Sleeping With The Devil (8 page)

    

    

    WITH THIS KIND of rot, you’d think that every map in official
Washington would have a red flag planted on the dot labeled “Riyadh” to remind the bureaucrats
that Saudi Arabia is on life support. The truth is just the opposite. As I write this in early
2003, Washington still continues to insist that Saudi Arabia is a stable country, that its
central government is in undisputed control of its borders; its police and army are efficient
and loyal; and its people are well clothed, fed, and educated.

    Let’s start with the State Department. It is more responsible than any
other government bureaucracy in Washington for spreading the big lie about the kingdom. To
listen to Foggy Bottom’s spin, you would think Saudi Arabia was Denmark. Just look at the way
it handled visas for Saudis. By law, the State Department has overseas responsibility for
visas; it issues them in our embassies and consulates. The 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act
is clear about eligibility. The section of the law related to granting tourist visas, Section
214(b), reads: “Every alien shall be presumed to be an immigrant until he establishes that to
the satisfaction of the consular officers… he is entitled to non-immigrant status.” In other
words, a foreigner who has no reason to return home - he’s unemployed, unmarried, and broke -
isn’t eligible for a visa. The presumption is that he will remain in the U.S.

    According to the law, all fifteen Saudis who took part in the 9/11
attacks should have been turned down for visas. With male unemployment in the kingdom hovering
around 30 percent, and with per capita income in a free fall, Saudis should be presumed
immigrants (unless they are royals or their retainers). Since most Saudis could work part-time
at a 7-Eleven and make a better living than at home, they are an inherent risk of remaining in
the U.S. Simply put, they don’t meet the qualifications of the law. But it’s worse than that.

    Right through September 11, 2001, Saudis were not even required to
appear at the U.S. embassy in Riyadh or the consulate in Jeddah for a visa interview. Under a
system called Visa Express, a Saudi had only to send his passport, an application, and a fee to
a travel agent to get a visa. The Saudi travel agent, in other words, stood in for the American
government. A short wait, and any Saudi who had the money for a flight was on his way to New
York - to disappear like a diamond in an inkwell or to run his airplane into a skyscraper. In
other words, in issuing visas to fifteen unemployed Saudis, the State Department broke the law.
Sure, four other hijackers got into the U.S., but did we have to make it so easy for the
majority of the assault force to take its positions?

    Then there’s the question of State having zero political sense. Osama
bin Laden is a Saudi by birth. Saudi citizens blew up the National Guard facility in 1995 and
the Khobar barracks in 1996. Two Saudis hijacked a plane to Baghdad in 2000. Saudis almost
certainly were behind the attack on the
Cole
. Saudis were involved in hundreds of other
terrorist attacks, from Chechnya to Kenya and Tanzania. How much more evidence did the State
Department need to figure out that Saudis were the world’s new terrorists and needed to be
tightly screened and interviewed? The way they ran Visa Express, Osama himself could have
slipped through.

    It wasn’t only visas, though. The State Department gave the Saudi
rulers a pass on almost everything. It shielded the Saudis from human-rights groups. It
supported them in the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. It dismissed the National
Guard and Khobar attacks as aberrations. Take, for instance, the State Department’s 1999
report: “Patterns of Global Terrorism.” The section for Saudi Arabia reads: “The Saudi Arabian
Government, at all levels, continued to reaffirm its commitment to combating terrorism.” Having
set a tone of dissembling, the report goes on: “The Government of Saudi Arabia continued to
investigate the bombing in June 1996 of the Khobar Towers.” We know the last was a whopper.
Na’if never lifted a finger to get to the bottom of it. But a lot else was going on in 1999
that State didn’t want us to know about. That year Na’if released from prison two clerics who
had issued fatwas to kill Americans. One of them, Safar al-Hawali, inspired bin Laden. At the
same time, the fifteen Saudi hijackers were apparently being recruited and indoctrinated in
Saudi mosques. So much for Saudi Arabia’s “commitment.”

