[iwar] [fc:How.vulnerable.are.the.Saudi.Royals]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-10-22 15:19:36
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=====================================
Date: October 22, 2001
Subject: #428A Correction for the Record  ]
=====================================
[Comment #:   ]
Discussion Thread - Comment #s - 428
URLs for Past Comments are Archived at 2 Locations:
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- Chronological Archive: http://www.infowar.com/iwftp/cspinney/
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Attached References:
[1] SEYMOUR M. HERSH, "KING'S RANSOM: How vulnerable are the Saudi
royals?" The New Yorker, October 22,2001.
=======================================
In Comment #428, "A Grunt's View of the Saudi Volcano," SSG
Kountzonikolai included the following paragraph immediately before his concluding
remarks.
"A recent demonstration illustrates how popular bin Laden's actions are
in Saudi Arabia: On the night of the attacks on New York and the Pentagon,
50,000 people gathered in Riyadh and celebrated [a far larger number
than the small demonstrations on the West Bank shown by CNN-CS]. In Saudi
Arabia, such demonstrations are unheard of. And it scared the royal
family to death."
A reader in Saudi Arabia replied there was no public demonstration of
this magnitude in Riyadh, to the best of his knowledge. I asked Kountzonikolai
to check this out and clarify his remarks, if necessary. What follows is
his clarification:

------[SSG Kountzonikolai's clarification]------

"My statement implying that  "50,000 people celebrated in the streets"
is incorrect, according to my friend in the embassy. The original
statement was
obtained from another friend who attended an unclassified security
briefing where he was told 50,000 people had demonstrated in the
streets. But, I
have determined that the original information briefed was intended to
convey the idea that "50,000 people celebrated," whatever that means.  Most
likely, that number is a guesstimate indicating widespread sympathy
expressed in the privacy of their homes, in coffeehouses, etc."

-------[End clarification]------

We both regret any confusion this error caused.  If any readers choose
to redistribute #428, I request that you either delete this incorrect
paragraph or
indicate that it is factually incorrect.. This error does not change the
essence of his report, which is quite similar to several subsequent
reports.  I

Included below as Reference 1 is one of the more informative essays
describing the Saudi volcano.  It was written by the investigative journalist
Seymour Hersh and appeared in a recent edition of the New Yorker.


Chuck Spinney
Archives of past commentaries or reports can be found at
Defense &amp; National Interest Website:
<a href="http://www.d-n-i.net/">http://www.d-n-i.net/> or Infowar at
<a href="http://www.infowar.com/iwftp/cspinney/">http://www.infowar.com/iwftp/cspinney/>

[Disclaimer: In accordance with 17 U.S.C. 107, this material is
distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a
prior interest in
receiving this information for non-profit research and educational
purposes only.]
===========[ Reference #1] ===========&lt;

ANNALS OF NATIONAL SECURITY
Issue of 2001-10-22
Posted 2001-10-15
KING'S RANSOM
How vulnerable are the Saudi royals?

by SEYMOUR M. HERSH, The New Yorker, October 22, 2001
Since 1994 or earlier, the National Security Agency has been collecting
electronic intercepts of conversations between members of the Saudi Arabian
royal family, which is headed by King Fahd. The intercepts depict a regime

increasingly corrupt, 
alienated from the country's religious rank and file, and 
so weakened and frightened that it has brokered its future by
channelling hundreds of millions of dollars in what amounts to
protection money
to fundamentalist groups that wish to overthrow it.


The intercepts have demonstrated to analysts that by 1996 Saudi money
was supporting Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda and other
extremist groups in Afghanistan, Lebanon, Yemen, and Central Asia, and
throughout the Persian Gulf region. "Ninety-six is the key
year," one American intelligence official told me. "Bin Laden hooked up
to all the bad guys -- it's like the Grand Alliance -- and had a
capability for
conducting large-scale operations." The Saudi regime, he said, had "gone
to the dark side."

