The Case of the Disenchanted Diplomat
_________
Well-founded fear of persecution. (i) An applicant has a well-founded fear of persecution if:
(A) The applicant has a fear of persecution in his or her country of nationality or, if stateless, in his or her country of last habitual residence, on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion;
(B) There is a reasonable possibility of suffering such persecution if he or she were to return to that country; and
(C) He or she is unable or unwilling to return to, or avail himself or herself of the protection of, that country because of such fear.
_________
Classical scholars may know Saudi Arabia as the land of frankincense and myrrh. Religious scholars may know it as the birthplace of Islam, where Mecca and Medina remain sites for religious pilgrimage. Few know it only became a nation in 1932, thanks to the conquests of Abdulaziz ibn Abdul Rahman ibn Faisal ibn Turki ibn Abdullah ibn Muhammad Al Saud, known to the West as Ibn Saud, who conquered most of the Arabian Peninsula and gave his family name to his new kingdom. Saudi Arabia is also a family business. An absolute monarchy, all the land belongs to the king, and his family members hold all the most important ministries, provincial posts, even diplomatic positions. Ibn Saud died in 1953 but still has more than thirty living sons.
When the kingdom was founded, most of its income came from taxes levied on pilgrims bound for Mecca. In 1938, oil was discovered, and Ibn Saud was receiving $2.5 million per week at the time of his death. As a son of the desert, the king worried that such wealth would corrupt the frugal lives of the royal family and its austere religious beliefs. He was right. By the reign of King Fahd in the 1990s, the nation’s $100 billion cash reserves had been reduced to a mere $7 billion. Royal family members received enormous stipends and lived in a manner frowned upon by the puritanical Wahhabi sect of Islam they were supposed to follow. Princes smoked, drank, and gambled at casinos in London and Monte Carlo. They built enormous palaces, invested in real estate all over the world, and bought expensive clothing and fleets of luxury cars.
Supporting that lifestyle has led to corruption. Historically, Saudi Arabia has been among the top customers for U.S. military hardware. To make these enormous sales, defense contractors regularly offer “commissions” (bribes) to influential government figures—who just happen to be Saudi princes. When the Saudi Air Force paid $5.5 billion to buy five Airborne Warning Control Systems (AWACS) aircraft in 1981, the planes themselves cost only $110 million each. Even adding in maintenance and training, $5 billion in overhead seems a bit steep—and an excellent target for some creative accounting.
Oil money has financed Wahhabi mosques and schools in many countries, spreading this intolerant form of Islam. Whether by clandestine government funding or the donations of wealthy Saudi families, untold millions of dollars have found their way to terrorist groups around the world. The Saudi royals made a bargain with their people, guaranteeing a comfortable living standard for all as the price of absolute authority. To ensure their preeminent position, they have used their wealth to breed chaos among the disparate elements within their own country—and by playing both sides in conflicts around the world.
Even with an extended family numbering in the thousands, the House of Saud can’t fill all the positions in the government. They rely on a new generation of college-educated technocrats for many functions. That, however, has brought a new problem. As many Saudis study in foreign countries, they become “contaminated” with Western ideals that are at odds with absolute monarchy. But rebels aren’t created merely by outside education. Even a product of the “safe,” conservative Saudi universities can become disenchanted. My client, Mohammed Abdulla al-Khilewi, is a case in point.
Khilewi was a member of a wealthy Saudi family, and he studied political science at King Saud University and attained a master’s degree from the Institute for Diplomatic Studies. Interestingly, approximately a quarter of his diplomatic training involved intelligence and security matters and spy craft, such as small-arms training, covert communications, and methods of hiding weapons and documents. All Saudi diplomats were issued pistols, and thanks to diplomatic immunity, they could carry them anywhere. Khilewi had assignments in Britain, Switzerland, and the United States. He accompanied the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Prince Saud, and even King Fahd as part of diplomatic delegations.
In 1992, Khilewi was named Second Secretary to the Permanent Saudi Arabian Mission to the United Nations. He worked mainly on nuclear disarmament issues, but he also served as chargé d’affaires, conducting diplomatic business, including voting in the General Assembly. He was promoted to become one of the three First Secretaries at the mission in 1993. Throughout his education and career, Khilewi had harbored growing doubts about the regime in his homeland. His own family had seen repression. Three male cousins had been imprisoned for activities in favor of human rights, and a female cousin was one of forty-five women arrested for driving cars at a mass protest against the ban on females operating automobiles in 1990.
