Inside the Kingdom (56 page)

Then America invaded Iraq, and suddenly Moscow became the object of another of Prince Abdullah’s pioneering foreign visits. The competitors discovered that they were really collaborators, controlling between them no less than 26 percent of the world’s known oil reserves and 31 percent of the gas. Since his accession to power in the late 1990s, Abdullah had been pursuing an ambitious pet project, his Oil and Gas Initiative, intended to encourage foreign investment in the development of new Saudi energy resources, including petrochemical and desalinization plants. Negotiations had not gone well with the largely American-led consortiums, particularly after 9/11, and had been broken off in the weeks following the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which, in the eyes of many Arabs, had been about nothing so much as the forcible laying of American hands on Arab oil. In January 2004 it was announced that Lukoil, a private Russian energy enterprise, along with some Chinese and European oil companies (Sinopec, Eni, Rep-sol YPF, Royal Dutch Shell, and TotalFinaElf) would now fill the space left by Exxon Mobil, Phillips, Marathon, Conoco, and Occidental.

Within months, Luksar, the joint venture formed by Saudi Aramco and Lukoil (with a $2 billion Russian investment) had gone to work, starting its first prospecting by the time Vladimir Putin arrived in Riyadh early in 2007. The Russian president set the tone for his visit with a speech delivered at the annual Munich Conference on Security Policy on his journey down from Moscow. Russia had had enough, he said, of the “unipolar world” created by America’s “almost uncontained hyper-use of force . . . airily participating in military operations” to impose its policies on other nations. “Who,” he asked, “is happy about this?”

Two days later Abdullah welcomed the Russian president to Riyadh, hailing him as “a statesman, a man of peace, a man of justice.” As befitted a man of peace, Putin offered Saudi Arabia a shopping list of Russian military technology—150 T-90 battle tanks, 100 attack and transport helicopters, 20 mobile air-defense systems, and a large number of armored personnel carriers, along with a proposal to help with the development of nuclear technology. To round off the warm and successful visit—Russia, it was noted, had always supported the cause of the Palestinians—Abdullah presented Putin with the Kingdom’s highest honor, the King Abdul Aziz Medal. At that date this medal had been presented to only two other foreign leaders, China’s President Hu and Jacques Chirac of France, who had led the United Nations campaign to halt Bush’s Iraqi invasion. It was difficult to think of a more satisfyingly anti-American trio.
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Catholic or Muslim, the old U.S.-Saudi special relationship had clearly become history, and a typically Saudi mix-up confirmed it. In July 2005 Prince Bandar bin Sultan resigned as Saudi ambassador to Washington, exhausted and disillusioned by what had become an impossible challenge. After inviting hundreds of friends and colleagues to a farewell party, he abruptly canceled it and vanished, as unpredictable in departure as he had been in his long tenure—to be replaced by his cousin and brother-in-law, Prince Turki Al-Faisal, the former intelligence chief who had been serving as ambassador to London since the departure of Ghazi Algosaibi. It was Turki who, more than a quarter of a century earlier, had first suggested that Bandar, then a young fighter pilot recently married to his sister Haifa, might do well in Washington as an advocate for Saudi causes.

When Turki arrived in the stand-alone, castlelike Saudi embassy beside the Watergate complex that September there was already a strategy in place for mending the broken relationship between the Kingdom and America—a “strategic dialogue” of U.S.-Saudi working groups to address the multitude of practical dislocations that had followed 9/11. These ranged from counterterrorism and business breakdowns to the strangling of U.S. visa procedures by the new Department of Homeland Security. Insensitive security restrictions had virtually extinguished the flow of Saudi students to U.S. universities and had also made entry into America an offensive and humiliating process for even the most respectable of Saudis. Six different working groups would be staffed by upper-level Saudi and U.S. officials who would meet face-to-face twice a year, alternately in Washington and Riyadh, and would maintain contact between meetings, hoping to build up the routine working relationships that had been neglected in Bandar’s years of “room at the top” diplomacy.