In interviews last week, current and former intelligence and military
officials portrayed the growing instability of the Saudi regime "and the
vulnerability of its oil reserves to terrorist attack" as the most
immediate threat to American economic and political interests in
the Middle East. The officials also said that the Bush Administration,
like the Clinton Administration, is refusing to confront this reality,
even in the
aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attacks.
The Saudis and the Americans arranged a meeting between Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and King Fahd during a visit by Rumsfeld to Saudi
Arabia shortly before the beginning of the air war in Afghanistan, and
pictures of the meeting were transmitted around the world. The United States,
however, has known that King Fahd has been incapacitated since suffering
a severe stroke, in late 1995. A Saudi adviser told me last
week that the King, with round-the-clock medical treatment, is able to
sit in a chair and open his eyes, but is usually unable to recognize
even his
oldest friends. Fahd is being kept on the throne, the N.S.A. intercepts
indicate, because of a bitter family power struggle.

Fahd's nominal successor is Crown Prince Abdullah, his half brother, who
is to some extent the de-facto ruler -- he and Prince Sultan, the
defense minister, were the people Rumsfeld really came to see. But there
is infighting about money: Abdullah has been urging his
fellow-princes to address the problem of corruption in the kingdom --
unsuccessfully, according to the intercepts. "The only
reason Fahd's being kept alive is so Abdullah can't become king," a
former White House adviser told me.
The American intelligence officials have been particularly angered by
the refusal of the Saudis to help the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. run "traces"
-- that is, name checks and other background information -- on the
nineteen men, more than half of them believed to be from
Saudi Arabia, who took part in the attacks on the World Trade Center and
the Pentagon. "They knew that once we started asking for a
few traces the list would grow," one former official said. "It's better
to shut it down right away."
He pointed out that thousands of disaffected Saudis have joined
fundamentalist groups throughout the Middle East. Other officials said
that there is a growing worry inside the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. that the
actual identities of many of those involved in the attacks may not be known
definitively for months, if ever.
Last week, a senior intelligence official confirmed the lack of Saudi
cooperation and told me, angrily, that the Saudis "have only one
constant -- and it's
keeping themselves in power."

The N.S.A. intercepts reveal the hypocrisy of many in the Saudi royal
family, and why the family has become increasingly estranged from the
vast majority of its subjects. Over the years, unnerved by the growing
strength of the fundamentalist movement, it has failed to deal
with the underlying issues of severe unemployment and inadequate
education, in a country in which half the population is
under the age of eighteen.

Saudi Arabia's strict interpretation of Islam, known as Wahhabism, and
its use of mutawwa'in -- religious police -- to enforce prayer, is
rivalled only by
the Taliban's. And yet for years the Saudi princes -- there are
thousands of them -- have kept tabloid newspapers filled with accounts
of their drinking
binges and partying with prostitutes, while taking billions of dollars
from the state budget.
The N.S.A. intercepts are more specific. In one call, Prince Nayef, who
has served for more than two decades as interior minister, urges a
subordinate to withhold from the police evidence of the hiring of
prostitutes, presumably by members of the royal family. According to the summary,
Nayef said that he didn't want the "client list" released under any circumstances.

The intercepts produced a stream of sometimes humdrum but often riveting
intelligence from the telephone calls of several senior members of the
royal family, including Abdullah; Nayef; Sultan, whose son Prince Bandar
has been the Saudi ambassador to the United States since 1983; and
Prince Salman, the governor of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia's capital.

There was constant telephoning about King Fahd's health after his
stroke, and scrambling to take advantage of the situation. On January 8, 1997,
Prince Sultan told Bandar about a flight that he and Salman had shared
with the King. Sultan complained that the King "barely spoke to anyone,"
according to the summary of the intercept, because he was "too
medicated." The King, Sultan added, was "a prisoner on the plane."
Sultan's comments became much more significant a few days later, when
the N.S.A. intercepted a conversation in which Sultan told Bandar that the
King had agreed to a complicated exchange of fighter aircraft with the
United States that would bring five F-16s into the Royal Saudi Air
Force. Fahd
was evidently incapable of making such an agreement, or of preventing
anyone from dropping his name in a money-making deal.
In the intercepts, princes talk openly about bilking the state, and even
argue about what is an acceptable percentage to take.
Other calls indicate that Prince Bandar, while serving as ambassador,
was involved in arms deals in London, Yemen, and the Soviet Union that
generated millions of dollars in "commissions."

