Sleeping With The Devil (15 page)

    Of more pressing importance, Murray wrote, “the military authorities
urgently desire certain facilities in Saudi Arabia for the prosecution of the war, such as the
right to construct military airfields and flight privileges for military aircraft en route to
the Pacific war theater… Thus far King Ibn Saud has declined to grant those facilities because
of British objections, believed to arise from postwar political considerations.”

    Since 1940 Great Britain had pumped nearly $40 million into Saudi
Arabia, to maintain stability and heighten its influence there. American lend-lease aid to the
kingdom had been about $13 million, with another $13.4 million coming in the form of advances
from the Arabian American Oil Company. To counter British influence and keep the Soviets at
bay, Murray, who would become U.S. ambassador to Iran at war’s end, recommended as much as $57
million in additional U.S. aid over the next five years. Otherwise, some other nation “might
attain… a position in Saudi Arabia inimical to our national interest there.”

    In an enclosed letter dated December 11, 1944, and also stamped “top
secret,” Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal carried the argument still further:

    

    The prestige and hence the influence of the United States is in part
related to the wealth of the Government and its nationals in terms of oil resources, foreign as
well as domestic. It is assumed, therefore, that the bargaining power of the United States in
international conferences involving vital materials like oil and such problems as aviation,
shipping, island bases, and international security agreements relating to the disposition of
armed forces and facilities will depend in some degree upon the retention by the United States
of such oil reserves… Under these circumstances, it is patently in the navy’s interest that no
part of the national wealth, as represented by the present holdings of foreign oil reserves by
American nationals, be lost at this time. Indeed, the active expansion of such holdings is very
much to be desired.

    

    The United States did have one great advantage with Saudi Arabia. Ibn
Sa’ud had spent much of his life fighting tooth and nail to assemble his kingdom. He didn’t
want to cede control to a nation such as Great Britain, with a long colonial past and a proven
appetite for interfering in the region. Confined by its own geography and defined for much of
its existence by its isolationism, the United States seemed a better and safer choice for a
backward kingdom just finding its feet in global matters.

    For the Saudis, the question was how to approach the United States. In
a letter delivered to the American minister at Jedda for transmittal to Roosevelt, Ibn Sa’ud
and his ministers put forth their case with delicacy and remarkable coyness:

    

    When the King sees the great nation of America content to have its
economic activity in Arabia reduced and defined by its ally, Britain, America in turn will
surely understand that Saudi Arabia may be excused if it yields to the same constraint from the
same source, not merely to please an ally, but to survive. Without arms or resources, Saudi
Arabia must not reject the hand that measures its food and drink.

    Unwilling as he is to entertain the thought, the King cannot but
consider the possibility that American may lose interest in his distant land, after the war, as
she has retired to domestic preoccupations after other wars…

    The Saudi Arabian government therefore inquires whether there is an
exit for our two nations from this confinement.

    

    Who was courting whom? Ibn Sa’ud had pulled all the right strings.

    BY FEBRUARY 1945, it was time for the two leaders to meet. Already in
the Mediterranean to discuss reparations and the possible postwar dismemberment of Germany with
Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin, Roosevelt steamed to the Great Bitter Lake in the Suez
Canal after the Yalta Conference closed. On February 12 he met with Farouk I of Egypt aboard
the U.S.S.
Quincy
, which had carried the president all the way from Norfolk, Virginia.
Ethiopia’s Haile Selaisse followed the next day. Meanwhile, at Jeddah on the Red Sea, Ibn Sa’ud
and his party were boarding the U.S.S.
Murphy
, the first American warship to make port
in Saudi waters, and setting sail for the Great Bitter Lake. On the fourteenth, the Saudi king
came aboard the
Quincy
.

    To accommodate Ibn Sa’ud, the ship’s crew covered the bow with a large
tent and set out a decorative chair and an assortment of rugs and seating cushions for the king
and his traveling party. In accordance with Muslim custom, a live sheep was slaughtered daily
on board and prepared for his meal. At a dinner thrown for officers and crewmen, the king spoke
through an interpreter of his own military conquests. U.S. Navy Captain John Keating recalled
Ibn Sa’ud quoting from the Qur’an: “First I am a warrior: Only then am I a king.” At six foot
four, he looked every bit the warrior.

    Away from the festivities, aides showed Ibn Sa’ud newsreels that
glorified U.S. military operations. The message was clear: If you need protection from your
enemies, who better to have on your side than the world’s preeminent military power? The
reverse message - if you want oil in your future, who better to have on your side than Saudi
Arabia? - didn’t need asking.

    In their talks aboard the
Quincy
, Franklin Roosevelt and Ibn
Sa’ud put their common seal on many arrangements already in the works. America would have
access to Saudi ports. It could construct the military air bases on Saudi soil, albeit with a
lease limited to five years. Equally important, Aramco, dominated by SOCAL and other American
oil companies, could begin building the Trans-Arabian pipeline to the Mediterranean. Roosevelt
had hoped to gain the king’s support for a Jewish state in the Middle East, but Ibn Sa’ud
argued that it was the Germans, not the Arabs, who had harmed the Jews; and thus the Germans,
not the Arabs, who should pay. Roosevelt ended up promising the Saudi king that the United
States would consult equally with Jews and Arabs over any change in U.S. policy toward
Palestine. He also vowed that America would not seek to occupy Saudi soil as the British had
occupied so many of Saudi Arabia’s neighboring countries. The latter point was key: Winston
Churchill rushed to meet with Ibn Sa’ud as soon as he learned that Roosevelt had done so, but
he was too late. The deal had been cut.

