Inside the Kingdom (74 page)

I am grateful to the following members of the royal family for their help: Abdul Aziz bin Nawaf bin Abdul Aziz; Abdul Aziz bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz; Abdullah bin Faisal bin Turki; Ahmad bin Abdul Aziz; Amr Al-Faisal; Bandar bin Abdullah bin Abdul Rahman; Bandar bin Khaled Al-Faisal; Princess Fahda bint Saud bin Abdul Aziz; Faisal bin Abdul Aziz bin Faisal; Faisal bin Abdullah bin Mohammed; Faisal bin Bandar bin Abdul Aziz; Dr. Faisal bin Mishaal bin Saud bin Abdul Aziz; Dr. Faisal bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz; Khaled Al-Faisal; Khaled bin Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz; Khaled bin Faisal bin Turki; Khaled bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz; Princess Latifa bint Musaid bin Abdul Aziz; Princess Loulua Al-Faisal; Princess Maha bint Mishari bin Abdul Muhsin; Mansour bin Miteb bin Abdul Aziz; Princess Mishael bint Faisal; Mishaal bin Mohammed bin Saud bin Abdul Aziz; Mohammed bin Khaled bin Abdullah Al-Faisal; Mohammed bin Mansour bin Miteb bin Abdul Aziz; Mohammed bin Nawaf bin Abdul Aziz; Mugrin bin Abdul Aziz; Mohammed bin Nayef bin Abdul Aziz; Nawaf bin Nasr bin Abdul Aziz; Nayef bin Ahmad bin Abdul Aziz; Princess Sara bint Talal bin Abdul Aziz; Dr. Seif Al-Islam bin Saud bin Abdul Aziz; Sultan bin Fahd bin Abdullah; Sultan bin Salamn bin Abdul Aziz; Talal bin Abdul Aziz; Turki Al-Faisal; Dr. Turki bin Mohammed Saud Al-Kabeer; Dr. Turki bin Saud bin Mohammed; Turki bin Talal bin Abdul Aziz.

I should also like to thank: Dr. Abdul Rahman Abdul Waheed; Dr. Hassan Abedin; Fahd Abu Al-Nasr; Safa Al-Ahmad; Bandar Mohammed Al-Aiban; Neal Allan; Maja Ahmad Al-Anaizy; Reza Aslan; Alan Barton; Shajahan Chandrathil; Sir James Craig; Sir David Gore-Booth; Dr. Christopher Boucek; Yvonne Butcher; Jim Chapman; Dr. Jeevan S. Deol; Samia Al-Edrisi; Ishtiyaq Eftekhar; Ahmed Eitezaz; Matt Elliott; Jacqui Powell, and Kirsty MacArthur at Coutts; Zaki Farsi; Professor F. Gregory Gause III; Camilla Goslett; Mohammed Hanif; Roger Hardy; Roger Har rison; Dr. Waleed Hassanen; Mounir Hassanieh; Aldine Honey; Saud Al-Houti; Hamdan Al-Hunaiti; Christopher H. Johnson; Albert Beckford Jones; Colonel Brian Lees; Thomas Lippman; Leslie McLoughlin; Yasmin Malik; Reehab Massoud; Reema Memon; Ben Montanez; Ann Morris; William D. Morrison; Sir Alan Munro; Dr. Joshua Muravchik; Caryle Murphy; Khadija Nehfawy; Professor Tim Niblock; Dr. Farhan Nizami; David B. Ottaway; K. P. Pillai; Sultan Ghalib Al-Quaiti and his wife Sultana; Raid S. Qusti; Lawrence P. Randolph; Hugh Renfrew; Dr. Eugene Rogan; Shaheeda Sabir; Abdulbaset Al-Sahafi; Dr. Abdul Aziz bin Sal amah; Dr. Sami Salman; Najat Al-Shafie; Mansour Al-Shalhoub; Professor Avi Shlaim; Gary Sick and the refreshingly disputacious members of his Gulf 2000 web forum; Qazi Suhail; Kevin Sullivan; Kirsty Sutherland; Dr. Abdullah Al-Thayer; Jan and Anna Thesleff; Jim Thomas; Ismail Tutla; Siraj Wahab; Dr. Ayman Samir Wahba; Val Weir; David Wells and John Whitbeck; Sir John and Maureen, Lady Wilton; Suzan Zawawi; and Rustom Zere.

I arrived in Jeddah in February 2006 to find Lawrence Wright winding up the research on his classic,
The Looming Tower.
With true collegiality he shared with me his finest contacts, including the finest of them all, Faiza Saleh Ambah. Life beside the Red Sea would not have been the same without her—nor without Friday lunches in the acerbic and genial company of Ben Dyal, a “virtual” Saudi whom I have known for thirty-one years, since we first met in the Polyglot Language School in London. With his knowledge and love of Jane Austen, Ben is an eighteenth century person living in the twenty-first century—like a good number of folk in this country.

