Author: Seymour M. Hersh
Publication: The New Yorker
Date: October 22, 2001
How vulnerable are the Saudi royals?
Since 1994 or earlier, the National
Security Agency has been collecting electronic intercepts of conversations
between members of the Saudi Arabian royal family, which is headed by King
Fahd. The intercepts depict a regime increasingly corrupt, alienated from
the country's religious rank and file, and so weakened and frightened that
it has brokered its future by channelling hundreds of millions of dollars
in what amounts to protection money to fundamentalist groups that wish
to overthrow it.
The intercepts have demonstrated
to analysts that by 1996 Saudi money was supporting Osama bin Laden's Al
Qaeda and other extremist groups in Afghanistan, Lebanon, Yemen, and Central
Asia, and throughout the Persian Gulf region. "Ninety-six is the key year,"
one American intelligence official told me. "Bin Laden hooked up to all
the bad guys-it's like the Grand Alliance- and had a capability for conducting
large-scale operations." The Saudi regime, he said, had "gone to the dark
side."
In interviews last week, current
and former intelligence and military officials portrayed the growing instability
of the Saudi regime-and the vulnerability of its oil reserves to terrorist
attack-as the most immediate threat to American economic and political
interests in the Middle East. The officials also said that the Bush Administration,
like the Clinton Administration, is refusing to confront this reality,
even in the aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attacks.
The Saudis and the Americans arranged
a meeting between Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and King Fahd during
a visit by Rumsfeld to Saudi Arabia shortly before the beginning of the
air war in Afghanistan, and pictures of the meeting were transmitted around
the world. The United States, however, has known that King Fahd has been
incapacitated since suffering a severe stroke, in late 1995. A Saudi adviser
told me last week that the King, with round-the-clock medical treatment,
is able to sit in a chair and open his eyes, but is usually unable to recognize
even his oldest friends. Fahd is being kept on the throne, the N.S.A. intercepts
indicate, because of a bitter family power struggle. Fahd's nominal successor
is Crown Prince Abdullah, his half brother, who is to some extent the de-facto
ruler-he and Prince Sultan, the defense minister, were the people Rumsfeld
really came to see. But there is infighting about money: Abdullah has been
urging his fellow-princes to address the problem of corruption in the kingdom-unsuccessfully,
according to the intercepts. "The only reason Fahd's being kept alive is
so Abdullah can't become king," a former White House adviser told me.
The American intelligence officials
have been particularly angered by the refusal of the Saudis to help the
F.B.I. and the C.I.A. run "traces"-that is, name checks and other background
information-on the nineteen men, more than half of them believed to be
from Saudi Arabia, who took part in the attacks on the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon. "They knew that once we started asking for a few traces
the list would grow," one former official said. "It's better to shut it
down right away." He pointed out that thousands of disaffected Saudis have
joined fundamentalist groups throughout the Middle East. Other officials
said that there is a growing worry inside the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. that
the actual identities of many of those involved in the attacks may not
be known definitively for months, if ever. Last week, a senior intelligence
official confirmed the lack of Saudi coöperation and told me, angrily,
that the Saudis "have only one constant-and it's keeping themselves in
power."
The N.S.A. intercepts reveal the
hypocrisy of many in the Saudi royal family, and why the family has become
increasingly estranged from the vast majority of its subjects. Over the
years, unnerved by the growing strength of the fundamentalist movement,
it has failed to deal with the underlying issues of severe unemployment
and inadequate education, in a country in which half the population is
under the age of eighteen. Saudi Arabia's strict interpretation of Islam,
known as Wahhabism, and its use of mutawwa'in-religious police-to enforce
prayer, is rivalled only by the Taliban's. And yet for years the Saudi
princes-there are thousands of them-have kept tabloid newspapers filled
with accounts of their drinking binges and partying with prostitutes, while
taking billions of dollars from the state budget. The N.S.A. intercepts
are more specific. In one call, Prince Nayef, who has served for more than
two decades as interior minister, urges a subordinate to withhold from
the police evidence of the hiring of prostitutes, presumably by members
of the royal family. According to the summary, Nayef said that he didn't
want the "client list" released under any circumstances.
The intercepts produced a stream
of sometimes humdrum but often riveting intelligence from the telephone
calls of several senior members of the royal family, including Abdullah;
Nayef; Sultan, whose son Prince Bandar has been the Saudi ambassador to
the United States since 1983; and Prince Salman, the governor of Riyadh,
Saudi Arabia's capital. There was constant telephoning about King Fahd's
health after his stroke, and scrambling to take advantage of the situation.
