Sleeping With The Devil (13 page)

    Press accounts portrayed Bandar as largely on the outside during the
Clinton years, passing melancholy weeks locked up in his humble Aspen mountain cabin (fifty
thousand square feet, thirty-two rooms, sixteen bathrooms, assessed value $55 million). It’s
true that the two men have differences of style: Bandar is proud of his flyboy military past;
every time Clinton tries to march on a parade ground, he looks as if he should be carrying a
saxophone, and the thought of him hunting anywhere is plain scary. Clinton had his own
back-door connection to Riyadh: a friendship with Prince Turki, the former head of the Saudi
intelligence service, dating back to their undergraduate days at Georgetown University. But
it’s just as likely that White House aides worked hard to keep the president and Bandar apart.
The last person Bill Clinton needed to spend more time with was a fabulously rich Arab with a
wandering eye.

    But Bandar was still his usual useful self.
Newsweek
reported
that he played a role in convincing the Libyans to turn over two of its citizens suspected in
the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. The magazine also wrote that
Bandar helped to break down Saudi resistance to the FBI’s investigation of the 1996 bombing of
the Khobar Towers - an odd interpretation, since the investigation lingers on over a half
decade after nineteen servicemen died there.

    On the personal side, Bandar used his influence to convince King Fahd
to donate $23 million to the University of Arkansas’s new Center for Middle Eastern Studies, “a
gesture of respect” for the Arkansas governor who had just been elected president. Clinton had
been lobbying hard for the money since 1989, including a 1991 meeting with the Saudi ambassador
and a November 1992 phone conversation with King Fahd only a week after he was elected
president. The money finally came in two installments: an initial $3 million, followed by the
balance two weeks after Clinton’s inauguration: Timing is everything. As he does at the end of
every administration, perceived friend or foe, Bandar also invited each of the Clinton Cabinet
members out to dinner at a restaurant of his choice, private or public room, depending on their
willingness to see and be seen.

    With the Bush II administration, Bandar retook the White House as
spectacularly as when the British burned it in 1814, turning himself into a permanently
visiting head of state. His long service in Washington makes him the dean of the diplomatic
corps, but it’s his parties that everyone likes to talk about. In December 1997 Jimmy and
Rosalyn Carter joined Bush Sr. at Bandar’s Potomac River mansion to help celebrate the
twenty-fifth anniversary of the prince’s marriage to Princess Haifa. Two years later, when
Nelson Mandela visited Washington, the Bandars feted him at a party in the McLean mansion that
lasted until one in the morning and included an after-dinner performance by singer Roberta
Flack.

    Then there’s Bandar’s famous Rolodex. In April 2001 Yasir Arafat called
Saudi Crown Prince ‘Abdallah to complain after Israeli soldiers fired on a convoy ferrying
officials of the Palestinian Authority. (Equal-opportunity favor-doers, the Saudis pick up
Arafat’s hotel tab whenever his entourage overnights in Washington - generally at the
Ritz-Carlton, where the Carlyle Group was holding its annual meeting when American Airlines 77
slammed into the Pentagon.) ‘Abdallah in turn called Bandar, who called Dick Cheney, who called
Colin Powell, who once was Bandar’s racquetball partner. (Powell and Bandar came to know each
other back in the late 1970s through David Jones, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
and another of Bandar’s racquetball buddies.) Within an hour of Arafat’s call from Prince
‘Abdallah, Powell was reading the riot act to Ariel Sharon in Tel Aviv. Tinkers to Evers to
Chance was never so efficient.

    In mid-2002, word leaked to the press that the semiofficial Defense
Policy Board, chaired by the durable cold warrior Richard Perle, had endorsed an assessment
that Saudi Arabia wasn’t our friend when it came to terrorism. To be exact, the report called
Saudi Arabia “central to the self-destruction of the Arab world and the chief vector of the
Arab crisis and its outwardly directed aggression. The Saudis are active at every level of the
terror chain, from planners to financiers, from cadre to foot-soldier, from ideologist to
cheerleader.”

    Again Powell was on the phone within hours, this time assuring Bandar -
and, through him, his principals - that such apostasy was not the official stance of the Bush
II administration. To reinforce the message, Bush II invited Bandar down to the family ranch at
Crawford, Texas, an honor usually reserved for the heads of state: Think Vladimir Putin in
chaps and spurs.

    In what could have been a delicious irony, the Defense Policy Board
security breach is suspected to be the work of master leaker and Saudi handmaiden Henry
Kissinger, who would later briefly head the blue-ribbon commission charged with investigating
the intelligence lapses that allowed 9/11 to happen. He had to resign before taking up his
duties, little doubt because he had Saudis on his client list.

    Bandar once told an American reporter that the phrase “don’t ask, don’t
tell” might have originated with a verse from the Qur’an: “Ask not about things which, if made
plain to you, may cause you trouble.” Maybe the verse should be carved over the front door of
the State Department, too.

    WHEN IT CAME OUT that Bandar’s wife, Princess Haifa, had made
charitable contributions that may have inadvertently helped two of the hijackers get settled in
San Diego, Powell visited NPR’s
Morning Edition
on November 28, 2002, to defend the
prince and princess, although with faint praise.

    “I have known Prince Bandar and Princess Haifa for many years,” Powell
told interviewer Michele Kelemen, “and I think it most unlikely that they would do anything
that would support any terrorist organization or individual. But let’s see what the facts are.”