In a PBS "Frontline" interview broadcast on October 9th, Bandar, asked
about the reports of corruption in the royal family, was almost upbeat
in his
response. The family had spent nearly four hundred billion dollars to
develop Saudi Arabia, he said. "If you tell me that building this whole
country . . .
we misused or got corrupted with fifty billion, I'll tell you, 'Yes.'. .
. So what? We did not invent corruption, nor did those dissidents, who
are so genius,
discover it."
The intercepts make clear, however, that Crown Prince Abdullah was
insistent on stemming the corruption. In November of 1996, for
example, he complained about the billions of dollars that were being
diverted by royal family members from a huge state-financed project to renovate
the mosque in Mecca. He urged the princes to get their off-budget
expenses under control; such expenses are known as the hiding place for payoff
money. (Despite its oil revenues, Saudi Arabia has been running a budget
deficit for more than a decade, and now has a large national debt.)

A few months later, according to the intercepts, Abdullah blocked a
series of real-estate deals by one of the princes, enraging members of
the royal
family. Abdullah further alarmed the princes by issuing a decree
declaring that his sons would not be permitted to go into partnerships
with foreign
companies working in the kingdom.
Abdullah is viewed by Sultan and other opponents as a leader who could
jeopardize the kingdom's most special foreign
relationship -- someone who is willing to penalize the United States,
and its oil and gas companies, because of Washington's
support for Israel. In an intercept dated July 13, 1997, Prince Sultan
called Bandar in Washington, and informed him that he had told Abdullah "not
to be so confrontational with the United States."

The Fahd regime was a major financial backer of the Reagan
Administration's anti-Communist campaign in Latin America and of
its successful proxy war in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union. Oil
money bought the Saudis enormous political access and leverage in
Washington. Working through Prince Bandar, they have contributed
hundreds of millions of dollars to charities and educational programs here.

American construction and oil companies do billions of dollars' worth of
business every year with Saudi Arabia, which is the world's largest oil
producer. At the end of last year, Halliburton, the Texas-based
oil-supply business formerly headed by Vice-President Dick Cheney, was
operating a
number of subsidiaries in Saudi Arabia.

In the Clinton era, the White House did business as usual with the
Saudis, urging them to buy American goods, like Boeing
aircraft. The kingdom was seen as an American advocate among the
oil-producing nations of the Middle East. The C.I.A. was discouraged from
conducting any risky intelligence operations inside the country and,
according to one former official, did little recruiting among the Saudi population,
which limited the United States government's knowledge of the growth of
the opposition to the royal family.

In 1994, Mohammed al-Khilewi, the first secretary at the Saudi Mission
to the United Nations, defected and sought political asylum in the United
States. He brought with him, according to his New York lawyer, Michael
J. Wildes, some fourteen thousand internal government documents depicting
the Saudi royal family's corruption, human-rights abuses, and financial
support for terrorists.
He claimed to have evidence that the Saudis had given financial and
technical support to Hamas, the extremist Islamic group whose
target is Israel. There was a meeting at the lawyer's office with two
F.B.I. agents and an Assistant United States Attorney. "We gave them a
sampling of
the documents and put them on the table," Wildes told me last week. "But
the agents refused to accept them." He and his client heard nothing further
from federal authorities. Al-Khilewi, who was granted asylum, is now
living under cover.
The Saudis were also shielded from Washington's foreign-policy
bureaucracy. A government expert on Saudi affairs told me that Prince
Bandar dealt exclusively with the men at the top, and never met with
desk officers and the like. "Only a tiny handful of people inside the government
are familiar with U.S.-Saudi relations," he explained. "And that is purposeful."

In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington,
the royal family has repeatedly insisted that Saudi Arabia has made no
contributions to radical Islamic groups. When the Saudis were confronted
by press reports that some of the substantial funds that the monarchy
routinely gives to Islamic charities may actually have gone to Al Qaeda
and other terrorist networks, they denied any knowledge of such
transfers. The
intercepts, however, have led many in the intelligence community to
conclude otherwise.
The Bush Administration has chosen not to confront the Saudi leadership
over its financial support of terror organizations and
its refusal to help in the investigation. "As far as the Saudi Arabians
go, they've been nothing but cooperative," President Bush said at a news
conference on September 24th.