    State never told the truth to Americans heading to Saudi Arabia.
Dependents of American citizens were never advised to leave. Saudi Arabia was never warned to
cooperate on terrorism. When I used to say to my State colleagues that the kingdom might one
day collapse, they would sneer, “There are no problems,” then fling at me the old Saudi line:
“The royal family is like the fingers of a hand. Threaten it, and they become a fist.” Catchy,
to be sure, but the reality is that when the Al Sa’ud are threatened these days, they pony up
more money for the fanatics, and State hands out more visas.

    State not only turned a blind eye to Saudi Arabia’s radical Islamic
foreign policy, it occasionally abetted it. State knew that Saudi Arabia’s plan to run gas and
oil pipelines across Afghanistan, from Central Asia to Pakistan, would help the Taliban stay in
power and ensure that bin Laden had a safe haven. Nonetheless, State went along, even
encouraging an American company, Unocal, to participate.

    I got a short course in Afghan pipeline politics on February 4, 1997,
when I was introduced to [text omitted] for the Afghan pipeline. He had been sent by the State
Department and the National Security Council to give me an update on Unocal’s scheme. In spite
of the ongoing civil war and the Taliban’s tightening grip on Afghanistan, Unocal intended to
proceed with both pipelines. It calculated that running a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to
Pakistan was going to cost $2 billion. A parallel oil pipeline would add another $2.5 billion.
Putting this kind of money in a country in the throes of a civil war seemed to me like a risky
investment. I asked [text omitted]if Unocal was nervous.

    [text omitted] looked at me for a couple of seconds as if I were a dim
bulb. “With U.S. government guarantees and the World Bank putting up the money, no,” he said.
“We’re not stupid enough to do this on our own.”

    [text omitted] was right when he said Unocal wasn’t alone. J. P. Morgan
and Cambridge Energy Research had prepared a study on government-to-government payment
structures in order to secure a World Bank loan. Unocal also roped in former U.S. ambassador
Bob Oakley, one of Saudi Arabia’s best friends in Washington. A slew of corporate giants were
promised a piece of the action, including Fluor Daniel. Unocal had official blessing.

    A week later, on February 13, 1997, [text omitted] was in Afghanistan
talking to the Taliban. They demanded that Unocal build a road from Torghundi to Spin Boldak
and invest money in the Kandahar schools - no doubt mosque schools. I have no idea whether
Unocal ever built the road, but if it did, I wonder if bin Laden used it to escape.

    Even after the 1998 attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and
Tanzania, organized by bin Laden from Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia continued to aid his host, the
Taliban. In July 2000
Petroleum Intelligence Weekly
, the bible of the international
petroleum industry, reported that Saudi Arabia was sending as many as 150,000 barrels of oil a
day to Afghanistan and Pakistan in off-the-books foreign aid. This tactic - sending free oil in
lieu of cash - was an established Saudi precedent. Turkey, Pakistan, and Morocco were similarly
helped in the early 1990s, and Bahrain was getting its own daily 150,000 barrels in an
acknowledged aid deal. We can only guess what motivated the House of Sa’ud to spend all this
money when it was running a crippling deficit. According to press reports, beginning in the
mid-1970s, Saudi Arabia poured over $1 billion into Pakistan to help it develop an “Islamic”
nuclear bomb to counter the “Hindu” nuclear threat from neighboring India. The House of Sa’ud
managed to keep that bit of foreign adventurism hidden from its American allies until well into
the early 1990s.

    Covert Saudi Arabian aid to the Taliban, which amounted to hundreds of
millions of dollars, continued right through the attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon. Still the State Department didn’t protest. So I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that
State was waiving visa interviews right through September 11, 2001. You want to see the U.S.A.?
Fine, drop us a postcard when you get there. And by the way, have a bang-up time.

    The CIA let State take the lead in this waltz. No stranger to
Washington politics, the CIA decided that the safest bet was to ignore Saudi Arabia by cleverly
pretending it was a U.S. domestic problem, and thus by statute not in its jurisdiction. CIA
directors had picked up long ago that the door to the Oval Office was always open to Saudi
ambassador Bandar bin Sultan and not to them. While the country’s chief spymasters waited for
months to get a face-to-face, all Bandar had to do to see the president was hit the speed dial.
The joke in the directorate of operations during the Clinton years was that if the director
would only take his cue from Bandar and show up with a box of the president’s favorite Cuban
cigars, he would be invited back more often. Years later, Clinton’s first CIA director, Jim
Woolsey, would tell me that when a nut flew a plane into the White House, the joke at 1600
Pennsylvania Avenue was that it was Woolsey trying to get in to see the president.
Incidentally, Woolsey was one of the few CIA directors to come out and tell the truth about the
kingdom.