On January 8, 1997, Prince Sultan told Bandar about a flight that he and
Salman had shared with the King. Sultan complained that the King "barely
spoke to anyone," according to the summary of the intercept, because he
was "too medicated." The King, Sultan added, was "a prisoner on the plane."
Sultan's comments became much more
significant a few days later, when the N.S.A. intercepted a conversation
in which Sultan told Bandar that the King had agreed to a complicated exchange
of fighter aircraft with the United States that would bring five F-16s
into the Royal Saudi Air Force. Fahd was evidently incapable of making
such an agreement, or of preventing anyone from dropping his name in a
money-making deal.
In the intercepts, princes talk
openly about bilking the state, and even argue about what is an acceptable
percentage to take. Other calls indicate that Prince Bandar, while serving
as ambassador, was involved in arms deals in London, Yemen, and the Soviet
Union that generated millions of dollars in "commissions." In a PBS "Frontline"
interview broadcast on October 9th, Bandar, asked about the reports of
corruption in the royal family, was almost upbeat in his response. The
family had spent nearly four hundred billion dollars to develop Saudi Arabia,
he said. "If you tell me that building this whole country . . . we misused
or got corrupted with fifty billion, I'll tell you, 'Yes.'. . . So what?
We did not invent corruption, nor did those dissidents, who are so genius,
discover it."
The intercepts make clear, however,
that Crown Prince Abdullah was insistent on stemming the corruption. In
November of 1996, for example, he complained about the billions of dollars
that were being diverted by royal family members from a huge state-financed
project to renovate the mosque in Mecca. He urged the princes to get their
off-budget expenses under control; such expenses are known as the hiding
place for payoff money. (Despite its oil revenues, Saudi Arabia has been
running a budget deficit for more than a decade, and now has a large national
debt.) A few months later, according to the intercepts, Abdullah blocked
a series of real-estate deals by one of the princes, enraging members of
the royal family. Abdullah further alarmed the princes by issuing a decree
declaring that his sons would not be permitted to go into partnerships
with foreign companies working in the kingdom.
Abdullah is viewed by Sultan and
other opponents as a leader who could jeopardize the kingdom's most special
foreign relationship-someone who is willing to penalize the United States,
and its oil and gas companies, because of Washington's support for Israel.
In an intercept dated July 13, 1997, Prince Sultan called Bandar in Washington,
and informed him that he had told Abdullah "not to be so confrontational
with the United States."
The Fahd regime was a major financial
backer of the Reagan Administration's anti-Communist campaign in Latin
America and of its successful proxy war in Afghanistan against the Soviet
Union. Oil money bought the Saudis enormous political access and leverage
in Washington. Working through Prince Bandar, they have contributed hundreds
of millions of dollars to charities and educational programs here. American
construction and oil companies do billions of dollars' worth of business
every year with Saudi Arabia, which is the world's largest oil producer.
At the end of last year, Halliburton, the Texas-based oil-supply business
formerly headed by Vice-President Dick Cheney, was operating a number of
subsidiaries in Saudi Arabia.
In the Clinton era, the White House
did business as usual with the Saudis, urging them to buy American goods,
like Boeing aircraft. The kingdom was seen as an American advocate among
the oil-producing nations of the Middle East. The C.I.A. was discouraged
from conducting any risky intelligence operations inside the country and,
according to one former official, did little recruiting among the Saudi
population, which limited the United States government's knowledge of the
growth of the opposition to the royal family.
In 1994, Mohammed al-Khilewi, the
first secretary at the Saudi Mission to the United Nations, defected and
sought political asylum in the United States. He brought with him, according
to his New York lawyer, Michael J. Wildes, some fourteen thousand internal
government documents depicting the Saudi royal family's corruption, human-rights
abuses, and financial support for terrorists. He claimed to have evidence
that the Saudis had given financial and technical support to Hamas, the
extremist Islamic group whose target is Israel. There was a meeting at
the lawyer's office with two F.B.I. agents and an Assistant United States
Attorney. "We gave them a sampling of the documents and put them on the
table," Wildes told me last week. "But the agents refused to accept them."
He and his client heard nothing further from federal authorities. Al-Khilewi,
who was granted asylum, is now living under cover.
The Saudis were also shielded from
Washington's foreign-policy bureaucracy. A government expert on Saudi affairs
told me that Prince Bandar dealt exclusively with the men at the top, and
never met with desk officers and the like. "Only a tiny handful of people
inside the government are familiar with U.S.-Saudi relations," he explained.
