more.26
11. REALM OF CONSPIRACY
THE TENETS OF Osama Bin Laden’s education were inseparable from the national ideology promoted by King Faisal in the late years of his reign. Al-Thaghr was not idly named a “model” school; it was a conspicuous example of Faisal’s program of modernization without secularization. The Muslim Brotherhood’s revolutionary goals made the king uncomfortable because they challenged the authority of the Al-Saud family, yet Faisal’s own vision of a politically conscious Islam echoed the Brotherhood’s call for action against enemies of the faith. After the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, for example, Faisal spoke repeatedly of a jihad to retake Jerusalem. His speeches denouncing the Israelis as an “impudent gang” bent on the “desecration” of Islam were not just designed to pander to Arab popular opinion; they were deeply felt, voiced by the king as forcefully in private as in public. As a young and increasingly active Saudi subject at Al-Thaghr, Osama identified with Faisal’s campaign against Israel— after all, his father had been the king’s emissary to Jerusalem before the 1967 war. Osama’s radicalization during high school did not, then, carry him into a state of opposition toward the Saudi government; in some respects, it deepened his alignment with Faisal’s foreign policy.1
Faisal was a popular king because the synthesis of Islam and modernity he called for was consistent with the choices he made in his private life. There was no free press or political opposition to investigate and expose the hypocrisy of the Saudi royal family’s irreligious self-indulgence, yet through rumor, informal observation, and Western press reports that filtered in, Saudis knew well enough which princes drank or gambled or extorted commissions from business contracts. By these channels they learned, too, that Faisal was exceptional. He refused to move into a garish palace built for him in Jeddah, preferring a suburban-style compound on a busy road. He had long ago given up alcohol. Operations on his digestive tract had left him able to tolerate only a bland diet of grilled meat, boiled vegetables, and rice. He worked several hours each morning at his palace office, prayed, held a working lunch, meditated privately, and then returned to his office for a second shift. At sunset each day he drove in one of his American sedans to the edge of the desert, sometimes taking his sons along, where he prayed alone in the sand. He returned yet again to his office to work into the night.2
For years Faisal had talked about transforming Saudi Arabia into a modern country but had delivered little. That had changed by the late 1960s. Gradually the Saudi state became a pervasive force in its subjects’ lives—an employer, an issuer of identity cards and passports, and a repository of commercial records. The long and troubled national highway program slowly linked the kingdom’s disparate regions. A few schools and universities opened. The ministries of Faisal’s government were far from efficient, but they now employed large numbers of Saudis, and in contrast to previous decades, they often issued their paychecks on time.
Faisal’s marriage to Iffat bint Ahmed Al-Thunayan, who became known as Queen Iffat, offered the most inspiring example—at least for women—of the king’s modernizing impulses. He had not always lived monogamously, but Iffat had been his only wife since about 1940, and by the 1960s, she had become an archetype of progressive womanhood, in a Saudi style. She had been raised in Istanbul to a Saudi father and a Hungarian or Circassian mother, and she was influenced by Turkish secularism as she came of age. She and Faisal had nine children. Iffat adhered to Wahhabi rules, never accompanying her husband on state visits or appearing unveiled before the Saudi public, yet she managed nonetheless to campaign on women’s issues. As early as 1955, she founded a school for orphaned girls, and supported girls’ education even in the kingdom’s most conservative regions.