    Bandar was not someone to be joked with, even by the president’s CIA
director. If Bandar suspected the CIA was undermining the kingdom in any way, he would complain
to the president, then let loose a pack of rabid K Street lobbyists on the agency. Let’s say
some case officer in Berlin decided to “pitch” a Saudi diplomat, or try to recruit him to spy
for the CIA. Recruited, the Saudi would be able to tell the CIA what, for instance, the
religious-affairs section of the embassy in Berlin was doing, like maybe funding terrorist
cells in Hamburg. Instead, assume the Saudi turned down the pitch and reported it to Riyadh.
The case officer would hear the crystal breaking all the way from Berlin. As soon as the
president put down the phone and recovered his hearing from Bandar’s screeching, there’d be a
call from a lobbyist, maybe one of the president’s old political chums. “Mr. President,” the
lobbyist would purr into the phone. “We really must keep a better eye on those cowboys out at
Langley. You know we have this big Boeing deal coming up, and if Bandar…” Act Three opens
twenty-four hours later with the young case officer on an airplane back to Washington to start
his new job: handing out towels in the CIA’s basement gym.

    Cowed by the same unspoken fears, the CIA’s directorate of intelligence
avoided writing National Intelligence Estimates on Saudi Arabia. It knew that NIEs - appraisals
drawn from across the intelligence community, including the CIA, the Defense Intelligence
Agency, and elsewhere - often find their way onto the front pages of U.S. newspapers and from
there on to Bandar’s breakfast tray, next to his fresh rose, croissant, and cup of Earl Grey
tea. The directorate also knew the president hated reading bad news about the kingdom. It was
one thing for Rwanda to go in the toilet, but not his good friends the Al Sa’ud. So I guess the
CIA was on to something when it treated Saudi Arabia like a domestic problem.

    So what do the Saudis have on the president, or the State Department?
I’ll start by saying I don’t believe in conspiracies; I don’t think Washington has ever been
able to keep a secret. It’s something a lot more subtle and insidious. It’s what I call a
consent of silence, or, more politely, deference. (A circumlocution preferred by certain
ex-ambassadors to Riyadh who have chosen to turn a blind eye to the kingdom’s dissolution.) It
all begins with fast money, a category in which I include cheap oil. Saudi Arabia has lots of
money and lots of oil. The country also proved over and over that it was willing to spend it,
as well as open the oil spigots anytime we asked. With a national capital addicted to fast
money and cheap oil, complaining about the situation was considered bad form, like pissing in
the village well. No one wanted to hear it, and no one wanted to do anything about it. The only
people willing to tell the truth were on the political fringe, and they were smugly dismissed
as cranks.

    

    

    IF YOU’VE EVER SPENT serious time in the Middle East, you know it’s
virtually impossible to pick up a tab. What usually happens at the end of dinner is that your
Arab friend pretends he’s going to the bathroom but veers off to corral the maître d’, pull him
out of sight, and pay. It’s done so smoothly, you don’t notice a thing. Another trick is for
your friend to make sure you end up at a restaurant where he knows the owner: Then there’s no
way you can pay. Among Levantines, this ritual about who pays for dinner is a sign of
hospitality; rarely does it involve any sort of quid pro quo. For the Saudis and rich Gulf
Arabs, it’s a matter of buying and selling people. If you hold yourself out as an alpha dog,
you have to pick up the tab to remind the other dogs where they fall in the pack.

    During the lead-in to the Gulf War, I was in Paris and got to see this
money ritual up close. One night I invited four prominent Kuwaiti opposition leaders to dinner
at the Ritz Hotel, maybe Paris’s fanciest. (Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed had their final tryst
there before they died in a car accident later that night.) The Ritz was normally too pricy for
my CIA expense account, but the gritty charm of my usual Paris dives would have been wasted on
the Kuwaitis. They may not have been royals, but they were fabulously rich.