Sleeping With The Devil (30 page)

    IT WASN’T as if the rest of the Fahd clan was united. Sultan, Salman,
and Na’if might have arrived at the hospital in a great show of solidarity - or to make sure
none of the others got there first - but they were in for a rude shock once they pushed through
the front doors. Jawhara and Azouzi had set up camp outside of Fahd’s hospital room, deciding
who would get in and who wouldn’t. That included ministers, senior princes, doctors, petitions,
decrees, and everything else. In other words, there had been a de facto coup d’état.

    Fahd’s brothers were furious, but there was nothing they could do. It
wasn’t as if they could arrest Jawhara and her son. The other choice, making ‘Abdallah regent,
was unthinkable. Their only consolation was that Jawhara and Azouzi were more or less on their
side. Jawhara would always be a handful, but they reassured themselves that they could handle
Azouzi. Let him ride his Harleys around the palace and steal a piece of property here and
there. They needed to make sure Fahd outlived ‘Abdallah so Sultan could assume the throne and
the Sudayri would be back in power. As it turned out, they’d misjudged Azouzi.

    For a start, they hadn’t plumbed the depths of his bottomless greed. He
was the biggest leech in Saudi Arabia’s history. He had learned about money at the feet of the
masters - the Ibrahims, his mother’s clan. In one deal, the $4.1 billion AT&T contract,
Azouzi not only landed a staggering $900 million commission, he outmatched his own brother
Muhammad “the Bulldozer” bin Fahd, who represented Ericsson. Muhammad bin Fahd, who won his
nickname through his predatory business tactics, wasn’t one to gracefully give up a commission.
But things got even worse when one of the Bulldozer’s retainers embezzled $22 million from him
and then stole his yacht. He couldn’t do anything because Jawhara and Azouzi didn’t care enough
to get it back.

    Azouzi did have his expenses to look after, including that legendary
palace outside Riyadh. From the moment the first slab of marble was laid, it was clear he
intended to outdo anything ever built by the Al Sa’ud. You enter the palace by going through
four separate arched gates, and that’s for starters. And he did have the family spirit. In
September 1997, when Jawhara had to make her husband sign a petition to put more of the Ibrahim
on the state payroll, Azouzi stood foursquare behind her.

    For Sultan and the other full brothers, Jawhara didn’t make things any
easier. Sultan found himself cut out of military procurement, at one time his exclusive
chasse gardee
. On August 20, 1996, he desperately tried to get Fahd to process some
defense contracts he knew had already been approved. No one in the king’s palace would return
his calls. He finally cornered Jawhara’s brother Walid Al Ibrahim, who promised to do something
about them. Jawhara pushed the contracts through, but at her own pace. Meanwhile, it drove
Sultan and almost everyone else crazy that a queen ruled the most male-chauvinist country in
the world.

    By March 1997 the situation had become intolerable, even for Fahd’s
family. Sultan teamed up with Salman in an attempt to block one of Azouzi’s property deals. I’m
not sure what the outcome was, but if they succeeded, it was a Pyrrhic victory. Azouzi’s theft
would only spread, soon to be accompanied by a brazen power grab.

    SAUDI SUCCESSION doesn’t proceed according to primogeniture. By
tradition, senior princes come to a consensus on succession, usually based on experience and
wisdom. The system had served the royal family well. The incapable were taken out of the line
of succession, and everybody got his turn. (Following King Khalid’s death in 1982 and Fahd’s
ascension to the throne, the princes had made ‘Abdallah the new crown prince, perhaps because
he commanded the powerful National Guard.) Now Fahd’s brothers were afraid that Azouzi was
trying to upend custom.

    Azouzi started involving himself more and more in national security,
from foreign affairs to intelligence. Even the Americans noticed. When the commander of U.S.
forces in the Middle East, General J. H. Binford Peay, came to Riyadh to meet Fahd on July 13,
1997, he was surprised to find Azouzi at Fahd’s side, whispering in his father’s ear. Where was
‘Abdallah? What had become of Sultan? Peay had to meet ‘Abdallah separately, and even then the
crown prince studiously avoided the issues that should have been at hand.

    But what really worried the family was Azouzi’s funding of radical
Wahhabi causes. Azouzi seemed to have rediscovered his faith. He was obviously courting favor
with the Wahhabis, knowing he would one day need their support to become king. Also, by giving
generously to the radicals, he was buying insurance they would shut up about his $4.6 billion
amusement park.

    In December 1993 Azouzi authorized $100,000 for a Kansas City mosque.
On September 15, 1995, he opened the King Fahd Academy in Bonn, and on September 17, 1995, he
dedicated a new mosque there. Nine days later, he invited the head of the Islamic Society of
Spain, Mansur ‘Abd-al-Salam, to Riyadh. In May 1996 Azouzi and Jawhara arranged for King Fahd
to release Muhammad al-Fasi from prison. Fasi had been imprisoned for opposing the Gulf War and
the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia: In other words, he shared one of bin Laden’s
platforms for kicking the United States out of the Gulf. ‘Abdallah strongly opposed Fasi’s
release, knowing that outside a prison cell, he would mean nothing but trouble for the Al
Sa’ud.

    Even the interior minister, Na’if, had to admit that Saudi Arabia had a
problem with Islamic militants. In November 2002 he said, “All our problems come from the
Muslim Brotherhood. We have given too much support to this group. The Muslim Brotherhood has
destroyed the Arab world.” Na’if went on to accept, at least minimally, Saudi Arabia’s
responsibility for militant Islam. “Whenever they got into difficulty or found their freedom
restricted in their own countries, Brotherhood activists found refuge in the kingdom, which
protected their lives” - even though, as Na’if was quick to add, “they later turned against the
kingdom.” He failed to mention the unbreakable bond between Saudi Arabia’s homegrown Wahhabis
and the Brothers.

