PART THREE
If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.
—Guiseppe di Lampedusa, The Leopard
CHAPTER 24
Prince 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.”
As someone who had himself committed terrorist acts, Mansour Al-Nogaidan knew the perils of takfeer. He had been speaking out against it for months. After his latest release from jail, his friends had found him a mosque in Riyadh where he was well looked after. It was a cushy billet. But Mansour had a new gospel to propagate. While reflecting in jail on the rigidity of the Wahhabi religious establishment, he had come to be offended by their refusal to accept any questioning—and that was not a criticism that the elders of his local community wanted to hear. They forced him out. Moving on to a career in journalism, the ex-imam was similarly outspoken. Not content with reading outside the red lines, he insisted on writing outside them and started to make a name for himself as an outpoken columnist.
When it came to 9 /11, however, Mansour had to confess that he was nonplussed. He was visiting his family in Buraydah when he saw the strike against the second tower live on television, and he found himself lost for words. He just stared blankly at the horror on the screen, appalled and silenced by the biblical smoke and destruction.
“I was shocked to my core. I didn’t know what I thought for three days. Where had it come from? It just defied human thinking.”
The demon center forward had scored a goal the crowd would never forget. Like Juhayman Al-Otaybi, Osama Bin Laden astonished his enemies with a coup for which no one was seriously prepared. Twenty years earlier Juhayman’s anger had transformed the Kingdom. Now Osama Bin Laden’s astonishing assault on America’s sovereignty and sense of security would transform the world—and America in particular.
“When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world,” George W. Bush had declared to the voters of Iowa the previous year. “It was Us versus Them, and it was clear who ‘them’ was. Today, we are not so sure who the ‘they’ are.”
Clarity was restored by 9 /11. Once more there was something of which America, the greatest power in the history of the world, could feel com fortingly afraid. As Gore Vidal remarked, “We desperately want a huge, dangerous enemy.”
Bin Laden attacked America for playing two ends against the middle. By financing Islamic extremism in Afghanistan in the 1980s and allying with the House of Saud while also supporting the Israeli cause at the expense of the Arabs, Washington had sent a conflicted foreign policy message that managed to provoke more death and destruction in the mainland United States than forty-five years of Cold War. America was the “far Satan,” in Osama’s eyes, because it was the patron and supporter of the Al-Saud, the “near Satan” that was his ultimate target. Understandably wounded and angry as they surveyed the smoking ruins of downtown Manhattan, few Americans could see that it was through the selection of contradictory friends that their successive governments had picked themselves this lethal foe.
Riyadh was suffering from an equivalent denial, as Robert Jordan, George W. Bush’s Texas lawyer, discovered when he arrived a few weeks after 9/11 to take up his post as U.S. ambassador.
“Many senior princes believed it was a Jewish plot. Nayef [the interior minister] actually said it was a Zionist conspiracy in a public statement. Even Abdullah was suspicious. They had latched onto this report that three thousand Jewish employees had not gone into work that day. It was an urban myth that has since been discredited, but at the time it was the only way they could make sense of it.”
“Ana ma talabtah, bas Allah jabha”—“I didn’t ask for it, but God brought it,” was the attitude of many Saudis.
“To accept that Saudis were major players in 9/11,” remembers the Arab News editor Khaled Al-Maeena, “was like accepting that your son was a serial killer. You had to refuse to believe it.”
The irony of the Jewish conspiracy theories was that a group of Arabs—and no one but Arabs—had finally hit the enemy in a way that was quite extraordinary. In terms of organization, surprise, and daring, 9 /11 was an aggressive and murderous stroke of sheer brilliance. Why, if you were a proud and upstanding Arab, would you want to hand the credit to the Zionists?
“That was typical Arab victim talk,” says the Jeddah journalist Somaya Jabarti. “When we engage in conspiracy theories we are disempowering ourselves. We are guilty of passive thinking, saying that someone else is always responsible.”
“Bin Laden was evil and murderous,” says Prince Amr Al-Faisal. “As a Muslim I fiercely and totally condemn what he did. But the Saudis are daring people, and it is not surprising that one of the most daring terrorists in the world should be a Saudi. As many Muslims saw it, the falling of the twin towers was a lesson to the pride and complacency of the Americans. It gave them just a little taste of what the Muslims have been going through.”
Out in the Saudi heartland most people agreed. When Mohammed Al-Harbi, then a twenty-five-year-old chemistry teacher, went into school in Buraydah on the day after 9/11, there was a happy buzz in the staff room.