"And that is purposeful."
In the aftermath of the terrorist
attacks in New York and Washington, the royal family has repeatedly insisted
that Saudi Arabia has made no contributions to radical Islamic groups.
When the Saudis were confronted by press reports that some of the substantial
funds that the monarchy routinely gives to Islamic charities may actually
have gone to Al Qaeda and other terrorist networks, they denied any knowledge
of such transfers. The intercepts, however, have led many in the intelligence
community to conclude otherwise.
The Bush Administration has chosen
not to confront the Saudi leadership over its financial support of terror
organizations and its refusal to help in the investigation. "As far as
the Saudi Arabians go, they've been nothing but coöperative," President
Bush said at a news conference on September 24th. The following day, the
Saudis agreed to formally cut off diplomatic relations with the Taliban
leadership in Afghanistan. Eight days later, at a news conference in Saudi
Arabia with Prince Sultan, the defense minister, Donald Rumsfeld was asked
if he had given the Saudis a list of the September 11th terrorist suspects
for processing by their intelligence agencies. Rumsfeld, who is admired
by many in the press for his bluntness, answered evasively: "I am, as I
said, not involved with the Federal Bureau of Investigation that is conducting
the investigation. . . . I have every reason to believe that that relationship
between our two countries is as close, that any information I am sure has
been made available to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia."
The Saudis gave Rumsfeld something
in return-permission for U.S. forces to use a command-and-control center,
built before the Gulf War, in the pending air war against the Taliban.
Over the past few years, the Saudis have also allowed the United States
to use forward bases on Saudi soil for special operations, as long as there
was no public mention of the arrangements.
While the intelligence-community
members I spoke with praised the Air Force and the Navy for their performance
in Afghanistan last week, which did much to boost morale in the military
and among the American citizenry, they were crestfallen about an incident
that occurred on the first night of the war-an incident that was emblematic,
they believe, of the constraints placed by the government on the military's
ability to wage war during the last decade.
That night, an unmanned Predator
reconnaissance aircraft, under the control of the C.I.A., was surveilling
the roads leading out of Kabul. The Predator, which costs forty million
dollars and cruises at speeds as slow as eighty miles an hour, is equipped
with imaging radar and an array of infrared and television cameras that
are capable of beaming high-resolution images to ground stations around
the world. The plane was equipped with two powerful Hellfire missiles,
designed as antitank weapons. The Predator identified a group of cars and
trucks fleeing the capital as a convoy carrying Mullah Omar, the Taliban
leader. Under a previously worked-out agreement, one knowledgeable official
said, the C.I.A. did not have the authority to "push the button." Nor did
the nearby command-and-control suite of the Fifth Fleet, in Bahrain, where
many of the war plans had been drawn up. Rather, the decision had to be
made by the officers on duty at the headquarters of the United States Central
Command, or CENTCOM, at MacDill Air Force Base, in Florida.
The Predator tracked the convoy
to a building where Omar, accompanied by a hundred or so guards and soldiers,
took cover. The precise sequence of events could not be fully learned,
but intelligence officials told me that there was an immediate request
for a full-scale assault by fighter bombers. At that point, however, word
came from General Tommy R. Franks, the CENTCOM commander, saying, as the
officials put it, "My JAG"-Judge Advocate General, a legal officer-"doesn't
like this, so we're not going to fire." Instead, the Predator was authorized
to fire a missile in front of the building-"bounce it off the front door,"
one officer said, "and see who comes out, and take a picture." CENTCOM
suggested that the Predator then continue to follow Omar. The Hellfire,
however, could not target the area in front of the building-in military
parlance, it could not "get a signature" on the dirt there-and it was then
agreed that the missile would attack a group of cars parked in front, presumably
those which had carried Omar and his retinue. The missile was fired, and
it "obliterated the cars," an official said. "But no one came out."
It was learned later from an operative
on the ground that Omar and his guards had indeed been in the convoy and
had assumed at the time that the firing came from rocket-propelled grenades
launched by nearby troops from the Northern Alliance. A group of soldiers
left the building and looked for the enemy. They found nothing, and Omar
and his convoy departed. A short time later, the building was targeted
and destroyed by F-18s. Mullah Omar survived.
