Fw: fwd: How vulnerable are the Saudi royals?

>
> October 16, 2001 ANNALS OF NATIONAL SECURITY KING'S RANSOM How
> vulnerable are the Saudi royals?
>
> by SEYMOUR M. HERSH New Yorker Oct. 22, 2001
>
> Since 1994 or earlier, the National Security Agency has been
> collecting electronic intercepts of conversations between members
> of the Saudi Arabian royal family, which is headed by King Fahd.
> The intercepts depict a regime increasingly corrupt, alienated from
> the country's religious rank and file, and so weakened and frightened
> that it has brokered its future by channelling hundreds of millions
> of dollars in what amounts to protection money to fundamentalist
> groups that wish to overthrow it.
>
> The intercepts have demonstrated to analysts that by 1996 Saudi
> money was supporting Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda and other extremist
> groups in Afghanistan, Lebanon, Yemen, and Central Asia, and
> throughout the Persian Gulf region. "Ninety-six is the key year,"
> one American intelligence official told me. "Bin Laden hooked up
> to all the bad guys -- it's like the Grand Alliance -- and had a
> capability for conducting large-scale operations." The Saudi regime,
> he said, had "gone to the dark side."
>
> In interviews last week, current and former intelligence and military
> officials portrayed the growing instability of the Saudi regime --
> and the vulnerability of its oil reserves to terrorist attack --
> as the most immediate threat to American economic and political
> interests in the Middle East. The officials also said that the Bush
> Administration, like the Clinton Administration, is refusing to
> confront this reality, even in the aftermath of the September 11th
> terrorist attacks.
>
> The Saudis and the Americans arranged a meeting between Defense
> Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and King Fahd during a visit by Rumsfeld
> to Saudi Arabia shortly before the beginning of the air war in
> Afghanistan, and pictures of the meeting were transmitted around
> the world. The United States, however, has known that King Fahd
> has been incapacitated since suffering a severe stroke, in late
> 1995. A Saudi adviser told me last week that the King, with
> round-the-clock medical treatment, is able to sit in a chair and
> open his eyes, but is usually unable to recognize even his oldest
> friends. Fahd is being kept on the throne, the N.S.A.  intercepts
> indicate, because of a bitter family power struggle. Fahd's nominal
> successor is Crown Prince Abdullah, his half brother, who is to
> some extent the de-facto ruler -- he and Prince Sultan, the defense
> minister, were the people Rumsfeld really came to see. But there
> is infighting about money: Abdullah has been urging his fellow-princes
> to address the problem of corruption in the kingdom -- unsuccessfully,
> according to the intercepts. "The only reason Fahd's being kept
> alive is so Abdullah can't become king," a former White House
> adviser told me.
>
> The American intelligence officials have been particularly angered
> by the refusal of the Saudis to help the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. run
> "traces" -- that is, name checks and other background information
> -- on the nineteen men, more than half of them believed to be from
> Saudi Arabia, who took part in the attacks on the World Trade Center
> and the Pentagon.  "They knew that once we started asking for a
> few traces the list would grow,"
>
> one former official said. "It's better to shut it down right away."
> He pointed out that thousands of disaffected Saudis have joined
> fundamentalist groups throughout the Middle East. Other officials
> said that there is a growing worry inside the F.B.I. and the C.I.A.
> that the actual identities of many of those involved in the attacks
> may not be known definitively for months, if ever. Last week, a
> senior intelligence official confirmed the lack of Saudi cooperation
> and told me, angrily, that the Saudis "have only one constant --
> and it's keeping themselves in power."
>
> The N.S.A. intercepts reveal the hypocrisy of many in the Saudi
> royal family, and why the family has become increasingly estranged
> from the vast majority of its subjects. Over the years, unnerved
> by the growing strength of the fundamentalist movement, it has
> failed to deal with the underlying issues of severe unemployment
> and inadequate education, in a country in which half the population
> is under the age of eighteen. Saudi Arabia's strict interpretation
> of Islam, known as Wahhabism, and its use of mutawwa'in -- religious
> police -- to enforce prayer, is rivalled only by the Taliban's.
> And yet for years the Saudi princes -- there are thousands of them
> -- have kept tabloid newspapers filled with accounts of their
> drinking binges and partying with prostitutes, while taking billions
> of dollars from the state budget. The N.S.A. intercepts are more
> specific.
>
> In one call, Prince Nayef, who has served for more than two decades
> as interior minister, urges a subordinate to withhold from the
> police evidence of the hiring of prostitutes, presumably by members
> of the royal family. According to the summary, Nayef said that he
> didn't want the "client list" released under any circumstances.
