Prologue

ON THE NIGHT OF SEPTEMBER 10, 2001, less than twelve hours before terrorist attacks on New York and Washington were to change the course of American history, the happiest man in Washington was Saudi Arabia’s ambassador extraordinaire, Prince Bandar bin Sultan. His trademark cigar in hand, he was relaxing in the warm waters of the indoor pool at his sprawling home in the northern Virginia city of McLean, overlooking the Potomac River, the tension oozing out of his exhausted body after the worst crisis in U.S.-Saudi relations of his career.¹

Bandar had delivered a letter containing an ultimatum to President George W. Bush from Crown Prince Abdullah, de facto ruler of the world’s largest oil exporter, threatening use of the powerful Saudi oil weapon in ways promising to roil the American stock market not seen since the 1973 and 1979 energy crises. He had watched with enormous relief as Bush and a lethargic White House had jumped into action, producing within forty-eight hours the promise of a major new U.S. initiative to settle the Israeli-Palestinian deadlock.

Just before Bandar went to bed, the anxious crown prince called to check on whether there had been any surprises that would delay Bush from going public with the groundbreaking announcement that he favored the creation of a Palestinian state and the launch of negotiations to make it happen. It had the makings of becoming the crowning achievement of Bandar’s long career in Washington. After checking with the White House, Bandar called back to assure Abdullah that all was well: Either the president himself or Secretary of State Colin Powell would make the historic announcement within the next few days.

Bandar went to bed that night relishing the accomplishment of yet another secret mission on behalf of the House of Saud, the kingdom’s ruling family, to avert a rupture in the half-century-old “special relationship” with its most important Western ally. For more than two decades, he had served as the human linchpin and guardian of that often stressful bond.

When he woke shortly before nine the next morning, Bandar turned on CNN as was his daily habit and saw smoke billowing from the upper floors of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Watching in stunned silence as the announcer confirmed that a passenger jet had crashed into the building, he saw another airliner plow into the South Tower. It was 9:03:11, the precise moment in history when the special relationship came crashing down together with the Twin Towers—and Bandar’s career in Washington.

The news all that morning just kept getting worse. Four Boeing airliners hijacked in Boston, Washington, and Newark and turned into suicide missiles with hundreds of passengers aboard; thousands dead as the Twin Towers collapsed; the Pentagon ripped apart; all civil aviation suspended and the U.S. government in full flight.

About ten the following night, Bandar got the first word that there was a strong possibility that as many as fifteen of the hijackers who had seized the four aircraft were Saudi nationals. The news hit him like a thunderbolt. He couldn’t believe it. His first thought was that while the names might be Saudi, the passports were probably stolen or faked to implicate the kingdom and cause a rift with the United States. However, not only did fifteen of the nineteen hijackers turn out to be Saudis, but their leader, Osama bin Laden, was a Saudi, albeit one stripped of his citizenship, disowned by his family, and banished from the kingdom.

“I said to myself, if I got the ten who hated America in Saudi Arabia the most, who hated Saudi Arabia the most, and hated Islam the most, and put them into a room and awarded them one million dollars for ideas who can do more damage or worse damage to Islam or Saudi Arabia, they could not have done a better job than what those people did.”²

In the coming months, the American media would turn on Saudi Arabia with a vengeance, castigating its leaders and blaming its puritanical form of Islam, known as Wahhabism, for inspiring those responsible for the attacks. Suddenly, the kingdom loomed as a security threat to the United States both at home and abroad, a startling new image for a country that had been America’s staunch partner throughout the Cold War and key ally during the 1991 Gulf War. Overnight, this old friend had morphed in the public mind into a new enemy. Scores of hearings in Congress and studies by Washington think tanks were devoted to pondering this question: “Saudi Arabia—Friend or Foe?”

A lot more than public perceptions were about to change, however. The bedrock of the relationship was also about to split asunder. Starting in 1945, the United States and Saudi Arabia had forged a close alliance based on a very simple quid pro quo: Saudi oil to satiate the voracious thirst of the American market in return for U.S. protection of the House of Saud from all foreign foes. The world’s number-one oil producer and its number-one consumer worked hand in hand to assure each other’s respective vital need was met.

