Sleeping With The Devil (29 page)

    The doctors couldn’t understand the desperation to keep Fahd alive, but
then again, they didn’t understand the politics of the kingdom. What the family knew and the
doctors didn’t was that Crown Prince ‘Abdallah was out there somewhere in the desert, a wolf
ready to rip through the flock as soon the shepherd was dead. The only way to keep him at bay
was to keep Fahd’s heart beating and his brain waves measurable, however faintly, for as long
as possible - even, God willing, until after ‘Abdallah died.

    ‘Abdallah had always been the odd prince out. For a start, his mother
was from the Shammar tribe, traditional rivals of the Al Sa’ud. Ibn Sa’ud married her to cement
a truce with the Shammar, but though the Shammar inside Saudi Arabia were now all loyal
subjects, ‘Abdallah was still mistrusted by Fahd’s full brothers. Almost alone in the top tier
of the royal family, ‘Abdallah had consciously chosen the way of the desert, turning his back
on the palatial luxuries of Riyadh, Jeddah, and Ta’if. He never went to Europe on vacation. He
preferred, when he could, to spend his time in a tent, drinking camel’s milk and eating dates.
He interspersed his conversation with peculiar Bedouin turns of phrase and aphorisms. All of
his children were raised according to the customs of the desert, a rough egalitarianism and a
vow of poverty. Maybe ‘Abdallah’s worst heresy was to forbid his sons from the fat commissions
that so many of the royal offspring were scrambling after.

    The Al Sa’ud hated being reminded that they had abandoned their Bedouin
roots, but what they hated still more was that ‘Abdallah wanted to cut back royal corruption
and perks. ‘Abdallah had made no secret that when he became king, he would put an end to their
thieving. It had become completely out of hand. Aping the senior members of the family, the
lesser princes had fantastic expectations of the way they should live, and their stipends
didn’t cut it. The third-generation princes were getting something like $19,000 a month, a
fraction of their needs. It cost $1 million a year to keep even a modest yacht on the French
Riviera. What were they supposed to do?

    In order to make ends meet, they were getting into nastier and nastier
business, from stealing property to stealing state assets, from selling immigrant visas to
selling heroin. One trick they’d discovered was borrowing money from a private bank and simply
refusing to pay it back. It wasn’t like the Sa’ud had any built-in discipline or sense of
shame. There were so many princes that they didn’t even know one another.

    For a while it looked as if ‘Abdallah might get his way even before
becoming king. In the mid-1990s, when Saudi Arabia was facing catastrophic financial
difficulties, he persuaded Fahd to appoint a handful of reformist ministers. ‘Abdallah had them
zero in on property seizures. The practice had become so widespread that it was completely
alienating Saudi Arabia’s traditional merchant and fledgling middle classes. A prince would
walk into a restaurant, see that it was doing well, and then write out a check to buy the
place, usually well below market price. There was nothing the owner could do. If he resisted,
he’d end up in jail.

    The senior princes used their government positions to do the same thing
on a much grander scale. One would pick out a valuable piece of property - maybe a particularly
good location for a shopping mall, or a piece of land he knew was needed for a new road - then
order a court to condemn it in the name of the state and have the king award it to him. The
money involved was staggering, and the practice was becoming more flagrant. Senior princes had
started to rely on it to keep up with their bloated personal budgets. So the senior princes
united and started to pick off ‘Abdallah’s reformist ministers one by one.

    The first to fall was ‘Ali Sha’ir, in 1994. Taking his ministerial
duties and ‘Abdallah’s reform campaign seriously, Sha’ir tried to block a deal engineered by
Prince Talal, who had arranged for a court to seize a particularly valuable piece of property
owned by a prominent businessman. Talal naturally screamed bloody murder and denounced Sha’ir
for having deprived him of his “God-given” rights. He immediately enlisted the governor of
Riyadh, Salman, and Interior Minister Na’if. Unable to withstand the pressure, Fahd let Talal
have his property and sacked Sha’ir.

