CHAPTER FIVE: The Double Marriage
Throughout the roaring eighties, the U.S.-Saudi marriage continued to thrive. It wasn't just that the United States got billions of dollars of reasonably priced oil and the Saudis were able to arm themselves with American weapons. In addition, the covert operations in Afghanistan and Iraq were beneficial to both parties. For all its success, however, there was just one problem with the arrangement: if one thought of the U.S.-Saudi activities as a steady relationship, Saudis were married to someone else.
More specifically, the House of Saud's political legitimacy was based on its allegiance to the sect of Sunni Islam known as Wahhabism and dated back three hundred years. It was at the core of kingdom's existence. Since many Wahhabis saw the United States as the Great Satan, that meant the Saudis had vital relationships essential to their survival -- a double marriage of sorts -- with partners who were mortal enemies.
Perhaps the Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti best explained the Saudis' high comfort level with such extraordinary contradictions and duplicity. "For an Islamic person to be polygamous is not unusual," he once told Jimmy Carter. "They can have four wives, for example. So forget it when it comes to foreign policy." [1] [i] The ascendancy of the House of Saud's power dates to 1747, [ii] when the Arab clan of al-Saud established a rudimentary government in league with the family of Ibn Abd al Wahhab, the prophet of Wahhabism. Marriages between the two families cemented the alliance, and the two families agreed that power would be handed down from generation to generation. [2]
The piety of al Wahhab gave legitimacy to the dubious religious credentials of the al-Sauds, who were essentially a violent bandit tribe. Likewise, the political muscle of the al-Sauds gave al Wahhab a means to spread his unusual theological views. What emerged over the next 250 years has been characterized by neoconservative author Stephen Schwartz in The Two Faces of Islam as "a unique fusion of religious and political control, a system in which faith and statecraft would be run as a family business." [3]
Over time, the Wahhabi-Saudi alliance spread, in part out of conviction, in part out of fear. Those who accepted Wahhabism swore allegiance to the leadership of the alliance and were expected to fight for it and contribute zakat (an Islamic tax to the leader of the religious community). Those who resisted it risked raids that threatened their livelihood. [4]
Schwartz and many neoconservatives who are scathing critics of the House of Saud argue that this synthesis of religious and political control in service to these extreme beliefs gave birth to a new kind of totalitarian "Islamo-fascist" regime, a theocratic monarchy espousing a radical fundamentalist form of Islam. [5] Other scholars argue that the physical and intellectual environments that shaped Saudi Arabia -- an ancient and conservative desert culture imbued with Islam -- have produced a way of life that Westerners like Schwartz all too easily misinterpret. [6]
In many ways, the extremely puritanical teachings of Wahhabism broke sharply with more traditional Islam by promulgating a wide range of practices that were heresy to traditional Muslims. For example, Wahhabis downgraded the status of Muhammad. They condemned those who did not observe all the prescribed times of prayer. They believed in an anthropomorphic God. They insisted on various specific bodily postures in prayer. And they required that their adherents profess faith in Wahhabism in a manner not unlike the practices of born-again Christian fundamentalists. [7]
Whereas American democracy was predicated in part on the separation of church and state, Saudi Arabia was based on their unification. Such a notion is antithetical to Western culture, much of which has long characterized Saudi Arabia as a moderate Arab state. But the unification of this extreme Islamic sect with political power meant that the Koran and the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad were regarded as the country's constitution, that fundamentalist interpretations of Islamic law ruled civil life, that such laws were enforced by religious police, that militant clerics had enormous political power. Wahhabi clerics repeatedly issued fatwas that were not necessarily in keeping with traditional Islam. There were fatwas against women driving, fatwas opposing the telephone, fatwas declaring that the earth was a flat disk and ordering the severe punishment of anyone who believed otherwise. [8] [iii]
Some of the more puritanical Wahhabi practices led to violence and bloodshed. Shortly after Ibn Abd al Wahhab began his campaign to "reform" Islam, he staged the public stoning of a woman accused of "fornication." [9] During a hajj in the early nineteenth century, Wahhabi fighters slaughtered forty members of an Egyptian caravan to prevent them from defiling the holy sites with false idols. [10] In 1926, Wahhabi militia, who had never heard music before, were so inflamed by hearing pilgrims coming toward Mecca accompanied by musicians that they began gunning down the numerous "unbelievers" who played music or appeared to enjoy it. [11]
