SEYMOUR M. HERSH
KING'S RANSOM: How vulnerable are the Saudi royals?
Sat Oct 20 02:49:52 2001


 The New Yorker, October 22, 2001
 
 Annals of National Security -
 
 KING'S RANSOM: How vulnerable are the Saudi royals?
 by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
 
  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 Defence
 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 defence 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 cooperation 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 rivaled 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 cooperative," 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
 defence 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 tr