Zaki and Tammam Yamani settled into married life together and began a family. Their first child was a boy, born in 1976, and, appropriately enough, they named him Faisal.
Their son Sharaf was born in 1977 and their first daughter Sarah came along in 1980. Their next daughter, Arwa, was born in 1981 and their third son, Ahmed, was born in 1983.
Because the king commuted regularly between Riyadh and Jeddah, Zaki and Tammam and their children were forever shifting back and forth between the Yamama Hotel and their home in Jeddah - a big house near the Red Sea with a large living room that sits just off the indoor swimming pool.
Every year when the king went to his mountain palace for the summer months, the Yamani’s moved into their farm in the hills of Taif, some 35 miles southeast of Mecca.
There, in the shadow of the mountains, they’ve covered a tree with an aviary and stocked it with all sorts of exotic birds. Near the outdoor swimming pool there are fountains with water cascading down a concrete sluice to wash over the cement rocks. And there is Astroturf along the pool because a real lawn will not grow.
By this point, Yamani’s older daughters Mai and Maha were in finishing school in Switzerland. Later Mai studied anthropology at Bryn Mawr on the Philadelphia Main Line and Maha got her law degree from Cambridge. His son Hani soon began studying law at Oxford University, but eventually transferred to business administration at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
Until he married Tammam, Yamani lived alone at the Yamama.
Except alone didn’t really mean alone because he had a manservant, and he sometimes had his chef there, and he also had couple of yappy Pomeranian dogs and two African Grey parrots.
Small dogs as pets were rare in those days.
The Saudis who kept dogs, like members of the royal family, always kept big dogs for hunting. It was a macho thing. Lap dogs were a bit too reminiscent of old Victorian ladies sipping tea in their European parlors. Small animals like Pomeranians were not yet part of Saudi culture.
In fact, it was Yamani who helped to change that.
He was one of the first people in Saudi Arabia, if not the very first person, to have small dogs, and to breed them, and to make them an accepted part of Saudi upper-class family life.
His two African Grey parrots were also unique. It seems they had the uncanny ability of mimicking perfectly whatever anyone said. Good words, bad words, in any language, they’d repeat whatever they heard. The problem was that they’d wait until the person who said something left the room and someone new arrived before they’d do their act.
One learned quickly at Yamani’s house never to criticize anyone in front of the birds.
*****
Boom-time in Saudi Arabia made a lot of people very rich.
In Yamani’s case, it also made him the most visible oil minister in the world and gave him a superstar’s status.
“It’s obvious why,” says Sir John Wilton. “Yamani was the man who dealt with the subject that captured the world headlines. He was someone everyone wanted to know. Westerners especially took to him because he was one of the few leading Saudis who entertained informally. He kept more or less open house. Everybody was always welcome. And his wife and children appeared. His family was a part of the business of entertaining his guests.”
Just as an aside, Wilton suggests that being a successful host in Saudi Arabia is a lot more difficult than being a successful host in the West.
“You always have to know who will mix with whom. There were a dozen or so families who habitually entertained the Western community where men and women, Saudi wives and western wives, would turn up. It was a thing you had to keep an eye on. When you wanted to have a party where you invited Saudis and their wives, you had to know whose wife went out in public and whose wife didn’t. Then, you not only had to know which Saudis were prepared to bring their wives, you also had to identify those with whom they were prepared to have their wives seen.”
The most special time of the year, Wilton adds, was during Ramadan. “You’d get to Yamani’s house at about sunset. The prayers would be finished and the dates and water and the coffee would be passed around. The meal eventually appeared and the nearest thing I can compare it to would be a fork buffet. It was that sort of informality. He was always so proud of his own cooking, although I never actually saw him wield a skillet. It was all very different from when the king or the crown prince entertained the diplomatic corps or a visiting head of state. Then it would be a sit-down dinner with placement and no women. Yamani’s dinners were infinitely more enjoyable.”
