CHAPTER 20
On November 19, 1995, a few days after the terrorist bombing of the National Guard training center in Riyadh, King Fahd suffered a stroke. He was seventy-four years old. Like many a Saudi, he was overweight and he smoked. His deputy, Crown Prince Abdullah, now stepped forward to take over the day-to-day running of the Saudi government, and while his position in the family meant he had to be accepted, many outsiders feared the worst.
Throughout Fahd’s reign the black-bearded Abdullah had been kept in the background by the king and the Sudayri brothers, making few public pronouncements, in part because of his notorious stutter. Abdullah’s lips would struggle silently beneath his thick black mustache, then he would lift his hand high and slap it down hard on his thigh: out would come the words in a rush. The story in the National Guard—which, several said, they had been told by Abdullah himself—was that the stutter went back to an occasion when the prince got on the wrong side of his father. The angry Abdul Aziz had his errant son locked up in a cell without light, so when the boy eventually emerged, his speech was permanently impaired.
The gap between intention and performance could be embarrassing. It caused some who met Abdullah to dismiss him as a simple man, and he rather cultivated the image of simplicity. Every Sunday evening he held a majlis to which the bedouin streamed by the hundred—“right out of the desert,” remembers Walter Cutler, who was U.S. ambassador to Riyadh twice in the 1980s. The crown prince sat in an ornate chair, the paramount chieftain gravely listening to his petitioners for more than an hour. Then he would kneel down to pray with all his guests, adjourning to the banqueting hall for a huge communal supper.
It was like the majlises organized every evening around the country by the Al-Saud—with one important distinction. As the years went by petitioners had come to adopt ever more extravagant forms of deference to their princes, trying to kiss hands and even weeping and crying out in supplication. Abdullah would have none of it. Nick Cocking, head of the British military mission to the National Guard and military adviser to Abdullah through the 1980s, noticed, as the petitioners lined up in front of him, that the crown prince was carrying a slender bamboo camel stick. Whenever he detected an obsequious kiss or prostration in the making, Abdullah would reach out and tap the offending head, hand, or body part.
“You’re a man,” he would growl at the culprit, who was usually a besuited Lebanese, not a Saudi. “What are you doing groveling on the floor?”
In the bedouin tradition, Abdullah was profoundly egalitarian, and among those in the know he was reckoned to be both honest and reform-minded. It was remarkable how many of the fiercest opposition tracts of the 1990s exempted him from their attacks. Osama Bin Laden even had a dream about Abdullah, which he described to Abu Rida Al-Suri, one of his longtime jihadi companions. Walking in his dream around the Prophet’s city of Medina, Osama had heard the sounds of popular celebration and looked over a mud wall—to see the Saudi crown prince arriving to the joy of a happy and cheering throng.
“It means that Abdullah will become king,” said Bin Laden. “That will be a relief to the people and make them happy. If Abdullah becomes king, then I will go back.”
FRUIT OF RECONCILIATION
Crown Prince Abdullah was born of “enemy” stock. When, in 1921, his father, Abdul Aziz, finally captured the northern town of Hail, the power base of his greatest adversaries, the Rasheeds, he gave out food to the inhabitants and forbade all looting or killing. But the Rasheedi leader, Mohammed bin Talal Al-Rasheed, expected no such kindness, for he had refused to surrender with the citizens. He had withdrawn to Hail’s fort to keep on fighting, and he had heard the tales of Ibn Saud’s vengeance when he was crossed.
So when, after his capture, servants came telling him to wash and bathe for a great occasion, the Rasheedi chieftain feared that this must be for his own execution. He put on his best robes to meet his death with dignity, but he found himself being led into Ibn Saud’s majlis and being set in the place of honor.
“Sit here beside me,” said Abdul Aziz, rising to embrace and to kiss his former enemy. “The time for death and killing is past. We are all brothers now. You and yours will come to Riyadh to live with me as part of my own family.”
So the Rasheedi princes came to live in Riyadh where they had once ruled, and from which they had been expelled in 1902 by Abdul Aziz. Conciliation was a controlling technique at which the Al-Saud excelled.