Khilewi’s top security clearance brought to his notice numerous terrorist activities undertaken by the Saudi government. Some were directed against groups within Saudi Arabia to help maintain the regime. But there were also international efforts to increase discord between Jews and Muslims, including planned actions against Jewish organizations in the United States. He also found proof of corrupt financial dealings within the government. Determined to prove any charges he brought, Khilewi began compiling a private collection of confidential documents by taking them to the copying center across the street from his office. In time, he assembled some 14,000 pages of secrets, including:
On May 17, 1994, Khilewi became convinced that the political situation had reached crisis proportions. Saudi Arabia was preparing for a war with neighboring Yemen to distract the population from the regime’s failures. Khilewi prepared a letter for the Grand Mufti, the leading religious figure in the country; Crown Prince Abdullah; other members of the royal family; and members of the Consultative Assembly, the Saudi parliament. In doing so, he apparently followed a tradition (legal and perhaps religious) of using open letters to government figures to publicize a request or belief. Khilewi’s letter decried King Fahd as a despot, implicating him in the assassination of his predecessor, King Faisal, and condemning corrupt and divisive activities of the Fahd regime. This was a bold step—even the most serious critics of the government stopped short of denouncing the king.
The response was quick: an offer by the Saudi Ambassador, Prince Bandar, for Khilewi to use his private jet to come to Washington and discuss the matter. Once aboard the private plane, Khilewi knew he could just as easily be taken to Saudi Arabia where torture or even death might await him. His homeland has a number of dire punishments under religious Sharia law—including execution by beheading. Within hours, a Saudi intelligence officer personally threatened him (which Khilewi captured on a voice recorder as he surrendered his pistol). He also received phone calls from his father and his brother back home in Saudi Arabia, reporting that they’d been contacted by the foreign minister, Prince Saud. The tone from various diplomatic staff members quickly progressed from sweet talk to bribery, usual government responses to dissident open letters. But then they became threatening. A so-called diplomat, whom Khilewi always believed to be an agent of the Saudi security service, was blunt: “Go back to Saudi Arabia, or you, your family in Saudi Arabia, your wife and kids will be killed.”
Faced with such an unexpectedly bloodthirsty reaction, Khilewi went into hiding. That’s where I entered the picture. I had only recently joined my father’s law practice, having previously served in the U.S. attorney’s office. A former law student of my father’s referred Khilewi to us, and my recent government service sealed the deal. Khilewi needed a direct conduit to U.S. law enforcement and hoped my contacts could do that job. For me, this would be an education in immigration law that no law professor had ever touched upon.
Being a political dissident is very dangerous in Saudi Arabia, where political parties are illegal. The government often buys silence— Khilewi was offered millions in hush money. Or the all-powerful royals may just ignore dissidents, attempt blackmail, or engage in a smear campaign. Khilewi was accused of working for Iran, the Israeli Mossad, being a lazy diplomat, and being an agent of the FBI. It seemed, however, that since Khilewi had thousands of pages of secret documents to back up his accusations, a determined faction wanted to take stronger measures— kidnapping or outright assassination.
Accusations that Khilewi worked for the FBI were especially ironic. The bureau did not cover itself in glory with this case. I contacted my former boss at the U.S. attorney’s office to arrange a meeting with the FBI. My father and I went to the Hotel Elysee near our midtown offices to meet agents and presented several documents from Khilewi’s information trove, describing Saudi intelligence operations on U.S. soil, including assassination plans against Western diplomats. We also shared documents about conspiracies for nuclear proliferation—Saudi government-sponsored funding for an Islamic bomb—which didn’t exactly fit the conventional view of Saudi Arabia as a loyal U.S. ally.
You would think the pages were radioactive, the way these counter-intelligence agents acted. They just let the papers sit on the conference table and went outside to call their superiors. These were the days when cell phones were the size of bricks, and I figured the FBI guys had to be racking up quite a bill as they worked their way higher and higher up the chain of command, only to get conflicting orders. What really shocked me, though, was that in the end they told me, “Shots are being called at a high level,” and they were told to leave this hard evidence on the table. Apparently, Washington decided it was better to ignore what Khilewi had risked his life to collect and avoid any diplomatic embarrassments with a country that was supplying the United States with a large amount of petroleum, buying a considerable amount of U.S. weapons, and supposedly helping to maintain stability in the Middle East. Who cared that he had documentary proof that the Saudis were doing just the opposite? It seemed our government as well as the Saudis just wanted Khilewi and his unwelcome information to go away.
Saudi Arabia has spent millions of dollars on lawyers, public relations firms, and lobbyists to extend its influence on the U.S. government, which includes some of these companies making donations to political action committees. Whenever our story got into the media, the Saudis would buy up whole sections of newspapers such as the Washington Post to counter the front page coverage of Khilewi’s defection.