Viscount Tonypandy, the Welsh-born former Speaker of the British House of Commons found himself at Yamani’s house one year for Ramadan, and simply couldn’t believe how fabulous it was.
“King Khaled and seven princes all came to dinner. Zaki had put up a great tent in the grounds of his house in Taif. And he brought in the poor from the area too because when the king comes you must have all the people. I will never forget it. The feast, the splendor and the dignity of Zaki receiving his king. It was ‘Arabian Nights’.”
A genuine celebrity at home, he was an even bigger star in the West. His face adorned two Newsweek covers, one Time cover and a newspaper ad for a British car manufacturer who promised you’d get “a run for Yamani.”
Secretly flattered, Yamani insisted the car manufacturer cease and desist.
Another car manufacturer then tried to name one of their models “The Yamani,” only to discover, again, that Yamani’s sense of humor doesn’t stretch quite that far.
On two occasions over the years, he also received offers from Hollywood. One film producer planning an epic about the Israeli raid on Entebbe contacted Yamani, offering him the role of the airline pilot. Yamani politely refused. Another dropped him a line to say that if he ever left government and wanted to become a movie star, any number of roles could be his simply for the asking. That letter went unanswered.
Because Yamani attracted so much attention, he always tried to make certain that it never got in the way of what he wanted to accomplish.
Throughout the 1970s, especially during the second half of the decade, he often visited Washington. Some of those visits were announced. But many were not. To avoid the press, he’d fly into the country without even informing his Embassy, hide himself away in a hotel or at the home of an American official, and go about his business using B-thriller techniques.
“I’d meet frequently with Henry Kissinger,” he says, “but there were times we didn’t want anyone to know because we both believed that the less attention our meetings attracted, the more we could accomplish.”
At those times, Yamani’s walkie-talkied bodyguards would rush him from his hotel suite to the nearest elevator without being seen, then down to the hotel’s garage where a smoked-glassed limousine would be waiting. The chauffeur would deliver him straight into the garage at the State Department, where he’d be whisked into the private elevator that brings you non-stop into the Secretary’s office.
“No one ever saw me coming or going except the people who were supposed to know I was there.”
In London he used a slightly different approach. “I’d come to England to meet Nigel Lawson when he was Energy Minister or to meet Peter Walker when he had that job, and the press never found out. I’d either meet them at home, like I did with Walker, or see them in the office late at night the way I used to do with Lawson.”
On one occasion he also met secretly with Margaret Thatcher. It took place at Peter Walker’s home. A very private luncheon had been arranged there. Just the Prime Minister, her husband, Yamani and Walker. No one ever found out about it.
“We could speak frankly knowing that we were free from the press,” Yamani continues. “Not because there was anything to hide but because without the press hounding us we were more relaxed, we could operate more smoothly. If you can do what you have to do in a very quiet manner, without being subjected to too much publicity, it’s usually easier to succeed.”
Of course, some of the people he dealt with, especially the Americans, were used to a more open style.
“Zaki is kind of idiosyncratic,” comments a cabinet member who served both Presidents Nixon and Ford. “He always liked to do things differently. Clandestine meetings with the President would appeal to Zaki. Come to think of it, Richard Nixon also would have loved to meet Yamani surreptitiously, if possible. Given the type of man Dick Nixon was, he would have enjoyed that kind of thing too.”
But then, many of Yamani’s lessons in dealing with the press were learned the hard way. When the embargo took hold, the ink that flowed wasn’t only about his oil policy.
In January 1974, the western press discovered that his two daughters were on their way to a private boarding school in Switzerland. Wrote one reporter, “They have both decided not to wear veils at home, instead opting for western style dress.”
Yamani shrugs, “Is that really news?”
When word came that Yamani had purchased a pied-a-terre in London, Fleet Street jumped on it. They explained that, while it was only a two-bedroom flat, it was in Belgravia and that he’d paid the then extravagant sum of £70,000. This was at a time when the average London flat, albeit not in Belgravia, was on the market at £10,000.
