Inside the Kingdom (15 page)

Since taking charge of Saudi foreign intelligence in 1977, Prince Turki had doled out large sums of money for the fighting of covert wars. In the mid- 1970s, Saudi Arabia had become a founding member of the Safari Club, the brainchild of Count Alexandre de Marenches, the debonair and mus tachioed chief of France’s CIA, the SDECE (Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage), suppliers of the CS gas that finally ended the Mecca siege. Worried by Soviet and Cuban advances in postco lonial Africa, and by America’s post-Watergate paralysis in the field of undercover activity, the swashbuckling Marenches had come to Turki’s father, King Faisal, with a proposition.

“His idea was,” recalls the prince, “that since our American friends were off the playing field, as it were, and could not launch undercover operations at this critical time, we should get together a group of like-minded countries to try and keep the Communists out of Africa with money, arms, soldiers—any sort of skullduggery. Calling it the ‘Safari Club’ was a sort of joke by Marenches, but the aim was deadly serious.”

The French spymaster had it all worked out. His SDECE would supply the technical equipment and expertise; Morocco and Egypt would supply arms and soldiers; Saudi Arabia would supply the money. Marenches also invited the Shah to join—which led to the premature revelation of the club’s activities when the Iranian leader fled from Tehran in 1979 without destroying his papers. By then, however, the Safari Club already had an impressive list of achievements to its credit. In March 1977 Moroccan troops (paid and armed by the Saudis) had fought off a Cuban-Angolan attack intended to oust Mobutu Sese Seko from Zaire; Somali president Mohammed Siad Barre had been bribed out of the Soviet embrace by $75 million worth of Egyptian arms (paid for again by Saudi Arabia); and Saudi money had enabled both Chad and Sudan to keep Libya’s Muammar Al-Qadhafi at bay.

“We did it for America,” remembers Prince Turki, “but we also did it, obviously, for ourselves. From the earliest days Saudi Arabia had always looked on Marxism as anathema to human well-being, and also to religion. We saw it as our job to fight against Soviet atheism wherever it might threaten.”

Now Marxist ideology and Russian arms were threatening Afghanistan—and the whole Gulf region. Zia-ul-Haq had a dramatic-looking red triangle that he would place on the map of Afghanistan to show how the Soviets were seeking to drive a wedge through the region to push south and achieve the historic Russian goal of a warm-water port. The Pakistani president got out his triangle for the benefit of William Casey, Ronald Reagan’s newly appointed head of the CIA, when he arrived in Islamabad in 1981, but Casey had no need of the lesson. Jimmy Carter, the outgoing president, had laid down U.S. policy a year earlier in his State of the Union address, a few weeks after Russian tanks had rolled into Afghanistan: “Let our position be absolutely clear. An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”

Early in February 1980 Carter agreed to a covert program that would put his doctrine into practice—a secret agreement that Saudi Arabia and the United States would match each other, dollar for dollar, to fund an undercover guerrilla campaign in Afghanistan that would hand the Soviets “their own Vietnam.” The two countries would eventually spend more than $3 billion each, according to Rachel Bronson, an authority on U.S.-Saudi relations, in a collaboration that would turn out to be world-changing. It was a partnership that could hardly have been imagined half a century earlier, when America and Saudi Arabia, so remote and so dramatically different from each other, had first drifted into contact.

CHAPTER 8

Special Relationship

I
t was no coincidence that American geologists started arriving in Saudi Arabia in the depths of the Great Depression. Abdul Aziz needed the money. By 1931 the worldwide recession had cut the annual flow of pilgrims, his chief source of income, from 130,000 to fewer than 40,000. Previously the Saudi king had sniffed at the Gulf sheikhs of Bahrain and Qatar who sold off the mineral rights in their territories. Given the choice, he would have preferred not to have infidel foreigners snooping around his lands. But with no money to pay the tribes, he swallowed his pride. Tribal loyalty was the basis of his power. Things had become so bad, he confided to one British diplomat, that he could no longer entertain the chiefs as custom required. He had had to restrict their visits to the time of the Eids (the two Muslim feast days following Ramadan and the Hajj).

In the spring of 1933 Abdul Aziz welcomed representatives of Standard Oil of California (Socal, later Chevron) to Jeddah. After spending a week or so playing them off against Britain’s Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC), whose surveyors doubted there was much oil in Arabia, he signed an exploration contract with the Americans for £35,000. It was a measure of the deal’s novelty that the already mighty U.S. dollar still carried little weight in the primitive barter-and-bullion economy of Arabia. Abdul Aziz wanted to be paid in gold sovereigns, which were duly shipped to Jeddah in a wooden chest that was placed for safekeeping, according to cherished Saudi legend, under the bed of his finance minister, Abdullah Al-Suleiman. Later that year Socal’s geologists started work in the east, and the king sent word that these non-Muslims should be greeted in his name and protected as honored guests.

But not everyone welcomed the Christians.

One Sabbath in 1933 Abdul Aziz was sitting in the baked-mud mosque a few steps away from his baked-mud palace in the heart of Riyadh. It was around noon on Friday, the moment when the male inhabitants of the town shuffled into the mosque for the principal prayer gathering of the week. The floor was strewn with thick and richly colored carpets, and the Saudi king’s sons sat around him as they listened to the sermon of Sheikh Ibn Nimr (“Son of the Tiger”), one of the great Wahhabi preachers of the day.