Officials in the State Department and other agencies tasked with keeping tabs on the Saudis can look forward to well-paying positions as consultants and executives at Saudi entities after retiring from their government jobs—provided they don’t rock the boat. Prince Bandar all but boasted of the policy: “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.” Even presidents can expect lucrative, Saudi-financed speaking engagements after their terms in office.
It seemed we couldn’t expect any help or protection from the FBI. But luckily we were approached by veteran Manhattan District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau, whom we met with frequently, developing a close personal regard for one another. Morgenthau had been trying to get a handle on criminal activity among the UN diplomatic corps, including money laundering, and hoped Khilewi could help. His office offered practical assistance in the form of a protective detail of NYPD detectives from the DA’s squad. When Detective Fred Ghussein started talking to us about security measures, I began to wonder if I hadn’t wandered into the pages of a spy novel. He suggested that my client wear a bulletproof vest—and that I should get one for myself for the times when I met with him. Ghussein also trained me to determine whether I was under surveillance, and he encoded certain communications with me in a pager so we did not have to get to a land line telephone. These were the days before cell phones were popular, and in fact I made the transition from a beeper to a personal phone during this case. I felt I didn’t have much choice if I wanted to protect myself and my family.
My law firm became a target as well. Our alarm system recorded a break-in at our offices on a Saturday evening. With gun drawn, Ghussein accompanied me to investigate. We found nothing, but the experience led me to engage a security consulting firm who spotted a surveillance camera in the building across the street. They advised us to discuss any delicate topics only in interior rooms and to switch these meetings around to different locations. Using a device to sweep the office for bugs became a regular practice too. Even so, it was obvious that the Saudis had an eye on us. As the case began, my mother had been diagnosed with cancer, a situation we were keeping within the family. Yet when we spoke to the Saudi ambassador, Prince Bandar, he wished for her “speedy recovery.” Well wishes conveying a threat—I found that very disturbing.
Prince Bandar was always very cordial in our communications, but he didn’t hesitate to refer to us as “Jew lawyers” in private conversation with Khilewi. Needless to say, we didn’t put much faith in whatever the prince told us. But it disheartened us, to say the least, to find people we considered friends and allies betraying our trust. Human Rights Watch, an international organization dedicated to publicizing governments’ oppression of their citizens, reported extensively on rights organizations arising in Saudi Arabia, and dissidents like Khilewi provided the group with sensitive information . . . only to discover that the officer on the HRW Saudi desk was actually working for the government and turning these secrets over to the Saudi security service.
As if to underscore the amount of influence the Saudis could wield, Prince Bandar stepped in when we seemed to be getting nowhere with our efforts to secure residence and safety for Khilewi. “Mr. Wildes, if your client wants a green card, I can arrange it for him,” Bandar said, suggesting we come to his ranch in Virginia to talk it over. Under diplomatic protocol that would be stepping onto Saudi soil, so we declined the invitation. At the same time the ambassador offered this olive branch—a green card if the situation could be handled quietly (i.e., no more embarrassing revelations)—Bandar’s uncle Prince Salman, the governor of Riyadh, played bad cop. A delegation of Khilewi’s family members arrived in this country, and I arranged for them to meet with Khilewi in Central Park with security from a private investigator. They brought a harsh message from the prince: “Tell your relative we can get him in the United States, we can get him even if he goes to the moon.”
The lawyer in me had to wonder. Was this part of a concerted strategy? Or was it an example of royal factions in the government jostling with one another to deal with a defector? One thing was sure; these weren’t empty threats. The FBI repeatedly beeped my pager with “911” urgent requests. When I called them, they warned that Saudi intelligence had sent a “team wanting to whisk your client out of here”—credible information that my client was in danger and I might be in harm’s way if I were with him. When I asked what could be done to protect a man defecting with important intelligence, they explained that their obligation was to me as a U.S. citizen—and that they’d “fulfilled their responsibility” by advising me of the threat.
This was a period when a number of diplomats had suffered mysterious, fatal “accidents.” I faced the question of how to keep my client alive when a government with various rogue players on its payroll wants him otherwise? My answer was to keep him in a glare of publicity. A front-page headline on the New York Post screaming, “Kidnap Team Stalks Ex-UN Envoy—Saudi Diplomat Is Terror Target” was probably more effective than a troop of bodyguards. As the only person communicating on his behalf, I waged an aggressive media campaign to keep Khilewi alive, shuttling between different rooms in the office to talk with camera crews from different networks and with print journalists. I felt I pulled off a real coup working with Barbara Walters and the staff of ABC’s famed 20/20 news magazine, broadcasting multiple exposés and updates about the case.