On the east coast, I have benefited immeasurably from the support and wisdom of my friends Nabil Al-Khuwaiter and Hassan Al-Husseini, the latter of whom has generously assumed the burden of checking the Arabic aspects of the manuscript. In Riyadh, Lubna Hussein has kept me laughing and given me more plugs that I deserve on her television show,
Bridges.

My greatest debt of all in the Kingdom has been to Ms. Hala Al-Houti, the executive assistant of Khaled Alireza, whom Khaled generously seconded to translate, organize, and shepherd me through my three years of research. Hala has been a joyful and ever resourceful companion—living proof, like many a determined young woman I have met here, that the Saudi future resides with the sex that wears black. The “whites” are discovering, day by day, that they cannot match the dynamism of women like Hala.

Back home, my mentor has been my calm and shrewd young literary agent, Jonathan Pegg, who has brought me home to harbor with two superb publishing teams and editors in Kevin Doughten of Viking Penguin, New York, and Caroline Gascoigne of Hutchinson—the house that published
The Kingdom,
as chance would have it, and who are now part of the Random House group in London. My additional thanks to Carla Bolte, Emily Votruba, Veronica Windholz, and Wendy Wolf at Viking. I am grateful to my former colleagues from the
Sunday Times Magazine
Suzanne Hodgart and Ian Denning for their work on the research and design of the pictures sections, and to Mateen Munshi and L. Ramnarayan Iyer at
Arab News
in Jeddah, who heeded the generous call of their editor Khalid Al-Maeena to unlock their picture archive. My thanks to Camilla Panufnik for her Photoshop expertise.

My friend Kieran Baker of Political Bytes Productions has enlivened my recent months by bringing the talented Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady of LOKI Productions to the Kingdom to shoot two documentary films that have grown out of my work here. Thank you to Kieran and to his wife, Nancy, for their hospitality in Washington, D.C.—and to David Sherwood and James Brooker of Flamble for keeping my e-mails and Apples buzzing. My thanks to Mr. and Mrs. Ian Seymour for their hospitality in Cyprus while I was researching the archives of the Middle East Economic Survey—and thank you to MEES for access to their invaluable records.

Cut off from home, whatever “home” has come to mean, it has been consoling to buy up the latest special offer of Mobily minutes and to talk long-distance with my supportive friends Lili Agee; Nafeesa Chinoy; Joe Feinberg; Prentis Hancock; Neil Letson; Daniel St. George; Bob and Patricia Shaheen—and to Jane Rayne, my most inspiring and supportive friend of all. “Home” for me, I have come to realize in the last three years, is the joy of being with Jane.

My children, Sasha and Scarlett, provide me with home whenever I can get to stay with them in Oregon and California, while Bruno looks after what used to be my home in Pimlico. My thanks to Thomas and Stephane Walde for being the most accommodating tenants for which a landlord could hope.

Before I had a publisher for this book, I had my old friend and editor Bill Phillips, who encouraged me and corrected me as I stumbled through early drafts of the text and who showed me, as ever, how to locate the story in the
meaning
of what I was discovering. He and his wife, Gladys, had been warm and gracious hosts on my annual visits to Massachusetts. In England Diana Melly made cheering and insightful comments on the manuscript, while Claus von Bülow and Christophe Gollut have been cheering and insightful in general. My thanks too to Gregorio Kohon.

Hana Moazzeni did calm and crucial work in organizing the source notes and reference section of the book when I was rushing to finish the manuscript, and, as always at such junctures, my old friend and colleague Jacqueline Williams came to the rescue with countless details from her mind-boggling research bank of electronic, documentary, and personal contacts. For
The Kingdom,
Jackie and I went to the desert together. For this book, we found gems in Marbella.

My most unexpected and welcome support came from my brother, Graham. Our mother, Vida Lacey, fell ill last year, and it was Graham who cared for her unstintingly, with the help of his companion, Gabriella Merry. My brother made it possible for me to keep working on my book. More important, he made the final months of our mother’s life a relaxed and warm experience in her own home, surrounded by those she loved. Thanks to Graham, I was there when she died.

 

Robert Lacey
Ar’Ar, Saudi Arabia,
March 2009

INDEX

Page numbers in
italics
refer to illustrations and maps; and
n.
indicates a footnote. Non-personal names beginning with Al-, the Arabic definite article, are listed here in the A’s under Al-. Surnames beginning with Al- are listed under the starting letter of the name: e.g., Banna, Al-. For members of the House of Saud, see the dedicated index of names and topics beginning on page 401.
Indexes by Cohen Carruth, Inc.