The Daily Express pointed out that Yamani quickly redecorated the place with glass, louvered doors and white walls. Except for the white walls, the place isn’t decorated like that. Nevertheless, they decided, “It would be very eccentric if he were an Englishman,” and then quoted a neighbor who suggested, “Perhaps he will help to improve the central heating.”
In June 1975, the first of several “Yamani at Harrods” stories broke. One news hound revealed, “Harrods agreed to stay open a few nights ago so that Yamani could bring his two teenaged daughters there to shop. The store shut to the general public while staff in selected departments stayed on to cater to Yamani and his daughters who reportedly spent in excess of £35,000 in the 75-minute shopping spree. In the past such ‘late night’ treatment was usually reserved only for the British royal family.”
The second installment of that story ran in December. The British press disclosed how Yamani was back at Harrods and had spent £35,000 again with his two teenaged daughters on Friday evening, December 19.
“Hours later,” they added with great drama, “he was kidnapped in Vienna.”
The only problem there is that the closest Yamani got to Harrods in December 1975 was Paris.
A year after that, the Press Association rehashed the story yet again. Leading with a rather odd sentence - “The wife of Sheikh Yamani, one of the world’s richest men” - they described Tammam on a 90-minute Christmas shopping spree. When asked why she left empty-handed, her escort, Harrods’ store manager, was quoted as saying, “We will be taking parcels round later.”
On that occasion Harrods supposedly brought so many parcels around later that they wouldn’t fit into Yamani’s Rolls-Royce so that a coal lorry had to be commandeered en route to Heathrow to help them get everything to the plane. It was, in keeping with the other episodes of the same story, nonsense.
Yet, the PA report concluded, “Last year the store stayed open especially late so the Sheikh could spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on Christmas gifts. One of his aides said, “He doesn’t like fighting his way through the crowds. In fact, he hates shopping so he has sent his wife to do it.”
At this point, Yamani roars with laughter. “I happen to love shopping. But you see how it gets more expensive for me every time?”
His version of the story is quite mundane. “We were shopping in the food halls at Harrods. I like to go there because I find all sorts of things at their health food counters. Just before closing we thought about looking at some garden furniture. We went upstairs and found something we liked but it was 5:30 and the store was closing. The salesman there said not to worry because at 5:30 they only lock the front doors so that no new customers can come in. He assured us that we would be welcome to stay. We bought the furniture, paid for it, arranged to have it shipped, and we left. It was just after 6:00. The next thing I heard was that the store stayed open late just for us, the way they do for the Queen of England, and that we spent £35,000 or £75,000 and now you say hundreds of thousands of pounds. I suppose if the papers keep printing the story often enough, it will become the truth. If they print if often enough even I might start to believe it.”
In September 1975, during the OPEC meeting in Vienna, the papers found a new angle to the “Yamani as cult hero” theme. They vividly described how he held his ground, refusing to give in to the demands of other member states.
The price of oil was then $10.46 a barrel and some cartel members were looking for an increase of up to 20 percent. But Yamani had gone into the meeting with a directive not to accept more than a 5 percent price rise. In order to agree to anything over that he’d need the approval of Prince Fahd.
As the discussion grew heated, Yamani supposedly matched the anger directed at him, shout for shout. The Venezuelan minister, trying to mediate, felt he was close to an agreement on a 7-8 percent increase, with the other members having come down from their 20 percent increase demand. They were now looking towards Yamani to compromise.
Quite frankly, if Yamani was frustrated at not being able to go beyond his mandate of 5 percent, it’s only fair to say that the other members must have felt a similar frustration, knowing that, in the end, it was Saudi Arabia, as the largest producer, that held the strongest hand when determining prices and policy. A price increase agreed by the other members would be very difficult to maintain without Saudi consent.
In the heat of the argument, Yamani went to the phone to call Saudi Arabia. When he couldn’t get through he went to another room, tried another phone and still couldn’t get through He then, reportedly, stormed out of the meeting in angry frustration.
