From The Washington Post
The dust jacket of Gerald Posner's Secrets of the Kingdom calls it an "explosive study" of Saudi Arabia. In 14 of its 15 chapters that's not true, but in chapter 10 it is -- literally.There Posner reports that Saudi Arabia has wired all of its major oil facilities with interlocking Semtex explosive charges that can be detonated from a single control point. Moreover, he says, the Saudis have blended radioactive materials into the Semtex so that detonation would not only destroy the facilities but also contaminate them beyond repair.
Why would the Saudis set off what's essentially a networked dirty bomb over their oil infrastructure? Because, according to Posner, they want to make certain that nobody could benefit from invading their country or taking down the ruling House of Saud. If the al Saud family goes, Posner writes, the world's petroleum-based economy goes with it.
Posner, the muckraking author of nine previous books, acknowledges that he cannot be sure this story is true. And indeed a Saudi official has questioned the credibility of the allegations. Posner attributes the story to conversations among Saudi officials intercepted by the National Security Agency and Israeli intelligence and compiled by the NSA into a file called "Petro SE" -- for "Petroleum Scorched Earth." It is possible, he concedes, that the Saudis knew their conversations were being overheard and concocted the doomsday scenario to ensure that the United States would come to their aid in a crisis. "What better incentive for Western powers, particularly the United States, to come to the aid of the House of Saud if it were under external or internal attack," Posner writes, "than to think that if it fell, like the shah of Iran did a quarter century ago, they would take the energy infrastructure of Saudi Arabia with them" and cause worldwide chaos?
The wealth of detail in Posner's account gives it an air of credibility. Moreover, Saudi Arabia does have a Nuclear Energy Research Institute, with scientists who are familiar with radioactive materials such as cesium that could be used in dirty bombs. Because (according to U.S. intelligence reports) the kingdom financed the development of nuclear weapons by Pakistan, it would have had access to nuclear material, if only through the clandestine network of Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan. And while Saudi Arabia is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, it has never agreed to an international inspection protocol.
On other levels, though, Posner's account defies belief. Hundreds of Americans work for Saudi Aramco, the state oil company, many in senior positions and many with intelligence connections. Would none of them have spotted this mammoth undertaking and reported it? Would the Saudis really destroy facilities in Medina, a city so sacred that non-Muslims are prohibited from going there? And who, in a royal family that operates by consensus and spreads out decision-making power among several senior princes, would have his finger on the detonation button? Thinking that the House of Saud would give absolute doomsday power to one individual runs contrary to Saudi Arabia's history for the past half century.
Moreover, if the story is true, what should the world do about it? Posner does not say. Having rolled this grenade under the reader's chair, so to speak, he just leaves it there. He does note that Semtex has a shelf-life of about 20 years and that the Saudis allegedly acquired their supply in the early 1990s -- which means that a few years from now the explosive network (if it exists) will no longer be functional. What are the implications of that? Posner says such questions can usefully be addressed only after the Saudis have been persuaded to allow international inspectors into the facilities that supposedly have been wired to see whether, in fact, they have been. Saudi officials and Americans familiar with Saudi oil installations have greeted Posner's account with derision. "The idea makes no sense, and whoever wrote it has no credibility," Saudi Oil Minister Ali Nuaimi said while in Washington earlier this month.
Aside from the chapter about the oil-field explosives, there isn't much new in Secrets of the Kingdom. Readers who were persuaded by the intimations of skullduggery in Craig Unger's House of Bush, House of Saud, which reached a wide audience via Michael Moore's movie "Fahrenheit 9/11," will find their suspicions reinforced; those who take a more nuanced view of Saudi Arabia and U.S.-Saudi relations are likely to find Posner's book a tendentious rehash of old material, repackaged to put the kingdom in the worst possible light.