This oil-for-security formula worked relatively well for half a century considering that the two countries were truly an odd couple in terms of their political systems, dominant faiths, and social customs—one a secretive monarchy, Islamic theocracy, and Sunni monoculture and the other a religiously pluralistic society, wide-open democracy, and Babel of cultures. Holding the alliance together was a delicate diplomatic task for both sides, requiring the downplaying of differences, secrecy, and often outright duplicity. Still, during times when an oil shortage loomed or prices soared, the Saudis more often than not increased production, often at the direct behest of a U.S. president. And whenever Egypt, Iran, Yemen, or Iraq threatened the kingdom, the Americans dutifully sent aircraft and even troops at the king’s request.

Starting in 1978, Bandar was at the center of this odd-couple relationship, and he stayed there for most of the next three decades. He made sure the oil-for-security formula worked to the satisfaction of both sides. He facilitated a growing U.S. military presence inside the kingdom against the wishes of powerful Wahhabi clerics and even part of the royal family, and he kept Saudi Arabia the number-one source of foreign crude for the American market, overriding the objections of Saudi oil ministers to do so. He made himself the indispensable middleman between the Saudi royal court and the White House, rendering personal and political services to five U.S. presidents to keep the special relationship going against increasingly long odds. He was at once the king’s exclusive messenger and the White House’s errand boy; he ran secret missions on behalf of some presidents and manipulated oil prices to help others stay in office.

Today, the underlying oil-for-security equation in the U.S.-Saudi relationship no longer holds, but American public hostility toward the Saudi kingdom since 9/11 is not the primary reason. Other harsh new realities have imposed themselves. Saudi Arabia can no longer alone meet America’s oil needs or calm world markets, while the United States can no longer shield the House of Saud from its new militant Islamic enemies; worse yet, America has become a major source of the insecurity threatening the Saudi royal family. These painful truths have placed in jeopardy the U.S.-Saudi relationship, whose future is full of questions.

Historians looking for dates marking the turning points may well choose April 9, 2003, and May 21, 2004. On the former, invading U.S. forces reached Baghdad and brought Saddam Hussein’s brutal reign to an abrupt end. On the latter, Saudi oil minister Ali al-Naimi announced that the kingdom would pump two million more barrels of crude to force spiraling world prices down and defend the benchmark ceiling price of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), then set at twenty-eight dollars a barrel.

The overthrow of Saddam’s government was an earth-shattering event for the entire Middle East, but for Saudi Arabia it proved especially traumatic, for it fundamentally altered the nature of security threats to the House of Saud. Suddenly, the kingdom had to cope on its northern border with a civil war between rival Muslim Sunni and Shiite sects that was setting off shock waves reaching deep inside the kingdom and all across the Middle East. The Sunni-Shiite rivalry for religious and political supremacy was as old as Islam, and Saudi Arabia was ruled by Wahhabi Sunnis who looked upon the Shiites as heretics and infidels. The worst possible Saudi nightmare imaginable was coming true: Iraq fragmented into three separate Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish entities and its central government largely under Shiite control thanks to Saudi Arabia’s old protector, the United States. In addition, the shift in power from the Sunni minority that had ruled under Saddam to the Shiite majority had emboldened Shiite Iran to challenge Saudi Arabia’s claim to leadership of the Sunni-dominated Arab world.

THE SAUDIS HAD always feared they would be left alone to pay the price of U.S. military interventions in their region. Iraq loomed as just as much of a quagmire for them as it was becoming for the Americans, a new Lebanon of proxy wars among eternally feuding sectarian groups sucking in neighboring states and foreign powers struggling for power or simply survival. Indeed, King Abdullah in late 2006 put Washington on notice that Saudi Arabia would not stand by idly and watch fellow Sunnis in Iraq slaughtered by the new Shiite-dominated government and its Shiite militia allies.³

The U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq rendered Saudi Arabia more insecure for another reason. Iraq’s Shiites harbored long-standing grievances against the kingdom’s Wahhabis, whose warriors had tried to raid and destroy their shrines in An Najaf and Karbal?a in the early twentieth century. Shiite extremists in Iraq might well decide to come south in aid of their religiously suppressed brethren in the kingdom, just as hundreds of militant Saudi Wahhabis were going north to help al-Qaeda fan the flames of sectarian violence and kill Shiites in Iraq. While Shiites comprise no more than 10 percent of the kingdom’s population, they are concentrated in its Eastern Province, where the world’s largest oil reservoirs happen to be located. Thus, they have long been regarded by the Saudi royal family as a potential fifth column for Iranian-inspired subversive activities inside the kingdom.