Going directly to his car, the papers said, he found that his chauffeur wasn’t there. He locked himself into the rear seat to wait and was immediately surrounded by reporters who shouted questions at him through the door.
One ingenious television sound man somehow squeezed a microphone through a crack in the window, into which Yamani supposedly said, “There is a complete difference of opinion. It is very violent in there.”
When his chauffeur eventually showed up, Yamani was said to have ordered the man to drive to the airport, where he climbed into his private jet and flew off to find a phone box that worked.
In London!
Former OPEC press spokesman, Hamed Zaheri, quite clearly remembers the incident. “I’ll admit that Vienna might not have had very good communications in those days. But I wouldn’t think he had to go all the way to London just to make a phone call. His Embassy could have easily sent a coded message to Saudi Arabia. No, this just was part of the show. In case you haven’t noticed, he’s really a very good showman. Whenever he wanted to put pressure on any of the others, his style was to come up with excuses to leave the meeting.”
Still, greatly amused by all of this, Yamani says the way the press reported it was almost the way it really happened. But not quite.
“First of all,” he says, “I never shout or raise my voice. I do not lose my temper. Secondly, I did not storm out of that meeting. I have only twice walked out of an OPEC meeting. The first time was in 1963 when the Iraqi oil minister said that Saudi Arabia was the agent of the oil companies. I asked for an apology and wanted his comments to be removed from the minutes. He refused, so I left. We then refused to attend any further OPEC meetings at the ministerial level. We sent someone as a representative just to sit and listen, but I wouldn’t appear. In the end the Iraqis simply had to give in and apologize. And their comments were removed from the records.”
He cites the only other time as being in 1976 in Bali. “Again, the Iraqi oil minister attacked Saudi Arabia as the agent of the imperialists. And again I got up and left. I asked for an apology and insisted on having his comments removed from the minutes. President Suharto personally intervened. In the next session the Iraqis apologized. But these were the only two times I’ve ever walked out of an OPEC meeting. I only did it on these occasions because the comments that were made touched the dignity of my country.”
However, he doesn’t deny that he flew from Vienna to London just to make a phone call.
“This is perfectly true. It was very difficult to use the phone from Austria to Saudi Arabia. Of course, I could have sent a coded message from the Embassy but that’s not like a personal discussion. It was only unfortunate someone leaked the information that I was going to London. Otherwise it would have not been known.”
Asked about his comment to the reporters from the back seat of his car - “There is a complete difference of opinion. It’s very violent in there” - he shakes his head. “I left Vienna without anyone knowing. There were no conversations from the back seat of my car. But it’s true that most of the OPEC meetings were violent. That was nothing new.”
Another favorite topic of the press is Yamani’s interest in horoscopes. “The Sheikh is a devoted astrologer and never goes anywhere without a book of astrology,” announced one newspaper.
Treating him like a rock star or the leading man in a hot new sit-com, they headlined their story, “21 Things You Didn’t Know About Sheikh Yamani.”
In addition to horoscopes, other items mentioned were the story of his after-hours spree in Harrods where they said he blew £38,000; that he lives in a tent during the summer months; and that in 1973/4 and again in 1979 he singlehandedly drove up the price of oil fourfold, causing a major economic crisis around the world.
But the astrology entry was the best because they asked, how come, if he knows so much about horoscopes, he didn’t know that Faisal would be murdered, that he would be kidnapped by Carlos and that he would eventually be fired by Fahd?
“Astrology”, he answers, “is an important subject in my life. But it’s not the astrology of horoscopes in newspapers. I’m interested in the effects of the various planets on human beings, marine life, animals and plants. I’m interested in how the moon’s cycle affects our lives. I’m not at all interested in the astrology of predictions, of what will happen tomorrow, the astrology of do this and don’t do that. I never look at my horoscope in the newspaper because I don’t believe for a moment that anyone can see into the future.”
