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"House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Families"
By Craig Unger
Scribner
368 pages
Nonfiction
Buy this book
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March 11, 2004 | Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States, had long been the most recognizable figure from his country in America. Widely known as the Arab Gatsby, with his trimmed goatee and tailored double-breasted suits, the 52-year-old Bandar was the very embodiment of the contradictions inherent in being a modern, jet-setting, Western-leaning member of the royal House of Saud.
Profane, flamboyant and cocksure, Bandar entertained lavishly at his spectacular estates all over the world. Whenever he was safely out of Saudi Arabia and beyond the reach of the puritanical form of Islam it espoused, he puckishly flouted Islamic tenets by sipping brandy and smoking Cohiba cigars. And when it came to embracing the culture of the infidel West, Bandar outdid even the most ardent admirers of Western civilization -- that was him patrolling the sidelines of Dallas Cowboys football games with his friend Jerry Jones, the team's owner. To militant Islamic fundamentalists who loathed pro-West multibillionaire Saudi royals, no one fit the bill better than Bandar.
And yet, his guise as Playboy of the Western World notwithstanding, deep in his bones, Prince Bandar was a key figure in the world of Islam. His father, Defense Minister Prince Sultan, was second in line to the Saudi crown. Bandar was the nephew of King Fahd, the aging Saudi monarch, and the grandson of the late king Abdul Aziz, the founder of modern Saudi Arabia, who initiated his country's historic oil-for-security relationship with the United States when he met Franklin D. Roosevelt on the USS Quincy in the Suez Canal on Feb. 14, 1945. The enormous royal family in which Bandar played such an important role oversaw two of the most sacred places of Islamic worship, the holy mosques in Medina and Mecca.
As a wily international diplomat, Bandar also knew full well just how precarious his family's position was. For decades, the House of Saud had somehow maintained control of Saudi Arabia and the world's richest oil reserves by performing a seemingly untenable balancing act with two parties who had vowed to destroy each other.
On the one hand, the House of Saud was an Islamic theocracy whose power grew out of the royal family's alliance with Wahhabi fundamentalism, a strident and puritanical Islamic sect that provided a fertile breeding ground for a global network of terrorists urging a violent jihad against the United States.
On the other hand, the House of Saud's most important ally was the Great Satan itself, the United States. Even a cursory examination of the relationship revealed astonishing contradictions: America, the beacon of democracy, was to arm and protect a brutal theocratic monarchy. The United States, sworn defender of Israel, was also the guarantor of security to the guardians of Wahhabi Islam, the fundamentalist religious sect that was one of Israel's and America's mortal enemies.
Astoundingly, this fragile relationship had not only endured but in many ways had been spectacularly successful. In the nearly three decades since the oil embargo of 1973, the United States had bought hundreds of billions of dollars of oil at reasonable prices. During that same period, the Saudis had purchased hundreds of billions of dollars of weapons from the U.S. The Saudis had supported the U.S. on regional security matters in Iran and Iraq and refrained from playing an aggressive role against Israel. Members of the Saudi royal family, including Bandar, became billionaires many times over, in the process quietly turning into some of the most powerful players in the American market, investing hundreds of billions of dollars in equities in the United States. And the price of oil, the eternal bellwether of economic, political and cultural anxiety in America, had remained low enough that enormous gas-guzzling SUVs had become ubiquitous on U.S. highways. During the Reagan and Clinton eras the economy boomed.
The relationship was a coarse weave of money, power and trust. It had lasted because two foes, militant Islamic fundamentalists and the United States, turned a blind eye to each other. The U.S. military might have called the policy "Don't ask, don't tell." The Koran had its own version: "Ask not about things which, if made plain to you, may cause you trouble."
But in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the ugly seams of the relationship had been laid bare. Because thousands of innocent people had been killed and most of the killers were said to be Saudi, it was up to Bandar, ever the master illusionist, to assure Americans that everything was just fine between the United States and Saudi Arabia. Bandar had always been a smooth operator, but now he and his unflappable demeanor would be tested as never before.
Bandar desperately hoped that early reports of the Saudi role had been exaggerated -- after all, al-Qaida terrorist operatives were known to use false passports. But at 10 P.M. on the evening of Sept. 12, 2001, about 36 hours after the attack, a high-ranking CIA official -- according to Newsweek, it was probably CIA director George Tenet -- phoned Bandar at his home and gave him the bad news: Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were Saudis. Afterward, Bandar said, "I felt as if the Twin Towers had just fallen on my head."
Public relations had never been more crucial for the Saudis. Bandar swiftly retained PR giant Burson-Marsteller to place newspaper ads all over the country condemning the attacks and dissociating Saudi Arabia from them. He went on CNN, the BBC and the major TV networks and hammered home the same points again and again: The alliance with the United States was still strong. Saudi Arabia would support America in its fight against terrorism.
Prince Bandar also protested media reports that referred to those involved in terrorism as "Saudis." Asserting that no terrorists could ever be described as Saudi citizens, he urged the media and politicians to refrain from casting arbitrary accusations against Arabs and Muslims. "We in the kingdom, the government and the people of Saudi Arabia, refuse to have any person affiliated with terrorism to be connected to our country," Bandar said. That included Osama bin Laden, the perpetrator of the attacks, who had even been disowned by his family. He was not really a Saudi, Bandar asserted, for the government had taken away his passport because of his terrorist activities.
But Osama bin Laden was Saudi, of course, and he was not just any Saudi. The bin Ladens were one of a handful of extremely wealthy families that were so close to the House of Saud that they effectively acted as extensions of the royal family. Over five decades, they had built their multibillion-dollar construction empire thanks to their intimate relationship with the royal family. Bandar himself knew them well. "They're really lovely human beings," he told CNN. "[Osama] is the only one ... I met him only once. The rest of them are well-educated, successful businessmen, involved in a lot of charities. It is -- it is tragic. I feel pain for them, because he's caused them a lot of pain."
Like Bandar, the bin Laden family epitomized the marriage between the United States and Saudi Arabia. Their huge construction company, the Saudi Binladin Group, banked with Citigroup and invested with Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch. Over time, the bin Ladens did business with such icons of Western culture as Disney, the Hard Rock Café, Snapple and Porsche. In the mid-1990s, they joined various members of the House of Saud in becoming business associates with former secretary of state James Baker and former president George H.W. Bush by investing in the Carlyle Group, a gigantic Washington, D.C.-based private equity firm. As Charles Freeman, the former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, told the Wall Street Journal, "If there were ever any company closely connected to the U.S. and its presence in Saudi Arabia, it's the Saudi Binladin Group." |