Even in recent times, extreme interpretations of Islamic codes have resulted in senseless tragedies. In March 2002, for example, at least fourteen students at a girls' public intermediate school in Mecca died in a fire. According to Human Rights News, several members of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice obstructed rescue attempts because the fleeing students were not wearing the obligatory public attire (long black cloaks and head coverings) for Saudi girls and women. "Women and girls may have died unnecessarily because of extreme interpretations of the Islamic dress code," said Hallny Megally, executive director of the Middle East and North Africa division of Human Rights Watch." [12]
At the same time that the Wahhabi clerics were developing their extraordinary version of Islam, the al-Saud family, the more political half of the Wahhabi-Saud marriage, had begun a rich history of violence and brutality. As recounted in The Rise, Corruption and Coming Fall of the House of Saud, by Palestinian author Said Aburish, in 1902 Ibn Saud retook Riyadh by terrorizing the general population and decapitating many of his enemies, displaying their heads on the gates of the city. [13] Between 1918 and 1928, the al-Sauds repeatedly massacred rival tribes, executing hundreds of people, including women and children. Members of the al-Saud family personally beheaded many of them. [14]
These executions were only a small part of the al-Sauds' legendary reputation for brutality. In the Saudis' successful campaign to conquer the Arabian peninsula in the twenties, it was not unusual for the al-Sauds to execute all their enemies even after they surrendered, to amputate the arms of the poor for stealing bread, and to brutally settle old tribal scores. By the time they subdued the country, they had staged public executions of 40,000 people and carried out 350,000 amputations -- this in a population of 4 million. [15] [iv]
Decades later, with the influx of hundreds of billions of petrodollars, the al-Sauds' penchant for violence became just one ingredient in a rich stew that included extraordinary extravagance, unimaginable corruption, and fanatic religious fundamentalism all at levels unrivaled the world over. For all practical purposes, the House of Saud saw the kingdom's oil as a family business. Tens of billions of dollars were siphoned off into the al-Sauds' treasury. The top princes took as much as $100 million a year each -- this in an enormous extended royal family in which there were thousands of princes. (An ordinary prince, with two wives and ten children, was paid $260,000 a month. [16]) As a result, despite its huge oil income, the kingdom ran an increasingly big budget deficit and had a huge disparity between rich and poor. And with many princes having dozens of wives and scores of children, the situation could only worsen.
Personal excess was unparalleled. King Fahd married one hundred women. His palace cost $3 billion. He regularly lost hundreds of thousands of dollars a night gambling and once, in 1962, dropped nearly $8 million in one night in Monte Carlo. [17] For decades, reports filled the tabloids about extravagant Saudi binges, partying with prostitutes, and other gross excesses. In the eighties, Fahd and his entourage spent up to $5 million a day on visits to the palace in Marbella, Spain. [18] On a private holiday, his fleet consisted of eight aircraft, including five Boeing 747s, and he brought with him four hundred retainers, two hundred tons of luggage, and twenty-five Rolls-Royces and limos. [19] In a PBS Frontline interview, Prince Bandar acknowledged that his family had misappropriated tens of billions of dollars. "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." [20]
Years later, the National Security Agency began electronically intercepting conversations of the royal family that specified exactly how corrupt they were. According to an article by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker, in one call, Crown Prince Abdullah complained about billions of dollars being diverted by the House of Saud from a huge state-financed project to renovate a mosque. In another call, Interior Minister Prince Nayef told a subordinate not to give police a prostitute's client list that presumably included members of the royal family. [21] As recently as the fall of 2003, according to one of their retainers, members of the royal family and their entourage while on a trip to Los Angeles carried packets stuffed with ten thousand dollars, strippers and prostitutes. Corrupt, rich, and brutal, this was one of America's most powerful friends, the ally on whom much of the American economy depended.