“Now we would know who to call,” explained a Saudi diplomat who was much involved in this reconstruction process.

On the public front, Turki accepted every invitation to appear on U.S. radio and TV shows, from Fox to NPR, calmly answering the most aggressive questions, including many about his own personal role in events—he was the Saudi official, after all, who had tried and failed first to contain, then to recapture Osama Bin Laden. Alongside this painstaking media campaign, for which he also recruited the onetime Salafi and campaigning journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the prince embarked on a grueling schedule of visits to grassroots America, accepting invitations to speak at universities and on the country’s rubber-chicken circuit of Rotary clubs and Kiwanis lodges, an unglamorous public diplomacy effort intended slowly to convert the views of the average American—“Joe Six-Pack,” as Bandar liked to call him.

The trouble was that Bandar could not keep his fingers out of the pie. The flamboyant prince seemed to be only happy while being indispensable. Back in Riyadh, Bandar had taken charge of a recently-revealed but long-planned National Security Council on the U.S. model whose function, it soon turned out, was to keep the ex-ambassador at the center of events, giving him important reasons to jet to London, Beijing, and Moscow, still carrying messages for the king—and still traveling, quite frequently, on high-level missions to Washington.

For more than a quarter of a century, Turki’s full brother Saud Al-Faisal, the foreign minister, had accepted Bandar’s wholesale trampling on his personal bailliwick, but Turki was not so tolerant. He had been given charge of Saudi policy in Washington, only to discover his brother-in-law flying in regularly to cozy up to his old pals in the Bush administration.

It was not a matter of Turki’s personal embarrassment—which he denied on the record, and, indeed, off the record. He had no problem, he said, with Bandar or anyone else carrying personal messages for the king. He well understood how the Saudi system worked, and he had himself carried royal messages in his days as intelligence chief. But it was embarrassing for lesser Saudi officials when they went to see a senior U.S. official to be asked whether they were “with Bandar or with Turki?” There were serious matters of foreign policy at stake. As the Bush administration increased its drumbeat of aggression toward Iran in the autumn of 2006, Turki was arguing for calm, hoping against hope that war might be avoided.

“For the United States not to talk to Iran,” he said, “is a mistake.”

In this Turki was voicing the official policy set by his brother Saud, who, the previous year, had called for the United States to engage in talks with Iran rather than indulging in threats. The Saudi foreign minister pointed out that if the Bush administration was now alarmed by the increasing regional influence of Iran they had only themselves to blame for “handing over Iraq on a golden platter.”

Bandar bin Sultan, however, was saying something much more to the taste of his friends inside the White House, and in particular of Dick Cheney, whose confrontational instincts Bandar shared. The prince had supported the neocon attack on Iraq, and now he encouraged the United States to get tough with Iran—a message that the administration greatly preferred to being publicly lectured by the Al-Faisal brothers. George W. Bush knew what he wanted to hear, and if it came straight from Riyadh on a plane via an old friend who had just come from the king, it surely carried more weight than the disapproving comments of a locally based ambassador whom he did not know so well.

This all came at the same time as a financial crisis in the embassy that spoke to the endemic Saudi confusion between public and private, along with the Kingdom’s deficiencies in administrative skills. For many years the large Saudi delegation in Washington had been running over budget, and Abdullah had ordered a cutback, in line with his attempts to impose financial discipline throughout government affairs. Bandar had blithely ignored the cutback—or had, rather, accepted the cutback, then made up the difference by deploying the lavish funds that poured monthly into his local Riggs Bank account from the Al-Yamamah project. The prince’s multimillion-dollar support for his country’s foreign service in Washington was one of the reasons he felt so confident in dismissing the accusations of corruption against him.

