THE MUTED OPENING of Osama’s war on Saudi Arabia coincided with the end of King Fahd’s reign—at least, the end of his ability to rule actively. On November 29, 1995, Fahd suffered a massive stroke. Perhaps the Riyadh bombing and its aftermath raised his blood pressure, or perhaps it was only age or genetics or his untreated obesity. He almost died, but his doctors, so long the beneficiaries of his patronage and largesse, worked to save him. By doing so they inaugurated an Elizabethan-tinged drama of rivalry and succession maneuvering within the Saudi royal family.
The intrigue was more whispered about than witnessed, more presumed than observed, but its outlines were clear enough. As long as Fahd remained technically alive, he would be king, even if he could do little more than nod silently in his wheelchair. The Al-Saud had no precedent for removing an ailing monarch, and after all, the crown prince could govern in his stead. But there was more to this decision than constitutional order. As long as Fahd remained on the throne, his full brothers—Sultan at Defense; Nayef and Ahmed at Interior; and Salman, the governor of Riyadh—might remain unchallenged in their lucrative ministerial fiefdoms, free to supervise their own contracts and to preside over their own patronage machines. Moreover, Fahd’s favorite son, Abdulaziz, might continue to enrich himself and those around him. (By 1993 companies controlled by the Ibrahim family, Abdulaziz’s maternal uncles, owned real estate in the United States valued at more than $1.2 billion worldwide, including Ritz-Carlton hotels in New York, Washington, Houston, and Aspen; a 23,000-acre ranch in Colorado; the Marina del Rey complex in Los Angeles; and a planned resort community near Disney World.) If Fahd died, Crown Prince Abdullah would take the throne—penny-pinching, provincial, isolated, stubborn, unreliable Abdullah, as the Fahd group tended to see him. In “their heart of hearts,” said Wyche Fowler, who served as U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia as this narrative unfolded, Fahd’s full brothers “were not enthusiastic that Abdullah would be their next king.”5
Abdullah remained, as a British diplomat had described him several decades earlier, “abrupt, impulsive, but popular.”6 He had little formal education, but his steady contact across decades with tribal levies in the National Guard had attuned his ear to public opinion—or, at least, to the opinions of male soldiers from the major tribes. At the time of Fahd’s stroke, Abdullah seemed to grasp, in a way that Fahd’s son, full brothers, and brothers-in-law did not, that the kingdom simply could not continue to drift along, ignoring the excesses of the royal family, as it had done for so long. Oil prices fell steadily during the 1990s, eventually touching record lows, if inflation was taken into account. Saudi Arabia’s per capita income, which had soared during the initial oil boom period, also declined dramatically—in part because the size of the native Saudi population grew at alarming rates. Yet Saudis remained poorly equipped for the modern workplace, and the kingdom’s universities remained dominated by religious curricula. In his seventies, living in his own grand palaces and on his desert farms, Abdullah was no firebrand reformer, but at a minimum, he wanted to bring the most visible excesses and self-enrichment of senior princes under control. He tried after Fahd’s stroke to unwind or cancel some of the most egregious contracts, such as the Al-Yamamah deal overseen by Prince Sultan, but he found his anti-corruption drive to be difficult. Among other things, according to Fowler, Fahd’s group sometimes evaded his edicts on contracting by routing their business through the untouchable young Abdulaziz—he was, after all, still the king’s favorite son. Then, too, Abdullah faced his own family members interested in business opportunities. Some of his own sons were entering into commerce, and one of those sons was a school friend of Abdulaziz. Abdullah might have sound instincts about Saudi Arabia’s needs, but he shared power, lacked strong blood allies, and possessed no transformational vision. Political and economic reform in the kingdom, it soon became plain, would be at best an evolutionary project, one where the pace might be barely perceptible to the human eye—nothing like what Osama Bin Laden and his allied dissidents in London had apparently hoped that Abdullah might champion.
As Osama careened toward violence in 1996, his family moved to strengthen its ties to America, and to hedge their bets. The Al-Saud, on the other hand, allowed their alliance with Washington to deteriorate. A shared antipathy to communism no longer bound Saudi Arabia to America. The rise of potent transnational Islamist ideology and jihadi violence, some of it supported by Saudi fundraising, presented a new divide. There were also more particular factors. Fahd’s sudden incapacitation was one—he had been the most pro-American king in Saudi history, by a considerable margin. At the Saudi embassy in Washington, Bandar Bin Sultan, the longtime ambassador, had failed to strike up a successful relationship with Clinton; they were similar personalities, and they seemed to annoy each other. Bandar drifted into diplomatic irrelevancy, and his embassy, filled with Saudi bureaucrats from the religious and education ministries who did not speak much English, became an impediment to day-to-day communication between the two governments. In an astonishingly short time, the confident, risk-taking, back-of-the-envelope relationship that had prevailed between Washington and Riyadh during the Cold War and the Gulf war came to an end. In its place rose a muddled, mutually resentful engagement in which the top leaders of the two countries rarely spoke, while midlevel and cabinet-level officials fumed at one another over perceived slights and failures to cooperate.
Early in 1996, alarmed by Osama’s support for violent attacks against American and Arab targets, the CIA formed a new unit to track him. Michael Scheuer, its leader, as one of his first tasks, submitted a request to the Saudi government for basic information about Osama Bin Laden—his medical records, his birth certificate, if one existed, and copies of the residence permit and passport the government claimed it had previously seized from him. Scheuer never heard a word in reply. He soon concluded that the Saudi government should be regarded as “hostile” to the United States on the subject of Osama and his Islamist militia. That was the same terminology used at the CIA to describe the intelligence services of Cuba and Iran. “They refused to do anything to help us, or even to provide us the minimal information,” Scheuer said later. He and other CIA officers also thought it was possible that Osama had recruited sympathizers or followers inside the Saudi intelligence or security services. Equally, the Saudi services themselves, in Scheuer’s analysis, wanted from the very beginning of the violence Bin Laden inspired to protect themselves from American investigations into Saudi Arabia’s private collaborations with Osama in the past, dating back to the anti-Soviet Afghan war. “Bin Laden knows so much about who the Saudis dealt with during the Afghan war, how the mechanisms for moving money work,” Scheuer concluded. “They were protecting the royal family, they were protecting the skeletons in the closet from the Afghan war.” Scheuer also believed, as did Clinton’s counterterrorism aide Richard Clarke, that the Saudi government had authorized some of Osama’s adventures in South Yemen—that they were not the rogue jihadi operations later depicted by Prince Turki. This history, too, had to be shielded from the Americans, in Scheuer’s analysis.7
Scheuer did not want to share sensitive CIA information with the Saudis, for fear it would leak through to Osama. For their part, some of the Saudis felt the same way about the CIA. When they passed on information they regarded as sensitive, they, too, often read it in the American papers or heard it on CNN.