Titillating as such reports of corruption might be, they did not represent a national security threat to the United States. If a peril was hidden in the alliance with the House of Saud, it had to do with the royal family's alliance with the Wahhabi clerics and their growing extremism. One elemental distinction between the Wahhabis and other Muslims was in the interpretation of the Islamic term jihad. In some contexts, jihad refers to the inner struggle to rid oneself of debased actions or inclinations, to achieve a higher internal moral standard. In the Koran, it also refers to a larger duty, outside the boundaries of the individual, "to enjoin good and forbid evil." [22] The Prophet Muhammad referred to both meanings of the term when he returned from a military campaign and is said to have told his companions, "This day we have returned from the minor jihad [war] to the major jihad [self-control and betterment]." [23]
Islam allows the use of force to fulfill these duties so long as there is no workable alternative. The more radical neo Wahhabis, however, especially those under the sway of the militant Muslim Brotherhood, strongly emphasized a much more extreme interpretation of jihad. Far from confining the meaning of jihad to the defense of Islamic territory, the Muslim Brotherhood advocated waging a holy war against the enemies of Islam. Not all Wahhabis were so radical, particularly those close to the House of Saud, which looked upon extreme militants as an aberration. Nevertheless, many Middle East scholars see Saudi Arabia as bearing considerable responsibility for the rise of such violence. According to F. Gregory Gause III, a University of Vermont professor and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, "It is undoubtedly true that the extremely strict, intolerant version of Islam that is taught and practiced in Saudi Arabia created the milieu from which Osama bin Laden and his recruits emerged." [24]
***
As the House of Saud entered the modern era, there were bitter disagreements within the royal family on exactly how close to the West it was acceptable to be. But to even the most westernized Saudis, modernization -- incorporating new technology, becoming part of the global economy -- did not mean buying into secular, libertine Western culture. Even though their extravagant behavior may have suggested otherwise, as Wahhabis they were profoundly opposed to becoming "westernized."
That included even the most powerful and pro West branch of the royal family, the Sudairis. The Sudairis consisted of the descendants of the favored wife of the late king Abdul Aziz. Cosmopolitan and sophisticated world travelers who lived lavishly and loved the night life, they held the reins of power and most of the highest-ranking positions in the government and were known to favor engagement with the United States. Officially, they were rigorously observant of Islamic law, but as a result of their worldly ways many Islamic purists saw them as hypocrites -- munafaqeen. [25]
Bandar, whose father, Prince Sultan, was one of the Sudairi Seven, [v] was a case in point. He smoked cigars and sniffed brandy, had palatial estates in Aspen, in Virginia near the CIA, and in the English countryside. No one enjoyed the fruits of Western civilization more than he. [26] But in the end, Bandar knew as well as anyone that the House of Saud was a theocracy and must heed the call of Islam. He was fond of pointing out that the Iranian Revolution had shown that no regime could adopt secular Western customs without considering the consequences. He once told the New York Times an anecdote about the shah of Iran's writing King Faisal a letter before he was deposed in 1979, saying, "Please, my brother, modernize. Open up your country. Make the schools mixed, women and men. Let women wear miniskirts. Have discos. Be modern, otherwise I cannot guarantee you will stay in your throne." To which King Faisal responded, "Your Majesty, I appreciate your advice. May I remind you, you are not the shah of France. You are not in the Elysee, you are in Iran. Your population is ninety percent Muslim. Please don't forget that." [27]
History proved Faisal right. As Bandar explained, "Intangible social and political institutions imported from elsewhere can be deadly -- ask the shah of Iran. ... Islam for us is not just a religion but a way of life. We Saudis want to modernize, but not necessarily westernize." [28]
So as King Faisal called for Saudi Arabia to modernize -- that is, to import technology and renew the economy -- he also made clear that he did not mean the country should westernize, as, say, Turkey had. [29] As part of Faisal's "reforms," the ulema, the senior Islamic clerics, became civil servants, part of the state bureaucracy. If anything, the alliance between the House of Saud and Wahhabi fundamentalism became more formalized than ever before. Wahhabi Islam was still the most fundamental part of the Saudi identity. This was irrevocable policy at the highest level of the kingdom. When necessary, the House of Saud did what it had to do to placate the Wahhabi clerics. Always.