“ ‘The jihad has started,’ they were saying. ‘There is more to come.’ They were all very supportive and content with the attack on New York, and were clearly very happy that it had been done by Saudi hands—or so they assumed. It was like their football team had won.”
Mohammed, a small, neat-bearded man, rather enjoyed tweaking his colleagues and provoking arguments with them, particularly on religious matters.
“They used to tell me that I was not qualified to discuss religion. ‘You have no marks of a religious person,’ they’d say—meaning that I trimmed my beard instead of letting it grow long and bushy, Salafi-style. They were all quite nice and friendly about it in those early days. They gave me books and tapes to educate me.”
But now the argument grew more pointed.
“Let’s put religion on the side, for the moment,” Mohammed would argue. “Let’s agree that an educated nation like America should be respected. Think how much money it took to build those towers. It is haram [shameful] to wreak such destruction.”
His colleagues shrugged their shoulders.
“That is the money of kuffar [infidels],” they replied.
“Don’t three thousand lives count for anything?” Mohammed asked.
“They’re not Muslims.”
“But don’t you feel sorry for all those people?” the chemistry teacher persisted. “I feel very sorry for them.”
“Why don’t you ever express sorrow for the Palestinians?” came the reply.
“Because the Palestinians have had a hand in their own destiny,” replied the chemistry teacher. “Those people in the towers were helpless.”
When he got into the classroom, Mohammed continued the discussion with his pupils and found them apparently accepting of his arguments. But in the weeks that followed, he discovered that his teaching colleagues were going behind his back to cross-examine his students, taking notes of what he had said.
“ ‘What did he tell you?’ they’d ask my pupils. ‘Don’t listen to him. He’s not in the correct path.’ ”
A little less than a month after 9/11, U.S. and UK forces invaded Afghanistan. At once feelings in the Buraydah staff room grew more strained. As news reports came in, Mohammed openly celebrated the defeat of the Taliban, whose intolerance he had always deplored.
“I am getting worried about you,” said one of his bearded colleagues with feeling. “I am getting very worried about the secular thoughts in your head.”
Mohammed understood the coded message.
“He was trying to sound friendly and concerned. But I knew that he was issuing a warning—a very serious warning. If an Islamic court finds that your thoughts are ‘secular,’ they take that to mean that you’re a Muslim who has renounced the faith, that you’re an ‘apostate.’ And the penalty for apostasy is death.”
Robert Jordan, meanwhile, was trying to get established as America’s ambassador to Riyadh—which included the presentation of his credentials in a bizarre ceremony at King Fahd’s palace beside the Red Sea.
“I had three hours’ notice to get to the airport with my documents. When I got there, I discovered sixty or seventy other ambassadors, the majority of the diplomatic corps, none of whom had been officially presented. We all flew down to Jeddah on the plane together—what a target that would have made for Al-Qaeda.
“King Fahd was pushed out in a wheelchair with a great deal of pomp and ceremony. It was a cool winter’s afternoon. The ceremony was out of doors, and we each went up to meet him, one by one, to present our papers. It was very sad to think that at this critical moment, Saudi Arabia should be looking to an invalid as its king.”
March 2002 was the twenty-year anniversary of Fahd’s accession, and all Saudi schoolchildren were instructed to compose a letter of thanks to him. Ahmad Sabri, fifteen years old, sat in his Jeddah classroom, determined not to be a puppet. Suddenly he knew what to write: “Thank you, oh great and kind King Fahd, for the Kingdom’s many wonderful things that improve the quality of our life—for the beautiful roads without pot-holes or repair sites, for the good schools, for the planes that always arrive on time . . .”
His teacher picked up the sheet of paper and studied his bright young pupil’s list of sarcasms.
“Ahmad,” he asked, “do you want to get into trouble?”
Ahmad pulled back his paper hurriedly and started to scribble the flattery that was required.
It was certainly the worst of moments to have a head of state who was incapacitated. But one of the several good things that emerged from 9/11, for Saudi Arabia at least, was that Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz finally became a ruling crown prince—if partly through default. Refusing to accept Saudi responsibility for what had happened, some of Fahd’s Sudayri brothers literally lost the plot in the dark undergrowth of their conspiracy theories.
“It is enough to see a number of congressmen wearing Jewish yarmulkes,” remarked Sultan, the deputy crown prince in June 2002, “to explain the allegations against us.”
“We still ask ourselves,” added his brother Nayef a few months later, “who has benefited from the September 11 attacks? I think that they [the Jews] were the protagonists of such attacks.”