She also traveled widely, shopped for modern clothes in Paris and San Francisco (only her husband and other women would see her wear them in Saudi Arabia), and promoted the business endeavors of her half-brother Kamal Adham, who became conspicuously wealthy. Adham served as one of Faisal’s most trusted emissaries, delivering cash subsidies to favored Arab leaders. In the early 1970s, Faisal appointed him as the first director of Saudi intelligence.3
The king did need someone to watch his back. Nasser had been weakened by his failure in the 1967 war against Israel, yet his pan-Arab nationalist movement, and its offshoots, such as Baathism, still threatened the Al- Saud. In 1969 the Saudi government arrested several hundred Saudis, including sixty to seventy military officers, whom Faisal suspected of plotting to kill him or overthrow his regime. The detentions quelled dissent, reported the bureau of intelligence and research at the U.S. Department of State, and yet “the basic causes of dissatisfaction remain. The process of modernization is creating a new middle-class elite in the military, bureaucratic and commercial fields. Many of the new elite are antagonized by the concentration of power in the Saudi royal family [and] they chafe at the narrow limits on social freedom and political expression.”4
Nasser died in 1970, succeeded by Anwar Sadat, with whom Faisal developed an alliance and a friendship. They were both cautious men, yet they shared a desire to avenge past losses to Israel. Faisal was profoundly anti- Semitic. From boyhood he had been instructed in a school of Islamic scholarship that cast Arabia’s Jews as treacherous betrayers in the narrative of war that culminated in the birth of the Prophet Mohamed’s new religion. As king, Faisal subscribed wholeheartedly to conspiracy theories about secret Jewish power. He regarded communism as a clever plot by Jews in their quest for world domination. During meetings with foreign visitors, he would often turn to his chief of protocol and ask, “Have they got the book?” The king was referring to
A pointed British memo summed up the tensions eating at the Saudi king during these years:
He is formidable if over-bearing in argument…The effect of sickness and advancing years has been to make him tetchy, opinionated and impatient of contradiction…He has in his recent years been almost obsessed by an apocalyptic vision of the forces of religion and morality (conveniently identified with his regime) being sapped by atheism, communism and Zionism. He has made his choice between the political west and east, but he is disenchanted with the west for its lack of support for him and his causes.6
Richard Nixon, better qualified than some world leaders to recognize a man with paranoid and anti-Semitic tendencies, remembered that Faisal “even put forward what must be the ultimate conspiratorialist notion: that the Zionists were behind the Palestinian terrorists.” Nixon’s Jewish national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, endured several of Faisal’s long harangues on the “dual conspiracy of Jews and communists,” which tested the diplomat’s patience considerably.7
Faisal’s theories might disappoint London and Washington, but ultimately, in an indirect fashion, his convictions helped to enrich Saudi Arabia beyond the king’s imagining. When Sadat told him early in October 1973 that Egypt and Syria had prepared a surprise attack against Israel, Faisal unhesitatingly pledged his support. The war that followed, although it proved another disappointment for Arab forces, led to a prolonged international oil embargo imposed by Arab producers, of which Saudi Arabia was the largest. The embargo was designed in part to punish the United States for its airlift of military supplies to Israel. For a time, the Nixon administration was so infuriated that it developed contingency plans for an invasion of Saudi oil fields. Faisal, however, sensed just how far he could go, and he bent just enough to keep the Americans at bay—he secretly allowed oil sales to support American forces fighting communists in Vietnam, for example, and he also agreed to pour billions of dollars from the embargo’s cash windfall into U.S. Treasury bonds.
The embargo was not a Saudi initiative, but it did more to transform the kingdom than any event since the discovery of oil itself. Faisal was arguably the 1973 war’s biggest winner.
The price of Saudi crude soared sixfold by early 1974 and kept rising. The kingdom’s gross domestic product quadrupled between 1973 and 1975. Its oil revenue had been about $4.3 billion in 1973; it now zigzagged upward each year, to a peak of $102 billion by 1981. This gusher of cash stimulated a new boom in construction and luxury imports that exploded so quickly it choked Jeddah’s ports; ships lined up for weeks to unload or pick up goods. Hotel lobbies teemed with frustrated salesmen unable to find a vacant room. In Jeddah a new Safeway opened, its shelves stocked with Jell-O and Campbell’s soups. Queen Elizabeth flew in for a visit and commented, “I’ve never seen so many cranes in my life.” Faisal’s grandson Amr remembered that “you’d go away for a summer holiday, and you’d come back, and you’d get lost…Things that would normally have taken twenty years to do were done in a few