>
> The intercepts produced a stream of sometimes humdrum but often
> riveting intelligence from the telephone calls of several senior
> members of the royal family, including Abdullah; Nayef; Sultan,
> whose son Prince Bandar has been the Saudi ambassador to the United
> States since 1983; and Prince Salman, the governor of Riyadh, Saudi
> Arabia's capital. There was constant telephoning about King Fahd's
> health after his stroke, and scrambling to take advantage of the
> situation. On January 8, 1997, Prince Sultan told Bandar about a
> flight that he and Salman had shared with the King. Sultan complained
> that the King "barely spoke to anyone,"  according to the summary
> of the intercept, because he was "too medicated." The King, Sultan
> added, was "a prisoner on the plane."
>
> Sultan's comments became much more significant a few days later,
> when the N.S.A. intercepted a conversation in which Sultan told
> Bandar that the King had agreed to a complicated exchange of fighter
> aircraft with the United States that would bring five F-16s into
> the Royal Saudi Air Force.
>
> Fahd was evidently incapable of making such an agreement, or of
> preventing anyone from dropping his name in a money-making deal.
>
> In the intercepts, princes talk openly about bilking the state,
> and even argue about what is an acceptable percentage to take.
> Other calls indicate that Prince Bandar, while serving as ambassador,
> was involved in arms deals in London, Yemen, and the Soviet Union
> that generated millions of dollars in "commissions." In a PBS
> "Frontline" interview broadcast on October 9th, Bandar, asked about
> the reports of corruption in the royal family, was almost upbeat
> in his response. The family had spent nearly four hundred billion
> dollars to develop Saudi Arabia, he said. "If you tell me that
> building this whole country . . . we misused or got corrupted with
> fifty billion, I'll tell you, 'Yes.'. . . So what?  We did not
> invent corruption, nor did those dissidents, who are so genius,
> discover it."
>
> The intercepts make clear, however, that Crown Prince Abdullah was
> insistent on stemming the corruption. In November of 1996, for
> example, he complained about the billions of dollars that were
> being diverted by royal family members from a huge state-financed
> project to renovate the mosque in Mecca. He urged the princes to
> get their off-budget expenses under control; such expenses are
> known as the hiding place for payoff money.
>
> (Despite its oil revenues, Saudi Arabia has been running a budget
> deficit for more than a decade, and now has a large national debt.)
> A few months later, according to the intercepts, Abdullah blocked
> a series of real-estate deals by one of the princes, enraging
> members of the royal family. Abdullah further alarmed the princes
> by issuing a decree declaring that his sons would not be permitted
> to go into partnerships with foreign companies working in the
> kingdom.
>
> Abdullah is viewed by Sultan and other opponents as a leader who
> could jeopardize the kingdom's most special foreign relationshipsomeone
> who is willing to penalize the United States, and its oil and gas
> companies, because of Washington's support for Israel. In an
> intercept dated July 13, 1997, Prince Sultan called Bandar in
> Washington, and informed him that he had told Abdullah "not to be
> so confrontational with the United States."
>
> The Fahd regime was a major financial backer of the Reagan
> Administration's anti-Communist campaign in Latin America and of
> its successful proxy war in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union.
> Oil money bought the Saudis enormous political access and leverage
> in Washington.
>
> Working through Prince Bandar, they have contributed hundreds of
> millions of dollars to charities and educational programs here.
> American construction and oil companies do billions of dollars'
> worth of business every year with Saudi Arabia, which is the world's
> largest oil producer.
>
> At the end of last year, Halliburton, the Texas-based oil-supply
> business formerly headed by Vice-President Dick Cheney, was operating
> a number of subsidiaries in Saudi Arabia.
>
> In the Clinton era, the White House did business as usual with the
> Saudis, urging them to buy American goods, like Boeing aircraft.
> The kingdom was seen as an American advocate among the oil-producing
> nations of the Middle East. The C.I.A. was discouraged from conducting
> any risky intelligence operations inside the country and, according
> to one former official, did little recruiting among the Saudi
> population, which limited the United States government's knowledge
> of the growth of the opposition to the royal family.
>
> In 1994, Mohammed al-Khilewi, the first secretary at the Saudi
> Mission to the United Nations, defected and sought political asylum
> in the United States. He brought with him, according to his New
> York lawyer, Michael J.
>
> Wildes, some fourteen thousand internal government documents
> depicting the Saudi royal family's corruption, human-rights abuses,
> and financial support for terrorists. He claimed to have evidence
> that the Saudis had given financial and technical support to Hamas,
> the extremist Islamic group whose target is Israel. There was a
> meeting at the lawyer's office with two F.B.I. agents and an
> Assistant United States Attorney. "We gave them a sampling of the
> documents and put them on the table," Wildes told me last week.
> "But the agents refused to accept them." He and his client heard
> nothing further from federal authorities.  Al-Khilewi, who was
> granted asylum, is now living under cover.
