist China—with which Saudi Arabia had never had diplomatic relations—for the supply of intermediate-range missiles built to carry nuclear warheads. When their arrival in the kingdom was finally discovered in early 1988, Israel and Saudi Arabia went to the brink of war before Washington intervened to diffuse the crisis. But Bandar’s deceit shocked the Reagan administration and cast him in a new light as a Machiavellian schemer ready to dupe his American friends if called upon to do so by king and kingdom.
Over the years, I kept running into Bandar both in Washington and in Saudi Arabia. The more I came to know the prince and those dealing with him, the more I realized he was a highly controversial figure. On the one hand, he was widely hailed as the most effective ambassador—Arab or otherwise—Washington had seen in a long time. On the other hand, many U.S. officials found him devious and highly manipulative. One senior Clinton administration official found that Bandar’s accounts of what Arab leaders had allegedly told him had to be checked and double-checked for accuracy. At the Post, where he delivered many backgrounders, reporters and editors became increasingly wary of his often potentially highly newsworthy leaks and versions of events. We found confirmation was sometimes hard to come by or altogether impossible. On several occasions, we discovered he was not above presenting his own personal policies as those of the kingdom.
In 1996, I had occasion to write a long profile of the prince. He had by that time virtually disappeared from the Washington diplomatic scene, and his behavior was a mystery. Over a period of several months, I interviewed him at his homes in McLean, Virginia, and Aspen, Colorado, and at the Saudi embassy, where he was rarely to be seen. I found him exhausted mentally and emotionally, but also very talkative about his adventure-filled life of secret statecraft on behalf of either Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd bin Abdulaziz or one or another American president. On more than one occasion, Bandar had served two masters at once.
After 9/11, former Post managing editor Robert G. Kaiser and I wrote a series of articles, published in early 2002, examining the past, present, and future of the beleaguered U.S.-Saudi “special relationship.” Bandar invited us to spend a Ramadan night with him at his McLean residence, where he proceeded to talk almost uninterrupted for eight hours, unloading his feelings about the catastrophe that had befallen both countries.
It was a strange and unforgettable interview that went on into the early hours of the morning. He repeatedly bemoaned the failure of Americans to understand his secretive kingdom, or even to want to look at it for what it was. The American attitude reminded him, he said, of Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison’s devastating account of white America’s refusal to acknowledge the realities of black America.
“You don’t see me not because I don’t exist, but because you choose not to see me,” Bandar said. “This closed society [Saudi Arabia], if it’s open at all to anybody, it’s to Americans. Yes, there is almost institutional blindness.”
What was it Americans were failing to see? Presumably, in his mind it was the thick skein of economic and political ties woven between the two countries ever since the first American oil wildcatters had set foot in the kingdom in the early 1930s. Presumably, too, it was all the favors Saudi Arabia had done over the years for Democratic and Republican presidents alike. But after 9/11, Americans were intent on understanding why and how Saudi Arabia had become a breeding ground for Islamic extremists such as those who had blown up buildings inside the United States filled with thousands of innocent civilians. My own editors wanted to know what impact Wahhabism was having on the Muslim community inside America, particularly after the Federal Bureau of Investigation and local law enforcement officials began investigating Saudi-financed mosques, religious centers, and charities across the country.
This led me to probe how the Saudi government had organized itself to export its faith abroad. I went back to the kingdom in the spring of 2004 to talk to its religious leaders and scholars and examine the various institutions, agencies, and means at the government’s disposal for exporting Wahhabi Islam around the world. The trip gave me a fuller appreciation of the kingdom’s fundamental commitment to the goal of turning what had once been a marginal Islamic sect into the Muslim world’s dominant school of religious thought. It also became clear to me that the kingdom’s impressive soft power was likely to remain a potential source of trouble, even conflict, for the United States and the West for years to come.
I returned again in the spring of 2006, this time to focus on the Saudi government’s struggle to contain the blowback from the Wahhabi extremism it had engendered at home and abroad. By then, the kingdom’s security forces were engaging in pitched battles with Saudi al-Qaeda militants—at times even in the streets of the capital, Riyadh. The government had undertaken a systematic purge of mosques, firing several thousand imams and sending hundreds of others to theological reeducation schools. The battle had spread from the streets and mosques into cyberspace. There, government Wahhabi scholars and clerics were infiltrating jihadi Web sites and teenage chat rooms to argue on behalf of moderation. The government had also begun scrubbing schoolbooks of Wahhabi teachings that emphasized hatred of Jews and Christians and a general distrust of other Muslim sects. The official religious establishment that for decades had encouraged the spread of militant Wahhabism was now desperately trying to propagate another, more moderate interpretation of the puritanical sect and ostracizing all “deviants” from the new official line.
By the time of my last visit, in January 2008, the Saudi government seemed to have gained the upper hand in its five-year-long struggle to find and break up al-Qaeda cells before they could strike. Riyadh was more relaxed, and there was an air of confidence that had not prevailed before. King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, Fahd’s half brother and the successor to the throne, had just entertained President George W. Bush on his first trip to the kingdom, taking the American leader from whom he had become estranged to his desert Al Janadriyah Farm outside Riyadh for informal talks, just as Bush had invited him down to his private ranch in Crawford, Texas, on two occasions. The one senior Saudi official absent for the occasion was the person who had been the living embodiment of the U.S.-Saudi relationship for nearly three decades: Prince Bandar bin Sultan. Though he was the king’s top national security adviser, Bandar had declined to attend for reasons that will become clear in the course of this book.