Inside the Kingdom (21 page)

Saudi intelligence had a strong presence on the minuscule, theoretically independent offshore island that was in the process of being connected to the Saudi mainland by a six-lane causeway. The Mabahith were on the lookout for young Saudis who had taken Iranian money and might be willing to abet the ayatollahs’ openly hostile attitude to the Kingdom.

“I had long hair, and the Bahrainis cut it off and stuffed it down my underpants. They also hit me round the head. But that was nothing to what the Saudis did when they got hold of me. The Mabahith kept beating and beating me on the soles of my feet. I couldn’t walk for a week. When they broke one stick, they brought a new one, and when the beating was over, they kept me standing up and awake day after day, night after night. They would not let me sleep. After ten days I gave in and signed what they asked for—a confession that I belonged to the IRO. Straightaway the beatings stopped and they let me go to sleep. That was the end of it. All they’d wanted was that piece of paper. I should have confessed on the first day.”

In the course of two years in jail, Ali made many new Shia friends.

“A lot of them had done nothing wrong. None of us had made any plans for bombings or shootings. We were not training or planning for violence. It was crazy to lock us up. At night in my cell I remember hearing men screaming for hours from the beatings. My cousin, the son of my father’s sister, lost his mind completely. They let him out early, but he has never been the same again. It was horrible. Shia are usually pretty quiet, conservative guys. But when we came out, it was hard to feel great kindness toward King Fahd and his son.”

Mohammed bin Fahd faced an uphill task as he took up his Eastern Province duties in 1984, for the general bitterness that lingered from the intifada of ’79 had been assiduously stoked by pamphlets and broadcasts from Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian government. The ayatollah made no secret of his wish to discomfit Saudi authority, and he viewed the Shia worshippers in the Qateef area—around a third of the local population
¹²
—as potential allies to his cause. In these years Radio Tehran broadcast regular appeals to Saudi Shias to rise in revolt against their princely “oppressors.”

Khomeini particularly resented Saudi claims to the guardianship of the holy places. Since 1980, Iran’s now revolutionary pilgrims had been using their annual hajj to promote their cause in Mecca, smuggling in posters of the ayatollah and brandishing them outside the Grand Mosque while shouting derisive slogans. “Fahd, the Israeli Shah” was a favorite. These essentially political demonstrations offended Saudi sensitivities, and, indeed, the feelings of many other Muslims, who felt that the pilgrimage was not the place for advancing the Khomeini cult of personality.

Then in 1986 a consignment of luggage from Tehran was found to include suitcases whose false bottoms had been packed with plastic explosives, and Mohammed bin Fahd was not inclined to take chances. How could he tell which of the local Shia were sleeping with the enemy? IRO followers inside the Kingdom started to feel the heat again, especially since their leaders, Sheikh Hassan and his lieutenants, were all living in Iran with the blessing and support of the Iranian government.

“I heard that my friends were getting taken in for questioning,” remembers Ali Al-Marzouq, “and I was not ready for two more wasted years—so much time erased from my life. When I had been in jail before, I was not allowed to read. There were no books. I’d just sat there day after day with my mind going round. Never again—and in 1986 I had just gotten married. So I talked about it with my wife and we decided we would leave. We got fake passports, and drove up to Kuwait. From there we flew to Syria. We both knew it would be a long time. We cried from the bottom of our hearts as we were leaving, but once we had crossed the border I said, ‘OK. This is a new life.’ ”

That did not prove the end of Ali Al-Marzouq’s travels. In August 1987 the Iranian demonstrations on the pilgrimage escalated one further and fatal step. Excited Iranians paraded through Mecca proclaiming “God is great! Khomeini is leader!” violating Islamic tradition by carrying knives and sticks beneath their pilgrim towels, according to Egyptian pilgrims who managed to escape the massacre that followed. A total of 275 Iranians, 85 Saudis, and 42 pilgrims of other nationalities were killed, most of them trampled to death in the pileup that resulted from the attempts by the Ministry of the Interior Special Forces to check the demonstration, which had been called by Mehdi Karrubi, Ayatollah Khomeini’s personal representative in Mecca. The Saudi government refused to condemn their soldiers’ actions. Preserving the peace at Islam’s greatest annual gathering was a responsibility they took very seriously. They had no doubt that the Iranian Shia were responsible for the tragedy—and Khomeini responded with fury. He denounced the House of Saud as murderers and called on all loyal Shia in the Kingdom to rise up and overthrow them.

Hassan Al-Saffar and the IRO had had no involvement in the Mecca tragedy, nor had any Shia from the east. But Khomeini’s incitement to revolt put them in an impossible position—they were forced to take sides.

“We were not willing to be the tool of a foreign government,” remembers Sheikh Hassan today. “There were a number of people in authority in Iran who wanted to recruit us against the Saudi government. They came to us—they made quite a few approaches to us. But we told them that we wished to remain independent.”

His aide Jaffar Shayeb did the political talking on the sheikh’s behalf.

“We listened to what they said,” says Shayeb of the Iranians. “But we were never willing to be part of their games.”

From the moment of his arrival in Iran, Al-Saffar had made clear his disagreement with the most radical of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s ideas—the doctrine that the ulema (religious scholars) are qualified not simply to advise the ruler, but to exercise government in their own right. This is the revolutionary concept—Khomeini’s own—that justifies Iran’s “government of the godly.” The executive power held by Iran’s clerics sets Iran apart from any Muslim government in history, and the doctrine was perceived as deeply subversive by the House of Saud. Sheikh Hassan Al-Saffar agreed with Riyadh.