Turki Al-Faisal, however, had no Al-Yamamah slush fund. He did his best when he arrived in Washington to introduce economies—it was not difficult to conduct business in a less lordly style than his predecessor—but there were many commitments that he could not cut quickly. Qorvis Communications, the embassy’s principal public relations adviser, and other suppliers were owed large sums of money that had mounted up over the months. Turki’s appeals to Riyadh for help fell on deaf ears. Following budget overruns in both the intelligence service and the London embassy during the times of Turki’s tenure, Abdullah had a poor opinion of his nephew’s financial acumen. More important, he declined to back Turki in his turf war with Bandar.

The king held no special brief for his bumptious national security adviser. He would, on a later occasion, show no hesitation in slapping Bandar down when he felt that the prince had stepped out of line. But now Abdullah effectively took Bandar’s side, refusing to extend Turki, his designated and incredibly hardworking official representative, any sort of helping hand. Perhaps the king agreed with Bandar that the United States should exert some pressure on Iran. Perhaps he was quite happy that mixed messages should be delivered to America. Perhaps—and this is the most likely explanation—Abdullah simply chose not to make a decision between the two cousins and felt that Turki should “get over it.”

The son of King Faisal did not see it that way. The Al-Faisal (sons of Faisal) conduct themselves as aristocrats inside an already aristocratic clan. The news of Turki’s resignation became public in December 2006, not much more than a year after he had started the job. Graceful to the end, the retiring ambassador declined to go into details. He insisted that he was leaving for personal, not political reasons, and with the full agreement of the king. But what was certain was that in just eighteen months, two senior and very talented princes—among the most able in the family—had given up on the unpalatable job of trying to represent Saudi Arabia in America.

. . .

If 9/11 took the special out of the U.S.-Saudi “special relationship,” the U.S. invasion of Iraq killed it stone dead—for the time being, at least. Oil for security had always been the basis of the pact, but Iraq produced the very opposite of that. From being a guarantor of safety, George W. Bush’s United States turned out to be a provider of chaos and jeopardy.

Oilwise, in 2002 Saudi Arabia ceased granting the discounted shipping rates with which it had for decades favored the successor companies of Socal, Texaco, Esso, and Mobil, the four U.S. oil majors that had made up the original, prenationalization components of Aramco. U.S. companies now had to pay the same price as everyone else, and the Kingdom rapidly ceased to be the United States’ foremost oil provider. By 2006, that honor went to Canada, at 2.3 million barrels per day, followed by Mexico at 1.7 million. At 1.4 million barrels per day, Saudi Arabia competed for the honor of third place with that other good friend of the United States, Venezuela.

Oil was the main item on the agenda when Bush and Abdullah met at Crawford, Texas, for a second time, on April 25, 2005. Scarcely noticed in the months following 9/11, the price of oil had started to creep upward. The invasion and chaos in Iraq had intensified that trend, so that, at $55 a barrel, a gallon of gas was costing $2.42 in the United States, well on its way to double the $1.41 level when the two men had met three years earlier.

This second encounter became notorious for the picture of the two leaders walking hand in hand as Bush shepherded Abdullah through his garden to the ranch building where they were to meet—the weird intimacy of the gesture being so obviously at odds with the two men’s clash of interests that it seemed to sum up Bush’s cluelessness. Bush wanted Saudi Arabia to use its pumping power to flood the world market and bring down the price per barrel, but Adel Al-Jubeir, Abdullah’s spokesman, pointed out the fallacy in that. The Kingdom could send a million or more extra barrels to America tomorrow, he said, but America did not have the refineries to process it. Saudi Arabia had been investing in new production, but the West—and America, in particular, had not been building refineries to match.

So the other half of the equation did not work either. America could not guarantee security and the Saudis could no longer guarantee cheap oil. It seemed scarcely surprising when, ignoring the media furor over the Al-Yamamah deal, the Kingdom turned back to Britain in 2007 to provide its new generation of high-tech fighter combat aircraft, a long-term contract worth some $40 billion, thus locking out U.S. manufacturers for the foreseeable future. “You go Uruguay” had come about with a vengeance—though the special relationship had an ally at its heart that might not have been expected.