Inside the Kingdom (43 page)

“That’s the moment the U.S. knew they had a problem,” remembers one of the Saudis involved.

“Hey, you guys scared us,” said Powell to Bandar.

“The hell with you,” replied the prince. “We scared ourselves.”

The Saudis had expected that the White House would take four or five days to get back to them. In the event, George W. Bush’s personal, two-page letter of conciliation arrived in less than thirty-six hours—and it was a revelation.

“What came through,” commented one surprised Saudi, “was the humane part of George W. He was very, very positive.”

Writing warmly, the president totally accepted Abdullah’s point about the blood of innocent people—“Palestinian, Israeli, Jewish, Christian, or Muslim”—and he told the crown prince that he rejected the humiliation of individuals, which the Saudi leader took to be a response to his complaint about the Israeli soldier’s boot. Most important of all, the president set down quite explicitly his acceptance of the “Two-State Solution”—the creation of a viable Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

This was new—“groundbreaking,” felt the Saudis. No U.S. president had given such a strong commitment before, and it staked out a U.S. position that was clearly different from that of Sharon. Bush’s letter had “things in it,” according to someone who saw it, “[that] had never been put in writing. He wrote constructively about the status of Jerusalem and the settlement of the refugee issue. He actually said, ‘I support two states.’ ”

The letter offered the prospect of a peace settlement with which the Saudis could live, and Bandar carried it back to Riyadh to discuss its contents personally with Abdullah. The U.S. president had even expressed a willingness to take a more active role in the peace process himself.

In the days that followed Abdullah got in touch with other Arab leaders—the presidents of Egypt and Syria and the king of Jordan—to share the good news. He briefed them on his message, and on the personal reply that his protest had prompted. He summoned Yasser Arafat from a visit to South Africa to come and read both documents: when Abdullah felt stirred to action, nothing much stood in his way. He got Arafat to give a written pledge that he would meet Bush’s conditions for restarting peace talks.

“ ‘This is your last chance,’ we told him,” according to Bandar. “ ‘You can’t screw it up like you did with Clinton.’ ”

Arafat’s pledge was sent to Washington with the crown prince’s own response to Bush’s letter, and by early September Bandar was back in Washington, working out the details. On Friday, September 7, his U.S. counterparts seemed ready to move on a peace initiative, and over the weekend he discussed definite steps—a speech by Colin Powell, by Bush himself (the Saudis’ preferred option), or possibly both. Yasser Arafat was coming to the UN later in the month; Would Bush agree to meet him? The president did not like the idea.

“Arafat is a liar,” he complained.

“We know that he’s a liar,” responded the Saudis. No one in Riyadh liked Arafat. Cabinet members knew they were in disfavor when the king assigned them to escort the Palestinian leader on one of his regular fund-raising trips—“I had him once for nearly a week,” recalls one minister with a shudder. “All those kisses and licks!”

Bush should hear out what the Palestinian said, the Saudis counseled, then hold him to whatever he promised

“If he goes back on himself,” said Bandar, “we won’t trouble you with him again.”

“Suddenly,” remembered the Saudi ambassador, “I felt . . . that we really were going to have a major initiative here that could save all of us from ourselves—mostly—and from each other. . . . The happiest man in the world on Monday night was Bandar bin Sultan. I was in the swimming pool [of his palatial residence in McLean, Virginia] smoking a cigar. I gave myself a day off because I had worked the whole weekend. I had been to Saudi Arabia . . . out with the [Bush] response, back with our response. I worked on the weekend up to three o’clock, four o’clock in the morning . . . I worked all Monday. And I said to my office, ‘Tuesday, I’m taking the day off.’ ”

Tuesday was September 11, 2001.

PART THREE

AL-QAEDA COMES HOME

A.D. 2001-2009 (A.H. 1422-1430)

If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.

—Guiseppe di Lampedusa,
The Leopard

CHAPTER 24

Fifteen Flying Saudis

P
rince Khaled Al-Faisal saw the smoke from the first hit pouring out of the tower on television.

“I was in a meeting in Riyadh with three other people,” he recalls. “The TV was on CNN, and when I saw the smoke coming out, I put the sound up higher. The commentator said that a small plane had hit the twin towers. I was just thinking that it looked like a lot of smoke for a small plane to make, when suddenly—Oh my God, what’s this?—I saw the second plane, a huge airliner, come flying sideways into the picture. I actually watched as that second plane flew straight into the tower and exploded.”

The broadcaster’s tone changed.

“It was quite clear to me,” says the prince, who was then governor of the southern region of Asir—from which, it turned out, four of the hijackers came—“that this could not be an accident. It was a deliberate attack. I turned to my companions and said, ‘Look at your watches. What’s the time? Everything is going to change. We live now in a different world from the one we inhabited an hour ago.’ ”

Then he added—“I only hope these men are not Saudis.”

Khaled Al-Hubayshi hoped the very opposite. On September 11, 2001, the young Jeddah-born jihadi was staying in an Al-Qaeda guesthouse in Kabul, holding his little Sony portable radio clamped against his ear. Like hundreds of other young extremists then training in Afghanistan, he was listening as reports came in of the very
first
plane hitting its target. They had all been told that “something” was about to happen.

“The leader of our guesthouse had told us to start listening to our radios a couple of hours before it happened,” he recalls. “He knew something was coming, but he did not tell us what it would be. He probably did not know himself. I later heard that the guys on the first Boston plane [Mohammed Atta and his team] sent back a message to report they had gotten through the airport security and were getting on board. So Bin Laden knew that the operation had started. As the news came through we could not believe it. Everyone was around the big radios cheering. We had never imagined that we had the power to hit America like that.

“But after a time, as I heard the stories of people jumping out of the towers, I began to wonder. All those thousands of civilians dead. What had this got to do with defending the Muslims? And then I started to think about my own survival—Am I going to stay? Am I going to fight?”

Like Prince Khaled in Riyadh, Al-Hubayshi realized that life could never be the same again.

“The moment we heard about the attacks on New York we knew, sure as hell, that the
Yanqees
were not going to take it lying down. They were going to come after us.

“Shit! I wondered. What’s going to happen next?”

Fouad Al-Farhan, a young student in Jeddah, had little doubt that the hijackers were Saudis, and when the names were released he tried to find out more about them—particularly the Al-Ghamdi boys, Ahmed, Hamza, and Saeed from Al-Baha, north of Asir.

“I had heard strange things about them,” he recalls. “One of them slept in a room with a view of a graveyard right outside his window—now why did he do that? It’s not natural. And the other was famous for coming out of evening prayers and pointing up at the sky. ‘You see that star?’ he’d say. ‘I can tell you that it’s not a star. It’s an American spy satellite. It’s looking down on us. It’s filming us right now.’

“So, based on what I can discover, my explanation of 9/11 is down to defective human mechanisms—wackos. And every human society has wackos. But we have to accept that most of them were Saudi wackos. Fifteen out of nineteen. We cannot shift the blame. If you subject a society to all those pressures—the rigid religion, the tribe, the law, the traditions, the family, the police, and, above all, the oppressive political system in which you can’t express yourself—you are going to end up with wackos. And if you then present them with the doctrine of takfeer, the idea that all their problems come from outside themselves, and that you should try to destroy people who do not share your own particular view of God, then you are going to end up with some folks who are very dangerous indeed.”