 

 

 

Abdul Aziz
(later the
Prince Abdul Aziz
; yacht)

Abdullah, Ahmed

Abu Bakr

Abdul Wahhab,
see
Wahhab

Abuhaimid, Abdul Rahman

Aburish, Said K.

Afghanistan

civil war in

jihad in

Soviet withdrawal from

Taliban in

U.S.-Anglo invasion of

Africa

Safari Club and

AIDS

Air Force, Saudi

Air Force, U.S.

Al-Aghar (The Forehead)

Al-Awjam

Alaysha prison

Al-Asheikh family

Al-Azhar

Albani, Mohammed Nasser Al-Deen Al-

alcohol

Alfred the Great

Algeria

Algosaibi, Ghazi

Al-Haier prison

Al-Haraka Al-Wataniya (the National Movement)

Al-Hasa

Al-Hayat
(Life)

Ali (cousin of Mohammed)

Al-Ikhwan,
see
Brothers;
also
Muslim Brotherhood

Al-Islahiyoon (the Reformists)

Al-Jazeera
(newspaper)

Al-Jazeera
(TV news network)

and CNN/Crown Prince Abdullah effect

Al-Johara Al-Ibrahim (the Jewel)

Al-Khafji

battle for (1991)

Al-Kharj

Al-Khobar

Allegiance Council,
see
Bayaa

Al-Muslimoon
(The Muslims)

Al-Qaeda

at Guantánamo

Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula

bombings by

Al-Udeid Air Base

Al-Waqt
(The Time)

Al-Watan
(The Nation)

Al-Yamamah arms deal

Ambah, Faiza

Amnesty International

ANGLICO (Air Naval Gunfire Liaison Company)

Angola

anti-Communism

see also
Safari Club

anti-Semitism

Arab Afghans

Arab-Americans

Arabia, three parts of

Arabia Unified
(Mohammed Al-Mana)

Arab League

Arab nationalism

Arafat, Yasser

Aramco (Arabian American Oil Company)

Ar’Ar

Armitage, Richard

Asfour, Mahdi Al-

Ashura

Asir

Atta, Mohammed

Austen, Jane

AWACS (airborne warning and control system)

Awdah, Salman Al-

Azzam, Abdullah

Babar, Naseerullah

Badeeb, Ahmed

Baghdad

Bayt Al-Hekma in

Bahaziq, Khaled

Bahrain

Baker, James

Bakr, Fawzia Al-

Balfour Declaration

Bangladesh

Banna, Hassan Al-

Barrak, Abdul-Rahman Al-

Barre, Mohammed Siad

Basic Law

Batarfi, Khaled

Bayaa (Allegiance) Council

Bayt Al-Hekma (House of Knowledge)

BBC

bedouin

Abdullah and

women

Begin, Menachem

Beirut

Bergen, Peter

Bhutto, Benazir

Bhutto, Zulfikar Ali

bidaa (innovations)

Bijad, Sultan ibn

Bin Baz, Abdul Aziz

blindness of

Grand Mosque siege and

Gulf War and

hisbah and

satellite TV and

Taliban and

women’s driving and

Bin Laden, Bakr

Bin Laden, Mohammed

Bin Laden, Osama

Afghan jihad and

Afghan retreat of

Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and

Gulf War and

low profile of

9/11 and

proposal to Prince Ahmad

Saudi citizenship and assets stripped from

in Sudan

Taliban and

Bin Laden company

Bolton-Lee, Anouska

Bosnia

British Aerospace (later BAe Systems)

Bronson, Rachel

Brothers, the (Al-Ikhwan)

Abdul Aziz and

in Jeddah

Brothers of Buraydah

Buraydah

Al-Harbi in

Al-Nogaidan in

women’s charity in

Bush, Barbara

Bush, George H. W.

Bush, George W.

Abdullah’s meetings with

Iraq War and

medal presented to

9/11 and

Palestinians and

Cairo

Arab League summit in (1990)

calendar, Islamic

Canada, oil of

Carter, Jimmy

cartoons

Casey, William

cassettes

censorship

Chad

Charles, Prince

Chase Manhattan Bank,

Chechen rebels

chemical weapons

Cheney, Dick

Gulf War and

Iraq policy and

Chertoff, Michael

China

Chinese CSS-2 Dongfong (East Wind) missiles

Chirac, Jacques

Christians

Christian Zionism

CIA

Citibank

Clarke, Richard A.

Clinton, Bill

Clinton, Hillary