    ‘Abdallah had a more immediate concern with the radicals. In September
1996 the newly appointed air force chief commissioned five followers of bin Laden. There was
already open discontent in the Ministry of Defense and Aviation about the U.S. presence in the
region. Officers of all ranks felt that the U.S. exaggerated the threat of Saddam Hussein as an
excuse to keep troops in Saudi Arabia and other countries in the region. The officers opposed
even the prepositioning of equipment in their country. The appointment of those five Islamic
radicals was sure to aggravate the situation, but no one was willing to reverse the commander’s
decision, including ‘Abdallah and Sultan. Over the next five years, Wahhabi militants continued
to worm their way into military and intelligence jobs. By October 2002 the Saudi police were
informing contacts in the American expat community that they could no longer count on the
loyalty of junior military and intelligence officers. The arrest of several Bahraini military
officers with ties to al Qaeda in February 2003 seemed to justify the Saudis’ fears.

    The spread of Islamic radicals inside the military only encouraged
Azouzi to give more to radical causes. In September 1997 he coordinated a $100 million aid
package to the Taliban. It didn’t make the slightest bit of difference that the Taliban were
protecting bin Laden, a man who had vowed to overthrow the Al Sa’ud. All Azouzi cared about was
the support of the Wahhabis, come hell or high explosives.

    In December 1999 the press caught wind of Azouzi’s arrangement with the
Islamic militants. It turned out that he had been funding a fellow bin Laden traveler, Sa’d
al-Burayk, who in turn was giving the money to Islamic groups in Chechnya to slaughter
Russians, military and civilian alike. Any leftover money, Burayk shipped on to militant
Islamic causes. With all the bad press, Na’if had no choice but to declare a moratorium on
Azouzi’s spending and bring his charity back under control; he also promised to put Burayk
under house arrest. But Na’if did nothing at all, and Azouzi continued to dump his millions
wherever he wanted. Recall, this was the same Na’if who humiliated Louis Freeh and got away
with it; the same Na’if who made it crystal-clear in all other ways that he had absolutely no
intention of cooperating in the al Khobar investigation. If the U.S. didn’t call him on that,
what were the chances of coming down on him like a load of bricks because he failed to rein in
Azouzi?

    Not only did Na’if let Burayk out of the country, Burayk accompanied
Crown Prince ‘Abdallah on a state visit to Crawford, Texas, in April 2002 to meet with George
W. Bush. Bush, ever the genial host, didn’t ask about Chechnya, bin Laden, or Burayk’s latest
public exhortations for Muslim men to enslave Jewish women. I suppose this is what State means
by “deference.”

    AS WITH NA’IF, it was impossible for any of Fahd’s full brothers to get
a rise out of Washington. Through the 1990s, Defense Minister Sultan continued to fund
‘Abdallah al-Ahmar, the head of Islah, the Muslim Brothers in Yemen. Washington ignored
evidence that Islah may have had a hand in bombing the U.S.S.
Cole
. When the governor of
Riyadh, Prince Salman, suffered a deep conversion to fundamentalist Islam in the mid-1990s,
Washington disregarded that, too, even though Salman was in charge of the charities whose money
found its way into the pockets of bin Laden and the Muslim Brothers. Fahd, Na’if, Sultan, and
Salman were board members of corporate Washington. They were above the law.

    Then again, Washington really had no choice. It wasn’t like the
administration could show up in Riyadh, tin cup in hand, ask for Boeing’s money and, in the
same breath, censure the royal family about funding and covering for people who were killing
Americans. And it certainly was in no position to chastise the Saudis for being spendthrifts.
The United States had enticed them to climb on this infernal merry-go-round. American defense
companies lived off Saudi contracts. The United States took the lion’s share of the country’s
defense spending, which accounted for half of Saudi government outlays. It talked the Saudis
into spending multibillions on the Gulf War. This was dollar diplomacy with a vengeance, or at
least with reckless abandon.

    You didn’t have to be a CPA to see that the Saudis couldn’t afford the
$7.2 billion Boeing-Saudia deal. The contract called for an initial $500 million signing
payment, but the Saudis could come up with only $60 million. By 1997 they owed $2.8 billion on
the airplanes, but not a penny could be earmarked out of the budget. In better days, Sultan
might have stolen the money from Yamama, but that caper was already $1 billion in arrears. He
also might have gone to his own well, but he had already kicked in $67 million to the cause. In
July 1997 Sultan’s mad scramble led him to his own Ministry of Defense. The Boeing payment, he
decreed, would have to come from that budget. To cover the tab, the ministry had to postpone
the purchase of spare parts and the delivery of new aircraft, which ended up costing Saudi
Arabia millions in penalties while undermining its ability to defend itself. The U.S. had to
pick up that slack with its fleet in the Persian Gulf.

    By late September 1996 ‘Abdallah was so alarmed about the kingdom’s
financial solvency that he tried to send a message to the Clinton administration. ‘Abdallah
couldn’t get the American embassy in Riyadh to listen; its sole mission seemed to be getting
the Saudis to pay their bills on time. Nor did ‘Abdallah trust Prince Bandar as a conduit to
the White House because at the end of the day, the ambassador was loyal to his father, Sultan.
The best ‘Abdallah could do was raise Saudi Arabia’s problems with former ambassador Richard
Murphy, then serving as a senior fellow with the Council of Foreign Relations. Murphy was known
in the Arab world as the U.S.’s most able, balanced expert on the Middle East. ‘Abdallah
trusted and liked him. Moreover, he had no connections to Israel, at least that ‘Abdallah was
aware of. The problem was that Murphy had been out of the government for almost seven years and
had little clout in official Washington. Still, ‘Abdallah decided Murphy was his only chance.