Meanwhile, from the eighties on, U.S. oil consumption grew from 15 million barrels a day to nearly 20 million a day. [30] Imported oil as a percentage of U.S. consumption continued to soar, and U.S. policy makers and oil executives alike overlooked the more disagreeable practices of their supplier.
That had always been the case. For decades, most of what Americans knew about Saudi Arabia came courtesy of Aramco, the Arab-American oil consortium that was granted the spectacularly lucrative long-term concession to bring Saudi oil to U.S. markets. As economic historian J. B. Kelly, the author of Arabia, the Gulf and the West, explained it, "Because there were no other sources of information about that country open to the American public, Aramco could put across its version of recent Arabian history and politics with almost insolent ease. ... Naturally, little prominence was accorded in Aramco's publicity to the fanatic nature of Wahabbism, or to its dark and bloody past." [31]
***
One family that lived with these contradictions was the bin Ladens. A devout Muslim who enforced strict religious and social codes in raising his children, Mohammed bin Laden, Osama's father, kept all of his children in one residence so he could preside over their discipline and religious upbringing. [32] He took pride in having fathered twenty-five sons for the jihad.
To Westerners, Mohammed's piety may have seemed incongruous in a cosmopolitan family of jet-setters with private planes, giant homes all over the world, and all the accoutrements of modern Saudi billionaires. But in the Saudi context, his great wealth and global business interests in no way contradicted his piety. [vi] Thanks to his private planes, on at least one occasion he fulfilled his dream of saying morning prayers in Jerusalem, midday prayers in Medina, and evening prayers in Mecca -- the three holiest cities in the Arab world. [33] He deeply supported the Palestinian cause. At one point, he even attempted to convert two hundred of his company's bulldozers into military tanks for the Palestinian insurgents. "He wanted to use them to attack Israel," Osama told a Pakistani journalist. "However, his technicians told him it would be impossible and he gave up the idea." [34]
Osama learned Islam at his father's knee and by the age of seven was studying with fundamentalist Islamic groups. [vii] He took enormous pride in his father's having rebuilt the holy mosques in Mecca and Medina. These were no ordinary mosques; they were the Islamic equivalents of Notre Dame and the Vatican. "Allah blessed him and bestowed on him an honor that no other contractor has ever known," Osama later told Aljazeera television. [35]
In 1968, Mohammed bin Laden was killed when his private jet crashed into the mountains of southern Saudi Arabia, leaving Osama, who was ten years old at the time, a fortune estimated at $30 million to $60 million -- roughly $200 million to $400 million in 2003 dollars. By the time he was a teenager, Osama was an unusually self-possessed and gentle young man. "He was singularly gracious and polite and had a great deal of inner confidence," recalled a man who taught English to bin Laden when Osama was about thirteen years old, around 1970. "[In his work, bin Laden was] very neat, precise, and conscientious. He wasn't pushy at all. ... If he knew the answer to something, he wouldn't parade the fact. He would only reveal it if you asked him." [36]
Older brother Salem, who took over the family business after Mohammed's death, bought huge homes in Texas and Florida, jetted around the globe, and flew private planes up the Nile. [37] Educated at the Millfield boarding school in Somerset, England, he married an upperclass Englishwoman, Caroline Carey, whose stepfather was the Marquess of Queensberry. [38]
But Osama led a more insular and ascetic existence. The only bin Laden child to be educated solely in the Middle East, he had far less contact with the West than his siblings and was perhaps the only one who did not travel to the United States. In 1971, Osama and twenty-two other members of the family went to Falun, Sweden, where the family had business with Volvo. But such jaunts to the West were rare for Osama. Given his family's high status, Osama was allowed to socialize with royalty, but even as a teenager, he preferred the company of the ulema. [39] Moreover, to the extent he related to the West, his antipathy was such that he pretended that he could not speak English -- even though several sources, his English teacher and journalists among them, say he learned the language fluently. [40] [viii]
As a teenager, Osama may have briefly strayed from the devout path he followed most of his life. Bin Laden, a controversial biography of Osama by the pseudonymous Adam Robinson, asserts that while he attended Broumanna High School in Lebanon, Osama played the part of a debonair Saudi playboy, driving a canary yellow Mercedes, wearing handmade suits, and drinking Dom perignon and Johnnie Walker Black Label at the Crazy Horse and the Casbah. [41]