    “Most unlikely”? “Let’s see what the facts are”? Had the Bandarians
broken ranks? Was the Bush administration sending a coded message? Perhaps, but Powell also
might have been simply laying down a little cover fire for himself. In early March 2001
Princess Haifa hosted a lunch at her McLean digs for eighty of Washington’s most prominent
women, including the wives of Donald Rumsfeld, Chief of Staff Andrew Card, Treasury Secretary
Paul O’Neill, and Supreme Court justices Clarence Thomas and Anthony Kennedy. The guest of
honor: Alma Powell, wife of Colin.

    So it goes in Washington, but to me the greatest surprise of the whole
affair wasn’t that Princess Haifa donated money that found its way to terrorists. Charitable
contributions to the needy are an admirable obligation of Muslims, enshrined in the Qur’an; and
Princess Haifa and her husband have Dumpsters of money to hand out. But how could anyone who
counted not know that some of the money might end up with the soldiers of jihad? Let’s get
serious: When was the last time we asked Saudi Arabia to account for anything? It’s just
another sign that where Saudi Arabia is concerned, Washington stopped seeing the big picture
long, long ago.

    Whatever you think about Saudi charities - and I’ve already said that I
think they might be overrated - they’ve been operating right under our noses for years. It’s
like the 9/11 attacks themselves: No one saw them coming because no one wanted to look. In
March 2002, half a year before the breathless revelation of Princess Haifa’s errant
contribution, Treasury agents raided the northern Virginia headquarters of four Saudi-based
charities: the SAAR Foundation, the Safa Trust, the International Institute for Islamic Thought
(IIIT), and the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO). Also included in the raid was
the local headquarters for the Muslim World League, an umbrella group funded by the Saudi
government, which sent money and weapons to bin Laden. Gathering money scant miles from
Bandar’s Potomac River mansion, all five charities can point to a long line of humanitarian
causes they have aided and supported. Treasury officials and other experts can also point to a
long string of alarming associations.

    Testifying before Congress on August 1, 2002, Matthew Levitt, a senior
fellow with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, noted that Tarik Hamdi, an IIIT
employee, had personally provided Osama bin Laden with batteries for his satellite phone, a
critical link in the stateless world that bin Laden inhabits. IIIT and SAAR are suspected of
helping finance Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, home to some of the most accomplished
suicide bombers in the Middle East. From 1986 to 1994, Muhammad Jamal Khalifa, brother-in-law
of Osama bin Laden, ran the IIRO’s Philippine office, from which he channeled funds to al
Qaeda. Only excellent work by the Indian police prevented another IIRO employee, Sayyid Abu
Nasir, from bombing the U.S. consulates in Calcutta and Madras. (Madras gets a little personal:
I used to work there.)

    Interviewed by PBS’s
Frontline
about the problems with keeping
track of Saudi money as it flows around the world, Prince Bandar said that the “money leaves
Saudi Arabia, goes to Europe, and we can follow it; goes to the United States, America, and we
lose contact with it.” A good thing, maybe, for the Bandars. Princess Haifa’s contribution to a
Saudi who aided two of the September 11 hijackers added up to $130,000. Throw in $550,000 that
a mysterious Saudi donated to a San Diego mosque that served as a forward base for the same two
hijackers, and the money exceeds the roughly $500,000 the FBI estimates as the total cost of
the 9/11 attacks. In other words, Bandar’s - or some other Saudi’s - “lost” money ended up
paying for nineteen jihadis to massacre more than three thousand people. We’ll never know
whether it was lost money that went where it was supposed to go until the Saudis decide to
assist with our investigation.

    In October 2002 a U.S. delegation headed by Alan Larson, undersecretary
of state for economic affairs, went to Riyadh, ostensibly to press the Saudis into increased
surveillance of their countrymen’s charities and financial networks. But as Jeff Gerth and
Judith Miller reported in
The New York Times
, the story didn’t end there: “In an
illustration of the persistent quandary facing Washington, American and Saudi oil executives
said Mr. Larson had another item on his agenda. He wanted to ensure, they said, that Saudi
Arabia would pump millions of barrels of extra oil into the world market should there be a
shortfall caused by an American-led attack on Iraq.”

    Don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t know. Above all, speak no evil… and keep
that oil flowing. The Saudis had it right all along.

    RIYADH HOLDS UP a fistful of petrodollars, and Washington salivates.
More and more, we’re seeing the dual result of that Pavlovian conditioning: an almost
pathological unwillingness on the part of U.S. government agencies to stare reality in the
face, coupled with a massive money grab by those who do see that the House of Sa’ud is on its
last wobbly legs.

    But to focus solely on money, or even money and oil, is to miss the
full complexity of the story. The marriage of Washington and the House of Sa’ud is far more
textured. It winds its way through geopolitics, World War II, and the sometimes myopic struggle
to contain communism. Franklin D. Roosevelt plays a part, as does the eighteenth-century tribal
chief Muhammad Ibn Sa’ud. So does another eighteenth-century Arab, Muhammad ibn ‘Abd-al-Wahhab
and the archconservative thirteenth-century cleric Ibn Taymiyah. And so, finally, do the fruits
of all the malignant seeds planted by Ibn Taymiyah: the Muslim Brotherhood.

    To learn more about all this, I needed a history lesson and a tutor in
the dark side of Islamic theology. I would have to travel to places that most Westerners would
not willingly go.