Many public figures wind up having an odd sort of love- hate relationship with the press. Especially politicians. They cheerfully acknowledge all victories as a demonstration of their own skill while defeats are blamed on a press which has totally distorted their views and misrepresented their cause. A right-wing press. A left-wing press. A world press conspiracy. It’s always the fault of the press.
Yet, all too many politicians habitually rely on half-truths and innuendo to escape answering tough questions, as if the Fourth Estate had neither the right nor the responsibility to subject public servants, their words and their actions to the most minute examination. In the same breath, those same politicians then accuse the press of reporting nothing more than half-truths and innuendo.
Case in point, Richard Nixon. As the first President ever to resign from the White House, he blamed most of his Watergate problems on the Washington Post.
You’d think that, after a lifetime in the public eye, most politicians would learn how to avoid such confrontations with the media. But very few ever manage that. Most politicians, and other public figures who live by the press, believe they might die by it too.
Exceptions are rare.
Henry Kissinger is one. As the story goes, he was in his office one afternoon at the State Department when a panic call came from someone at the front door that the Foreign Minister of some never-before-heard-of African country was arriving. It wasn’t on Kissinger’s calendar and no one knew anything about it. Statesman to the end, Kissinger headed for the front door to greet the man. On the way, he stopped in the press room and gathered up all the reporters he could find. He put them into a reception line so that the visiting Foreign Minister would think he was being met by two dozen very important State Department officials. That was impressive enough. But what really stuck in the reporters’ minds that afternoon was that, while Kissinger was walking the Foreign Minister down the reception line, he introduced every reporter by name.
Yamani is out of that mold.
Comments one old-time reporter, “You’d be hard-pressed to find a guy who’s covered the world oil scene for any length of time and who hasn’t broken bread with Zaki, or been to his house, or met his family, or at least been welcomed by him as an old pal the second time they’re introduced.”
Zaheri agrees, “Yes, Yamani definitely knows how to use the media. He’s always been most efficient. He knows when to use it, where and how. Amouzegar did also. Actually, in the early 1970s Amouzegar was the more forthcoming. Yamani didn’t have so much power to talk, it seems, so it was always Amouzegar who was quoted. Especially when it came to technical things. He knew a lot. After Amouzegar, Yamani became the lone star. He had the right background for it. His English is very good. He’s a lawyer. He’s intelligent. And don’t forget he was in the business for a long time. But it was not only Yamani who wanted to talk to the press. The press also wanted to talk to him because he was the representative of a country with such a high capacity for production. The press was always trying to corner him. So he learned how to deal with them. His was the longest university course in journalism you can possibly have.”
Obviously he graduated with honors.
“Yamani is unfailingly gracious with the press,” says Joe Fitchett of the International Herald Tribune, “and with Henry Kissinger’s gift for knowing when to take a journalist apparently into his confidence in order to drop a strategic bit of information. He always put the West and his customers on notice and gave warning in advance of everything the Saudis were going to do. Besides not lying and” besides being rather acute and courteous and not saying too much so you’d pay attention to what he did say, he also knew how to use a background. He took real experts, of whom there are only a few, and skillfully used those channels in order to explain a situation.”
The method was based entirely on the mutual trust he’d established over several years with a small handful of reporters who were as knowledgeable about the world oil business as he was.
At select times, when matters had real weight to them, Yamani would supply one of these confidants with just enough inside information to send them off in the right direction.
It was like a journalistic treasure hunt, where he’d provide the clues to help get them to the prize. They, in turn, scooped their competitors while editorializing on Yamani’s points in their own voice.
The beauty of the device was that the direct responsibility for bringing the facts to light was theirs. It protected Yamani both against western complaints and also against anybody in the Arab world who wanted to accuse him of having said too much.