    In 1995 the same thing happened to the minister of municipal and rural
affairs, Muhammad ibn ‘Abd-al-‘Aziz Al Shaykh, when he tried to prevent a similar seizure by
one of Sultan’s sons. Al Shaykh confided in a friend that “the only land the royal family had
not reached to grab was the moon.” Sultan went crazy. He didn’t care so much about his son
being out of some money, but he could see how far ‘Abdallah intended to take his reforms. One
day it was his son; the next day it would be him. ‘Abdallah lost, and Al Shaykh was fired.

    Sultan was absolutely right about being in ‘Abdallah’s sights. For the
crown prince, the crooked property deals were a small piece of the tapestry of corruption. The
off-budget deals were the bigger pieces, bankrupting the country, and no one was more up to his
ears in them than Prince Sultan.

    With off-budget spending, revenue from oil sales went directly to
special accounts, bypassing the Saudi treasury. The money was then used to pay for pet causes,
from defense procurement to construction projects. With no government audits or any sort of
accountability, commissions and bribes were enormous.

    The most notorious off-budget deal became known as the Yamama project,
after the Riyadh palace it was signed in. The deal, which dates back to 1985, called for
British Aerospace to trade Saudi Arabia forty-eight Tornado fighter airplanes for six hundred
thousand barrels a day of oil, but it was not a onetime deal. Yamama allowed for upgrades of
hardware, spare parts, and so on. According to BAE’s publicity flacks, the trade was a good
deal all around - British Aerospace had an assured market for its hardware, and Saudi Arabia
for its oil. But Yamama was a huge commission-generating machine. British Aerospace overcharged
for its hardware and spare parts, with the difference going to commissions. Most of the
commissions went to Sultan, his family, and a legion of middlemen. Some estimated the
commissions from Yamama went as high as 45 percent.

    Needless to say, Fahd received his consideration. Since he didn’t want
his hands dirtied by the money, he let Jawhara’s brothers and half brothers handle it for him.
The Ibrahims, as they were called, were good at it. They had been raking off commissions unseen
for much of the kingdom’s history. Through the 1980s and early 1990s, if you wanted an arms
deal, you had to see the Ibrahims. If your construction company was ailing and you needed to be
cut in to some government public-works project, you went to see the Ibrahims.

    Normally, facts about the Ibrahim deals are hard to come by. But on
December 12, 1997, ‘Abd-al-‘Aziz Al Ibrahim brought legal action against Rolls-Royce in London,
claiming that the company, which had supplied the engines for the Tornados, had reneged on a
commissions agreement with his own firm, Aerospace Engineering Design. Like the Boeing suit,
this one makes for fascinating reading if you’re interested in how corruption works in the
Middle East.

    For ‘Abdallah, the issue wasn’t so much who got what out of Yamama. He
just wanted the money - the revenue from the six hundred thousand barrels a day - put back
under treasury control so it would be harder for the jackals to get at it. In September 1996
‘Abdallah thought he had a chance to do that. With all the rake-offs, Yamama had become an
intolerable burden on Saudi finances. By early 1996 Saudi Arabia was no longer able to top off
the fund from oil revenues, and British Aerospace was forced to borrow $400 million to keep
Yamama solvent. Still, Yamama was a bad deal for the Saudis: They were effectively getting a
lot less for their oil; and worse, one day they would have to pay back British Aerospace. But
they didn’t dare pull out. Doing that would screw up the Challenger 2 tank deal - another
British Aerospace package they wanted to slip into the Yamama folder. It was an infernal cycle.
No Yamama. No new tank deal. No new commissions. If Yamama was going down, ‘Abdallah would have
to muscle it through every step of the way.

    Initially, ‘Abdallah signed an order to Saudi Aramco to halve the money
going to Yamama. That failed. Then, during a cabinet meeting on September 5, 1996, ‘Abdallah
tried to get the ministers to vote Yamama out. Sultan put up a staunch defense. Since he
couldn’t argue that hundreds of millions in commissions would be lost - exactly what ‘Abdallah
wanted stopped - Sultan defended Yamama by arguing that Saudi forces were too dependent on
British hardware to change. Sultan also said that if Yamama was canceled, Saudi Arabia would
have to rely even further on the United States for weapons, which was politically unacceptable.