>
> The Saudis were also shielded from Washington's foreign-policy
> bureaucracy. A government expert on Saudi affairs told me that
> Prince Bandar dealt exclusively with the men at the top, and never
> met with desk officers and the like. "Only a tiny handful of people
> inside the government are familiar with U.S.-Saudi relations," he
> explained. "And that is purposeful."
>
> In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington,
> the royal family has repeatedly insisted that Saudi Arabia has made
> no contributions to radical Islamic groups. When the Saudis were
> confronted by press reports that some of the substantial funds that
> the monarchy routinely gives to Islamic charities may actually have
> gone to Al Qaeda and other terrorist networks, they denied any
> knowledge of such transfers.
>
> The intercepts, however, have led many in the intelligence community
> to conclude otherwise.
>
> The Bush Administration has chosen not to confront the Saudi
> leadership over its financial support of terror organizations and
> its refusal to help in the investigation. "As far as the Saudi
> Arabians go, they've been nothing but cooperative," President Bush
> said at a news conference on September 24th. The following day,
> the Saudis agreed to formally cut off diplomatic relations with
> the Taliban leadership in Afghanistan.  Eight days later, at a news
> conference in Saudi Arabia with Prince Sultan, the defense minister,
> Donald Rumsfeld was asked if he had given the Saudis a list of the
> September 11th terrorist suspects for processing by their intelligence
> agencies. Rumsfeld, who is admired by many in the press for his
> bluntness, answered evasively: "I am, as I said, not involved with
> the Federal Bureau of Investigation that is conducting the
> investigation. . .
>
> . I have every reason to believe that that relationship between our two
> countries is as close, that any information I am sure has been made
> available to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia."
>
> The Saudis gave Rumsfeld something in return -- permission for U.S.
> forces to use a command-and-control center, built before the Gulf
> War, in the pending air war against the Taliban. Over the past few
> years, the Saudis have also allowed the United States to use forward
> bases on Saudi soil for special operations, as long as there was
> no public mention of the arrangements.
>
> While the intelligence-community members I spoke with praised the
> Air Force and the Navy for their performance in Afghanistan last
> week, which did much to boost morale in the military and among the
> American citizenry, they were crestfallen about an incident that
> occurred on the first night of the war -- an incident that was
> emblematic, they believe, of the constraints placed by the government
> on the military's ability to wage war during the last decade.
>
> That night, an unmanned Predator reconnaissance aircraft, under
> the control of the C.I.A., was surveilling the roads leading out
> of Kabul.
>
> The Predator, which costs forty million dollars and cruises at
> speeds as slow as eighty miles an hour, is equipped with imaging
> radar and an array of infrared and television cameras that are
> capable of beaming high-resolution images to ground stations around
> the world. The plane was equipped with two powerful Hellfire
> missiles, designed as antitank weapons. The Predator identified a
> group of cars and trucks fleeing the capital as a convoy carrying
> Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader. Under a previously worked-out
> agreement, one knowledgeable official said, the C.I.A. did not have
> the authority to "push the button." Nor did the nearby command-and-control
> suite of the Fifth Fleet, in Bahrain, where many of the war plans
> had been drawn up. Rather, the decision had to be made by the
> officers on duty at the headquarters of the United States Central
> Command, or CENTCOM, at MacDill Air Force Base, in Florida.
>
> The Predator tracked the convoy to a building where Omar, accompanied
> by a hundred or so guards and soldiers, took cover. The precise
> sequence of events could not be fully learned, but intelligence
> officials told me that there was an immediate request for a full-scale
> assault by fighter bombers. At that point, however, word came from
> General Tommy R. Franks, the CENTCOM commander, saying, as the
> officials put it, "My JAG -- Judge Advocate General, a legal officer"
> -- doesn't like this, so we're not going to fire." Instead, the
> Predator was authorized to fire a missile in front of the building
> -- "bounce it off the front door," one officer said, "and see who
> comes out, and take a picture." CENTCOM suggested that the Predator
> then continue to follow Omar. The Hellfire, however, could not
> target the area in front of the building -- in military parlance,
> it could not "get a signature" on the dirt there -- and it was then
> agreed that the missile would attack a group of cars parked in
> front, presumably those which had carried Omar and his retinue.
> The missile was fired, and it "obliterated the cars," an official
> said. "But no one came out."
>
> It was learned later from an operative on the ground that Omar and
> his guards had indeed been in the convoy and had assumed at the
> time that the firing came from rocket-propelled grenades launched
> by nearby troops from the Northern Alliance. A group of soldiers
> left the building and looked for the enemy. They found nothing,
> and Omar and his convoy departed. A short time later, the building
> was targeted and destroyed by F-18s. Mullah Omar survived.