Crown Prince Abdullah was not averse to blaming the Zionists. But he was first among the senior sons of Abdul Aziz—the topmost princes who mattered—to accept the Saudi role in 9/11.
“We showed him the dossiers,” remembers Robert Jordan, “with the details of who was on the planes, the actual comings-and-goings of all these young Saudis, their photographs, the shots from the airport security cameras. I suppose you could dismiss all that documentation as the most incredible hoax. Otherwise you had to take it seriously.”
Abdullah did. As commander of the National Guard, he knew the exact significance of each tribal and family name on the 9/11 roll call: Al-Ghamdi, Al-Hazmi, Al-Haznawi, Al-Mihdhar, Al-Nami, Al-Omari, Al-Shehri, Al-Suqami, Hani Hanjour, Majed Moqed.17Abdullah knew the heads of many of these families. He made phone calls to check. He spoke to the relatives. He took it all very personally. In his simple, emotional way he looked on each of the young men as one of his sons, and his eyes welled up as he looked at their photo-booth photographs.
The crown prince was convinced. Saudi Arabia had a problem, and as the crisis evolved, the need for rapid decisions also solidified his power. On 9/11 itself he had gone into a huddle with Ali Al-Naimi, the long-serving oil minister, to agree that Saudi oil production be increased to its ceiling to avoid an energy crisis—the most important decision that the Kingdom could take that day, and perhaps, in itself, a certain signal of remorse. In his pre- 9/11 jostling with Bush, Abdullah had taken decisive control of Saudi foreign policy. Now he took firmer charge of domestic policy as well.
Robert Jordan was impressed. Unlike any other ambassador, America’s envoy had a standing appointment to sit down with the Kingdom’s ruler on a regular basis, when the two sides went through a comprehensive state-of-the-relationship discussion through translators, with a TV camera and microphones recording every word.
“I found Abdullah rather austere, and also slow to speak,” he recalls. “But he was always listening. He was learning. He was clearly seeking to make wise choices. He was a surprisingly emotional person. He seemed to form a lot of his judgments on the basis of how much he liked the person with whom he was dealing. And he was also, obviously, getting besieged with conflicting advice from different sections of the family.”
Much of Jordan’s time was spent shepherding a succession of worried officials sent from Washington to locate and plug the holes through which the United States felt that her principal Arab ally had let her down.
“They were difficult days,” recalls Jordan. “Very painful. They were so angry that we were so angry with them. I remember George Tenet [head of the CIA] came out to Riyadh. He was furious, very aggressive. I remember one meeting with Mohammed bin Nayef. He really got in the young prince’s face.”
Mohammed bin Nayef, the studious son of the interior minister, had been given the responsibility for counterterrorism.
“In the very earliest days,” says Jordan, “the Saudis wouldn’t share the ‘pocket litter’ with us—the debris found in the suspects’ pockets, the speed-dials and such like, the messages on their mobile phones. That was back in the days of the Al-Khobar [Towers] bombing. Eventually they relaxed enough to let us listen in on their interrogations. Our people were allowed to look through a one-way mirror and pass along the questions we needed to be asked.”
The trouble was that the FBI, which was charged with taking the lead in all this, was not really in a position to conduct many direct interrogations.
“On the day of 9 /11,” says Jordan, “the bureau had just five fluent Arabic speakers on its books, all of them prosecuting lawyers. ‘Legal Attaché’ is the title carried by the FBI man in any U.S. embassy. But the legal attachés exist to investigate and to set up prosecutions after the event. They are not there for prevention, or to gather intelligence—they are not detectives. I felt there was a profound need for a complete culture change.”
There were many areas for improvement, Jordan discovered. The FBI and CIA representatives in his rambling, sand-colored Riyadh embassy compound were scarcely speaking to each other.
“The CIA would ask me to chase the Saudis for the cell-phone records of some local suspect. They’d complain that they couldn’t get anything out of the Ministry of the Interior. So I’d go down to the ministry to jump up and down and make a lot of fuss, to be told that they had given that particular set of phone records to somebody in the embassy months ago—to the FBI man, who had kept the papers to himself! And this was happening twelve months after 9 /11.”
When he went back to Washington, the ambassador raised the problem with the CIA’s George Tenet and Robert Mueller, the FBI director. The two men promised better cooperation between their agencies, but below them the institutional disdain of their respective hierarchies was almost impossible to overcome.
“The FBI simply was not committed to sending its best and brightest overseas,” asserts Jordan. “The high-fliers stayed at home. They wanted to make their names in the domestic prosecutions. That was another part of the culture. As I was leaving Riyadh toward the end of 2003, one attaché was being disciplined for not being a very good officer, and his substitute only lasted two months.”