We can stipulate that Saudi Arabia has more than its share of odious, reprehensible people, some of them with American blood on their hands; that its social customs are sometimes alien to Western sensibilities; that its human rights record is deplorable; that business deals there have been landmarks of corruption; and that a lot of Saudi money has supported bigotry and funded terrorism. Posner reviews these issues but adds very little to our knowledge of them. Except for the "Petro SE" material, he relies almost entirely on secondary sources, drawing heavily from mainstream news outlets and well-known earlier books. Mike Ameen, a longtime Aramco executive, and Hermann Eilts, a former U.S. ambassador to the kingdom, are quoted only from their remarks on a PBS documentary, even though both men are easy to find.
The result is a briskly written narrative that will shock anyone who has been marooned on a desert island for 40 years but contains little new for readers who have been paying attention. Here are stories about Adnan Khashoggi, Ambassador Bandar bin Sultan, various kings and princes, and the puritanical Wahhabi religious establishment. The controversial 1980 public television film "Death of a Princess" surfaces here, and the 1981 fight over selling AWACS planes, and the Carlyle Group, and the BCCI bank-fraud scandal and the Arab oil embargo of 1973-74. These are entertaining tales, but often told.
Some of the supposedly new material is also flimsy. "The 9/11 Commission gave the Saudis a free pass," Posner asserts in his opening chapter. "This book shows why." But he neither establishes that a whitewash took place nor explains why it allegedly occurred. To support his charge, he offers an entire chapter about the extravagance of Prince Mohammed bin Fahd and another about the global business dealings of Prince al Waleed bin Talal. But the former's excesses are well known, as are the latter's business ventures, and Posner does not even suggest that this information has anything to do with the work of the 9/11 Commission. Relying mostly on news reports, Posner assembles a coherent narrative of Saudi funding of terrorist groups, but he acknowledges that on this issue the 9/11 Commission did indeed go after the Saudis, noting in its final report that "al Qaeda found fertile fund-raising ground in Saudi Arabia." Posner includes a hair-raising account of how the Saudis fund the distribution of extremist literature and ideas inside the United States, but that ground, too, has been extensively plowed, most notably in a long report last December by Freedom House, a nonprofit group that supports democracy abroad.
It is understandable that Posner wanted to keep his manuscript secret in hope of making news upon its release, but it would have benefited from a good vetting by a reader more knowledgeable about Saudi Arabia and the region. Such a reader would have caught the obvious errors that pockmark the text. Posner writes that in 1957 King Saud "was still smarting over the U.S.'s support of Israel in its 1956 war with Arab countries," when all Arabs know that Suez was the one Arab-Israeli war in which Washington stood with them against Israel. The Shatt al Arab is a waterway, not "a disputed region of land." The Bedouin are not a single clan. And Aramco's Mike Ameen would never have said of King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, the kingdom's founder, that "people who dealt with him never considered him bright," as Posner reports. Ameen was talking about Abdul Aziz's dimwitted son, Saud -- as he confirmed when I called him, which Posner never did.
Posner's best chapter is his last one, entitled "The Future?". The question mark is apt. Posner gives a compelling summary of the economic, social, educational and political choices facing Saudi Arabia and its rulers and notes that there are "no easy choices." As he observes, Saudi Arabia must make major changes to satisfy the aspirations of its restless younger generation, but "if it moves too quickly, it will destabilize the peace within the fractious monarchy itself, especially when King Fahd dies and succession again confronts the country." Well put. It's regrettable that Posner didn't put his powers of observation to more productive use in the rest of the book.