    To commemorate the meeting, the two leaders parted with an exchange of
gifts: a sheik’s robe and solid-gold knife for Roosevelt, and harem outfits for wife Eleanor
and their daughter, Anna, who had accompanied the president from Norfolk. FDR presented Ibn
Sa’ud with a Douglas two-prop plane, to be delivered later, and an exact replica of his own
wheelchair. The king, who suffered from an old leg wound, took to the chair immediately and
rarely left it except to sleep, until his death in 1953 of obesity, lack of exercise, and
general decrepitude.

    Contemporary historians and other commentators tended to treat the
meeting as an aside, and even modern historians are apt to give it short shrift. Yalta is where
the action was. The war was winding down. Europe needed to be rebuilt; Germany and Japan, to be
shaped into pacifist nations. But it was on the
Quincy
, not at Yalta, that the energy
cornerstone of America’s postwar industrial machine was laid.

    Heavily invested in Iran and elsewhere, British and British-Dutch oil
interests would continue to dominate the Middle Eastern trade in the years immediately
following the war, but as the Saudi-U.S. relationship took root and spread, and as Saudi oil
production grew - from 21.3 million barrels extracted in 1945 to 142.9 million in 1948 and over
300 million by 1952 - all that would change.

    With the United States, the Saudis had protection against Egypt,
against their ancient enemies in Jordan, against the Shi’a and the Iranians and all the other
intrigue and danger of the Arab world. With the Saudis, the U.S. broke European hegemony in the
Middle East and set up a bulwark against communist influence in the area. Everything that would
come to define the U.S.-Saudi relationship was there from the beginning: oil diplomacy, the
intertwining of government and corporate influences, the intermingling of public and private
interests. The only thing missing was excessive greed, and that would take care of itself. The
balance of global industrial-oil would have two clear termini: the U.S. and Saudi Arabia.
People at either end would grow rich beyond all reckoning; and the second leg of the triangle
that connects money and power, Islam and Christianity, terrorism and nationalism, would be
complete.

    THE FIRST LEG of that triangle had been set in stone two centuries
earlier when Muhammad ibn ‘Abd-al-Wahhab was expelled from the desert oasis town at Al
‘Uyaynah, northwest of Riyadh.

    Born at Al ‘Uyaynah in 1703 or 1704, Muhammad was said to have learned
the Qur’an by heart by the time he was ten years old. At twelve, he entered into a marriage
arranged by his father and set off on a pilgrimage to Mecca. Soon thereafter he was in Medina,
studying under ‘Abdallah ibn Ibrahim ibn Saif, and from there he traveled far and wide,
including to Kurdistan, Baghdad, and Basra, in what is now Iraq. In Basra, at the confluence of
the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, ‘Abd-al-Wahhab began preaching the message that would resound
through Saudi Arabia to this day.

    Islam, ‘Abd-al-Wahhab told anyone who would listen, had lost its way.
Islam was a monotheistic faith. The Qur’an strictly enjoined Muslims to refrain from imputing
divine qualities to anyone other than Allah. Even the prophet Muhammad, founder of the faith,
was only an ordinary man called by Allah to an extraordinary mission. Yet the evidence of
polytheism was everywhere in the Muslim world: Muslims worshiped at the prophet’s tomb. They
went on pilgrimages to mosques built atop the tombs of saints, offered sacrifices, and prayed
for the saints’ intervention. Magicians, sorcerers, fortune-tellers - all ran afoul of the
Qur’an. So did those who trusted their fate to talismans and amulets. ‘Abd-al-Wahhab even went
so far as to order his followers to cut down the few trees that lived on the peninsula because
they were worshiped by pagans.

    Forced to leave Basra while he was still developing his message,
‘Abd-al-Wahhab returned to Al ‘Uyaynah and there launched his relentless puritan campaign.
Islam could be made pure again, he preached, only by returning it to its purest form: the
Qur’an and the Sunna, the code of conduct and acceptable views based on the prophet Muhammad’s
life. Anything introduced since - any practices instituted more recently than three centuries
after Allah had delivered the truth through his prophet - was
bida
, an abominable
innovation. Ostentatious living, gaudily decorated mosques, and excesses of style were insults
to Allah and distractions from his word. By way of correction, ‘Abd-al-Wahhab and his followers
- the Wahhabis, as they became known - offered strict prescriptions that extended to the tiny
details of everyday life. There was a Wahhabi way to sneeze, embrace, shake hands, yawn, kiss,
dress, and so on. There was even a Wahhabi way of reinterpreting physics; strict Wahhabis
believe the world is flat. (If this begins to conjure images of the Taliban rule in
Afghanistan, there’s a good reason.)

    For the pagans who followed faiths established before Muhammad
introduced the one true religion and the one and only god, there was no pity for their
ignorance. For Muslims who refused to acknowledge the truth of ‘Abd-al-Wahhab’s teaching, there
was jihad: holy war. The Wahhabis lived by the sword, and anybody who opposed them died by it.

    Wahhabi intolerance finally got to be too much for ‘Uthman ibn
Mu’ammar, the ruler of Al ‘Uyaynah. Facing opposition from his own people and fearing the wrath
of powerful tribal chiefs - and unwilling, apparently, to have his guest put to death - ‘Uthman
ordered ‘Abd-al-Wahhab to leave his territory but offered him the choice of destinations. And
thus it was that sometime in the late 1730s or early 1740s, Wahhab walked forty miles down the
Wadi Hanifah to Dar’iya, near present-day Riyadh, and made the acquaintance of its ruler,
Muhammad ibn Sa’ud, great-great-great-great-grandfather of Ibn Sa’ud. It was a marriage made in
heaven.