Sleeping With The Devil (28 page)

    SOME OTHER NATION faced with shrinking revenues, heavy obligations, and
a platinum-plated resource such as the planet’s largest known oil reserve might go to the World
Bank for a loan, to tide things over until the price of oil rose or the books could get
balanced - no one is suggesting imminent bankruptcy in the Saudis’ case - but the World Bank
demands at least a modicum of transparency in its dealings. Saudi Arabia would have to open its
books to outside inspection, and that would risk revealing to its own populace how many
billions of dollars in national revenues are being siphoned off by the House of Sa’ud.

    How, for example, to explain that $7.2 billion for the Boeing
commercial jets and accessories? Accounting has become more creative all around the world, but
someone would be bound to notice that at least 10 percent of the purchase price the Saudis had
agreed to pay Boeing disappeared in commissions. Follow the money even partway, and it would
soon be obvious in which direction the money flowed: from the royal treasury to Khalid bin
Mahfouz and others, then back to the royals. Bin Mahfouz also was forced to put some into
Sa’ud-sponsored charities, and who knew what happened to it from there.

    Officially, military expenditures consume 13 percent of Saudi Arabia’s
gross domestic product. Throwing in off-budget military spending, the total is much, much
higher. In Israel, a nation in a constant state of warfare, armed to the teeth and surrounded
by enemies on every side, military expenditures claim only 9 percent of GDP. If the books were
opened up, someone would begin to wonder why the Saudis were spending so much more of their GDP
on weaponry than the Israelis, especially when the U.S. protects the Saudis from outside
enemies. For decades the Saudi royals and their subjects have followed their own “don’t ask,
don’t tell” policy, though such disciplines are a lot easier when there’s no end to the money.

    A second approach would be to bite the bullet, heed the old
guns-and-butter lessons, and tighten the belt. But this path, too, is fraught with peril. Cut
back on the butter, and you violate the social contract that has allowed the Al Sa’ud to govern
despite the ruling family’s deviation from the theocratic principles of the Wahhabis. Thus the
welfare state continues. Thus the mosque schools. Thus the kingdom is now dotted with
state-of-the-art hospitals that would provide excellent free care if only the funds existed to
staff and open them.

    If you cut back on the guns, you risk the wrath of your American
protectors; the British, who are also major suppliers of arms and armaments (John Major, please
call home); and the whole complicated web of private and public Western interests that you
worked so long and hard to build up and maintain. You also piss off some of the most powerful
members of your own ruling clan, who depend on the commissions from arms sales and ancillary
activities - base building and the like - to support their harems, castles, jets, yachts,
warehouses full of suits, and so on.

    That leaves only one other choice: Continue to exhaust the treasury and
run up national debt by buying guns and providing butter, placate the jihadists in whatever
ways you can (money; sanctuary; a network of mosque schools for breeding the next generation of
terrorists, some of whom will undoubtedly want to cut your throat; training camps for Central
Asian adventurers; and so on), and pray to Allah every chance you get that the moment of
inevitable reckoning will not come soon. That appears to be the path the ruling family has
chosen.

    In 1979, 127 Saudi troops and 117 Saudi insurgents died in a pitched
two-week battle after Wahhabi fanatics seized the Grand Mosque at Mecca. The insurgents carried
the same message that Wahhabi clergy are preaching in the mosques today: The House of Sa’ud is
defiling Islam. (As one Saudi diplomat said memorably in the wake of 9/11, “What shocks me most
is why they hit America and not us.”) King Khalid was on the throne when the Grand Mosque was
seized. Not anxious to duplicate his experience, King Fahd gave $25 billion to expanding and
modernizing the holy shrines at Mecca and Medina, and billions more to the new universities
that are turning out the Islamic scholars who have no jobs waiting other than agitating people
against the West and their immediate benefactor.

    The massive public-works projects at Mecca and Medina had an immediate
financial beneficiary: the Bakr bin Laden family, which oversaw the construction and
restoration and pocketed billions in payments and commissions, a portion - maybe a large one -
of which undoubtedly found its way to cousin Osama, al Qaeda, and other violent fundamentalist
groups. That’s the way things work in Saudi Arabia today: It’s an end game. The only question
is when does the end come.

    The West and the United States especially have left the Al Sa’ud little
choice. While most Saudi royals look the other way and hope the future never comes, Washington
fiddles and pretends Riyadh won’t burn, watching passively as wealthy Saudis channel hundreds
of millions of dollars to radical groups in hopes of buying protection. Washington pretends
that all the loudspeakers in all the mosques throughout all the kingdom that are blaring out
their messages of hate against the West haven’t been paid for with contributions from the royal
family that America so readily declares to be its best friend and ally in the Middle East.
America welcomes leading royals like Prince Salman to our shores even as we know that he
controls distributions from the International Islamic Relief Organization with an iron hand and
strongly suspect that the IIRO played a leading role in funding the terrorists who tried to
blow up the World Trade Center over eight years before al Qaeda, another IIRO beneficiary,
succeeded.

    Leading American corporations like Boeing McDonnell Douglas hire and
rehire indicted Saudis to represent their interests so they can land the deals that will pay
the commissions back in Saudi Arabia that will further erode the budget and thus further divide
the ruling class and the underclass. Former CIA directors serve on boards that have to hold
their noses to cut deals with Saudi companies because that’s business, that’s the point of
entry, that’s the way it’s done. Ex-presidents, former prime ministers, onetime senators and
members of Congress and Cabinet members walk around with their hands out, rarely slowing down
because most of them know that this charade can go on only so long. The trick is to get on that
last plane loaded with gold before the SAM launchers are set up around Riyadh International.
The status quo is too compelling, the rewards too great to do otherwise.