But bin Laden was redeemed, the book says, in 1977 when he and his brother Salem joined the masses to perform the demanding series of rituals of the hajj near Mecca. Afterward, Osama visited the cave at Mount Hira, near Mecca, where Muhammad is said to have received the revelations from God. According to Robinson, Osama was profoundly moved by the experience, sold his Mercedes, grew a beard, and threw himself into Islamic studies as never before. [42]
At Jeddah's King Abdul Aziz University [ix] bin Laden's religious training began in earnest, at a time when thinking at the university was dominated by two of the leading voices of the Muslim Brotherhood, Egyptian scholar Sayyid Qutb, an intellectual hero and principal theoretician of the Islamist revolution, and Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, the creator of the First International Jihadist Movement, who was a stirring speaker and a powerful figure raising funds and recruiting for the jihad. [43]
Qutb had been a secular Egyptian scholar and literary critic -- he discovered Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, who was later awarded the Nobel Prize -- but a sojourn to the United States in 1949 left him appalled at American insensitivity to spiritual matters. [44] A student at what was then Colorado State Teachers College in Greeley, Colorado -- ironically, a conservative, religious town -- Qutb wrote about Greeley in his book The America I Have Seen as materialistic and soulless, finding evidence of America's greed in conventions and possessions that seem quite ordinary to most Americans, such as the green lawns in front of their homes. [45] Qutb attacked American jazz music and dress, and most of all, the American concern with sexuality, especially among women. "The American girl ... knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs -- and she shows all this and does not hide it," he wrote.
Shocked when he witnessed a priest encourage young men and women to dance together at a party, Qutb saw a church social as evidence of America's debased attitude toward sexuality -- and wrote about it with the salaciousness of a romance novelist: "They danced to the tunes of the gramophone, and the dance floor was replete with tapping feet, enticing legs, arms wrapped around waists, lips pressed to lips, and chests pressed to chests. The atmosphere was full of desire ..." Qutb returned to Saudi Arabia a militant Muslim, determined to forge a vision of Islam purged of the vulgar influences of the West.
One of Qutb's books, Signposts Along the Road, [x] argued that Western civilization had led to "corruption and irreligion" and that jihad should be waged not just defensively to protect Islamic homelands, but offensively against enemies of Muslims. [46] Qutb asserted that the United States was especially dangerous precisely because, unlike the Saudis, the Americans insisted on separating church and state. As a result of this, he argued, the West was trying "to confine Islam to the emotional and ritual circles, and to bar it from participating in the activity of life." In the end, as he saw it, this amounted to "an effort to exterminate this religion." [47]
By the early sixties, Qutb had become the most prominent fundamentalist theoretician in Islam, and his suffering in prison in Egypt and his execution in 1965 became the stuff of legend. [48] The more moderate Islamists saw Qutb's analyses as valuable but flawed by his bitterness at having been jailed and tortured. Wahhabis influenced by the House of Saud scorned his followers as a sect they labeled Qutbites. [49]
Nevertheless, Qutb's ideas lived on. They were promulgated by both the militant Wahhabi scholar Sheikh Abdullah Azzam and Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian surgeon who later became notorious as the man behind Osama bin Laden. Azzam became particularly effective in persuading masses of Muslims all over the world to wage an international jihad. [50] By the late seventies, Osama, six feet five inches, lean, bearded, and dour, had imbibed such strong anti-American feelings from Azzam at the university that he began to boycott American goods. When Muslims bought American, they were contributing to the repression of Palestinians, he said. [51]
At the time, Islamic fundamentalism had begun spreading through Saudi Arabia, and Osama was not the only militant member of his family. Sayyid Qutb's ideas had become important to the organization now known as the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), which had been founded by Abdullah bin Laden, a relative of Osama's, in 1972. Omar bin Laden, another relative, was also a director of WAMY. In addition, Mahrous bin Laden, one of Osama's older brothers, became friendly with Syrian members of the militant Muslim Brotherhood in exile in Saudi Arabia. [52] In late 1979, the Muslim Brotherhood asserted that the House of Saud had lost its legitimacy through "corruption, ostentation, and mindless imitation of the West." [53] Even though the bin Ladens were close to the royal family, Mahrous had become friendly enough with the Brotherhood that they were able to exploit their relationship with him in their most daring operation ever.
