Inside the Kingdom (36 page)

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.”
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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.