The U.S. occupation of Iraq set off another kind of struggle as well. Starting in mid-2003, Saudi Wahhabi fanatics under the banner of al-Qaeda launched a determined campaign to bring the House of Saud down through attacks on oil facilities, government buildings, and living compounds for American and other foreign workers. The Saudi government soon discovered that some of the terrorists were Saudis who had joined the jihad, or holy war, against American occupiers and heretical Shiites in Iraq and were now returning home to turn their attention inward. The al-Saud family thus faced challenges from both Sunni and Shiite extremists thanks to the American presence in Iraq. Not since the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran had the House of Saud seemed in such peril, and Saudis had not forgotten the inability, or unwillingness, of the United States to help save the shah of Iran.

MAY 21, 2004, on the other hand, heralded the end of the prevailing U.S. assumption that the kingdom alone could be the decisive factor in determining the supply and price of oil in the world. On that day, Saudi oil minister al-Naimi made clear that his government was ready to pump an additional 2 million barrels of oil a day for a total of 10.5 million to calm the market and lower prices after the cost of a single barrel crossed the $40 mark.⁴ Formerly, such a pronouncement by the chairman of the world’s “central oil bank” would have been enough to cause speculators to blink and the price at least to dip. After all, al-Naimi was to the world of energy what Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan had been for seventeen years to the world of finance—an oracle whose softly spoken words sent markets up or down. But al-Naimi’s words had the opposite effect of what he had intended. The price of oil on the U.S. market went up immediately by $1.79 a barrel and continued its upward spiral, finally reaching around $55 in late October just before the U.S. presidential election. Clearly, Saudi clout over the world oil market had been seriously blunted. There were simply too many other variables in the changing world oil picture beyond Saudi control.

Faced with these new realities, U.S. and Saudi leaders began scrambling after 9/11 to find substitutes for the old oil-for-security formula that had so successfully bound the two countries together for more than half a century. Both readily embraced the “war on terrorism” as a new common cause upon which to build a fresh alliance. Yet this new form of cooperation, while vital to both countries, was hardly a replacement for the oil-for-security keystone of their old alliance. Indeed, the Saudis began turning elsewhere for new oil markets, partners, and investments. They struck multibillion-dollar deals with Chinese, Russian, and European companies to develop their gas fields at the expense of their traditional American partners. Saudi oil exports to China surged, while those to the United States declined, and the kingdom lost its place as the number-one source of foreign oil for the American market.

The Saudis also turned elsewhere in search of military allies to shield the kingdom against potential enemies like Iran. They ordered the U.S. Air Force to stop using Prince Sultan Air Base and turned to Britain and Europe for the purchase of new warplanes. And they moved noticeably closer to Muslim Pakistan, a nuclear power in its own right with a proven track record of sending troops to the kingdom when called upon to do so. If Iran did become a nuclear power and threatened the kingdom, Pakistan could well become its principal defender rather than the United States. And if Iran supported Saudi proxies in an attempted takeover of the kingdom, Muslim Pakistani soldiers would be far more acceptable than Christian American ones, whose chief concern might well be securing Saudi oil fields rather than saving the House of Saud.

Just how oil, arms, and Allah have served either to bind or split asunder the U.S.-Saudi special relationship is the central theme of this book and Prince Bandar bin Sultan its central character. His remarkable career in Washington encompassed both the high points and the tribulations of that relationship over the past three decades as its “special” nature became more and more concentrated in Bandar’s personal dealings with the White House. The ups and downs in his career there often mirrored those taking place in the overall relationship. Bandar became a kind of barometer of the state of U.S.-Saudi affairs. His standing at the White House soared steadily during the Cold War years, when he dealt with first President Jimmy Carter and then President Ronald Reagan. It reached its zenith during George H. W. Bush’s time in office, thanks largely to the first Gulf War, which bound the two countries together on the battlefield in a strong common cause. Thereafter, the prince’s status in the Oval Office began slipping. His relations with Bill Clinton were noticeably cool, even distant much of the time. But this was also true of the overall U.S.-Saudi relationship, which, in Bandar’s own words, was drifting along on “autopilot.” Finally, Bandar’s standing at the White House bottomed out during the second Bush presidency, and so, too, did the entire U.S.-Saudi relationship, as we shall see. But first it is important to understand the origins of how oil, arms, and Allah became intertwined in a very tangled U.S.-Saudi relationship.