On November 20, just a month before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, more than a thousand members of the Muslim Brotherhood invaded Mecca and seized control of the Grand Mosque in a desperate attempt to rid the country of the House of Saud. The Grand Mosque, of course, is the spectacular place of worship to which 2 million Muslims make their pilgrimage during the hajj each year. It is the site of the Kaaba, one of the holiest icons in all of Islam, a rectangular stone room with black silk and cotton sheaths embroidered in gold with verses from the Koran.
At the time of the uprising, the Saudi Binladin Group was rebuilding the mosque, and its trucks carried permits allowing them to enter and depart without having to be inspected. An investigation by Saudi intelligence revealed that the militants had taken advantage of Mahrous to use the bin Laden family's trucks without his knowledge. [54] The episode, which became known as the Mecca Affair, was the most serious attack on the House of Saud in its three-hundred-year history.
The siege led to a two-week battle that left the Saudi Arabian National Guard (SANG), a praetorian guard of sorts whose primary mission was to defend the royal family, battling the fundamentalists to the death. One hundred twenty-seven Saudi troops and 117 rebels were killed. [55] Fighting was so fierce that the Vinnell Corporation, an American company that trained the Saudi National Guard, was called in to help out. [56] [xi]
The battle marked a rare moment in which both the covert nature of the Saudi-American relationship and the contradictions of the marriage between the House of Saud and militant Islamic fundamentalism erupted. To the Brotherhood, the House of Saud were nothing more than corrupt, pro-Western hypocrites -- munafaqeen -- who were paying lip service to the clerics while they were really in bed with the decadent Great Satan, the United States. As a result, the Brotherhood asserted that the Saudi regime had lost its legitimacy. [57]
Fortunately for Mahrous, the bin Laden family was so much a part of the fabric of the House of Saud that it was impossible to take strong punitive action against him. Other members of the Muslim Brotherhood suffered the ultimate penalty: no fewer than sixty-three rebels were publicly beheaded. Mahrous, though arrested, was released and later became manager of the Saudi Binladin Group's offices in Medina. [58]
The House of Saud's gentle treatment of Mahrous strongly suggests that the bin Ladens' ties to the royal family had paid off. However, this would not be the last time a member of the bin Laden family would be at odds with the House of Saud.
_______________
[i] Higher-ranking Saudis often had far more than just four wives. According to Said Aburish's The House of Saud, it is estimated that the forty-two sons of Abdul Aziz married more than fourteen hundred women, an average of more than thirty- three wives for each son.
[ii] Various texts differ on the date. According to Madawai Al-Rasheed's A History of Saudi Arabia, the alliance began in 1744.
[iii] In 1985, the blind Wahhabi imam Abdul Aziz bin Baz retracted his fatwa punishing people who believed the earth was round after a conversation with Prince Sultan bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud, the grandson of Ibn Saud. The prince had just been a passenger in the American space shuttle Discovery and told the imam that having been in outer space, he could personally attest that the world was round.
