Sleeping With The Devil (6 page)

    What about the Saudi royal family’s army of guards, with all of their
tanks and airplanes - surely they’re up to taking care of the fanatics? That’s another myth
that will take an event as momentous as September 11 to kill. But let’s look at the available
evidence. Saudi Arabia’s grim sheriff, Interior Minister Na’if, cares only about protecting the
Sa’ud’s grip on power, at the expense of everything and everyone else. [text omitted]

    [text omitted]To make his point, Na’if went out of his way to avoid FBI
director Louis Freeh. When Freeh showed up in Saudi Arabia to put some teeth into the
investigation of the bombing of the U.S. barracks at Khobar, Na’if stayed on his yacht anchored
off the coast in the Red Sea, near Jeddah. Freeh met with two low-ranking security officials in
the internal security service, neither of whom knew anything about Khobar. The parallel would
be for Na’if to come to Washington and be hosted by Freeh’s driver.

    It wasn’t like Na’if had the diplomatic sense to keep his hate for
Americans out of the press. After September 11, at the worst possible time, Na’if said that the
United States, “the great power that controls the earth, now is an enemy of Arabs and Muslims.”
In fact, things were a lot worse than even the most rabid Saudi bashers suspected. [text
omitted]Al-Rajhi

    is the managing director of the al-Rajhi Banking and Investment
Corporation, which runs nearly four hundred branch offices in Saudi Arabia and abroad. Founded
in 1987, it is one of the richest banks in the kingdom, contributing to charities like the
International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO), which funneled money to bin Laden and other
militant Saudis.

    No one could do anything about Na’if, including King Fahd. Na’if ran
the Interior Ministry like his own personal reserve. As Fahd’s full brother, Na’if is a
“protected” prince and can’t be fired, even as he steps up his private war against the United
States and extorts money from militant Wahhabis. I often wondered why Na’if hated the U.S. so
much. [text omitted]

    Louis Freeh has never gone on the record about Khobar and Na’if, but I
suspect he wasn’t surprised. He’d seen worse. By the mid-1990s, Qatar was hosting ten al Qaeda
terrorists now on the most-wanted list. When Freeh received a rock-solid report showing
conclusively that al Qaeda’s most lethal operative, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, was among those
being harbored by the Qatar government, Freeh sent a
démarche
to the Qatari minister of
foreign affairs, asking that Qatar honor its commitment to turn Muhammad over to the FBI.

    Freeh particularly wanted to put away Muhammad because he was the uncle
of Ramzi Yousef, the man who planned the truck-bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993.
Muhammad had also planned to blow up eleven American airliners over the Pacific. He even
practiced on a Philippines airliner, killing a young Japanese passenger on a flight in late
1994. One of Muhammad’s associates arrested in the Philippines credits Muhammad with being an
early backer of hijacking airplanes and running them into U.S. buildings including the CIA
headquarters. Freeh’s request to the Qatari minister leaves no doubt that he considered
Muhammad a psychotic murderer.

    “Muhammad’s suspected involvement in terrorist plots clearly threatens
U.S. interests,” Freeh wrote in a letter shown to me by a high-ranking Arab intelligence
official. “His activities in Qatar threaten your government’s interests as well. Indeed, you
indicated during our meeting that he may be in the process of manufacturing an explosive device
that would potentially endanger the lives of the citizens of Qatar. In addition, you indicated
that Muhammad has over twenty false passports at his disposal.”

    Qatar’s response? Although Muhammad was an employee of the Qatari
government at the time (ironically, he was working in the public water works), the
administration claimed they could not find him. In fact, they secretly whisked Muhammad out of
the country, keeping an FBI squad cooling its heels in a Doha hotel. Freeh’s dismay must have
turned to anger when he found out that Qatar had dumped $23,938,994.20 between 1997 and 1999
into a Washington law firm close to the White House and another $689,805.16 into a K Street
public-relations firm to buff up its image and cover its flanks while it served as a holding
tank for some of the world’s most dangerous people. The icing on the cake was when the American
ambassador in Doha - the man charged with convincing the Qataris to turn over Muhammad - later
went to work for the Qataris. Muhammad himself won time to start masterminding 9/11.

