Sleeping With The Devil (12 page)

    Here, too, the trail gets complicated. Delta Oil was formed in the
early 1990s by fifty wealthy Saudis, including Crown Prince ‘Abdallah, according to a May 1999
report by the U.S. embassy in Riyadh. The greatest among equals, though, appears to be Muhammad
Husayn al-Amoudi, a Saudi who operates out of Ethiopia, where he oversees a conglomerate with
tentacles in construction, banking, oil, and mining. The al-Amoudi and bin Mahfouz families
have formed several partnerships, including Delta-Nimir, an oil venture that joined forces with
Unocal in 1994 to develop oil fields in Azerbaijan. Like the bin Mahfouz clan, the al-Amoudis
have been accused of giving money to Osama bin Laden, in this case through the
family-controlled Capitol Trust Bank of London and New York.

    We’ll probably never sort out whether Saudi Arabia’s charities
knowingly funded bin Laden. In all probability, they were a lot like American-Irish pub keepers
in New York, handing around a tin can for the IRA: Most of the money ended up feeding orphans
and widows back in the old country, but some of it no doubt ended up buying guns and
explosives. That doesn’t let anyone off the hook, though. The Saudi government and Washington
never demanded an accounting, letting the believers among the Al Sa’ud and the Wahhabi
militants send money to bin Laden through unwitting fronts. If it was easy money for the
faithful in Washington, it was easy for the faithful in Riyadh and Jeddah, too.

    EVEN WASHINGTON’S COMMONERS started to look at Saudi Arabia as their
supplemental 401(k) plan. Aware that government bureaucrats can’t retire comfortably on a
federal pension, the Saudis put out the message: You play the game - keep your mouth shut about
the kingdom - and we’ll take care of you, find you a job, fund a chair at a university for you,
maybe even present you with a Lexus and a town house in Georgetown.

    Walter Cutler, former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, is president of
the Meridian International Center in Washington. Established to “promote international
understanding,” according to its website, the center has been generously supported by Saudi
donors. Board members include a who’s who of Congressional and Cabinet wives: Mrs. Spencer
Abraham, Mrs. Ken Bentsen, Mrs. John Breaux, Mrs. Jon Corzine, Mrs. William Frist, Mrs. Charles
Hagel, and Mrs. Patrick Leahy, to parse only the first half of the alphabet.

    Edward S. “Ned” Walker, Jr., a former assistant secretary of state for
Near Eastern affairs in the Clinton administration and an ambassador to Tel Aviv and Cairo
before that, presides over the Middle East Institute, also in Washington. Founded in 1946 to
promote understanding of the Arab world, the institute operated in 2001 on a budget of $1.5
million, $200,000 of which came from Saudi contributors, according to Walker. The institute’s
board chairman is Wyche Fowler, Jr., the former Georgia senator and ambassador to Riyadh in the
second Clinton administration. Other board members include former Defense Secretary James
Schlesinger and former FBI and CIA Director William Webster.

    American journalists have provided example after example of American
diplomats and other State Department officials who left their Middle East posts, signed on with
some Saudi-backed entity or another, and began carrying the party line to op-ed pages, learned
conferences, and anywhere else that would have them. Why not, with the Kissingers, Scowcrofts,
Powells, and Carluccis setting such a splendid example? The little people need to eat, too.
They eat less, but the rules are the same: See no evil. Hear no evil. Speak no evil.

    Prince Bandar, Saudi Arabia’s longtime ambassador to the United States,
once told an associate that he is careful to look after American government officials when they
return to private life. “If the reputation then builds that the Saudis take care of friends
when they leave office, you’d be surprised how much better friends you have who are just coming
into office,” Bandar observed, according to a
Washington Post
source. When you’re rich
and arrogant enough, you can buy the luxury of candor.

    Just to make sure no one is tempted to complain too much, Saudi Arabia
keeps possibly as much as a trillion dollars on deposit in U.S. banks - an agreement worked out
in the early 1980s by the Reagan administration, in yet another effort to get the Saudis to
offset the U.S. budget deficit. The Saudis hold another trillion dollars or so in the U.S.
stock market.

    On the compulsory one-to-ten scale of economic catastrophe, having the
Saudis withdraw all their U.S. bank deposits and vacate the stock market is probably only a
six, well below the Saudis turning off the oil spigot or having the spigot blown to bits - the
ten-point, apocalypse-now disaster. But it all begins to suggest that someone might have
someone else by the short hairs.

    

    

    IN 1994 CIA headquarters brought me back to Washington after a two-year
stretch in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, the remotest, poorest patch of hardscrabble on earth. Frankly,
I was happy to come home and kick back for a while. I’d had enough of cold showers, military
rations, and the bedtime lullaby of tank fire, and I needed a break before going to one more
godforsaken part of the world. That is, until I started looking around Washington for a place
to rent.

    When I signed up with the CIA in [text omitted] I could afford
Washington, even an apartment in Georgetown. Back then you could still go out a couple of times
a week without having to spend the rest of the week eating pork and beans. This had all changed
by 1994. Rents in Georgetown had gone through the ceiling. All the local places I had hung out
in were gone, replaced by trendy French cafés, boutiques, and cigar bars. If you had a family
and wanted to lead anything like a middle-class life in Washington, you were looking at
Virginia’s exurbs, maybe an hour’s commute away.

    I was about to give up and settle for someplace outside the Beltway
when I happened on a house in Palisades, a neighborhood just outside of Georgetown. The house
was on a month-to-month lease, but that didn’t matter. It was the perfect size: three bedrooms,
two baths, and a lawn, more than adequate for me and my family. Better still, it was maybe five
minutes by car to headquarters in Langley, Virginia. In fact, it was close enough for me to
ride my bicycle to work: a straight shot across the Potomac River on Chain Bridge to Route 123,
a hard pump for about half a mile up a hill, then an easy pedal right up to the CIA’s front
gates. It not only saved buying a second car; I got a good daily workout in the bargain.