[iv] Even in the modern era, the Saudi fondness for harsh punishment persisted. In June 2003, a BBC interview with Riyadh's leading executioner, Muhammad Sa ad al-Beshi, gave Westerners a taste of exactly how commonplace beheadings are in Saudi Arabia. "It doesn't matter to me: two, four, ten -- as long as I'm doing God's will, it doesn't matter how many people I execute," said Beshi, a forty-two-year-old father of seven children. Beshi said he kept his executioner's sword razor sharp and sometimes allowed his children to help him clean it. "People are amazed how fast it can separate the head from the body," he added.
[v] King Abdul Aziz, the founder of modern Saudi Arabia, had forty-three sons, and the Sudairi Seven refers to the seven sons by his favored wife. They include King Fahd, Defense Minister Prince Sultan, Riyadh governor Prince Salman, Interior Minister Prince Nayef, business leader Prince Abdulrahman, Prince Ahmed, and Prince Turki bin Abdul Aziz, who is not to be confused with onetime intelligence chief Prince Turki bin Faisal. It was Fahd who permitted U.S. forces to be stationed on Saudi soil during the Gulf War. Sultan's son Prince Bandar had, of course, been the most prominent Saudi in the United States for decades.
[vi] The Saudi Binladin Group was so comfortable with infidel culture that it actually played an important role in bringing Disney-like theme parks to the Arab world. In 1998, SBG contracted to build the Dreamland megamarket, a shopping complex of megastores adjacent to Dream Park, Cairo's answer to Disney World.
[vii] Reports differ as to the exact number of children sired by Mohammed bin Laden -- but it is generally agreed to be at least fifty-four. In addition, various accounts place Osama bin Laden as his seventeenth son while others say he was the last of twenty-five sons.
[viii] 1989, journalist Edward Girardet of the Christian Science Monitor encountered bin Laden in Afghanistan and had a heated forty-five-minute conversation with him in English. In addition, a man named Brian Fyfield-Shayler claims to have taught English to bin Laden and thirty other wealthy Saudis around 1970.
[ix] It is widely agreed that bin Laden attended King Abdul Aziz University, but there are conflicting reports as to when or if he graduated and which field he studied -- economics, engineering, or public administration.
[x] The title of the book, Ma'allim fi al-tariq, is sometimes also translated as Milestones.
[xi] Vinnell, which had trained the Saudi National Guard since 1975, was widely said to have been a CIA front. In the Vietnam era, the company did everything from construction of military bases to military operations, and a Pentagon source termed it "our own little mercenary army in Vietnam." When one of Vinnell's men in Riyadh was asked if he saw himself as a mercenary, however, he had a slightly different characterization. "We are not mercenaries because we are not pulling the triggers," he told Newsweek. "We train people to pull the triggers. Maybe that makes us executive mercenaries."
NOTES:
1. Alan Friedman, Spider's Web, p. 84.
2. Stephen Schwartz, The Two Faces of Islam, p. 74.
3. Ibid., p. 75.
4. Madawi Al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia, p.19.
5. Schwartz, The Two Faces of Islam, p. 105.
6. David E. Long, "Whither Saudi Arabia?" Jewish Daily Forward, September 5, 2003, www.forward.com/issues/2003/03.09.05/arts1.long.html.
7. Schwartz, The Two Faces of Islam, p. 69.
8. Ibid., p. 118.
9. Ibid., p. 73.
10. Daniel Benjamin and Steve Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror, p. 54.
11. Schwartz, The Two Faces of Islam, p. 106.
12. "Saudi Arabia: Religious Police Role in School Fire Criticized," Human Rights News, March 15, 2002, http://www.hrw.org/press/2002/03/saudischool.htm.