“This is a very sophisticated technique,” Fitchett goes on. “But never forget that he was in a very difficult position. Yamani was trying to represent Saudi interests in a way that would be palatable to the West. However, there were factions in the West which were eager to say that the kingdom was leading an assault on the West in spite of the fact that Yamani always believed there was a community of interest in financial terms, security terms arid political terms between the West and most of the members of OPEC.”
At the same time, Fitchett says, it’s worth noting that Yamani was considered a very polished press performer. “So formidable, in fact, that he was more than once singled out for extensive disinformation attacks against him by anti-Saudi groups. I remember hearing Israeli radio one day report that the name Yamani was a derivation of the word Yemeni and that they had located someone in Israel, a Yemeni Jew, who was claiming to be his relative.”
One of Yamani’s long-standing confidants was Ian Seymour of the Middle East Economic Survey. “I always thought he handled the press very very well. He was extremely good at relaxed briefings. But he was also just as good at formal press conferences. I met him some time during his first year as minister. He was a bit diffident when he came into office but it didn’t take him long to develop confidence. He had good relations with quite a number of reporters. Although anyone who, either by accident or by design, got on his wrong side, well, that was it.”
One western reporter who got on Yamani’s wrong side earned his place by writing about group-sex shenanigans after hours at OPEC meetings. He made the drastic mistake of tarring Yamani with a brush too wide. While Yamani won’t say whether other ministers might have taken part, other ministers are fast to say that Yamani has never ever been involved with anything of the kind. That reporter, who has since tried to apologize to Yamani - but has never been permitted close enough to extend his regrets - discovered the hard way that his best source of information had dried up about as fast as the ink on the offending story.
Another long-time Yamani confidant is Wanda Jablonski, founder of Petroleum Intelligence Weekly. She was one of only two reporters at the first OPEC meeting in 1960 and therefore already an OPEC veteran when Yamani arrived on the scene two years later.
The way she tells the story, she wanted an exclusive interview with him after his first meeting. Instead, he invited her to his press conference. She told him that she didn’t go to press conferences. He shrugged as if to say, too bad for you. She then showed her class by walking out, finding a comfortable chair in the hotel lobby and sitting there with a woman’s magazine pushed up to her face, knowing that eventually, he’d have to walk right past her.
When Yamani finished with his press conference, he headed for the lifts. And he couldn’t help but notice her sitting there. He also couldn’t help but see that she was miffed.
Yet, he said nothing and continued upstairs.
A few minutes later, a messenger came down with an invitation from His Excellency to join him.
She asked if it was for her interview.
The messenger said, no, that His Excellency was playing cards but if she wanted to join him...
She said she wasn’t interested.
The messenger went away.
She sat right where she was.
Several more minutes passed before the messenger returned.
His Excellency would be pleased to speak with her.
Yamani gave in.
And she got her interview.
Twenty-five years later their friendship is firmly intact. But then, he works at maintaining friendships and never misses an opportunity to strengthen them, especially with journalists he likes.
Again Wanda Jablonski. During the participation negotiations, she’d broken the story in PIW about the secret terms Yamani had exacted from the producers and was about to take with him to Kuwait, seeking their approval. The story ran literally only hours after the talks concluded.
Arriving at the hotel in Kuwait to cover the next part of the story, Jablonski received a telex from her office in New York saying that George Piercy was livid that she’d run the story and was hereby cancelling Exxon’s many subscriptions to PIW. He was also demanding a full refund for those cancelled subscriptions, which amounted to about $36,000. The telex ended, “What should we do?”
Jablonski wired New York, “Give them their lousy $36,000 back but tell them we will continue sending all PIWs until their expiration date because ‘we honor our contracts’.”
She explains that was a phrase Piercy himself had frequently used during the negotiations.
A few minutes after she’d sent her answer, Yamani happened by. He found her holding the telex from New York, still a bit shocked.
“What’s that?” he wanted to know.
She gave it to him and muttered, “What’s going on?”
He read it, then reassured her, “But I like your reply.”
She was stunned. “How do you know about my reply?”