Days afterward, top Administration
officials were still seething about the incident. "If it was a fuckup,
I could live with it," one senior official said. "But it's not a fuckup-it's
an outrage.This isn't like you're six years old and your mother calls you
to come in for lunch and you say, 'Time out.' If anyone thinks otherwise,
go look at the World Trade Center or the Pentagon." A senior military officer
viewed the failure to strike immediately as a symptom of "a cultural issue"-"a
slow degradation of the system due to political correctness: 'We want you
to kill the guy, but not the guy next to him.' No collateral damage." Others
saw the cultural problem as one of bureaucratic, rather than political,
correctness. Either way, the failure to attack has left Defense Secretary
Rumsfeld "kicking a lot of glass and breaking doors," the officer said.
"But in the end I don't know if it'll mean any changes."
A Pentagon planner also noted that
some of the camps the bombers were hitting were empty. In fact, he added,
it became evident even before the bombing that troops of the Northern Alliance
had moved into many of the unused Taliban camps. The Alliance soldiers
came up with a novel way of alerting American planners to their new location,
the officer said: "They walked around holding up white sheets so when the
satellites came by they're saying, 'Hey, we're the good guys.' "
The American military response has
triggered alarm in the international oil community and among intelligence
officials who have been briefed on a still secret C.I.A. study, put together
in the mid-eighties, of the vulnerability of the Saudi fields to terrorist
attack. The report was "so sensitive," a former C.I.A. officer told me,
"that it was put on typed paper," and not into the agency's computer system,
meaning that distribution was limited to a select few. According to someone
who saw the report, it concluded that with only a small amount of explosives
terrorists could take the oil fields off line for two years.
The concerns, both in America and
in Saudi Arabia, about the security of the fields have become more urgent
than ever since September 11th. A former high-level intelligence official
depicted the Saudi rulers as nervously "sitting on a keg of dynamite"-that
is, the oil reserves. "They're petrified that somebody's going to light
the fuse."
"The United States is hostage to
the stability of the Saudi system," a prominent Middle Eastern oil man,
who did not wish to be cited by name, told me in a recent interview. "It's
time to start facing the truth. The war was declared by bin Laden, but
there are thousands of bin Ladens. They are setting the game-the agenda.
It's a new form of war. This fabulous military machine you have is completely
useless." The oil man, who has worked closely with the Saudi leadership
for three decades, added, "People like me have been deceiving you. We talk
about how you don't understand Islam, but it's a vanilla analysis. We try
to please you, but we've been aggrieved for years."
The Saudi regime "will explode in
time," he said. "It has been playing a delicate game." As for the terrorists
responsible for the September 11th attacks, he said, "Now they decide the
timing. If they do a similar operation in Saudi Arabia, the price of oil
will go up to one hundred dollars a barrel"-more than four times what it
is today.
In the nineteen-eighties, in an
effort to relieve political pressure on the regime, the Saudi leadership
relinquished some of its authority to the mutawwa'in and permitted them
to have a greater role in day-to-day life. One U.S. government Saudi expert
complained last week that religious leaders had been allowed to take control
of the press and the educational system. "Today, two-thirds of the Saudi
Ph.D.s are in Islamic studies," a former Presidential aide told me. There
was little attempt over the years by American diplomats or the White House
to moderate the increasingly harsh rhetoric about the U.S. "The United
States was caught up in private agreements"-with the Saudi princes-"while
this shit was spewing in the Saudi press," the former aide said. "That
was a huge mistake."
A senior American diplomat who served
many years in Saudi Arabia recalled his foreboding upon attending a training
exercise at the kingdom's most prestigious military academy, in Riyadh:
"It was hot, and I watched the cadets doing drills. The officers were lounging
inside a suradiq"-a large pavilion-"with cold drinks, calling out orders
on loudspeakers. I thought to myself, How many of these young men would
follow and die for these officers?" The diplomat said he came away from
his most recent tour in Saudi Arabia convinced that "it wouldn't take too
much for a group of twenty or thirty fundamentalist enlisted men to take
charge. How would the kingdom deal with the shock of something ruthless,
small, highly motivated, and of great velocity?"
There is little that the United
States can do now, the diplomat said. "The Saudis have been indulged for
so many decades.They are so spoiled. They've always had it their way. There's
hardly anything we could say that would impede the 'majestic instancy'
of their progress. We're their janissaries." He was referring to the captives
who became élite troops of the Ottoman Empire.
"The policy dilemma is this," a
senior general told me. "How do we help the Saudis make a transition without
throwing them over the side?" Referring to young fundamentalists who have
been demonstrating in the Saudi streets, he said, "The kids are bigger
than the Daddy."