    At the end of the day, Sultan got to keep Yamama, and Yamama continued
to sap Saudi Arabia’s finances. By June 1997 Sultan was putting pressure on the Saudi
International Bank to come up with $473.1 million to top off Yamama once again. His loan
application probably didn’t mention that the fund needed help because Sultan was bleeding it
dry.

    Another off-budget project that ‘Abdallah wanted back under treasury
control was the expansion of the Two Holy Mosques project. This sweetheart deal involved
tearing down and rebuilding the old Medina and Mecca mosques. As with Yamama, the $25 billion
allocated came from the direct sale of oil. The bin Laden family was responsible for
construction and took care of bribes paid to royal family members who ensured the funding never
stopped; it also took care of the kingdom’s American friends, particularly American
construction companies with clout in Washington. York supplied the largest air conditioner in
the world for the project.

    By the mid- to late 1990s, the total amount of oil going to off-budget
programs was about a million barrels a day, a sixth of Saudi Arabia’s exports. At current
prices, that meant Saudi Arabia was hemorrhaging something like $30 million a day. With the
money out from under Saudi Aramco control, anyone with enough clout could pillage as much as he
wanted. That’s what happened with Old Mecca. Key government ministers and their Wahhabi allies
would decide that one more part of the historic site needed to be torn down and rebuilt. The
government then would order Aramco to put aside, say, $100 million, and the royal family would
send a check to the Bakr bin Laden group, commissioning the work. But rather than have the full
$100 million go to construction, somewhere on the order of 90 percent went back to the senior
princes, charities, and Wahhabi clerics. Everybody walked away a winner. Well, almost
everybody. The average schmuck on the street didn’t get a penny, but he could always go to
Mecca or the other thousands of Bakr bin Laden-built mosques and pray (for free) for better
days. ‘Abdallah wanted to end that. At the very least, he wanted to put some of the Mecca
mosque reconstruction money into creating jobs for young, unemployed Saudis so they wouldn’t be
spending all their days in the mosques.

    Add it all up, and ‘Abdallah was Al Sa’ud’s worst nightmare. Even Fahd
had his worries about him. In October 1995 Fahd got it in his head that ‘Abdallah might want to
seize control of the country, maybe conspiring with Foreign Minister Sa’ud Al Faysal. Fahd had
noticed that every time Sa’ud got into trouble, he went to ‘Abdallah for help. Later, Sultan
and Fahd agreed that they could never be out of the country at the same time. Someone had to
watch ‘Abdallah.

    ‘Abdallah was kept out of the tight circle that formed around Fahd
after his stroke. They couldn’t take him out of the line of succession, but they could lie to
him about Fahd’s health. Nine months later, when Fahd needed knee surgery, ‘Abdallah wasn’t
included in the debate over whether it was better for Fahd to remain bedridden or risk dying
under the knife. ‘Abdallah wasn’t even told the names of Fahd’s doctors.

    Within the family, bitterness against ‘Abdallah was so deep that he was
blamed for Fahd’s stroke. One version had it that Fahd and ‘Abdallah were on the telephone
arguing about who would attend a meeting of the Gulf Cooperation Council in Oman; although it
was an unimportant decision, relations between the two had become so acidic that a vein popped
in Fahd’s head. Another version held that Fahd and ‘Abdallah had been arguing about what they
always argued about: the looming financial collapse. There were whispers that ‘Abdallah had
intentionally provoked Fahd, knowing his health couldn’t withstand a shouting match. We’ll
never know because neither is talking.

    A year and a half after Fahd’s stroke, Sultan had come to so despise
‘Abdallah that he stopped attending cabinet meetings chaired by him. The feeling was mutual. In
July 1997 ‘Abdallah bypassed the Council of Ministers, which was heavily stacked in favor of
the Sudayri, and tried to get Fahd to sign off on decrees and laws that he thought should be
passed. Jawhara and Azouzi teamed up to thwart him once more.