He grinned, “I have my ways.” Then, he said, if after the meeting, she wanted to go back to Saudi Arabia, there’d be room for her on his plane.
She accepted his offer.
Landing in Riyadh, Yamani was about ready to get off when he spotted George Piercy at the bottom of the steps. Thinking fast, he took Jablonski’s arm and her luggage.
Yamani greeted Piercy, handed Jablonski’s suitcase to him and asked gently, “You don’t mind carrying Wanda’s luggage, do you George?”
As Piercy’s jaw dropped, Yamani and Jablonski walked away.
He is equally adept at making new press friendships. A favorite OPEC press corps story concerns a young journalist, a novice on the oil beat, who decided he was going to corner Yamani for an exclusive interview.
Easier said than done, he spent several days trying to get a message through without much luck. He finally summoned up his courage to head Yamani off at the lifts after a long meeting.
Weary as he was, Yamani sussed out the situation right away and invited the young journalist upstairs for a chat.
The exclusive interview lasted barely long enough for a coffee and various assorted comments on astrology. The young journalist didn’t get his scoop about oil prices, but he had been in to meet the star and that was something to crow about.
It also put yet another marker in Yamani’s pocket for a rainy day.
Onnic Marashian of Platts Oilgram News has covered OPEC since 1962 and he too has always been impressed with Yamani’s media skills. “At the time he became the Saudi oil minister, it’s possible he’d never even seen an oil well or had any idea how oil came out of the ground. But Yamani is someone who always did his homework. Right from the beginning you could tell he was a clever young man. He had more hair then and a darker beard. I must also say he was not as sophisticated as he ended up. He wasn’t as good in those days at handling the press. But at the end, he was very very good. He could draw huge crowds of journalists. He mastered the techniques of how to deal with the press and they threw a huge amount of importance on him. He’s always been a nice man and he’s always been very correct with people. He’s never been rude, although you can read impatience on someone’s face and sometimes he grew impatient, especially with the press.”
Yamani definitely grew impatient with Oriana Fallaci when she went to Saudi Arabia to interview him for the New York Times Magazine in mid-1975. But then she says she grew impatient with him too.
They met the first time in London.
Fallaci says she thought the interview would take place there. “It was the birthday of one of his daughters. He was having a big dinner that evening. We went to a very expensive place and he was, as usual, very gracious. I said, okay, tomorrow we will make the interview. He said, no, tomorrow I must give a lecture. You will come and listen to me so you can hear what I have to say. I told him, okay. But the lecture was very technical and didn’t interest me very much. When it was over I said, okay, shall we make the interview now? But he said, no, we shall do it in Saudi Arabia. He kept his word. I went to Saudi Arabia but I had to wait 15 days there for my interview.”
She says she flew to Jeddah and saw Yamani there. But each day he’d say he wasn’t yet ready to do the interview. “I grew more and more impatient. You don’t stay somewhere for a week to see the person every day without getting the interview. Finally he said we will make the interview in Taif. He has a big house there in the middle of nothing. It’s newly built. There’s a smaller house next to it, with lots of India fig trees. It’s the guest house. It’s like a little hotel, very neat, very clean, with lots of small rooms, with beds and closets built in. I was there for four or five days. Then Yamani started again, putting me off. I remember I said to Tammam, he is making fun of me. Tammam raised her eyes to the ceiling and said, I don’t know. I’ll tell him.”
Fallaci adds here that she liked Tammam and found her, “Very simpatica. But she’s more at ease than him. With him you don’t know if he’s relaxed or not. She’s smart and she’s a modern girl for an Arab. You know what? She was always dressed in western clothes like me. I never saw Tammam dressed as an Arab woman.”
Over the course of the next few days, Fallaci says, she and Zaki and Tammam and all the children had lunch together and dinner together and even took long walks together.