    What does Qatar have to do with Saudi Arabia, aside from the fact that
it shares a border with the kingdom and has a population similarly weighted toward a militant,
fanatical interpretation of Islam? Consider this: When Khalid Sheikh Muhammad was run to ground
in Pakistan in March 2003, he was in the company of Mustafa Ahmed Hawsawi, a Saudi conduit for
the September 11 hijackers drawing from accounts in the United Arab Emirates. According to a
Gulf security official I talked to, Hawsawi crossed over from the kingdom to carry out the
transfers to the hijackers. In other words, there are no hard-and-fast borders to this terror
network. Osama bin Laden flies no national flag over his cave, wherever that might be. Anger
against the West and particularly the United States spills all over the Land of Islam. But
there are groups that all the signs keep pointing to - the Wahhabis, the Muslim Brotherhood,
and al Qaeda, of course - and there’s one place that serves more than any other as the
principal backer: Saudi Arabia.

    The Clinton administration, by the way, didn’t give a damn that its own
FBI director got stood up in Qatar. It didn’t even complain to the Qatari foreign minister, who
wandered in and out of the White House as if he worked there. I was once asked to vacate the
office of Al Gore’s national security adviser so the vice president could meet with the foreign
minister when he showed up unannounced.

    But Na’if alone wasn’t the problem. The House of Sa’ud and the kingdom
it rules basically hit the mute button beginning in the mid-1990s, and it hasn’t let up since.
In 1996 the Saudi government simply declined Sudan’s offer to turn over Osama bin Laden.
Riyadh’s explanation? Bin Ladin was too popular in Saudi Arabia; his arrest would incite a
revolution. Since September 11, not a single indictment or even a useful lead has come out of
Saudi Arabia. So thorough has been the lockdown that the FBI has not been allowed to interview
suspects, including the families of the fifteen Saudi hijackers. Long after September 11, Saudi
Arabia refused to provide advance manifests for flights coming into the U.S., a basic and
potentially fatal breach of security.

    If Saudi Arabia were even remotely a free and open country, the U.S.
press might be able to tell us why Na’if is at war with America; but with few exceptions,
American journalists are not issued visas to visit the kingdom. The few who visit find
themselves closely controlled by the secret police. Don’t look for much illumination from the
supposedly new and improved FBI, either. The bureau’s Riyadh office is, or at least was until
recently, staffed with two Muslim agents, but not because they had special access to the Arab
street. The FBI was far more interested in demonstrating how “in touch” it was with Saudi
sensitivities. Perish the thought that we might risk insulting the Al Sa’ud by sending an
infidel to watch them.

    FOR MOST AMERICANS, September 11 was both a national horror and a
geopolitical awakening. It was almost impossible to absorb that fifteen of the hijackers were
Saudis, the citizens of a country we’d always been told was our best ally in the Middle East,
after Israel. But in the fall of 2002, when Saudi Arabia started to lead the Arab campaign
against a war in Iraq, mainly because it was worried about its own stability, Americans began
to come around to the fact that they’d been lied to about Saudi Arabia. A decade earlier,
during the Persian Gulf War, the Saudis opened their door to U.S. forces. In 2002 America found
itself begging Qatar to provide a communications base for our invading forces. As if Americans
needed more evidence, perhaps two-thirds of al Qaeda prisoners being held in the Camp Delta
prison facility at the Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba - “the worst of the worst,” according to
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld - were said to be Saudi nationals.