Reviewed by Thomas W. Lippman
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
A Free Pass for the Saudis
On August 31, 2003, Time published the first review of my book Why America Slept, and focused on the final chapter about the capture and interrogation of an al Qaeda terrorist, Abu Zubaydah. It revealed an American intelligence scheme to dupe Zubaydah into disclosing whatever he knew about imminent terrorist attacks. Using a room in a CIA-linked Afghan facility that was hastily converted to resemble a Saudi Arabian prison, U.S. officials concocted an elaborate ruse. Two Arab-American Special Forces soldiers pretended to be Saudi interrogators. The Saudis wanted Zubaydah—Osama bin Laden’s number three man—for terrorist crimes, and they had a well-deserved reputation for using torture in interrogations. The thinking behind the Mission Impossible–type deception was that Zubaydah would be so frightened he would either divulge critical information to avoid torture or prefer to be handed over to, and cooperate with, American questioners to avoid the tougher fate with the Saudis.
It took almost three years before news leaked out confirming that the government had approved so-called “false flag” operations for terrorists. On January 29, 2005, The New York Times, in its coverage of Michael Chertoff’s nomination to be the next homeland security chief, reported that in his former job at the Justice Department, Chertoff had advised the CIA on the legality of coercive interrogation methods for terror suspects under the federal antitorture statute. CIA officials evidently wanted legal protection so its officers minimized the risk of prosecution. “Other practices that would not present legal problems were those that did not involve the infliction of pain, like tricking a subject into believing he was being questioned by a member of a security service from another country,” reported the Times.1
The subterfuge backfired. Zubaydah seemed relieved rather than frightened when confronted by the fake Saudi interrogators. From memory, he rattled off two telephone numbers and told the startled U.S. Special Forces agents, “He will tell you what to do.” The numbers were private home and cell phone lines of Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz, the nephew of Saudi king Fahd. The Western-educated Ahmed was one of the wealthiest members of the royal family and chairman of the Research and Marketing Group, the Kingdom’s largest publishing company. Although his media firm was responsible for virulent anti-American and anti-Israeli propaganda, he was considered by most observers simply a Westernized businessman with little apparent political interest. Ahmed was best known as a premier collector of Thoroughbred horses, including the 2002 Kentucky Derby winner, War Emblem. Since 1996, he had spent $126 million buying racehorses.2
The CIA officials running Zubaydah’s interrogation directed the two American Special Forces agents to falsely tell the terrorist that the telephone numbers he had provided were wrong. By that time, Zubaydah had been deprived of sleep for days, maintained on minimum pain medication for gunshot wounds sustained in his capture, and had been secretly administered a “truth serum” by intravenous drip. Yet, when told his telephone numbers had not panned out, he did not panic. Instead, he gave the “Saudi” interrogators several more numbers, these belonging to two other Saudi princes as well as the chief of Pakistan’s air force, the equivalent of being a member of America’s Joint Chiefs of Staff. These were his key contacts inside Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, Zubaydah claimed. And in a rambling monologue that one investigator later dubbed “the Rosetta stone” of 9/11, Zubaydah told his American interrogators that two of those named, the king’s nephew and the chief of Pakistan’s air force, knew before 9/11 there would be an al Qaeda attack in America around that date. No one had warned the United States.
Zubaydah’s astonishing information put American intelligence in a quandary. At the time, April 2002, the U.S. was working hard to convince the Saudi and Pakistani governments to cooperate with George Bush’s declared war on terror. Pakistan had already allowed the U.S. to use its military bases to conduct the war in Afghanistan, and the Kingdom was slowly providing some minor intelligence on al Qaeda, as well as tacitly supporting the Americans in Afghanistan. There was no willingness in the Bush administration to confront either ally based only on the unproven word of an avowed terrorist, especially since Zubaydah recanted his entire confession once he learned he had been duped by the Americans.
Intelligence analysts speculated that Zubaydah’s inclusion of Prince Ahmed raised the possibility that the supposedly apolitical prince might merely be a conduit of information for someone higher ranking. Ahmed’s father, Prince Salman bin Abdul Aziz, is the governor of Riyadh, the Saudi capital, a post he has held since 1962. One of seven sons of the country’s founder, he is one of the Kingdom’s most influential ministers and a trusted advisor to King Fahd. Since Fahd’s 1995 stroke, Salman rarely leaves his brother’s side in Jeddah. According to diplomatic reports, Salman, along with his older brother Sultan, the defense minister, and his half brother Abdullah, the crown prince, are the de facto rulers of Saudi Arabia.