“Let us treat our foes with mercy,” the Saudi ruler used to say. “When they punished us, it stirred us to revenge.”
It also made sense, of course, to keep such bitter enemies close at hand and under supervision.
Three Rasheed women had been widowed by the fighting, and Abdul Aziz took special care of them, giving one to his younger brother Saad, and the second to his eldest son, Saud bin Abdul Aziz. He took the third widow, Fahda bint Asi Al-Shuraim, of the Shammar tribe, as a wife for himself. Fahda came to live with him in Riyadh, and two years later, in 1923, she gave birth to a son, on whom his proud father bestowed the name Abd’Allah—“Slave of God.” The boy was the fruit of reconciliation.
It was as a reconciler that Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz first made his mark on his family. As the Al-Saud splintered in the late 1950s under the challenge of Arab nationalism and the charismatic Gamal Abdul Nasser, a group of radical young princes flew to Cairo and called for constitutional democracy.
“In our country,” complained their leader, Talal bin Abdul Aziz, “there is no law that upholds the freedom and rights of the citizen.”
Idealistic and liberal, Talal was the family maverick—the Ralph Nader of the Al-Saud. He had served as communications minister in the 1950s and later as finance minister under the controversial King Saud. Subsequently he would serve as a special envoy for UNESCO. Abdullah was close to Talal both in age and ideas, and there was a sense in which, as the elder half brother, Abdullah had played godfather to the rebellious “Free Princes.”15 He had a deep, almost simplistic radicalism about his politics, and while in religion he had to be rated a solid Wahhabi (one of Abdullah’s strengths as a reformer was that he could never be dismissed with the damning putdown of “secular”), he sniffed at extreme ideas that came, as he put it, “from the dryness of the desert.”
Abdullah was not prepared to break family ranks. For much of the 1950s he had steered clear of his siblings’ squabbling, effectively exiling himself to Beirut, where he had picked up a love of card games and playing boules, along with some passable French. So when the quarrels reached their climax, it was to Abdullah that the family turned. Faisal and Fahd persuaded him to use his closeness to Talal, and also his neutrality, in the cause of peace.
“I wish Talal had never left,” said Abdullah in Beirut in 1962, “and now I wish he would return.”
He sympathized with many of his half brother’s complaints, but he placed family unity above them.
“Talal knows full well,” he said, “that Saudi Arabia has a constitution inspired by God and not drawn up by man. . . . True socialism is the Arab socialism laid down by the Koran.”
The early 1960s were perilous years for the Al-Saud. Ten years after the death of Abdul Aziz, a succession of family disputes was threatening to tear his achievement apart. A century earlier the so-called Second Saudi State had disintegrated in dynastic quarreling, creating the vacuum into which the Rasheeds had moved. Now the physical fruit of the Rasheed reunion made sure that the same did not happen again. The solidity of Abdullah played a crucial role in pulling the clan through. In 1959 he accepted the invitation of Faisal, then crown prince, to come home and take command of the National Guard, the tribal force of bedouin levies. Abdullah kept the Guard loyal in the power play that ended in November 1964 when Faisal replaced his brother Saud as king, and he then used his closeness to Talal to help negotiate the peaceful return of the Free Princes as well.
Commanding the National Guard became the cornerstone of Abdullah’s power and identity. With no full blood brothers, he was something of a loner in the family, many of whom viewed his radical soul mates like Talal with suspicion. But the National Guard was like a family in its own right, with military might and a patchwork of nationwide patronage that gave Abdullah the punching power of several princes—more than enough, as it turned out, to keep the Sudayri Seven on their toes.
At the time of this writing Abdullah ibn Abdul Aziz—King Abdullah since 2005—has been commander of the National Guard for more than forty-seven years, his tough public persona perfectly reflecting the character of a tough tribal force. The original function of the Guard was to enlist the loyalty of the tribes to protect the royal family against any threat—including, in the last resort, a threat from the country’s other armed forces. The Guard was founded at a time of suspected military coups, so its first bases were sited close to Riyadh and the major cities. The idea was that the Guard could block hostile forces coming from the more distant army and air force bases on the borders. Its anti-aircraft weapons were designed to shoot down Saudi fighter planes. Its antitank rockets had to be good enough to take on the Saudi Army.