    Every day seemed to bring damning new revelations about Saudi Arabia,
many connected to the royal family: The wife of the Saudi ambassador to the United States had
handed out money that found its way to two of the 9/11 hijackers. A raid on the Hamburg
apartment of a suspected accomplice of the hijackers had turned up the business card of a Saudi
diplomat. The two hijackers who arrived in Los Angeles were met by a Saudi working for a
company contracted to the Ministry of Defense. Other Saudis fed the ATM machines for the
hijackers. When NATO forces raided the offices of the Saudi High Commission for Aid to Bosnia,
founded by Prince Salman, they found before-and-after photos of the destroyed U.S. embassies in
Kenya and Tanzania and of the World Trade Center (when it still stood), and of the U.S.S.
Cole
, as well as files on the use of crop-duster planes and materials for forging
official U.S. identity cards. In November 2002 the Saudi embassy in Washington gave the finger
to the State Department and federal law officials, providing a new passport for the wife of a
suspected al Qaeda sympathizer and slipping her and her five children out of the U.S. after she
was subpoenaed to testify before a federal grand jury.

    As the facts against Riyadh mounted, the Saudis couldn’t refute them.
Instead, they reacted heatedly. In a rare press appearance at the kingdom’s Washington embassy,
Adel al-Jubeir, a foreign policy adviser to the crown, complained: “We have been assailed as
the kernel of evil, the breeding ground of terrorism. Our faith has been maligned in ways that
I did not expect Americans to ever do.” In the meantime, Na’if continued to pretend that Saudi
Arabia had nothing to do with the attacks. A year and a half later, there still hadn’t been a
single Saudi arrest that helped us get to the bottom of September 11.

    Frankly, none of this should come as a surprise. The Saudi judicial
system looks as if it were designed by Ghengis Khan. Saudi Arabia tops the world in public
beheadings. (The venue for many of them is a Riyadh plaza popularly known as Chop-Chop Square.)
The kingdom’s secondary schools and universities have become the West Point of global
terrorism. Its public-decency police force, the muttawa, has zero interest in stopping Saudis
from plotting righteous murder abroad. It tends to more important matters, like forcing store
owners to shut down during prayer times and beating women on the arms and legs when their robes
are too short. In March 2002 it blocked the exits from a girl’s school on fire in Mecca because
the girls weren’t properly covered; fourteen died. Foreign workers are virtually without rights
in Saudi Arabia. No one in the kingdom, national or visitor, can practice any religion but
Islam. Anyone caught putting up a Christmas wreath is lashed.

    Even the U.S. State Department had to admit things weren’t so good in
the kingdom when it came to religion. It considered putting the kingdom on a blacklist of
nations that restrict religious freedom, including Iran, Iraq, China, Burma, Sudan, and North
Korea. The department’s “International Religious Freedom Report for 2002” cited detentions of
Christians, confiscation or censoring of Bibles, and harassment of Christians by the country’s
religious police. In the end, though, it just couldn’t bring itself to do anything so extreme.

    Things are even worse than they seem. Saudi Arabia doesn’t have what we
would call a rule of law. Look inside a Saudi passport: It states that the holder “belongs” to
the royal family. A Saudi commoner is chattel, a piece of property no different from an Al
Sa’ud’s Jeddah palace or his Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud. There are no rights in the kingdom, just
as there isn’t a parliament or a constitution.

    Things might be better if Saudi Arabia were some romantic kingdom ruled
by a wise, benevolent king and a royal family with a sense of noblesse oblige. But it isn’t.
Starting at the top, King Fahd is close to brain-dead, incapacitated by a 1995 stroke. This
became clear late that year when Fahd shit in his pool during physical therapy, in front of his
family. Crown Prince ‘Abdallah supposedly fills in for Fahd, his half brother, but he has no
real power. He is mistrusted and despised by the senior princes - the cabinet ministers - and
his authority is checked at every opportunity.

    Fahd’s favorite wife, Jawhara al-Ibrahim, and her spoiled, megalomanic
son ‘Abd-al-‘Aziz - Azouzi, or “deary,” as Fahd calls him - actually run Saudi Arabia. Jawhara
alone has twenty-four-hour-a-day access to Fahd. She decides who will see him and who won’t,
which decrees he will see and which he won’t. For all practical purposes, she sets the general
course of Saudi internal and external policy. For all we know, she states how much oil will be
pumped or completely cut off.