The following day, the Saudis agreed to formally cut off diplomatic
relations with the Taliban leadership in Afghanistan. Eight days later,
at a news
conference in Saudi Arabia with Prince Sultan, the defense minister,
Donald Rumsfeld was asked if he had given the Saudis a list of the September
11th terrorist suspects for processing by their intelligence agencies.
Rumsfeld, who is admired by many in the press for his bluntness, answered
evasively: "I am, as I said, not involved with the Federal Bureau of
Investigation that is conducting the investigation. . . . I have every
reason to believe
that that relationship between our two countries is as close, that any
information I am sure has been made available to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia."

The Saudis gave Rumsfeld something in return -- permission for U.S.
forces to use a command-and-control center, built before the Gulf War,
in the
pending air war against the Taliban. Over the past few years, the Saudis
have also allowed the United States to use forward bases on Saudi soil for
special operations, as long as there was no public mention of the arrangements.

While the intelligence-community members I spoke with praised the Air
Force and the Navy for their performance in Afghanistan last week, which did
much to boost morale in the military and among the American citizenry,
they were crestfallen about an incident that occurred on the first night
of the
war -- an incident that was emblematic, they believe, of the constraints
placed by the government on the military's ability to wage war during
the last
decade.

That night, an unmanned Predator reconnaissance aircraft, under the
control of the C.I.A., was surveilling the roads leading out of Kabul.
The Predator,
which costs forty million dollars and cruises at speeds as slow as
eighty miles an hour, is equipped with imaging radar and an array of
infrared and
television cameras that are capable of beaming high-resolution images to
ground stations around the world. The plane was equipped with two
powerful Hellfire missiles, designed as antitank weapons. The Predator
identified a group of cars and trucks fleeing the capital as a convoy carrying
Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader.

Under a previously worked-out agreement, one knowledgeable official
said, the C.I.A. did not have the authority to "push the button." Nor
did the
nearby command-and-control suite of the Fifth Fleet, in Bahrain, where
many of the war plans had been drawn up. Rather, the decision had to be
made by the officers on duty at the headquarters of the United States
Central Command, or CENTCOM, at MacDill Air Force Base, in Florida.

The Predator tracked the convoy to a building where Omar, accompanied by
a hundred or so guards and soldiers, took cover. The precise sequence
of events could not be fully learned, but intelligence officials told me
that there was an immediate request for a full-scale assault by fighter
bombers. At
that point, however, word came from General Tommy R. Franks, the CENTCOM
commander, saying, as the officials put it, "My JAG" -- Judge Advocate
General, a legal officer -- "doesn't like this, so we're not going to fire."

Instead, the Predator was authorized to fire a missile in front of the
building -- "bounce it off the front door," one officer said, "and see
who comes out,
and take a picture." CENTCOM suggested that the Predator then continue
to follow Omar. The Hellfire, however, could not target the area in
front of the
building -- in military parlance, it could not "get a signature" on the
dirt there -- and it was then agreed that the missile would attack a
group of cars
parked in front, presumably those which had carried Omar and his
retinue. The missile was fired, and it "obliterated the cars," an
official said. "But no
one came out."

It was learned later from an operative on the ground that Omar and his
guards had indeed been in the convoy and had assumed at the time that the
firing came from rocket-propelled grenades launched by nearby troops
from the Northern Alliance. A group of soldiers left the building and
looked for
the enemy. They found nothing, and Omar and his convoy departed. A short
time later, the building was targeted and destroyed by F-18s. Mullah Omar
survived.

Days afterward, top Administration officials were still seething about
the incident. "If it was a fuckup, I could live with it," one senior
official said. "But it's
not a fuckup -- it's an outrage. This isn't like you're six years old
and your mother calls you to come in for lunch and you say, 'Time out.'
If anyone thinks
otherwise, go look at the World Trade Center or the Pentagon."