The sheikh had taken as his theme some verses from sura 11 of the Koran—“Incline not to those who do wrong, or the fire will seize you. You have no protectors other than Allah, nor shall you be helped.” The sheikh was indignant at the recent appearance of non-Muslims in the Kingdom—he promised damnation to those who dealt with the infidels—and as the preacher developed his theme, Ibn Saud’s annoyance became more and more obvious.

Suddenly the king interrupted the sermon. He told the Son of the Tiger to step down, and then rose to his feet to offer another set of verses, which he recited perfectly from memory: “Say to those that reject [your] faith,” he declaimed, citing the more tolerant words of the Koran’s sura 109, “I worship not that which you worship, nor will you worship that which I worship. . . . You have your religion and I have mine.”

“Live and let live” was Abdul Aziz’s sermon for the day.

The U.S.-Saudi relationship may have been founded on money, but for Ibn Saud it always had a personal and even sentimental dimension. The first Americans he met were Christian medical missionaries based on the island of Bahrain. These doctors and nurses from the Reformed Church in America treated his soldiers on several occasions after 1911, and came across from the island quite regularly—their painstaking archives record the treatment of nearly three hundred thousand mainland patients in the course of Abdul Aziz’s reign. Thirty-five hundred of these patients required surgery, including the king himself, who summoned Dr. Louis Dame urgently to Riyadh in 1923 to operate on an alarming and painful “cellulitis of the face” that had caused one of his eyes to swell to the size of a baseball.

Dr. Dame, who, like all the mission doctors, spoke Arabic, lanced the inflammation and solicitously attended the king and other members of the royal family for nearly a week. He was particularly caring toward the king’s aging father, Abdul-Rahman. Grateful and much impressed, Abdul Aziz insisted that the Reformed Church’s medical facilities should be matched and expanded by Socal when the oil company started work in the Eastern Province, and in 1936 Dr. Dame was recruited to help set up the service.

Having pieced together his own independent kingdom largely on his own terms, Abdul Aziz now invited the United States to play, in some respects, the role of his colonial power. He felt no threat from idealistic Americans like Louis Dame, Christian missionary though he was, nor from the proliferating legion of Socal oil prospectors—booted and bearded pioneers who were pursuing their own mission of gushers and derricks. When it came to the political machinations that might be hatched by the government of these good-hearted men, the Saudi king took comfort from the fact that, as he candidly put it to one American visitor, “you are very far away!” His translator, Mohammed Al-Mana, later recalled the pleasure at court in 1933 as it became clear that Socal was outbidding Britain’s IPC for the oil concession, “for we all felt that the British were still tainted by colonialism. If they came for our oil, we could never be sure to what extent they would come to influence our government as well. The Americans on the other hand would simply be after the money, a motive which the Arabs, as born traders, could readily appreciate and approve.”

This optimistic Saudi view of the United States as a generous and detached power that was somehow more moral than the rest of the world neatly chimed, of course, with America’s own exceptionalist image of itself. The loss of innocence over subsequent years would provide both sides with a succession of painful and poignant moments. The first came in February 1945 when Abdul Aziz traveled up the Red Sea for his first-ever encounter with a Western head of state, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had come to Egypt following the Yalta conference. It had been a hopeful and novel jaunt up from Jeddah for the Saudi party on board the USS
Murphy,
the king’s cooks and coffee servers slaughtering sheep on the deck of the destroyer, while his sons enjoyed the titillating sight of Miss Lucille Ball cavorting in various states of undress, courtesy of the movie projector in the crew’s quarters.

But then FDR sprang his bombshell—he invited the Saudi king to help him secure a home in Palestine for the Jewish people. The Jews of central Europe had suffered most terribly at Hitler’s hands, the president explained, and he felt a personal responsibility to help them—he had committed himself indeed to finding a solution to their problems. Did the king of Arabia have any suggestions to make?

The king certainly did, and he based his proposal on simple bedouin principles.

“Give them [the Jews] and their descendants,” he said, “the choicest lands and homes of the Germans who oppressed them.” There was no reason why the Arab inhabitants of Palestine should suffer for something the Germans had done. “Make the enemy and the oppressor pay,” he said. “That is how we Arabs wage war.”

Jewish immigration into Palestine had been a major and universal Arab grievance since the 1920s, with Britain attracting most of the blame, since London administered the Palestine mandate and had been the architect of the Balfour Declaration, which first expressed “favor” toward the prospect of a “national homeland” for Jews in the Middle East. Now, it appeared, the United States was also an endorser of the Zionist project, though as he said good-bye to Abdul Aziz, Roosevelt promised the Saudi king that “he would do nothing to assist the Jews against the Arabs, and would make no move hostile to the Arab people.”

FDR’s successor, Harry Truman, broke this pledge in Saudi eyes when America supported Israeli statehood at the United Nations in 1948. Dwight Eisenhower was judged more evenhanded. Following the attempt of Britain, France, and Israel to seize the Suez Canal in 1956, Eisenhower sternly compelled the three conspirators to withdraw their forces. But this humiliating illustration of where postwar power lay prompted some creative thinking in Jerusalem. Nine years later, the purposeful marshaling in Washington of what would become known as the Jewish lobby helped ensure U.S. acquiescence and effective support for Israel’s 1967 conquest of Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza in the Six-Day War. When Egypt sought revenge six years later, taking Israeli troops by surprise as they marked the ceremonies of Yom Kippur 1973, Richard Nixon threw the weight of U.S. armaments behind the defense of Israel. In the twenty-eight years since FDR and Ibn Saud met, America had moved from tentative patron to firm guarantor of the Zionist project. As the Saudis saw it, Israel had become America’s fifty-first state.