Sleeping With The Devil (7 page)

    Dementia, palace intrigues, and jealousy are only the start of the Al
Sa’ud story. The Al Sa’ud are as violent and vengeful as any Mafia family. The first Saudi to
write a book critical of the kingdom was kidnapped in Beirut and presumably murdered in the
early 1970s. I learned, after I left the CIA, that in the mid-1990s, Na’if was behind at least
two attempts on the life of Muhammad al-Masari, the leader of the London-based Committee for
the Defense of Legitimate Rights. Surely that ought to be reason enough for al-Masari to join
others in taking up arms against the Al Sa’ud - Osama bin Laden, for example. In another case,
‘Abd-al-Karim Naqshabandi, a Syrian who irritated a member of the royal family, was beheaded on
the streets of Riyadh in 1996, despite the pleas of human-rights activists from around the
world. The charge: sorcery. Anything can be a capital crime in Saudi Arabia if it serves the
interest of a Saudi don.

    Like royals anywhere the Al Sa’ud are enormously resistant to change.
They don’t want to admit to the rot in the Kingdom. In particular, they don’t want to talk
about the fact that Fahd’s stroke has set the country adrift, allowing corrupt princes to make
fortunes in illegal ventures, from selling visas and alcohol to stealing property. They also do
not want to talk about the fact that the importation of foreign labor has resulted in large
numbers of young Saudis out of work, encouraging them to spend their time in the mosque being
indoctrinated for jihad and righteous murder.

    Every Saudi prince receives a substantial allowance, but since none can
ever have enough money, many supplement their royal allotments through bribes on construction
projects (mostly from the bin Laden family), arms deals, and outright theft of property from
commoners. Besides visas, they also sell liquor and narcotics. In July 2002, Na’if bin Sultan
bin Fawaz al-Shaalan was indicted by a Florida grand jury on charges that he used his personal
plane to transport two tons of cocaine from Caracas to Paris in 1999. That incident surprised
even me: I’ve known the Shaalan family for over a decade. Until then, they’d managed to avoid
infection by the kingdom.

    Stories of Al Sa’ud profligacy are legion, but Fahd’s youngest son,
Azouzi, broke the mold when he built himself a sprawling theme park outside Riyadh because he
was “interested” in history. He has told visitors that the park cost $4.6 billion. The property
includes a scale model of old Mecca, with actors attending mosque and chanting prayers
twenty-four hours a day. Also on the property: replicas of the Alhambra, old Mecca, and Medina,
and half a dozen other Islamic landmarks. True to form, Azouzi seized the land the park was
built on.

    But he’s only following family tradition. When King Fahd’s family
visits the palace at Marbella, they spend on average $5 million a day in the local stores, so
much that shopkeepers want to name a street after the king. Yet as much as the Al Sa’uds love
the objects money buys - diamonds, yachts, palaces, planes - they love human flesh more. Put
simply, the Al Sa’ud are obsessed with sex, everything from prostitutes to little boys.
Incidentally, Interior Minister Na’if has sex on the brain, too: He spends his spare time
consulting with doctors about a cure for his impotence. It’s apparently affected his wife,
Maha, who has a severe anger-management problem. In 1995, on a visit to Orlando, she assaulted
a male servant, accusing him of helping steal $200,000 in cash and jewelry. As Maha beat the
servant bloody in front of the off-duty sheriff’s department deputies assigned to her security
detail, no one raised a hand. She had diplomatic immunity. The lesson didn’t go unnoticed. Six
years later, also in Orlando, another Saudi princess was charged not only with beating her
servant but pushing her down a flight of stairs. This princess didn’t get off so lightly,
despite the Saudi embassy’s claim that she was protected by diplomatic immunity. Police charged
her with aggravated battery, then tacked on grand theft for snatching $6,000 worth of
electronics from her former chauffeur.

    But I was talking about sex.

    THE SAUDIS ARE PROBABLY the most sexually repressed people in the
world. Women are kept out of reach of men until the day they marry. After that joyous occasion,
the husbands keep their wives locked up at home until the day they die. Only 5 percent of women
work. A woman cannot drive. If she needs to go somewhere, a male first cousin, brother, or
father has to chauffeur her. Even then she is allowed to go only to gender-segregated malls,
restaurants, and swimming pools. If she’s ever unfortunate enough to be caught in the act of
adultery, she’s stoned to death, along with her lover. It’s easier for a young Saudi man to
hitchhike to Afghanistan than to hook up with a young Saudi girl.

    Like men anywhere, though, Saudi men won’t take no for an answer. One
desperate trick they’ve resorted to is writing their cell-phone number on a piece of paper and
taping it to the back window of their car. It looks as if the car is for sale. But the owner’s
fantasy is that some brazen Saudi girl will call to introduce herself. With something like
380,000 young unemployed Saudi males, you can imagine all the cruising going on, waiting for
that lucky phone call. Filipina and Indonesian servants in the kingdom live in constant fear of
rape. Since foreigners work and live in the kingdom at the whim of their Saudi sponsors, the
servants are afraid to go to the police. No one has any idea how much rape goes on in the
country. Those statistics aren’t published, but if sexual frustration were gold, the Saudis
wouldn’t need all that oil.