    One night I was on my way home and noticed a convoy coming up Route 123
from the Potomac, led by a Chevy Suburban 2500 with flashing lights. At first I thought it was
the president - he’s the only official in Washington who gets that kind of protection. But
right before the convoy got to me, it turned in to a gated estate. The enormous iron gates
opened, and in a second the cars disappeared down a tree-lined driveway. Only then did I notice
that I was riding in front of the estate of Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to the U.S.
Because the limo windows were fashionably smoked, I could only guess it was Bandar coming home.

    The next day I asked about Bandar’s status and was told that he alone
of all ambassadors got official State Department protection. The Suburban must have belonged to
State. Even back then, the incident seemed to encapsulate something important about Bandar,
Washington, the CIA, and the peculiar relationship between Saudi Arabia and the United States.
Here I was on my bicycle, a CIA official supposedly charged with protecting America’s national
security, passed on the road by the Saudi ambassador with his U.S. government protection, who
then pulled into his estate overlooking the Potomac - the best piece of property in Washington.
Ten of my houses could have fit inside his.

    But it was a lot more than that. Bandar could wander into the White
House and around Congress for a chat anytime he liked. It took me weeks to get an appointment
with a low-ranking staffer in the National Security Council, and I’d be lucky to get even a few
minutes. Bandar was an A-list Washington party guest. He could pass a sensitive message to
anyone in the government or the press whenever he liked - on the opening night of the Kennedy
Center; at a sit-down dinner in the house of Katharine Graham, the late publisher of the
Washington Post
; or at the Cosmos Club. Bandar was a Washington player; I - the CIA -
wasn’t.

    Bandar’s convoy, his sprawling house, the special access, the no-limits
lifestyle: They were all a constant reminder of the way Washington really ran. Forget the crap
about democracy, about the capital of the free world. Washington was a company town, and Bandar
had a seat on the board. If you wanted to move into even the outer reaches of his orbit, you
had damn well better play by his rules.

    EVERY ARRANGEMENT as cozy as the U.S.-Saudi embrace needs someone with
a foot in each camp: well connected at either end of the line, able to move comfortably in two
cultures, expansive enough to make people seek out his company yet attentive to all the details
that get results at the end of the day. For the Washington-Riyadh axis, that person is Bandar
bin Sultan bin ‘Abd-al-‘Aziz. Prince Bandar ranks low on the royal-gene charts - although his
father is the Saudi defense minister, his mother was a mere house servant - but Washington has
always cared more about money than bloodlines.

    Ever since he was named the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. in 1983, at
age thirty-four, Bandar has been winning friends and influencing people for the Al Sa’ud. A
daredevil fighter pilot in his younger years, a Muslim with a taste for single-malt scotch and
Cuban cigars, and an envoy with an always open wallet, Bandar has proved himself a franchise
player, working both the public and private sides of diplomacy. As the Saudi military attaché
to the U.S., he scored a stunning coup in 1981 by convincing Congress to approve the sale of
AWACs early-warning aircraft technology to Saudi Arabia, over the near-hysterical objections of
AIPAC, the powerful Israeli Washington lobby. Later, as ambassador, Bandar paid down the
kingdom’s debt by secretly placing $10 million in a Vatican City bank as reported in 2002 by
the
Washington Post
. The money, deposited at the request of then CIA director William
Casey, was to be used by Italy’s Christian Democratic party in a campaign against Italian
communists. In June 1984 Bandar ponied up the first of $30 million from the royal family so
Oliver North could buy arms for the Nicaraguan contra rebels.

    It’s on the personal front that the affable Bandar truly shines. When
George H. W. and Barbara Bush flew to Saudi Arabia in late November 1990 to visit the troops
massing there to take Kuwait back from Iraq, Bandar’s wife, Princess Haifa, invited the Bushes’
newly divorced daughter, Dorothy, and her children to celebrate Thanksgiving at Bandar’s
Virginia farm. When the president and Bandar met in Riyadh several days after Thanksgiving,
Bush is said to have embraced the prince with tears in his eyes, proclaiming, “You are good
people.” (The tears are by Bandar’s own account.)

    A visit to the Bush summer home in Kennebunkport, Maine, earned the
prince the affectionate family sobriquet “Bandar Bush.” Bandar reciprocated by inviting Bush to
hunt pheasant on his estate in England. For good measure, Bandar also contributed an even $1
million to the construction of the Bush Presidential Library in College Station, Texas. At
Bandar’s suggestion, King Fahd sent another $1 million to Barbara Bush’s campaign against
illiteracy, just as he had donated $1 million to Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign against
drugs.

    Prince Bandar is not the only Saudi with an acute interest in
presidential libraries and the like. Back in October 1983 Adnan Khashoggi - the arms merchant
and future Iran-Contra middleman - footed the $50,000 bill at a New York City benefit for Jimmy
Carter’s presidential repository in Atlanta. Six months earlier, the former president and
future Nobel Peace Prize winner had sung the kingdom’s praises at a Saudi trade conference held
in Atlanta. Much more recently, in late 2002, Prince al-Walid kicked in $500,000 to help launch
the George Herbert Walker Bush Scholarship Fund at Phillips Academy, Andover - alma mater to
George W. Bush as well. A year earlier, you’ll recall, Rudy Giuliani had turned down Prince
al-Walid’s attempted $10 million gift.