Nick Cocking tried to incorporate some of these basic but politically sensitive objectives into a National Guard mission statement that he drafted soon after he arrived in Riyadh in 1984—and received his only rebuke in eight years of happy collaboration with the crown prince. “Please tell the brigadier,” came the message, “not to write about things that are not his business.”
Without putting anything on paper, Abdullah had developed his own mission statement for his “White Army,” whom he dressed in khaki. What the crown prince wrought with the National Guard over the years revealed a man of more complexity than his exterior suggested.
“He saw the Guard primarily as a way to develop and educate Saudis,” says Abdul Rahman Abuhaimid, who supervised the Guard’s civil works with the rank of deputy commander for twenty-four years. “Our hospitals, our schools, our housing, our training—everything had to be the very best. He would insist on testing the prototypes for the various housing units to make sure that families would be happy in them.”
Under Abdullah the National Guard became a reasonably competent fighting force, but its military aspects often seemed less important to him than its civilian infrastructure and social development—the creation of his own ministate to standards that he could not, at that moment, extend throughout the country. The Guard’s local, part-time territorial levies remained tribally based, but Abdullah insisted that tribes should be mixed inside the full-time professional Guard regiments, and that each base should feature active adult-education units. Today the hospitals of the Saudi National Guard are modern, clean, and bright—anything but tribal. One of them, in Riyadh, is the world’s leading specialist center for the separation and rehabilitation of conjoined twins. It is an unpublicized hobby of Abdullah’s to go to the center to spend time with the separated twins and their parents, whom he flies to Riyadh from all over the world at his own expense.
Abdullah constructed a double identity just as Fahd did—and, indeed, as all Saudi princes do—by presenting his people with the image of a traditional, stern, and formal desert authority figure, while acting totally otherwise in private. But whereas Fahd’s private persona involved Mediterranean yachts and casinos, Abdullah’s hidden world involved hours splashing in the swimming pool with his children. Struck by the elegant freestyle stroke of Abdullah’s daughter Reema, Nick Cocking’s wife, Anna, asked her the name of her swimming coach. With a smile, and a perfect accent, the little girl answered, “My father, of course.” Abdullah made sure that all his children learned English.
He liked splashing in the pool by himself, swimming a daily set of lengths that was part of his self-improvement regime. Another aspect involved speech-therapy lessons with a series of specialists who were flown to Riyadh and worked with him on exercises that eventually all but eliminated his stutter.
“I remember a speech that he gave [in Arabic] in London at the Mansion House,” says Nick Cocking. “Now that’s a pretty intimidating venue. He was totally fluent—word perfect.”
In his younger days Abdullah shared in the distribution of land grants and cash that Abdul Aziz, Saud, Faisal—and particularly King Khaled—spread around the royal family. But he did not elbow his way into profits in the way that many of his half brothers did.
“Abdullah never pocketed a direct government commission himself,” says one insider. “Of that I am quite sure. He is not badly off. He lives like a prince. But he is certainly the least wealthy of the senior sons of Abdul Aziz—the brothers who are over seventy.”
The crown prince was no innocent. He understood the temptations of patronage and he tried to channel them in constructive directions.
“He would study all the National Guard contracts very carefully,” remembers Abdul Rahman Abuhaimid. “He always insisted, when it came to foreign governments, that they should be pushed to give something extra at their own expense—training or education to transfer skills to local Saudis. And he was constantly on the lookout to close all the doors and windows against corruption. ‘Do you think,’ he would ask, ‘that there is anyone we know who is linked in on this?’ ”
Cracking down on corruption and overpricing became Abdullah’s hall-mark. “Trop!” “Too much!” he would say, deploying his best Lebanese French as he studied almost any contract, and the papers would go back to be renegotiated. Legend had it that the crown prince would allow his four wives a new car only every two years, and that he sat down with his sons once a week to go through their bank accounts. His sons deny the truth of that, but most of them are low-key in their appetites and spending patterns.