    Was John O’Neill, the former head of counterterrorism for the FBI who
died in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, quashed because he refused to kowtow to the
Saudis, their oil, and its American Fifth Column? I honestly don’t know. I’ve read the stories:
how the State Department barred O’Neill from entering Yemen, even though he was heading up the
investigation into the terrorist attack on the U.S.S.
Cole
. O’Neill knew he was being
stiffed by both State and the Saudis, and when he started to complain, it wasn’t long before
the knives came out. FBI management started leaking his personnel file to the press. Realizing
he was outgunned, he retired and took a job as chief of security for the World Trade Center.
(The irony never stops in these matters.) When I met O’Neill, I knew right away he was someone
who was ready to go off message and take on official Washington. If I’d known what I know now,
I could have told him that by violating the consent of silence, he would only end up signing
his own death warrant.

    Back in 1997, during my waning months with the CIA, I tried to get some
twenty-something staffer on the National Security Council to attend to what I’d seen in the
Fergana Valley and Dushanbe and Kokand: The U.S. was closing its eyes while Muslim extremists
set up shop in the very places we most needed to stop them - the oil-rich former Soviet states
of Central Asia. I was ignored, of course. The only thing the NSC had its eye on was Caspian
oil. Big Oil had what amounted to a permanent seat on the NSC in the Clinton administration,
and having cut its deals with the Saudis and formed partnerships to exploit the energy
resources of Central Asia, it didn’t want my message anywhere within hearing of the White
House. I can’t imagine Big Oil’s NSC seat has been any less secure during the tenure of Condi
Rice, the former Chevron board member and intimate of the Bush family and its oil-man buddies
going back two decades.

    What Big Oil wants more than anything else is a stable apple cart.
That’s what nearly everyone who counts wants, but this isn’t just about the apple cart. It’s
not just about whether Henry Kissinger’s client base takes a beating, or the Carlyle Group
partners have to put up in a Holiday Inn in Riyadh instead of a $4.6 billion palace on the
outskirts, or Colin Powell can’t go back to hawking Gulfstream jets once his State Department
gig is done. It’s not just about the Clinton people, not just about the Bush people. Saudi
Arabia is more and more a breathtakingly irrational state - a place that spawns global
terrorism even as it succumbs to an ancient and deeply seated isolationism, a kingdom led by a
royal family that can’t get out of the way of its own greed. Is this the fulcrum we want the
global economy to balance on?

    

    

    IF I HAD TO PICK a single day when the wheels started flying off Saudi
Arabia, it would be November 29, 1995, when King Fahd suffered his near-fatal stroke. It was
clear to those close to him that he would never again rule Saudi Arabia. But since he was
clinically alive, Crown Prince ‘Abdallah couldn’t take over.

    Without a king, Saudi Arabia drifted into chaos. The proof was
everywhere. Royal corruption turned to theft on a scale never seen in Saudi history. Government
finances went into a free fall. Wahhabi militants, all adherents of Osama bin Laden’s violent
interpretation of Islam, were off the reservation. The government in Riyadh stopped any
meaningful cooperation with Washington on terrorism. And Washington did what it always did when
it came to Saudi Arabia - pretended nothing was wrong. It even used the opportunity of Fahd’s
stroke to extort more money from the kingdom.

    AS SOON AS the royal family heard about Fahd’s stroke, it went to
battle quarters. From all over Riyadh came the
thump-thump
of helicopters and the sirens
of convoys descending on the hospital where Fahd had been taken. Among the first to arrive was
his closest family - his fourth and favorite wife, Jawhara, and Azouzi. Fahd had come to depend
on Jawhara, and Azouzi was the apple of his father’s eye. Fahd doted on him and indulged him in
everything. Everyone had heard the stories about Azouzi riding a Harley-Davidson around his
father’s palace, chasing servants and smashing furniture. Most of the Al Sa’ud found the king’s
indulgence strange. Azouzi was pimply, craven, and a bit slow. But Fahd’s favorite soothsayer
had reportedly told him that as long as Azouzi was by his side, the king would have a very
long, fulfilling life. Azouzi was his father’s good-luck charm.

    Next to arrive were Fahd’s full brothers - Defense Minister Sultan,
Interior Minister Na’if and Governor of Riyadh Salman. To outsiders, they were a tight bunch.
Their mother, who was from the Sudayri clan, had taught them from an early age that they would
have to stick together or risk being elbowed out by the other forty or so sons of Ibn Sa’ud.
They took the lesson to heart, and although they did not particularly like each other, they
always closed ranks when the going got tough. The pillars of Fahd’s rule since he became king
in 1982, the brothers all arrived at the hospital about the same time.

    Other princes hurried to the hospital, too, from all over the kingdom
and the rest of the world. You could see private executive jets lined up at Riyadh’s airport,
wingtip to wingtip. They couldn’t get anywhere near Fahd, but by being close, they could pick
up more reliable news and, just as important, demonstrate their fealty. Fahd’s health wasn’t a
minor question for them. Most of them lived off his largesse - royal stipends, which ran as
high as $270,000 a month, to as many as twelve thousand people. The recipients knew they were
breaking the treasury. Would Crown Prince ‘Abdallah cut back their funds or even eliminate
them? They had to stick around to find out.

    As soon as it was clear that Fahd would live, his full brothers were on
the phone with doctors in the United States and Europe. Their questions seemed bizarre: What
would it take to keep Fahd’s heart beating and his body warm? They didn’t seem to care whether
he would recover his mental capacities or what kind of life he would have; they merely wanted
to keep him clinically alive, and money wasn’t a problem. If necessary, they told the doctors,
they would lease as many Boeing 747 cargo jets as needed to bring in mobile hospitals and
medical teams.