But still no interview. “I don’t understand that man. I feel very uncomfortable with the Arabs because this is a world I do not know. And I am very perplexed in my judgment of him. Maybe he was simply scared by me. But then, why was he so exaggeratedly polite and kind with his hospitality. He even gave a party for me in Taif.”
But no interview. “I remember his son Hani was even making fun of me because everybody knew about this story. Everybody knew how he kept me waiting. We would walk together in what he called his garden. It was really an orchard. He had tomatoes and figs. He would pick up a fig and put it in my mouth, which bothered me a lot. I didn’t want the fig and I didn’t want him to put it in my mouth. But that shows you how he wanted to be friendly and full of affection.”
Eventually, she says, she couldn’t stand it any longer. “I went to him and said, ‘Listen, I don’t understand this game. You are very gracious and so exquisite but I came here to do some work. What can I tell my editors in Milan and New York?’ Actually, to say gracious is to say very little. He is more than gracious. But he made me wait 15 days. I got the interview in the morning and left that same afternoon.”
She insists that when he was finally ready, they went in his study where he did one of the things that offends her the most. “He put on a tape recorder. I don’t like that because the moment you give an interview it belongs to the one who does it. I don’t like them to tape my interview. I was taping him and he was taping me.”
His version of the story is very different.
Yamani says that when Fallaci first arrived she announced that she wasn’t quite ready yet to do the interview. She wanted to take some time just to observe him But the date of the interview was fixed, he emphasizes, according to her request.
The day before the scheduled interview, Yamani says, he had a tiring 12 hours at the office. That evening there was a cabinet meeting. He returned home at around 11 p.m., exhausted. That was when, he says, Fallaci herself announced, “We’ll do the interview now.”
Yamani refused. Fallaci threatened to leave. Yamani offered to help her get to Jeddah and on the next flight for home. But, he says, she backed down.
The next day, as had been planned all along, he matched her punch for punch.
It must be said here that she’s known for her especially brash technique. It must also be said here that her technique happens to produce for her colorful reactions in the people she’s portraying. And her interview with Yamani, all these years later, still stands out as an excellent example of magazine journalism.
After polite talk about his family and of his various homes, she got Yamani to talk about Yassir Arafat.
Obviously well aware that Arafat’s reputation in the United States was generally that of a criminal terrorist, she baited Yamani with, “I expect your opinion of him is an enthusiastic one.”
Yamani said Arafat was viewed by some as a reasonable man, a moderate.
She snapped back, saying that when she interviewed Arafat he was anything but a moderate. He was a man who kept shouting that Israel had to be swept away, wiped off the map.
Yamani parried, “If Arafat didn’t talk that way, the Palestinians would never have a home. Sometimes people have to talk in a certain way and say certain things.”
When they got on to the subject of oil price increases, she prodded him, “Between ourselves, Yamani, is it really in your interests to push us over the brink?”
He told her that in Saudi Arabia they didn’t think so. He said they knew that if the American economy were to collapse, Saudi Arabia’s economy would collapse as well. The problem was, as he saw it, that some members of OPEC didn’t believe that another oil price hike would lead to disaster. And that some of them did not particularly care whether the world’s economy collapsed or not.
Fallaci mentioned the problems involved with discovering suitable sources of alternative energy, then hit him with, “When that day comes, we’ll no longer need you.”
Yamani retorted, “By that time we’ll be so wealthy that you’ll need us for other things.”
Now Fallaci suggested, “You’ve already got too much money, haven’t you?”
And Yamani told her, “Yes.”
Looking back on the interview, Fallaci concedes it’s not one of her favorites. “There are only a few parts I like. At one point he said to me, I wish we could import water the way you import oil. I said to him that I have a property in Tuscany, in Italy, and there is so much water everywhere. I said, if you want. I’ll sell you water. That was fun for me because we were joking. But the rest was not spontaneous. He’s extremely polite. Very, very polite. And very diplomatic. I know through some friends that he hesitated to see me. But frankly, my judgment of him is in a kind of limbo. I don’t really know what to think.”
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