“I was in first class, going from Riyadh to Jeddah,” remembers a Saudi newspaper editor, “when I saw one of Abdullah’s sons walking through, going back to sit in the business cabin. I offered him my seat and he refused. Imagine one of Fahd’s sons not traveling right up front with an entourage of ten. Few people know who Abdullah’s sons are—and he tells them to keep it that way.” (The same is true of Abdullah’s daughters.)
Abdullah has tried—with varying success—to apply that principle across the entire royal family, and certainly today the British staff who work for Saudia, the national airline, at London’s Heathrow Airport bless his name. Gone are the last-minute crises as princes—and friends of princes—turn up at the check-in desk without reservations, requiring that ordinary mortals get turfed off the flight. Abdullah ended the special flying privileges for most of the royal family soon after he took power.
Abdullah’s proper taking of power, however, took time and involved quite a fight. Until 1995 the crown prince’s stutter was symbolic of his limited influence at the top of the family. Fahd and his eldest Sudayri brothers all got on with running the country as they wished. Abdullah was never part of their inner circle and the brothers found it hard to change their ways after Fahd’s stroke.
“They could make things difficult for Abdullah,” recalls a royal adviser. “They might ‘forget’ to tell him things and just go on running the show in their own way.”
Fahd made something of a recovery, and the Sudayris forced Abdullah formally to return the powers of regency he had assumed. When the king had a second and more severe stroke in 1997, they played down its significance, but the sad truth of Fahd’s condition was difficult to ignore. The king could speak only haltingly, and it was embarrassing when he was wheeled in to preside over family dinners.
“Poor guy,” remembers one of his female relatives. “He’d give you that smile. It was sort of pathetic. He was only just hanging in there.”
The king’s health depended on the drugs administered to him that day. A European ambassador remembers escorting a visiting minister from his country for a courtesy call. As they walked into the royal presence, a strange and indecipherable sound emanated from Fahd’s throat.
“His Majesty is delighted that you have come all this way to visit him,” said the interpreter brightly.
Another croak ensued.
“His Majesty welcomes the chance to strengthen the ties that have always connected our two nations.”
For television appearances the king was whisked around in a wheelchair that was hidden away when the cameras started rolling. It was an Orwellian pretense, but it reflected the mystique at the heart of any monarchy, and the particular reverence for seniority to which the Al-Saud had always subscribed.
Abdullah chafed at the limits within which he had to operate, but as in the Free Princes crisis of 1962, he remained a loyal supporter of the family way.
“If you’re staying in your brother’s house,” he would say, “you don’t change the curtains.”
The crown prince had long been developing his own very definite ideas about what was needed to right the wrongs of the country—and they were very different from some of Fahd’s.
“If you could have read the letters that he sent privately, brother to brother, to the king,” confided Abdul Aziz Al-Tuwayjri, Abdullah’s closest adviser, talking of the years before Fahd’s illness, “you would have thought that the crown prince was leader of the opposition.”
But there was no hint of this in public—quite the contrary. In the autumn of 1998 Abdullah reached out to Azouzi, the twenty-five-year-old Abdul Aziz bin Fahd, to bring the young prince into the Saudi cabinet as a “minister without portfolio.” By virtue of the soothsayer’s prophecy, Azouzi effectively controlled access to his ailing father, and he became the crown prince’s direct channel to the king, securing Fahd’s signature on especially important documents. Whenever Abdullah undertook the presentation of ceremonial orders and medals to visiting heads of state, he would make clear that he himself did not belong to the ultimate, elevated level to which the visitor was being admitted. That honor was reserved for his beloved elder brother, the king.
In the absence of fathers and mothers, elder brothers command absolute deference in Saudi society; respect for age is one of the pillars on which a tribal society rests.
“After Saud became king, in 1953,” recalls a friend of the family, “Faisal would scamper to bring him his shoes, even though he felt contempt for what his elder brother was doing.”