Besides his official position, Salman, whose Riyadh office overlooks Sahat al-Adl—“Justice Square”—where public beheadings take place on Fridays after noon prayers, is influential both with Saudi intelligence and in censoring the media. But there were several other roles that interested American investigators more. One was Salman’s multiyear courtship of religious fundamentalists as his power base, especially after his born-again conversion to strict Islam in the 1990s. He has strong ties to the religious conservatives, particularly those in the regional strongholds of Buraydah and Darriya, places Salman frequently visits. The CIA was also intrigued that during the 1980s Afghan war against the Soviets, Salman was responsible for organizing transportation to Afghanistan for the militant armies (mujahideen) from various Arab countries. And finally, he controlled the Kingdom’s charities that raised tens of millions for the mujahideen, and brought in billions for Muslim causes worldwide. And many of those chari-ties were on the U.S. government’s list of terror sponsors.3
But U.S. intelligence agencies were soon stymied in determining whether there was an al Qaeda link between the senior Salman and his son. So the Bush administration gambled. It authorized the CIA to pass along Zubaydah’s charges to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. By covertly monitoring the reactions inside those two countries, the administration thought it might determine the accuracy of Zubaydah’s remarkable revelations. Both countries quickly answered, however, with remarkably similar denials, feigning outrage at the very suggestion there could be any truth in the disclosures.
If that had been the end of it, Zubaydah’s confession might just be a footnote to the 9/11 story. However, what happened next ensured that the questions raised by Zubaydah might forever remain unanswered. Only three months after the Saudis and Pakistanis learned of what he had told the Americans, the people he named started dying. Within a few days, all three Saudi princes were dead. Forty-three-year-old Prince Ahmed, the king’s nephew, died after he voluntarily entered the best hospital in Riyadh for non-life-threatening surgery for a digestive problem, diverticulitis (one acquaintance says the prince actually went for liposuction, but that procedure is normally done on an outpatient basis). He was dead two days later, with Saudi officials and doctors flip-flopping over the cause of death from a heart attack to a blood clot. One of the doctors suggested that the portly Ahmed was himself responsible for a deadly clot because he was not active enough after his surgery. The doctors, he claimed, felt they could not advise Ahmed to move about since he was a prince, and as such could not be given orders, even by medical professionals.
The day after Ahmed’s untimely death, the second prince named by Zubaydah—Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki al-Saud—a forty-one-year-old former military officer, was killed in a car accident. He was Ahmed’s cousin, and was on his way to Ahmed’s funeral. No other car was involved. He must have been driving too fast, concluded the Saudi police, when his car spun out of control and off the road. A week later, the third prince named by Zubaydah—Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabir—a twenty-five-year-old, was found dead near his car, only fifty-five miles outside Riyadh. According to the Saudi Royal Court, which took the unusual step of announcing the death, this prince had “died of thirst,” a victim of dehydration in the brutal Saudi summer.
Zubaydah’s Pakistani link, Air Marshal Mushaf Ali Mir, died on February 20, 2003, together with his wife and fifteen of his top aides, when his military aircraft crashed in Pakistan’s rugged Northwest Frontier province. That plane had recently sailed through a thorough maintenance inspection. The weather was clear at the time. There are reports—which Pakistani authorities refuse to acknowledge—that another military officer replaced the air marshal’s trusted private pilot at the last moment. Also, ear witnesses told investigators they had heard a loud explosion immediately before the crash.
If foul play was involved in the cluster of deaths, what could the victims have known that was so significant that someone wanted them dead? It might not be possible to answer that. Saudi Arabia, for instance, never even made a pretense of investigating the deaths of the princes. In Pakistan, a full investigation was announced into...