We carefully maintained a steady but slow stream of disclosures from Khilewi’s information archive—one scoop after another to keep the basic defection story prominent. Journalist Marie Colvin took a report about getting Chinese assistance for Saudi nuclear bomb development and turned it into a front-page story for Britain’s Sunday Times. A brilliant Middle East expert and front-line journalist reporting on conflicts around the world, she was killed by Syrian artillery in the brutal civil war in that country.
I found it a surreal experience to spend months dealing with regular clients while running a media circus and arranging and attending meetings with Khilewi and the FBI at various times and interesting locales. On a more public stage, Congressman Tom Lantos, cofounder of the Human Rights Caucus (and later chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee) took a great interest in Khilewi’s case. Lantos had a valid historical reason for his human rights concerns—he was a Holocaust survivor. Our visit to Washington was memorable. Not only was it the first time I’d ever worn a bulletproof vest professionally, but I enjoyed a shared ride with a Capitol Police officer armed with automatic weapons. Khilewi and I participated in a closed hearing with no press. Afterward we staged an impromptu press conference on the steps of the Capitol that was reported in the Washington Post (the Style section—maybe they thought we were modeling the latest in Kevlar fashion).
At this event I met Steve Stylianoudis, a gentleman of inestimable worth on this case and others. Stylianoudis had an interesting resume, to say the least: besides being an arms dealer, he was also active in public relations—even working for the Saudis. Given his experience and insight, his counsel was invaluable on many delicate Middle Eastern matters.
Throughout the case, the Saudi government tried to downplay the situation, to move Khilewi from the front page to the back pages. Their official response was that Khilewi was merely a disgruntled employee, afraid of being transferred to a posting in an unpleasant African country. He’d claimed asylum to continue enjoying the good life in the United States. In truth, Khilewi had a completely justified fear of persecution if he returned to his homeland. He was officially granted asylum a little more than two months after his application. I counted it a victory when we succeeded in obtaining permanent residency for this brave man. Before joining my father’s private practice, I had been a special assistant U.S. attorney, often prosecuting and sometimes fighting to deport undesirable aliens. Frankly, when I first joined my father, I was concerned about being tasked with protecting rogue individuals. In defending Khilewi, I felt I was doing battle for “the good guys.”
We asked for special consideration from the INS (predecessor of the USCIS) that they officiate the final resolution of Khilewi’s case in our office for security reasons. This was the first time we made such a request, but as subsequent cases will show, it was not the last. When he won his legal residency, Khilewi promised to “fight for the right to live under a democratic system” in his country. He still dreams of a country whose vast wealth is shared fairly, where men and women, the Shia and Christian minorities, and the numerous tribal groups enjoy freedom and safety.
On October 4, 1995, I was in synagogue for Yom Kippur when my pager beeped. I discovered several emergency calls had been made to my office from the FBI, who’d receive information that Khilewi had been murdered in a hotel. I immediately started calling around our circle of friends and associates, and after some anxious time found that Khilewi was fine. He confirmed that the rumor was being circulated by the Saudis—why, he could not say. At the time he was undertaking no dangerous activities, just writing a book. Maybe this was their way of expressing an opinion about that. An interesting side note—later that day, I received a message from the Saudi desk officer for Human Rights Watch. Apparently, a mutual friend of his and Khilewi’s had “actually been killed.” This was the same human rights activist privy to information of all sorts from dissidents who turned out to be a Saudi double agent. All in all, quite a holy day!
Khilewi has faced more death threats, the most recent in 1998. When terrorists exploded a bomb alongside the USS Cole in 2000, killing seventeen sailors, the Office of Naval Intelligence consulted Khilewi regarding possible Saudi involvement, beginning a relationship that lasted for years. He has advised and offered information to a variety of intelligence services, not to mention working as a consultant for author Tom Clancy. Khilewi spoke out about the Saudi connection in the tragic events of 9/11 on several television public affairs shows, which makes it all the more ironic that he was reported by several of his neighbors as a suspicious character in the subsequent terrorism scare. Representing him has brought other Saudi defectors and people with problems involving the Middle East to my office. I’ve often consulted with Khilewi and used his services as a translator.
As for Saudi Arabia, King Fahd died in 2005, the kingdom’s finances having run into deficit territory. Crown Prince Abdullah, one of the Saudi notables who received Khilewi’s letter of protest when he defected, became king. Abdullah instituted some reforms—too few, in the eyes of many—and died in 2015. He was succeeded on the throne by Prince Salman, the same man who had threatened to “get” Khilewi in 1994.
Twenty-five years after his dramatic defection, Khilewi, now a fully vetted United States citizen, enjoys the freedom and hospitality of our nation—tempered with vigilance. “Even though protecting anyone who lives in this country is a job for the FBI,” he says, “I take my own precautions.”