A senior military officer viewed the failure to strike immediately as a
symptom of "a cultural issue" -- "a slow degradation of the system due
to political
correctness: 'We want you to kill the guy, but not the guy next to him.'
No collateral damage." Others saw the cultural problem as one of bureaucratic,
rather than political, correctness. Either way, the failure to attack
has left Defense Secretary Rumsfeld "kicking a lot of glass and breaking
doors," the
officer said. "But in the end I don't know if it'll mean any changes."

A Pentagon planner also noted that some of the camps the bombers were
hitting were empty. In fact, he added, it became evident even before the
bombing that troops of the Northern Alliance had moved into many of the
unused Taliban camps. The Alliance soldiers came up with a novel way of
alerting American planners to their new location, the officer said:
"They walked around holding up white sheets so when the satellites came
by they're
saying, 'Hey, we're the good guys.' "
The American military response has triggered alarm in the international
oil community and among intelligence officials who
have been briefed on a still secret C.I.A. study, put together in the
mid-eighties, of the vulnerability of the Saudi fields to terrorist
attack. The report was "so sensitive," a former C.I.A. officer told me,
"that it was put on typed paper," and not into the agency's computer system,
meaning that distribution was limited to a select few. According to
someone who saw the report, it concluded that with only a small amount of
explosives terrorists could take the oil fields off line for two years.
The concerns, both in America and in Saudi Arabia, about the security of
the fields have become more urgent than ever since September 11th. A
former high-level intelligence official depicted the Saudi rulers as
nervously "sitting on a keg of dynamite" -- that is, the oil reserves.
"They're petrified that somebody's going to light the fuse."

"The United States is hostage to the stability of the Saudi system," a
prominent Middle Eastern oil man, who did not wish to be cited by
name, told me in a recent interview. "It's time to start facing the
truth. The war was declared by bin Laden, but there are thousands of bin
Ladens. They are setting the game -- the agenda. It's a new form of war.
This fabulous military machine you have is completely
useless." The oil man, who has worked closely with the Saudi leadership
for three decades, added, "People like me have been
deceiving you. We talk about how you don't understand Islam, but it's a
vanilla analysis. We try to please you, but we've been aggrieved for years."

The Saudi regime "will explode in time," he said. "It has been playing a
delicate game." As for the terrorists responsible for the September
11th attacks, he said, "Now they decide the timing. If they do a similar
operation in Saudi Arabia, the price of oil will go up to one hundred
dollars a
barrel" -- more than four times what it is today.
In the nineteen-eighties, in an effort to relieve political pressure on
the regime, the Saudi leadership relinquished some of its
authority to the mutawwa'in and permitted them to have a greater role in
day-to-day life. One U.S. government Saudi expert
complained last week that religious leaders had been allowed to take
control of the press and the educational system.

"Today, two-thirds of the Saudi Ph.D.s are in Islamic studies," a former
Presidential aide told me. There was little attempt over the years by American
diplomats or the White House to moderate the increasingly harsh rhetoric
about the U.S. "The United States was caught up in private agreements" --
with the Saudi princes -- "while this shit was spewing in the Saudi
press," the former aide said. "That was a huge mistake."

A senior American diplomat who served many years in Saudi Arabia
recalled his foreboding upon attending a training exercise at the
kingdom's most
prestigious military academy, in Riyadh: "It was hot, and I watched the
cadets doing drills. The officers were lounging inside a suradiq" -- a large
pavilion -- "with cold drinks, calling out orders on loudspeakers. I
thought to myself, How many of these young men would follow and die for these
officers?"

The diplomat said he came away from his most recent tour in Saudi Arabia
convinced that "it wouldn't take too much for a group of twenty or thirty
fundamentalist enlisted men to take charge. How would the kingdom deal
with the shock of something ruthless, small, highly motivated, and of great
velocity?"
There is little that the United States can do now, the diplomat said.
"The Saudis have been indulged for so many decades.They
are so spoiled. They've always had it their way. There's hardly anything
we could say that would impede the 'majestic instancy' of their progress.
We're their janissaries." He was referring to the captives who became
�lite troops of the Ottoman Empire.

"The policy dilemma is this," a senior general told me. "How do we help
the Saudis make a transition without throwing them over
the side?" Referring to young fundamentalists who have been
demonstrating in the Saudi streets, he said, "The kids are bigger than
the Daddy."

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