“This is not in the Koran, nor in the Prophet’s teachings in the Hadith,” he says. “The scholars give advice to the ruler. They do not rule.”

Al-Saffar gave the order for his followers to leave Iran, and the Saudi Shia were once again on their travels. They could not stay in Iran, but they could not return home either. Late in 1987 the entire community of exiles started packing their bags and dispersed to Syria, Cyprus, London, and Washington.

Ali Al-Marzouq was sent to Cyprus to coordinate the IRO’s press activities, where he and his wife survived on a meager stipend from the organization, plus whatever help their families could send them.

“Sometimes the money arrived,” Ali remembers. “Sometimes it didn’t. If we were lucky, we could afford one chicken per month. My wife became very good at cooking biryani—with lots of rice.”

Back in the Kingdom, meanwhile, Prince Mohammed bin Fahd continued with his program of Eastern Province reform and infrastructure building—though in the absence of senior Shia figures he could hardly accomplish the high-level talking and conciliation for which his father wished. Saudi Arabia was not operating in a vacuum. It was living in a dangerous neighborhood where people and events outside its borders could have unforeseen consequences back home.

CHAPTER 12

The Dove and the East Wind

W
hen Prince Khaled bin Sultan was studying air-defense tactics in the early 1980s at the Air War College in Maxwell, Alabama, he regularly took part in war games. A few years later he found himself on the edge of the real thing. On June 6, 1984, the prince was flying in a helicopter over the port of Jubail in eastern Saudi Arabia when his radio picked up the voice of an Iranian fighter pilot who was talking excitedly to his base. The Iranian had just flown his F-4 fighter onto the wrong side of the “Fahd line,” the air frontier that the Saudis had defined down the center of the Gulf as the Iran-Iraq War heated up.

The purpose of the Fahd line was to provide Saudi air defenses with more reaction time. Unauthorized planes that crossed the line would be shot down, Riyadh had warned, and this pilot had already been given two warnings. Alerted by their AWACS patrols, manned at that time by U.S. Air Force personnel, the Saudi Air Force had already put two of their own F-15 fighters in the air. When the Iranian ignored their requests and kept his plane plowing onward toward the Saudi coast—and the Saudi oil fields—the reaction was uncompromising. One of the F-15s shot the intruder down. The Iranian’s radio cut off as his fighter spiraled down into the sea.

It was a crisp and effective Saudi victory, but it raised worrying issues. The dogfight was part of what became known as the “Tanker War,” in which Iranian planes menaced ships that were carrying oil not only from Iraq but from Iraq’s two major allies and bankers, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. This was a threat to the entire world economy—any trouble in the Straits of Hormuz could disrupt oil supplies for weeks—and King Fahd sent an urgent appeal to the White House. The Reagan administration responded promptly, shipping four hundred short-range ground-to-air Stinger missiles to Riyadh, along with an air force aerial tanker that could extend the patrolling and fighting distance of the Saudi fighter planes.

But the president had sold these weapons to Saudi Arabia without consulting Congress, and the lawmakers were furious. The Stingers were particularly effective missiles. What if the Saudis passed on a few to their Palestinian friends? When the Kingdom presented a formal application later that summer to purchase a range of weaponry that included advanced F-15 fighter jets and Lance surface-to-surface missiles, the reaction was hostile. Israel made clear that it did not want to see such powerful weaponry in Saudi hands. The Kingdom had been obstructive of the Camp David process, and there was a widespread perception that, sooner or later, the Al-Saud would go the way of the Shah.

The pro-Israeli grouping that Bandar bin Sultan had so narrowly out-maneuvered to secure the AWACS sale four years earlier regrouped with renewed determination. This time the Saudi sale would not pass. In 1985 the chances of Ronald Reagan actually accomplishing the downfall of the “Evil Empire” still seemed less than plausible, even to those who agreed with his ambitions, and the Saudi contribution to America’s secret wars remained hidden by necessity. The president could not, for example, reveal that the pro-Palestinian Kingdom of Saudi Arabia had, with his blessing, already purchased Stinger missiles by the hundreds and then passed them on to the freedom fighters of Angola and Afghanistan.

The Saudi arms package stalled in Congress, and in February 1985 Reagan reluctantly admitted defeat. To procure their planes, Bandar and his father, Prince Sultan, the defense minister, turned to Mrs. Thatcher’s Britain, where, within months, they negotiated a multibillion-pound package—the Al-Yamamah deal—to acquire Tornado fighter-bombers and other weaponry, and also to build some military bases.

“That woman,” Bandar liked to say of the British prime minister, “was a hell of a man.”

At the time, the Al-Yamamah contract was said to be worth some $5 billion. By the year 2000 it had escalated to tens of billions as air base construction and service contracts were written in—more than the Kingdom had by that date expended on every U.S. military purchase in its history.

“My friends, let me tell you, we are not masochists,” said Bandar, explaining to a group of McDonnell Douglas executives why the Saudis had so dramatically diverted their petrodollars away from the U.S. defense industry. “We don’t like to spend billions of dollars and get insulted in the process.”