One of the sights to enjoy when Saudi princes get together is to observe how they shuffle instinctively into their order of precedence: they know their rank in the hierarchy and they stick to it, even where seniority is a matter of having been born only days apart. It would have been disrespectful for Abdullah to significantly alter his brother’s council of ministers while Fahd remained alive, and in any case the kingdom’s two most important ministries, Defense and the Interior, were operated as personal fief doms by Fahd’s full brothers, Sultan and Nayef—as, indeed, Abdullah retained permanent control of the National Guard.
In this respect, Abdullah was complicit in his own helplessness. As the 1990s drew to close, the king and the crown prince were each handicapped in their different ways. Neither could give of their best—and the Saudi curtains were in sore need of changing. Having briefly surged above twenty dollars per barrel at the time of the Gulf War, oil prices tumbled downward for the rest of the decade—in 1998 the price of a barrel of oil would sink to nine dollars.
“We must all get used to a different way of life,” declared Abdullah in January 1999, proclaiming that the days of easy oil money were history. He announced a stringent austerity budget, cutting government spending by 16 percent, and urged Saudis to seek a way ahead “which does not stand on total dependence on the state.”
“This was the first and only time in my life I saw a suicide,” remembers Dr. Ahmad Gabbani, a human resources director in Jeddah. “It was on the Medina Road. There was a wooden bridge over the road, and some poor guy had put a rope round his neck and jumped. I saw the body hanging there. People said that he was crazy. It is a deep sin if you are a Muslim to take your own life. But it turned out that the man could not find a job. He could not provide for his family.”
The Ministry of Finance refused to pay up on massive contracts that were long completed without dispute. Local businessmen trekked cap in hand around the ministries for month after humiliating month trying to secure payment for themselves and their foreign partners.
“You’ve made enough money in the past,” they were told dismissively.
In the middle of this recession, an acerbic and humorous little economist was trying to reform the Saudi telephone system. The pixielike Dr. Ali Al-Johani had been appointed minister of posts and telecommunications (PTT) three months before Fahd’s stroke and had concluded that the only way to improve was to privatize.
“The PTT was a bazaar,” he remembers. “So many people were for sale. There were simply not enough lines to go around. Every new line, every new number went across the desk of somebody in the ministry and they put whatever price they wanted on it.”
Al-Johani identified twelve senior officials who had to go. Six accepted his offer of a golden handshake, but six refused to budge, so he took their names to the crown prince, requesting their immediate dismissal.
Abdullah was astonished.
“Six?” he asked. “Just six? I’ll sign for six hundred.”
Abdullah had long held a profound contempt for civil servants. Bureaucracy pressed his buttons. To suggest that a committee might be formed was a sure way to trigger the ire of the crown prince.
“Prince Abdullah,” says Al-Johani, “can smell reform from miles away. He might not have known, at the time, the detailed economic benefits of privatization. But he knew that it meant giving greater freedom to Saudi citizens, and that it would give me greater freedom to change things for the better. That was good enough for him. Some of the nonroyal ministers complained that the government should not be surrendering control over such a major area of information, but that was not an issue for him, nor for Prince Sultan either. In every battle I have to say that those two men gave me their total backing.”
The new minister soon discovered that he needed it.
“I had opened the gates of hell. To start with, everybody wanted to be my best friend. Then when I did not give them what they wanted, they became my worst enemy—the tribes, the merchants, the families. They accused me of corruption, of course, but let me tell you, there are three hundred thousand Al-Johanis and not one of them got a job or a phone line because of me.
“So that made enemies out of them, of course, my own people. They said I was a traitor, that I was not looking after my own. I came to feel I could trust no one. If I had an important document to take to the Council of Ministers, I would carry the draft myself down to the basement of the ministry building. There was one typist there I knew. I could rely on him to type it promptly without phoning someone or sneaking an extra photocopy.”
The new minister held twice-weekly majlises, royal style, so customers could come and present their complaints. Discovering that the ministry had been holding back a huge stock of lines for its own purposes, Al-Johani gave away all but fifteen. He published a priority entitlement code for securing telephone service, starting with doctors, emergency workers, and sick children. Most daring of all, he got the crown prince’s backing to cut off the mobile service of princes and princesses who did not pay their bills.