Another FBI man in Riyadh, the deputy legal attaché Gamal Hafiz, an Egyptian by birth, was accused of being “pro-Muslim” when he refused to go into a mosque wearing a surveillance wire. He resigned his position and sued the bureau.
“After 9 /11 we made a lot of noise,” says Jordan, “but you could argue that the Saudis did a better job on what really mattered. In the end I think that they were quicker than us in getting up to speed on the true priorities of counterterrorism. It was fairly soon after 9/11 that Prince Saud Al-Faisal [the foreign minister] suggested to Washington that we should set up a joint U.S.-Saudi task force to cooperate on terrorism—and he received absolutely nil response from the White House. Deaf ears. Quite extraordinary! It wasn’t until May 2004 that the president finally appointed Frances Townsend, and that was largely the result of Prince Saud doing the pushing.”
Meanwhile the crown prince took the issues raised by 9/11 to the country—or rather, to the country’s elite.
“We must pay careful attention,” Abdullah declared in a series of televised gatherings to which he summoned the religious sheikhs, the tribal leaders, the media, and the business community. “Something serious has gone wrong here, and we have to put it right. Those who govern [wali al-amr] need to work out a strategy for what has to be done.”
Each majlis nodded gravely, made some cautious suggestions, and went away to think. But one of the religious sheikhs came up with an extra point. Dr. Abdullah Turki, the learned member of the council of the ulema who had accompanied Prince Turki to Afghanistan to try to convince the Taliban to hand over Bin Laden, fastened on Abdullah’s use of the term wali al-amr.
“Those who govern,” he pointed out, included not only the king and the government, but also the senior ulema. From its earliest days the Saudi state had been a partnership between the political and the religious, and Dr. Turki suggested that at this moment of crisis the religious sheikhs needed to have more say in how the country was run.
It was a controversial claim, but it had a historical basis. In the very earliest years of the Saudi state, according to the Nejdi historian Ibn Bishr, it was the religious leader Mohammed Ibn Abdul Wahhab—“the Sheikh”—who had exercised ultimate authority, not Mohammed Ibn Saud, the secular ruler. “No camels were mounted and no opinions were voiced,” wrote the historian of the 1750s and ’60s, without the approval of the Sheikh. He meant Abdul Wahhab.
In 2001 the House of Saud no longer saw it that way.
“I was watching the meeting on television,” recalls Prince Turki Al-Faisal, “and when I heard that remark I wanted to shout out at the screen, ‘You are totally wrong! Will someone please stand up and tell him so!’ ”
No one spoke, so the prince sat down immediately to lay out his views in an article that was published a few days later.
“I wanted to explain,” he says, “how, from the very first caliphs, the secular rulers have always been the executive rulers in Islamic history—the ultimate boss. It has been their job to exercise the power, while the job of the religious men—the sheikhs and the mufti—has been to give them advice. Never to govern. That is where Khomeini and the Iranian ayatollahs departed from true Islam. They put themselves in the position of supreme governmental authority, which is a totally new thing—completely un-Islamic and un-historical.”
A few days later another article appeared delivering the same verdict. Prince Talal bin Abdul Aziz, the former Free Prince, had a maverick reputation, but he ranked high in the brotherly pecking order. Younger than Sultan, Talal was actually senior to Nayef and Salman. More important, he was close to Abdullah and was known to share the crown prince’s view that too much undigested religion had led to takfeer, and to impressionable young Saudis committing mass murder in the name of Allah. The sheikhs and the ulema had very valuable advice to offer, wrote the prince, but it was no more than that—advice. They should not consider that they were among “those who govern.” Dr. Turki’s bid for a direct religious role in Saudi government was firmly slapped down, and the reverend doctor did not argue back.
So 9/11 finally settled who ruled whom in Saudi Arabia. After Juhayman, the 1980s had seen the clerics dictating the agenda in an almost Iranian fashion, with the Al-Saud anxious to appease them—no prince would have dared stand up in those days to contradict the say-so of a religious figure. In the 1990s the Sahwah (Awakening) sheikhs had claimed the right to lecture the government and to demand changes in accord with their religious beliefs, though that had landed some of them in prison. Now the arguments were over—so far as Crown Prince Abdullah was concerned. September 11 had shown what happened when religion got out of hand. Rulers must rule, and the religious must go along with that. The days were gone when no camels could be mounted and no opinions voiced without the say-so of the Sheikh and his successors.