    Saudis with money also don’t have to take no for an answer. In the
early 1970s, when the petrodollars started flooding in, enterprising Lebanese began smuggling
hookers into the kingdom for the princes. Since the women were posing as Middle East Airlines
flight attendants and were driven directly to the royal palaces, the muttawa couldn’t do
anything about it. Having established a beachhead in the kingdom, a lot of the Lebanese pimps
branched out into interior decorating and construction. Since no one in the royal family knows
how to balance a checkbook, the Lebanese became fabulously rich. More than a couple went back
to Lebanon and built political careers with their fortunes.

    Saudis who can’t tap in to the stream of royal prostitutes take
multiple wives, the younger the better. It’s common for seventy-year-old Saudi men to marry
girls in their early teens. Other rich Saudis simply go whoring abroad. You need only take a
flight out of the Gulf to see the robes come off and the cigarettes and the liquor come out:
These gentlemen are on their way to a party. Spend a night visiting popular clubs on France’s
Côte d’Azur or in Monte Carlo, and you’ll find young Saudi men (and women) staying up all
night, enjoying every moment of their freedom. London’s red-light districts and call-girl
services cater largely to Saudis and other Gulf Arabs.

    Stories about Saudi whoring get a snicker in the American press and
preachy editorials about women’s rights, but everyone seems to be missing the point: Saudi
Arabia spends a staggering percentage of its GDP on sex. If we’re donating a dollar to the
royal family’s bodyguards every time we fill up the tank with gasoline that began as Saudi
crude, we’re probably donating half again as much for Saudis to get laid.

    Needless to say, the royal family spends the lion’s share. You can find
their rutting palaces along the Mediterranean, all built to entertain prostitutes. Being of
royal blood, a Saudi prince couldn’t make do with some drab
garçonnière;
he needs all
the comforts of home. Legend has it that King Fahd’s administrator for the palace near Antibes
once made a proposal to the government that is still talked about in France today: to move the
Paris-Nice railroad track away from the palace. It didn’t matter that the existing line didn’t
run all that near the palace, or that moving it would cost millions. Fahd, the administrator
explained, would be annoyed to hear even the distant sound of passing trains while strolling in
his garden. The French officials shook their heads in disbelief - they knew the king hadn’t
visited his Antibes palace in over a decade.

    IN THE EARLY 1970S, the Al Sa’ud’s Riviera frolicking came to an abrupt
end after Fahd lost in one sitting a reported $6 million at a Nice casino and was photographed
with a phalanx of young beauties. The royal family had to find a new playground. As soon as
King Hassan of Morocco heard that the Saudis were in the real estate market, he phoned Riyadh
to offer up Morocco. Hassan had no choice; he was stone-cold broke. With no oil of his own and
the remittances from Moroccans working in Europe just not cutting it, how else could he afford
the upkeep on his twenty palaces?

    So it was that King Hassan allowed dozens of Saudi princes to build
secluded estates in Morocco, many in the rugged mountains around Tangier. The area, called the
Rif, was wild and lawless - a perfect place to hold an orgy or go on a drinking binge, away
from the prying eyes of the Wahhabis back home and the Western press in Europe’s old watering
holes. A journalist trying to get a story or picture risked being kidnapped or having his
throat cut. When I was in Morocco, the CIA picked up a rumor that a Saudi prince with
well-placed friends in Washington had bitten off the breast of a young Moroccan girl in a
drunken frenzy. King Hassan swiftly had the incident covered up. The girl’s family was paid
off, and she was told she would keep her mouth shut or spend the rest of her life in jail. The
strong-arm tactics worked; the incident never saw the light of day.

    In return for Morocco’s delicate diplomacy, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf
Arabs dumped loads of money into the country. It’s impossible to calculate precisely how much,
but there are tantalizing hints. In 1998 Saudi defense minister Sultan secretly bought Société
Anonyme Marocaine de l’Industrie du Raffinage (SAMIR), Morocco’s oil refinery, for $420
million. The transaction was handled through a cascade of nominees, shelf companies, and
middlemen to keep Sultan’s name out of the press. Saudi Arabia also poured almost a reported
billion dollars into the huge Casablanca mosque. But that was merely the public face of Saudi
aid.

    IF YOU’VE FOLLOWED THIS devil’s logic so far, then it’s a small step to
the conclusion that we in the West and the Saudi rulers themselves are in serious trouble. All
the ingredients of upheaval are in place: open borders, the availability of arms, political
alienation, the absence of a rule of law, a completely corrupt police force, a despised ruling
class, plummeting per capita income (and fabulously wealthy rulers to remind the poor exactly
how poor they are), environmental degradation, surly neighbors, and a growing number of young
home-grown radicals who care more about righteous murder than they do about living. The
kingdom’s schools churn out fanatics faster than they can find wars to fight. Burma, Vietnam,
Cambodia, Nicaragua, Angola, Somalia, and Sierra Leone succumbed to chaos under less volatile
conditions. Why should Saudi Arabia escape this fate?