13. Said Arburish, The Rise, Corruption and Coming Fall of the House of Saud, p. 14.
14. Ibid., p. 24.
15. Ibid., p. 27; and "Saudi Executioner Tells All," BBC radio broadcast, June 6, 2003.
16. Arburish, The Rise, Corruption and Coming Fall of the House of Saud, p. 68.
17. Ibid., p. 55.
18. Robert Baer, "The Fall of the House of Saud," Atlantic Monthly, May 2003, p. 56.
19. Tina Marie O'Neill, "Sands Shift Under House of Saud," Sunday Business Post, August 11, 2002.
20. Seymour Hersh, "King's Ransom," New Yorker, October 22, 2001, p. 35.
21. Ibid.
22. "Jihad, About Islam and Muslims," www.unn.ac.uk/societies/islamic/jargon/jihad1.htm.
23. Jihad, About Islam and Muslims; Ibid.
24. F. Gregory Gause, "Be Careful What You Wish For," www.house.gov/international_relations/107/gaus0522.pdf .
25. Evan Thomas and Christopher Dickey, with Eleanor Clift, Roy Gutman, Debra Rosenberg, and Tamara Lipper, "War on Terror: The Saudi Game," Newsweek, November 19, 2001, p. 32.
26. Interview with Prince Bandar, "Looking for Answers," PBS Frontline, www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/ ... andar.html.
27. Elaine Sciolino, "Ally's Future," New York Times, November 4, 2001, sec. 1 B, p. 4.
28. Bandar bin Sultan, New York Times, July 10, 1994, p. 20.
29. Al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia, p. 124.
30. "U.S. Oil Consumption and Imports, 1973-2000," Office of Transportation Technologies, www.ott.doe.gov/facts/archives/fotw191.shtml .
31. Schwartz, The Two Faces of Islam, p.115.
32. Anonymous, Through Our Enemies' Eyes, p. 81.
33. Michael Field, The Merchants, p. 105.
34. Anonymous, Through Our Enemies' Eyes, p. 82.
35. Ibid.
36. Jason Burke, "The Making of the World's Most Wanted Man," Observer (London), October 28, 2001.
37. Interview with Dee Howard.
38. Peter Bergen, Holy War, Inc., p. 45.
39. Anonymous, Through Our Enemies' Eyes, p. 84.
40. Ibid., p, 83; and Edward Girardet, "A Brush with Laden on the Jihad Front Line," Christian Science Monitor, August 31, 1998, p. 19.
41. Malise Ruthven, A Fury for God, pp. 197-98.
42. Ibid.
43. Anonymous, Through Our Enemies' Eyes, p. 84.
44. Lawrence Wright, "The Man Behind Bin Laden," New Yorker, September 16, 2002, www.lawrencewright.com.
45. Robert Siegel, "Sayyid Qutb's America," All Things Considered, National Public Radio, May 6, 2003, www.npr.org/display_pages/features/feature1253796.html.
46. Anonymous, Through Our Enemies' Eyes, p. 85; and Gregory Palast, "FBI and US Spy Agents Say Bush Spiked Bin Laden Probes," Guardian (London), November 7, 2001.
47. Paul Berman, "Al Qaeda's Philosopher," New York Times Magazine, March 23, 2003, p. 27.
48. Wright, "The Man Behind Bin Laden."
49. Ismail Royer, e-mail correspondence.
50. Anonymous, Through Our Enemies' Eyes, p. 85.
51. Ibid., p. 85.
52. "Hunting bin Laden," PBS Frontline, www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/ ... amily.html.
53. Neil MacKay, "Family Ties: The Bin Ladens," Sunday Herald (Scotland), October 7, 2001, www.sundayherald.com/19047.
54. "Hunting bin Laden," PBS Frontline.
55. Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil, p. 166.
56. Kim Willenson, with Nicholas Proffitt and Lloyd Norman, "Persian Gulf: This Gun for Hire," Newsweek, February 24, 1975, p. 30; and William Hartung, "Bombings Bring U.S. 'Executive Mercenaries' into the Light," Orlando Sentinel, May 19, 2003.
57. MacKay, "Family Ties," p. 14.
58. Anonymous, Through Our Enemies' Eyes, p. 87.