The King's Messenger by David B Ottaway

Author:David B Ottaway
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2009-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

* Bandar’s expression appears to come from a knock-knock joke that goes as follows: “Knock, knock. Who’s there? Uruguay. Uruguay who? You go Uruguay, and I’ll go mine.”

CHAPTER 10

“Everybody Has a Price”

IN LATE NOVEMBER 2001, Prince Bandar was on retreat in his palatial McLean residence on Chain Bridge Road celebrating Ramadan with his family and occasionally one or two guests. Two Washington Post reporters were invited to join him for iftar, the Muslim breaking of the dawn-to-dusk fast. The two were preparing a series of articles about the impact on U.S.-Saudi relations of the September 11 terrorist attacks.1 Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers in the four passenger airliners used were Saudi citizens. The shock and horror of this fact were still being digested in both countries. Americans suddenly had a different view of the kingdom, one of a country whose religion was creating fanatics filled with hatred for the United States and bent on destroying it. The Saudi royal family and public were still living in a state of denial, accusing Zionists of being responsible for the attacks, or other Arabs using stolen Saudi passports. Nearly three months after the even, even Bandar still believed that half of the hijackers identified as Saudi nationals were not really Saudi.

Bandar and his guests sat at a small dining table in his exquisitely decorated Moroccan Room. The prince’s mood alternated between manic and depressive. His world had clearly spun out of control. U.S.-Saudi relations lay buried in the ashes of the Twin Towers in New York, where twenty-eight hundred Americans had just died. Though on the edge of despair over the new realities of his mission in Washington, the prince talked for eight straight hours, at times philosophical, at others analytical, but always remaining the principal actor in the unfolding U.S.-Saudi drama.

In Bandar’s mind, 9/11 was pure Greek tragedy. Everyone in both Saudi and U.S. intelligence agencies had known something was about to happen, but nobody could prevent it. Bandar supported CIA director George Tenet in his contention that he had been ringing the alarm bell loudly and clearly within the administration. For almost two months before the attacks, Tenet had sounded like “a broken record,” running around saying, “Guys, I can see it. I can feel it. It’s coming. It’s going to be preposterous. Let’s look out.”2 U.S. and Saudi counterterrorism officials had done everything they could, but they couldn’t quite put the dots together. Part of the problem for the Saudis was the lack of cooperation among U.S. security agencies—the CIA, the FBI, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). Still, the Americans had almost run some of the terrorists to ground, arriving less than four hours too late to intercept two of them.

If U.S. security agencies had failed by only four hours to disrupt the 9/11 plot, the Saudis had been off by years in understanding that Osama bin Laden, son of one of the richest construction magnates in the kingdom, was a menace to the world. Bandar said they had never taken him seriously.

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