“They could not believe it, and they went to complain to the crown prince. He just told them they must pay their bills like everyone else.”
It was a crucial change. Elite Saudis—royal and nonroyal—might take as many as a hundred mobiles to London for their family and entourage to use, calling freely, day and night, all over the world throughout their holiday.
“We, the Saudi PTT, would have had to pay out tens of millions of dollars in foreign service charges,” remembers Al-Johani. “It would have been impossible to privatize if we had not made that reform.”
A team of foreign consultants to the ministry told Al-Johani it would take twelve years to privatize the telephones.
“ ‘So how come,’ I asked them, ‘Mrs. Thatcher did it in two?’ ”
“You meet with the senior partners of these foreign consultants,” adds the sharp-toothed former minister, “and they shower you with wisdom that is music to your ears. You sign a contract to tap their expertise, and then you never see them again. They send you out beginners who can’t speak proper English and who serve you outdated information from the Internet.”
In the middle of all this, Al-Johani started feeling feverish as the day wore on. He was diagnosed with leukemia—bone-marrow cancer. He flew to Seattle for chemotherapy, leaving the PTT in the hands of a succession of other ministers who had little time or inclination to do Dr. Ali’s job.
“In fact,” he recalls without too much malice, “one of them certainly wanted my job.” On his return, he resumed his battle, couriering bone-marrow samples to Seattle every week or so.
“The chemo and the immune drugs had a very bad effect on my temper. I’ve never been easy to work with. I can’t tolerate fools gladly, and I hate being obstructed—I have to admit it. There was only one way to do things, and I was the only person who knew what that was.”
In the end, the academics and administrators who made up the board of the newly privatized Saudi Telecoms Company said they could not work with Al-Johani anymore. He treated them like the petty bureaucrats he believed them to be, and they had no further wish to be snapped at. They presented their combined resignation to the crown prince, and Abdullah summoned Dr. Ali. The battle was over, he said; the day had been won. The prince made Al-Johani a minister of state with cabinet responsibilities for three years, while Prince Sultan made him a present of his most valuable and handsome white bull camel.
Saudi telephone lines had been liberated, blazing a fresh trail for the congenitally centrist and risk-averse Saudi government, which now edged toward a new economic style. Fahd’s long-serving finance minister, Mohammed Aba Al-Khail, had started slow negotiations for Saudi Arabia to join the World Trade Organization, but the economic team that Abdullah recruited brought fresh energy to the bid.
“We saw WTO accession as a vehicle for domestic reform,” recalls one of the team. “We could use the new regulations as a pretext. The business establishment was wary of change. But now we could go to them and say, ‘Look guys, sorry. These are the rules. They come from the outside.’ It was a whole change of philosophy.”
Abdullah announced the creation of a new Supreme Economic Council to streamline economic decision making. But this could provide no immediate help to the growing numbers of young Saudis who could not find jobs at the end of the 1990s. Youth unemployment was a tragedy. The unrestricted entry of cheap foreign workers had flooded the Saudi labor market with millions of third-world workers who were willing to live in primitive camps and to work for seven hundred riyals ($190) per month. This was a third of the amount on which a Saudi could survive, and the logical solution—that young Saudis should be trained to work as managers—was handicapped by the rising generation’s embarrassing deficiencies in education, particularly when it came to practical knowledge and independent reasoning skills. The teaching of math, science, and English in Saudi schools had been drastically reduced in the early 1980s to make room for the extra religious classes that featured learning by rote—the post-Juhayman backlash had almost guaranteed the production of more Juhaymans.
The days of the oil boom seemed very distant. Most young men leaving school or graduating from university took it for granted that the next two or three years of their life would be “dead,” with no prospect of work. Hanging out in shopping malls or driving aimlessly around the streets of Jeddah or Riyadh without the cash to buy new clothes, let alone to finance marriage, was a depressing existence. Small wonder that the vision of jihad in foreign lands offered purpose and excitement that attracted many a frustrated young “Angry Face.”