>
> Days afterward, top Administration officials were still seething
> about the incident. "If it was a fuckup, I could live with it,"
> one senior official said. "But it's not a fuckup -- it's an
> outrage.This isn't like you're six years old and your mother calls
> you to come in for lunch and you say, 'Time out.' If anyone thinks
> otherwise, go look at the World Trade Center or the Pentagon." A
> senior military officer viewed the failure to strike immediately
> as a symptom of "a cultural issue""a slow degradation of the system
> due to political correctness: 'We want you to kill the guy, but
> not the guy next to him.' No collateral damage."  Others saw the
> cultural problem as one of bureaucratic, rather than political,
> correctness. Either way, the failure to attack has left Defense
> Secretary Rumsfeld "kicking a lot of glass and breaking doors,"
> the officer said. "But in the end I don't know if it'll mean any
> changes."
>
> A Pentagon planner also noted that some of the camps the bombers
> were hitting were empty. In fact, he added, it became evident even
> before the bombing that troops of the Northern Alliance had moved
> into many of the unused Taliban camps. The Alliance soldiers came
> up with a novel way of alerting American planners to their new
> location, the officer said:
>
> "They walked around holding up white sheets so when the satellites
> came by they're saying, 'Hey, we're the good guys.' "
>
> The American military response has triggered alarm in the international
> oil community and among intelligence officials who have been briefed
> on a still secret C.I.A. study, put together in the mid-eighties,
> of the vulnerability of the Saudi fields to terrorist attack. The
> report was "so sensitive," a former C.I.A. officer told me, "that
> it was put on typed paper," and not into the agency's computer
> system, meaning that distribution was limited to a select few.
> According to someone who saw the report, it concluded that with
> only a small amount of explosives terrorists could take the oil
> fields off line for two years.
>
> The concerns, both in America and in Saudi Arabia, about the security
> of the fields have become more urgent than ever since September
> 11th. A former high-level intelligence official depicted the Saudi
> rulers as nervously "sitting on a keg of dynamite" -- that is, the
> oil reserves.
>
> "They're petrified that somebody's going to light the fuse."
>
> "The United States is hostage to the stability of the Saudi system,"
> a prominent Middle Eastern oil man, who did not wish to be cited
> by name, told me in a recent interview. "It's time to start facing
> the truth. The war was declared by bin Laden, but there are thousands
> of bin Ladens.
>
> They are setting the game -- the agenda. It's a new form of war.
> This fabulous military machine you have is completely useless."
> The oil man, who has worked closely with the Saudi leadership for
> three decades, added, "People like me have been deceiving you. We
> talk about how you don't understand Islam, but it's a vanilla
> analysis. We try to please you, but we've been aggrieved for years."
>
> The Saudi regime "will explode in time," he said. "It has been
> playing a delicate game." As for the terrorists responsible for
> the September 11th attacks, he said, "Now they decide the timing.
> If they do a similar operation in Saudi Arabia, the price of oil
> will go up to one hundred dollars a barrel" -- more than four times
> what it is today.
>
> In the nineteen-eighties, in an effort to relieve political pressure
> on the regime, the Saudi leadership relinquished some of its
> authority to the mutawwa'in and permitted them to have a greater
> role in day-to-day life.
>
> One U.S. government Saudi expert complained last week that religious
> leaders had been allowed to take control of the press and the
> educational system. "Today, two-thirds of the Saudi Ph.D.s are in
> Islamic studies," a former Presidential aide told me. There was
> little attempt over the years by American diplomats or the White
> House to moderate the increasingly harsh rhetoric about the U.S.
> "The United States was caught up in private agreements" -- with
> the Saudi princes "while this shit was spewing in the Saudi press,"
> the former aide said. "That was a huge mistake."
>
> A senior American diplomat who served many years in Saudi Arabia
> recalled his foreboding upon attending a training exercise at the
> kingdom's most prestigious military academy, in Riyadh: "It was
> hot, and I watched the cadets doing drills. The officers were
> lounging inside a suradiq "a large pavilion" with cold drinks,
> calling out orders on loudspeakers. I thought to myself, How many
> of these young men would follow and die for these officers?" The
> diplomat said he came away from his most recent tour in Saudi Arabia
> convinced that "it wouldn't take too much for a group of twenty or
> thirty fundamentalist enlisted men to take charge. How would the
> kingdom deal with the shock of something ruthless, small, highly
> motivated, and of great velocity?"
>
> There is little that the United States can do now, the diplomat
> said.
>
> "The Saudis have been indulged for so many decades.They are so
> spoiled.
>
> They've always had it their way. There's hardly anything we could
> say that would impede the 'majestic instancy' of their progress.
> We're their janissaries." He was referring to the captives who
> became elite troops of the Ottoman Empire.
>
> "The policy dilemma is this," a senior general told me. "How do we
> help the Saudis make a transition without throwing them over the
> side?"
>
> Referring to young fundamentalists who have been demonstrating in
> the Saudi streets, he said, "The kids are bigger than the Daddy."
>
> ======================
>
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